07-Past Imperfect

by Margaret Maron

  By the end of their conference, Tillie was still unhappy about the situation; but he’d promised Sigrid that she could count on him to help keep up morale in their unit.

  Alone in her office again, Sigrid took an apple from her desk drawer and bit into it thoughtfully. She seldom went in for deliberate and conscious self-psychoanalyzing, but she knew now that she hadn’t avoided Cluett’s clumsy attempts at familiarity merely because she disliked the man personally. (Which she did, she reminded herself grimly.) She was sorry he’d been shot, but his death didn’t alter the facts of his life. He’d been lazy, sloppy, and nearly useless on her squad and she wasn’t going to elevate him to sainthood simply because he’d been killed.

  Nevertheless, that still small voice of conscience compelled her to admit—to herself, if to no one else—that she’d deliberately discouraged Cluett because he could have told her about the past, and she didn’t want to deal with whatever had happened between McKinnon and her father.

  Two days past her birthday though, and wasn’t it about time she finished growing up?

  The picture of Leif Harald lay sealed in an envelope in her desk drawer. Balancing the apple on top of her coffee mug so that sticky juices wouldn’t gum up any papers, Sigrid drew the silver-framed photograph from the envelope and looked around for a place to put it.

  She had done very little to personalize the small boxy office assigned to her when she arrived. The previous occupant had painted it off-white, a change from the dark and light tones of blue throughout the rest of the building, and a fluorescent light recessed behind frosted glass in the ceiling above lent an artificial brightness. There were the usual file cabinets, desk, and bookshelves; a swivel chair upholstered in black vinyl for herself, some mismated straight chairs for visitors. Except for an administrative flowchart, a map of the city, and a drawing of the five boroughs divided by precincts, the walls were bare. The window ledge behind her desk held a neat row of police manuals and bulletins, not plants or whimsical knickknacks.

  The only personal items visible were a brass lamp with a green glass shade, a large brassbound magnifying glass, the blue-green pottery coffee mug, and a small glass bowl that held a tangle of brass steel and silver puzzle rings which often served as worry beads for her fingers when her mind was elsewhere.

  She pushed aside the bowl of puzzle rings and set the picture there so that Leif Harald faced her. In uniform. He’d died in an ordinary business suit though, died a plainclothes detective. In some down-at-the-heels cheap hotel. Would he still be a blond Viking if he’d lived?

  She took another bite of apple and swiveled her chair around to look out at the cold crisp day. Thanks to snowplows and shovels, dirty snowbanks three and four feet high lined the curbs.

  Nothing stayed pristine in this city very long. Even things that started out pure and clean.

  The apple was her lunch and when she’d finished it, she swiveled back and dropped the core into her wastebasket.

  An empty wastebasket. Sometimes the cleaning crew were too damned efficient.

  Didn’t matter. Tillie had mentioned that the contact person for the Viking Association was a lieutenant over in the First Precinct. She pulled the phone to her. It took less than five minutes to track him down, to say, “My father might have been a member years ago. Can you give me the names of some members who would have known him?”

  CHAPTER 19

  Revving up for the turnaround shift was never easy, and Bernie Peters and Matt Eberstadt were both yawning as they checked in Saturday morning. Bernie had been up early with his infant son, and Matt’s cold seemed to be settling in his chest. There were bags under the older detective’s eyes and his long face looked almost haggard.

  “I’m gonna use some of the comp time I’ve got coming and take off early,” he told Bernie. “Frances’s plane gets into JFK at two and I want to pick her up.”

  “Sure,” said Bernie, riffling through the files on his desk. “Guess we’d better get statements from some of Caygill’s associates, see when they last saw him wearing that ring Cohen found in Jackson’s body.”

  Matt Eberstadt lifted a doughnut from the box, stared at it moodily and then put it back. Usually he could have eaten the whole box by himself. Today they looked as appetizing as wet sawdust. “Bernie?” he said.

  “Um?” His partner was busily jotting down names and addresses.

  “Yeah?” he asked as he opened another file folder.

