‘Yeah, who else?’
He thought about that for a minute. ‘You think they’re in love?’
Harley gaped at him in disbelief. ‘You just get a news flash, genius? Where the hell have you been for the past six months? Of course they’re in love.’
Roadrunner’s lower lip curled down in that tragic, wounded expression he always got when he thought he’d been left out of something. ‘I’ve never even seen them hold hands. I thought they were just friends.’
Harley rolled his eyes. ‘Jesus Christ, this isn’t think-tank material, Roadrunner. It doesn’t take more than a heartbeat and one functioning brain cell to know there’s something up the minute you see them together, getting all dopey and sloe-eyed on each other.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.
That’s
why you think they’re in love? Honestly, Harley, you’re such a hopeless romantic. You only see what you want to see. Magozzi gets all dopey and sloe-eyed. Grace always holds back, and if you had
two
functioning brain cells you would have seen that. I know Magozzi’s in love with Grace, and I really feel sorry for the man, but Grace just isn’t ready to let herself go down that road. Maybe she never will be.’
Harley glowered at him. He didn’t like what Roadrunner had said, so he decided not to believe him.
‘Do not
ever
quash anyone’s dreams of romance. Love is a mysterious and unpredictable force, and stranger things than Grace and Magozzi getting together have happened. Hell, who knows? One day a human female might actually find
you
attractive. The world is just full of surprises.’
‘Puff! Here kitty, kitty, kitty!’ There was a tremor in Rose’s voice, and for good reason. It was dreadfully late and that useless beast was still sauntering around the yard, pretending to be deaf.
She’d always hated the dark, even as a little girl, and the fear had only grown worse with age. Now, some seventy-odd years later, it had morphed into an irrational, debilitating phobia that made no sense at all. She wasn’t afraid of the mundane dangers that might befall an elderly woman living alone, things like burglars or murderers or rapists; or even of falling down and breaking her hip, all concerns her daughter voiced at every opportunity. It was the dark itself.
She took another tentative step out onto the back porch and caught a brief glimpse of white in the farthest corner of the tulip bed. Puff obviously assumed that all the hard work Rose had put into the gardens today were for his benefit – the world’s largest litter box.
‘Puff, come here!’
He responded with an irritated twitch of his tail, letting her know he’d come in when he was good and ready and not a minute before. His tiny kitty brain just didn’t understand that once darkness swallowed the backyard, it wouldn’t matter if he were being eaten alive by the neighborhood dogs before her very eyes – she still wouldn’t be able to go out to save him.
God, she hated being like this, hated the tears of frustration that prickled behind her eyes. Why couldn’t that damned cat just come
in? . . .
‘PUFF, COME
HERE!
’
And at last, Puff did. He trotted up to his mistress as if he’d just noticed her presence for the first time, tail flagging in a cheerful greeting. Rose scooped him up into her arms, cooing admonishments as giddy tears of relief splashed onto his fur. Once she retreated into the safety of her bright, cozy kitchen, her silly tears dried and she poured a dish of cream for him, a glass of sherry for herself.
The phone rang as she was settling into a sofa almost as old and lumpy as she was. It was her son-in-law – not the brightest fellow on the planet, and a lousy dentist, she’d always thought – but he was a good husband to her Lorrel, and Rose supposed a mother couldn’t ask for much more.
‘Hello, Richard. Yes, I’m fine. I suppose Lorrel is working late again? Of course I remember tomorrow night, I haven’t lost my mind yet, Richard. Five o’clock. Kiss the girls for me and tell them I can’t wait to see them. I baked cookies.’
Rose smiled as she hung up the phone, and was still smiling as she clicked on the TV, coaxed Puff onto her lap, and started to doze. Her granddaughters were home from college, and tomorrow night they would all go out for dinner.
Rose woke up much later, disoriented and aching from her arduous day of gardening. Puff had deserted her lap, but she could feel his fur tickling the back of her neck. He’d retreated to his favorite perch on the back of the couch, where he liked to sit and look out the window. She reached behind to pat him, but her hand froze in midair.
Puff was growling.
She groped for the remote and eventually found the mute button. ‘What’s wrong, kitty?’ After a few moments of silence, she heard a faint rustling coming from behind her, outside in the bushes.
