‘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.’
29
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?’