Live Bait (9 page)

Why didn’t he shoot the bastard when he had the chance?

Magozzi had heard that question around City Hall a hundred times in the months afterwards, and it always made him feel bad, especially when Gino said it.

‘Did either of you know Hannah?’ Chief Malcherson was asking.

Magozzi shook his head. ‘Just to say “hi” to in the hall. She used to pick Marty up sometimes.’

‘I can’t stop thinking about Mrs Gilbert. Her daughter, and then her husband, both murdered within the space of a year. I don’t know how you survive something like that.’

‘Well, don’t get all touchy-feely about the old lady just yet,’ Gino said. ‘She didn’t have an alibi either.’

‘Gino didn’t care much for Mrs Gilbert,’ Magozzi explained.

‘What I didn’t care for was that she trashed a crime scene, she didn’t seem all that broken up that her husband was dead, and she’s got this
attitude.
’

Malcherson frowned at him. ‘What kind of an attitude?’

‘Pretty hostile, if you ask me. We’re just doing our job, trying to find out who killed her husband, so I ask her a couple of questions and she’s all over me.’

Malcherson slid a weary gaze over to Magozzi for a translation.

‘Gino asked if Mr Gilbert had had any “unusual business dealings,” and she took offense.’

‘Oh.’

‘She actually snapped at him.’

‘Ah.’ Malcherson looked back at Gino, and for one fearful moment, Magozzi was afraid the chief might actually smile. ‘In summary, then, you questioned her late husband’s integrity, and her response was less gracious than you thought you deserved.’

Gino started to blush, and his head seemed to be sinking into his neck. ‘You kind of had to be there.’

‘I’m very sorry she hurt your feelings, Detective Rolseth.’

Magozzi wiped his hand across a smile, and Gino saw it.

‘Aw, come on, Leo, it was a whole lot more than that and you know it. There’s something going on with that old lady. Forget that she didn’t shed a tear and she’s got a mouth like a whip. Did she fall to pieces when she found her husband dead? No. She gets him into a wheelbarrow – a
wheelbarrow,
for God’s sake – pushes him around, flops him on a plant table, then washes him with a garden hose and dresses him up for company. This is not your average grieving widow, and if we get caught up in that scenario, we close our eyes to the possibility that she might also be a killer who did her damnedest to destroy evidence.’

Malcherson leaned back in his chair and sighed. ‘You interviewed her, Detective Magozzi, and you listed her as a nonsuspect in your report.’

‘I’ll stand by that, at least for now,’ he said, but he was frowning, thinking about Gino’s image of events – Lily Gilbert dragging her husband around like a sack of grain – and his own picture of a distraught, elderly woman struggling to get her husband out of the rain, to make him ‘presentable.’ Either one worked; he just wasn’t a hundred percent sure which one was accurate, and in the long run, it might make a whole lot of difference. ‘But like Gino said, I agree that there’s something there. She’s a tough lady, and she’s pretty closed off. Could be she knows more than she wants to let on. Could be she’s protecting someone. I just don’t know yet.’

Gino brightened immediately. ‘Hey, I like that. Maybe she’s covering up for that sleazebag son of hers. Sure, she hates his guts, but she’s got that maternal thing going. So picture this. Jack Gilbert at the club, sucking up scotch like a Wet-Vac. Pretty soon he starts ruminating about his life and the appalling state of his familial ties, and he gets a little maudlin. The old man isn’t getting any younger, and Jack’s thinking maybe it’s finally time to patch things up. So when he gets kicked out at bar time, he decides to pay him a visit and bury the hatchet once and for all. But things don’t go so well, and next thing he knows, his father is dead and he’s holding a smoking gun.’

Malcherson raised one white brow. He was used to Gino’s off-the-cuff theories. ‘I don’t suppose you found any actual evidence that led to that postulation.’

‘Not a scrap,’ Gino said happily. ‘Just came up with it this minute.’

‘Does Jack Gilbert have a history?’

Gino shook his head. ‘Nah. Just a couple DUIs and some speeding tickets. No gun registered in his name or his wife’s name. But that doesn’t mean anything. And he’s a PI attorney,’ he added, apropos of nothing.

‘So give me a quick summary of the time line.’