Juncos in the arborvitae, that’s all it is, she told herself. At night the little birds sheltered in the soft evergreen, making fluttery noises as they hopped from branch to branch.
But this wasn’t a fluttery noise, exactly. It sounded . . . bigger.
Someone is out there.
Rose felt it in those good senses people never pay attention to until it’s too late: the little hairs standing up on the back of her neck, the goose bumps rising on the loose, checkered skin of her old arms, and when the low rumble of Puff’s growl jumped in pitch, she knew . . .
. . . Someone is out there, on the other side of the glass, looking in at me.
She turned her head slowly, slowly, and then she saw a pair of eyes hanging there in the dark just outside the window, staring in at her.
There was a brief moment when her body reacted the way it was supposed to – when her heart leaped and started to hammer, when the blood rushed from her brain to her legs in an ancient preparation for flight, leaving her face cold and clammy. But it was over almost as soon as it began, and Rose simply turned her eyes back to the muted television screen and sat there quietly, waiting to wake up from this very bad dream.
It isn’t a dream.
The rustling stopped and a few minutes later, when she’d finally summoned the courage to turn around again, there was nobody at her window.
She didn’t breathe until her lungs screamed for air, and by then, she was feeling a little silly, because it probably
had
been just a dream. The mind always played tricks on you in that twilight netherworld between sleep and wakefulness; especially old minds.
And then the front door rattled in its frame and Rose started shaking so badly, she feared her old bones might shatter like glass.
Call the police.
She reached for the phone on the table beside her, but her hand wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, no, not at all, and there was nothing she could do but watch helplessly as the useless appendage spasmed and flailed and twitched and knocked the phone to the floor.
The noise at the front door finally stopped, but the silence was much worse, because she was terribly afraid that she might have forgotten to lock the back door, and even more afraid to get up and look.
She sat frozen on the sofa, a pathetic old woman deluding herself into believing that if she remained perfectly still, if she didn’t breathe, whatever was coming would simply pass her by. In the next instant, she heard the back screen door open, then close with a click, and still, she couldn’t move.
The heavy inside door closed, sucking a little air from the room.
Rose never turned to look at him, so he walked into her line of sight and waited for her eyes to rise to his. When they did, he pulled a large handgun from his jacket pocket and pointed it at her.
Oh, God. It wasn’t going to pass her by; this time it was going to kill her.
In that dreadful moment of realization, she became young and strong and fearless again, and she vaulted upward at the precise moment the bullet left the muzzle, ruining his killing shot. Fire tore into her stomach instead of her heart and Rose looked down to see a blossom of red spreading across the front of her little-old-lady dress.
‘Goddamnit,’ he said, and shot her again.
Chief Malcherson was one of those tall, well-built Swedes with thick white hair, lake-ice eyes that made him look mean, and a hangdog face that made him look mournful. Sort of like a homicidal basset hound. He was wearing pinstripes this morning – for him, a daring foray into edgy fashion.
‘I like the suit,’ Gino pronounced, flopping into a chair next to Magozzi. Magozzi shot him a warning look, but Gino was oblivious. ‘It’s real zippy. Kind of a mob look.’
Malcherson froze in the middle of taking off his suit jacket and closed his eyes. ‘Not exactly the kind of image I was hoping to project, Rolseth.’
‘I meant it in a good way.’
‘That’s the frightening part.’ Malcherson settled behind his desk and tapped one manicured finger on a stack of two bright red file folders. He always kept his copies of open homicides in red folders, probably because this ultraconservative man found the color almost as offensive as the crime. Magozzi hadn’t seen one on his boss’s desk in over four months. ‘The media would like to know why our senior citizens are being tortured and murdered.’
Magozzi’s brows shot up. ‘Someone actually said that?’
‘An intern from Channel Ten.’ Malcherson waved a pink phone message slip.
Gino snorted. ‘That is such bullshit. This is what happens when you do your job and you don’t have a homicide for a while. The minute two guys get offed in one night some idiot in the media tries to scare the hell out of the city by talking spree, or serial killer, or some such Hollywood crap. Besides, only one of them was tortured, and it wasn’t ours. Morey Gilbert was dead before he hit the ground, and he didn’t have a mark on him except for that one little bullet hole.’