  “Ah, never mind,” said Matt. “Shove some of that stuff over here and let’s see what’s on the docket for this morning.”

  Roman Tramegra had already written another four pages of Freeze Factor, the title he’d finally decided on, and was in the kitchen experimenting with a kiwi omelet when Sigrid came out to the kitchen at eight-fifteen looking for coffee. Not only was she dressed, she was dressed rather well in tailored black slacks, flat-heeled black leather shoes, a slate-blue tweed jacket Anne had given her for Christmas, and a white silk shirt with squared lapels. In one hand she carried a blue scarf, in the other a silver necklace shaped like a flat collar.

  Knowing how she often slept till noon when off-duty, Roman glanced first at the calendar and then at the clock. “This is Saturday, is it not?”

  “Don’t start with me, Roman,” she warned. She held out the scarf and necklace. “Which one?”

  “The necklace,” he answered promptly; but when she’d clipped it on, he cocked his head and examined the effect with a critical eye. “It’s nice, yet something’s lacking. More color?”

  She looped the blue scarf around her neck and tucked the ends inside her shirt.

  “No,” Roman decided. “That’s not right.”

  “Oh God!” she said and yanked it off again.

  “Wait, wait!” he said, suddenly inspired. “I have just the thing you need.”

  He hurried through the door to his quarters and soon returned with a dark wool tie. “Power red. All the TV anchors wear one.”

  Sigrid took it out to the hall mirror, buttoned her shirt all the way up to the top, slipped the tie under her collar, and promptly ran afoul of the knot.

  “No, no, no,” Roman called from the kitchen. “Leave your shirt open as it was before, with the necklace showing, and knot the tie below the vee.”

  Obediently, Sigrid did as she was told. It was difficult to get the square knot to come out flat and she wasn’t crazy about the way the ends drooped when she was finished. Especially since one end was wider than the other. “This isn’t working, Roman.”

  “Well, of course, it isn’t,” he rumbled in his deep voice, as he came out to supervise. “You’ve tied it like a Girl Scout’s neckerchief when you want a regular four-in-hand.”

  Her fingers were so clumsy trying to tie a four-in-hand at that length that Roman said, “Oh, do let me. Stand still now.”

  He unknotted her first effort and began anew. “Oh dear. Do you know, I’ve never done this for someone else. I shall have to—”

  Feeling like a child, Sigrid found herself staring into the mirror while Roman stood behind her, his arms encircling her thin body as he too looked in the mirror to tie a perfect knot: over, under, around, and through, so that the wide end fell properly over the narrow and the knot wound up precisely at the vee of her shirt.

  “There!” he said, stepping back. “You look quite nice. What is the occasion, may I ask?”

  Sigrid continued to gaze at her reflection. “The mirror cracked from side to side,” she quoted gloomily. “‘The curse has come upon me,’ cried/The Lady of Shalott.”

  “Ah,” Roman said with instant, and sympathetic, understanding. “A dental appointment.”

  “Worse,” she moaned. “A fashion appointment.”

  Clothes and cosmetics couldn’t have been further from Dinah Urbanska’s mind as the young detective jogged along the Promenade, a cantilevered esplanade built out over the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Today was warmer than yesterday even though the sun came and went fitfully. Another cold fron
t was supposed to roll in after midnight, but the morning weather report predicted a high of forty-five today. After the bone-numbing chill of the past few days, forty-five felt almost balmy.

  Even with no sunlight to sparkle on the water, the view from high above the piers was spectacular: Brooklyn Bridge to the north, wearing its hundred years with massive grace; the towers of lower Manhattan directly across the East River; and Governors Island just to the south, with the bay and the Statue of Liberty beyond.

  The Promenade was about a third of a mile long and each time she reached one end, Dinah usually stopped and jogged in place, pumping the half-pound weights on her wrists as she savored the view. Although she’d grown up in Long Island’s Levittown, Dinah was as dazzled by the city as any starstruck kid who ever fled a farm. She had made it as far as a tiny studio apartment on the edge of Brooklyn Heights and hoped to find someplace affordable in Manhattan before another summer was gone, if—and a very big if, she warned herself—she didn’t screw up again and get busted back to patrol duty.

