Live Bait (37 page)

One by one they all started to smile for the first time in twenty-four hours. All except Johnny McLaren, who was looking at Malcherson with undisguised awe. ‘Chief, you are the sneakiest son of a bitch on the planet.’

‘Thank you, Detective McLaren.’

Malcherson was all the way to Gloria’s desk when Gino called after him, ‘Hey, Chief.’ Malcherson stopped in his tracks, but didn’t turn around. ‘Thumbs-up on the navy suit. The average Joe can get away with black in mourning situations, but a man in your position of power? Might have been a little too much drama. I think you nailed it again.’

Chief Malcherson waited until he was out in the hall, and then he smiled.

Twenty minutes later, Detective Aaron Langer walked into the chief’s office just as he was hanging up the phone. Malcherson looked inordinately pleased with himself.

‘That was Paul Shafer,’ he said. ‘He seemed absolutely delighted to hear that we finally realized the Arlen Fischer case was beyond the scope of our investigative abilities.’

Langer smiled. ‘What did you tell him, sir?’

‘The absolute truth. That the Minneapolis Police Department doesn’t have the media skills to manage a case of this magnitude.’

‘That had to be irresistible.’

‘I believe it was. He’s on his way over now to pick up the file. Personally.’

‘So as far as we’re concerned, the Arlen Fischer case is now closed.’

‘That’s correct.’

‘That’s good news, Chief.’ Langer removed his sidearm, ejected the clip, and cleared the chamber, then laid it butt first on the desk.

Malcherson stared at it, and then at the badge case Langer laid next to it.

‘May I sit down, sir?’

‘Absolutely.’

Langer settled in the chair, then looked out the window because he couldn’t look the chief in the eye. He hadn’t been able to do that for a long time now. ‘Marty Pullman was at my desk the day I got that call telling us where we could find Eddie Starr. I wrote down the address, then left the office.’

Malcherson waited, his face still, his expression unreadable.

‘Marty overheard the call. He knew whose address that was, and I knew he knew it. So I left the note in plain view and just walked away.’

Malcherson looked down at a fingerprint in the high gloss of his desktop, wondering whose it was. ‘What on earth were you thinking, Detective Langer?’ he asked softly.

‘I’m not sure, sir. Maybe that Marty deserved a chance to beat the shit out of the man who killed his wife before we got there. Or maybe somewhere in the back of my mind I was thinking he might do more than that. I honestly don’t know, and it really doesn’t matter. The point is that when I saw Eddie Starr’s body, I knew damn well what had happened. Marty may have pulled the trigger, but I made it possible when I walked away from my desk that day.’

Malcherson cleared his throat softly. ‘Detective Langer, I will never believe that your intent was for Marty Pullman to commit murder.’

Langer’s smile pulled at one side of his mouth. ‘Really? Well I’m not so sure, and it’s been driving me crazy for months. And I’d spent months before that looking at what Morey and Lily and Jack were going through, watching Marty fall apart a little more each day, and all I could think of was how unfair it was that a scumbag like Starr could destroy so many good people . . . you see what I was doing? I was deciding, sir. Deciding who was good and who was bad and maybe even who deserved to die. Just like Marty did, and Morey and all the rest. Then when this case started to unravel and I realized that Eddie Starr was a piker, that if he’d lived another hundred years he wouldn’t be able to catch up to Morey Gilbert’s body count . . . the good guys and the bad guys kind of blended together until the only thing I was sure of was that I’d never been able to tell the difference.’ His eyes drifted down to his badge. ‘I should have turned that in, turned myself in, a long time ago.’

He stood up then and patted his pockets, already missing the weight of his life that he’d left on the Chief’s desk. Then he met Malcherson’s eyes head on and smiled. Strange, he thought, how good that felt. ‘You know where to find me, sir,’ he said, then turned and walked out.

Malcherson sat quietly at his desk for a long time after he left.

Magozzi and Gino were at the big front table in Homicide, making copies of the reams of paperwork they’d all accumulated since the night Arlen Fischer and Morey Gilbert had been murdered. Paul Shafer was in Malcherson’s office now with a couple of his FBI henchmen, formalizing the turnover of the Fischer case and all related evidence. They’d be here in a few minutes to collect it.

McLaren wheeled in a dolly with four large boxes he’d retrieved from the evidence room. ‘This is the last of the stuff we took from Fischer’s place.’ He stopped at Gloria’s desk and wiped his forehead. ‘You want to give me a hand with this, Miss Gloria?’