‘So there’s no reason at all to suspect a connection between the two murders.’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘If there is one, we can’t see it yet. They were both old, they lived in the same neighborhood. That’s about it. Arlen Fischer’s name didn’t ring any bells with the Gilbert family or employees; neither did his description, and I’m guessing they’d remember a three-hundred-pound ninety-year-old man.’
‘Good. We can quash the serial rumor, then. We’re going to get enough pressure on the Gilbert murder the way it is. The desk logged over three hundred calls last night and this morning.’
Magozzi raised his brows. The number was unreal. Twenty calls on a case were enough to make the brass nervous; three hundred could break careers. ‘On Gilbert, or the train track guy?’
‘The “train track guy” has a name,’ Malcherson admonished him. ‘Arlen Fischer. Most of the calls on that case were from the media, and the stack is pretty slim compared to Gilbert’s, which is amazing when you consider the horrendous nature of Fischer’s murder. So what I’d like to know, gentlemen, is who on earth was this man?’
Gino shook his finger at the ceiling. ‘That’s exactly what I asked when I saw all those people outside the nursery yesterday. Of course, I said it a little more colorfully.’
‘I’m sure. I saw a flash of that crowd on the news last night. Just a flash – there didn’t seem to be a lot of media interest, until they did a little research on the man. Now Channel Three is putting together a documentary, and you know what they’re going to call it?
Saint Gilbert of Uptown.
’
Gino chuckled. ‘Oh, that’s rich. McLaren told us Morey Gilbert was putting the screws to him once about why Jews couldn’t be saints, and now here you go; they finally slap the label on the very Jew asking the question, and he’s not around to enjoy it.’
‘I’m quite certain the designation is secular, absolutely not Catholic, but real or imagined, the Minneapolis Police Department should not allow saints to be murdered. That was the gist of most of the calls. Frankly, I found it a little embarrassing that I knew nothing about a man who had done so much for others, especially when he was the father-in-law of one of our own.’
Gino slid down in his chair and laced his hands across his stomach. ‘Yeah, well, Marty Pullman was never much of a talker. Kept his family life close to the vest. But from what we’ve heard so far, Morey Gilbert was a one-man charity. Helped more people than you can shake a stick at, and if that’s not saintlike, I don’t know what is. Trouble is, that doesn’t make him a real likely candidate for murder.’
Malcherson turned his eyes on Gino. ‘I read your Q & A with Detective Pullman. How was he?’
‘He looked like hell, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t put it in the report, but he pretty much fessed up to being on a toot since the day he walked out of here last year. Couldn’t even remember where he was the night his father-in-law was killed. Said he woke up on the kitchen floor holding an empty bottle, and that’s all he knows.’
‘You didn’t seriously suspect him.’
‘Marty? Jeez, no. But I had to ask. We gotta look at the family, and he knows that. Funny thing is, his brother-in-law? Jack Gilbert? First off, he hasn’t been on speaking terms with his folks for who knows how long – seems he married a Lutheran instead of a nice Jewish girl, which I’m guessing didn’t go over too well – so that’s interesting. And the night his dad bought it he was running the same deal as Marty, only in a better part of town. Got himself looped up at the Wayzata Country Club, woke up in his driveway next morning, and the people at the club say it’s almost an every-night thing. It’s like that whole damn family fell to pieces when Hannah got killed.’
Chief Malcherson looked down at his hands, and for a moment, no one said anything.
Even after a year, the mention of Hannah Pullman’s murder still had the power to stop any conversation in this building. Random violence was not unknown in Minneapolis, particularly in those few neighborhoods where gangs clung to a tenuous foothold and innocent bystanders were occasionally caught in the crossfire – but it was a rare thing, and always set the city on its ear. But the murder of an officer’s spouse had multipled the shock value a thousandfold, and everyone on the force had been deeply affected.
Sometimes cops were killed; that went with the job; but that risk was absolutely not supposed to extend to their families. The murder of Detective Martin Pullman’s wife had been a gut-wrenching wake-up call for every one of them, because Marty had been carrying, standing right next to Hannah when her throat had been cut, and still, he hadn’t been able to protect her. It made them all think of their families as a little more vulnerable, made them all feel a little more helpless, and the sad truth was, a lot of them resented Marty for that.