P. Tracy: Live Bait

Marty managed a half smile. ‘She’s not falling apart, if that’s what you mean. Lily doesn’t do that.’ He glanced toward the main greenhouse. ‘She’s in there. I tried to get her to go to the house – it’s on the back of the lot, behind all the greenhouses – but that’s not about to happen until they take Morey away. ME’s on the way, right?’

Magozzi nodded. ‘He’ll do a little on-site before they move him. I don’t think you want her around for that.’

‘Hell, no, I don’t. But Lily will be wherever she wants to be. That’s just the way she is.’ He sucked air in through his teeth. ‘There’s something else.’

Magozzi and Gino waited quietly.

‘After she got him inside, she washed him. Shaved him. Changed his clothes. He’s lying in there on one of the plant tables all decked out in his funeral suit.’

Gino closed his eyes briefly, trying to hold his temper in check. ‘That’s not good, Marty.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I mean, her son-in-law was a cop. She had to know she was destroying evidence.’

‘She’s damn near blind, Gino. Can’t even get a driver’s license anymore. Says she never saw any blood. I’m guessing the rain washed it away before she got out here. He caught it in the head, small caliber right behind the left temple, and he’s got this great head of thick white hair… hell, even I had to look for it and I knew it was there.’

‘Okay.’ Gino nodded, letting it go for the moment.

Magozzi made a note to have the crime-scene techs collect the clothes the dead man had been wearing when he was shot. ‘Anything you can think of that might help us out here?’ he asked.

Marty’s laugh was short and bitter. ‘You mean like who’d want to kill him? Sure. Look for somebody who’d pop Mother Teresa. He was a good man, Magozzi. Maybe even a great one.’

The air in the greenhouse was hot and swampy, laden with the scent of wet earth and vegetation. Long tables filled with plants were lined up in two rows, leaving a narrow central aisle – it looked like every other greenhouse Magozzi’d ever been in, except for the front table, which held a corpse in a black suit instead of potted flowers.

Even dead and laid out for viewing, Morey Gilbert was still a formidable presence. Very tall, very well-muscled, and better dressed than Magozzi had ever been in his life.

Two young bike cops fidgeted near the body, trying to pretend it wasn’t there.

‘Where are they?’ Marty asked them.

‘Your mother-in-law took the old gentleman back there, sir.’ One of the bike patrols tipped his head toward a door in the back wall.

‘What’s back there, Marty?’ Magozzi asked.

‘The potting shed, a couple more greenhouses. Lily probably wanted Sol out of here for a while. He was pretty shook up.’

‘Sol?’

‘He’s the funeral director who called it in, but he was also Morey’s best friend. This is a tough one for him. Hang on, I’ll get them.’

Gino waited until Marty was out of earshot before whispering to Magozzi. ‘Her husband is dead, and she’s consoling the funeral director? That’s a little ass-backwards, isn’t it?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘Maybe that’s how she holds it together, by taking care of other people.’

‘Maybe. Or maybe she didn’t like her husband very much.’

They walked over to the front table to take a closer look at the dead man before the family came back. Gino used a pen to lift the white hair, exposing the bullet hole. ‘Tiny. I suppose you could miss it if you were half blind, but I don’t know.’ He looked up at the bike patrols. ‘You guys can take off now if you want. We got it covered. Send copies of your reports up to Homicide.’

‘Yes sir, thank you.’

Magozzi was looking at Morey Gilbert’s face, seeing a person instead of a corpse, starting to form the kind of bond that always linked him to victims. ‘He’s got a nice face, Gino. And he was eighty-four, still running his own business, taking care of his family… Who’d want to kill an old man like this?’

Gino shrugged. ‘Maybe an old woman.’

‘You’re just pissed because she moved the body.’

‘I’m suspicious because she moved the body. I’m pissed because you made me come here in short pants.’

They both took a step away from the table when the back door opened and Marty came through with his little geriatric entourage, led by a tiny, wiry old woman with silver hair cropped close to her head. She wore a long-sleeved white blouse under child-sized bib overalls, and thick glasses magnified her dark eyes, making her look a little like Yoda.

A tough Yoda, Magozzi decided as she drew closer. There was no sign that she’d been crying, no surrender to despair, or to age, for that matter, in the straight backbone or squared shoulders. She was barely five feet and probably never saw ninety on a bathroom scale, but she looked like she could roll over Cleveland.

The elderly man who followed in her wake was a different story. Grief was weighing him down, pulling at his puffy, red eyes and a mouth that trembled.

Magozzi thought it was interesting that Marty reached out as if to touch the old woman’s arm, but pulled back at the last minute. Apparently not a touchy-feely relationship. ‘Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth, this is my mother-in-law, Lily Gilbert, and this is Sol Biederman.’

Lily Gilbert stepped up to the table and laid a hand on her dead husband’s chest. ‘And this is Morey,’ she said, frowning at Marty as if he’d been rude to exclude his father-in-law from the introductions, simply because he was dead.

‘Marty tells us your huband was a wonderful man, Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi said. ‘I can’t imagine what a terrible loss this must be for your family. And for you, too, Mr Biederman,’ he added, because tears were running freely down the old man’s face now.

Lily was staring at Magozzi intently. ‘I know you. You were all over the news last fall for that Monkeewrench thing. I saw more of you than I did of my own family.’ She gave Marty a pointed look, which he studiously ignored. ‘So, you have questions, am I right?’

‘If you think you’re up to it, yes.’

Apparently she was not only up to it; she decided to skip the questions and go straight to the answers. ‘All right. So this is what happened. I got up at six-thirty, just like I always do, made some coffee, came out to the greenhouse, and there was Morey, lying in the rain. Marty thinks I should have left his father-in-law outside with the rain falling in his eyes; left him there so strangers could come and see his mouth filling with water…’

‘Jesus, Lily…’

‘But this is not how families take care of each other. So I brought him inside, made him presentable, called Sol, and then I called Marty, who hasn’t answered his phone in six months.’

‘Lily, it was a crime scene,’ Marty said tiredly.

‘And I should know this? Am I a policeman? I called a policeman, but he didn’t answer his phone.’

Marty closed his eyes, and Magozzi had the feeling he’d been closing his eyes to this woman for a long time. ‘I’m not a policeman anymore, Lily.’

Magozzi had an immediate flashback to a day almost a year gone, when he’d passed Detective Martin Pullman as he went out the front doors of City Hall, carrying his career in a cardboard box, looking like he’d been run over by a truck. ‘You’ll be back, Detective,’ Magozzi had said, because he didn’t know what else to say to a man who had lost so much, and worse yet, he didn’t understand a man who could walk away so easily from a job he loved. Marty had smiled, just a little. ‘I’m not a detective anymore, Magozzi.’

Magozzi shifted back to the present in time to hear Gino asking the usual litany: Was anything missing? Any sign of a break-in? Did Morey Gilbert have any enemies, any unusual business dealings?…