Live Bait (24 page)

‘Goddamned son of a bitch beat us bloody,’ Gino grumbled.

‘He did that.’

‘I hate lawyers. Goddamned hate ’em. So what was the wife like? Did she give you anything?’

‘I don’t think that woman gives anybody anything anytime. She was really cold. Minnesota ice. She didn’t know anything about why Jack and his dad were fighting, and never cared enough to ask, as far as I could tell.’

Gino leaned his head back and closed his eyes for a minute. ‘Tell me we’ve got enough to throw him in jail for an obstruction of justice charge.’

‘We don’t.’

‘So where the hell do we go from here? He’s not going to tell us anything.’

‘Maybe Pullman can help us out.’

The front two rows of the nursery parking lot were full by the time they pulled in, and a surprising number of customers were moving through the outdoor display tables, pulling flat wooden wagons that sprouted flowers and greenery.

‘Looks like the flower business is booming,’ Magozzi said.

Jack was already sitting forward in the backseat, anxious to get out. ‘It’s eighty-two degrees. This time of year, you get an extra two cars in the lot for every degree the temperature rises over seventy.’

‘No kidding?’

‘No kidding. Stop this thing and let me out, will you?’

Magozzi glanced at him in the rearview mirror. Two seconds at his mother’s place and the cockiness was gone. ‘Hold your horses. I’m looking for a spot.’

Gino was scowling out the passenger window, still fuming over the abysmal failure of his efforts to get information from Jack. ‘Who are all these people? Why don’t they have jobs? And why can’t they park between the lines? Every one of these goddamned cars is taking up two spaces, at least.’

Magozzi pulled into a slot that faced the big greenhouse just as Marty and Lily came out the door, pulling loaded wagons toward a customer’s pickup. Marty spotted their car immediately and gave them a questioning look and a tentative wave. He looked even more puzzled when he saw Jack climb out of the unmarked and make a beeline toward his Mercedes convertible at the back of the lot.

‘Gee. He didn’t even say good-bye.’

‘Scummy bastard,’ Gino muttered.

They waited in the car, watching Marty load flats into the pickup while Lily supervised.

‘Pullman looks better today,’ Magozzi observed.

‘Hard labor and a female overseer. Builds character, according to my mother-in-law, or at least that’s the line she was feeding me last weekend when she had me up on a ladder cleaning out the gutters. She looks like a little kid in those overalls, doesn’t she?’

‘Who? Lily?’

‘Yeah. Let’s go in and rough her up a little. Maybe she’s an easier takedown than her kid.’

Magozzi snorted. ‘She’d eat you alive.’

‘I know. You take care of her, I’ll talk to Marty.’

They followed Marty and Lily into the greenhouse, then waited politely until a customer at the counter had checked out and left. There were other shoppers in the greenhouse, but all were out of earshot. Magozzi stepped up to the counter, but Jack barged in before he could say a word.

‘I need my keys.’ He glanced briefly at his mother, then at Marty. ‘Where are they?’

Marty looked blandly at the bruise on Jack’s cheek and the bandage on his forehead. ‘You mouth off to the wrong person, Jack?’

‘Ran into a tree.’

‘Figures.’

‘Trying to get away from the person who was shooting at me.’

Lily’s eyes jerked toward her son, and for the first time, Magozzi saw the mother inside the woman. ‘Who tried to shoot you?’ the words snapped out.

Jack almost shuddered. His mother hadn’t addressed him directly in a very long time. ‘I don’t know.’

And now the old woman straightened, and her eyes grew hard again.

Shit,
Magozzi thought.
She knows something, too.

Marty was staring at Jack, wearing a lot of expressions on his face. Anger, disgust, frustration, and maybe a little fear, too; but there was concern behind all of them. It surpised Magozzi a little to see that Marty Pullman actually cared for Jack.

‘What do you know about this?’ Marty asked Gino.

Gino eyed a woman in purple capri pants approaching the register with her cart. ‘Let’s take a walk. I’ll give you what we’ve got.’

‘Keys,’ Jack demanded just as they started to move away.

Marty turned around and pointed a finger at Jack. ‘No keys. You’re staying right here.’ He looked straight at Lily as he added, ‘All day, all night, from now on, until I say otherwise.’

Jack and Lily both blinked at him like startled children.

‘I mean it,’ Marty warned as he and Gino went out the door.

Jack opened his mouth to speak just as the woman in purple capri pants tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Excuse me, sir. Could you tell me if this is the right fertilizer for rhododendrons?’

