Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald)

by Maron, Margaret

  Sigrid thought of Tillie and Marian, of Bernie Peters and his wife Pam, whom she’d never met. She’d heard both men speak of shielding their wives and children from some of the realities of the job. Hentz was divorced, like a dozen others she could name, marriages down the drain. McKinnon had never married. Only Matt Eberstadt sounded as if he and his Frances treated each other like adults.

  “You’re not married either?” she asked.

  “Now I am. Then, I went through two wives in a hurry because I couldn’t leave it at the station house like Leif could. Mac was the only one he could trust to leave it behind, too. Or some old hair bag like Cluett. I guess I was too wild. I remember you, though.”

  “You do?”

  “I drove him home a few times when Anne was in class and he had to pick you up at the baby-sitter’s. Rosie Bloomgardner. I never forgot that silly name.” He smiled as he lit another cigarette. “Remember her?”

  Sigrid tried, but nothing came.

  “Well, you were just a baby then. And now you’re a lieutenant already. Too bad you aren’t black, too. You’d probably be a captain or a deputy inspector by now.” He caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for another scotch. “You ready?” he asked Sigrid.

  Her glass was still half-full and she shook her head, tight-lipped, her hands clenched into fists beneath the table.

  She didn’t know which grated more, the casualness of his racist and sexist remark or the easy assumption that she shared that view. She told herself he was a dinosaur from another age, that she wouldn’t change him by exploding, that she was here to learn whatever this man could tell her about her father. If she got up now and walked away from the table in anger, she knew she’d soon be asking herself if she’d left because Tom Oersted was a bigot who said no more than she’d heard a thousand times since her promotion or if it were because she really didn’t want to know? She had loved her father. Everyone in the family said he’d possessed an easygoing tolerance and a knack for friendship. Why not accept that Leif had liked Oersted for reasons that had nothing to do with the man’s values and attitudes?

  “Is that why Mother didn’t know your name? Because Dad kept everything compartmentalized?”

  “Look,” said Oersted. “You said on the phone you wanted to know about him. You want the truth?”

  At that moment Sigrid quit trying to like him for her father’s sake.

  “That’s a loaded question, isn’t it?” she asked coldly. “Obviously the only answer is yes, but it implies that the truth will hurt.”

  He laughed. “Ask your questions. I’ll answer anything I know for sure, but not things I don’t know.”

  “Again, that implies there are things you suspect. Bad things?”

  He shrugged. “What’s bad to you?”

  She had to know the worst. “Was he dishonest? On the take?”

  “No, nothing like that,” said Oersted. Smoke curled from his nose. “Actually, he was a damn good cop. Foolhardy at times, the way he’d go wading in to break up a street fight or a barroom brawl, or worse, get between a husband and wife when one had a knife and the other a baseball bat. And smart, too. He and Mac could see patterns, make connections better than anybody I ever saw. Look how quick they got the gold shields. Took me eight years.”

  “Were you ever partners?”

  “Not after he made plainclothes. Before that, yeah, we pulled tours together. After, it was him and Mac all the way.” He said it nonchalantly, but Sigrid sensed an undertone of remembered jealousy.

  “Did they work as well together?”

  “Better. They really were a good match.” Oersted said it slowly, as if looking back from such a long distance were giving him new perspective. “Like pencil and paper, you know? Better together than separately. One brought out the strengths of the other.” He gave an ironic chuckle. “Leif and I brought out each other’s worst and we both knew it.”

  “How?”

  A burst of laughter from the bar floated above the bluesy music. Sigrid glanced over and saw a voluptuous redhead flirting with three guys from Narcotics. “Was he cheating on my mother?”

  Oersted seemed amused by the chaste term. “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  Sigrid suddenly felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach.

  “Hey, you really didn’t know, did you?” asked Oersted. His voice seemed to come from a long way off.

  Sigrid finished her drink in two gulps and looked around for the waiter. “No.”

  “I’d have thought Anne or Mac would’ve told you by now, especially since—but then, that’s right: they didn’t marry, did they?”