She held up ten black-enameled fingers and wiggled them. ‘Look at these and tell me how much of a fool you are for asking such a stupid question.’

McLaren put a hand to his heart. ‘I am a fool. I am anything you want me to be. All you have to do is ask.’

‘I want you to be gone.’

‘I want you to be my woman.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ She slammed out of her little cubicle and stomped away on her black platforms.

He grinned and wheeled the dolly over to the table. ‘I think I’m getting to her.’

‘A regular Lothario, that’s what you are,’ Gino said, grabbing a box. ‘You know, McLaren, if you ever lifted anything heavier than a pencil with those little chicken wing arms of yours, you wouldn’t have to ask a woman for help.’

‘Who’s Lothario? And where the hell is Langer, anyway? I swear, that guy finds something else to do every time we’ve got to bring these boxes upstairs.’

Magozzi stepped away from the table when his cell rang.

‘Hey, Magozzi.’

‘Hey, Grace.’

‘I saw the news. I’m sorry about your friend, Marty. That must have been terrible. Are you okay?’

God, he loved it when she worried about him. ‘Not really.’

‘Maybe I could come over tonight, cook you supper, we could open a few bottles of wine.’

Magozzi took a few more steps away from the table and lowered his voice. ‘You want to come to
my
house?’

‘I have a present for you.’

Magozzi’s spirits spread their little wings and tried to flap. ‘You’re not going to Arizona?’

‘Sorry, Magozzi. Annie flies in this afternoon, we all leave tomorrow.’

Splat. Spirits squashed under Grace MacBride’s boot.

‘This is a different present.’

‘So it’s a going-away present. Goddamnit, Grace, that sucks.’

‘You’ll like it. I’ll be there at seven.’

Magozzi closed his phone and decided that he didn’t give a damn if Grace MacBride went to Arizona or the moon. Gino was right. He needed a life. He needed a woman – preferably one who’d help him buy a sofa. Oh, he’d let her come over tonight, they’d eat a little, drink a little, and maybe he’d even bend her over backwards once and kiss her until her boots blew off, but then, by God, he’d kick her ass out. That’s what he was going to do.

Gino looked over at him, brows raised. ‘Grace?’

‘Yeah,’ Magozzi growled, sounding like a real man, a man who didn’t care, a man who was taking charge. He wondered if the silly grin he felt on his face spoiled the image.

Harley Davidson was behind the wheel of the custom-built forty-five-foot RV, his beefy, tattooed arms draped over the big steering wheel, his solid frame enveloped in a Connolly leather captain’s chair specifically designed to accommodate his size. It had cost twenty thousand to have the chair made; another thousand to air-express it over from the small Italian furniture company he’d commissioned for the job; another three grand to install the hydraulics. A white grin sliced through his black beard. It had been worth every penny. ‘Goddamnit, I love this thing. I’d drive her to hell and back and be a happy man.’

The storklike man next to him folded long, scrawny arms over his bony chest and pouted. ‘It’s my turn. I want to drive it. You drove to the airport, I should get to drive back. So pull over.’

Harley’s eyes darted right – you couldn’t look away from the road too long in this baby or you’d take out a subdivision. Roadrunner was in his customary head-to-toe Lycra, but today it was blaze orange. Harley felt like he was about to talk to a construction cone. ‘Roadrunner, you are never driving this machine. Get it out of your head.’

‘Oh yeah? Why not?’

‘Well, gee, lemme think. Number one, you do not, and never have had a driver’s license. Number two, the only thing you’ve driven for the past thirty years is a bicycle. The brakes are not on the handlebars in this thing, you dipshit.’

‘Would you guys quit fighting?’ Annie drawled petulantly from behind them, and Harley’s gaze jerked to one of the seven mirrors. He had three of them adjusted so he could see three different angles of Annie Belinsky sprawled languidly on one of the couches. She was wearing this skintight fawn-colored suede thing with fringe on the bottom and beads on the top and omigod, cowboy boots with spurs. ‘Christ, Annie, I can almost feel those spurs in my flanks.’

Annie glared at his back. ‘Imagine that. I’ve only been gone for two weeks, and yet somehow I managed to totally forget what a disgusting pig you are, Harley.’

‘He missed you,’ Grace said. She was slouched on the opposite couch, booted feet stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles. ‘We all did.’

Roadrunner spun his chair around and faced Annie. ‘Did you bring me a present?’

