Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald)

by Maron, Margaret

  To tell the truth, thought Lotty, she wasn’t all that crazy about taking the subway home alone herself. That was the only drawback with this position. She liked the hours, had asked for them in fact so that her invalid mother never had to be alone except for that half-hour gap between the time she had to leave for work and the time her father got home from his own job.

  It was supposed to be a four-to-midnight shift like the standard police rotation, but because the computer section was understaffed, she had been on six-to-two for the last week and a half. This meant going down into a subway station that was even more deserted than at midnight when others on the regular rotation might also be homeward bound. Certainly no rush hour crowds at two A.M. and no safety in numbers.

  Once or twice, one of the guys working midnight-to-eight had walked her down and waited till the train came and then made sure she was in a car with a conductor. Usually though, she chickened out and took a bus. It was three times as slow, but felt six times safer.

  She’d been promised that her four-to-midnight would be restored as soon as they hired more people. By the end of the month, for sure, Personnel had promised. Like summer, it couldn’t come too soon for Lotty.

  She entered the building and flashed a friendly smile at the familiar face of the uniformed officer behind the high booking desk.

  5:58. She’d made it with two minutes to spare.

  Across the drafty entrance hall, four blue-clad officers waited for the elevator and a couple of them teased her about cutting it close.

  Lotty laughed, loosened her coat and pulled back the scarf. Her long chestnut hair gleamed in the overhead light and the delicate scent of her floral shampoo mingled with the men’s after-shave and the smell of gun oil and leather. She was not beautiful. Her nose was much too big for her small face and she still struggled with acne, but her body was sweetly shaped, her smile came easily, she was younger than the other civilian clerks who worked in this building, and she had always been as friendly as a two-month-old puppy.

  This was her fourth year on the job, and she still loved it. Loved the horseplay and us-against-them feeling of solidarity, the excitement of helping an ongoing investigation even if her part was mostly simple number-crunching: license checks, arrest records, the serial numbers on stolen goods.

  As the elevator doors opened, an older uniformed officer emerged. “Hey, Lotty,” he said. “You gonna have time to check out somebody for me tonight?”

  “If it’s as slow as last night, sure, Wally,” she answered. “Might be after ten though.”

  “That’s okay.”

  They went into the small room behind the main desk where her terminal was located; and while Lotty hung her coat and scarf on a nearby hook and put her purse and supper in the drawer of her desk, Officer Wally Abronski scribbled two names on her pad.

  “This is the kid that my daughter’s started seeing and this is his old man. I just want to make sure he’s okay, you know?”

  “No problem,” she assured him, settling into her chair.

  She cleared the computer screen, typed in the four digits of her personal security code number and reached for the first arrest worksheet of the night. The digital clock above her desk registered 18:00:59 and she mentally translated it into civilian time: fifty-nine seconds past six P.M.

  Lotty’s fingers danced upon the keyboard and no premonitions troubled her thoughts. As she entered arrests and ran mechanical checks distanced from the dark deeds she recorded by a subconscious awareness that she sat in a warm, well-lighted building peopled by police officers who would, in theory, lay down their lives for her life, Lotty Fischer felt blissfully safe and protected.

  CHAPTER 5

  [Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

  At the academy, they tell us every life’s got equal value.

  Sounds nice but like so many nice-sounding things, it ain’t necessarily so. A rich man’s murder gets more attention than a poor man’s, white gets more than black unless the newspapers and TV get into it, and when a cop gets himself killed—even if the cop’s an old fart like Michael Cluett—the investigation takes precedence over every routine homicide already in the works. Labs process physical evidence quicker, FBI checks go faster, and the man’s body gets posted and released to the undertaker in hours.

  Before leaving my office to direct the search of the mucky bottom beneath the footbridge across Sheepshead Bay, I’d already gotten a phone call from the M.E.’s office with their preliminaries. An inch-by-inch examination of the bridge gave us nothing; but I knew that by tomorrow morning—tomorrow evening at the latest—I’d find on my desk all the printouts of any computer records the FBI had on that palm-size Browning semi-automatic we pulled from the inlet. Nothing much to tell the family yet. At least I wouldn’t have to stonewall questions about when the undertaker could claim the body.

