07-Past Imperfect

by Margaret Maron

  We thanked her for her help and apologized again for bothering her.

  I gave her my card and she promised to call if she remembered anything more.

  None of us expected that she would.

  Back at street level, snow was piling up on the sidewalk, although traffic kept the street itself pretty clear. As we walked back to the car, we passed several guys already out with brooms and shovels to keep their storefronts clear.

  Three-ten. Nearly another hour till our shift ended. Still time to check on the neighbor kid who’d smart-mouthed Cluett, but Davidowitz was really antsy, so I said, “Why don’t you head on home, Hy? I can see the kid by myself.”

  “You sure?” He looked around for the nearest bus stop.

  I brushed snow off the windshield and said, “Sure, go ahead,” but I was talking to myself. Davidowitz was already half a block away and out in the street flagging down a bus.

  I put the car in drive and cautiously headed for Manhattan Beach.

  CHAPTER 14

  If the idea was to inconvenience the bus driver who had ignored Lotty Fischer’s attempt to board last night, Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee had timed it well. After two or three polite pushes on the intercom to 3-C got no response, Lowry planted his thumb on the small black button beside the name T. Inskip until a groggy male voice growled obscenities from the speaker.

  “Police,” Lowry growled back and continued to push until the man buzzed them through the locked door. The building was a remodeled tenement with no elevator and they climbed the steep steps up to the third-floor landing, where they had another lengthy ring on the doorbell.

  There came the sound of several bolts and locks being turned, and a door opened across the hall to reveal an elderly man in slippers and robe. He held in his arms an enormous silky cat the color of orange marmalade, and cat and man stared at the police detectives in disapproval. “Teddy’s gonna be pissed as hell wit’ you two and you wake ’im up.”

  “Butt out, Pitkin,” said the same grumpy voice they’d heard through the intercom.

  He couldn’t have been asleep for more than an hour. He was barefooted, his face was sleep-swollen and in need of a shave, his dark hair was mashed flat on one side and stuck out in a dozen different directions on the other. His pajamas were warm-up pants and ratty sweatshirt, and two things were immediately obvious: Theodore Inskip thought he was God’s gift to women and he hated having any woman, even a cop, see him like this. Most particularly did he hate having a female cop as blonde and cute as Detective Elaine Albee stand in his dirty studio apartment and look at him as if she thought he hadn’t changed his underwear in five years.

  He kept smoothing his hair, running his hand over the raspy growth on his chin, and kicking himself that he hadn’t at least folded up the sleeper couch and put on his newish Who sweatshirt. Worse, he was so groggy that he couldn’t zero in on what they really wanted from him.

  Especially since they came at him from both sides. “How long you been driving?” asked the man.

  “Three years, why?”

  “You like it?” asked the woman.

  “Sure, it’s okay,” he said, puzzled. “A pain at times. As many ass-holes as potholes.”

  They didn’t laugh.

  “Why?” he asked again. “What’s this about?”

  “We’ll ask the questions,” the man snarled.

  “What about last night?” asked the woman. With the toe of her boot, she nudged aside an empty pizza box on the floor beside his television as if she suspected it had roaches. “Was it boring last night? Who’d you see on the streets between two and two-thirty?”

  He tried to remember, but last night was only a blur of cold streets except for a couple of crackheads he wouldn’t open up for down in the Bowery. They’d pounded the doors, run alongside for a half-block, and he’d heard something hit the side as he took off, but that was before two.

  “Nobody,” he said. “Just the usual. Not many riding that late.”

  “But you picked up everybody that wanted on?”

  Their badgering was beginning to get to him and made him uneasy.

  His mouth felt like the underside of a carpet.

  “Sure,” he said cautiously. “If they were at the stop. If they had the change. This isn’t about those bums on the Bowery, is it? They were stoned and—”

  Forget about the Bowery, the man told him, and concentrate on a stop further north. They even told him which intersection along Third Avenue. “You sure you didn’t see anybody try to flag you down? Fuzzy red coat?”

