Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald)

by Maron, Margaret

  “Oh sure,” said Greenapple. “We just discovered like a three-room apartment at the Franklin Avenue station over in Brooklyn—complete with a La-Z-Boy recliner, hibachi pot and a pile of Wall Street Journals. But if your killer was standing about here when he pushed her—” The bloodstains down on the ties below marked the spot. “—then a witness down there wouldn’t have been close enough to get a make on him.”

  He stood quite still, considering the station. “You sure he wasn’t stretched out on the bench there? Sometimes people think a drunk is just a pile of papers or old rags till they go to sit down.”

  “Eight people plus the trainman and the conductor swear that the station was empty except for the victim and the man who pushed her,” said Elaine as she rejoined them. “The only reason we know this Gerald Byrd was even—”

  “Gerald Byrd?” asked Greenapple. “Now where have I heard that—”

  A broad grin suddenly lit his homely face.

  “You know the name?” she asked.

  “Jerry the Canary!” he exclaimed. “Has to be.”

  He turned and seemed to examine the main entrance. “You’re right about most guys flopping down in the tunnel somewhere; but Jerry’s what you might call a bird of a different feather altogether. C’mon.”

  He strolled along slowly as he talked, looking up into the sooty girders overhead, until he halted directly in front of the turnstiles.

  “I was right,” he grinned. “Look!”

  Jim and Elaine followed his pointing finger and saw an irregular hump among the straight edges of filthy black I-beams and crossbraces, about fifteen feet up. Unless one were looking for it, the bundle of dark rags—clothes? blankets?—was completely unnoticeable.

  “Jerry’s the only one I know who builds nests,” said Greenapple. Proprietary pride shone in his voice.

  “Jerry the Canary has a less-than-gilded cage,” said Elaine, peering up at the bedding he’d abandoned in his sudden decampment last night.

  “Oh, that’s not how he got the name,” Greenapple told her. “I doubt if many cops know that Jerry never sleeps at street level. They call him the Canary because he panhandles for money by doing bird imitations. He can sound like any bird you want to name, and he’s got pictures, too. Goes over pretty good. In nice weather. People don’t stand around in the winter for him, so he works the trains till we chase him. Usually he has enough to rent a flop. With all the SRO’s going, though . . .”

  Greenapple’s voice trailed off, but it was a familiar situation and one that was getting worse. There were many complex reasons why more people became homeless and took to the streets each year, but one big factor was that scores of buildings throughout the city had converted from low-income single-room occupancy to upscale, high-priced co-ops. As a result, hundreds now occupied space that had once housed thousands.

  Jim Lowry stepped off the short distance to where Lotty Fischer and her killer had stood and looked back up at Gerald Byrd’s nest. They would pull a tape on it, but he’d bet it was no more than forty feet.

  No wonder the homeless man had seized the opportunity to get away before someone spotted him. From that perch, he certainly could have had a clear bird’s-eye view of the killer.

  CHAPTER 15

  [Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

  The concrete Cluett drive was separated from the Gelson blacktop by a two-foot strip of frozen grass; and the two garages at the rear of the yards were like Siamese twins sharing the same wall. Both garages had been built back when cars were a lot shorter and taller. Cluett had bumped out the front wall so he could still garage his car, but the Gelsons had just blacktopped their whole backyard for a car park.

  As I pulled up nose-to-nose with a shiny late-model station wagon parked at the front curb, I figured family and friends must still be offering Irene physical support. Three more cars lined the Cluett drive, and someone had swept and shoveled the sidewalk.

  Nobody’d laid a shovel on the Gelson drive yet, though a car had driven in after the snow started, judging by the fresh tread marks. A beat-up Volkswagen, oversized tires, no fenders. A purple paint job that must have come out of a spray can. Dozens of faded plastic flowers epoxied to the roof and hood. Probably looked like hot shit at Plum Beach in August, but on this gloomy February day under a layer of pristine snow, it just looked like shit.

  I’d deliberately parked on the wrong side of the street and I flipped down the sun visor to warn any cruising snow plows that this particular vehicle was on OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS and better not get plowed under.

  Both houses were two-story detached bricks that sat back from the street in a yardful of fifty-year-old trees and shrubs. Yuppification had so far missed this half of the block. Not that these houses looked shabby—the bushes were pruned, the shutters and trim weren’t yelling for paint—but they were dowdy. No structural changes had been made since the front walls were “modernized” with picture window surgery in the fifties.

