P. Tracy - Live Bait

‘ Marty, get over here. Look at this.’ Morey was standing at an upright cooler that held milk, cheese, and other perishables, looking into an adjacent water tank with a noisy bubbler, shaking his head.

Marty peered into the tank and grimaced at a writhing black mass of leeches. On top of the tank all manner of worms squirmed in cups of sawdust and dirt. ‘This is disgusting. What’s wrong with these worms? How come the white ones are in sawdust?’

‘I should know this?’ Morey gestured a young clerk over to the tank. ‘This isn’t against the health code?’

‘Uh… are you an inspector or something?’

‘No, no, I’m not an inspector, but it’s common sense. There are leeches next to the milk.’

‘And worms,’ Marty added.

‘That’s just the live bait,’ the clerk replied. ‘That tank there’s the live well, and that’s the dry bait on top.’

Morey snorted. ‘Of course it’s live. It’s moving. This is disgusting.’

‘Uh… we get a lot of fishermen in here.’

‘Fishing. Bah. And they call themselves sportsmen. What kind of a sport is it that you impale helpless creatures on a wire hook so you can throw it in the water and impale bigger helpless creatures?

‘Well, they’re just worms and leeches and stuff.’

‘To you, maybe. Tell me. Did you see that Spielberg movie?’

‘Oh, hey, yeah, man, I’ve seen them all.’

‘Really. I’m impressed. You saw Schindler’s List ?’

‘Uh… you sure Spielberg did it?’

‘Never mind. The one I’m talking about had dinosaurs.’

‘Oh, yeah, Jurassic Park, sure. I saw that one four times. The sequels kind of sucked, but the first one really rocked.’

‘Then you’ll remember where they tied up the goat so the big dinosaur would come?’

‘Oh yeah, that was gross.’

‘And did you feel sorry for the little goat?’

‘Well, sure, sort of. I mean it was scared, crying and stuff.’

‘Live bait. Like these worms.’

The clerk gave Morey a blank look.

Morey shook his finger at him. ‘There’s an important lesson here. Do you know what it is? I’ll tell you. One man’s worm is another man’s goat. Remember that.’

She’s wrong, Marty thought as he drifted back from his reverie. No matter what Lily said, no matter what anybody said, Morey Gilbert was no fisherman.

The unseasonable heat continued on the morning of Morey Gilbert’s funeral, and meteorologists predicted yet another day of sunny skies and temperatures in the eighties. Old-timers in the state sat on sun-drenched porches, paging through their well-thumbed Farmer’s Almanac s as if they were the writings of Nostradamus, searching history for a similar Minnesota April heat wave, and finding none. But fifteen hundred miles north, deep into the Canadian territories, the belly of an enormous cold front began to sag toward the American Midwest. A change was coming.

The Uptown Precinct had called for five extra patrols to manage the traffic converging on the synagogue where Morey Gilbert’s service was held. By ten in the morning there was standing room only inside; by eleven, when the service began, the crowd had spilled out onto the lawn, the sidewalk, and ultimately the street itself. The numbers were in the hundreds, and there was no hope of moving them, and simply no place to move them to, so the street had finally been closed for three blocks in either direction. Not one resident or motorist complained. Even the cops, initially irritated to be diverted to traffic management, were eventually moved by the size and reverent demeanor of the crowd, and became caught up in the sense that they were more honor guard than enforcers, there to witness the passage of a great man. None of them understood it, and later could only say, ‘You had to be there.’

Three hours later Magozzi and Gino sat in the unmarked outside Lily Gilbert’s house behind the nursery, watching a small army of black-clad mourners funnel through the front door.

‘You know, I think half the city showed up at the cemetery. I don’t know how the hell she’s going to squeeze them all into that cracker box,’ Gino commented.

‘It’s a private reception. Family and friends only. These are the people who knew him best; the ones we want to listen to.’

Gino sighed and started to loosen the knot in his tie. ‘You ever seen press coverage that heavy at a funeral before?’

‘Not for anybody who wasn’t in politics or a rock band.’

‘And isn’t that a sad comment on the state of the world? But I’ve been thinking, you listen to all those people who stood up and told their stories about how Morey helped them out? Christ, it was like taking a stroll through a maximum-security cell block. You had your drug dealers, gangbangers… hell, pick a felony, they were all there.’

‘ Ex -drug dealers, ex -gangbangers.’

Gino snorted. ‘So they say. But what if one of them went bad again, came back to good old Morey for a little more monetary support and got pissed when he unhitched him from the gravy train?’

Magozzi looked at him. ‘You know, I just figured it out. You’re really respectful, almost genteel, until you loosen the knot in your tie, then everything goes to hell.’

‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’

Magozzi sighed and draped his wrists over the steering wheel. ‘That one of the people he helped came back on him? I suppose, but if that’s the case, we’re going to have a hell of a time picking him out. There must have been over a thousand people there today. Besides, that punches a hole in the same killer hitting Rose Kleber, and I’m kind of stuck on that.’ He leaned forward and squinted out the windshield. ‘Who’s that guy in the navy suit hugging Jack Gilbert?’

‘Whoever it is, he ain’t hugging him, he’s holding him up. Didn’t you see him bobbing and weaving at the grave? Man, for a minute, I thought he was going to fall in the hole and shake hands with his dad.’

‘Yeah, I saw that.’ Magozzi sagged back against the seat and watched the man in the navy suit steadying Jack, then just as soon as he had him stabilized, hurrying away as if he didn’t want to be anywhere near him when he fell. It seemed that nobody wanted to be around Jack Gilbert. ‘He’s alone all the time, you notice?’

‘Gilbert?’

‘Yeah.’

Gino shrugged. ‘No surprise there. The guy’s a train wreck.’

‘Lily wouldn’t get within ten feet of him today. Neither would Marty, for that matter. He was just standing there all alone, just like Langer and McLaren told us he did at Hannah’s funeral. You’d think at least his wife would have come with him.’

‘I heard a couple of people talking about that on the way out of the cemetery. Sounds like she’s going to file on him any day, if she hasn’t already. No love lost there.’

Magozzi set his jaw. ‘She still should have come. It would have been the decent thing to do.’

Gino turned sideways to look at him. ‘Come on, Leo. Jack Gilbert is a drunken asshole. You reap what you sow, and all that, so stop feeling sorry for him.’

‘I only do it from a distance. When I get closer, I hate his guts.’

‘There’s the partner I know and love.’

‘But it’s the chicken-and-egg thing.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Well, you have to wonder, is he a drunken asshole because he’s been ostracized, or was he ostracized because he’s a drunken asshole?’

Gino blew out an exasperated sigh. ‘I pick door number two. Can we go in now?’