‘Well, sure, sort of. I mean it was scared, crying and stuff.’
‘Live bait. Like these worms.’
The clerk gave Morey a blank look.
Morey shook his finger at him. ‘There’s an important lesson here. Do you know what it is? I’ll tell you. One man’s worm is another man’s goat. Remember that.’
She’s wrong, Marty thought as he drifted back from his reverie. No matter what Lily said, no matter what anybody said, Morey Gilbert was no fisherman.
19
The unseasonable heat continued on the morning of Morey Gilbert’s funeral, and meteorologists predicted yet another day of sunny skies and temperatures in the eighties. Old-timers in the state sat on sun-drenched porches, paging through their well-thumbed Farmer’s Almanacs as if they were the writings of Nostradamus, searching history for a similar Minnesota April heat wave, and finding none. But fifteen hundred miles north, deep into the Canadian territories, the belly of an enormous cold front began to sag toward the American Midwest. A change was coming.
The Uptown Precinct had called for five extra patrols to manage the traffic converging on the synagogue where Morey Gilbert’s service was held. By ten in the morning there was standing room only inside; by eleven, when the service began, the crowd had spilled out onto the lawn, the sidewalk, and ultimately the street itself. The numbers were in the hundreds, and there was no hope of moving them, and simply no place to move them to, so the street had finally been closed for three blocks in either direction. Not one resident or motorist complained. Even the cops, initially irritated to be diverted to traffic management, were eventually moved by the size and reverent demeanor of the crowd, and became caught up in the sense that they were more honor guard than enforcers, there to witness the passage of a great man. None of them understood it, and later could only say, ‘You had to be there.’
Three hours later Magozzi and Gino sat in the unmarked outside Lily Gilbert’s house behind the nursery, watching a small army of black-clad mourners funnel through the front door.
‘You know, I think half the city showed up at the cemetery. I don’t know how the hell she’s going to squeeze them all into that cracker box,’ Gino commented.
‘It’s a private reception. Family and friends only. These are the people who knew him best; the ones we want to listen to.’
Gino sighed and started to loosen the knot in his tie. ‘You ever seen press coverage that heavy at a funeral before?’
‘Not for anybody who wasn’t in politics or a rock band.’
‘And isn’t that a sad comment on the state of the world? But I’ve been thinking, you listen to all those people who stood up and told their stories about how Morey helped them out? Christ, it was like taking a stroll through a maximum-security cell block. You had your drug dealers, gangbangers… hell, pick a felony, they were all there.’
‘Ex-drug dealers, ex-gangbangers.’
Gino snorted. ‘So they say. But what if one of them went bad again, came back to good old Morey for a little more monetary support and got pissed when he unhitched him from the gravy train?’
Magozzi looked at him. ‘You know, I just figured it out. You’re really respectful, almost genteel, until you loosen the knot in your tie, then everything goes to hell.’
‘Well, it’s possible, isn’t it?’
Magozzi sighed and draped his wrists over the steering wheel. ‘That one of the people he helped came back on him? I suppose, but if that’s the case, we’re going to have a hell of a time picking him out. There must have been over a thousand people there today. Besides, that punches a hole in the same killer hitting Rose Kleber, and I’m kind of stuck on that.’ He leaned forward and squinted out the windshield. ‘Who’s that guy in the navy suit hugging Jack Gilbert?’
‘Whoever it is, he ain’t hugging him, he’s holding him up. Didn’t you see him bobbing and weaving at the grave? Man, for a minute, I thought he was going to fall in the hole and shake hands with his dad.’
‘Yeah, I saw that.’ Magozzi sagged back against the seat and watched the man in the navy suit steadying Jack, then just as soon as he had him stabilized, hurrying away as if he didn’t want to be anywhere near him when he fell. It seemed that nobody wanted to be around Jack Gilbert. ‘He’s alone all the time, you notice?’
‘Gilbert?’
‘Yeah.’
Gino shrugged. ‘No surprise there. The guy’s a train wreck.’
‘Lily wouldn’t get within ten feet of him today. Neither would Marty, for that matter. He was just standing there all alone, just like Langer and McLaren told us he did at Hannah’s funeral. You’d think at least his wife would have come with him.’
‘I heard a couple of people talking about that on the way out of the cemetery. Sounds like she’s going to file on him any day, if she hasn’t already. No love lost there.’
Magozzi set his jaw. ‘She still should have come. It would have been the decent thing to do.’
Gino turned sideways to look at him. ‘Come on, Leo. Jack Gilbert is a drunken asshole. You reap what you sow, and all that, so stop feeling sorry for him.’
‘I only do it from a distance. When I get closer, I hate his guts.’
‘There’s the partner I know and love.’
‘But it’s the chicken-and-egg thing.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘Well, you have to wonder, is he a drunken asshole because he’s been ostracized, or was he ostracized because he’s a drunken asshole?’
Gino blew out an exasperated sigh. ‘I pick door number two. Can we go in now?’
Magozzi balked. ‘Maybe we should wait a few more minutes before we barge in. Just to be respectful.’
‘We’ve been plenty respectful, Leo. It’s not like we’re the first ones here, standing at the door with tape recorders and rubber hoses. Besides, in a crowd this size no one’s going to notice a couple of extra extremely handsome guys in spiffy funeral suits.’
Within fifteen minutes, Magozzi was questioning the wisdom of attending this reception, even though the reasoning had been sound. The theory was that no one, not even Morey Gilbert, was a hundred percent good, and there was no way a man could live eighty-four years without pissing somebody off. They were hoping that if they listened closely to the people who knew him, they might get a hint of something about the dead man they hadn’t heard yet; something worth looking at.
But so far all Magozzi had heard were even more weeping testimonials – if the man hadn’t been a saint, he had been damn close, and it was starting to annoy him. Morey Gilbert had given away whatever he had to give – time, money, counseling, food, lodging – and he hadn’t only helped the people he’d stumbled upon – he’d gone out looking for them. It was just plain unnatural.
Suddenly, a whirl of motion from across the room caught his eye. Jack Gilbert was careening from guest to guest like a poorly aimed pinball, obliterating any sympathy Magozzi had felt for him earlier, advertising himself as the single most obvious failure of Morey Gilbert’s good intentions.
Magozzi followed Jack with his eyes, thinking hard. It felt like his brain was bobbling over a series of speed bumps.
He found Gino loading up his second plate from a buffet table that exceeded even his wildest food fantasies.
‘Is this great, or what?’ Gino said gleefully. ‘You gotta try the noodle stuff with the raisins.’ He popped a cocktail meatball into his mouth. ‘So, did you get anything interesting?’
‘I think we’ve got to look harder at Jack Gilbert.’
Gino raised an eyebrow, which was the only movement possible with his mouth as full as it was.
‘He’s the one and only crack in Morey Gilbert’s halo, Gino.’