P. Tracy - Live Bait

Sol led them into a vast sitting room filled with furniture that had been fashionable thirty years ago. The air smelled of fading flowers and scorched coffee, and the stale, cloying scent of the cheap cologne someone had worn to the last viewing.

The air-conditioning, if there was any, was turned very low. Gino flopped into a maroon wing-back chair, grabbed a tissue from a nearby box, and mopped his forehead.

‘Who would have thought April could be so warm, eh? I have a man working on the air conditioner now, but in the meantime, please take your jackets off, Detectives. Be comfortable.’

‘Thanks, we’re fine,’ Gino said, his reddening face belying his words.

‘I’m not expecting anyone until five. We’re alone here. No one will see your guns except me, and I’m very good at keeping secrets.’

Gino was out of his jacket before by-the-book Magozzi could give him so much as a dirty look for defying department policy. He’d just decided to shame Gino by sweltering in his jacket when Sol gestured to his own bare arms below the short sleeves of his shirt.

‘If you don’t remove your jacket, Detective Magozzi, I’ll be forced to put on mine. I’m an old man. I could die from the heat.’

Magozzi grinned and slipped off his sports coat while Sol settled in a nearby chair.

‘I assume you have some follow-up questions for me. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help to you yesterday.’

Gino pulled out his notebook. ‘You did fine yesterday, Mr Biederman. And we understand how upset you were. But the problem is, everything got a little more complicated this morning.’

Sol nodded sadly. ‘I heard about Rose Kleber. Her daughter called shortly before you arrived. Such a terrible thing, an unbelievable thing, and I had to ask myself, is there a madman out there killing old Jews?’ He looked from Gino to Magozzi. ‘That’s why you’re really here, isn’t it? You’re wondering the same thing.’

‘We’re looking at a lot of things, Mr Biederman,’ Magozzi said. ‘So you knew Rose Kleber? She was a friend of yours?’

Sol shook his head. ‘Not a friend exactly, but it’s a small community. Everyone passes through here eventually. I took care of Mrs Kleber’s husband when he died ten years ago.’

‘Was she a friend of Mr Gilbert’s?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘And you would have known that, because you were Morey Gilbert’s best friend, right?’

Sol looked off into the middle distance, blinking rapidly. He didn’t answer for a moment, as if it had taken that long for the question to travel across the space between them. ‘Yes, absolutely. I would have given my life to save Morey’s.’

It was such a calmly delivered, matter-of-fact statement that Magozzi believed it immediately.

Gino leaned forward in his chair. ‘This is the deal, Mr Biederman. These two killings weren’t random. They weren’t accidents. Somebody wanted both Morey Gilbert and Rose Kleber dead, and if the same person killed them both, that means they had something in common we haven’t discovered yet: something that might lead us to the killer. So any little detail you can remember, even if it was just Morey mentioning her offhand, or recognizing her on the street, anything like that could really help us out.’

Sol thought about it for a moment, then shook his head. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think so.’

‘They were both in concentration camps during the war. I’m sure you knew that,’ Magozzi said.

Sol raised his left arm, showing the faded numbers on the underside. ‘Of course I knew.’

Gino gaped at the old man’s arm. ‘You know, my whole life I never met one person who was in a concentration camp, and now you’re the third in twenty-four hours.’

Sol gave him a small smile. ‘We don’t exactly advertise, but there are more of us than you might imagine. Especially in this neighborhood.’

‘Damn, I’m really sorry,’ Gino said.

‘Thank you, Detective Rolseth.’ He looked down at the ropy veins in his old hands. ‘I’m trying to imagine why someone would want to kill people who survived the camps. What’s the point?’ He spread his hands in a poignant gesture. ‘We’re all old. Pretty soon we’re going to be dead anyway.’

And what do you say to that? Magozzi thought, taken aback by the man’s directness. ‘We’re taking a look at hate crimes.’

Sol met his eyes and held them with a gaze so riveting Magozzi couldn’t have looked away if he tried. ‘When you hate Jews enough to want to eliminate them, you kill the breeders, Detective, you understand?’ Magozzi tried to nod, but it felt like his neck was frozen. ‘The Nazis taught us that. That’s what they called the young ones – breeders – as if we were animals. Sure, they killed old people, but only because they were useless, they got in the way. This has to be something else.’

Gino hadn’t moved since the old man had started talking. Finally he released a long exhale and spoke softly. ‘Then we need to find some other connection between your friend Morey and Rose Kleber. Like we said before, something else they had in common that would put them both in a killer’s path. Maybe they met each other back in the camps, kept up some sort of contact over the years?’

Sol shook his head. ‘Mrs Kleber was in Buchenwald. That was all she would tell me the day she came to make arrangements for her husband, and she could barely manage to speak the name of the place aloud. Morey was in Auschwitz, as was I. He saved my life there, did you know that?’

‘No, sir, I didn’t,’ Gino replied.

‘Well that was Morey. He was helping people even then. Maybe someday I’ll tell you about it.’ He looked over at Magozzi, and then back at Gino, his dark eyes growing moist. ‘The man was a hero. Who would kill a hero?’

It was almost sunset when Magozzi stood on the pressure pad outside Grace MacBride’s front door, listening to the security camera whir in the eave above his head, stilling the impulse to push his hair back off his forehead. It was thick and black and too long now, falling all over the place. He should have had it cut Saturday, before people in Minneapolis had started killing each other again.

There was a soft woof from the other side of the steel door as the dead bolts started sliding back, and that made him smile. Charlie, the great, wiry mongrel mix Grace had rescued from the streets, was only slightly less paranoid than his owner. It had taken weeks before he would wait on the other side of the door when Magozzi arrived, woofing an excited welcome instead of scrambling for a hiding place. Magozzi had tossed more than one shirt ruined by muddy paws and enthusiastic doggy kisses, and cared not a whit.

When the door finally opened he got a freeze-frame of Grace’s swinging black hair and smiling blue eyes before Charlie’s paws hit his shoulders and the long, sloppy tongue found his face. It always made him laugh; made the world a better place. He wondered if maybe he should start dating the dog.

‘Don’t let him do that,’ Grace always said. ‘He’s not allowed to jump on people. You’re ruining him.’

Magozzi grinned at her over Charlie’s shoulder. ‘Leave us alone. This is the only hug I’ve had today.’

‘Oh, you two are hopeless. Get in here.’

Grace was wearing black sweats and tennis shoes, which meant they weren’t going out – she wouldn’t take a step beyond the front door without the English riding boots – but her Sig Sauer was snug in the shoulder holster, a sure sign that they might go into the tightly fenced backyard, where she felt she needed the range and power of the bigger gun. The derringer was her close-quarters-inside-the-house weapon. If she’d been wearing that instead, over the thick socks that kept the ankle holster from chafing, he would have known the evening held no hope of fresh air, since Grace never opened her windows, in spite of the iron bars that made the little house look like a prison.