Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald)

by Maron, Margaret

  An overlooked shard of glass twinkled on the desk top as she watched him pace, and she delicately transferred it to the wastebasket.

  “He was always such a talker, Mickey. I was sure he’d tell you—”

  “He tried,” Sigrid said. “I never let him.”

  She tilted her head back and forth, but no more glass could be seen. “What would he have told me about Dad’s death?”

  “Leif and I’d been working the murder of a showgirl with mob connections. Mary-Ell Wright. At first we thought it had something to do with kickbacks the club owner was paying to one of the bosses and Mary-Ell got in the middle. Then we realized it was sexual. Pure and simple jealousy. One of the small-time mugs. Gianni Gold. Little short guy, a bagman for Benny DelVecchio. We knew him. Leif did, anyhow. He ran, we put out the word on the street, and someone fingered him. The Ambassador Hotel, one of those flop shops off Lexington these days and pretty ratty even back then.”

  He looked down at the bandage on his thumb. The gauze pad showed a blur of red, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. There was a straight-back wooden chair next to the bookcase. McKinnon pulled it out and straddled the seat, resting his arms on the back.

  “Mickey was still riding patrol and he drove us over. I wanted more backup, but Leif just laughed at me and said Gianni Gold was a little mouse who’d come squeaking out of his hole as soon as he knew we were there. Mickey was all the backup we needed, he said.

  “We left him watching the front and went in. The desk clerk gave us the room number but he must have called up, because as soon as Leif banged on the door and said, ‘Police,’ Gianni put three slugs through it. If we hadn’t been standing off to the side, we’d have bought it right then and there. For some reason, Leif thought that was funny as hell. He started laughing and yelling, ‘Hey, come on, Gianni! It’s me, Harald.’ We could hear the guy whimpering, like a little kid, and Leif kicked the door open and told Gianni to come on out.

  “He was still whimpering and whining, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ and we saw him come out from behind the dresser with the gun in his hand almost dragging on the floor. He wasn’t much taller than the dresser and I guess it struck Leif funny ’cause he put his gun away. He just couldn’t take the poor little schnook seriously.

  “There was Gianni looking like a kid on his way to a licking and there stood Leif, grinning, with his hand out for the gun, and he said, ‘What the hell you doing playing with guns, Gianni?’ And Gianni seemed to go off his nut. Maybe it was because Leif was so tall and good-looking, like the guys Mary-Ell always went for; or maybe it was because Leif didn’t give him any respect at all. Who knows? Anyhow, Gianni got red in the face and said, ‘Don’t laugh at me! Nobody’s ever gonna laugh at me again!’ and then he jerked the gun up and shot twice more just as Mickey came barreling down the hall. I got off two shots, too, but it was too late to save Leif.”

  For a moment, McKinnon sat with his shoulders slumped, his face buried on his arms.

  “You froze?” Sigrid asked.

  McKinnon straightened. “I didn’t freeze. Leif was in the line and it took me too long to get clear.”

  “No subconscious wish fulfillment?”

  “I didn’t want him dead,” he said evenly. “It wasn’t the dark ages. Even well-bred Southern women got divorced then.”

  “Except that Mother still loved him.”

  “Yeah.” His voice rasped with remembered grief. “God help us, we both did.”

  For some time after McKinnon stood up and walked out of her office, Sigrid sat looking at her father’s picture, ruined by McKinnon’s blood.

  She thought about Anne, all those years of moving every few months. Had she been running away from guilt or was it her way of dealing with the loss of love?

  Which love?

  Sigrid reached for the phone, then jumped as it went off beneath her hand.

  Automatically, she answered, “Detective unit. Lieutenant Harald.” The conversation was short and terse and a minute later, she had grabbed up her coat and was hurrying down the hall to the special operations room that the task force had taken over.

  Jarvis Vaughn was the only one still there and he had just turned off the lights as she arrived, buttoning her coat and drawing on gloves. “What’s up?”

  “One of our informants just called. Our witness has a room at the Hotel Paradiso.”

  “Jerry the Canary?”