  It was just past sunset—or what would’ve been sunset if the sun’d ever made it through the frigid gray sky—as Hy Davidowitz and I got out of our unmarked car and walked down to the two-family house off Hampton Avenue that Cluett and his wife had shared with her brother and his family. Two blue-and-whites were double-parked in front.

  “Days are getting longer,” Davidowitz said. His dark droopy mustache gives his round face a vague resemblance to Fu Manchu. At thirty-seven he’s built like one of those blue steel mailboxes you find on every other street corner and he’s been just as solid whenever I’ve needed him.

  “Soon be spring again,” I agreed. The years keep getting shorter the older I get.

  Somebody’d hung a big showy spray of white chrysanthemums and stiff white satin ribbons beside the front door just in case the neighbors couldn’t guess by all the cars and steady stream of people in and out that there’d been a death in the house.

  As we approached the steps, a couple of uniforms came through the doorway. Dark blue caps were pulled low against the frigid February twilight. One slim, a rookie about twenty-five; the other a middle-aged harness bull grown bulky on the job.

  “Hello, Sarge,” they said. “Davidowitz.”

  I couldn’t remember the older officer’s name but knew he was from an adjacent precinct. We stopped to talk a minute before ringing the bell.

  “How’re they doing in there?” Hy Davidowitz asked him.

  “’Bout like you’d expect,” he answered. His colleague zipped his black leather jacket and pulled the collar up around his ears. “His children are doing okay, but Irene keeps breaking up. Married forty-two years—” He shook his head. “It blows a big hole in her life.”

  “Any leads yet?” asked the younger officer. “We heard you found the gun.”

  “The lab says it looks like he bought it with a .380 JHP and we got a .380 auto out of the bay,” I answered. We did a shuffly version of the Texas two-step and moved past each other so that Davidowitz and I stood at the half-open door while the other two paused on the walk. “The confirm’ll probably be there by the time we get back to the shop and we’ve already put it on the wire.”

  In the chilly night air, those chrysanthemums by the door smelled like every funeral I’ve ever been to. A sort of crisp vegetable odor like the celery and parsley at Kwan Te’s grocery around the corner from my house. Not unpleasant exactly, but nothing to do with the smell of real flowers and certainly nothing to soothe or comfort a person. Not like the flowers around my granny’s front porch when my sister and I were kids and our parents sent us to spend the summer down on her New Jersey truck farm. Her hard black hands’d had green fingertips and she’d grown lavender and stock, washtubs full of petunias, masses of sweet peas, lilacs and spicy carnations in the spring, followed by roses that perfumed the hot summer days and night-blooming nicotiana.

  Quick takes of high school botany flicked through my head, along with muddled thoughts of ozone layers, pesticides, and genetic engineering. What’s been done to flowers that they never smell sweet anymore?

  Inside the house was what I expected: living room and dining room ja
mmed with people, one or two uniforms, but mostly civilians.

  And mostly women. Birth and death, it’s always mostly women. Cluett’s daughter and two daughters-in-law went back and forth almost like hostesses at a reception. While we were there, they kept a steady stream of strong hot tea coming, and every few minutes they came around to check that everybody had all the cream and sugar and paper napkins they needed. Keeping busy.

  I recognized Cluett’s sons with a couple of men who were later introduced as his brothers. The men seemed stiff and half-embarrassed. They moved awkwardly between the crowded living room and kitchen and talked in low tones with neighbors who brought sympathy and plates of food.

  Almost everyone had dirty smudges on their foreheads and at first I wondered if this was some sort of white-man’s funeral ritual I’d never heard of before. Eventually it hit me that today was Ash Wednesday. The whole family had been to mass and received the mark.

  Took me a minute to pick out Irene Cluett. She sat on the gold velour couch supported by a pair of horsey-faced women. One of them wore the self-important look of A Member of the Family. The other had on one of those chopped-off black things that passes these days for a nun’s veil. Irene Cluett sat between them with a glazed expression on her homely flat face. “Bearing up,” Granny would call it.

