Live Bait

by P. J. Tracy

  Right up until the last minute, Tim and Jeff were still trying to stay on. They offered to patrol around the grounds all night, if not to stop trouble, to at least watch for it. The idea of these two kids walking the property in the dark made Marty shudder, because the feeling that something could happen was growing stronger by the minute.

  It was the weather, he thought, when he finally put the kids in their beater cars and shooed them out of the drive, locking the gate behind them. You couldn’t see the big clouds yet – just a filmy white haze that lay over the sun like a cataract – but you could feel them coming deep in your chest, like when they put that heavy lead apron on you before X rays at the dentist’s office. The air was thick and hard to breathe, and leaves hung limply on every tree and bush.

  Marty looked around the parking lot one last time – saw only his Malibu, Jack’s Mercedes, and Becker’s patrol car – and then, satisfied, walked around the big greenhouse to the planting beds in the back.

  Lily Gilbert had always hated the straight lines that men were forever drawing all over the world. Lines were bossy, unforgiving things; harbingers of tyranny. Rows of crops, rows of buildings, and eventually, rows of people standing mute and still and fearful.

  The front of the nursery had that kind of rigid order – the main greenhouse aligned with the street, the hedge aligned with the sidewalk, white lines in the parking lot telling the cars where to go. She had to put up with them in the front of the greenhouse, because that’s the way it was when they bought the place. But in the back, where the previous owners had lined up pots and plants like subjugated servants, Lily had destroyed the order of straight lines and created happy chaos.

  Pea gravel walkways meandered like sleepy drunks through stands of potted trees and flowering shrubs, arcing around the perennial beds that provided cutting stock – the ‘mother beds,’ Morey had called them, where the seeds from a single flower produced hundreds of seedlings they would sell the following spring. And in high summer, little forests of ornamental grasses crowded some of the walkways, towering over giggling children who ducked beneath bobbing, seed-heavy heads as they followed the twisting paths through the lovely disordered maze of nature Lily’s hatred of lines had created.

  She waited for Martin on a bench circled by potted lilacs. She’d forced blooms on a few of the shrubs so customers could see the color, but most were still flowerless, rather ordinary-looking plants with unremarkable leaves. The peasant plants, she called them, secretly pleased when for two short weeks every spring, the lowliest of these dressed themselves like gaudy monarchs.

  Martin moved lightly for such a big man, but the nursery was so quiet Lily could hear his shoes crunching on the pea gravel long before she felt his weight on the bench next to her.

  ‘I’m going to try to get Jack to stay in a hotel for a few days,’ Marty said.

  ‘Good. I could use a vacation. So could you. Get a suite with a kitchen.’

  ‘I’d just as soon you kept your distance from Jack until this is over, Lily.’

  She turned to look at him. Most of the time Lily was moving so fast it was impossible to think of her as an old person. But the strain of this week was wearing on her, and he could see the age in her face, wiping away the illusion of strength. It was the first time he’d ever thought of her as a frail mortal, just like the rest of them. ‘Jack goes to a hotel, I go to a hotel.’

  Marty gave her a little smile. ‘So you’re a mother again.’

  ‘You have kids, even a schlock, you’re always a mother, no matter what. This is not a voluntary thing.’

  Marty thought about Lily and Jack locked in a hotel room, a cop at the door. He liked the picture.

  ‘The only bad part about the hotel is that this has been good for you, Martin, being here. You want to know how I know this?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know this because you’re drinking like a normal person again. A little tipple at night, maybe, that’s all.’

  ‘Can’t think and drink.’

  ‘So what are you thinking about?’

  ‘I want to find out who killed Morey.’ He turned and looked at her hard. ‘Don’t you?’

  She tightened her mouth, so spare of flesh now that it almost disappeared.

  ‘You know, it’s funny, Lily. Most of the time when someone gets killed, the family’s all over the cops, calling, coming down to the station, how’s the investigation going, do they have a suspect…’

  ‘Like you and Morey did, when Hannah was killed,’ she said with an odd chill in her tone.

