07-Past Imperfect

by Margaret Maron

  Urbanska had made detective only six months ago. A powerfully built young woman, five eight, a hundred forty pounds, with golden brown hair that she kept knotted on the top of her head, Urbanska had proved her dedication, intelligence, and physical endurance with seven years of patrol work before coming to the Twelfth. But she was like a coltish palomino in the squad room. Cups leaped from her hands and upended on someone else’s desk; at her touch, books slid off shelves, staplers flew apart and reports jumbled. One of her cases, fortunately a minor one, had been thrown out of court because she screwed up a key bit of evidence.

  Red-faced, she picked up the packets of sweetener. “It was awful about Detective Cluett,” she said, and Sigrid recalled that the younger woman had worked a couple of cases with the old officer.

  “My friend in the Six-Four thinks they might have a witness,” said Matt Eberstadt, looking up from his desk. He handed the lieutenant a report he’d just finished and sheepishly deciphered the message he’d taken for her earlier.

  “An eyewitness?” Bernie Peters leaned back in his chair at the adjoining desk. His voice was still hoarse from his own bout with bronchitis. “You didn’t tell us they had a witness.”

  Eberstadt rubbed the bald spot in front of his rapidly disappearing hairline and shrugged. “Vinnie didn’t know any details—he’s not working the case—he just knows they’re acting like whoever did it might’ve thrown the gun in the bay there. Somebody heard a splash. That’s why they called in divers.”

  “Probably turn out to be a beer bottle,” said Sam Hentz.

  Hentz was something of a problem for Sigrid. A dapper, almost natty dresser, he was a thoroughgoing professional who had expected to get her job and thought she’d only been promoted in because of her sex. He was even more chauvinistic than Bernie Peters, though more subtle in expressing it. When Hentz’s regular partner retired and Sigrid paired him with Dinah Urbanska, she expected the fledgling detective to come back clawed and shredded.

  So far, it hadn’t happened. Urbanska’s clumsiness drove everyone else up the wall; but for some quixotic reason, Sam Hentz had endless patience with her. He was a good teacher, too, one who took time to explain the details, thereby giving her a chance to develop her own investigator’s skills. To Sigrid’s surprise, the temporary arrangement seemed apt to become permanent.

  Most of the time, Hentz remained as aloof as before, but today the violent irony of Cluett’s end drew him into their conversation.

  They batted it around a few minutes more as Jim Lowry returned from court and Elaine Albee drifted back from Records, where she’d been researching some aspects of a current case. Lowry hadn’t heard of Cluett’s death and had to be brought up to speed, while Albee had picked up a few extra details from a record clerk whose aunt was a friend of Mick Cluett’s next-door neighbor. The young blonde officer smoothed the crease in her russet corduroy slacks as she perched on the edge of Eberstadt’s desk to share the clerk’s aunt’s account.

  “She said Cluett went out to walk the dog and when he didn’t come back right away, his wife got mad and went on to bed without waiting up for him. Jeanie’s aunt’s friend said that walking the dog was Cluett’s excuse for slipping over to his favorite bar a couple of nights a week. The dog woke Cluett’s wife an hour or two later, scratching at the back door and whining, and she got up to let it in, but she was still mad so she didn’t worry about him till she got up this morning and realized that he’d never come home.

  “She called her daughter over on Ocean Avenue to ask if he’d spent the night there—that’s what he did if he got especially bombed—and she’d just hung up the receiver when someone from the Six-Four rang her doorbell and gave her the bad news.”

  “Poor lady,” Tillie said soberly. His own wife had gone through something similar back in October and she’d told him how it felt to pick up a telephone and hear someone from the department tell you your husband’s hurt. Marian’s caller had been mercifully terse, the whole message delivered in seconds, yet it’d seemed to her that all eternity had been compressed in that brief instant between hearing that Tillie’d been in an incident—her immediate, time-stopping certainty that Tillie was dead—and then hearing that he was in a hospital still alive.

  Marian Tildon had gotten lucky. Irene Cluett hadn’t.