  Sigrid nodded. “Want to come with me to pick him up?”

  “Hey, wait a minute!” he said. “This is my case, remember? You can come with me.”

  She glared at him hotly and then whirled away down the hall. “Are you going to stand there arguing precedence till he flies the coop again?

  CHAPTER 29

  [Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

  Harald had a point, but damn it all, Rawson had made the Canary my responsibility and technically, she had no business doing anything more than passing the info on to me. She kept on walking.

  I followed her into the elevator and said, “You’re out of line here, Lieutenant. You may outrank me, but—”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I do.” And she smiled.

  Changed her whole face when she smiled like that. I’ve always been a pushover for sassy women.

  “Okay,” I said, “but I’m driving.”

  The car we drew had chains on it and we clanked up Third Avenue in the snow while she fiddled with the heater. It wasn’t far. No need to haul out the portable blue light and stick it on the roof to expedite.

  I’d spent the last half hour charting places this bird’d been sighted.

  Most of them were strung out along the IRT midtown stations on both the East and West Side lines. If he’d paid for a cheap hotel room, I was pretty sure he’d still be there unless Harald’s snitch had spooked him.

  The Hotel Paradiso was located between Third and Lex. Old and shabby, but looked like it was still struggling for respectability. Still had a faded awning over the door. Probably half welfare, half SRO. Even on this raw night, six or eight kids were huddled outside in the low stairwell, rapping.

  As we passed on the opposite side of the street, Harald suddenly twisted around in her seat to get a better look at the entrance.

  “What?” I eased into a place half a block down, in front of a hydrant.

  “Probably my imagination,” she muttered. “I didn’t see the face, but the build, that walk—”

  She was out of the car and running back down the snowy sidewalk before I cut the engine.

  I jumped out and raced after her. As she angled across the street, dodging between cars, her heel caught an icy patch and she went down. A cab swerved in front of another car and missed her by inches. I sprinted over, hauled her to her feet and got her up on the sidewalk where she grabbed at a lamppost for support.

  “You okay?”

  “It’s fine,” she gasped, brushing snow and dirt from her trouser legs. “Really. Only a twist. Let’s go.”

  She put her full weight on it and took off toward the entrance of the Paradiso, but I saw that she favored that ankle.

  The kids out front looked us over as we threaded our way through them into a narrow shabby lobby. The walls had most of their marble slabs intact but the floor was worn linoleum and the sheetrock ceilings were stained with water marks. Directly opposite two elevators, the desk was barred and fortified with glass and metal bars like an old-fashioned bank window.

  We didn’t have to show our gold. The blood behind the bars made us for cops right away.

  “Hey, what’s shaking?” he asked when I told him we wanted Jerry Byrd’s room number. “The Canary rob a bank or something? Another cop just went up.”

  Harald immediately leaned on the elevator buttons. The cages were the kind with a brass arrow over each door that told you what floor it was on. One arrow was at five, the other at ten. Neither budged.

  “What number?” I yelled, heading for the door to the stairs.

  “
Five fifty-six,” he yelled back. He had the house phone in his hand. Made me hope he’d warned the Canary. “When you get there, keep going left. Fifty-six is almost behind the elevator and kinda hard to find.”

  I slammed through the doorway and Harald followed. More kids were sitting at the top of the first flight and they scattered like Granny’s chickens as we pounded up the stairs. Neither of us had our guns out yet, but these kids had enough smarts to dive for cover. The air was thick with pot and tobacco smoke, and graffiti covered the walls. Once past ground level, the stairwell was open to the elevator landings all the way up to the top. I leaned over the railing and looked up. There was a big central skylight in the roof, black now, with light bulbs around the edge, half of them broken or burned out. Made me dizzy just to look up, all those steps and railings looping back and forth, in and out of shadows. We passed the second floor. Somewhere a baby cried, and I could hear the kids scurrying around below us, foul-mouthed and excited.

  Our running footsteps rolled off the walls like we were in an echo chamber. A ten-story megaphone.