  Marty closed his eyes for a second. ‘You never came with us. You never asked. It was like Morey and I were all alone in that. And now you’re doing the same thing again. Morey’s been dead for three days, and not once have you shown the slightest interest in who might have killed him. I just don’t get it.’

  Lily filled her lungs with the sodden air and looked at the lilacs, not at him. ‘Let me tell you something, Martin. For me, if it’s cancer or war or a man with a gun or a knife, dead is dead. Dead is the end. It’s been seven months since the man who murdered Hannah was killed. Now you tell me, is your life so much better, now that he’s in the ground? Because it’s not better for me. This person, he was a nothing. Bury ten thousand more just like him and still’ – she tapped her chest – ‘this is empty.’

  Marty braced his elbows on his knees and dropped his head into his hands. ‘I’m still glad he’s dead,’ he whispered.

  Lily shook her head. ‘You men. You always want to know who did this or that terrible thing, so someone can find them and make them pay. Always it’s been like this for men, the eye for the eye, as if it would make any difference.’

  Jack was well on his way to a fine toot by the time Marty and Lily got up to the house, the weight of the weather and their conversation weighing them down, slowing their steps.

  He was sitting at the kitchen table, a bottle of Glenlivet in one hand, a glass in the other, dispensing unwanted legal advice to Officer Becker. The young cop was standing off to one side, watching his charge, the windows, the doorway. Marty figured he’d had them made before he and Lily ever got anywhere near the house.

  ‘Marty, ole’ buddy, glad you’re here. Tony here’s a hell of a nice guy, but he’s a little stiff, you know? And he’s making me nervous, hopping around peeking out windows and all that.’

  ‘That’s his job, Jack. Saving your sorry life.’

  Jack giggled. ‘A little too late for that.’

  ‘We’re all going to a hotel. Right after supper.’

  Jack raised his glass. ‘Whatever you say, Marty. In the meantime, grab yourself a glass, I’ll make your world a better place.’

  And it was a little too late for that, too, Marty thought, watching Lily shoot a sharp glance in Jack’s direction that sent him slinking away into the living room, Becker close behind.

  They ate a myriad of cold salads and meats contributed by thoughtful friends and neighbors. ‘Funeral food,’ Lily called it, making a plate to force on Officer Becker while Marty made one for Jack he probably wouldn’t eat.

  After supper Marty went upstairs, showered, dressed, and started packing a few clothes in his duffel. In the contained environment of a hotel with an officer posted at the door, Jack and Lily would be perfectly safe. There was no logical reason for him to go with them – except for this sudden sense that that was where he belonged. This was his family, dysfunctional though it was. It was all he had; all he’d ever had, really.

  When he went to the closet to get his favorite shirt – a short-sleeved white linen Hannah had gotten him for his birthday last year – it slipped from the hanger and fell on the floor. When he bent to retrieve it he saw an old red metal tackle box tucked into the back corner.

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ he murmured, pulling it out, remembering his disbelief when Lily told him Morey had gone on fishing trips with Ben Schuler. He flipped the hasp, opened the lid, and saw an array of lures, hooks, and bobbers, still encased in unopene
d plastic, tucked into the neat compartments of the upper tray. Marty didn’t know much about fishing, but he did know you probably had to take the lures out of the plastic to use them. This was not the tackle box of a real fisherman.

  He caught himself smiling. In his heart he had known that Morey, who revered all life, was incapable of pushing a barbed hook through a live worm, but Lily’s assertion had been so unequivocal, it had planted a troubling seed of doubt. What he was looking at now seemed to prove that Morey had been exactly the man he appeared to be. He may have sat on a dock or in a boat with Ben Schuler, but Marty would bet his life that he never dropped a line in the water. As a matter of fact, he probably freed the minnows when Ben wasn’t looking.