  Not that it was her fault, strictly speaking. Cluett had been the more experienced one on the case. He was the one responsible for maintaining the chain of evidence. Yet she was the one who’d had to accept the command discipline and the mark against her record.

  Every time she remembered Cluett, she got angry all over again.

  Why’d he want to hang on for forty anyhow? Police work wasn’t for stupid old men too lazy to carry their own weight.

  She turned and began jogging toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Its stones were as gray as the sky above it. Snow lay melting in dirty piles on either side of the esplanade and wind stirred the bare branches of the trees beyond. More snow predicted before morning, thought Dinah. She and Sam Hentz went on duty at four. With luck, it would hold off till their tour was over.

  Thinking of Sam Hentz made her warm all over, made jogging feel like dancing. Her ponytail streamed out behind her like a golden mane as her sturdy legs, sheathed in electric-pink lycra, pounded along the Promenade. Such a difference working with him. Silly the way she’d been so scared of him at first, when now—

  Oh, not that Sam gave a good goddamn about her. She knew he didn’t. Not yet anyhow. Nevertheless, she couldn’t stop daydreaming about him, wishing he could know that she’d do anything for him.

  Anything.

  Despite the gray skies, Sam Hentz was sorely tempted to put the top down as he tooled back across the George Washington Bridge in a sleek black Jaguar, returning from his aunt’s house a few miles up the Hudson. Half the fun of driving a racy car was the feel of wind streaming across one’s face. He thought of Elaine Albee, always mouthing about a Lamborghini, and wondered what she’d think of his XJS if she saw him driving it.

  A red Lamborghini yet, he thought scornfully. Black would be miles too subtle for her. With his free hand, he stroked the soft butterscotch leather of the other seat. If Albee ever did get a Lamborghini, she’d probably have the interior reupholstered in leopard skin.

  Like a cubic zirconia in a platinum setting, Imagine You! was tucked into a second-floor suite with floor-to-ceiling mirror glass windows that fronted onto an exclusive section of Fifth Avenue in the mid-Fifties.

  At one minute before ten, Sigrid stepped out of a brass and chrome elevator that was more burnished than a piece of high-tech jewelry and pulled open a glass door etched like crystal with the image of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis.

  Sigrid considered herself above such trite and obvious symbolism—were clients really supposed to feel like lowly caterpillars whose only hope of metamorphosing into exotic butterflies lay beyond these crystal doors?—yet as soon as she stepped inside, she was immediately intimidated by the waves of high-priced glamour that seemed to radiate from the very walls.

  The tiny reception area was sheathed in space-expanding mirrors, polished black marble and chrome. The mirrors were subtly etched with fine-line impressions of more butterflies. Some drifted in solitary flight through the middle of one panel; in another, several hovered near the floor.

  Every angled surface seemed engineered to reflect and multiply the receptionist’s image. A strikingly beautiful redhead, she was the only color in the room but she burned with it: a flaming yellow jacket over a purple minidress belted with fire-engine red patent leather. It was an eye-jangling combination yet somehow, on her, the blazing cacophony of hot colors worked.

  She smiled at Sigrid. “May I help you?”

  Sigrid identified herself. “I have a ten o’clock appointment.”

  “Certainly, Miss Harald.” She touched a button on the shiny chrome desk top. “Carina? Miss Harald is here for her makeover.”

  She touched another button and a section of the mirrored wall slid aside noiselessly. “Go through please, Miss Harald.”

  Carina was a platinum blonde clone of the receptionist, dressed in a bright red jumpsuit. She led the way down an all-white hall to a small cubicle which she unlocked before handing the key to Sigrid.

  “Please remove your outer garments and all jewelry, especially any wedding or engagement rings, and put on the robe and slippers which you will find inside.” She smiled and fluted in all the right places, but it was obviously a much-repeated spiel since Sigrid wore no rings of any kind. “Then please lock the door and continue down the hall to the preparation area.”

