CHAPTER 9
Working late in his office, Captain McKinnon saw Sigrid pass his open door and called out to her.
She entered reluctantly, stopping just inside the door and pretending not to see his gesture toward a chair.
Captain McKinnon was built like a grizzled, overgrown teddy bear: rumpled looking and easygoing until faced with incompetence. That’s when his staff realized that the muscles on that large frame hadn’t softened with paperwork, and that those sleepy brown eyes had noted every lapse up to and including the one they were being chewed out for right then.
In the past year Sigrid had often caught the captain looking at her with a puzzled expression as if he expected something more from her, and it made her uneasy. Could he possibly have worked with her father? They would have been about the same age. Probably not, though; for whenever she met any people who’d known her parents—blond, laughing Leif and dark, beautiful Anne—that person sooner or later commented on how different the daughter was from the parents.
Sigrid had built up no special myths about her father in her mind, but her mother never talked of his police work, and Sigrid would have liked to know what kind of officer he’d been—how competent, how dedicated, how involved. The old-timers on the force who actually remembered Leif Harald were few, and they seldom connected her name to his. In any event, she was too reserved to approach them and ask for their memories.
For the thousandth time Sigrid wished she’d inherited her father’s happy congeniality or her mother’s knack of immediate friendliness. She knew how stiff and cold she must still seem to her colleagues, but to be otherwise was impossible. Although she was no longer a tongue-tied child, a considerable shyness continued to numb her in social situations.
Here in the department some of the men still resented her promotion over them; some felt threatened; some ignored her completely. Yet even with the two or three like Detective Tildon, who respected her competence and accepted her presence among them, there was no easy give-and-take of camaraderie and laughter.
None of which bothered Sigrid Harald. Or so she thought.
Nevertheless, Captain McKinnon did make her uneasy, and she couldn’t quite analyze the reason why. He was scrupulously fair and treated her the same as his other officers—piled on work and distributed praise and criticism with absolute impartiality. Yet always there was that vague air of expectation. Because she was female?
Efficiently she summarized for her superior the completion of the investigation into that doctor’s knifing and outlined the situation at Vanderlyn College.
“Cohen’s preliminary findings were on my desk just now. ‘Respiratory paralysis and shock as a result of ingestion of potassium dichromate.’ That’s one of the chemicals from the print workshop, and anybody in the department could have got hold of it without being noticed.”
“No A.P.B. out for that kid, what’s his name?” McKinnon asked mildly.
“Harris, sir; Harley Harris. I didn’t think it justified yet. I sent a man over to his home, and he reported that the parents seem cooperative. If Harris shows, they’ll probably make him get in touch.”
“What about that Hungarian janitor?”
“The same. Physically he could have done it. We think he had access to the closet key, and he was alone with the victim’s coffee cup.” She gave a brief description of how Szabo had carried the tray for Sandy Keppler.
“The girl couldn’t have exposed that tray to more potential poisoners if she’d sent it around Times Square,” McKinnon said sourly. “Better have that Szabo in for a thorough questioning just the same.”
“His landlady said he hadn’t been home since this morning; I thought I’d try again later.”
Her voice was cool and her gray eyes stony. Leif’s eyes, wondered McKinnon. Leif Harald’s eyes had been piercingly blue to match a blond Viking’s build. His daughter had his slender height, and yes, the shape of the eyes was his; but the color, as well as her dark hair, came from Anne.
McKinnon still remembered how he’d felt a year ago upon her assignment to his department. To open her folder and read Mrs. Leif Harald under the next-of-kin heading had been an unexpected shock. When one of Anne’s photo essays had been nominated for a Pulitzer a while back, he’d assumed that Harald was just a professional name by now, that she surely must have remarried. He should have known better.
He looked across his cluttered desk at the reserved young woman who stood just inside his doorway without nervousness, without fidgeting, until he would be done with this interview and dismiss her. If she remembered him even slightly she’d given no hint of it.