  “What?”

  The room seemed to tilt and Sigrid sat very still until it righted itself again.

  “What the hell?” said Oersted.

  As he finished his own drink, Sigrid suddenly realized that he knew she found him distasteful.

  “Mac told me not to tell you anything except what I knew for a fact.” There was deliberate and satisfied malice in the glint of his eye and the curl of his lip. “This is a fact, Lieutenant: when Leif bought it, word got around that Mac had set him up so he could have Anne.”

  He stood up and threw some bills on the table to cover their drinks. “But they never married, so I guess it was just an ugly rumor, right?”

  CHAPTER 27

  Once when she was eight years old and spending the summer with Grandmother Lattimore while Anne was on an assignment in Europe, Sigrid had run barefooted onto a clump of hard dry sandspurs. It was not the first time her soft city feet had encountered those vicious spiked burrs but this was the worst. Not one, but at least a dozen pierced the soles of her feet like tiny needles; and as she drew back from the clump, walking on her heels so as not to press them deeper, the first sharp awareness of pain gave way to anxiety over the pain to come. Each sandspur had six or eight points, each point was barbed like a tiny fishhook; and as much as they hurt going in, they hurt even worse coming out. She hobbled over to a safe patch of grass under a tree and lay down on her back to stare up into the tree, losing herself among the thousand leaves and twigs, concentrating on leaves and clouds that seemed to float on the surface of a sky as blue and limpid as a gulf reef. Her feet no longer hurt and so long as she did not touch the sandspurs, they wouldn’t. She floated like a leaf on limitless blue sky, suspended between pain for almost an hour, until at last—

  “Hey, Lieutenant! You okay?”

  Abruptly, clouds and trees disappeared and her senses were assaulted with the smell of cigarette smoke, toasted barley and hot pastrami, the sound of Benny Goodman’s solo clarinet, and the sight of Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn’s chocolate brown eyes looking down at her. Sigrid pulled herself back to the present.

  “I—I— Yes, I’m fine,” she stammered. But she still felt slightly disoriented, as if she should be brushing grass and leaves off the back of T-shirt and shorts instead of gesturing for Vaughn to sit down and join her in this now-crowded tavern.

  “You sure?” He pushed aside the money Oersted had left on the table and set down the glass and sandwich plate he’d brought over from the bar. After another long look at her pale face, he signaled for the waiter. “Buy you another drink, Lieutenant? You look like you could use it.”

  “Actually,” said Sigrid, “I think what I could use is some food.”

  “Take half of mine,” Vaughn said. “It’s more than I want.”

  In truth, sandwiches at the Urban Renewal Society were gargantuan and Sigrid felt no compunction in accepting his offer. She bit into the warm meat and savored the tang of spicy mustard against her tongue. “Just a large glass of ice water,” she told the waiter.

  Vaughn put some of his potato chips on the napkin she was using for a plate. “If you want to talk, I’m a pretty good listener.”

  Sigrid smiled. “I bet you are. No, I’m okay now. Really. You through for the day?”

  “Not quite. I have a few more things to read through.”

  “Who’d Rawson pick for the task fo
rce?” she asked, taking another bite of the sandwich.

  Vaughn gave names and postings. Sigrid had met Henry Eastman and Sandy Yow in passing, but knew none of them personally, although she’d heard of everyone. “Did you make much progress today?”

  “Now, Lieutenant, you know I can’t talk specifics.”

  “No?” She ate a salty potato chip and looked at him shrewdly. “Then why are you sitting here at this table?”

  His thin brown face relaxed in laughter. “They said you were a pistol.”

  As he finished his half of the pastrami sandwich, he crumpled his napkin on the plate and said, “This is when I really miss cigarettes. After a meal. Relaxes everybody. Gives you something to do with your hands and eyes.”

  “Lets you segue into a grilling before the other person knows what’s happening?” Sigrid asked sardonically.

  “You got it.”

