Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald)

by Maron, Margaret

  Davidowitz interrupted her for the man’s name.

  “Frank’s all I ever heard,” she said; but she knew the garage’s location. Davidowitz carefully listed it on the top sheet of his legal pad.

  “The Gelson kid next door,” Irene continued. “We think he may be dealing. He flew off the handle when Mickey and my brother asked him how come so many kids were hanging out back there in their garage.”

  “This Gelson kid have a first name?” asked Davidowitz.

  “Edward.” She watched him write it out. “He’s about seventeen, but big and strong from lifting weights. Got a fresh mouth on him, too. All about how he knows his rights and Mickey’s got no right to say who can come in their garage and who can’t.”

  “Anybody else?” I asked.

  She shook her head slowly, paused, then shook her head again.

  I recognized the hesitation and pushed. “You sure, Irene? It might not seem like anything, but you’ve been a cop’s wife long enough to know how people can do crazy things for stupid reasons.”

  “You said a true mouthful there, Jarvis,” she nodded. “It doesn’t really seem like it could be anything, but there’s his cousin Neal. Neal O’Shea. We lent him five hundred dollars when he lost his job back at Thanksgiving so he and Marie could buy Christmas for their kids. He’s working again but we still haven’t seen a penny. Mickey only asked him about it once, but he took it wrong and we’ve heard he’s been bad-mouthing Mickey to his brothers.”

  Davidowitz took down the cousin’s name and address.

  A sum total of three names. After a lifetime of opportunity to make enemies, could any man really go out with only three? On the other hand, assume for a minute that three’s all, is that good, bad, or indifferent?

  Mick Cluett hadn’t been much of a detective. Lazy, sloppy, always behind in his paperwork. Always played catch-up with his notes and teetered on the skinny edge of perjury if he had to testify in court. Resented others’ success. In short, not particularly interested in the job beyond picking up his paycheck and making his forty. We couldn’t figure out why forty was the magic number for him. Certainly didn’t mean a bigger pension. And it wasn’t like he was getting serious respect or saving the free world from crime. Oh, he’d do what you asked, but damn if you didn’t always have to ask. He was already in place when I transferred in and I was stuck with him, part of the job. Like the lousy coffee and the never-ending paperwork. Not so bad that you’d take the trouble to get rid of it once and for all—and even if I’d manipulated his clearance rates, getting rid of Cluett would have been a hell of a lot of trouble given all the job security mechanisms in place—no, he was just one more of those ongoing irritations life sends you to keep you from being too pleased with your lot.

  Incurable, endurable, Granny used to say.

  “Nobody else, then?” I asked Irene. “No trouble with work or anything?”

  She looked blank and shook her head. “He never really talked about the job. Oh, maybe if it was something on the news and Barbara or one of the boys asked him about it, he’d say what he’d seen or heard. He should’ve retired after thirty, but he was so set on making forty. He went on the job when he was twenty-one and he said he was going to stay till he was sixty-one. Just like his uncle Michael, God rest him. It wasn’t easy for him. Years ago, he used to talk more and, of course, we were proud of him when he finally made detective, but seems like it didn’t mean as much to him. He said—”

  Irene put her hand to her mouth, like a kid who’s spoken out of turn and spilled a family secret.

  “He said what?” I prodded.

  She gave a what-the-hell? shrug. “He said that the only reason he made detective was because Chief Buckthorn wanted to stick it to Willie McMahon.”

  So he’d known about that, had he? I felt a sickly wave of shame wash over me even though that little bit of departmental politics was over and done with before I came on the job. Willie McMahon was my predecessor and he and the then chief—also gone before my time—had gone head-to-head in monumental clashes, if all the stories were true. I hadn’t been in Willie McMahon’s old office three days before I heard how Buckthorn had promoted Mick Cluett onto the detective squad just to spite McMahon. Whenever I got particularly pissed with Cluett, I had to remember that it really wasn’t his fault for being where he was bound to screw up.