And after all, she’d been very young—a thin solemn-eyed little girl who’d clung to her mother’s hand, bewildered by the ceremony; while he, McKinnon, had been only another blue uniform with bright brass buttons, one of a dozen honor guards at her father’s funeral. Anne had refused to let him be more than that.
They had been such unlikely partners—McKinnon, stolid, deliberate and motivated by logic; Leif Harald, mercurial and intuitive. The combination had worked, though, and had carried over into their off-duty social life until that day in a dark hallway of a third-rate hotel, where a killer had gone to earth behind one of those thin doors. When it was over, the killer was dead, and the dark bearlike man had walked out unmarked; but his partner, the golden Viking, was carried out on a stretcher, the blood already drying and turning black around those bullet holes in his body.
“Murderer!” Anne had screamed. Had she filled the girl with hate over the years? Was that what kept those gray eyes so steady and noncommittal whenever they met his?
McKinnon wrenched himself away from that night and put the years behind him with a sigh. Better to keep it all official, perhaps. Personalities complicated things. If he had to take on a woman officer, Lieutenant Harald seemed one of the best. At least he hadn’t been stuck with a sex bomb who could keep his staff room teetering on the edge of an explosion. The loose, tailored pantsuits, the dark hair skinned back into a knot at the nape of her neck, the minimal makeup—hell! There were times like tonight when she looked closer to forty than thirty. No trouble on that score.
And yet it pained him to see Anne’s daughter looking so finely drawn.
“Not burning the candle at both ends, are you, Harald?” he asked, attempting a jocular note.
“Sir?
“A joke. What I mean is, you’re not working too hard, are you? We’re supposed to be using the pass-along system, remember?”
Sigrid remembered. Difficult not to with the city going deeper into the red every year. There had been severe layoffs among personnel, and cutbacks had been ordered everywhere. In an effort to reduce departmental overtime, officers going off duty were encouraged to pass their cases along to the officer on the next shift. The procedure had indeed cut down on overtime, but no one really liked it. “Pass along” meant losing your identification with a case, your pride in a job well done when you cracked it wide open. Sigrid sensed that McKinnon didn’t like it any more than she did, and others in the bureau complained of feeling like pieceworkers on an assembly line. Overtime dropped, but further compliance was a sometime thing. Unless a situation was really coming unraveled with a need to act quickly, many officers tried to hang onto the cases they’d begun until the next shift.
“This department is officially committed to eighthour shifts, Harald, and it’s nearly ten now.”
“I had no intention of filing overtime,” Sigrid said with the first hint of heat she’d allowed into her voice. “Anyhow, you’re still here, sir.”
“The privilege of rank,” he said loftily.
There! That almost got one of her rare smiles. Inordinately pleased, he dismissed her with a wave. “No more work tonight, Lieutenant. Leave Szabo till tomorrow and that’s an order.”
Driving uptown, Sigrid was bemused. Burning the candle at both ends, indeed! As if she spent the nights dancing in chiffon until dawn. Had it been Duckett or Lyles, the two who most re
sented her presence in the department, she would have looked for the insult buried in the gibe. But McKinnon? No matter how she looked at that last exchange, there was only one conclusion: the captain had felt fatherly toward her. It was a novel idea.
And strangely warming. She could never remember getting that sort of reaction from a man. Her father’s uncles had offered a kindly solicitude that arose more from duty than from choice. Looking back on it, Sigrid didn’t blame them. All had possessed grandchildren of their own, and she knew—regretfully but objectively—that she had not been a lovable child. In formal greeting or departure she had given the ritual kisses that the family expected, but never had she hugged one of them impulsively. Too, on those long-ago Sunday afternoons she had been eclipsed whenever Cousin Hilda came over from her house just down the street.
Cousin Hilda had been plump and winsome with silver blond curls and delft-blue eyes, and she had always elbowed Sigrid aside to hold Great-uncle Lars’s hand on those walks to the zoo. Carelessly, lavishly, she bestowed kisses at the slightest provocation. The family pet. And the more demonstrative Hilda had been, the more touch-me-not Sigrid must have seemed.