  “Police!” I shouted in case the other cop was in hearing distance, in case he was legit or had a twitchy finger. “Everybody stay inside!” My voice bounced off the skylight and we heard doors slam.

  I rounded the fifth-floor landing and Harald was still with me. Up above came more running steps, then suddenly the goddamnedest racket filled the stairwell. Woody Woodpecker’s zany cries burst upon us like automatic-rifle fire. “Eh-eh-eh-EH-oh!”

  “Jerry!” Harald yelled. “Police officers! We’re here to help you!”

  The frantic cartoon woodpecker began again, then ended in an abrupt “Auwkp!” as a shot rang out.

  Glass tinkled down from above. The slug must have hit one of the bulbs on the skylight. By the time glass quit falling, we both had our guns out, listening.

  We’d paused to catch our breath and get our bearings, then Harald and I realized at the same instant that the elevator door stood open on this landing. Someone had blocked the door open with a metal ashtray.

  “I’ll take it to the top and work down,” Harald said quietly. She kicked the ashtray out of the way and was gone before I could stop her.

  Keeping close to the inner walls, I raced on up past the sixth and seventh. Still no sign of movement. The shot sounded like it came from very near the top.

  I heard the elevator doors open and immediately came another burst of gunfire. Two guns this time. So he was up on the tenth floor after all.

  Now I was taking the stairs two at a time, gasping for air. As I burst on to the tenth floor, the landing widened out into what must have been a nice space when the building was new. Like a big sunroom, twenty feet wide by maybe forty long. Two more skylights and tall square columns to support the roof. They probably had couches here, I thought, and pots of ferns all around. Now the walls and columns had grim black graffiti spray-painted everywhere. Instead of couches, some ugly iron benches with ratty plastic cushions were chained to the stair railings.

  Even while I was thinking this, I was also looking around for bodies or movement. Both elevator doors were closed and from the mechanical hum and the arrows, both were heading down. Did Harald get shot and fall back inside with the killer?

  Then I realized I was standing in a strong draft of cold air. On the other side of the room, almost camouflaged by the dim light and black spray paint was a narrow door, half open to darkness. As I rushed over, a movement on the periphery sent me diving for cover behind one of the columns.

  “Come out with your hands high,” I snarled.

  “No,” quavered a voice. “You’ll shoot me.”

  “Canary?”

  A low trill of bird whistles confirmed it.

  “Hey, man, I’m a cop. We’re here to save your ass, not shoot it.”

  “Vaughn!” The looey’s voice seemed to come from far away. “Up here!”

  I pushed open the door and found a set of steep iron steps that led up to the roof. Gun in hand, she was standing just outside the threshold, half shielded by the open metal fire door.

  There was no light on the roof itself, but there’s never real darkness in the city. We could see that kids had been up here earlier, too. A snowwoman with huge tits and fat round hips grinned at us on the other side of a skylight and there was no way to tell which of the footprints leading away from the door belonged to our killer.

  “You see who it was?” I asked.

  Steps sounded on the stair behind me and the Canary edged onto the landing. “You gonna get him?” he asked. “You gotta shoot him. He pushed her and he was gonna push me.” Trills and whistles were all mixed in with his words as if fear had made him forget if he was a bird or a man.

  “I saw him. He pushed her in front of a train. He was gonna push me over the stairs. You gotta kill him, too.”

  “Will you get the hell back down?” I told him. “You want to get shot?”

  “Listen!” said Harald.

  A metallic clatter. Fire escape.

  We burst through the doorway together onto the roof. It was cluttered with air vents and chimneys, the elevator cable housing, and those three chest-high skylights. A large billboard at the far end of the roof blocked the lights of a taller building and it took us longer than it should have to locate the fire escape. Harald spotted it first, beyond the billboard scaffolding, and we rushed to peer over the edge. The bright lights of the billboard, a beer sign, made us squint, and it took a moment for our eyes to adjust. I saw nothing but inky shadows all the way down to the side street; then far below, a dark figure ran away from the building and into an alley.

  “Christ! How’d he do that so fast?” I groaned.

  “It’s not our guy,” she whispered in my ear and pointed to the undisturbed snow that still capped the fire escape rungs.

