‘Something the matter, Langer?’
He shook his head and pretended to study an old political flyer he’d just pulled from the box. He didn’t talk about his mother’s long death to anyone. Not his partner, not his rabbi, not even his wife, who was probably on the schedule as his next failure. His mother had been the first. After a lifetime of love and humor and Chicklets, he’d run from her Alzheimer’s, abandoned her to strangers who left her to die alone, just as he had.
‘Langer?’
And after he’d failed his mother, he failed the job, watching like a blind fool as the Monkeewrench killer passed him in the parking ramps at the Mall of America, pushing the latest victim in a wheelchair. He was a detective, for God’s sake, and he hadn’t recognized a killer just a few yards away. He still woke up in the middle of every night, sweating, gasping, thinking of the lives that were lost after that day, and how easily he could have saved them.
And then, of course, came the big one, when he had failed himself, his god, and everything he had ever believed in, and the funny thing was that it had only taken a moment. No, not even that long. Just the few seconds it had taken him to. . .
‘Jesus, Langer, what the hell’s wrong with you?’
He jumped at Johnny McLaren’s hand on his shoulder, and in that instant thought his heart had stopped, and the possibility moved him not at all.
‘Hey, what is it, man? You got the flu or something? You’re sweating like a pig.’
Langer straightened and wiped at his face, feeling the greasy slick of fear and regret. ‘Sorry. Yeah. Maybe a touch of the flu.’
‘Well, sit down, for chrissakes, I’ll get you some water, and then maybe you better think about going home.’ McLaren was watching him with a wary, almost frightened caution. ‘You really zoned out there for a minute, you know? Creeped me out big-time.’
Langer smiled at him, just because McLaren had offered to get him water. Such a silly, little thing, and yet it touched him, as if it were a kindness far beyond what he deserved. ‘Pigs don’t sweat,’ he said.
‘Huh?’
‘You said I was sweating like a pig. But pigs don’t sweat.’
‘They don’t?’
‘No.’
McLaren looked absolutely flummoxed. ‘Well that’s so stupid. Man, that really pisses me off. Why the hell do they make up sayings about pigs sweating when they don’t sweat?’
‘I just don’t know.’
By the time McLaren returned with a chipped mug of water and two little white pills, Langer was sitting quietly at his desk, watching the grass turn green across the street from City Hall.
‘You look better.’
‘Actually, I feel fine now. Normal, in fact. What are these?’ he pushed at the little pills.
‘Aspirin. Well, not aspirin, exactly. Couldn’t find any of those, but Gloria said they have aspirin or aceta-whatever in them, you know, just in case you had a fever.’
Langer flipped a pill over and smiled when he read the marking he recognized from the pills his wife took for PMS. ‘Thanks, Johnny. I appreciate it.’
‘No problem. You know, I was thinking, you opened that box and then boom, you got sick. Could be some kind of spores living in all that old junk, like when they opened the Egyptian tombs? And you just got a big whiff.’
‘Ah.’ Langer nodded sagely. ‘So we should close that box and forget it, because there may be life-threatening spores inside, right?’
‘Good idea.’ McLaren started to close the box flaps, then stopped, releasing a miserable sigh. ‘Trouble is, that pretty much leaves us with nowhere to go. I suppose we could talk to the housekeeper again, but I don’t know what more she could tell us.’
‘Probably nothing.’ Langer glanced over at the abandoned box. ‘There doesn’t seem to be much to tell about that man’s life.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I was telling Gloria, that he was kind of a nobody, and she said basically that a nobody didn’t die the way he did, and that’s the kicker, isn’t it? Somebody knew Arlen Fischer existed, and apparently he really, really pissed them off.’
Langer thought about that for a minute, then pulled a fresh tablet from his drawer and clicked open a ballpoint. ‘Okay. Who tortures people when they get really, really pissed off?’
McLaren started counting them off on his fingers. ‘Well, you got your mob types, which we’ve already eliminated because there’s absolutely nothing to support it . . .’
‘Right.’
‘. . . and then there’s your sicko serial killers, a bunch of foreign dictators, military intelligence in a couple hundred countries, bad cops, hate groups . . .’ McLaren stopped and blinked. ‘Jeez. That’s kind of a long list, isn’t it?’
Langer nodded. ‘The sorry world we live in.’