Almost without thinking Jack turned around and looked at the green plastic jug she was holding. ‘Oh no. That’s too alkaline. You need something more acidic for a rhododendron. Should be something on the same shelf where you found this.’

‘Really? Do you think you could show me? There were so many brands of fertilizer there . . .’

Jack pinched his nose while he slipped from one dimension into another. ‘Okay. Yeah. Sure, I can show you.’

‘Sounds like he knows the business,’ Magozzi said to Lily.

‘He should. He grew up with it,’ she said absently, her eyes following her son past a crowd of customers overloading their wagons from a sale table of impatiens. ‘So tell me about this shooting business. Who was shooting at Jack?’

‘Maybe you should ask Jack about that.’

‘I’m asking you.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘Jack thinks somebody took a shot at him in his driveway this morning, so he shot back.’

Lily turned her head slowly to look at him. ‘He
thinks
? He’s not sure?’

Magozzi shrugged. ‘He is. We’re not. At least not yet. There were a lot of slugs and casings around, but they might all be from Jack’s gun. We’re checking on that.’

Lily was giving him one of her Yoda stares through her thick glasses. ‘Jack doesn’t own a gun. He hates guns.’

‘He says it was Morey’s, and that he took it home from here last night after he heard Ben Schuler was killed.’ Magozzi watched her face carefully as he asked, ‘Did you know Morey had a gun?’

Her stare never faltered. ‘If he did, he didn’t tell me about it.’

Magozzi leaned his forearms on the counter, which put his eyes on a level with hers. ‘Listen, Mrs Gilbert,’ he said quietly. ‘We think Jack knows something about these murders – including your husband’s.’

Lily’s eyes flickered at that.

‘He almost fainted at the reception yesterday when he heard Ben Schuler was shot, and not just because he was shocked. He was scared to death, and we think it was because he knew he was next. He knows something, Mrs Gilbert, and we can’t help him unless we know it, too.’

‘You want me to talk to him,’ she said flatly.

Magozzi straightened and spread his hands. ‘He won’t talk to us. Maybe he’ll talk to his mother.’

Outside, Gino and Marty were perched on the front bumper of the unmarked, slamming bottled water Marty had pulled out of a cooler near the entrance. ‘He’s all we’ve got at this point,’ Gino was saying; ‘and he won’t give us diddly squat. My preference, slam him in a cell with a couple of Bubbas until he decides to talk, but Magozzi’s got this ethics problem. I was thinking because you were family and all, you could get away with beating the shit out of him.’

Marty started a smile, then thought better of it and just shook his head. ‘I tried last night, Gino, and I pushed hard. I know he’s holding something back. The funny thing is, I get the feeling he thinks he has a damn good reason. But I’ll try again. Later tonight, after Lily goes back to the house.’

‘You’re really going to keep him here?’

‘If someone’s really trying to kill him, he’s probably safer here than anywhere else.’

‘How do you figure? Morey wasn’t very safe here,’ Gino pointed out.

Marty turned to look at him squarely. ‘Because I’m not leaving, and I’m carrying. Last night Jack asked me to go home and get my gun. He was worried about Lily. Now I’m worried about both of them. I think he’s really scared, Gino.’

Gino nodded. ‘So do we. But he might have shot up his yard all by himself, Marty. We won’t know until we get something back from Ballistics, and maybe not even then. If we get a positive on something that came from a gun other than the one Jack was waving around, we can put a car out here.’

They stopped talking when they saw Jack rushing across the lot toward them.

‘Where the hell are the Big Boys, Marty? They’re supposed to be on the same table as the Early Girls, and I’ve got a customer freaking out back there because she can’t find any.’

Marty rubbed at his forehead, trying to shift gears from murder to plants. ‘I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Jack.’

‘I’m talking about fucking tomatoes, for chrissake. Now where are they?’

‘Oh. I think I put a bunch of those in the shade over there by the small greenhouse.’

Jack gaped at him. ‘You put tomatoes in the shade?’

‘I guess. If those things over there are tomatoes.’ He jerked a thumb to the right, and Jack looked in that direction.

‘Oh my God.’ He started to hurry off, then turned around and walked back to Gino. ‘I think I forgot to thank you for the ride, Detective.’

‘Yes, you did.’

Jack nodded, shoved his hands in his pockets and looked off to one side. ‘And there’s another thing.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Sometimes I’m kind of a prick.’

‘You think so?’

