P. Tracy - Live Bait

‘Shit.’ Jack sagged back down into the lawn chair. ‘Half the people in the city have Dad’s number. He used to pass out cards at the soup kitchen, for chrissakes. The man was totally out there.’

‘Then again, for all you know, she could have been someone your dad saw every day, right?’ Gino asked casually. ‘Seeing as how you haven’t been around here much lately.’

Jack tipped his head thoughtfully to one side, and for a moment Magozzi feared it would fall off his neck. ‘Yep. You’re right about that. Did I tell you I’ve been persona non grata here for a year or so?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘You did. Yesterday. I thought that was kind of a shame. Hate to see rifts like that in a family. It must make this especially hard for you, losing your dad before you had a chance to patch things up.’

‘Nah. There wasn’t a chance in hell we were going to fix that.’

‘Really.’

‘I mean, it wasn’t like I didn’t take out the garbage or something, you know? Never could be what Pop wanted me to be, and like I told you yesterday, to top it off I married a Lutheran. That went over like a pork chop at a Seder dinner.’

Gino nodded sympathetically. ‘Sounds like he was a little hard on you, Jack, and I know just where you’re coming from. I could never please my father, either.’

Magozzi maintained a poker face. Gino’s father thought his only son walked on water.

‘No matter what I did,’ Gino continued, ‘no matter how hard I tried, it was just never enough for that man. Used to really piss me off.’

Jack raised his eyes in drunken disbelief. ‘Jesus, Detective, I’m an attorney. Give me a little credit. Did you actually expect me to fall for that load of sympathetic bonding crap?’

Gino shrugged. ‘Had to give it a shot.’

‘Well for what it’s worth, I didn’t kill my father, okay?’ He collapsed back onto the lawn chair and closed his eyes. ‘Shit. You guys might want to step back a little. I think I might actually hurl.’

‘So who was she, this Rose Kleber?’ Lily was standing at the front window of the greenhouse with her arms folded, staring out at Jack, cluttering the parking lot with his lawn-chair and cooler, lying there like a stunned carp.

‘She lived over on Ferndale, Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi answered, ‘and a couple of things caught our attention. She was in the camps for one thing, just like Mr Gilbert.’ He saw Lily’s eyes close briefly. ‘And she had his name and number in her phone book.’

Marty was at the counter, rubbing at an old stain with his thumb. ‘Sounds pretty thin, guys.’

‘It is. Just something we’re checking out.’

Marty nodded absently, and Magozzi had the feeling he was barely interested, barely present.

Lily took a breath and turned away from the window. ‘People buy plants, Morey gives them a card, tells them to call if they have trouble with them. Do you have a picture? Maybe she was a customer.’

‘Not yet. We’ll get one to you as soon as we can. In the meantime, you don’t recall hearing the name?’

She shook her head. ‘Morey was the one who was good with names. Never forgot a name. Never forgot a face. Such a big deal people made over that, like he was giving them a present.’

Magozzi tucked away his notebook. ‘Do you have a customer list? A Rolodex, maybe?’

‘In the office in the back of the potting shed. But mostly it’s numbers I wrote down. Morey never needed to. He heard a number, he remembered it forever.’

‘Maybe we could take a look anyway, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

Back by the potting shed, they ran into the two employees Magozzi had talked to yesterday when they showed up at the impromptu memorial outside the nursery. They were tossing fifty-pound bags of fertilizer onto a wheeled pallet with a careless ease that made Magozzi long for his youth, but they straightened respectfully when Lily approached. They gave her shy, almost identical smiles, then turned to Magozzi and Gino.

‘Good morning, Detectives,’ they piped in unison, wiping their hands on their jeans, then holding them out.

Gino looked positively flummoxed by the apparition of two well-mannered young men greeting their elders with almost old-world politeness. ‘Hey, yo,’ was about the nicest thing anybody under twenty had ever said to him.

‘Jeff Montgomery, right?’ Magozzi shook the hand of the tall blond kid first, then the shorter, darker one. ‘And Tim…?’

‘Matson, sir.’

‘Either of you remember a woman named Rose Kleber shopping here at the nursery?’ Gino asked.

The boys thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘We help out a lot of customers, but we don’t always get their names, you know?’ Jeff Montgomery said. ‘What does she look like?’

Magozzi cringed inwardly, remembering the mottled face, the blood- stained dress. ‘Elderly, a little heavy, gray hair…’ he looked at their blank faces and realized this was hopeless. Teenaged boys remembered teenaged girls, and that was about it.

‘Actually, that sounds like a lot of the people who come here, sir,’ Tim Matson said. ‘Maybe she’s on the mailing list. Mr Gilbert sent out sale flyers every now and then. Did you check the computer?’

‘You know how to run that thing, Timothy?’ Lily asked impatiently.

‘Sure. It’s just a computer.’

‘Good. Come with us. Jeffrey, we’re almost out of basil on the herb table. Take care of that, would you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Jeff disappeared in a flash while Lily led the way through the potting shed into a tiny back office.

There was a fine layer of black dust over everything – soil from the adjacent potting shed, Magozzi assumed. It covered a bookcase jammed with catalogs, a paper-cluttered desk, and the old computer and printer that sat on it. Grace MacBride would have had a fit.

‘Can’t be good for this thing,’ Gino tapped a finger on the top of the computer. ‘Having it right next to the potting shed like this.’

Tim took a seat in the only chair and booted up the computer. ‘It’s an old one, sir. They aren’t as sensitive as the new ones. Better hardware, if you ask me. And Mr Gilbert didn’t use it for much. Just the invoices once a month, and the mailing list.’

‘ Hmph.’ Lily folded her arms across her chest in disapproval. ‘That’s what you think. He played games on this stupid machine. You can hear that beep-beep-beep thing all the way from the front greenhouse, so I come back and take a look one day, and there he is, a grown man shooting down little cartoon spaceships.’

Tim held back a smile as he pulled up an alphabetized mailing list, then waved his hand at the screen. ‘Sorry. No Rose Kleber.’

Gino was lifting some of the loose papers on the desk, peeking under them. ‘You got a Rolodex, Mrs Gilbert?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘One of those things with all the little cards?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

She shook her head. ‘Silliest things I ever saw. You want to find Freddie Herbert’s number? You spend half your day looking at all those little cards, one by one.’ She opened a drawer, slapped a thin address book on the desk and opened it to the H ’s. ‘Here. All the H ’s on one page. No turning, no little cards, Freddie Herbert right there in a second.’ She paged to the K ’s, glanced at the three names listed, then shrugged. ‘No Kleber.’

‘Anything else on that computer, Tim?’ Maggozi asked.

Tim pushed a few keys and called up the main menu. ‘Just the mailing list and the invoices, sir. That’s it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Can I turn it off? I should get out there and help Jeff.’

‘Go, go, go,’ Lily told him, and then turned to Magozzi and Gino, obviously impatient to get back to her customers. ‘Anything else?’