  Now he had a fix on it. Oh, crap! The dame who’d chased after him was probably this guy’s sister or something and they were going to lean on him because he hadn’t stopped in the middle of the block? Well, screw her, he thought resentfully. And screw them for waking him up.

  “Look, I was making up time; I didn’t see nobody! Anyhow, if nobody’s waiting at the designated stop, then I don’t stop there; and I can’t stop just because somebody tries to wave me down. It’s against rules. Anyhow, it’s her word against mine!”

  As soon as the words were out, he knew he’d blown it.

  “Who said it was a woman?” the man asked quietly.

  Inskip cursed, but it was purely from habit. Sullenly, he admitted that he’d seen the woman, but the rules said he wasn’t supposed to stop for people in the middle of the block, tie up traffic.

  Then he was forced to admit that at 2:10 his bus was practically the only traffic moving along that section of Third Avenue.

  The blonde had gone from looking as if he needed clean shorts to looking as if he’d just crawled out of the sewer. “You are a piece of work, aren’t you?” she said. “Gunning your bus down Third like it’s your private little red sports car, and because you had to strut your one scummy piece of power, a decent human being gets pushed under a train.”

  “What?”

  They gave him a graphic description of Lotty Fischer’s death, and he sat white-faced and sweating amid the tumbled covers of his unmade couch.

  At that minute, his phone rang and he pounced on it like a lifeline. “Yeah, this is Ted Inskip—who . . . who? He said what? . . . No. No, I didn’t. No!”

  He slammed down the phone and looked up at them with a dazed expression on his handsome face. “That was a reporter from the Post. Some guy at an all-night deli saw me pass her up.”

  The consequences of his actions last night were finally beginning to sink in on Inskip. “I could lose my job,” he said.

  Lotty Fischer lost her life, they reminded him coldly.

  “Listen to me,” he pleaded. “I didn’t mean any harm. It was just a joke. People look so funny running after you. You’ll have a guy chase you four blocks and you wait till he gives up and then you stop and wait for him with the door open and when he gets on, he’s panting and you can say, ‘Gee, guy, I almost didn’t see you.’ And then he doesn’t know whether to be mad or grateful so half the time he’ll thank you for waiting. It’s just a game, see? That’s all it was last night. A game. I’d have waited for her, honest. But then the lights broke for me and that’s another game—seeing how many blocks you can go without stopping.”

  They took him back over it and over it till he was ready to freak. But no matter how much he tried, he couldn’t remember anyone else on the street with the woman in the red coat.

  The telephone began ringing again as they turned to go and they left him looking at it hopelessly, afraid to answer.

  Back at headquarters, Tillie had caught up with Officer Steven Greenapple by telephone. Greenapple wasn’t due to report to work till late afternoon, but he agreed to meet Lowry and Albee at two. When Lowry called to check in, Tillie relayed the message.

  “I guess that’ll give us time to see Fischer’s parents?” said Jim, half hoping she could think of a reason to put it off.

  “Yeah,” Elaine agreed glumly.

  Breaking the news of death to someone’s family was one of the most difficult things a cop had to
do, but interviewing a homicide victim’s family the next day wasn’t much easier. Elaine called to make sure the Fischers would be there and willing to talk to them.

  They stopped for lunch at a corner deli crowded with other New Yorkers bundled against the snow, which had picked up considerably in the last hour. The white tile floor was slippery with dirty gray puddles and bits of slush tracked in by each new customer. A kid ran out with a mop every few minutes, but he was swabbing against the tide. The two detectives ate their sandwiches standing up, then headed back to the nearest uptown subway station.

  The subway system was almost a century old now and it showed everywhere in broken tiles, accumulated trash, temporary jacks under sagging arches. The stations and platforms were like badly patched overcoats. Every train was infested with panhandlers for charities (some legitimate, most of the self-interest variety), freelance performers who sang or played every instrument from the tuba to the piccolo, and both the colorfully eccentric and the flat-out crazy; and while the graffiti blight might be on the wane, it had, over the years, taken a dark toll in human dignity and civic pride.

