P. Tracy: Live Bait

‘ “Unusual business dealings?” ’ Lily snapped. ‘What’s that supposed to mean? You think we’re growing marijuana in the back greenhouse or something? Running a white slavery ring? What?’

Gino had never responded very well to sarcasm, and his face started to turn red. They’d dealt with their share of grieving relatives over the years, and Gino did okay with the ones who fell apart. They tore him up, and he suffered for a long time afterwards, but at least he knew how to respond to them. People were supposed to fall apart when a relative died. That fit in with Gino’s image of life and death and love and family, and made it easy for him to be softspoken, gentle, as comforting as a cop could be in such a situation. But the angry ones who lashed out, or the stoic ones who kept their feelings close to the vest, always threw him into a tailspin, and Lily Gilbert seemed to be a combination of the two.

‘Excuse me, Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi interrupted gently, eliciting an eye roll from Gino. ‘Would it be too difficult for you to take me outside and show me where you found your husband? Maybe walk me through it, step-by-step, while Gino talks to your friend Sol? We can get through this faster, then.’

The reminder of finding her husband’s body brought the first sign of weakness to her eyes. Just a flicker, but it was there.

‘I’m really sorry to have to ask you to do this. If it’s too hard, we don’t have to do it right now.’

Her gaze sharpened immediately. ‘Of course we have to do it now, Detective. Now is all we have.’ She marched toward the door, a little old soldier focusing on the mission, so she didn’t have to think of anything else. Magozzi hurried to open it for her.

‘Wait just a minute.’ Marty frowned. ‘Where’s Jack, Lily? Why isn’t he here yet?’

‘Jack who?’

‘Damnit, Lily, don’t tell me you didn’t call him…’

She was out the door before he finished.

‘Shit.’

‘Who’s Jack?’ Magozzi asked, still holding the door.

‘Jack Gilbert. Her son. They haven’t talked in a long time, but Jesus, his father just died… I gotta call him.’

While Marty went to the checkout counter and started punching numbers into the phone, Gino walked over to Magozzi and said under his breath, ‘Listen, while you’re out there talking to the old lady, why don’t you ask her how a ninety-pound peanut managed to drag over two hundred pounds of dead weight all the way in here, then heft it onto that table.’

‘Gee, Mr Detective, thanks for the tip.’

‘Glad to help.’

‘You don’t like her much, do you?’

‘Hey, I like her fine, except for the fact that she’s got a personality like ground glass.’

‘Huh. She never mentioned your outfit. I’d say that was a kindness.’

‘This is the deal. I’m thinking, How the hell did she move him? So I answer myself: Gee, maybe she didn’t. Maybe she shot him in here, and just said he was killed outside so we’d think we didn’t have a crime scene.’

Magozzi thought about that for a minute. ‘Interesting. Devious. I like the way you think.’

‘Thank you.’

Magozzi opened the door to go outside. ‘But she didn’t do it.’

‘Damnit, Leo, you don’t know that…’

‘Yeah. I do.’

Detective Aaron Langer had reached that point in life when you stopped hoping the next year would be better than the last, and just hoped that it wouldn’t be as bad.

That’s what happened when you hit middle age. Old people you loved got sick and died, young people you hated got promoted over you, the market crashed and took your retirement funds with it, and your body started to look like your father’s did when you used to think you would never, ever let yourself go like that. If anyone ever told five-year-olds the truth about life, he thought, there’d be a rash of kindergarten suicides.

So far the job had gotten him through the worst of it. Even when his mother had been dying of Alzheimer’s, even when his 401(k) had run off to Brazil with his financial planner, the job had been his refuge, the one part of his life where the line between good and evil was clean and sharp, where he knew exactly what to do. Murder was evil. Catching murderers was good. Simple.

Or at least it had been, before the secret. Now the line he had walked for his whole life was horribly blurred, and he barely knew where to step. What he needed most was a good, clear-cut case of senseless homicide that would perversely make sense of the world again, and at last, it looked like he had one.

‘Langer, would you quit smiling? You’re giving me the creeps.’

He looked at his partner, horrified. ‘I was smiling?’

Johnny McLaren grinned at him. ‘Sort of. Not really. I mean, your teeth weren’t showing or anything. Besides, I know how you feel. After four months of nothing to do I almost went out and killed somebody myself.’

Langer closed his eyes, desperate to justify almost smiling in a bloody room where some poor soul had certainly died. ‘It isn’t that, McLaren,’ he said sadly, and then he looked away, because he couldn’t say anything more.

Most of the carnage in Arlen Fischer’s house was in an otherwise pristine living room – specifically, on a once-ivory sofa that looked like it had spent a good deal of time on a slaughterhouse floor. Jimmy Grimm, star crime-scene tech of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, walked in, took one look at the blood patterns on the sofa, and said, ‘That’s an artery hit, guys. It should have dropped him. He was what? Eighty-nine?’

‘Unless the old guy was the shooter,’ McLaren suggested. ‘Maybe it’s somebody else’s blood, and Fischer’s out there right now burying him in the woods.’

‘God, I love a mystery.’ Grimm put his hands on his hips and looked around, a rotund man in white disposable coveralls and slippers. Langer thought he looked a lot like the Michelin Man. ‘Wow. This is really interesting.’

‘What is?’ asked McLaren, but Jimmy didn’t hear him. He was bent over the sofa, already in another world – his world – where the only things he listened to were the stories blood splatter and minutiae told him.

Frankie Wedell, one of the patrolmen who’d secured the scene, approached the living room entrance and stopped. ‘You guys remember how to do this, or do you need a little refresher course from the boys in the trenches?’

McLaren looked over at him and grinned. Frankie was the oldest officer on the force, a patrol by choice, and had trained more recruits than he could count, McLaren and Langer among them. ‘This is our refresher course, old man,’ he cracked. ‘Homicide Light – no body. How the hell are you, Frankie?’

‘I was a whole lot better before the radio caught fire this morning. Damn near broke my heart to hear about Morey Gilbert over at Uptown Nursery.’

McLaren’s grin faded. ‘That one’s going to break a lot of hearts.’

‘Hell of a way to end a dry spell, losing a good man like that. You two got to know him pretty well last year, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah, we did.’

‘Good thing you didn’t catch it, then.’

‘Amen to that,’ Langer murmured. ‘Your partner said you did the walk-through from the front, Frankie. That right?’

‘Yep. Tony covered the back. We started out looking for a shooter, ended up looking for a body.’ His gaze drifted reluctantly to the bloody sofa. ‘Still can’t believe we didn’t find one. That much blood, you wouldn’t think the guy could get very far, especially at his age.’

Langer’s eyes were sweeping the room while Frankie talked, noticing the little things: the high gloss on the hardwood floor, the precisely fanned magazines on a polished side table, the careful alignment of leather-bound classics in a bookcase. Nothing was disturbed; nothing seemed out of place here except the obscenity of the sofa. That, and the three large, glossy books stacked on the floor next to the coffee table. His eyes stopped there. ‘What was the scene like when you got here, Frankie?’