I nodded and he went on to the forensic report on Fischer.
“Forensic didn’t give us much more on Lotty Fischer than they gave Vaughn on Mick Cluett.” He skimmed through the highlights of the report. “They just confirm the motorman’s statement—it happened too fast for her to struggle. One thing though: she was wearing a fuzzy red coat with distinctive wool and polyester fibers that shed easily. Lab says it’s a strong probability that her assailant will have some of those fibers on the clothes he was wearing when he pushed her. On his pants, on his jacket, and certainly on his gloves.”
“Hell,” I said. “If the coat sheds that much, those fibers could be all over the building. We could have them on our own clothes by now.”
“Maybe not,” said Yow. “January wasn’t all that cold. She may not have worn the coat many times this season.” She glanced at Rawson. “Want me to check it out?”
Rawson nodded, then closed the folder and laid his glasses on top of it. “Forensic will probably nail him down for us once we have a suspect in custody, but it won’t help us pick him out of the haystack. The obvious question is how big’s our haystack?”
He called across the room to the P.A.A., a tiny gray-haired woman who worked the screen from her electric wheelchair. “Got anything yet, Mrs. Delbridge?”
“It’s all very rough, but I can get you started.” Her husky voice was deep as a man’s. Surprising in that little body.
She scrolled long lists of names across her screen, punched at the keyboard and suddenly the printer sprang into noisy life. As we waited, Delbridge turned her chair around and rolled over to us.
“I’ve done a global search and pulled the names of everybody assigned here four years ago,” she said. “Then I pulled the names of everybody assigned in the same two precincts with Detective Cluett for the past two years—I made it two years because I figured that if Cluett was killed because of a case, it would likely be something still pending.”
This Delbridge was a self-important little hacker who was going to dot every I and cross every damn T. I caught myself drumming my fingers on the armrest of my chair. Been me at this point, I’d have told her to cut to the chase, but Rawson sat back like we had all day.
“Right now, I’m printing up six copies of every name that duplicated,” Delbridge said.
“How many names?” Yow and Flick spoke at the same time, so I wasn’t the only one getting antsy.
“This is just sworn police personnel. I can’t get the rest of the civilian records till tomorrow.”
“That’s okay, Delly,” said Rawson, giving her one of his God-you’re-wonderful smiles. “How many names for starters?”
“Fifty-one.”
We all perked up at that. For some reason, I’d expected hundreds.
Fifty-one was nothing. We could do a quick and dirty on fifty-one in a matter of days.
The printer went silent, Delbridge wheeled over to it, ripped off the pages, then wheeled back to us and passed them around the table. I’d seen several of the names before but not counting one patrol officer from the Six-Four, McKinnon’s name was the only one I could put a face to. But then I’d never worked Manhattan.
Right away, Rawson told us to cross off for now the names of six people who’d been newly assigned to the precinct after Fischer ran the Browning through her computer. To be safe, Delbridge had bracketed the incident with a six-months space on either side. Made me want to check the motor on her chair, see if she was carrying a spare battery.
Rawson made a big show of thanking her for her careful thoroughness, but said we’d put on the back burner for now any personnel who’d either retired or been reassigned in the two years before their tours overlapped Cluett’s October-to-January stint here. Eleven names.
The sergeant knew that one of the clerks had married one of the patrol officers last Sunday. They weren’t due back from their honeymoon in the Caribbean till sometime that afternoon. Two more gone.
“That gets us down to thirty-one,” said Flick.
“Thirty-two,” Delbridge corrected with prissy disdain.
“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Flick’s radish face got a little pinker.
For the first rough screening, we agreed a name had to meet the two major criteria: a tour of duty in the Twelfth four years ago when Lotty Fischer ran the gun check, plus either a tour between October and January, when Cluett was here, or else assignment in Sheepshead this past year.
We narrowed the list to twenty-six names and Delbridge started pulling personnel files that had physical data.
