P. Tracy: Live Bait

‘Those are uncooked brats, imported all the way from Milwaukee, you food pygmy. Where’s your grill?’

Magozzi gestured toward a rusty old Weber in the corner of the porch.

Gino nudged it with his foot and it collapsed. ‘We’re going to need duct tape.’

Magozzi hefted a suspicious-looking, dark orange brick of cheese. ‘Twelve-year cheddar? Is that legal?’

Gino grinned. ‘That stuff’ll make you weep with joy, I promise. Got it at a great little cheese house in Door County. Somebody forgot about a wheel in the cellar and found it twelve years later, covered in about a foot of mold. Nirvana, my friend. Pure nirvana. It’s amazing what a cow and some bacteria can do.’

Magozzi sniffed it and cringed. ‘Oh yeah. Every time I see a cow I think, Hey, wouldn’t it be great to get some bacteria and really do something with this thing. Why do you have a file folder in the cooler?’

‘It’s a cold case.’

‘Very funny.’

Gino lifted the grill and another leg fell off in a shower of rust. ‘This one’s from ninety-four. Thought we could take a look at it later. You know, just to keep our hand in, in case anyone ever kills somebody in this town again. You remember hearing anything about the Valensky case?’

Magozzi sat down on the chaise and opened the folder. ‘Sort of. The plumber, right?’

‘That’s the one. Shot seven times, three of them in places I don’t even want to think about.’

‘Plumbers charge too much.’

‘Tell me about it. But other than that, this guy was damn near a candidate for sainthood. Some Polack who actually made it out of the war alive, emigrated to the good old U. S. of A., started a business, married, had three kids, deacon at his church, scout leader, the whole American dream, then bled to death on his own bathroom floor after someone used him for target practice.’

‘Suspects?’

‘Hell no. According to the reports in there, everybody loved him. Case dried up in about two seconds.’

Magozzi grunted and tossed the folder on the floor. ‘Most guys with a free Sunday would probably find something else to do, like sit on a bench at Lake Calhoun and count bikinis.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m a crime fighter, I have a higher purpose.’ Gino ran a hand through his hedge of closely cropped blond hair, reconsidering. ‘Besides, it’s probably too early for bikinis.’

They got the call before Magozzi had finished duct-taping the legs back on his grill. Gino had gone inside to unload the cooler, and when he came back out to the porch he was beaming.

‘Hey, want to go see a body?’

Magozzi sat back on his heels and frowned. ‘You found a body in my kitchen?’

‘Nah. Phone rang while I was in there, so I picked up. Dispatch got an honest-to-God homicide call. Uptown Nursery. The owner’s wife found him this morning by one of the greenhouses and figured it was a heart attack, because the guy is pushing eighty-five and what else would drop a man that age? So she called the funeral director. He finds a bullet hole in the guy’s head and calls nine-one-one.’

Magozzi looked wistfully at the grill and sighed. ‘So what happened to the on-duty guys who are supposed to be taking this?’

‘Tinker and Peterson. Just what I wanted to know. They just took a call at the train yard over in Northeast. Found some poor bastard tied to the tracks.’

Magozzi winced.

‘Nah, don’t worry. Train never hit him.’

‘So he’s okay?’

‘Nope, he’s dead.’

Magozzi looked at him expectantly.

‘Don’t look at me. That’s all I got.’ He jumped when his shirt pocket spit out an irritating, tinny version of Beethoven’s Fifth.

‘What is that?’

Gino pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and stabbed viciously at buttons half the size of his chubby fingers. ‘Goddamnit. Helen keeps programming in all these weird rings ’cause she knows I got no clue how to change it.’

Magozzi grinned. ‘That’s funny.’

Beethoven spoke again.

‘Fourteen-year-olds are only funny when they belong to somebody else… shit. I’m gonna invent one of these things with big fat buttons and make a jillion dollars… Hello, this is Rolseth.’

Magozzi stood and brushed the rust off his hands, listened to Gino grunt into the phone for a few seconds, then went inside to lock up. By the time he got back out to the porch, Gino had retrieved his gun from the car and was hooking it to the belt that almost held up his Bermuda shorts. He looked like an armed and dangerous tourist.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got a pair of pants that would fit me.’

Magozzi just smiled at him.

‘Aw, shut up. That was Langer on the phone. He and McLaren just got called in for a suspected homicide – “suspected” meaning someone did a little interior design with a few gallons of blood, but there’s no body. And guess what?’

‘He wants us to take it?’

‘Nah, Dispatch told him we were on the nursery thing, that’s why he called. The bloody house is just a few blocks over.’

Magozzi frowned. ‘That’s a pretty decent neighborhood.’

‘Right. Not exactly a killing field, and all of a sudden we’ve got two possibles in one day. And there’s another thing. The guy who lives in that house is – or was – also in his eighties, just like our guy.’

Magozzi thought about that for a minute. ‘He’s thinking cluster? What, that some psycho’s running around killing old people?’

Gino shrugged. ‘He was just giving us a heads-up. Thought we should keep in touch in case something clicks.’

Magozzi sighed, looked longingly at the Weber. ‘So we’re back in business.’

‘Big-time.’ Gino paused for a moment. ‘You ever think there’s something wrong with a job where you only have something to do if someone gets murdered?’

‘Every day, buddy.’

Marty Pullman was sitting on the closed toilet lid in his downstairs bathroom, staring down the muzzle of a.357 Magnum. The round black hole looked very large, which worried him. Worse yet, the toilet faced the big mirror on the sliding doors that enclosed the bathtub, and he wasn’t too keen on watching his own snuff film. He thought about it for a minute, then got into the bathtub and slid the doors closed behind him.

He smiled a little as he aimed the shower nozzle toward the back of the tub and turned the spray on full blast. He may have made a mess of his life, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to make a mess of his death.

Finally satisfied, he sat down in the tub and put the muzzle in his mouth. Water poured over his head, his clothes, his shoes.

He hesitated for just a few seconds, wondering again what, if anything, he’d done last night. Not that it would matter now, he thought, slipping his thumb through the trigger guard.

‘Mr Pullman?’

Marty froze, his thumb quivering on the trigger. Goddamn it, he was hallucinating. He had to be. No one ever came to this house, and certainly no one would just let himself in – except maybe a Jehovah’s Witness, which made him glad he had the gun.

‘Mr Pullman?’ The male voice was louder now, closer, and he sounded young. ‘Are you in there, sir?’ A forceful knock rattled the bathroom door in its frame.

The gun tasted terrible as he pulled it from his mouth, and he spat into the water swirling toward the drain. ‘Who is it?’ he shouted, trying his best to sound scary and aggressive.

‘Sorry to disturb you, Mr Pullman, but Mrs Gilbert told me to break the door down if I had to…’

‘Who the hell are you and how do you know Lily?’ Marty shouted.

‘Jeff Montgomery, sir? I work at the nursery?’

The kid spoke only in questions. God, that was irritating. Marty looked down at the gun and sighed. He was never going to get this done. ‘Stay right where you are. I’ll be out in a minute.’