  “In the midst of life, we are in death,” intoned Eberstadt, whose own wife was religious.

  It was something to think about, they agreed.

  Nevertheless, none of them felt personally touched by the older detective’s death, even though they’d each worked with him a time or two in the three months he was there. He’d been specialed in as a temporary substitute while Tillie recovered from a bomb that exploded next to him at a cribbage tournament, and he was like someone from a different era, from a time when the police force was mostly Irish and seniority had really made staying on the job worthwhile for lower-echelon men like Mickey Cluett.

  There had been speculative murmurs as to why Captain McKinnon would accept Cluett even temporarily; and at first, the general feeling was that Mickey Cluett must have a rabbi near the top, someone too powerful for McKinnon to buck. But when the man arrived with a beer gut that had been years in the making, a wide face, hard blue eyes surrounded by puffy bags, and big hands that ended in broadly spatulate fingers—”From sitting on his hands too long,” the trim Sam Hentz had quipped—it was clear that he was merely a place holder, an empty suit, a warm body. They’d all partnered with him when schedules demanded it, but because of the transient nature of his assignment and his impending retirement, no one had made much effort to know the man or to take him very seriously.

  Sigrid Harald was too reserved to join in squad room scuttlebutt, yet she had been annoyed by Cluett’s incompetence and puzzled by the captain’s tolerance. With a vague sense of guilt now that Cluett was dead she realized that even though he’d only returned to work a few days before Cluett was transferred back to Brooklyn, Tillie had probably known Cluett as well as any of them.

  Tillie and Captain McKinnon?

  As conversation flowed from Cluett’s death to their own load of homicides, Sigrid wondered if the captain knew.

  Some twenty blocks north, in an overheated midtown photo lab, Anne Harald could feel herself beginning to lose it.

  “Look, sugar, I can talk about f/stops and film speeds and graininess till we’re both blue in the face and yes, you can crop and dodge and burn and flash and all those other little precious darkroom tricks but ninety-seven point nine-nine percent of a photograph happens before you ever get around to tripping the shutter: brain and eye—what’s behind the lens, not what’s in it. What you see is what you get and, honey lamb, you’re just not seeing.”

  Anne pulled a pencil from the tangle of curls behind her ear, dark curls that betrayed her true age with a dusting of silver, and thumped a particularly mawkish photo with the pencil’s eraser. “Where’s your eye here? Where’s your brain?”

  The sting of her critique was suddenly softened by the smile that danced in her hazel-gray eyes as she regarded the bearded youth whose weedy thinness topped her own five two by at least a foot. She shook her head and lapsed into exaggerated Southern dubiousness. “You do got brains, don’t you, shug?”

  Mid-fifties or not, Anne Lattimore Harald was still a beautiful woman, a beauty enhanced by the successful career she enjoyed; but before the dazzled apprentice could defend the photographs spread across the counter, a short pear-shaped man pushed through the darkroom curtains. “Telephone, Anne.”

  “Oh, come on, Lou,” she protested.

  The lab owner gave a hands-up shrug. “I told him you’re busy. He wouldn’t take no. What am I doing? Running a business or screening your calls? You want I should hang up on him, tell me already.”

  “No, I’ll come.” With one fluid movement, she plucked a couple of prints from the counter and handed them to the young man who’d shot them. “Take a grease pencil and circle the real emotional center of these two s
treet scenes. I’ll be back in a jiff.”

  Lou’s telephone extension was located between the lab’s salesroom and the darkrooms and Anne carried her pocket calendar along A hardworking photojournalist, she expected the caller to be an editor with the final okay on one of several projects she had pitched since Christmas. There was an answering machine on her home phone but most of her professional callers had quit trying to keep up with a number that changed at least once a year, if not twice or three times. They’d long since learned that if Anne were in town, Lou’s shabby midtown lab was where she developed those award-winning photographs, and messages left there would always reach her sooner or later. It made for neater Rolodexes all over town.

  “Hello?”

  “Anne?”

  One syllable in a voice she hadn’t heard over the telephone in years and yet it was so instantly recognizable that adrenaline sent a rush of pure cold fear coursing through her veins.