The trainman had described the person who pushed Lotty Fischer as apparently Caucasian, average build, and approximately six inches taller than his victim. Since she’d been five three, that meant someone around five nine, give or take an inch.
The nurse, Kitty Jozell, had told Davidowitz and me that the person she’d seen join Cluett appeared slightly shorter and not as stout. Not old either, but that was at night from at least a block away and she couldn’t be sure what was physical build and what was bulky winter clothing.
Even so, since Cluett had been five eleven and weighed two-twelve at the time of his death, the two descriptions were roughly similar.
Using the more detailed files Delbridge had procured, we threw out the grossly fat, the short, and the over-six-footers. Rawson knew many of the people currently assigned here by sight and he was able to personally delete three markedly black blacks, one unmistakable Chinese-American, and a property clerk with a noticeable limp.
By midafternoon, the list was down to thirteen names.
Delbridge expected to find at least a dozen civilian employees, and she could probably double it again if she added in casual social workers, various inspectors, and other supervisory types who were in and out several times a year.
But we’d start with those thirteen names. Rawson got on the horn to the desk sergeant downstairs and told him to round up the first few and send them up one at a time.
In the meantime, Sandy Yow had called Fischer’s parents and came up with our first piece of luck: The night she died was the first and only time Lotty Fischer had worn her new red coat to work, so those red fibers stood to help us after all.
CHAPTER 24
Now that Field Internal Affairs had taken over the case, Sigrid knew she should leave it alone; yet as long as any of her own people were involved, she couldn’t resist taking a precautionary look at the possible nature of that involvement.
Once again Tillie’s penchant for detail came in good stead. Sergeant Rawson and his special task force now had physical custody of all files of the cases that Cluett had worked; but while she might not have the reports, thanks to Tillie and his backups for backups, she did have copies of all the index sheets contained in each case folder.
These listed items submitted for evidence, such as photographs, property vouchers, and lab reports. More importantly, they also listed the daily reports turned in by each investigator, so that Sigrid could reconstruct who had worked what and when. She was supposed to be off today, but if she chose to use her own time playing connect-the-dots instead of heading for the pool or working the diagramless crossword puzzle in the Sunday Times, it was no one else’s business, she told herself, knowing she was rationalizing, knowing I.A.D. would not agree if Sergeant Rawson found out and chose to make an issue of it.
Nevertheless, she worked steadily through the sheets, pausing here and there as certain memories surfaced between the numbered lines of jargon and abbreviations.
Here was that case back in October where a young dancer had been impaled on an iron fence during a well-attended performance. Cluett had worked that one, along with Eberstadt and Peters, although Albee and Lowry had carried most of the load there. Cluett did manage to nail down one damning bit of evidence and he’d been in at the kill, but it was nothing the rawest rookie couldn’t have handled.
The accused was coming up for trial at the end of the month. She knew Cluett had been subpoenaed to testify about that one m
inor point because Albee had grumbled that he’d kept her on the phone almost an hour trying to refresh his memory of the case from his sketchy notes.
What a poor excuse for a detective the man had been! Sloppy paperwork, bad work habits, always looking to shave a half hour off his shift. A potentially bad influence on the others. Look how his laziness had caused Dinah Urbanska to screw up.
Sigrid knew that everyone thought she’d been too rough on the younger woman, that Cluett should have been given that command discipline, not Urbanska. It was clearly too late for a c.d. to help Cluett straighten up, but Sigrid had hoped that rapping Urbanska’s knuckles so sharply at the beginning of her career as a detective might keep her on the straight and narrow, might keep her from taking an older officer’s word that it was okay to risk a case just to do someone a minor favor, might teach her that every favor carried a price tag.
It must have seemed like such a little white lie to Urbanska. Cluett had developed indigestion that evening and he’d left her to do the paperwork connected with their shift so he could cut out early. As a result, Urbanska had created an official record to which she’d signed her name that she was the one who’d witnessed the suspect doing something Cluett had told her he’d seen, something really quite minor at the time.
