Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald)

by Maron, Margaret

  “Not me.” The nervous titter went up another notch. “Shawn was still getting over his earache. Marie’d been up with him two nights in a row, so I took over for her Tuesday night.”

  My ex and I never had kids so I couldn’t speak from experience, but I thought I’d heard Terry talk about how quick Adam’s winter ailments always reacted to antibiotics. If that bratty kid had been on medication for three days, maybe he’d actually slept through Tuesday night as soundly as I was willing to bet Marie O’Shea had.

  Nearly five when I got back to the station and went up to my office to jot down notes on the interviews while they were still fresh. Several messages waited on my desk: Hy Davidowitz had made it home safely. Fabrizio had skidded into a bus as he came off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and expected to be a little late getting to work. Then Kirkwood came in with a funny expression on his face.

  “Did you hear?”

  It’d been a long day. “Hear what?”

  “The gun that killed Mick. Some P.A.A. over in New York ran a check on it a couple of years ago.”

  “And?”

  “And they don’t know why.”

  Kirkwood has a warped sense of humor. Normally I’d let him spin it out, but reports were piled on my desk and snow was piling up outside. “Cut to the chase,” I snapped.

  Kirkwood hated stepping on his own punch lines. “Okay, but at least ask me why they don’t just ask her.”

  Resigned, I rotated my hand in the universal signal to speed it up. “Consider it asked.”

  “They can’t. Somebody pushed her under a train last night.”

  “What?”

  “So help me, Sarge! What’s really weird though is that she worked the Twelfth. The same damn precinct that borrowed Mick from us.”

  “The hell you say!”

  I looked at Kirkwood and I didn’t like what I read on his face. Damn it all, cops aren’t supposed to kill other cops.

  CHAPTER 16

  “This is AM Radio! WNYT—New York Talks! You’re on the air, Dolores. Talk to me!”

  “Hello? Roddy? I just want to say that it’s not just bus drivers. We’ve got a whole class of city employees who act like they’re doing us a favor to take these high salaries our tax dollars provide and give back nothing! I’m asking you, Roddy—whatever happened to the idea of public service? There’s no service to the public—it’s the public be damned. These blippity-blip—”

  New York Talks was on a ten-second delay. The show’s producer grinned at host Roddy Fitzwilliam through the soundproof glass and gave the throat-slashing signal that meant he’d cut the caller off in time.

  “Ah-ah, Dolores. Language! Keep it clean, people. We don’t want the FCC pulling our plug, do we? WNYT—New York Talks! What’s on your mind, Pete?”

  “Yo, Roddy! Listen, man, I was trying to get crosstown from East 116th yesterday and this M20 driver—”

  WNYT’s afternoon talk show had struck a metropolis-wide nerve. The topic of today’s session was supposed to be how well the city’s transportation system handles a snowstorm; but the first caller asked if Roddy’d heard about the girl that got pushed under a train last night and hey, maybe she’d still be alive right now if some smart ass bus driver would’ve stopped for her.

  The show’s producer sensed a real story and immediately went to a commercial break. Off-mike, the caller repeated the details he’d heard a couple of hours ago in Lundigren’s Twenty-Four Hour Delicatessen; and by the time the first set of commercials ended, the producer had the night clerk on the phone and Roddy Fitzwilliam was cued to conduct a live interview.

  At that point, the switchboard had gone nova as New Yorkers vied to tell horror stories of their own experiences with bus drivers.

  “That’s all we need,” Bernie Peters groaned as he switched the minivan’s dial to Radio 88 (“MORE Than Just The Headlines!”) to catch the headlines. Radio 88 was into Dow-Jones averages, so he lowered the volume as he negotiated the snowy Manhattan Bridge. The powerful wipers were keeping the wide windshield swept clean. The mini felt so luxurious after the cramped sedan he’d rattled back and forth in for the last three years.

  “They’ll start with bus drivers,” he told Matt Eberstadt, “but they’ll finish with cops.”

  “Maybe not,” said Matt. “People aren’t real crazy about sanitation workers either. Especially if their cars get plowed under.”