  “I don’t like taking my unit apart person by person,” she told him. “They’re good officers, not—”

  “Even good officers fall. You know that.”

  “So I’m learning.” Her eyes darkened in private thought, then she shook her head impatiently. “Of course I know it. I’ve been on the job long enough to know it’s no Sunday School choir. They know it, too. That’s why it could tear us apart. So don’t you ask me to start theorizing and pointing the finger at any of my people till you’ve cleared every civilian and uniform here in the Twelfth and at the Six-Four and even then—” She took a long steadying swallow of her ice water.

  Vaughn put his elbow on the table, propped his chin on his fist and his voice was almost gentle. “It’s that strong a suspicion, huh?”

  She looked at him mutely and her gray eyes were sad.

  He leaned across the table as if to drag it from her. “If we found the Canary tomorrow, who would you nominate for the lineup, Lieutenant?”

  In the warm smoky room, her chilled glass left wet rings on the shiny pine tabletop and she moved it to form a design of interlocking circles.

  “When you were a child, Sergeant, did you ever step on a sandspur with your bare foot?”

  His sense of urgency suddenly diffused by what he read in her eyes, Jarvis Vaughn sat back with legs outstretched, ankles crossed, hands clasped behind his head.

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” he said, “only we called ’em stickers.”

  Now that there was all the time in the world, now that he knew she would be telling him, he spoke of his granny’s truck farm down on the Jersey coast, of her sweet-smelling flowers and sweet-tasting corn and luscious vine-ripened tomatoes and the treachery of New Jersey stickers.

  Sigrid described the summer she was eight and then she took a deep breath as she had all those years ago. This was going to hurt worse than pulling sandspurs from her bare foot. A hell of a lot worse. But she had done it without flinching back then and she would do it now.

  In a stoic’s monotone, she told him what she’d suspected after reading his Brooklyn interviews and his summation of Cluett’s last notes. She also told him about the wild-goose chase on which she’d sent Cameron Stewart.

  “She knows someone in the main division down at the World Trade Center and he ran the name through all their computer banks without any luck, but we’ll have to wait till tomorrow to query IRS.”

  The snitch was one of the regulars. A coward, but a braggart, too.

  Especially when it was as safe as this. Besides, what could a goddamned bird imitator do to him?

  He fed a quarter into the phone and a few minutes later, he was saying, “Word’s on the street that you guys wanna talk to Jerry the Canary. I know where he’s roosting tonight. You interested? I ain’t saying over the phone. I gotta have some money tonight. Meet me at the usual place.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Sigrid and Jarvis Vaughn walked back through the snow together to the precinct house. Neither detective made friends easily, but sharing a pastrami sandwich and childhood memories seemed to have bridged the usual reserve.

  Irrational, thought Sigrid, yet she did feel she could trust Vaughn in a way she couldn’t trust Sergeant Rawson. As they parted at the elevator, he promised not to say anything to Rawson and she said she’d let him know as soon as she learned anything the next day.

  The squad room was empty. Eberstadt and Peters had finished their shift before five o’clock, and Hentz and Urbanska must be out questioning witnesses or running down leads. She pulled off her heavy coat and laid it over the back of a nearby chair.

  The door to her office was cracked and although she’d switched everything off when she left to meet Oersted, the green glass shade of her brass desk lamp cast a pool of light across her papers. She pushed open the door and saw Captain McKinnon standing in the shadows by the window.

  Oersted’s slimy insinuations had been temporarily displaced by her session with Vaughn; but at the sight of McKinnon, they suddenly flooded back into her mind in all their ugliness.

  She started to flip on the fluorescent light overhead, then let her hand drop. “Captain?”

  He turned and she saw that he held the silver-framed picture of Leif Harald in his blue winter uniform. At her voice, McKinnon glanced again at the youthful face of his dead partner, then put the picture back where he’d gotten it and moved away so that she could take her usual place behind the desk.

  “Tom Oersted called me yesterday,” he said, sitting heavily in the other chair. The lamplight softened his rugged features, but his words came harshly.

