‘Maybe we could take a look anyway, if it isn’t too much trouble.’

Back by the potting shed, they ran into the two employees Magozzi had talked to yesterday when they showed up at the impromptu memorial outside the nursery. They were tossing fifty-pound bags of fertilizer onto a wheeled pallet with a careless ease that made Magozzi long for his youth, but they straightened respectfully when Lily approached. They gave her shy, almost identical smiles, then turned to Magozzi and Gino.

‘Good morning, Detectives,’ they piped in unison, wiping their hands on their jeans, then holding them out.

Gino looked positively flummoxed by the apparition of two well-mannered young men greeting their elders with almost old-world politeness. ‘Hey, yo,’ was about the nicest thing anybody under twenty had ever said to him.

‘Jeff Montgomery, right?’ Magozzi shook the hand of the tall blond kid first, then the shorter, darker one. ‘And Tim…?’

‘Matson, sir.’

‘Either of you remember a woman named Rose Kleber shopping here at the nursery?’ Gino asked.

The boys thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. ‘We help out a lot of customers, but we don’t always get their names, you know?’ Jeff Montgomery said. ‘What does she look like?’

Magozzi cringed inwardly, remembering the mottled face, the blood- stained dress. ‘Elderly, a little heavy, gray hair…’ he looked at their blank faces and realized this was hopeless. Teenaged boys remembered teenaged girls, and that was about it.

‘Actually, that sounds like a lot of the people who come here, sir,’ Tim Matson said. ‘Maybe she’s on the mailing list. Mr Gilbert sent out sale flyers every now and then. Did you check the computer?’

‘You know how to run that thing, Timothy?’ Lily asked impatiently.

‘Sure. It’s just a computer.’

‘Good. Come with us. Jeffrey, we’re almost out of basil on the herb table. Take care of that, would you?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Jeff disappeared in a flash while Lily led the way through the potting shed into a tiny back office.

There was a fine layer of black dust over everything – soil from the adjacent potting shed, Magozzi assumed. It covered a bookcase jammed with catalogs, a paper-cluttered desk, and the old computer and printer that sat on it. Grace MacBride would have had a fit.

‘Can’t be good for this thing,’ Gino tapped a finger on the top of the computer. ‘Having it right next to the potting shed like this.’

Tim took a seat in the only chair and booted up the computer. ‘It’s an old one, sir. They aren’t as sensitive as the new ones. Better hardware, if you ask me. And Mr Gilbert didn’t use it for much. Just the invoices once a month, and the mailing list.’

‘Hmph.’ Lily folded her arms across her chest in disapproval. ‘That’s what you think. He played games on this stupid machine. You can hear that beep-beep-beep thing all the way from the front greenhouse, so I come back and take a look one day, and there he is, a grown man shooting down little cartoon spaceships.’

Tim held back a smile as he pulled up an alphabetized mailing list, then waved his hand at the screen. ‘Sorry. No Rose Kleber.’

Gino was lifting some of the loose papers on the desk, peeking under them. ‘You got a Rolodex, Mrs Gilbert?’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘One of those things with all the little cards?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

She shook her head. ‘Silliest things I ever saw. You want to find Freddie Herbert’s number? You spend half your day looking at all those little cards, one by one.’ She opened a drawer, slapped a thin address book on the desk and opened it to the H’s. ‘Here. All the H’s on one page. No turning, no little cards, Freddie Herbert right there in a second.’ She paged to the K’s, glanced at the three names listed, then shrugged. ‘No Kleber.’

‘Anything else on that computer, Tim?’ Maggozi asked.

Tim pushed a few keys and called up the main menu. ‘Just the mailing list and the invoices, sir. That’s it.’

‘Okay.’

‘Can I turn it off? I should get out there and help Jeff.’

‘Go, go, go,’ Lily told him, and then turned to Magozzi and Gino, obviously impatient to get back to her customers. ‘Anything else?’

‘Not for the moment,’ Magozzi said. ‘Thank you for your help, Mrs Gilbert.’

‘What help?’ Gino grumbled a few minutes later as they were following the asphalt apron around the greenhouse, back toward the parking lot.

‘She showed us the office, she answered our questions.’

‘Yeah, but she didn’t ask any of her own. We’ve been here almost an hour and she didn’t ask once if we had any leads on who killed her husband, and that just pricks my cynic trigger.’

They paused at the place where Lily said she had found her husband’s body.

Gino rubbed the back of his neck. ‘You know, it just bothers the hell out of me that she opens this place the day after her husband was murdered. Shouldn’t she be home covering her mirrors or something?’

Magozzi raised his brows at him. ‘Gino, I am amazed and impressed. You went home and read up on Jewish funeral traditions last night, didn’t you?’

‘Nah. Movie. Melanie what’s-her-name, the good-looking blonde with the baby voice? She was NYPD, undercover someplace with these really religious Jews – can’t remember what you call them, but all the guys had banana curls.’

‘Hasidic Jews.’

‘Whatever. Anyway, somebody died and they covered all the mirrors. She oughta be home doing that.’

Magozzi sighed. ‘She’s not Hasidic, Gino, or even Orthodox. McLaren said they weren’t even religious, remember?’

‘You don’t have to be religious to show respect.’ He looked at his watch and tapped the crystal. ‘What time is it? I told Rose Kleber’s daughter we’d be there at eleven.’

‘Almost that.’

‘We better move it, then. Damn, this is going to be more fun than a barrel of crippled monkeys.’

Marty hadn’t moved since Lily, Magozzi, and Gino had left the greenhouse. Most of the customers were still outside, emptying the sale tables, and for ten full minutes he’d been alone at the counter, staring at nothing, thinking that another six or seven beers from Jack’s cooler might take the edge off the headache that had been with him since yesterday. He’d been stone-cold sober for over twenty-four hours now, and couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Sobriety, he decided, wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.

He glanced out the window and saw Jack passed out on his lawn chair, turning red in the sun. He took one step toward the door to holler at him to get in the shade, then stopped.

Let the bastard fry.

14

Detective Johnny McLaren sat behind the stacks of clutter on his desk, tufts of bright red hair barely peeking over the top. Gloria was sashaying down the center aisle toward him, and there was no hope at all of concentrating on anything else when that body was in motion. She was a big, black, beautiful bulldozer of a woman and most of the time she dressed with all the subtlety of a movie marquee. Today she was wearing an intense yellow sari with a matching headdress and Johnny felt like he was staring into the sun.

‘What are you looking at, you little Irish twerp?’ She poked a pink message slip onto his desk with a long, yellow fingernail.

‘Poetry in motion. The woman of my dreams. My soul mate. My destiny.’

‘Give it a rest, McLaren.’

‘I can’t. I look at you, I look at me, I see little red-haired black children…’

‘Uh-huh. Grand dreams for a little stick man.’ She tapped the message slip again. ‘That guy called three times this morning. Some Brit with an attitude.’

McLaren’s ruddy face wrinkled into a perplexed frown as he read the message. Just a name and overseas number. ‘What the hell would a Brit be calling me for? I don’t know any Brits.’