‘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
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? . . .
‘ “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?’
‘Well, the housekeeper – her name’s Gertrude Larsen – was standing on the front steps, totally hysterical, out of control, flapping her arms, wailing . . . hate to see what she’d have been like if there’d actually been a body in here. Anyhow, I finally got her calmed down and brought her out to the squad, but she’s starting to drift big-time. She must have taken a pill or something. You should probably talk to her before she goes comatose.’
‘Did she move anything in here?’
‘I doubt it. The picture I got was she walked in, saw the blood, went nuts. She called from her cell instead of the inside phone, so I don’t think she made it much past the front door.’
‘Thanks, Frankie. Tell the housekeeper we’ll be right out.’
‘You got it.’
Langer walked over and looked down at his reflection in the surface of the coffee table. ‘This isn’t right.’
McLaren joined him and studied the table for a long moment, frowning. ‘Okay, I’ll bite. I see a nice shiny coffee table, no gouges, no blood, no big smeary fingerprints. So what am I missing?’
‘The books on the floor. They’re supposed to be on the coffee table.’
‘So? Are you telling me that every little thing in your house is exactly where it belongs all the time?’
‘Lord, no, not in my house. But in this one? I think so. Take a look around this room. They’re the only things out of place, Johnny.’
McLaren gave the room the once-over, considering. ‘Gotta admit, the damn place looks like a magazine picture, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes, it does.’
‘Except for the sofa.’
‘And the books on the floor.’
McLaren sighed and shoved his hands in his pockets. ‘Okay, then maybe they got knocked off the table in the struggle.’
Langer shook his head. ‘If that happened they’d be scattered, at least a little. Look at them. These things are in an almost perfect stack. Someone lifted them off the table and put them there.’
‘Someone being the shooter.’
‘That’s what I’m thinking.’
Jimmy Grimm’s head popped up from behind the sofa, startling McLaren and putting a lie to the general consensus that Grimm never heard a thing when he was working a crime scene.
‘Jesus, Jimmy, I forgot you were even here. What the hell are you doing hiding back there?’
‘I got an exit hole in the fabric I’m lasering up with the entrance in that front cushion. Looks like we’re going to find a slug in that bookcase somewhere.’ He peered over at the coffee table, then grinned up at Langer. ‘Nice call on the books, Langer. I’ll bag them as soon as I finish this, put them on the top of the list at the lab.’
‘Thanks, Jimmy.’
McLaren scratched at the red haze of whiskers sprouting along his unshaven jaw. ‘Still doesn’t make sense. You walk into this place, pop a guy sitting on the couch, then you turn around and take a stack of books off the coffee table and set them on the floor. Now why the hell would you do that?’