  “The best time for Mickey was back when he was still riding patrol over in New York. He liked it when they’d give him a rookie to break in. But after a few years, when some of his rookies were getting promotions and making detective, he seemed to think he ought to try for detective, too. And with four kids, we could always use the money. He was never on the pad, Jarvis.”

  That I knew. Lazy and incompetent as Cluett was, the most I’d ever heard of him taking was an occasional pastrami sandwich to look the other way on some minor infractions. Pads exist. No point pretending they don’t. The most you can do is keep breaking them up before they get too organized and entrenched. Opportunity’s always knocking, but I think Cluett stayed straight because crooked was harder; too damn complicated to remember who knew what. Honesty probably wasn’t Cluett’s best policy, just the easiest.

  Her fingers had gone back to picking at the afghan.

  “You probably know better than me, Jarvis—you were his boss—but it seems to me that maybe a man’s better off doing what he likes, what he’s good at, than trying to get what he thinks he ought to want.”

  “The Peter Principle.” Sometimes Davidowitz seemed to think out loud to himself.

  We both looked at him.

  “Some guy named Peter,” he explained. “He said people always get promoted past the level of their competence.”

  He heard what he’d said and tried to backpedal. “Not that Mick was incompetent. I mean, that is, Peter meant that if a person’s doing a good job, he’ll usually get promoted on up the ladder till he lands in a job where he’s no good. I mean where he’s not as good. Mick was a great patrol cop, so he gets promoted and . . .”

  His explanation of the Peter Principle petered out pretty lamely and Irene Cluett couldn’t seem to decide whether to take Hy the right way or get mad about it on her late husband’s behalf.

  “He was a good patrol cop,” she said huffily. “And if he was such a bad detective, why’d Captain McKinnon borrow him from you?”

  She sure as hell had a point there. Why did McKinnon ask for Cluett by name? I hadn’t paid all that much attention at the time, just been mildly tickled that Manhattan had pulled his name out of the hat. I was sure they’d mistaken him for some other, sharper detective. Now I remembered Cluett’s face when I told him he was being specialed across the East River.

  “Good old Mac!” he’d said, sucking in his gut and trying to look like a real cop for a change. “I broke him in, you know. Knew from the very beginning he was going to do okay.”

  “Yeah?” I’d asked as I initialed the temporary transfer.

  “Now he’s a big-time captain and he wants me, Mickey Cluett.”

  “How’d it go over there?” I asked Irene. As his boss I should know without asking, but I honestly couldn’t remember. Oh, sure, I remembered the first day he was back, asking him how he’d liked Manhattan duty. He’d muttered something about things being the same all over, which it mostly is.

  I heard him shoot the breeze with a couple of the guys about a homicide/suicide mixed up with drugs. Gory, but getting commonplace even down to the pile of blood-drenched money they’d confiscated. “A wad of hundreds big enough to bloat a goat,” he’d bragged. And he’d worked that case where some dancer got herself killed on stage in front of an audience. That was a hair more interesting, but I’d still let it go in one ear and out the other.

  Evidently, Irene had, too.

  “He thought it was going to be something special,” she said, “but it wound up just being a longer commute and more court hassle. He was supposed to go back over and testify on a couple of things and you know how he ha
ted that. And it wasn’t really working for Mac either. He had to take orders from a woman—a chit of a lieutenant who wasn’t even born when Mickey first joined the force.”

  Hy Davidowitz half-smiled. “Yeah, I heard him say he once bounced her on his knee when she was a baby.”

  There was nothing nostalgic in Irene’s tone. Instead, I caught an echo of Cluett’s sour resentment.

  “I’m a woman myself,” she said, “and I’m for equal pay and all that, but I just don’t think it’s right for any police officer to have to take orders from a woman. In fact, I don’t think women even belong on the force. Not on the street anyhow. You put a woman in the same patrol car with one of these young buckos and send them out on night duty—”

  She shook her head at so much opportunity for sin and sex but before she could get going on what sounded like an old sore point, her daughter appeared at the door again.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Ma, but Father Ambrose is here and he needs to talk to you about Pop’s mass.”