  He lifted the top tray by its handle, and stared curiously at what lay beneath – a clear plastic sandwich bag, and inside it, a passport.

  Morey Gilbert smiled at him from the photo on the inside of the front cover. Not the young Morey who had come to America in the late forties, but Morey as Marty had known him. He checked the date of issue – eight years ago – and flipped through the pages, his frown deepening with every entry stamp, then he tucked it into his pocket.

  There was a small, dirty cloth bundle on the bottom of the tackle box. Marty tugged at a corner of the fabric, then scrambled backwards when the thing inside fell out, his heart pounding, his mind seeing Morey again, standing at his front door holding out a paper grocery bag. It had been exactly one month since Hannah’s murder.

  This is for you, Martin.

  What is it?

  Jack’s inheritance back when he was my son. He didn’t want it; now it’s yours.

  I’m not taking Jack’s inheritance, Morey… Jesus. Where did you get this?

  Beautiful, isn’t it? Government Model 45-A Colt. Custom pearl handle. It’s over sixty years old. I took it off a dead Nazi who probably killed an American officer to get it. This is the most valuable thing I own, Martin. This is my legacy.

  Marty sat on the bedroom floor, catching his breath, staring at the pearl-handled.45 preposterously kept in the bottom of a tackle box. He’d never expected to see that gun again.

  He didn’t know he was reaching for the gun until he felt the smooth mother-of-pearl against his palm. The texture, the weight, the little indentation in a curve of the trigger – it was all the same. Exactly the same as it had been last time.

  He smelled urine in the room, smoke, and the unmistakable acrid odor of someone cooking death. A rat crossed his path, stopped and looked at him, then moved on at a leisurely pace. He watched his own shadow move along the wall he approached, darkening the long, stringy blond hair of the noncreature who slumped there as he slid a needle into his arm.

  And then he saw the eyes he would never forget, the pale, sinewy hands that had slashed Hannah’s throat, and then the Colt, rising into his line of sight, pointing at Eddie Starr’s forehead like an accusing finger. Fire seemed to jump from the muzzle when he pulled the trigger, but it didn’t startle him. He stood there for many moments, watching with empty eyes as red blood dripped down the wall.

  The next morning Marty had gone to the nursery and given the gun back to Morey. It was too valuable, he’d said; too much a part of family history; he couldn’t keep it. That afternoon he’d bought the.357 and started planning his suicide.

  He was calm now, maybe calmer than he’d been in months. He carefully wrapped the gun, put it back in the tackle box, and tucked that back in the closet corner where he’d found it. At some point in the last three days he’d decided he still had a family, he still had obligations, and amazingly, he still wanted to live.

  So he’d turn in the gun, he’d turn in himself, and he would pay the price for what he’d done, because that was the way it was supposed to work.

  But not just yet.

  36

  By five o’clock Magozzi could see thunderheads piling up in the distance outside the window, as if someone had dumped a bag of cotton balls on the western horizon. Langer had come back from his hasty exit from the office a few minutes later, looking a little pale, but solid, and they’d all been hitting the phones ever since.

  They’d confirmed unsolved murders that matched the dates on the twenty most recent photos pulled from the Schuler house, put the locals to work tracking family members, but now they were hitting a wall. Farther back than that a lot of law enforcement records were archived in dusty boxes in a warehouse someplace, and most of the detectives who had worked them were long since retired.

  Magozzi wasn’t particularly worried. The way he figured it, if some vengeful family member wanted payback for a relative Morey, Rose, and Ben had killed, they weren’t likely to wait that long anyway. If it was a family member at all. There were no guarantees with that theory. Maybe they were just spinning their wheels in a rut that went nowhere, and that did worry him.

  But ten minutes ago he’d come upon something interesting, and now he was drumming his fingers on his desk, waiting anxiously for the phone to ring.

  ‘Son of a bitch,’ Gino said, slamming down his phone. ‘The Brainerd sheriff’s been out of his office for two hours, and you want to know why? He’s out on some lake with damn near every other officer in the county, trying to save some deer that went through ice.’

