P. Tracy - Live Bait

Gino had no clue what schmaltz was, but it didn’t sound half as good as the soup smelled. He picked up his spoon, then hesitated. She thought they were going to take her to jail, and she was giving them soup. He wondered if eating it would constitute accepting a bribe.

‘Don’t fight it,’ Jack was watching him. ‘She knows why you’re here. We’ll tell you anything we can. But you still have to eat the soup.’

‘First,’ Lily added. ‘Then we talk.’

Magozzi ate his soup, but unlike Gino, he understood the offering for what it was. Lily Gilbert was finally letting them in.

When they’d finished, she cleared the dishes and sat down next to Jack. ‘Tell them about Brainerd.’

Magozzi got busy pulling out his notebook and pen, keeping his face averted in case the surprise showed. How the hell did Jack know about Brainerd? He knew the answer before he asked the question, and it sickened him. Jack had been up there at the fishing lodge with his father and the others. Jack had been in on it.

He felt the tension coming off Gino, knew he was thinking the same thing, but they both kept their silence, waiting to hear it out loud.

The real story was almost worse.

It took Jack a long time to tell them about Morey, Rose, and Ben shooting the old man in the fishing lodge, about the shadow he’d seen in the loft that day, and finally about his own refusal to participate.

Magozzi and Gino stopped writing and looked up at Jack simultaneously.

‘What?’ Jack asked.

‘Nothing, Jack. Go on.’

He told them about the ride home that day, the fight with his father, and everything that came after. ‘But I never connected Brainerd with Pop’s death at all,’ he finished. ‘Not until yesterday when Ben was killed and I saw Rose Kleber’s picture in the paper – I never knew her name until then. That’s when I realized what was happening, that whoever had been up in that loft saw what we did, and they were taking us out, one by one.’

‘What they did, Jack,’ Gino corrected him. ‘Not you.’

‘Whatever. I’ve got blood on my hands any way you look at it. If I’d told you sooner, maybe you could have figured it out in time to save Marty.’

Magozzi gave him the truth. ‘Maybe. But maybe not. Jeff covered himself pretty well.’

He’d thrown him a little bone, but it would never be enough, and Magozzi couldn’t offer any more. Half of him wanted to wring Jack’s neck, because he had to believe that with a little more lead time they might have been able to save Marty – but the other half of him bled for the guy. What would it be like to have a father who tried to turn you into a killer, then disowned you when you refused?

Jack got up and poured himself a cup of coffee. ‘There’s something else. Pop said they’d been doing this for years, that they’d killed a lot of Nazis. He said he kept a list on the computer, but I couldn’t find anything. He could have erased it.’

‘We’ll have someone come over and pick up the computer, take a look at it just in case,’ Magozzi said.

Jack shrugged. ‘It might not even be true.’

‘I’m afraid it is true,’ Magozzi said. ‘We just put that together this afternoon. Ben Schuler kept records of the ones they’d killed on the backs of some pictures he had in his house.’

Lily straightened slightly in her chair. ‘How many?’

‘Over sixty so far.’

She closed her eyes.

‘You had no idea what Morey was doing all those years?’

She took off her thick glasses, opened her eyes, and looked at him. It was the first time that Magozzi had seen her eyes without the barrier of the glasses. They were beautiful, he thought, and tragic.

‘This is what I knew. He started talking about this thing right after the war. Other people, little groups, were hunting these men down, killing them, and he thought this was just. A noble thing. I told him if he ever left our house to kill another human being, not to come back, and he never talked about it again.’

‘He took trips without you at least twice a year,’ Gino reminded her. ‘You didn’t think that was strange?’

‘You’re such a suspicious person, Detective Rolseth. Your wife goes away for the weekend with friends, do you think, aha, she’s out killing people? Morey and Ben went fishing every now and then. Was that so hard to believe? So anyway, that’s all I knew until the night Morey was shot. I thought he was in the greenhouse, like every night. But then he woke me up at about midnight and said he’d killed the Animal.’

‘An animal?’ Gino asked.

‘ The Animal. It’s what we called him. He was S.S. at Auschwitz.’

‘Heinrich Verlag,’ Magozzi said. ‘Also known as Arlen Fischer.’

Jack’s jaw dropped open. ‘Fischer? The man who was tied to the railroad tracks? Are you telling me Pop did that? And then he told you about it?’

Lily nodded. ‘Verlag, I knew. Verlag, I had seen in action. Sixty years, I wished for that man’s death. So Morey wakes me up like a proud cat bringing home a dead mouse, maybe thinking I wouldn’t mind that he had killed this one. All those years, and he never knew me.’

‘You should have told me, Ma.’

‘You think I wanted my son to know his father was a murderer?’

‘But I already knew that.’

Lily gave him a sad little smile. ‘Now you tell me.’

Magozzi laid down his pen and rubbed his eyes. It was almost too much information to take in, and almost none of it looked good for either Jack or Lily.

‘We’re going to have to write all this up, turn it in,’ Gino said, echoing his thoughts.

Jack smiled a little. ‘Don’t look so glum, Detective. You’ve been trying to get me in a cell for two days, and now you’ve got your wish. I witnessed a murder, I didn’t report it, and I’ll sign a confession. It’s about time somebody in this family started taking responsibility for what they’ve done.’

Lily patted his hand.

‘Well don’t get your hopes up for any luxury accommodations at Stillwater just yet. Lots of extenuating circumstances here. We don’t know where the county attorney will go with any of this.’

‘One more question, Jack,’ Magozzi said. ‘Marty wanted you to tell us something that would close the Eddie Starr case.’ He glanced at Lily, saw that the name hit her hard. ‘He knew that Morey killed him, right?’

Jack just stared at him for a minute.

‘It doesn’t matter now, Jack. We already had that anyway – the gun Morey and the others used on a lot of the victims matched the gun that killed Eddie Starr…’

‘Morey killed the man who killed Hannah?’ Lily whispered.

‘No.’ Jack said quietly. ‘Marty did. That’s what was killing him. That’s what he couldn’t live with.’

Magozzi and Gino looked at each other, then leaned back in their chairs, as if the effort of sitting upright was suddenly too difficult.

Magozzi closed his eyes and saw hatred and vengeance everywhere. Morey killing, Marty killing… and only Lily and Jack standing apart, standing alone against the violence that had destroyed their lives. He wondered if they realized how very much alike they were, if anyone could sift through the confusion of all their mistakes to see their essential goodness.

And then he remembered Marty’s words as he lay dying.

All this time, you were the only good guy, Jack. Better than any of us. You’re the hero.

Sometime during the night the storm had blown out of Minnesota and into Wisconsin, leaving muddy fields and shattered buildings and ruined lives in its wake. Nine tornadoes had touched down in the state, and for the time being the media was somberly preoccupied with photo-ops of the aftermath.