  I had a feeling we’d just made a very dumb mistake.

  With her gun, she waved for me to circle around while she ducked through the metal scaffold that supported the billboard. Everywhere I looked seemed to be a potential hiding place. No one crouching behind the first skylight. Across the rooftop, I saw the Canary watching me, then he glanced toward Harald and his face froze.

  At that same instant, I heard her yell, “Vaughn!”

  I whirled, dropped and rolled just as two slugs crashed through the skylight where I’d been standing. As I lay there at the base of the middle skylight, face down in the snow, I realized that the metallic sound we’d thought was the fire escape was really the steel ladder up to the billboard. He’d copied the Canary’s trick and gone up, not down; and if Harald hadn’t yelled, I’d have been dead meat.

  Carefully picking the side of the skylight in deepest shadow, I crawled around the edge and risked a look. He was lying prone on a metal ledge, his head level with hers. One hand was twined in her hair, the other held the gun pressed against the back of her skull. No sign of the Canary.

  “Throw out your gun, Sergeant,” he called, “or she gets it.”

  “Come on, Bernie, this is crazy,” she argued. “You know there’s no way—”

  He gave her hair a vicious yank that must have hurt like hell. “I mean it, Vaughn.”

  “Once anybody takes a hard look, it’s obvious you’re the one that killed Cluett,” she said.

  “Liar!”

  “It wasn’t just Albee he was bugging about court testimony; it was you, too. He told everyone there’d been a huge wad of hundred-dollar bills—enough to “bloat a goat”—but you only vouchered fifty-three, less than a quarter-inch stack, and you couldn’t count on him not noticing the discrepancy if the defense lawyer asked him about it. There was no nineteen-thousand-dollar lottery win. They ran your name through the Lotto computers this afternoon and there’s no record that you ever won anything more than that three hundred before Christmas. You skimmed it when you and Cluett had to inventory that bloody drug money.”

  “Shut up!” he screamed. “Vaughn!”

  I lay motionless in the shadows
, only the edge of my black face exposed. I had him in my sights, less than thirty feet away, but I was afraid to risk it. I do okay on a firing range, but lying flat like that, he presented almost no target; just his head next to hers. And even if I hit him, reflexive spasms were bound to pull his trigger.

  “You can’t kill us all, Bernie,” she gasped. “Who’s next? Eberstadt? Your wife? You think they never noticed you carry a drop gun? Will Pam lie when they come around to check on your alibi?”

  Peters yanked her hair so hard that her body arched backward and she cried out with the pain.

  “You say one more word, bitch, and I swear to God it’ll be your last. Bitches and niggers screwing up the job, screwing me—”

  In one fluid motion, he pulled her in front of him and dropped to the rooftop. She was a good two inches taller and to maintain his grasp on her short hair, he had her head tilted back till her face was almost pointed up to the heavy sky. Lights reflected off the clouds in a brownish pink glow. He pushed her toward the door and kept his body so close there wasn’t a prayer in hell for me to miss her. My gun was almost quivering I was so damn frustrated.

  Another few steps and he’d be inside the door and on his way down and there wouldn’t be a damn thing I could do about it unless I could get a clear shot from the busted skylight, but the risk—

  At that moment, Jerry the Canary popped up from behind the far skylight and gave that lunatic, “Oo-oo-oo-EH-oh! Oo-oo-oo-EH-oh! Eh-eh-eh-eh!”

  Instinctively, Peters swung to fire in that direction, and just as instinctively I squeezed off three shots at the broad target he’d given me.

  They went down together as if poleaxed.

  I rushed over and kicked away the gun. “Hey, Lieutenant, you okay? Lieutenant?”

  She groaned. “Oh, God, my head!”

  The guy’s fingers were still wrapped in her hair. I pried them open and untangled her hair, and she twisted around to look at him. “Peters!”

  He lay on his back. The front of his dark jacket was even darker with a wet stain as blood soaked through. His eyes opened. Focused on our faces over his. “Bitch,” he gasped. “Nig—”