  “I know.” Dreading this emotional confrontation, yet trying not to let herself be paralyzed by it, Sigrid dipped into the little pottery bowl beside the picture and began to manipulate the linked circles of the first puzzle ring her fingers touched. “He said you warned him not to tell me anything he didn’t know for a fact.”

  When McKinnon didn’t speak, she lifted her eyes from the ring to his face. “Did you set my father up to be killed?”

  His face was impassive. “Is that what Oersted said?”

  “He said those were the rumors at the time.”

  “They were lies,” McKinnon said flatly.

  “Was it a lie that he slept with other women?”

  McKinnon shifted in the chair. “Lieutenant—”

  “Was it?” she asked coldly.

  “No.”

  “Or that you and Mother—”

  The puzzle ring was clenched so tightly in her hand that the delicate circles were bent into twisted ovals and left their imprint on her palm. She heard McKinnon let out a deep breath and realized that he was as tense as she. She also realized that he was not denying it.

  “Did Oersted make it sound shabby and sordid?”

  Sigrid shrugged. “You mean it wasn’t? She was your partner’s wife and you went after her. Then you set my father up so you could have her, only Mother didn’t fall into your arms afterwards.”

  “That’s not—”

  “She might make love with her husband’s partner,” Sigrid interrupted bitterly, “but she wouldn’t marry his murderer.”

  “Damn it, that’s not the way it was!” His fist slammed down so heavily on her desk that Leif Harald’s picture fell forward onto her metal stapler and the glass shattered.

  Appalled, McKinnon grabbed for it; and as he tried to set it upright, one of the shards of glass sliced the meaty pad of his right thumb. Instantly, bright red blood dripped onto the picture.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “God, I’m sorry.”

  Rattled, Sigrid dropped the silver rings and pushed a box of tissues toward him. “Put pressure on it,” she ordered and rummaged in her desk for the first-aid kit she kept there. She found a small bottle of alcohol as well and, ignoring McKinnon’s protests, sloshed it over his thumb, then drew the cut edges together with a wide Band-aid. A second and third Band-aid secured the first.

  “I don’t think it’ll need stitches,” she said. “Fingers always bleed a lot.”

  They looked down at the picture and saw that his crimson b
lood had seeped into the cracked glass and stained Leif Harald’s face and chest. The glass could be replaced but the photograph was ruined; and even though Anne now had a negative, Sigrid knew she would never ask her mother to make another copy.

  McKinnon gave a weary sigh and sat back down. For the first time, he looked his full age.

  “We should have talked months ago, but I was afraid you’d put in for a transfer if you knew; and frankly I wanted you here. After all these years, I thought if we ran into each other casually, Anne and me, maybe we could put things back together, be friends again if nothing else.”

  As he spoke Sigrid began to remove the bits of broken glass from her desktop to her wastebasket, piece by individual piece.

  “It finally happened last October,” said McKinnon. “In your hospital room. Only she wouldn’t talk to me. That’s why I specialed in poor old Mickey Cluett. Stupid thing to do, but I knew he could be a motor mouth at times and I thought if he tumbled to who you were and started telling you some of the old tales, the good ones—”

  He stood up and began to pace back and forth in the confined space. “When your dad and I got out of the Academy, Mickey Cluett had charge of the rookies. He broke us in on patrol, showed us the ropes, and he was around after we got our gold shields, too. He liked Leif and he was crazy about Anne and her Southern accent. He was there the night they met. She ever tell you about it?”

  “Dad thought she and another guy were robbing someone’s car at one o’clock in the morning and he threatened to arrest them,” said Sigrid.

  “Yeah. Somebody from her photography class. They’d gotten back late from a trip up the Hudson and when the guy went to get her cameras out of the trunk, he accidentally closed the lid on his keys. For some reason, Anne thought she could pop the lock. By the time Mickey and Leif rolled up, all they’d done was dent the lid good; but Leif said they looked guilty as hell in the headlights.”