Magozzi shuffled through his dog-eared mess of frayed spiral notebook paper. ‘Same routine as always, according to Mrs Gilbert – she went to bed right after the news, and Morey stayed up to do some paperwork and a few extra chores in the greenhouse. She said he usually turned in around midnight, but she can’t confirm that on the night of his death.’

Malcherson frowned his question.

‘They had separate bedrooms, sir. She said she slept straight through the night and woke up at six-thirty
A
.
M
. as usual. Found him outside the greenhouse shortly after that. But the ME estimates time of death to be between two and four
A
.
M
.’

Malcherson’s brows shot up. ‘A little late for an elderly man to be outside gardening.’

Magozzi nodded. ‘That’s what we thought, sir. Either something kept Morey Gilbert up and outside past his bedtime, or something brought him out there later.’

‘Or someone, like maybe his son,’ Gino pushed his latest pet theory. ‘Or if you don’t like the son, how about the wife? I could go either way.’

Malcherson gave him one of those long-suffering looks you see on the faces of parents confronting a problem child for the hundreth time. ‘Your empathy for grieving relatives gives me hope for mankind, Detective Rolseth.’

‘The thing is I’m not seeing a lot of grieving from that quarter, Chief. You give me grieving, I’ll give you empathy.’

‘What it boils down to,’ Magozzi interjected, ‘is that we have to find out a whole lot more about Morey Gilbert, see if anything points us in a different direction. Seems unlikely at this point that he made a lot of enemies, but obviously he made one, and no one we’ve talked to so far will even admit that’s possible – including Langer and McLaren, who got to know him pretty well when they were investigating Hannah’s murder. He had some close friends – the funeral director, for one – and we’ll talk to him again.’

The red light on Malcherson’s desk phone started flashing.

‘Probably another reporter,’ Gino said. ‘Want me to take it?’

Malcherson almost smiled. ‘Excuse me for a moment, gentlemen. Don’t go anywhere.’

He picked up, listened for a few moments, then took a pristine legal tablet from his center desk drawer and laid it carefully on his leather blotter. He seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of these brand-new tablets – Magozzi had never seen him use one that looked even remotely used, and he often wondered if the chief had a closetful of tablets he’d discarded because they were missing the first sheet.

He and Gino watched with growing apprehension as Malcherson scribbled away with his Montblanc. Benign phone calls did not require copious note taking.

‘This is not good news,’ Malcherson said when he finally hung up. ‘Officer Viegs just called in, responding to an elderly woman found shot to death in her home this morning.’ He ripped off the sheet of paper and handed it to Magozzi.

‘Same neighborhood?’ Gino asked.

‘Good guess, Detective Rolseth.’ Malcherson looked down at his tablet – the second page was marred with pen impressions, sullied by the details of a murder. One more for the closet.

Magozzi and Gino pulled up in front of a tidy little rambler with gleaming white shutters and a cheery, robin’s-egg blue paint job that made Magozzi instantly sad. Houses like this weren’t supposed to have ugly yellow crime-scene tape clashing with the color scheme.

The yard did nothing to alleviate his melancholy. It was filled with meticulously prepared flower beds that would probably be weed choked and forgotten within the week, and the sort of kitschy lawn ornaments only a grandmother could get away with. There were birdbaths encrusted with playing marbles, resin frogs with foggy, rhinestone eyes, and smiling troll statues that wore brocade coats of colorful, broken glass. One of the trolls held a painted plaque that read
GRANDMA
’
S
GARDEN
.

Gino stared at that troll for a long time, then finally turned away.

Officer Viegs was waiting in the sun near the front door, little droplets of sweat sparkling between his hair plugs.

‘Viegs, you show up at any more murder scenes, we’re going to have to put you on the suspect list,’ Magozzi said.

‘Detective, you get any more murders like this on my beat, I’m going to be taking some time off to move my mom someplace safe, like the Bronx. She lives in the senior condos just off Lake, and she and her neighbors were ready to pack up after the two yesterday. This one is going to send them over the edge, and I can’t say I blame them.’

‘I hear you. But for what it’s worth, nothing we’ve got so far pulls those two together.’

Viegs raised his brows, and all his hair plugs moved. ‘Except that now we’ve got three, they were all old, they all lived in this neighborhood, and they were all shot.’

‘Yeah. There is that. What do you have for us?’