  “Uh-oh.” The rear wheels fishtailed slightly, and Bernie gently pressed on the accelerator to bring them out of it, enjoying the confident surge of power.

  Because his new family-size van had four-wheel drive, he’d swung past Ozone Park to pick up Eberstadt. Now he was beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t have taken the train to work. The snow was really coming down. Traffic was keeping it pretty much churned to slush right now, but he hated to think what it was going to be like when their four-to-midnight ended.

  He glanced across at Eberstadt, who seemed tired and listless this afternoon. “You catching something?”

  “Naw. I never sleep too good when Frances is away.”

  Eberstadt’s oldest child, a girl, had just been transferred to Atlanta. It was her first move and Bernie knew that Frances Eberstadt had gone down last weekend to help her settle in.

  “When’s she due back?”

  “Tomorrow.” Eberstadt stared out through the windshield. Snow was falling so heavily that he could barely make out the twin towers of the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building was almost obliterated as well. “Really bad about the Fischer kid, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Only twenty-two,” Eberstadt said heavily. “Not married yet.”

  Bernie Peters was surprised. “You knew her pretty good, huh?”

  “She was a nice kid. Friendly. I used to tease her a lot when she first came because she’d turn bright red if she got rattled. Four years ago, and she was fresh outta high school. She thought detectives walked on water.”

  Canal Street was thick with traffic when they came off the bridge and worked their way over to Allen. As Peters drove north on First Avenue he discovered he was behind a sanitation truck that was spreading salt: He’d had the underside of the mini-van sealed against salt damage but he wasn’t optimistic about its effectiveness, and he switched lanes just as Eberstadt flicked the dial back to WNYT.

  An irate citizen of the Bronx was saying, “—so even if she’d of had a chance to dial 911, all she’d of got was a busy signal, and I think if they’d put the cops back walking a neighborhood beat instead of—”

  “What’d I tell you?” said Peters.

  In the squad room at the station, fatigue had finally caught up with Albee and Lowry.

  “I shouldn’t have sat down,” groaned Jim Lowry. “Now I’m too tired to get up and go home.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Elaine. She pushed away from the typewriter and stretched her arms behind her back to flex her shoulder muscles. “If I didn’t need clean clothes, I’d just sleep here again tonight.”

  The hall door opened and Dinah Urbanska entered the squad room. Or tried to enter. The pocket of her black ski pants caught on the doorknob and jerked her back. She stuffed her gloves in a pocket of her parka and untangled herself, but as one pocket came free, the other dumped her gloves on the floor. Unzipping her parka, she caught the amused glances of the others and looked around wildly. “What? What?”

  Wordlessly, Sam Hentz pointed behind her.

  “Oh gosh!” she breathed and went back for the gloves. As she bent, the other pants pocket snagged on the knob.

  “I don’t believe this,” Elaine muttered to Jim.

  Flustered and flushed, Dinah finally got herself and all her articles of clothing to her desk. She was cold and damp from interviewing street corner news vendors as potential witnesses to a hit-and-run. Snow had melted on her black wool watch cap and when she pulled it off, her dark blonde hair looked wet.

  Hentz handed her some paper towels.

  “Any
body want the last cup of coffee before I make fresh?” asked Tillie, waving the pot in their direction.

  Jim shook his head. “I’m coffeed out.”

  “Yeah, I’ll take it,” said Hentz, who was seldom without a half-full cup on his desk.

  “I’ll get it for you, Sam,” offered Dinah, bounding up with a suddenness that banged her chair against the wall.

  “No,” he said tightly. “Sit. Do not get up. That’s an order.”

  “Hot chocolate,” Jim said dreamily. “Dark and sweet and three marshmallows on top.”

  “Huh?” asked Hentz.

  Jim grinned. “That’s what my mom always used to make me whenever it snowed.”

  Tillie pawed through the clutter behind the coffee maker. “There’s a packet of instant here if you want it.”

  “Any marshmallows?”

  “Nope.” Spooning fresh coffee into the basket, Tillie smiled. Marian always made their children hot chocolate when they came in from playing in the snow. “And no whipped cream either.”

  Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters arrived, red-cheeked and almost as damp from the snowstorm as Dinah Urbanska. Bernie slung his coat over the back of his chair and walked over to hurry the coffee along.

  “Rough day?” he asked Elaine. “You look like hell.”

  “Thanks, Bernie,” she scowled. “You always know how to cheer a person up.”

  “Speaking of cheer—” He pulled out his wallet. “Your share of last week’s winnings.”

  “Oh, yeah,” said Dinah. “I was supposed to tell you we hit.” Every week, several of them chipped in a dollar each to buy Lotto tickets. So far, their biggest jackpot had been two hundred dollars which put them marginally ahead of their losses. “Four dollars apiece,” said Bernie, handing bills to Jim, too.

  “At this rate, I’m going to be eighty before I get my Lamborghini,” Elaine complained. “I still think you were crazy to buy a van instead of a sports car.”

  “A sports car with bucket seats,” said Bernie. “Just what every father of three needs, right, Tillie?”

  Tillie looked up from sorting a handful of departmental circulars that had come up with the last mail.

  “I’d take your new mini-van over a Lamborghini any day,” he said wistfully. “It must be great having enough space for car seats and diaper bags.”

  As he spoke, a door at the end of the room opened and everyone straightened unconsciously as Lieutenant Harald entered with some papers. Her eyes fell on Lowry and Albee.

  “I didn’t realize you two were back,” she said. “Any developments with the Fischer case?”

  She listened impassively as they described the possibility of an eye-witness to the murder.

  “We’ve got an APB on the wire and Greenapple’s put the word to Transit,” said Elaine.

  Jim added, “If this bird’s still in town, we should have him by tomorrow.”

  “Excellent.” Sigrid paused by Matt’s desk. “Ah, Eberstadt. Here’s something that should interest you and Peters.”

  She handed him an autopsy report which had come in that day on a stabbing victim. He and Bernie were handling the investigation, a particularly violent homicide. The dead man had been stabbed over twenty times until his midsection resembled hamburger.

  “What was the name of that guy you suspected?” Sigrid asked. “A bartender, wasn’t he?”

  “Caygill,” said Eberstadt. He laid the report on the corner of the nearest desk and began to read as he unzipped his heavy jacket and unwound the heavy wool scarf from his neck. “Zach Caygill.”

  “Turn over to the next page,” Sigrid told him. “The M.E. found a man’s ring under the victim’s liver. According to Cohen, it’s engraved with the initials Z.B.C.”

  “Nice,” said Matt. “Very nice. I’ll just make a few phone calls, confirm that he owns a ring like that. We may be able to pick him up tonight.”

  When Sigrid had returned to her office, Dinah Urbanska giggled and began to flap her elbows. “Bird imitations? That’s all the guy does? Bird imitations?”

  Lowry caught the reference and laughed. It had been one of his favorite M*A*S*H episodes, too: one of Hawkeye’s corny jokes about a little man who wanted to join the circus; but when he flapped his elbows and flew around the tent, the circus manager remained singularly unimpressed.

  Amid their laughter, Tillie followed Sigrid into her office with some papers that needed her signature and one of the interdepartmental flyers he thought might interest her.

  “You’re Swedish descent, right, Lieutenant?”

  “Danish,” she corrected. “Why?”

  He showed her the flyer. “The Viking Association’s having a membership drive.”

  Sigrid frowned. “Viking Association?”

  “It’s one of the department’s benevolent associations like the Irish and Italians have, only smaller, I guess. For police officers of Scandinavian descent.”

  Oblivious to her raised eyebrow, he skimmed the paper and read aloud some of the phrases. “March in Norwegian Constitution Day Parade, vacation in the fjords . . . dinner dance . . . annual fishing trip in June . . .”

  He had a sudden absurd picture of Lieutenant Harald equipped with rod and reel on a party boat full of tipsy Vikings. He felt her gray eyes upon him and flushed crimson.

  As if she’d read his thoughts, she took the flyer from his hand and dropped it in her wastebasket.

  “I don’t think so,” she said dryly.

