‘So what have you got?’
Magozzi looked down at the idle doodling that always helped him think. ‘Two sunflowers and a butterfly. How about you?’
Gino held up a page that was filled with a large unidentifiable stick figure. ‘Horse.’ He turned the page toward him and frowned at it. ‘You know, we should draw masculine stuff when we do this. Guns, cars, shit like that. This looks bad.’
‘Shred it.’
‘Good plan.’ Gino tossed his paper in the shredder basket and looked down at a blank page. ‘I don’t think my brain wants to go here. I try to think about it, and I see packs of geriatrics with holsters on their little old bony hips. I may never go to the market on Senior Day again. This thing just blows my mind.’
‘It’s still just circumstantial, Gino.’
‘Maybe. But you know what, Leo? It feels right.’
Magozzi nodded. ‘Yeah. It does. But it’s goddamned unbelievable.’
Gino rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘You know, I couldn’t even find a guy to clean out my roof gutters, so how do you find a contract killer? And what kind of an outfit would employ a bunch of geriatrics? Bob’s Discount Assassinations?’
‘You think they were working for an agency?’
‘Maybe. I can’t see two old guys and a little old grandma hanging out in the kinds of sleazy places where you can get a secret word about that kind of thing. Besides, they were pretty busy for freelancers, and these hits were slick. Pro, all the way.’ He blew out a long sigh. ‘As much as I hate to say it, this is a little out of our venue.’
‘Then don’t say it.’
‘It’s their kind of ball game, Leo. They were hot for the Interpol murders already. If we really think we’ve a got a team of assassins operating here, we’ve got to bring in the Feds.’
Magozzi started filling in the petals on his sunflower. ‘That’s just it. We don’t know that. At least not for a certainty. If we bring them in too early, they’re going to mess up our case.’
‘If we don’t bring them in and it turns out these people were assassins, there’s going to be hell to pay.’
‘No there won’t. It’s not our job to prove Morey Gilbert and his group were killers. It’s our job to find out who’s killing them. Hang on to that. Besides, we’ve got a lot of reasons to doubt the contract killer theory, and only one coincidence to support it – the overseas trips. And the triad thing really bothers me. Three killers for one hit? Never heard of anything like that.’
Gino threw down his pencil. ‘The longer you think about this, the wronger it gets. We just spent half an hour convincing McLaren and Langer our trio of elders were killers, and now we’re spending another half hour convincing ourselves they weren’t.’
Magozzi smiled a little. ‘It’s a hell of a merry-go-round, isn’t it?’
‘I guess.’ Gino reached across the desk and dragged over the Arlen Fischer murder file Langer had given them before he left. ‘This one really freaks me out. Sure, everybody wants to kill somebody, but what the hell did Arlen Fischer do to deserve this? Knock a plant over at the nursery? Put a door ding in Grandma Kleber’s car? I mean, Christ, this was brutal.’ He Frisbeed a glossy across the desks to Magozzi. ‘Have you seen these shots? They tied the guy to the tracks with barbed wire, for God’s sake. Talk about your pre-mediation. You can’t pick that stuff up at the corner market. They got it way ahead of time. Torture was a big part of the plan.’
Magozzi centered the glossy in front of him and stared down at it, keeping his brain very still so that one thought, the one that had been nagging at him since breakfast with Malcherson, could start to creep forward. Maybe the thought had been there from the beginning of the investigation, when his mind recorded what he wasn’t ready to look at yet, a sad, unpretty thing festering in the dark until it was time to show itself.
And then it did.
‘Jesus, Gino. There it is.’
Gino rose slowly to his feet, peered across at the upside-down photo, trying to see what Magozzi saw. ‘What? For chrissake, what?’
Magozzi looked up at him with the most miserable expression Gino had ever seen on his face. ‘Barbed wire. Trains. Concentration camps. They were Jews, Gino. Holocaust survivors.’
Gino eased his bulk slowly back down into his chair, never taking his eyes off Magozzi.
‘They weren’t contract killers,’ Magozzi said sadly. ‘Ten cents against my badge, Morey, Rose Kleber, Ben Schuler – they were killing Nazis – the ones who got away. And this one’ – he jabbed a finger at Arlen Fischer’s photo – ‘this one, they knew personally.’
Gino looked down at the photo again, then turned his chair sideways and stared at the wall for a minute. ‘Angela made me watch this thing on public television once. Somebody was interviewing Jews. Concentration camp survivors. A bunch of old men and women, and they were talking about the Nazis they’d hunted down and whacked after the war. Not one of those official things like Simon What’s-his-name…’
‘Wiesenthal?’
‘Yeah. That sounds right. But it wasn’t anything like that. These were underground groups, little death squads, and they said there were a lot of them.’
‘You believed them?’ Magozzi asked.
‘I don’t know. At first I thought it was just some sensationalistic bullshit they put on during pledge drive to suck people in, but the thing is, these people had lists of the ones they said they killed, and they knew stuff about some unsolveds the locals had been holding back. By the time the show was over the hair was standing up on the back of my neck.’
31
When Langer and McLaren got back from lunch, Magozzi and Gino sat them down and laid out the whole thing.
Langer knew he wasn’t taking it well – maybe because he was Jewish, maybe because it made so damn much sense he couldn’t talk himself out of it. The notion of Morey Gilbert as a contract killer had enough holes to give him hope it might not be true; Morey Gilbert as a Nazi killer closed most of them.
For the first thirty-some years of his life Langer had listened closely for stories his mother never told, trying to understand the empty places that lived in her eyes, wishing she would tell the terrible secrets he knew she kept. Alzheimer’s finally loosened her tongue and granted his wish, and in her last months of sporadic, time-traveling recall, she forgot he was her son and remembered instead the horrors of her eleven months in Dachau, sixty years before.
Be careful what you wish for.
Her disease had delivered its ultimate blow, erasing every memory except Dachau, and her mind spent its last functional moments on a narrow, splintered wooden bunk in a foulness of smell and sound and spirit that left Langer weeping in the chair beside her bed.
Morey Gilbert, Rose Kleber, and Ben Schuler had shared her experience, had kept their silence just as she had, but maybe for them, justice and morality had different parameters.
He glanced over at McLaren, sitting at his desk with his arms folded, his face closed, angry and sad all at once. Contract killers, Nazi killers, it probably didn’t make a whole lot of difference to him. McLaren had idolized Morey Gilbert. The idea of him killing anyone for any reason was simply incomprehensible.
But now Langer believed it. He even understood what would compel the hunted to become the hunters, had understood the moment he’d relived Dachau with his mother. And he suddenly realized that that ability to understand had probably been his downfall.
He looked up at Magozzi. ‘If you’re right about this, in order to close our case, McLaren and I have to prove a man we both liked very much killed Arlen Fischer.’
‘That’s about the size of it. And Gino and I need that information, too, because whatever Morey and his friends were tangled up in is probably going to point the way to who killed them.’