‘And in spite of everything, you and your partner have been pretty decent to me. I wish I could help you out.’ He raised his eyes to meet Gino’s. ‘I really mean that.’

Gino watched him walk away with a miserable expression. ‘Goddamnit. Now I’m really conflicted.’

Marty chuckled. ‘Jack turns everybody upside down.’

Gino was mobbed the minute he pushed through the door to Homicide. Langer, McLaren, Gloria, and Peterson all moved toward him like a pack of slobbering puppies. A lesser man, he thought, might have been fearful. ‘Lars, what are you doing here?’ he asked Detective Peterson. ‘I thought they bumped you over to Narc until Tinker got back from vacation.’

Peterson was zipper thin and had just a little more color than most of the corpses they’d seen in the last few days. ‘Just for yesterday. And you know how I spent it? Sitting in a methadone clinic waiting for Ray the Mouth to show up. God knows what I caught there . . .’

Gloria pushed Peterson aside with a gentle nudge of her hip that nearly dropped him. ‘Yadda yadda yadda, come on, Rolseth, spit it out.’

‘What?’

‘Are you kidding?’ McLaren asked. He was wearing a navy-and-white houndstooth check jacket that looked like an eye test. ‘You’ve been all over the news all morning, and you don’t even call in. So what happened at Gilbert’s place? Where’s Magozzi?’

‘Leo’s dropping off some stuff for Ballistics, and nothing happened at Gilbert’s.’

‘No dead people?’

‘No dead people. Looks like Gilbert killed his wife’s car emptying a clip at a phantom assassin. That’s about it.’

Peterson’s bony shoulders sagged beneath his white shirt. He looked sadly down at his empty desk, probably dreaming of homicides, the bloodthirsty bastard. ‘Sounded like Waco on the news.’

Gloria spun in a swirl of rainbow silk, cornrow beads clattering. ‘I told you fools there was nothing to it. You flick a Bic in Wayzata, everybody gets all worked up. Peterson, you’ve got about three minutes to sign off with Narc before Harrison leaves, or you belong to them.’

‘Oh shit.’ Peterson beat a path to the door.

‘So nothing broke for you?’ Langer asked Gino as they all drifted back toward their desks.

‘Don’t ask. Another twenty steps forward and we’ll be back to square one. How about your case?’

Langer shook his head and stabbed at a thick pile of printouts on the edge of his desk. ‘This is everything we could get on the six Interpol victims. Dull as dirt, most of them, ordinary people living ordinary lives.’

‘But Interpol had them pegged as contract hits, right?’

‘So they say, but they’re the unlikeliest targets I ever came across.’

‘Just like all the people getting bumped off around here.’

Langer raised an eyebrow. ‘Good point. But we still can’t come up with a connection to Fischer, except for the gun.’

‘And the Feds are nipping at Malcherson’s ass,’ McLaren said miserably. ‘The way they figure it, we’re a couple of cow tippers who can’t see shit in a sewer, so they’ll just take our case, solve it on their lunch hour, and get all the glory. Which means Langer and I are probably going to be giving safety lectures at some grade school tomorrow.’

‘Huh.’ Gino made a feeble attempt at tucking in his shirt. ‘What’s Malcherson say?’

Langer shrugged. ‘We’ve got until the end of the day to come up with something, then he’s letting them in. And to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure it isn’t a good idea. We’re pretty much at a dead end.’

Gino shook his head. ‘If they want it, they’ve got something you don’t have.’

‘Probably.’

Magozzi came into the office like a stiff breeze, moving swiftly down the aisle with his cell phone pressed to his ear, listening hard. He greeted everyone with a wave as he passed, thumbing Gino toward their desks in the back.

While Magozzi finished his call, Gino pawed through his desk drawer looking for food. He was examining a soggy, lint-covered cough drop, trying to decide if it was edible, when Magozzi said, ‘Thanks, Dave,’ into the phone and flipped the cover closed.

‘Dave? As in Ballistic Dave?’

‘That’s the one. He had a little news. Rose Kleber and Ben Schuler were killed with the same 9-mm.’

‘Oh, yippy-ki-ay, our first solid connection, and please, God, tell me it was the 9-mm Wayzata took off Jack Gilbert so I can throw his ass in jail.’

‘Sorry. Dave did a quick test-fire. It wasn’t Jack’s gun.’

‘Crap.’

‘He also scoped all the slugs from Gilbert’s place. All of them came from Jack’s gun, except one.’