Hilda had grown into a blithe young matron, still as plump and merry as in childhood. Married to an insurance broker or a C.P.A.—Sigrid could never remember which—she now lived in Port Jefferson out on Long Island with a family of plump and merry children. Four of them, the last time Sigrid heard.
While I’ve grown into a dried-up old maid, she told herself. She peered through the windshield, momentarily distracted from her thoughts by a dilemma familiar to all drivers: the misty night air had deposited enough moisture on the glass to bead up soot and grime and to make seeing difficult, but was it really misting enough to wash all the dirt away if she turned on the wipers? The windshield was now so obscured that further debate became academic. She pushed the washer button and wipers simultaneously, and one feeble stream of water jetted up. Just enough to make a complete smear when the blades swished back and forth.
I remember to get gas, she told herself savagely, I remember to check the oil and the transmission fluid, so why the hell can’t I remember to keep the washer bottle filled?
And no, dammit, it was not misting enough to clean the glass.
Briefly she wondered if Cousin Hilda ever had these mundane automotive aggravations, or did acquiring a C.P.A. husband free you from that?
Which brought a rueful smile to her lips, because however much she might wish she were less stiff in social situations, no way did she envy Cousin Hilda’s life. She was chagrined by the circuitous path her thoughts had taken, all because Captain McKinnon had given her a couple of casual fatherly words in passing.
The mist thickened into a slow drizzle, and now the wipers managed to clear the windshield. She enjoyed driving through the streets at night. Especially in midtown when she was in no hurry to get home. Traffic had begun to pick up as movies and theaters emptied out onto the sidewalks. There were more cabs, buses and private cars and knots of people descending into the subway. Few people cared to go down alone at night anymore, which was a shame. Violence or the fear of violence kept so many from utilizing fully the only sensible way of getting around the five boroughs; but violence was a fact of life, and it was futile to feel that spasm of anger.
“Do what you can and don’t let the rest eat on you.” All rookies got that lecture. Good advice. If you could follow it during your shift, pass everything along when you left and keep your eyes averted when you were off duty, there would be fewer policemen nursing ulcers. As it was, every precinct house in the city could furnish enough antacid remedies to stock a small drugstore.
A smell compounded of gasoline fumes, buttered popcorn and wet pavement slid in through her slightly opened window as she stopped for a red light at Times Square. The drizzle was starting to take itself seriously; might almost be called a true rain; yet the boy and girl who passed dreamily in front of her car were oblivious to it, to the changed, lights, to everything except each other.
Sigrid drove on automatically, her mind only halfaware of the mechanics of driving. Without noticing where her thoughts had drifted, she found herself going over the earlier part of the evening as she contrasted Captain McKinnon’s kindly air of solidity with Oscar Nauman’s brusqueness.
Nauman was older than McKinnon as calendars run; but there was a curiously youthful, unfinished quality about the artist. He was a mature man, no little-boy-not-grown-up, yet he had retained an indefinable youthful quality. As if he were still in a state of becoming. As if the world still held new surprises, new possibilities, after all these years.
Probably the artistic temperament, Sigrid thought scornfully; but a sudden impulse made her head the car crosstown toward her mother’s apartment.
She told herself it was time to anyhow. Whenever Anne was out of town, Sigrid stopped by to pick up mail and to make sure everything was okay. It was her duty, she told herself firmly, and curiosity about what Oscar Nauman had looked like fifteen years ago had nothing to do with it.
CHAPTER 10
Her mother’s current apartment was in one of the newer high rises overlooking the Hudson River. Some women shift furniture; Anne Harald kept all the same pieces of furniture in approximately the same positions and restlessly shifted apartments instead. Her friends had long since learned to enter her new telephone and street numbers in their address books in light, easily erased pencil. Anne had inhabited Manhattan Island from the Battery to Harlem. She’d even crossed the East River once and tried Brooklyn Heights, but that was a short-lived experiment. Shorter still had been a sojourn in Connecticut. The U-Haul rental truck had deposited Anne and her chattels in a picturesquely rustic cottage on a Tuesday afternoon. An identical truck had carried everything back to Manhattan the following Friday morning.