  Nobody really enjoyed traveling in a rolling zoo; nevertheless, trains were still the most efficient way to move around Manhattan. Especially in the snow.

  Flashing their badges, Albee and Lowry passed through a side gate onto the platform as the uptown local roared into the station.

  Grief, palpable and unremitting, wrapped the Fischers’ bright and airy apartment on the Upper West Side.

  Winston Fischer opened the door for them and his eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed behind thick glasses. He couldn’t have been much past forty, forty-five at the outside; yet there was such a look of aged grief on his face that Elaine Albee thought she could almost mark the lines that would soon be permanently etched.

  His wife was confined to a wheelchair. Multiple sclerosis had wasted Amy Fischer’s leg muscles and drained her arms of strength until she could barely feed herself. The loss of her only child had devastated her store of emotional strength and her thin face was haggard with hours of crying, but she insisted on staying to talk to them even though she was clearly at the end of her physical reserves.

  “You knew Lotty?” she asked. Her voice was raw with weeping.

  “Yes,” said Elaine. “Not very well, I’m afraid. Her work was more with the patrol units than the detective squad, but yes, we certainly knew who she was.”

  “We’re very sorry about this, Mrs. Fischer,” said Jim. “She was a nice person.”

  “Lotty hated coming home alone after one,” said Mrs. Fischer. “She tried not to show it, but she worried. And I worried, too, but you always think— And then—oh dear God! My baby! What will we do?”

  Fresh tears streamed from her eyes, but her arms were too weak for her to lift to her eyes the handkerchief she twisted helplessly in her hands. A gray-haired woman, their next-door neighbor, gently daubed the tears with a tissue.

  “There, there, love,” she crooned.

  An attractive brunette who looked closer to Lotty’s age came in from the kitchen with a lunch tray. Mrs. Fischer let the young woman hold the mug of tomato soup to her lips and took a small swallow, but she pulled her head away from the sandwich.

  “I can’t,” she said in a shaky voice. “Thank you, Marla, but I just can’t. Give it to Win.”

  They could see that Mr. Fischer wasn’t hungry either. Then his eyes met his wife’s. “Right,” he said with mock heartiness. “We have to keep up our strength. I’ll eat this if you’ll take your soup. Deal?”

  “Deal,” she said, and let the young woman help her with another swallow. “I’ll finish it later,” she promised and turned back to Albee and Lowry.

  “Lotty wasn’t just our daughter, you see. She was our best friend, too, and she used to share things that happened at work. Her office was right there behind the booking desk and she heard most of what went on, so I know that a lot of parents, when their kids get booked for things, they’ll come to the desk sergeant and swear on a stack of Bibles that their kids never did anything wrong in their whole lives. Lotty told me that. So I do understand why police officers might get cynical when they hear parents say things like this. But I swear to you, our Lotty—”

  Her voice broke and the neighbor started to wipe her eyes again, but Mrs. Fischer jerked her head back. “Our Lotty never did anything bad to anybody in her life. If you knew her, then you know she was always looking to help people. You ask anybody. Right, Marla? Marla will tell you.”

  The younger woman nodded.

  “What about men?” asked Elaine Albee. “Was she seeing anyone?”

  “No,” said Mrs. Fischer and again Marla confirmed it. “Not since the end of the summer.”

  They asked for and were given the man’s name, but he was described as someone six foot one and built like a football tackle. Besides, he’d met another girl and had moved to the Bronx to be near her. Since then, there’d been no one else romantically involved in Lotty’s life. No torch-bearers, no disappointed lovers.

  Further questioning brought no more names.

  Except for the change in her schedule, Lotty had loved her job, had spoken well of all her coworkers, and had gone off to work the night before in her new red coat without a care in the world—at least none that she’d voiced to family or friends.