  This was beginning to take on the aspects of a visit to the doctor, thought Sigrid. She slipped off her top clothes, taking pains not to disturb the perfect knot of Roman’s red tie, and put on the calf-length white terry robe and cotton scuffs.

  The preparation area had aspects of an ordinary beauty salon: five chairs in front of a bank of sinks and mirrors. Again, everything was gleaming white except for the attendants, who wore linen jumpsuits, each in a different primary or secondary color as pure and unsophisticated as a child’s crayon.

  Three of the chairs were already filled, one by Anne Harald, who smiled at her in the mirror but said nothing to give away their relationship to the others, which was one of Sigrid’s conditions for coming. Talking was not encouraged at this point anyhow. Carina had pinned a name tag to Sigrid’s robe that gave her first name only. The other three women were introduced as Gillian, Anne, and Phyllis.

  “From this point on, Berthelot insists on first names only,” she explained. “He doesn’t wish to be distracted by stereotypes of ancestry. And please be very careful not to mention your marital status or profession either. Only your looks count here.”

  As she spoke, she brushed Sigrid’s fine dark hair away from her face and slipped on a white bandeau that held the hair back and framed her face like a bandage. “The first thing we do is strip your face of all makeup.”

  “I’m not wearing anything except lipstick,” Sigrid said.

  Carina merely smiled and adjusted the white vinyl chair to a reclining position. “Lean back, please.”

  Resigned, Sigrid lay back in the chair and closed her eyes as Carina smoothed on warm cleansing cream and then covered her face with a hot towel.

  “Ah, that feels heavenly,” said Phyllis from the next chair.

  Faces stripped, the four women were led into a circular mirrored conference room where a small ebullient man of late middle age awaited them. Berthelot’s obviously dyed jet-black hair had receded to the top of his squarish head, but what remained was thick and brushed straight back from the hairline to hang collar length at the nape of his neck. His naturally sallow skin was deeply tanned and his dark eyes swept over them with apparent delight and admiration.

  “Oh marvelous!” he cried, jumping up and rushing around the table to welcome them. “A Summer, an Autumn, and two Winters! Come mes chéries! We shall have such fun discovering the glorious you nature intended you to be!”

  It was going to be an awfully long day, thought Sigrid.

  In his Greenwich Village apartment, McKinnon was finally doing something about the ill-fitting sliding glass door that led to his small balcony. In summer, the breeze
s that wafted around his balcony could be delightful: the winter version whistling through the cracks had sent his latest heating bill over the moon.

  When the rent-controlled apartment that he’d originally shared with a string of different roommates came up for sale a few years back, McKinnon had bought it. Ever since Leif Harald moved out to marry Anne Lattimore, he’d lived alone here, content with the location, the neighbors, the apartment itself, except when subjected to the annoyances of ownership.

  Year before last, when he’d first noticed the drafts, the winter had been mild enough to let him ignore the problem. Last year, he’d simply taped the cracks over with masking tape. This proved effective only so long as he didn’t want to use the terrace. Unfortunately New York could string two or three warm days together even in January and bingo! There went another whole roll of masking tape.

  This year, he had launched a two-prong attack: self-adhesive foam weather stripping and heavy-duty insulated drapes. Yet there was still a discernible draft.

  Which was why he had spent the last hour down at the lumberyard pricing new double-glazed French doors. He could remember when a new car could be bought for what they were going to charge to take away the old door and install the new; but this time he’d closed his eyes and written a check for the down payment. It was tentatively agreed that carpenters would arrive on the first of April.

  In the meantime, McKinnon had stopped off at the hardware store for another roll of masking tape and was halfway through the process of applying it when the phone rang.

  “Yeah?” He tucked the phone under his chin and continued taping the door.

  “McKinnon? Mac McKinnon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mac, this is Tom Oersted. Remember me?”

  “Yeah, sure Tom,” he said, surprised. “Been a long time.”

  “Ten years or more,” said Oersted. “How’ve you been?”