These frequent moves had been so much a part of Sigrid’s childhood that she no longer recalled that they had begun immediately after Leif’s funeral. By now it was just another quirk of Anne’s personality; easier to shrug one’s shoulders and accept it than to try to understand.
This year’s building was all glass and steel. Its ground floor as impersonal as a bank and quite bare except for the slight softening effect of low fernfilled planters along the front walls, a colorful mosaic floor and a few backless leather benches clumped together in the center of the lobby. At the rear were elevators and banked mailboxes. The whole place was as brightly lit as an all-night diner and even less inviting, but it was virtually mugger proof. To compensate for the lack of a doorman, tenants could inspect everything behind those floor-toceiling glass walls before unlocking the street door and letting themselves in, and there were no shadowy culs-de-sac where a rapist could lurk undetected.
Closed-circuit televisions on the main door and in the elevator videotaped everyone coming or going, and it was useless to tell her mother that the tapes probably weren’t checked unless a tenant actually got mugged. Anne was convinced that a watchman or somebody monitored them, and unless she were in a tearing hurry, she always blew kisses to the cameras or thumbed her nose or modeled a new dress.
“They must get so bored just watching people galumph in and out as if they’re going to their own funerals,” she would say.
Whenever her mother was brightening up a hypothetical watchman’s day, Sigrid would stand to the far side of the elevator and pretend not to know her.
It was raining briskly when Sigrid slipped inside the lobby and paused long enough to empty Anne’s mailbox. Some of the letters had been forwarded through five or six addresses. She took a selfservice elevator to the eighteenth floor and let herself into a front apartment.
Anne Harald’s image stood just inside the vestibule with arms outstretched. A fellow photographer had cleverly matched front and back views, blown them up, then laminated them together into a rigid sheet of acrylic to form a life-sized cutout doll who welcomed her visitors the way Anne welcomed life—with open arms; dimples flashing; short hair an exuberance
of dark curls; her slender body still petite and shapely at fifty.
Anne herself used the thing as a hat stand, draping it in scarves, light meters and paraphernalia cases, but it was too lifelike for Sigrid’s taste. She always hurried past it when making her tours of inspection.
Things were normal that evening. Nothing dramatic like burst water pipes or signs of forced entry: although a stranger might have had difficulty distinguishing between a burglar’s ransacking and Anne’s normal going-away clutter. Every drawer was slightly ajar, and every surface overflowed.
Film cartridges were jumbled in with sliding piles of professional journals, unanswered letters, discarded panty hose, airline itineraries and butt-filled ashtrays. Anne’s departures were perennially hurried. Schedules always surprised her.
“The plane leaves at noon?” she’d wail. “But it’s eleven now! Who’s got a car? Where’s my coat? My camera bags?”
Some people found her disorganized, chaotic air appealing. Sigrid preferred order and calm; but because she’d lived apart from her mother since college, it was not a source of friction any longer. Now they could look at each other fondly—if somewhat quizzically—across the generation gap.
Like many untidy people, Anne Harald kept surprisingly meticulous records. Five large steel file cabinets followed in her wake wherever she moved. Couches, tables, bric-a-brac and rugs had become battered and shabby from occupying hap-hazard spaces on those do-it-yourself moves organized and executed by the youthful neophyte photographers who clustered around Anne; but the file cabinets were always the last on and first off those rental trucks. Admittedly Anne’s filing system was peculiarly her own and not always logical; but sooner or later she could lay her hands on any of her negatives, or her magazine and newspaper articles from the last twenty-five years.
Under the S’s was a file with Sigrid’s name on it, begun in her fifth year because Anne had obtained and then managed to misplace three separate copies of her daughter’s birth certificate, and the kindergarten wouldn’t enter Sigrid without proof that she’d been born the proper number of years before. The folder still contained Sigrid’s immunization and dental records and the pediatrician’s careful listing of childhood diseases, report cards and—though Anne always denied being sentimental—every Mother’s Day card Sigrid had ever labored over in grade school and all her letters from boarding school and college, which strangely touched Sigrid the first time she had stumbled upon her folder.
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