  The two detectives rose to go and Marla went with them after promising the Fischers to come back that evening. As they waited for the elevator at the end of the hall, Elaine and Jim pressed her again on the question of male friends.

  “A friendly young woman like that, you’re sure there wasn’t someone she was seeing, someone maybe her parents wouldn’t approve of?”

  “Never. Oh, there might have been a couple of guys at work that Lotty could’ve liked, but she wouldn’t let herself get interested in anybody right now,” said Marla. “See, she was really pretty except for her nose, but most guys couldn’t see past it. We talked it all out in August after Sid dumped her.

  “She said there was no point spending money on fancy clothes or makeup, and why go out with guys just to get dumped again as soon as a prettier face came by? She decided she wasn’t going to get involved with anybody again till she’d saved up enough for a nose job, and that was going to be this summer.”

  New York is a collection of parallel villages and the inhabitants of each can be surprisingly parochial. Most New Yorkers rarely venture outside the parameters defined by work and home. They use the same bus or subway route to travel back and forth, they patronize particular dry cleaners, hairstylists or grocery stores in their neighborhood, they often wait till a movie opens at one of the theaters within a five- or six-block radius, they choose a park or beach as “their” park or beach, and they frequent one particular library branch instead of another that might have better hours or a larger selection. They do these things with such regularity that they keep running into the same people over and over, citizens of the same village by virtue of having made similar choices.

  This is why, in a city of seven million inhabitants, New Yorkers constantly amaze their small-town friends when they walk down a teeming Manhattan street and greet as many familiar faces as would the friends themselves back home.

  Every New Yorker knows his own subway line, of course, and can ride it with his eyes closed, keeping tabs on where he is by the squeals in the curves and whether the doors open up on the left or right. Most commuters can fall asleep on the train and wake up the instant the train pulls into their stop. But when faced with the need to get from a familiar place to one unfamiliar, even New Yorkers ask for directions. Those detailed maps are not placed in every car solely for the use of tourists.

  As the Seventh Avenue local rumbled along beneath Broadway, Jim Lowry, a confirmed East Sider ever since he left his parents’ Pennsylvania apple farm, hung onto an upright steel pole and studied the map.

  “We change at Times Square,” said Elaine Albee, denizen of the West Side, as she placidly added to he
r notes.

  “Just checking. I always get screwed up taking the shuttle.”

  From the car behind theirs, a slender black man entered and began to coax an oddly appealing tune from a long wooden recorder. He wore brown wool socks pulled up over his pantlegs and lashed with leather thongs. His shaggy brown jacket was tied across his thin shoulders like a cape and he wore a brown slouch hat that almost covered dark eyes dancing with mischievous merriment. An impudent child of Pan, he paused in front of Elaine and began to pipe an elusively familiar melody.

  Jim had adopted the I-don’t-see-a-thing blank stare of jaded New Yorkers, and the piper glanced from his stony face to Elaine’s attentive smile. Elaine laughed out loud when she realized the name of the tune; and as he finished and swept off his hat, she gladly tossed in several of the loose coins she carried in her pockets for street performers who touched or amused her.

  “What was he playing?” asked Jim when the musician had passed into the next car; but Elaine shook her head and laughed again as their train slid into the Times Square station.

  Despite his name, Steven Greenapple did not look like a sylvan wanderer. If anything, he appeared stolid and unimaginative when they got off the train at the subway station near their office and spotted him waiting on the platform. A stocky man, with a broad plain face, he wore the usual blue uniform of the Transit Authority police. But the T.A. clerk to whom they’d spoken earlier had described Greenapple as a serious enthusiast of the city’s underground spaces—the abandoned “ghost stations” or miles of unused tunnels—and he did look disappointed when he realized they merely wanted to locate a specific person, not book a guided tour of the tunnels in this area.

  “We’re looking for someone who would have been in a position to see the platform,” Jim explained, as Elaine walked down to the very end and peered into the darkness of the dirty black tunnel. “Aren’t there ledges and niches just beyond the light?”