P. Tracy - Live Bait

She always did that. Said right out loud the things you never wanted to hear expressed, because some of them were just too terrible to contemplate.

He leaned forward, arms braced on his knees, empty wineglass dangling from his fingers. ‘I don’t want to think either of those things. What I want is for you to plug those two into your program and discover that they were really bad people involved in something that got them killed.’

‘A geriatric drug cartel or something?’

‘That would be ideal. Besides, the camp connection thing just doesn’t work. Like an old man told us this afternoon, why kill old Jews? They’re going to be dead soon anyway.’

‘Wow. That’s pretty cold.’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘He was in the camps too. Gives him license.’

Grace was quiet for a moment, tapping shave-and-a-haircut on the wooden arm of her chair with her fingertips. She always did that when she was thinking. ‘I don’t know, Magozzi. From what I hear on the news about Morey Gilbert, he doesn’t seem like much of a candidate for criminal activity.’

‘And you haven’t heard the half of it. He spent his life helping people. Saint, hero, pick a title, I’ve heard them all. He was a good man, Grace.’

‘Too good to be true?’

Magozzi thought about that for a minute. ‘I don’t think so. I think he might have been the real thing.’

‘What about the other one, Rose Kleber?’

‘Grandma Kleber. Cookies, garden, cat, family who adored her.’

‘So another noncriminal type.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘I’m spinning in circles here, aren’t I?’

Grace poured the last dribble of wine into his glass. ‘Then maybe it wasn’t something they did, Magozzi. Maybe they both happened to be in the same place at the same time, saw something or someone they shouldn’t have.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘That would be my all-time favorite scenario, but how the hell do you even start looking for something like that?’

‘That’s what you’ve got me for.’

He watched her get up from her chair, a graceful spill of black water rising into the darkness.

‘No it isn’t.’

Grace smiled and stretched, her fingertips brushing a branch of the magnolia.

The bird went nuts.

While Magozzi and Grace were sipping wine under the magnolia, Marty Pullman was downing scotch with more serious intent. He was sitting on the bed in a room that had once belonged to Hannah, long before she’d been his wife. The room had changed over the years in a slow conversion from daughter’s bedroom to one of those sad places that has no real purpose anymore. There was a desk no one used, a bed no one slept in, a closet with empty hangers that clattered together when you opened the door. And yet Hannah lingered here as she did everywhere, and there wasn’t enough scotch in the world to erase her.

He took a deep drink from his glass and stared out the window at the dark. It was only his second night in this house, and yet it seemed a hundred years since he’d sat in his own bathtub with a gun in his mouth.

He hadn’t been fooled when Lily had asked him to stay. From any other woman whose husband of fifty-some years had just been murdered, the request would have been perfectly understandable. Grief expands to fill a newly empty house, and Marty knew better than anyone that the only thing worse than being dead was being a solitary survivor. But that’s not why Lily wanted him here. Now that Morey’s death had finally brought him out of isolation, she was going to keep an eye on him, and they both knew it. Somehow the old bag knew what he was up to. She always had – except for that one time.

He cringed when the shrill whine of the vacuum started up again. For the past four hours, Lily had been cooking and cleaning in preparation for a houseful of mourners tomorrow. He’d tried to help so she could finish and go to bed; at one point they’d almost come to blows over the vacuum cleaner. ‘Have a heart, Martin,’ she’d said to him then, and that was when he realized that the object wasn’t to finish the job at all. Marty had his bottle, Lily had her vacuum, and God help anyone who tried to take their tools of sanity away.

He grabbed the scotch, went to the kitchen for two fresh glasses, and brought them out into the living room, kicking the vacuum cleaner cord out of the socket on his way. ‘For God’s sake, Lily, sit down and rest. It’s almost eleven o’clock.’

He expected at least some resistance, or perhaps a pointed comment about the booze, but apparently, even Lily Gilbert had her limits. She sagged down onto the couch next to him and stared mindlessly at the muted TV. She was still in her child-sized overalls, but she was wearing a blue cotton babushka over her cropped silver hair, as she always did when she cleaned. The scarf baffled Marty. He wondered if she’d worn her hair long as a girl, donning the scarf to hold it back, and if the scarf had lingered as a habit long after the hair was gone. He tried to imagine Lily with long hair, but with her little old face, her eyes magnified by her glasses, and four shots of scotch in his belly, all he could see was E.T. after the kids had put the wig on him.

‘I think the house is clean enough,’ she pronounced, to dispel any notion that she was sitting down because Marty told her to.

‘The carpet is almost bald now. Yeah, I’d say it’s clean enough.’ Marty poured her out a finger of scotch. ‘Here.’

She gave him a disapproving look. ‘You don’t want to drink alone, is that it?’

‘I have no problem with drinking alone. You need to relax.’

‘I don’t like scotch.’

‘You want something else?’

She stared at the glass for a long time, then finally took a sip and grimaced. ‘This is horrible. How can you drink this?’

Marty shrugged. ‘You get used to it.’

Lily took another tentative sip. ‘Morey’s scotch is better. Still bad, but better than this. This is cheap, isn’t it?’

He smiled a little. ‘Yeah.’

Lily nodded, got up, and disappeared into the kitchen. A few moments later, she came out carrying a bottle of twenty-five-year-old Balvenie.

Marty gaped at the bottle. ‘My God, Lily, do you know how much that stuff costs?’

‘So we shouldn’t drink it? You think you can sell a half-empty bottle of scotch on eBay?’

Marty couldn’t decide which was more surprising – the fact that Lily had lugged out a two-hundred-dollar bottle of scotch, or that she knew about eBay.

They sat quietly together, drinking scotch and staring at the silent TV, and because the moment was so strangely comfortable, Marty was almost tempted to tell her everything. Just blurt it out, forget the consequences, let her do her worst.

Suddenly, he saw an image of Jack Gilbert smiling back at him from the TV. He blinked a few times, certain that he was hallucinating, but the smiling face didn’t go away. ‘Hey, that’s Jack. Turn it up.’

Lily snatched the remote from the table and turned the TV off.

‘Come on, Lily!’ He grabbed the remote, flipped the TV back on, and watched in amusement as the commercial cycled through a montage of touching scenes: Jack at a car accident, helping the victim, Jack at a construction site, talking to workers, Jack at a hospital bed, looking earnest and caring. A narrator’s voice spoke over the final shot of a dynamic, charismatic Jack in court: ‘You need a lawyer who cares about you. Call Jack Gilbert at 1-800-555-5225. That’s 1-800-555-J-A-C-K, Jack. Don’t let them jack you around.’

‘What a schlock,’ Lily muttered.

‘I don’t know. I thought it was pretty good.’

She grunted.

‘You never used to think he was a schlock. You used to be proud of him.’