by P. J. Tracy
The girl who’d greeted them appeared miraculously with a fresh bottle. “Don’t look so surprised,” she laughed, refilling their glasses. “I told you I’d keep an eye out for empties.”
“Well, cheers to you,” Gino said. “Do you think you could fill up my friend over there, too? The tall skinny guy?”
“Sure.” She drifted away toward Roadrunner and Gino gave Magozzi a wink.
“I’m going to make my way over there, see if Super Geek had any more luck tracing those e-mails.”
Roadrunner almost looked grateful when Gino approached him, then his face twisted in confusion, remembering that he was supposed to be taking sides. “Detective,” he said warily.
“You look like you’re about as happy to be here as I am.”
Roadrunner twirled his glass between his fingers nervously. “Yeah.”
“Any new progress on the e-mails?”
“No.” His eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are you playing good cop now?”
Gino laughed. “No, I’m always the bad cop. But I’m off-duty, sort of. From now on, you’ve all got your own personal police protection, courtesy of MPD. We’re just filling in till the swing shift gets assigned.”
Roadrunner looked alarmed. “You mean … you’re tailing us?”
Gino shrugged good-naturedly. “Surveillance, protection—either way you look at it, everybody’s safer.”
Roadrunner frowned at him for a minute, then sighed. “Okay. I guess that makes sense, from a cop’s point of view.”
“Only view I got, buddy. So you get dragged to this kind of stuff often?”
“Pretty much. Courtesy to Mitch and Diane, you know?”
“What do you think of the art?”
He shrugged in halfhearted apology. “Hey, I don’t know shit about art. Coming to the shows always makes me feel like an idiot.”
“Well, if any of these people came to your office to see your work, you’d make them feel like idiots, so then it’d be even.”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
Harley appeared from out of nowhere, which was hard to believe, given his mass. He placed himself between Roadrunner and Gino like a protective father defending his son against the neighborhood bully. “You checking up on us, Detective?”
“Basically. I was just telling Roadrunner here, we got a car on each of you from now on.”
Harley looked Gino hard in the eye. “So you’re covering Grace?”
“You bet.”
“Well, I sure as hell hope you’re better at covering her than you were covering the goddamned Megamall.”
Gino glared at him. “You’re pretty fucking mouthy for a guy who doesn’t have an alibi for any of these murders.”
“And you’re pretty fucking self-righteous for a guy who knew the last two murders were going down and didn’t stop them.”
Gino looked down into his glass, blowing out a silent whistle, counting to ten. “Okay, buddy,” he finally said, “I’m a little buzzed right now, and I’m guessing you are too, which is why you forgot this whole shitload of a case is messing up your doorstep as much as ours.”
Harley glared at him for a minute, then slowly his shoulders slumped and he deflated like a spent balloon. “I didn’t forget, Detective,” he said quietly. “Christ, we’re never going to forget. That’s the problem. Grace still blames herself for Georgia and now she’s taking the hits for these, too. We’re worried about her and it makes us crazy. Jesus, what a fucking mess.”
Gino eyed him speculatively. It hadn’t been an apology exactly, but it was close enough. “Fucking mess. I’ll drink to that.” He lifted his flute and acknowledged Harley with a slight nod before draining his glass. “You know what? These damn glasses are too small.”
Harley nodded. “Sit tight. I know where they keep the bottles.”
Ten minutes and almost a bottle later, Gino was starting to think that Harley wasn’t such a bad guy after all—in fact, they seemed to have a lot in common. They both hated abstract art, liked pink champagne, and loved to eat. Roadrunner seemed pretty decent, too, especially for a technowienie.
They were all standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a painting of bold, distorted strokes that stretched upward like chunks of pulled taffy, trying to make sense of it.
“So what do you think this is supposed to be?” Gino asked.
“Hell if I know,” Harley said. “Black-and-white shit. I think they’re supposed to be people.”
“They’re clothespins,” Roadrunner said with great certainty.
“Nah,” Gino disagreed amiably. “Gotta be people. See the legs? And those fat globs of paint on the bottom are feet. Besides, why would anybody do abstracts of clothespins? They’re already abstract, aren’t they?”
Harley finished off the rest of the champagne straight from the bottle. “Good point, Detective.”
“You have to wonder if they’re supposed to be anything,” Roadrunner said, slurring his words slightly. “What if all this contemporary art stuff was just a scam? What if they just pour a bunch of paint on a canvas and hope it turns into something some pseudo-intellectual art critic says is profound?”
“That’s exactly what I think,” Harley started to say, but then a stunning blonde in a tight black dress sidled up next to him and touched his arm. “Is this your work?”
Harley concentrated hard to keep his jaw from falling open. “Uh … no.”
“Oh.” She looked around uncomfortably, searching for a polite way to extricate herself from her obvious mistake.
“It is a … moving piece, though, isn’t it?” Harley added quickly.
Roadrunner and Gino pretended to ignore the exchange, but they were both smiling smugly.
“Oh, yes! I think it’s incredible!” the blonde gushed with renewed interest. “Whoever did these is quite talented. So what’s your interpretation of this one?”