  It was as good a time to leave as any. I guessed we’d probably got all we were going to get from Irene that night.

  Back at the car, Hy radioed in. Everything was quiet at the station, so I let him drop me at the nearest subway stop. I’d promised Terry I’d pick up some shrimp salad for supper. I’d also promised to get home on time.

  Oh well. One out of two’s not too bad for a cop.

  CHAPTER 6

  Midtown was clogged with the beginning of rush hour traffic. As Lieutenant Sigrid Harald drew near Lou’s Foto Finish, a van parked illegally at the top of a bus stop flashed its left rear blinker and pulled out in front of her. She automatically slid her car into the space he’d vacated.

  Just as automatically, she flipped down the sun visor to display the emblem that identified this as a police officer’s car even though she wasn’t on duty. Taking advantage of her position to bend the law on minor things such as double-parking or parking at fire hydrants always gave Sigrid Harald a twinge of guilt. Obscurely, she’d promised herself that if she ever stopped feeling guilty, she’d stop doing it. Not that twinges of guilt made it alright, of course, but surely they proved that she didn’t feel entitled to break the law.

  As always when she found herself looping back and forth between guilt and morality, a Pavlovian reaction made her remember the moral struggles of an old school friend.

  Kathie deNobriga had been a committed activist who marched and fasted and boycotted specific products on behalf of downtrodden farm laborers and sweatshop workers the whole country over, but grapes were her Achilles heel. Others might be addicted to peanut butter or chocolates; Kathie kept a bowl of grapes in her room and nibbled on whatever was in season from September to June. Yet, when Chavez called for a boycott on behalf of California grapeworkers, she valiantly dumped the grapes and refilled her bowl with apples and bananas.

  Sometime later, Sigrid had spotted a little pile of twigs and seeds among the oranges on Kathie’s nightstand. “I thought you gave up grapes for the duration.”

  Sheepishly, Kathie had opened the lower drawer on her nightstand and brought out a bag of luscious purple bunches. “I’ve gone back to eating them, only now I sneak and that makes me feel really guilty, so I’m not enjoying them as much and that makes up for it don’t you think?”

  Remembering that bit of existential sophism, Sigrid left the visor down, locked the car and hurried past the people waiting in frozen resignation at the bus stop.

  A bell above the door tinkled as she entered the lab. Lou Bensinger lifted his head from the proof sheet he was examining and smiled at her through the large magnifying glass.

  “Ah, New York’s finest’s finest! Come to sell me tickets to the Policeman’s Ball, my darling?”

  Lou Bensinger had teased her since she was twelve and was one of the few people she felt at ease bantering with.

  “Only five hundred a pair, too, Lou. If I promise to dance every horah with you, how many tickets will you buy?”

  Trudy, his wife of forty years, came in from a back room. “Another Harald female come to flirt with my husband yet?” She circled the counter and gave Sigrid a big hug. “Too long since I’ve seen you!”

  She was even shorter than Lou, but she clasped the younger woman by both arms and looked up at her critically. “Ho, now, what’s this?”

  At once Sigrid realized that she hadn’t been in the lab since she’d had her long dark hair cut short. She gave a self-conscious shrug, but Trudy Bensinger was delighted.

  “Turn! Turn!” she commanded and Sigrid obediently did a three-sixty. “I like! So who’s the lucky man?”

  “Why must a man be involved when a woman cuts her hair?” Sigrid countered. “I merely thought it was time for a change.”

  “It is, it is! And I know just the change you need. My cousin Selma’s boy. The divorce, it wasn’t his fault. A doll he is. A lawyer, too. I’ll give him your number, okay?”

  Remembering some of those cousins’ sons (not to mention nephews, godsons, and the younger brothers of various in-laws) that Trudy had tried to foist off on her over the years, Sigrid hastily said, “No, please, Trudy. Actually, I am seeing someone right now.”

  “And when are we meeting this young man?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing like that.”

  “Then you can talk to Selma’s boy.”

  “I’d better tell Mother I’m here,” said Sigrid, retreating down the rear hall.