‘McLaren!’ Gloria poked her head around the edge of her cubicle. ‘That Brit is on line two; and Langer, pick up line one right now. Your downstairs toilet is backing up.’
Langer grimaced at his blinking phone. ‘I was supposed to fix that toilet last week. Forgot. Who’s the Brit?’
‘Dunno. Some guy with an attitude, Gloria says. Already called a couple times. Probably pissed I didn’t call him back yet.’
‘Not as pissed as my wife.’
It took Langer the better part of ten minutes to calm down his wife and intimidate the plumber she’d called – one of those emergency yahoos who stood in the middle of your flooding house and demanded a thousand dollars to turn a valve. By the time he finished, McLaren had filled three paper napkins with scribbles, and was thanking his caller with uncharacteristic politeness.
‘Sounds like your call went a little better than mine,’ Langer said, settling his phone into its cradle.
McLaren’s grin was a little foolish, close to giddy. ‘Man, you are not going to believe this. You know who that was? Interpol. The goddamned friggin’ Interpol, for chrissakes. We’ve got a little action on our .45.’
Langer could almost feel his ears pricking. ‘The .45 that put a hole in Arlen Fischer’s arm?’
McLaren nodded, beaming. ‘They picked up the ballistics we punched through the FBI, and it hit on six cylinders.’
Langer frowned, confused, as always, by McLaren’s labryinth-like metaphors.
‘Six hits,’ McLaren explained excitedly. ‘That gun is the murder weapon in six unsolveds over the past fifteen years, and Langer, my man, they are all over the place.’
Magozzi pulled the unmarked into his driveway, thinking that talking to Rose Kleber’s family had been one of the most difficult interviews he could ever remember. It was disturbing to talk to high-voltage grievers who wailed so loudly you had to shout to be heard; troubling to question the ones whose eyes were still glazed with shock, whose voices were empty monotones; but it had been heart wrenching to interview this small family of gentle people who all cried endlessly, often soundlessly, even as they politely answered every question put to them.
Understandably, the two college girls who had found their grandmother’s body seemed to be the most distraught, choking back sobs as they compulsively patted a bewildered cat that huddled between them on the sofa. But their mother, Rose Kleber’s daughter, wore an expression of devastation that was far deeper. Her husband fluttered around his little family, patting shoulders and heads, doling out hugs like magic potions, but he too was weeping, even as he struggled for dignity. Whoever Rose Kleber had been, she had been deeply loved.
No, none of them had known Morey Gilbert personally, and as far as they knew, neither had Rose. The daughter had visited her mother every day, and couldn’t imagine being unaware of any friendship between the two elderly people. ‘We shopped at the nursery occasionally,’ she told them, ‘and he might have waited on us once or twice. I honestly can’t remember.’
‘Any reason for your mother to have his number in her address book?’ Gino had asked.
‘They stick plastic stakes with the nursery number on it in every plant. I suppose she might have copied it from one of those.’
They’d asked a few more questions after that: what Rose Kleber did with her time, what organizations she belonged to, and the hardest one of all, about the tattoo on her arm. But the family knew nothing about her time in the camps half a century ago. She had always refused to talk about it.
Gino popped his door and propped it open the minute Magozzi stopped the car. ‘That was a bummer,’ he grumbled, dispelling the gloomy silence that had ridden with them all the way from the house of Rose Kleber’s daughter. ‘But you know what?
That
was genuine grieving. That’s what Lily Gilbert and that drunken sleazebag son of hers should be doing, unless, of course, one of them killed the poor old guy.’
Magozzi sighed and unfastened his seat belt. ‘People grieve in different ways, Gino.’
‘You know, that’s such a load of crap. It might look different on the outside, but you can tell when people are broken up because somebody died, and I’m telling you, I don’t see it with the Gilberts – except maybe a little with Marty. I’m beginning to think he was the only one of the bunch that really cared about the old man. Jesus, Leo, have I mentioned lately that this is the scabbiest, sorriest-looking scrap of yard I ever saw in my whole life?’
And with that, Gino set aside the grief of Rose Kleber’s family, the murders, the investigation, and stepped into the here and now, dragging Magozzi along with him.
Magozzi took a breath, felt lighter, and grinned at his partner. ‘Not lately.’
They got out of the car and walked across spears of green with large patches of dirt between them. ‘You know what this looks like? It looks like Viegs’s head, with all that scalp showing between the hair plugs.’