  As they went over the reports that she wanted pushed the next day, the private line on her telephone rang and Tillie waited while she answered.

  After listening for a long moment, she reached for her desk calendar and flipped the page to the next day. “Your office? Certainly. Yes, sir, I will.”

  From where Tillie was sitting, he could see that she’d penciled in “McK” at the ten o’clock hour. “Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

  She leaned back in her chair and wedged one knee against the desk.

  “I know your shift’s over at four, Tillie, but I want every file on every case that Michael Cluett worked while he was here and I want them on my desk by eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”

  “Ma’am?”

  She looked at him coldly. “Was I unclear, Tildon? Which part did you not understand?”

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said and beat a hasty, and very puzzled, retreat.

  Alone in her office, Sigrid pondered what Captain McKinnon had just told her over the phone. She thought of the warm camaraderie that existed out there in the squad room at this moment and wondered how much longer it would last.

  CHAPTER 17

  [Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

  Friday morning. Still cold, but the wind had stopped. So had the snow.

  The house has three bedrooms on the second floor and mine’s the middle-sized one on the back. I could stand at the window and look out across garage roofs mounded with snow. No clouds. A sky as blue as the Lady Washington hollyhocks on the cover of the new Burpee catalog that was waiting when I got home the night before. By tomorrow there’d probably be three layers of soot. At that moment, though, the sun on the snow dazzled everything till it looked like the pearly gates of heaven Granny used to sing about when she was happy.

  In the yard downstairs, a scrawny gray cat slinked through the picket fence, walked across the snowdrifts to where the wind had exposed a bit of earth, and relieved itself under my Rose of Sharon tree.

  My tree, my yard, my dirt. Still wasn’t used to it.

  Marva Lee never wanted any part of a house. Her idea of living’s a hotel with twenty-four-hour room service, so the marriage’d been over almost two years when Terry came to me at Christmas and talked me into going in on this house with her. Troy Avenue in East Flatbush. Used to be an all-white blue-collar neighborhood. Now it’s three-quarters black and getting yuppified.

  It’d be an investment, she said. Security for both of us. Rental apartment on the top that she and Adam would move into if I ever m
arried again ’cause she sure as hell never planned to again.

  “It’d be good for Adam to have you around—be good for you, too,” she said. “You can even quit grieving over Granny’s farm and grow your own flowers and tomatoes.”

  Cats might be a problem. I tried to remember what Granny had done about cats.

  Or maybe cats weren’t a problem if you lived on a five-acre truck farm. Enough dirt for everybody.

  I pulled on warm-up pants and jacket and knocked on Terry’s door as I passed.

  “I’m up! I’m up!” Little Miss Sunshine.

  “You lie like a rug,” I called back.

  She hasn’t changed from when she was twelve and our parents used to send me to roust her out. If she was really up, she’d be grumpy. Cheerful was to make me think she was wide awake.

  I went on down to the kitchen and found Adam eating cold cereal and reading a library book Terry’d brought home for him.

  “Must be a good book,” I said as I started the coffee.

  He grinned, those new front teeth shining. “You bet your britches, Claude!”

  “You sassing me, boy?”

  “Beats me, Claude!” he giggled, tickled that I was asking the right questions. He almost bounced in his chair, waiting for me to go again.

  I knew there were at least two more Claude books in the series but I couldn’t remember titles. “Finish your cereal,” I told him. “I’ve got snow to shovel.”

  He went into gales of laughter. “If you say so, Claude!”

  The brand new snow shovel Terry had given me for Christmas was out in the furnace room. I’d never worked one before. You don’t shovel much snow in a twenty-story apartment building. But it didn’t strike me as something that took too much brains. I could hear some of the neighbors out there shoveling, the rasp of metal against concrete. Once I got out there and got the hang of it, it went pretty fast. Wasn’t like I had to do a half-mile. Just the steps, walk, and a stretch of sidewalk as wide as the house in front. A bit longer in the back. Enough to work up a sweat though, even in the cold.

  Good exercise, I thought, as I went up to shower and shave. “I could get into this home-owner schtick,” I told Terry when I passed through the kitchen.