Gino watched as more people crossed the street and slipped quietly into the ranks of mourners. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Who the hell was this guy?’
A tall blond kid next to the tape kept raising his hand just a little, trying to attract their attention. Magozzi walked over and leaned in close to him. ‘Something I can do for you, son?’
‘Um… are you the detectives?’
‘That’s right.’
The kid was probably good-looking under other circumstances, but now his face was blotchy and red and puffy around the eyes. ‘I’m Jeff Montgomery? And this is Tim Matson? We work here, and Mr Pullman told us to stay home, you might want to talk to us? But… we had to come, you know?’
Magozzi thought they looked like a couple of lost puppies. He raised the tape and gestured them under, suppressing the instinct to pat them on their heads and tell them everything would be all right.
7
When there were no obvious suspects, the first day of any homicide investigation was a blur of interviews and fact-checking that ate up the precious golden hours between a murder and the probability of it ever being solved. If you were lucky, you caught a spark – a tiny scrap of information that might lead you in the right direction, but Magozzi and Gino hadn’t been lucky today. Fourteen hours into the Gilbert case without a glimmer.
Magozzi parked the car on the street next to City Hall, and for a moment he and Gino just sat there in the dark.
You know your big problem, Leo? You take every murder so goddamned personally.
It was the one thing his ex-wife had said to him that still left him dumbstruck, all these years later. Even her endgame confession of all her infidelities had lost its punch as time passed, but not that. It was the very first time he’d ever considered the possibility that murder wasn’t personal to everyone, and he still couldn’t get his head around that.
It had something to do with empathy for the victim, he supposed. Not once had he ever been able to look at a body with the mental distance that would allow him to see it as ‘just’ a body. Some cops could do that. Some cops had to do it, or they’d go nuts. Magozzi had never been able to manage it. To him, it was never just a body; it was always a dead person, and there was a big difference.
But this one was worse than most. Only one day into the investigation and he wasn’t just feeling sorry for the victim; he was starting to feel sorry for himself because he hadn’t known the man, and that had never happened before.
‘Long day,’ Gino finally sighed.
‘Too long. Too many sad people. You know, just once I’d like to work a case where everybody hated the dead guy.’
Gino grunted. ‘That ain’t gonna happen. Nobody hates a dead man. It’s not allowed. You could be the meanest son of a bitch on the planet, but once they put you in the coffin and lay you out in front of the people who hated you when you were alive, they all seem to find something nice to say. It’s like a miracle.’
Magozzi scowled out the windshield at the deserted street. Maybe Gino was right. Maybe Morey Gilbert had been just like anybody else, somehow elevated by death. But in his heart, he didn’t think so.
Gino was silent for a minute. ‘Except I think this one might be a little different, Leo.’
‘Yeah, I know. I was just thinking the same thing.’ Magozzi closed his eyes, remembering all the mourners outside the nursery. It was the kind of impromptu gathering you expected to see when a celebrity died, or a beloved public figure; not some average Joe nobody had ever heard of. The media had covered it, but mostly because it had snarled traffic on the boulevard. They’d never heard of Morey Gilbert either, and most of their attention was focused on the delicious, ratings-grabbing horror of another old man being tortured and tied to a train track.
Beethoven’s Fifth sang out from the pocket in Gino’s shorts. He ripped his pocket pulling out his cell phone before the irritating melody started again. ‘Damnit, I’m going to ground that kid. Teach her to have a little respect for her father and classical composers.’
‘You should get one of those cell phone holsters for that thing.’
‘Oh sure. A cell phone in one holster and a gun in the other. I’d end up shooting myself in the ear. Yeah, Rolseth here.’
When Gino turned on the map light and started taking notes, Magozzi got out of the car and leaned against the door, pushing speed-dial on his own phone, waiting for the answering machine beep on the other end. ‘Hey, it’s Magozzi. We’ve got something going here, and I’m going to be a little late. I’ll try to make it by ten. Call back if that’s too late; otherwise, I’ll see you then.’ He flipped his phone closed and got back into the car, praying that ten o’clock wouldn’t be too late; that his phone wouldn’t ring in the next few hours.
Gino waggled his notebook at him. ‘That was the night manager at the Wayzata Country Club. Jack Gilbert was there last night, just like he said. Apparently he’s there almost every night, solo, which tells you a little about his home life. But the place shuts down at one, and Anant put time of death between two and four, right?’
‘Right.’
‘So he had plenty of time to get to the nursery and pop his father. Which means we don’t have one person in that family we can clear. The old lady’s alone in the house, and the son and the son-in-law are both supposedly three sheets to the wind and can’t remember a damn thing.’ He sighed and tucked his notebook in his shirt pocket. ‘Nobody has alibis anymore. I hate that. So what do you think?’
Magozzi reached into the backseat to grab one of the two grease-stained bags that were probably leaking onto the seat. ‘I think this car is going to smell like barbeque for the next year. Tell me again why we had to pick up dinner.’
‘Because if we’d sent Langer he’d have come back with carrots and sawdust or some such vegetarian crap, that’s why.’
Minneapolis was dressing itself for the evening with a sparkle of lights. It was a pretty city, Detective Langer thought, staring out at the yellow rectangles in a distant tower, climbing into the night sky like some kind of golden ladder. Not the kind of place you’d expect to produce such a killer.
McLaren, as Minnesotan as he was Irish, was convinced that whoever had murdered Arlen Fischer was certainly from somewhere else; Chicago, maybe, or New York, or wherever it was that people like the Sopranos lived. Langer had smiled at that, but had to admit there was an old-time mob taste to the way the elderly man had been killed. You didn’t see creativity like that in many other arenas.
He glanced back at his monitor, jiggled his mouse to bring the report he was writing back to life. He hated writing reports. Hated the arcane, affected cop-speak that mangled the brain and tied the tongue. You never went into a house; you entered a residence. People were never shot to death; they sustained mortal wounds inflicted by such-and-such-caliber firearms. And Arlen Fischer had certainly not been tied to a train track to be turned into oatmeal by the midnight freight to Chicago; he’d simply been ‘secured to the southbound tracks by means of barbed wire.’ You couldn’t even mention that the train was due, because that would imply the alleged perpetrator had actually premeditated a means of death not in evidence. Some junior-high-school defense attorney would jump all over that. Genteel, legalese gobbledygook is what it was. If a cop ever talked like that in real life, he’d be laughed off the force.
He looked out at the lights again, dreaming of his last sentence, wondering if Chief Malcherson would suspend him if he wrote that Arlen Fischer had been left on the tracks to get filleted by a train.
‘C’mon, Langer,’ McLaren chided him. ‘Goose the mare, would you? The caterers have arrived.’