‘It’s supposed to look like this,’ Magozzi said defensively. ‘It’s called xeri-scaping.’
‘Zero-scaping?’
‘No, xeri, with an
x.
’
‘Did you just make that up?’
‘No, I did not just make that up. It’s a design term, for when you use native plants that don’t require a lot of care.’
‘You mean like all those dandelions and quack grass?’
‘Exactly.’ Magozzi unlocked the door and gestured Gino inside. ‘Grab the brats while I fire up the grill.’
By the time Magozzi had a nice bed of coals smoldering in the duct-taped Weber, Gino was finished with his kitchen prep and had wandered into the living room. He looked around at the bare walls, the leather recliner, and the single side table with one of those cheapo high-intensity lamps. ‘So what do you call this? Xeri-decorating?’
‘No, this is Minimalism.’
Gino shook his head. ‘This is pathetic. Looks exactly the way it did the day your ex cleaned you out. You need to do something with this place.’
‘Hey, you didn’t have to come here for lunch, you know. If you don’t like the ambience, you can go home and eat.’
‘Oh no I can’t. First of all, I left my brats and twelve-year cheddar here yesterday, and second of all, the in-laws are only on photo album number three in a series of ten from their last cruise. God love ’em, they’re beautiful people, but they’ve been here for four days and sometimes you just gotta take a step back. Seriously, Leo, how long are you going to live in a place that looks like an abandoned warehouse? It’s like you put your whole life on hold the day Heather left, and that ain’t healthy.’
‘First of all, I put my life on hold the day I married Heather, I started to get healthy the day she walked out, and second of all, single guys do not spend their free time at feng shui seminars at Wally’s World of Furniture. It’s not macho.’
Gino grunted. ‘Well this sure isn’t macho. Macho is a big-screen TV and a wet bar. This is just plain empty, like nobody lives here. You ever hear the expression a man’s home is a reflection of the man?’
‘From what I’ve seen, a man’s home is the reflection of the woman he lives with.’
‘Are you talking about my house?’
‘Actually, I was talking about this place when Heather lived here.’ But he was thinking about big bad Gino with a gun living in a house of soft upholstery, dried flowers, and herbal wreaths. A girlie house. Angela’s house. Not a big-screen TV or a wet bar in sight. It always smelled like the garlic and basil sauce that was forever simmering on the stove, and occasionally, baby powder. ‘And maybe yours, too, yeah.’
Gino rocked back on his heels, grinning. ‘Which proves my point. My house is a perfect reflection of who I am. I’m the man who loves Angela.’
Half an hour later, Magozzi was finishing his third brat. ‘These are unbelievable.’
‘Told you,’ Gino said around a mouthful. ‘The real secret is in the precook – you got to simmer brats in beer and onions before you grill. If you don’t, you might as well be eating tofu pups. Want the last one?’
Magozzi put his hand to his heart. ‘I think I’ve done enough arterial damage for one day. I may be a risk taker, but I’m not suicidal.’
Gino gave the remaining brat careful consideration for about two seconds before plucking it off the serving platter. ‘That’s why God invented Lipitor.’ He paused for a moment, frowning. ‘And speaking of being suicidal, how worried do you think we should be about Pullman? He didn’t look like he was doing so hot today.’
Magozzi leaned back in his chair and thought about that. ‘It’s hard to say. There’s a big difference between thinking about it and actually doing it, but he could be going that way. If he’s really blacking out a lot, he’s got a good start on drinking himself to death, that’s for sure.’
‘Just like his brother-in-law. Christ, what a messed-up family. You know, I really wanted to like Gilbert for popping his dad, but to tell you the truth, I don’t think he’s got it in him. Doesn’t have the schtupa.’
‘Chutzpah, not schtupa, and you might want to forget trying out your Yiddish at the funeral tomorrow.’
‘Whatever. He ain’t got it.’ Gino chewed thoughtfully for a moment. ‘Besides, I got the case solved, and I’m sticking with my original doer.’
‘Lily Gilbert?’
‘Who else? Only now we got her for killing her husband
and
Rose Kleber.’
Magozzi rolled his eyes. ‘Okay. I’ll bite. Why would Lily Gilbert kill an old woman she’s never met before?’
‘Hul-lo. Because her husband was nailing the cookie-baking grandma, that’s why. Geriatric crime of passion, clear as a bell.’