  “What’s wrong? Has something happened to Sigrid?”

  “No, no. Not her. Mickey Cluett,” the male voice rumbled “He was shot last night.”

  “Mickey Cluett?” Anne Harald ran a trembling hand through her hair. “You called to tell me Mickey Cluett’s been shot? Why? Did you shoot him, too?”

  “Christ, Anne! I thought you’d—”

  She broke the connection without waiting to hear what Mac McKinnon thought.

  CHAPTER 3

  On the edge of Brooklyn, a dispirited sun halfheartedly tried to break through clouds as gray as the waters of Sheepshead Bay. Gusts of icy February air brought a not-unpleasant smell of fresh fish and brine to the knots of people watching from either end of a footbridge that spanned the bay’s western end. The bridge was about eight feet wide, built of utilitarian creosoted timbers, salt-treated two-by-fours, and unpainted planks. It connected the largely residential Manhattan Beach neighborhood on the south side of the inlet with the boat piers and fish houses fronting Emmons Avenue on the north.

  At the moment, the bridge was still cordoned off by yellow-and-blue sawhorses at each end and by yellow plastic ribbons to deter the public from entering a crime scene. Michael Cluett’s heavy body had been found slumped in a corner of the access ramp on the Manhattan Beach side; and although a mobile lab had processed the whole bridge from one end to the other, it remained off-limits to all except police officers.

  Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn leaned on one of the wooden railings, stared into the cold gray water where the shape of a diver could just be discerned, and thought about the civil rights movement.

  You’ve come a long way, baby, he told himself sourly as he inhaled a deep breath of frigid salty air through his nose and let it out slowly through his mouth.

  He no longer looked for racial slurs beneath every casual or unthinking remark uttered in his presence and he knew that the movement had helped him advance about as fast as any other officer of similar intelligence and ambition, but he also knew he wouldn’t feel true equality had been achieved till he could look at such a pitiful excuse for a human being as this Leviticus Jones, their only eye witness to Mickey Cluett’s shooting, and not feel somehow personally debased simply because the wino was black.

  Did Kirkwood’s belly wrench when needletracks scarred a white skin? Did Fabrizio feel like apologizing to somebody every time Mafia power struggles erupted in gunfire? Hy Davidowitz had certainly never shown any sense of personal shame about the rising crime rate in Brighton Beach’s Little Odessa. If his colleagues could distance themselves from the dregs of their race, why couldn’t he?

  Jarvis Vaughn took another deep breath. It was part of a relaxing technique that his sister had read about in one of those psychology books she was always lugging home from the library where she worked. Sometimes it helped.

  Not today though. And not now.

  He pulled a packet from the pocket of his overcoat and with gloved fingers clumsily freed an antacid mint. As he put it in his mouth, the bum standing beside him at the bridge railing stretched out a dirty hand. “Ain’t had nothing to eat all day, bro.”

  Leviticus Jones was a long way from the land that had spawned him, but his slurred voice still carried the soft accents of his birth. His ragged overcoat was a travesty of Vaughn’s almost dapper brown wool. The filthy garment was brown, too, but pilled and buttonless, cinched at the waist with a length of telephone cord, and miles too big for the emaciated frame it covered.

  Shame and a guilty repugnance churned Vaughn’s stomach. He bit down upon the mint and handed the pack to the wino, who immediately broke it open and let the paper fall to the ground as he crammed the remaining mints into his mouth.

  “Pick it up!” Vaughn snarled.

  “Huh?”

  “You got to put more trash on the earth? Pick up the goddamned paper.”

  The derelict looked at him blankly and Hy Davidowitz stirred uneasily beside his partner. “Hey, lighten up, my man.”

  It was an old joke between them and for a moment, Jarvis Vaughn relaxed.

  The wind caught the paper scraps and carried them off the bridge onto the water as the goggled diver broke through the surface, flipped back her mouthpiece and called, “Nothing here but garbage, Sarge.”

  “Keep looking,” Vaughn called back.

  Davidowitz turned to the bum. “Okay, Jones, tell us again. It was dark, it was quiet, right?”