Harley leaned back on the rundown heels of his motorcycle boots. “Well, I think it’s a poignant representation of the contemporary dichotomy between homogeneity and global diversity.”
Next to him, Roadrunner bent forward and coughed into his hand, stifling a laugh. Gino looked away.
The blonde’s eyes brightened in admiration. “I can see that. You know, with the contrast between the black … and the white.”
“Exactly. A bold statement. Black. And then, white. I think there are some racial undertones, too.”
“I still think they’re clothespins,” Roadrunner said quietly.
The blonde frowned over at him, crinkles of irritation creasing her forehead. “What did you say?”
“I said they’re clothespins. Black and white clothespins,” Roadrunner repeated.
She nodded. “I see your point. The clothespins represent rural artifacts in a complicated world …”
“And I think they’re people with teeny-weeny heads and big fat shapeless feet.” Gino upped the stakes.
“O-kay. I could see that, too. The suggestion of motor function overriding mental function as a general condition of mankind; the rigidity of the torsos and the emptiness of the background hinting at a paralysis of spirit that has rendered life meaningless …”
“A combined representation of paganism and Judeo-Christianity enveloped in hopelessness.” Harley gave a sage nod.
The blonde looked as if she’d just had an epiphany. “Perhaps it’s trying to talk to us about being spiritually bereft.”
Gino’s eyes were watering from the effort of holding back his laughter. He looked into his empty glass. “My major concern at the moment is the fact that I’m alcoholically bereft. If you’ll excuse me?” He turned and sought out the girl with the tray; Roadrunner examined his options and decided to take up his old station by the far wall.
Across the gallery, Magozzi had waited to approach Grace until she was alone—a window of opportunity that had proven to be rare as hen’s teeth. He shouldn’t have been surprised—aloof, dark-haired beauties were universally alluring to men, whether your passion w
as art or punk rock or reading back issues of Field & Stream during halftime. And if you were clueless to the fact that this particular beauty had a very nasty temper and a loaded Sig lodged under her armpit, she probably seemed like fair game.
She watched him approach, her expression absolutely neutral. They stood there and stared at each other for a moment, then Magozzi said, “There are some things I need to ask you.”
“I was alone at the office. No witnesses. No alibi.”
“I know. It wasn’t that.”
“What, then?”
Magozzi looked around, hesitating, stalling. “It’s not that easy. I shouldn’t be talking to you at all.”
“Because I’m a suspect?”
“Something like that.”
She didn’t say anything; she just stood there waiting, not helping him at all.
“Can I give you a lift home?” he finally asked. “We could talk on the way.” When she didn’t answer right away, he added, “It’s important.”
She thought about it for a minute. “I’ve got my car. You can ride along if you want.”
“Give me a few minutes. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
Magozzi made a quick circuit of the gallery and finally found Gino just coming out of the restroom. “Hey, buddy.” Gino slapped him on the back. “You taken a leak yet? They got phones in there, right on a little table with curvy legs …”
“I’m going to ride home with MacBride.”
Gino blinked once, then tried to lower his brows in a scowl, but champagne spoiled the effort, leaving one brow up so he merely looked whimsical. “You’re gonna date a suspect?”
“It’s not a date.”
Gino tried to absorb that, tucked his lower lip inward. “You gonna look under her skirt?”
Magozzi covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. “Look, Gino, you don’t know where I am, you don’t know what I’m doing, okay?”
“Damn right I don’t know what you’re doing. Do you?”
“Hell, no. Can you catch a cab?”
Gino tipped back on his heels and came perilously close to falling over before he righted himself. “Well, buddy, as it happens, I just talked to Angela. She found a last-minute sitter, and she’s meeting me next door for a drink in fifteen minutes. First real date since the Accident.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“You’re a lucky man, Gino.”
“Yes, I am.”
Chapter 37
Magozzi was playing with the passenger-seat controls in Grace’s Range Rover. By the time he found the seat heater and the lumbar control, he was seriously considering a career as a gigolo.
They were two blocks away from the gallery when Grace said, “You put a tail on me.”
Magozzi glanced in the side mirror and saw the squad half a block back. “Kind of conspicuous, isn’t it?”
“Just me?”
“All of you.” He counted to twenty and was almost disappointed when she didn’t jump all over him. “Don’t tell me you’re okay with that.”
Grace sighed and draped her wrists over the top of the steering wheel. “Magozzi, I’m tired. And you know what? I’m past caring about a lot of things. Now, did you really have something you wanted to talk to me about, or did you just want a ride in my car?”
“I want to know your real names.”
She took the ramp onto I-94, then shot into the far left lane and accelerated. It was a full minute before she spoke again. “I take it Tommy hasn’t hacked into the FBI file yet.”
“You know damn well he hasn’t. You made sure of that.”
Grace didn’t say anything.
“He ran into the firewall you put on it. And don’t bother to deny it. You did it this morning, probably when you realized he was good enough to crack through FBI security, so you beefed it up a little. You’re speeding.”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Grace said quietly. “If anyone ever connects who we are now with who we were in Atlanta, we’d have to disappear again, start all over.”