Who could know that the case would eventually hinge on that small point?
But during discovery, when a defense lawyer asks for and is given access to all the written records, that small discrepancy had been noticed and what should have been a watertight case suddenly sprang a leak.
At least Urbanska had sensibly owned up to the lie before it went to trial. Everyone knew at least one horror story where some officer in a similar situation had perjured himself and wound up bounced from the force and serving a suspended sentence.
The perp had walked, of course.
As she read through the index lists, Sigrid couldn’t help wondering if Cluett had left them any other little time bombs. That murder at the Erich Breul House, for instance. He’d been the one to search the victim’s apartment and had reported finding nothing pertinent; but even though she was confident they’d charged the right person for the murder, she’d occasionally felt there was a piece missing from that particular puzzle.
Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters had been in on the Breul House case; and Eberstadt, Peters, and Cluett had also worked the homicide/attempted suicide where a midlevel crack dealer had shot his lover before turning the gun on himself. Unfortunately, he’d dipped into his own stash first, and even though he tried three times, none of his bullets had hit a vital organ.
There’d been blood all over that apartment, on the confetti of money that had littered the floor, on the phone with which he’d called for help, soaked into the bed where they’d found him when his rescuers smashed in the door. The index listed property vouchers for all those small bills: 1,123 ones, 702 fives, 836 tens, 872 twenties, 449 fifties, 53 hundreds.
Sigrid could still see Cluett and Peters sitting at the kitchen table sorting the pile of blood-soaked bills they’d collected into neat, if sticky, stacks. The counting had taken longer than it once would have. Since it wasn’t known whether either of the principals had ever been tested for AIDS, Cluett and Peters had pulled on three pairs of rubber gloves before they touched the blood-drenched money and it’d made their fingers clumsy.
Sigrid knew that the crack dealer’s trial was due to begin next month. It was such an open-and-shut case that they’d expected an automatic plea bargain. Instead the accused man had decided to waste more taxpayer dollars and to plead self-defense.
Then there was the Negus homicide Cluett and Lowry had worked with Sam Hentz and Dinah Urbanska when Albee was out with the flu immediately after Christmas.
Alfred Negus had returned from a business trip to the luxurious Gramercy Square apartment he shared with his sixteen-month-old daughter Erica and his wife Helene. Negus had found his young daughter, stiff with rigor mortis, floating facedown in their bathtub and no sign of his wife, the owner of a pricey boutique in the Village.
With no sign of a struggle and only the wife’s coat and purse missing, the detectives had at first theorized that Helene Negus might have left the baby alone in the bath, returned to find it drowned, and had then fled in panic from a mixture of grief and guilt.
Negus insisted that his wife would never have left their daughter unattended; and while the detectives had heard it all before, they had handled the investigation with care and diligence. Their professionalism paid off when Cluett, Hentz, and Urbanska accompanied Negus to his wife’s boutique and discovered her body stashed in one of the dressing rooms. Nearby, they found a gaping hole in the wall and scattered jewelry. (Urbanska had created another legend for klutzy behavior when she trod on a gold and amethyst earring and walked away with it embedded in the crepe sole of her shoe.)
Forensic soon helped them piece it all together. Thieves had gained entrance to the Negus apartment, abducted Mrs. Negus before she could take little Erica from the bath, and had forced her to open up her store. From there, they had proceeded to take sledgehammers and smash their way into the tightly protected jewelry store next door without setting off any of its sophisticated alarms. Even though the owner had prudently locked his most valuable gems in his small vault, the thieves had still walked away with a quarter-million in gold jewelry and lesser gems.
They hadn’t meant to kill Mrs. Negus, one of them explained when he was caught pawning his share of the loot the following week, “But she wouldn’t shut up about her goddamned brat, so Arnie stuffed a gag in her mouth.”