Viegs sighed and pulled out his notebook. ‘Rose Kleber, with a
K.
Seventy-eight, widow, lived alone. Two shots, one to the stomach, one to the chest, no obvious signs of burglary or sexual assault. Her two granddaughters were home from college on spring break, came over to surprise her this morning, found the back door open and their grandmother dead inside. They called nine-one-one, then their mom.’ He paused and took a breath. ‘They were all pretty messed up, so I had Berman drive them home after we got their statements. Nothing much there, though. I mean, she was an old lady. She gardened, she went to the senior center, she baked cookies, for chrissake . . . well, shit. Sure took them long enough.’

Gino followed his gaze to see the Channel Ten van pulling up to the curb. ‘A fuel tanker rolled on 494 about an hour ago. Every reporter in town was standing around with the cameras running, waiting for the damn thing to blow up. Guess it didn’t. Put up a wall and play dumb, will you, Viegs?’

‘Sure. You might want to go in the back door. Jimmy’s crew is working the front room.’

Just inside the back door, Magozzi and Gino ran into Jimmy Grimm, whose expression was as solemn as they’d ever seen it.

‘Hey, guys. Long time, no see.’

Magozzi clapped him on the back. ‘And we liked it that way.’

Gino brightened a little, grateful for the distraction. ‘Hey, Jimmy. I thought you were going to retire.’

‘Yeah, right. You obviously haven’t looked at your pension fund lately.’

Magozzi nodded toward the fistful of evidence bags he was clutching. ‘Got anything for us?’

His shoulders seemed to slump under the weight of a question with no good answer. ‘Not much. No brass. Some dirt, probably from the gardens here, plenty of cat hair, and one 9-mm slug we found drilled into the couch cushion. That was a through-and-through; the other one’s probably still inside the victim. Looks like she took it in the stomach first. But how the hell you could miss a kill shot at close range is beyond me.’

‘Maybe he planned it that way.’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘Then the bastard is a real sadist.’

‘Viegs said there was no forced entry, no robbery.’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like it. Her purse was out in plain view with a wad of cash in it, and we’ve got no jimmy marks anywhere. She either let him in, or the door was open and he let himself in.’

‘Or maybe he had a key, or knew where she kept a key,’ Gino added, making a note to check on repairmen, lawn service, anybody who might have had access.

Jimmy nodded. ‘Could be. By the way, the TV was on when we got here, but I turned it off after we dusted.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘Jerry Springer was on, and there was something obscene about listening to him while we were working this scene. Anyhow, I just turned her over to Anant, if you want to take a look before he moves her. I think he’s waiting for you.’

‘Thanks, Jimmy. Be in touch.’

He tried for a smile, but it never quite made it to his lips.

As they walked through the kitchen, Magozzi noticed a plate of homemade cookies sitting on the counter, carefully wrapped in plastic, violated by a dusty layer of black fingerprint powder.

Dr Anantanand Rambachan was standing quietly, almost prayerfully, over Rose Kleber’s crumpled body. She was slumped facedown on the floor in a large circle of rusty brown, close to a blood-splattered telephone. Even Anant seemed utterly bewildered by what he saw, which made Magozzi’s heart sink, because if there was a person alive who could make sense of the nonsensical, it was Dr Rambachan. If he was having trouble with this, there wasn’t any hope for the rest of them.

He looked up and gave them a sad, gentle nod. ‘Detectives Magozzi and Rolseth. I am delighted to see you both again despite the circumstances.’

‘You’re always saying that, Doc,’ Gino said kindly. ‘I think we all need to go out for a beer sometime, break the cycle, you know?’

‘Indeed, Detective Rolseth, I do know.’

‘Good to see you too, Dr Rambachan,’ Magozzi said.

He reciprocated with a broad, white smile that did wonders to improve everyone’s mood. ‘Detective, you have obviously been practicing your Hindi, because I am hearing marked improvement in your accent since last we met.’

‘Yeah, well, those night classes really help.’

Dr Rambachan cocked a brow at him, then smiled again. ‘I think you are joking. Very good.’

And then he was all business, slipping on a pair of latex gloves and crouching next to the body. ‘I’m going to turn this dear lady over now, and I must warn you, it might be difficult to look at. She has been dead for some time, and I’m sure you know that blood pools where gravity takes it . . .’ – he searched their faces, and added – ‘and uncirculated blood eventually turns black.’