  Magozzi looked out at the city sizzling under the day’s heat. ‘They’ve got ice?’

  ‘Are you kidding? It’s April in Brainerd. They’ll have ice for another month. Besides, they’re north of the warm front, haven’t gotten any of the heat we’re getting. You know what this reminds me of? Hansel and Gretel.’

  ‘You’re going have to explain that to me.’

  ‘Come on, it’s obvious. The old witch keeps the kids for a while to fatten ’em up before she eats them. That’s just what these guys are doing. Saving a deer one of them’s going to pop next fall and turn into link sausage. And in the meantime I’m here sitting on my thumbs trying to solve sixty murders while they’re out on a venison rescue…’

  Magozzi’s phone rang, cutting Gino’s rant short. He listened for a minute, then held the phone to his chest. ‘Get everybody off their calls. We may have caught a break.’

  A few minutes later Langer, McLaren, and Peterson had rolled their chairs over to hear what Magozzi had to say.

  ‘According to Grace’s list, Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler made a trip to Kalispell, Montana, a few years ago, but there was no Montana kill on any of Schuler’s pictures. So I called law enforcement up there, just to check it out. There was no homicide the day our threesome was there, but there was a shooting. Some old kook who lives in the woods with his adult son – apparently they’re survivalists or something like that – comes into the hospital with a.45 slug in his leg. The only thing he could give the cops was that a black pickup pulled up to the cabin, and someone inside opened fire on him and his son while they were sitting on the porch. Neither one of them got a make or a plate.’

  Gino thought about that. ‘Or maybe they did, and just didn’t share it with the law. I can’t see a couple of survivalists waiting for the cops to take care of their business. Those guys hate us.’

  McLaren whistled softly. ‘Wow. So maybe they left one alive.’

  ‘It’s possible. The old guy was the right age. And the best part is that the sheriff just took a run out there, and when there was nobody around, he talked to a neighbor. Seems the old man and his son took off in their camper a couple weeks ago, supposedly to Vegas, but the neighbor thought that was a little peculiar since they hadn’t left the property in over twenty years, and as far as he knew, they weren’t gamblers.’

  Langer got up from his chair. ‘Did you get a plate?’

  ‘And the names.’ Magozzi passed over a scrap of paper. ‘Langer, why don’t you take Vegas, get an APB out on the plate, try to sweet-talk somebody down there into checking the campgrounds. McLaren, you get an APB on the air here, the rest of us will hit the yellow pages and split up the campgrounds around the Cities.’

  The
sheriff in Brainerd caught Gino between campground calls, and kept him on the phone for fifteen minutes.

  ‘The good news,’ Gino told Magozzi after he’d hung up, ‘is that the deer’s okay.’

  ‘That’s a load off.’

  ‘The bad news is the sheriff was tickled to death we might have a lead on who killed his resort owner, and depressed as hell when I told him they were dead. He wanted to wring their necks personally.’

  ‘He knew the victim?’

  ‘Yeah. Salt-of-the-earth, hardworking type. The old guy had a wife and two sons, one in high school, one in college in California. Six months after he bought it the resort folded and the wife killed herself.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘It gets worse. The college kid died in a car wreck on his way home for his mother’s funeral.’

  Magozzi stared at him. ‘Are you making this up?’

  ‘I wish. Anyway, the high school kid had some kind of a breakdown after that, and went to live with some of his dad’s relatives in Germany, see if he couldn’t get a life together.’

  ‘Germany?’

  ‘Right. Ties in with the Nazi thing. The sheriff’s going to pull the file and fax us everything.’ Gino blew out a sigh and pushed away his notebook. ‘But you know what? Maybe the old guy was a bad-ass and the world’s better off without him. But his wife and kids? What did they do? Makes you wonder if Morey and his crew ever stopped to think about the wreckage they were leaving behind.’