‘Ben who?’
‘Come on, Lily. Ben Schuler.’ Sol was obviously worried, but a little impatient, too. ‘He wasn’t at the funeral, and if he’s not here, something’s wrong. His heart isn’t so good, you know, and he’s not answering his phone.’
‘He’s not here because he’s not welcome in my house and he knows it,’ Lily said sharply.
Sol’s smile was gentle as he touched her hand. ‘Frightening as you are, Lily, even you couldn’t stop him from coming to his old friend’s memorial. I’m going to drive over there, just to set my mind at ease, but I won’t be long.’
‘If he’s not dead, tell him he’s still not welcome in my house,’ Lily said. She turned on her heel, saw Jack moving toward her, then turned and walked in the opposite direction.
Gino let out a low whistle as soon as Sol and Lily had gone their separate ways. ‘Remind me never to get on that woman’s short list. What’s she got against this Ben guy?’
Marty shrugged. ‘You never know with Lily. Excuse me, guys. I should get back to her.’
‘She’s got about fifty people around her right now, Marty,’ Gino said. ‘Cut yourself some slack and take a few minutes. I just saw a meatball with your name on it.’
It was tough to watch one of your own going down, Magozzi thought. Gino knocked himself out trying to engage Marty in conversation, and because Marty was a polite man, he tried hard to pretend to be interested in what Gino was saying. But the pretense part was painfully obvious, and after about ten minutes, Magozzi began to feel like they were torturing the guy.
‘We should get going, Gino,’ he said, but at that moment, Jack Gilbert came stumbling up, sloshing a drink almost as red as his face down the front of his white oxford. He draped his arm over Marty’s shoulder. ‘Hey, guys! What a turnout, huh?’ He gestured around the room with his drink, spraying an arc of punch. ‘You’d think the fucking Pope died.’
With a suddenness that surprised everyone, Marty spun toward Jack, dislodging the offending arm from his shoulder, and snatched away Jack’s drink. For a minute, Magozzi thought he saw a trace of the old Gorilla. ‘Don’t push it, Jack. Not today.’
Jack stumbled backward and almost lost his balance. ‘Jeez, no offense, Marty. You gotta chill. You want a drink?’
A heavyset woman with maroon hair approached and handed Marty a portable phone. ‘Somebody’s calling for you.’ When Marty took the phone and stepped away, she moved in on Jack. ‘Jack Gilbert, look at you, sloshing around, spilling drinks, offending people… how could you do this to your mother?’
Jack’s head wobbled on his neck a little as he tried to bring the woman into focus. ‘Jesus, Sheila, is that you? You look like Dennis Rodman. What the fuck happened to your hair?’
She narrowed her eyes and leaned close to him. ‘
Gino’s eyes were wide open. He didn’t know what the woman had called him, but he was absolutely sure Jack had deserved it. ‘You know what, Mr Gilbert? You might want to think about reeling it in a little bit. Sit down on the couch over there, maybe get a cup of coffee.’
‘Well, that’s a hell of an idea, Detective, but you see, I just poured my best bottle of bourbon in the punch bowl and there’s this Jewish tradition that says if you pour alcohol at a funeral, you have to drink it all or it dishonors the dead.’
Gino stared at him for a minute. He was pretty sure he was full of shit, but you never knew with religion. I mean, who would believe the Catholics smear ashes on people’s foreheads?
‘He was kidding, Gino,’ Magozzi said.
‘I knew that. Let’s get out of here.’
He and Magozzi started to shoulder past Jack when Marty’s hand shot out and grabbed Gino’s arm. Still a lot of strength in that hand, Gino was thinking as Marty held him fast, murmuring a low reassurance of some kind into the phone before pulling it away from his ear and pushing disconnect. ‘Thought you might want to hear this,’ he said very quietly, looking around to make sure none of the guests were close enough to overhear him. ‘That was Sol. Ben Schuler’s been shot.’
Magozzi’s face tightened. ‘Dead?’
Marty nodded grimly.
‘Who’s dead?’ Jack said much too loudly, bumbling in a little closer.
‘Keep it down, Jack,’ Marty told him. ‘It’s Ben Schuler.’
‘No shit? Poor old bastard. What was it, heart attack?’
Marty hesitated, maybe in a remnant of every cop’s reluctance to share information with a non-cop. ‘No,’ he finally said. ‘He was shot. Once in the head. Just like Morey.’
With those few words, Jack Gilbert became frighteningly sober, and every drop of blood drained from his drunken, red face. ‘Suicide?’
Marty shook his head.
Jack Gilbert got a strange look on his face then – one that Magozzi had only seen a few times in his life – a look of genuine fear. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispered.
‘Did you know him?’ Gino asked.
Jack nodded. ‘Yeah. I knew him.’ And then he turned and walked away in a perfectly straight line.
Marty found him a few moments later standing over the kitchen table, staring down at the picture of Rose Kleber in the morning paper. His whole body was shaking.
20
There were a lot of neighborhoods in Minneapolis that had once been moderately fashionable, until freeways started taking big bites out of the city’s real estate. Ben Schuler’s house was in one of these, perched on a hill where hundred-year-old elms used to shade a boulevard the city had filled with flowers every spring. Dutch elm disease had taken most of the trees within the past twenty years, a new freeway ramp system had taken the rest, and now the locals had little to look at except the six lanes of traffic at the bottom of the hill. Magozzi and Gino could hear the roar of an eighteen-wheeler shifting on an upgrade the minute they got out of the car.
‘Used to be nicer up here,’ Magozzi said, looking at a long crack in the stucco of Ben Schuler’s house; the sagging porch of the two-story brick next door. ‘My great aunt had a big old Victorian a few blocks over.’
‘Then why the hell did it take you so long to find it?’ Gino grumped, peeling off his suit coat and tie and draping them over the seat.
‘Haven’t been up here in years. We only came a couple of times, when I was about six or seven. She was a scary old broad. Never met a person she liked, according to my folks, and that included family. Refused to speak English, and my dad refused to speak Italian, just to piss her off. Last time we came she slapped me right across the face for picking up my fork before she said grace.’
Gino’s mouth tightened into an unforgiving line. Striking a child was one of the few things utterly beyond his comprehension. ‘Goddamnit, I hate that. I hope your dad slugged her.’
‘My dad wouldn’t raise a hand to a woman if she was flaying him alive.’ Magozzi smiled a little, remembering. ‘My mom decked her, though.’
Gino grinned and blew a kiss eastward toward St Paul, where Magozzi’s parents still lived in the house he’d grown up in. ‘I always did like your mother.’
‘And she likes you. Are you going to take off all your clothes, or can we go in now?’
‘You know what it costs to get a suit dry-cleaned?’
Magozzi shook his head. ‘Never paid attention.’
‘Boy, sometimes I hate single people. I just paid a pretty penny to get this thing cleaned, and I sure as hell don’t want it smelling like a murder house.’
‘You’re still wearing your pants.’
‘Yeah, well I can’t figure a way around that.’ He slammed the car door and they headed up the drive.
‘Looks like Anant and the BCA boys beat us here.’
‘Small wonder.’ Gino glanced at the ugly ME wagon in the drive, and the BCA van snugged up behind it. ‘GPS in
