P. Tracy - Live Bait

Langer set the box on a working table they’d shoved between their desks. ‘This is the last of them.’

‘Gloria says it’s mob related.’

Langer smiled a little. ‘The scary thing about that woman is that she’s right more than she’s wrong, which is better than our average. I don’t know why she doesn’t just sign up and get into the job for real.’

‘I asked her that once. Said she wouldn’t be caught dead in the clothes they make us wear. Do we really have to go through another one of those damn boxes?’

‘We do.’

‘It’s depressing as hell.’

‘Tell me about it.’ Langer started sorting through more of the detritus of Arlen Fischer’s life with little hope of finding anything helpful. So far the contents of the old man’s desks and cabinets had yielded little but confirmation that he filed garbage instead of throwing it away. They’d been through four boxes like this already, and the most interesting thing they’d found was an old, empty Chicklets box that had instantly called up childhood memories for both of them. Apparently mothers of all faiths had surreptitiously doled out those precious little white squares of gum to keep their children quiet during sermons.

Johnny stood up and stretched, peered into the box, and plucked out a cellophane packet of crumbled soup crackers. ‘Oh boy. Here’s a clue.’

Langer looked at the pathetic little package, frowned hard, and looked quickly away. It was the kind of thing he’d found in his mother’s house after he’d buried her last year. Single pieces of gum so old and brittle they’d shattered in their tin foil shrouds when he touched them; boxes of candle stubs and scraps of wrapping paper; and the one that still puzzled him – a paper bag of panty hose, all with one leg cut off. The collections of the dead were surely among the saddest things in the world.

‘Something the matter, Langer?’

He shook his head and pretended to study an old political flyer he’d just pulled from the box. He didn’t talk about his mother’s long death to anyone. Not his partner, not his rabbi, not even his wife, who was probably on the schedule as his next failure. His mother had been the first. After a lifetime of love and humor and Chicklets, he’d run from her Alzheimer’s, abandoned her to strangers who left her to die alone, just as he had.

‘Langer?’

And after he’d failed his mother, he failed the job, watching like a blind fool as the Monkeewrench killer passed him in the parking ramps at the Mall of America, pushing the latest victim in a wheelchair. He was a detective, for God’s sake, and he hadn’t recognized a killer just a few yards away. He still woke up in the middle of every night, sweating, gasping, thinking of the lives that were lost after that day, and how easily he could have saved them.

And then, of course, came the big one, when he had failed himself, his god, and everything he had ever believed in, and the funny thing was that it had only taken a moment. No, not even that long. Just the few seconds it had taken him to…

‘Jesus, Langer, what the hell’s wrong with you?’

He jumped at Johnny McLaren’s hand on his shoulder, and in that instant thought his heart had stopped, and the possibility moved him not at all.

‘Hey, what is it, man? You got the flu or something? You’re sweating like a pig.’

Langer straightened and wiped at his face, feeling the greasy slick of fear and regret. ‘Sorry. Yeah. Maybe a touch of the flu.’

‘Well, sit down, for chrissakes, I’ll get you some water, and then maybe you better think about going home.’ McLaren was watching him with a wary, almost frightened caution. ‘You really zoned out there for a minute, you know? Creeped me out big-time.’

Langer smiled at him, just because McLaren had offered to get him water. Such a silly, little thing, and yet it touched him, as if it were a kindness far beyond what he deserved. ‘Pigs don’t sweat,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘You said I was sweating like a pig. But pigs don’t sweat.’

‘They don’t?’

‘No.’

McLaren looked absolutely flummoxed. ‘Well that’s so stupid. Man, that really pisses me off. Why the hell do they make up sayings about pigs sweating when they don’t sweat?’

‘I just don’t know.’

By the time McLaren returned with a chipped mug of water and two little white pills, Langer was sitting quietly at his desk, watching the grass turn green across the street from City Hall.

‘You look better.’

‘Actually, I feel fine now. Normal, in fact. What are these?’ he pushed at the little pills.

‘Aspirin. Well, not aspirin, exactly. Couldn’t find any of those, but Gloria said they have aspirin or aceta-whatever in them, you know, just in case you had a fever.’

Langer flipped a pill over and smiled when he read the marking he recognized from the pills his wife took for PMS. ‘Thanks, Johnny. I appreciate it.’

‘No problem. You know, I was thinking, you opened that box and then boom, you got sick. Could be some kind of spores living in all that old junk, like when they opened the Egyptian tombs? And you just got a big whiff.’

‘Ah.’ Langer nodded sagely. ‘So we should close that box and forget it, because there may be life-threatening spores inside, right?’

‘Good idea.’ McLaren started to close the box flaps, then stopped, releasing a miserable sigh. ‘Trouble is, that pretty much leaves us with nowhere to go. I suppose we could talk to the housekeeper again, but I don’t know what more she could tell us.’

‘Probably nothing.’ Langer glanced over at the abandoned box. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much to tell about that man’s life.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I was telling Gloria, that he was kind of a nobody, and she said basically that a nobody didn’t die the way he did, and that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Somebody knew Arlen Fischer existed, and apparently he really, really pissed them off.’

Langer thought about that for a minute, then pulled a fresh tablet from his drawer and clicked open a ballpoint. ‘Okay. Who tortures people when they get really, really pissed off?’

McLaren started counting them off on his fingers. ‘Well, you got your mob types, which we’ve already eliminated because there’s absolutely nothing to support it…’

‘Right.’

‘… and then there’s your sicko serial killers, a bunch of foreign dictators, military intelligence in a couple hundred countries, bad cops, hate groups…’ McLaren stopped and blinked. ‘Jeez. That’s kind of a long list, isn’t it?’

Langer nodded. ‘The sorry world we live in.’

‘McLaren!’ Gloria poked her head around the edge of her cubicle. ‘That Brit is on line two; and Langer, pick up line one right now. Your downstairs toilet is backing up.’

Langer grimaced at his blinking phone. ‘I was supposed to fix that toilet last week. Forgot. Who’s the Brit?’

‘Dunno. Some guy with an attitude, Gloria says. Already called a couple times. Probably pissed I didn’t call him back yet.’

‘Not as pissed as my wife.’

It took Langer the better part of ten minutes to calm down his wife and intimidate the plumber she’d called – one of those emergency yahoos who stood in the middle of your flooding house and demanded a thousand dollars to turn a valve. By the time he finished, McLaren had filled three paper napkins with scribbles, and was thanking his caller with uncharacteristic politeness.

‘Sounds like your call went a little better than mine,’ Langer said, settling his phone into its cradle.

McLaren’s grin was a little foolish, close to giddy. ‘Man, you are not going to believe this. You know who that was? Interpol. The goddamned friggin’ Interpol, for chrissakes. We’ve got a little action on our.45.’