“Because you’re afraid the Atlanta killer would find you.”
“Exactly.”
“He already has.”
Grace sighed heavily. “Maybe. Maybe it’s the same guy, but what if it isn’t? What if this really is just some new crazy playing the game, and because we buy into the theory that it’s the same guy, we get careless and he finds us again? Can you guarantee it’s the same man? That we’ve got absolutely nothing to lose by blowing our cover?”
Magozzi thought about that. “No. I can’t guarantee it. Not tonight, anyway. But I might be able to tomorrow.”
“Then tomorrow I’ll tell you our real names.” She turned her head and looked at him. “Why is it so important to you to know who we were, Magozzi? There’s no magic back there, just ordinary names.”
“I’ll get to that.”
“When?”
“To tell you the truth, I’m kind of going out on a limb here. Giving you information about an ongoing homicide investigation isn’t exactly procedure.”
Grace looked at him briefly, then back at the road. “Something broke, didn’t it?”
“Maybe.” He rubbed at the ache that was just starting in his temples. Exhaustion and champagne were a bad combination. “If there’s a chance you might know anything about it, I’ve got to ask you. If my instincts are right, it could break the case. If they’re wrong … shit, I don’t even want to go there.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.”
“I know. I hope to make more sense later. I guess at the very least I’d like to be looking you in the eye if I go out on that limb.”
“You expect me to invite you into my house?”
“We could stop somewhere else. A coffee shop, bar, whatever.”
Grace shook her head and kept heading toward home.
While Grace put the Range Rover in the garage, Magozzi went out to where the squad was just pulling up to the curb. When the uniform rolled down the window, he recognized Andy Garfield, one of the older patrols who had the savvy to go inside, but absolutely no interest in leaving the streets.
“She was doing eighty-three in a fifty-five, Magozzi. How fast do you think she goes when she doesn’t have a cop in the right seat?”
“God knows. How the hell are you, Garfield?”
“Better.”
“I heard Sheila came out all right.”
“Yeah. We were scared shitless for a week, but it was just a cyst.”
“Gino told me. We raised a glass.” He glanced over his shoulder when he heard Grace’s boots on the front walk. “I’m going to be inside for a while. Heads up out here, okay?”
“You got it.”
Up at the door Grace was just inserting her key card when Magozzi came up behind her. “Garfield’s on you tonight. He’s a good man.”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“I don’t know. It makes me feel better.”
When she cracked the fortress door a wire-haired mutt was right there, doing a little tap dance, his tongue lolling. His doggy expression shifted comically from great joy to utter shock when he realized Grace wasn’t alone, but surprisingly, he didn’t run away. He merely kept a wary eye on Magozzi, who was careful to keep his movements slow and predictable.
“So this is the dog that’s afraid of strangers? He doesn’t seem too afraid now.”
Grace bent over and ruffled his fur. “Hey, Charlie.” She looked back at Magozzi. “I guess he remembers you. Or at least the smell of you. Probably figures if you were invited back, you’re pretty harmless. Of course, he doesn’t realize that you weren’t invited either time. That might change his mind.”
“What happened to his tail?”
“I don’t know. He was a stray.”
Magozzi knelt down and extended his hand slowly. “Hey, Charlie. It’s okay.”
Charlie scrutinized the offered hand from a distance, then stretched his nose forward tentatively.
The stub of his tail wiggled back and forth a couple times.
“He’s wagging his stump at me.”
Grace rolled her eyes. “You sound excited.”
“My standards have dropped a lot in the past week.”
Grace hung her duster in a closet, looked at Magozzi for a moment, then finally held out a hand for his coat. He stared at her hand for a moment, confused by the unexpected gesture of civility, then scrambled out of his topcoat in record time. “You’re amazingly hospitable when you’re tired.”
She just sighed, hung up his coat, and then headed down the hallway toward the kitchen. Charlie scampered behind her, and Magozzi followed, with considerably more dignity, he thought.
“Sit down if you want,” Grace said.
Magozzi pulled up a chair at the kitchen table, then watched, absolutely amazed, as Charlie climbed up into the chair opposite him and sat there like a person.
Grace chose to remain standing, leaning against the counter instead of sitting. Magozzi decided she was big on taking the high ground, moral and otherwise.
“Okay, Magozzi. I’m looking you in the eye. Talk.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly and climbed out all the way to the edge of that shaky old limb. “Let me rattle off some names and you tell me if they mean anything to you.”
“Oh boy. Word association.”
“Does the name Calumet mean anything to you?”
“Baking powder,” she said without batting an eye. “Did I pass?”
“No, you failed. How about Kleinfeldt?”
“Nothing. So what’s Calumet?”
“A small town in Wisconsin.”
“Wisconsin is a state, isn’t it?”
Magozzi smiled. “You’re actually funny. Does anyone else know that?”
“Just you.”
“How about Brian Bradford?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Nope.”
“You sure?”
Grace studied him for a minute. “That’s the big one, isn’t it?”
Magozzi nodded.
“I’ve never known a Brian Bradford. I’ve never known a Bradford, for that matter.”