Magozzi rolled his eyes. ‘Kidding, Gino.’
‘Well, I believed it. She’s still got the house locked up tighter than a drum.’
‘A lot of people have home security.’
‘Most of them don’t run around in their own house with a gun strapped to their ankle.’
‘She’s getting better, Gino.’
‘You keep saying that, but personally, I don’t see it.’
‘She bought me a chair.’
Gino arched a brow. ‘You mean for here? Your very own chair?’ He looked over his shoulder into the living room. ‘Where is it?’
‘Outside.’
‘And that doesn’t tell you something?’
‘You don’t understand.’
Grace came from the hall into the kitchen then and started making little domestic noises. A minute later she walked into the dining room balancing four plates. Three held mounds of glistening greenery topped with large, snowy chunks of lobster. The fourth held kibble buried under some kind of chunky gravy that smelled like the greatest hotdish ever made.
Gino looked pointedly at that one. ‘Smells terrific,’ he said, saddened a little when she set it in front of Charlie. ‘But jeez, Grace, this is some cracker.’
‘I figured you hadn’t had a chance for lunch with all that was going on today. We might as well eat while we’re waiting for the program to kick out something.’
Gino looked down at the generous pile of lobster on his plate and almost wept. ‘This is the nicest goddamned thing…’ was all he managed to get out before his fork found his mouth. When he was finished, he patted the corners of his mouth with a napkin. ‘Grace MacBride, I will tell you this. Aside from Angela’s marinara, this is, without a doubt, the best food I have ever eaten in my life.’
‘Thank you, Gino.’
‘And I like the way you decorated the plates with all this green stuff, too.’
‘That’s not decoration. You’re supposed to eat that.’
‘No kidding.’ Gino prodded warily at the greenery. ‘So what are these little round things that look like worms?’
‘Eat one.’ Grace pointed with her fork. ‘Then I’ll tell you.’
Gino sorted through the meadow on his plate, finally stabbed one of the scary little green coils, and eased it carefully into his mouth. He chewed tentatively a couple of times, then scooped up another forkful. The real measure of Gino’s eating pleasure was taken by the number of times he chewed. Steak got three chews, pasta got two, dessert got one, but this time Magozzi could have sworn he swallowed it whole. ‘Man, this stuff rocks.’
Grace looked on in satisfaction; Magozzi looked almost alarmed. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you eat anything green before. Am I going to find a pod in the car?’
Gino looked offended. ‘I eat green stuff sometimes.’
‘Like what?’
‘Lime popsicles.’ He grinned at Grace. ‘Okay. What is this stuff, ’cause I gotta get some.’
‘Fiddlehead ferns in a champagne vinaigrette with Comte cheese.’
Gino nodded. ‘That explains it. I’d eat Leo’s shoes if you poured champagne on them. There is no culinary road I won’t travel.’ He pushed away from the table and laced his hands over his protruding stomach, looking at Grace. ‘You are going to make some lucky man a wonderful wife someday.’
Grace stared at him for a second. ‘That is the most sexist thing I ever heard anyone say. You do know I’m armed, right?’
Gino grinned. ‘That was just my little attention-getting intro.’
‘Okay. You’ve got my attention. Intro to what?’
‘Well, I’ve just been wondering what your intentions are.’
Grace’s blue eyes widened a little, which made a startling change in a face so normally devoid of expression. ‘Excuse me?’
‘Toward my buddy here. I’d like to hear your intentions. And you see? I’m not sexist at all. Usually you ask the guy that question.’
Magozzi dropped his head in his hands. ‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
Grace’s eyes went back to their normal size. Gino had done the near-impossible by catching her off guard, but she recovered quickly. ‘And that would be your business because…?’
‘Because he’s my partner and my best friend, and partners and friends look out for each other, and because you two have been seeing each other for damn near half a year and I’m guessing neither one of you ever brought up the subject of where this thing is going, or whether you’ll ever get there.’
Magozzi looked up, embarrassed and angry. ‘Jesus, Gino, shut up.’
‘I’m doing you a favor here, Leo. You’d do the same for me.’
‘Not in million years.’
A faint chime sounded from the office. Grace was still staring at Gino with that flat, emotionless expression that had bothered him the first time he’d met her. He couldn’t read her at all, and it made him wary. When the chime sounded again, she got up from her chair. ‘I’m going to get that. There’s dessert and coffee in the kitchen, Magozzi. Bring it in, would you? Feel free to dump it on Gino’s head.’
A few minutes later Gino had forgotten the mysteries of Grace MacBride as he gazed happily at a layer cake with a gleaming shell of chocolate. ‘Jesus, Magozzi, cut the damn thing. I’m dying here.’
‘You’re lucky I didn’t dump it on your head. What the hell was that all about?’
‘That was about me, taking care of you.’
‘Well, stop it. Grace is right. It’s none of your business.’
‘Well, that’s about the dumbest thing you ever said.’
Now Magozzi was staring at him, and Gino didn’t have a bit of trouble reading his expression. He raised his hands in surrender. ‘All right, all right, maybe I went a little too far. I apologize. I want to make up. Let’s cut the cake and toast our reconciliation with chocolate.’
Grace walked in and tossed a printout on Gino’s cake plate, intentionally, he was sure. ‘We have a couple of hits, the first on one of the Interpol victims. Charles Swift, retired mason murdered in Paris during one of the trips your victims made together. His real name was Charles Franck.’ She pointed to a place halfway down the page. ‘Convicted at Nuremberg; served fifteen years for war crimes.’
Gino and Magozzi were silent as they read the pertinent paragraph a few times, letting it sink in.
‘Anything on the others?’ Magozzi finally asked.
Grace shook her head. ‘This one had been caught. He was in the system, so when he changed his name after he served his time, he had to do it legally, which made the records easy to find. If the others were Nazis, too, they were probably under pretty tight cover.’
Gino sucked in air through the side of his mouth. ‘I told Langer if the Feebs wanted this case they had something he didn’t. What do you bet it was the goods on this Swift character. Really nice work, Grace.’
‘Don’t try to make up with me, Gino.’ She placed another printout on the table, this one with an old black-and-white photograph of several men wearing the unmistakable garb of the S.S. Grace had circled one of the faces. ‘That’s Heinrich Verlag, bad boy at Auschwitz, a.k.a. Arlen Fischer, sixty years and a hundred and fifty pounds ago.’
Magozzi looked down at the picture. The pieces were finally coming together. ‘Morey Gilbert was at Auschwitz. So was Ben Schuler.’
It was the confirmation they had been hoping for and dreading, all at the same time, and Grace saw the conflict in their faces. ‘I will never understand cops,’ she complained. ‘You come here looking for information, I give you exactly what you ask for, and now you’re depressed. Your old people were Nazi killers. That’s what you thought, wasn’t it?’
Gino nodded, his face glum. ‘Yeah, that’s what we thought. But we were kind of hoping they didn’t kill anybody. That we had this nice, normal psycho serial killer bumping them off instead.’
Magozzi’s mouth turned down in unhappy resignation. ‘These were nice people, Grace. Ben Schuler was a lonely old man who passed out ten-dollar bills to inner-city kids on Halloween. You should hear his neighbors talk about him. Rose Kleber was this sweet little old grandmother who loved her family, a cat, and her garden. And Morey Gilbert did more good for other people in a day than I’ll ever do in a lifetime. We prove they were cold-blooded killers, and all that is gone.’