‘Honey, I sure did. It’s in that little black bag right there.’

Roadrunner’s face lit up, and he started digging in the bag until he found a tissue-wrapped parcel. He ripped it open and held up a lime green Lycra cowboy shirt, complete with piping on the yoke, mother-of-pearl snaps, and a cow skull appliqué on the pocket. ‘Oh, man, Annie, this is great. Where did you find a Lycra cowboy shirt?’

‘Let me tell you, Phoenix is a shopper’s paradise if you’re into the Urban Cowboy look. They put a cactus, a cow skull, or a piece of fringe on damn near anything. That came from a specialty bike shop a few miles out of town.’

Roadrunner stood up, his head almost brushing the seven-foot ceiling, and peeled off his orange Lycra top.

Harley glanced at him, then did a double-take. ‘Jesus Christ, Roadrunner, is that your chest or did you swallow a xylophone?’

‘A man with boobs your size shouldn’t be criticizing.’

‘These are not boobs, they are pecs.’

Annie put her head in her hands. ‘Are you two going to be like this all the way to Arizona?’

‘You should have heard them when they were putting this rig together,’ Grace said. ‘Couple of old bickering hens.’

Roadrunner was beaming, now newly dressed in his southwestern finery. He posed in his blaze orange stick legs and his lime green shirt. ‘How do I look?’

Harley glanced at him. ‘Are you kidding? You look like a goddamned carrot.’

Annie rolled her eyes and looked at Grace. ‘How’d that thing you were working on for Magozzi turn out?’

‘Turned out great,’ Harley boomed, loath to be left out of any conversation within shouting distance. ‘Our Gracie cracked the case with that face-recognition software she put together.’

‘You go, girl. That thing’s going to make a jillion dollars when you get it down to idiot level and put it on the Web. So what was the case all about?’

Grace closed her eyes. ‘Don’t ask.’

‘The lady wants to know,’ Harley said. ‘And I’m the man to tell her. You see, Annie, this is the way it went down. First the Nazis killed the Jews, right? So you know what happened right here in our fair city? Three old ass-kicking Jews got themselves a Nazi. Is that righteous, or what?’

Roadrunner gaped at him. ‘I think that’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever heard you say.’

‘What?’

‘
Harley
ey tied a ninety-year-old man to the train tracks so he’d get smushed.’

Harley shrugged, genuinely baffled. ‘He was a Nazi, for chrissake. What’s your problem?’

‘Like most civilized men, Harley, I have this little problem with murder. They should have turned him in, sent him to The Hague. Courts, lawyers, fair trial, does any of this ring a bell? It’s not exactly a new concept . . .’

‘Ah, bullshit. The only good Nazi is a dead Nazi. You don’t believe me? Ask any German and they’ll tell you the same thing.’

‘How do you know what the Germans think?’

‘Because, Mr Chickenshit I Won’t Fly, I go to Germany at least once a year to buy wine and party with some of the most hospitable people in the world who happen to live in one of the most beautiful countries in the world, and that’s not even getting into the exceptional quality of their lager, or the
cars
 . . . and those people hate Nazis.’

Annie leaned across the aisle and whispered to Grace. ‘I am not riding all the way to Arizona with those two madmen.’

Grace sighed and smiled, totally happy to be right here, listening to Harley and Roadrunner snipe at each other, Annie complaining – the absolute sounds of family, she thought. Sometimes she loved these people so much it hurt. And some days, when she was feeling really good about herself, she felt that way about Magozzi, too.

Annie was reading her mind again. ‘You’re going to miss Magozzi, aren’t you?’

‘He’s a nice man, Annie.’

‘He’s a prince,’ Harley bellowed. ‘A hail-fellow-well-met. I love the guy. Every time I see him, I want to kiss him on the lips. How’s the old bastard doing, anyway?’

Grace shrugged. ‘It’s been a bad week.’ She looked at Annie. ‘There was a shooting last night. All part of the Nazi-Jew thing, I think. He lost a cop, and had to kill a kid.’

‘Oh, Lord. Magozzi does dearly hate to kill people. Poor man.’

Grace nodded. ‘I’m going over to his place tonight. Sort of a bon voyage dinner.’

‘You should sleep with him,’ Annie decided. ‘That always makes men feel better.’

Harley actually turned his head around to look at Grace. ‘Are you kidding me? You haven’t slept with him yet? I thought this guy was Italian.’