  “Coward!” Lou called after her.

  Sigrid found her mother in the lab’s common workroom. Lou’s Foto was a holdout against unnecessary high-tech gadgetry, and Anne was using a manual paper cutter on her last batch of photographs.

  “Siga?” She frowned and turned to check the clock on the wall behind her. “You early or am I late?”

  “Some of each. I was able to get away on time for a change.”

  She watched as Anne Harald briskly aligned the edge of a picture then pulled down cleanly on the blade. Her mother’s expertise often surprised strangers. Someone this decorative was not usually expected to be competent as well. And even in jeans and sneakers and a shaggy old gray sweater, with most of her lipstick eaten off and chemical stains on her fingers, Anne Harald remained a thoroughly decorative woman.

  She examined with a critical eye the picture she’d finished blocking then handed it and another over to Sigrid. “You said you wanted copies. Happy birthday.”

  Sigrid took the top one and looked down into her own eyes. Not really, of course. Her eyes were a slate gray that could look silver under certain conditions but Leif Harald’s had been a clear light blue. This black-and-white photo turned his blue eyes silver, though. Spaced as widely as hers, too, and shaped the same. Over the years, so many family friends and relatives had pulled her features apart one by one in an attempt to explain how someone so physically plain and awkward could have sprung from two such attractive parents that Sigrid knew exactly which attribute she’d inherited from each.

  From Leif had come the eyes, thin nose, high cheekbones, silky straight hair, and her height, five ten in her stocking feet. From Anne came the changeable gray of her eyes, the darkness of her hair and a jutting chin. Neither side of the family claimed the mouth that was too wide, the neck that was too long, nor the crippling self-consciousness that had kept her tongue-tied with shyness even after she grew up.

  The first picture was a three-quarters view of her father, dressed for patrol in what would have been winter blues, the jacket unbuttoned and half open. He had his hand in one pocket, his hat and nightstick in the other, and she could see the big handle of his holstered service revolver as he leaned against a door frame and smiled into Anne’s camera—a confident young Viking, off to tame urban dragons, captured on film by his young wife. He couldn’t have been much more than twenty-six or twenty-eight himself.

  The next picture must have been snapped a moment or two later.

  The jacket was buttoned now, but she had crawled into the picture, a solemn, wide
-eyed infant, who looked up into his laughing, indulgent face and reached for his hat with the shiny badge.

  “You’re sure five-by-seven is what you want?” asked Anne. “No problem to make them eight-by-tens.”

  “No, these are perfect,” said Sigrid. “Thanks. But I thought you said you didn’t have negatives.”

  “I didn’t,” she said shortly. “I had to copy the positives and make new negatives. That’s why they’re not as crisp as they should be.”

  They looked fine to Sigrid. When she’d flown down to North Carolina for a cousin’s funeral back in October, she’d found these two wallet-size pictures among her grandmother’s albums and had asked to borrow them. “I don’t have any pictures of Dad,” she said. “Photographers’ spouses must be like shoemakers’ children.”

  “You may have them to keep,” Grandmother Lattimore had said.

  She seemed puzzled though. “There should be boxes of pictures. Anne was always taking Leif. I suppose it’s all those moves. They say seven moves are equal to one fire. If that’s true, it’s a wonder your mother hasn’t lost everything she ever owned.”

  Anne gave her a stiff protective envelope and gathered up her own things while Sigrid slid the photographs inside and tucked the envelope into her pocket.

  “Ready?”

  Anne nodded and they said goodnight to the Bensingers, then plunged out into the icy wind and hurried down the crowded sidewalk to Sigrid’s car.

  Inside, Anne shivered on the front seat beside her. “This is as cold as the night you were born. At least it’s not snowing, though.”

  “Supposed to before morning,” Sigrid warned, edging the car into the stream of heavy traffic.

  “Really? I’ve been too busy to read a paper or listen to a weather report.” She lapsed into silence.

  The stop-and-go traffic had brought them only a short way west on Forty-third when Sigrid drew a momentary blank.