  Their only witness nodded hesitantly.

  “You were cooped-up under the ramp here when you heard voices and then the shot and then the splash like, maybe a gun being thrown in the water, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re sure the splash was off to your right?” Davidowitz asked patiently.

  The man’s thin arm waggled inside his ragged right sleeve. “Yeah.”

  “Then why the hell can’t we find it?” snarled Vaughn. He heard the anger in his voice and took another deep and steadying breath. “Show us exactly where you were,” he said.

  Leviticus Jones turned and lurched away and the two detectives followed his shambling form. He circled the handrail at the foot of the ramp, walked back to the seawall, and crawled through a narrow opening between the concrete bridge supports into a surprisingly capacious recess beneath the ramp.

  Vaughn stooped to peer through the opening into the dark refuge Jones had found for himself. The plywood sheathing kept out the worst of icy winds off the water and a plastic shower curtain patterned with faded pink flamingos had been tacked over the cracks to further cut the wind. A couple of rumpled army blankets lay atop a pile of newspapers that insulated Jones from cold concrete that would otherwise drain away his body heat. There were some canned goods off to one side and three lumpy shopping bags.

  “Sheepshead Hilton,” grinned the derelict through stained and broken teeth. “No extra charge for sea breezes.”

  Vaughn had seen Manhattan efficiencies with less floor space than Leviticus Jones had staked out for himself underneath the sloping ramp. He watched as Jones curled up on the newspapers and drew the ragged blankets over his scrawny shoulders.

  “You sure that’s exactly how you were lying when you heard the splash?”

  Davidowitz heard a muffled affirmative.

  Vaughn straightened up with a look of exasperation on his thin black face. “Tell the diver to look on the other side of the goddamned bridge.”

  He patted his pockets until he located a fresh packet of antacid tablets.

  Twenty minutes later, the diver found Cluett’s sodden wallet. A few minutes after that, she emerged from the chilly water with a Browning semiautomatic pistol clutched in her gloved hand.

  CHAPTER 4

  As the subway train hurtled into the station, young Lotty Fischer gave her reddened nose a final dab, then tucked her handkerchief into an outer pocket, and stood up. The train ground to a stop with an ear-wrecking shriek of brakes and a lurch that made her clutch at one of the upright steel poles to keep her balance. She had been fighting a cold all week with over-the-counter
medications, and antihistamines always made her a little dizzy.

  5:37 P.M.

  There was a raw tickle in the back of her throat and the subway car seemed warmer than usual. Maybe her mother was right, Lotty thought. Maybe she was coming down with something more serious than a head cold and should’ve called in sick. Except that the computers at work were already understaffed and it would back everything up and make even more paperwork for her cop friends if she stayed out, too.

  Crowds of homeward-bound commuters jostled each other on the platform as Lotty waited for the train doors to open.

  The ending of their work day meant the beginning of hers.

  Like a fish swimming upstream against the current, she let them surge past her. Another cascade of humanity flowed down the damp concrete steps from the street, but she kept to the right wall and doggedly continued upward. Once she’d gained the sidewalk, a vicious gust plastered her new red coat to her small body and tried to whip away the ends of her red wool head scarf. She shifted the strap of her shoulder bag and pulled the scarf ends tighter, grateful that she only had a few short blocks to walk in this icy wind. Spring couldn’t get here too fast to suit her.

  5:43.

  Even though the days were getting longer, darkness had already fallen. Streetlights turned the overcast sky a pinkish orange but neon store fronts were a blaze of cheerful color.

  Lotty ducked into one of the stores, a kosher Chinese deli, for a carton of eggdrop soup to go with the tuna salad she’d packed for her supper. “At least promise me you’ll get something hot,” her mother had said.

  Lotty smiled indulgently as she paid for the soup and hurried back outside. Twenty-two years old and Mom still couldn’t quit treating her like a little girl off to school with her lunch money clutched in her hand. She worried that Lotty wouldn’t eat properly, wasn’t dressed warmly enough, wasn’t safe going back and forth alone on the subway.