  Weird how much a husband and wife can start to look alike after years of marriage. She looked so much like Cluett she could have been his twin sister: thirty pounds overweight, slack gray hair cut short and parted on the same side, only hers was held in place by a plain blue plastic barrette. Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed and when she recognized us, her lower lip started quivering.

  I was Cluett’s boss, but I’d only met his wife at official social functions, occasional summer picnics in Prospect Park or at widely spaced PAL events. She’d been civil every time, no half-hidden hostility, but none of that buttering-up that some of the younger wives use when they think it’ll help their husbands’ careers.

  Maybe she’d always known Cluett’s career was past help.

  Tonight was partly an official expression of departmental sympathy and partly because Mrs. Cluett had to be questioned as a necessary part of our investigation. Two birds, one stone. I’d expected nothing more than formal politeness, and it surprised the hell out of me when she teared up at the sight of my face. She held out both hands to mine and put her broad cheek up for me to kiss it.

  “Oh, Jarvis!” she sobbed and clutched my hands in hers like we were old friends. “Are you handling his case personally? You’ll find who shot my poor Mickey down in cold blood, won’t you?”

  “You know we will, Mrs.—er, Irene,” I assured her awkwardly. To cover, I pulled Hy over. “You’ve met Detective Davidowitz, haven’t you?”

  Davidowitz took her limp hand. “Sorry for your troubles, ma’am.” (He’s picked up that useful, all-purpose condolence from the Irish.) “Bless you both,” she said brokenly. “This is my cousin, Sister Bernadette, and my brother’s wife, Gina Callahan.”

  The two women nodded and murmured, then the elderly nun began to hoist herself from the gold velour cushions. “Take my place, Sergeant Vaughn,” she offered.

  “No, no, you stay right here,” said Irene Cluett and called to her daughter, “Barbara, bring your father’s friends a chair.”

  People sprang for some of the folding chairs the undertaker had supplied, but I waved them aside. “Please don’t bother,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mrs.—um, Irene, but is there someplace we can talk alone?”

  The Cluett den had probably been the Cluett daughter’s bedroom.

  There was something girly about the rosebud wallpaper and even though the daybed was heaped with green cushions on a matching slipcover, you could tell it’d started life as a single bed.

  Four teenage kids, three boys and a girl, were sprawled before an expensive color television, but they jumped to their feet and edged past as their grandmother led us into the room.

  In front of the television were two white vinyl recliners separated by a lamp table that held the remote control, a box of Kleenex, and the only reading material I’d yet noticed in the whole house: a current TV Guide and a couple of National Enquirers. The wall above the television was plastered with family pictures: from turn-of-the-century photographs of stiff-faced old-timers to fat little Cluett grandbabies sitting on the laps of Easter Bunnies, Santa Clauses, and even a Saint Patrick’s Day leprechaun.

  The rose-sprigged wallpaper behind the two recliners was bare except for a brightly colored picture of the Sacred Heart. A pale-skinned, blond Christ, I noted, pissed at myself for noting. Jesus as Anglo-Saxon white bread instead of Semite bagel and how did that make Davidowitz feel?

  The fancy gold frame had some faded fronds of palm leaves sticking out of the top. Probably put up there on Palm Sunday a year ago and due to be replaced in a few weeks. Christmas didn’t seem like more than just a couple of weeks back and all of a sudden here it was Ash Wednesday again. Soon be spring.

  As if by habit, Irene Cluett headed straight to the first chair and patted the arm of the other white recliner. “Sit here, Jarvis,” she said.

  She didn’t have to tell me it was Cluett’s. I knew from the rump-sprung look of the seat that it had to be his favorite chair.

  Felt weird to put my skinny behind where his fat ass must have wallowed just last night, but I pulled the chair around to face her as Davidowitz lowered his bulky form gingerly onto the daybed.

  There was a pink crocheted afghan on the back of Irene’s chair and she draped it over her legs even though the room felt warm to me. I loosened my overcoat and stuffed my gloves in a pocket. Davidowitz slid out of his coat altogether. He took out one of the four or five rolled-up yellow legal pads we all go through on a case and smoothed it flat for taking notes.