While they filled their shopping bag with expensive jewelry, strewing brooches and earrings underfoot in their haste, Mrs. Negus had suffocated on the gag.
“Arnie” hadn’t yet been located, but his partner had immediately pleaded guilty to grand larceny and two counts of involuntary manslaughter and was already serving time.
Lowry and Urbanska had done every line of paperwork on that case.
Hentz had been in charge of the investigation and it was the only way he could be certain it’d get done right.
Hentz had grumbled about having to use Cluett the three months he was in the Twelfth, especially after Cluett’s slapdash laziness had gotten Dinah in trouble.
Nevertheless, she couldn’t see that there was anything here for Sergeant Rawson to fasten on. Surely Cluett’s death was rooted in Brooklyn. That’s where he lived, where he’d spent the last twenty years of his career.
Unless it was something from even further back?
She closed the last set of index records and came to the copy of the duplicate file Sergeant Vaughn had given McKinnon on Friday. She’d almost forgotten she had it and Rawson hadn’t thought to collect it when he took the original from Vaughn.
Sigrid often deplored the profligate use of copying machines. Even when bureaucracy had been limited by stencils and carbon paper, they had circulated too many irrelevant documents marked “For Your Information.” With the arrival of a copier in every office, the bales of paper that flowed across her desk seemed to grow exponentially each year. But occasionally, she had cause to applaud their invention. Without a photocopier, she probably would not be reading such a complete file.
She rapidly scanned the accounts Vaughn and Davidowitz had written of their interviews with Cluett’s widow, the cousin—that “bloat a goat” phrase was one she’d heard Cluett use about the hundreds and fifties of drug money they’d confiscated—the next-door neighbor, the car mechanics, and the regulars at the Shamrock. There was a summation of Cluett’s last few cases and even a photocopy of the scribbled notes where he’d pestered Albee and Peters, trying to fill in missing gaps before he had to get up and swear to them in court.
She closed the last folder and swiveled in her chair to gaze out her window. The exterior glass hadn’t been washed since autumn and a film of gray soot made the gray day even duller. The powdery snow fell with a steady hypnotic persistence as Sigrid considered each member
of her unit in the hard cold light of known facts. She still thought Cluett’s killer would prove to be someone connected with the Six-Four in Brooklyn, but there was one point that had snagged her attention, almost like a small jagged tear in a fingernail and just as easily smoothed away if she could put her hands on an emery board.
Unfortunately, this was Sunday. Now who—?
A friend—Anne’s friend, actually—came to mind. Cameron Stewart. Through hard work, a thick skin, relentless optimism, and a genuine talent for making friends among the secretaries and administrative assistants who keep a system functioning, Cammie Stewart had risen high in the city’s bureaucracy. True, her expertise lay in the social services, but Sigrid was confident that Cammie would know some workaholic who could be called on a Sunday.
She turned back to her desk and looked up the telephone number.
Cammie had her answering machine switched on, but as soon as Sigrid identified herself to the tape, the older woman’s voice cut in. “Sigrid! How ARE you? WHERE are you? How’s Anne?”
When all the who, when, what, where, how questions subsided, Sigrid told her what she wanted to know. Cammie went silent and Sigrid could almost hear her riffling through a mental Rolodex.
“I thought maybe a federal clerk?” she suggested.
“On Sunday?” Cammie snorted. “No, best to go right to the source. Now let me think . . . hmm. You going to be there for the next half hour? Okay, say the name again. Spelled like it sounds?”
Sigrid spelled the name.
“And the date?”
“I’m not really sure. Sometime since Christmas anyhow.”
“Okay. If it can be done today, I should have an answer for you in an hour. Ninety minutes tops.”
After the connection had been broken, Sigrid went back to watching the snow. If she were lucky, Cammie would soon call back and tell her that she had an overactive imagination and that the random dots she’d connected in her mind did not produce a real picture.
Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) Page 18