  Without us asking, Irene had already started talking about Cluett’s last evening—the pot roast and potato dumplings she’d made for his supper—“He likes everything I cook but I do believe that’s really his favorite so I’m glad I fixed it. His last meal. He really enjoyed it, too. Only I made string beans and he always likes cabbage better even though it doesn’t agree with him.” She looked confidentially at Davidowitz. “Gas.”

  She described the television programs they’d watched, then how he’d gone out to walk the dog at eight-thirty.

  “Did he always walk the dog at the same time?” I asked.

  She pursed her thin lips in thought. “It depends. If he’s going over to Sheepshead for a beer, he usually leaves then. If it’s just to let Sheba do her duty, then he’ll stay on the block and go out around bedtime, ten-thirty or so.”

  “How often did he walk across the bay?”

  “Three or four nights a week,” she sighed. Her fingers were so swollen—arthritis?—that the joints looked like links of tiny little white bratwursts as she plucked at the flowers on the afghan in her lap. “What can I tell you? He’s not supposed to drink much on account of his weight pulling on his heart, but the doctor says he needs to walk and when he walks, he winds up over at the Shamrock. Most times it’s only one beer and out and I figure he probably walks that off coming home so it’s probably not all that bad for him, don’t you think? I mean just one beer?”

  “Probably not,” agreed Davidowitz. He’s the good-hearted one.

  We let her tell it in her own words—the way she’d gone to bed mad at Cluett when he didn’t come home by the usual ten-thirty, something that might happen once every three or four months. How the dog woke her up around midnight pawing at the back door, which had made her even madder.

  “Cold as it was, leaving Sheba outdoors like that? No consideration for a poor dumb animal. Not that she has to wait outside the Shamrock. They let her come in with Mickey in the wintertime if nobody complains, but still— Of course I didn’t know.” She wiped fresh tears from her eyes. “I thought he was probably too loaded to walk home so he’d gone to Barbara’s and Sheba’d gotten away from him and all the time I was mad
at him, he was lying out there on the freezing sidewalk and—”

  Irene fumbled for the box of tissues on the lamp table and loudly blew her nose. A minute later, her daughter pushed open the door and looked in. “You okay, Ma? Can I get you anything?”

  “No, no, I’m fine. Unless—” She looked at Davidowitz and me. “Don’t you want a cup of tea or something?”

  We declined. The daughter gave us worried glances, but left without saying anything else.

  We let Irene finish describing her night, how she’d phoned her daughter early this morning and how she’d felt when someone from the Six-Four rang her doorbell and gave her the bad news; then I asked, “Did he have any problems with anybody lately, Irene? Anybody that might have wanted to get back at him?”

  She cut her eyes at me sharply. “Wasn’t it a mugging?”

  I shrugged. “His pockets were empty. That’s why it took those rookies so long to identify him. But when we searched the bum that heard the shot, he had Mick’s watch and a handful of loose change. That’s all though. We found Mick’s wallet in the bay, near the gun. It still had forty-three dollars in it and all his credit cards.”

  “Not a mugging,” she repeated slowly. Her body had been a soft lump of flesh inside that shapeless dark wool dress. Now there was a hint of muscle that made her seem to sit a little straighter. “Somebody killed Mickey on purpose?”

  “We’re not ready to go that far yet,” I cautioned.

  She didn’t argue, just sat there thinking. I’d have said “cowlike” a minute earlier, now it felt more like those pale blue eyes were reading through a list of names, pause here, slide past whole columns there. She ticked them off on her fingers.

  “The head mechanic over at the Chrysler place. The car’s still under warranty but he don’t want to fix the power steering. Three-ten a month car payments and the thing turns like a tank, Mickey says. They had hard words Saturday. Mickey was going to take it in again tomorrow. He says—said—he’s going to give him one more chance and then he’s getting some of the guys from the beat to hassle him about cars double-parked on the sidewalk in front of the garage.”