  No response when I pushed the Gelsons’ front bell, so I trudged down the drive and around to the back door and saw that someone had recently walked from the garish little VW to the back stoop and from the stoop, back and forth to a small door cut into one of the garage’s original old-fashioned double doors. I followed the footprints and rapped on the smaller door.

  “Who is it?” called a male voice.

  “Police.”

  “Police?” The voice suddenly sounded younger and I heard scrambling noises like boxes or heavy furniture were being shoved around inside the garage.

  “Hey, man, you got a search warrant?” the voice demanded. Everybody knows his rights these days. Too bad they don’t care as much about the responsibilities that go with rights.

  “Do I need one?”

  The door opened a narrow crack and one blue eye squinted at me. A warm sweetish smell went drifting past. “What do you want?”

  “Edward Gelson?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want to ask you a few questions about Michael Cluett.”

  “What if I told you to go jerk yourself?”

  “Then I send a couple of officers over and they’ll bring you to me at the station,” I said pleasantly.

  The blue eye tried to glare, couldn’t hold it.

  “What’s it going to be, Eddie?” I was getting impatient. “I’m not here to bust you for smoking a little pot; but you keep me freezing my butt out here in this snowstorm much longer and I’m gonna haul your butt down to the station.”

  The door swung open and the mush head stepped back to let me in. Your typical all-American asshole. From the tip of his little pug nose to his druggie little daydreams of making it as a rock star.

  Not that he’d left any joints left lying around; only the tattletale smell that permeated the place. His playhouse matched the VW: dingy gray carpet, lumpy green couch pushed against one wall, rock posters on the pressed fiberboard panels that provided soundproofing for the drums and guitars arranged around a synthesizer.

  “Who plays?” I asked mine host.

  “Me and my friends,” the kid said sullenly.

  Irene Cluett said Eddie Gelson was seventeen, but this guy was built like a man five years older. Nearly six feet tall and at least a seventeen-inch neck. Real biceps under a loose orange-and-black Princeton sweatshirt; muscular thighs and calves inside his tight jeans.

  Beyond the couch, I saw a weight bench with a set of barbells resting across the steel support. A chinning bar hung from two heavy hooks overhead. “You and your friends work out, too?”

  “Sometimes. What’d you want to ask me about Cluett?”

  I circled the garage and inspected everything before I sat down on the couch in front of a small electric heater with red-hot coils. “How come your friends aren’t here today? Lifting weights, beating on the drums?”

  “There’s a wake next door, for chrissake.” He picked up an acoustic guitar, perched on an arm of the couch, and began to strum the shiny steel strings.

  �
�Yeah, but from what I hear that shouldn’t make a difference. You weren’t exactly Mick Cluett’s favorite neighbor.”

  “Tell it to my old man,” Eddie Gelson muttered as idle chords filled the garage. “Look, we weren’t trying to bug him, you know? We put up soundproofing, kept the amps turned down, and we didn’t play after ten. What more’d he want? Don’t we have rights, too? I mean, Jesus H. Christ!” His hand crashed the guitar in a burst of ear-jangling discord.

  “You’re a big kid,” I said. “Tall as Cluett, too. Ever try to punch him out?”

  “Hell, no, man!” His hand fell away from the guitar and he sounded shocked. “My dad would’ve killed me.”

  I tried to recall the last time I questioned a kid who would admit that he gave a happy damn about how his father might react.

  “When did you see Cluett last?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Monday, maybe.”

  “You sure you didn’t see him night before last?”

  “When he got it? No way, man. It was too cold to go out and my drummer has the flu. Besides, I had a history test yesterday and I stayed in to study.”

  “Your parents will confirm this?”

  “Sure.” The baby blues shone with such blatant honesty that I knew he was lying.

  “When will they be home?”

  “Mom doesn’t get in before six, and my dad’s working late this week.”

  “I can come back,” I told him.

  “Look, I really was here the whole night,” Eddie said. “But out here, not in the house. It’s more private. I study, practice my guitar, listen to my tapes—”

  “—smoke a little pot?” I needled.

  “—and sometimes I fall asleep out here. My folks turn in early and this way, I don’t bother them. But their bedroom’s on the back here and they can see my light and they’d hear if I cranked my car. It roars like a tiger.”

  He seemed to think this clinched his alibi.

  “They sleep with the windows open these cold nights?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  “So they wouldn’t know if you slipped out and walked over to Sheepshead Bay?”

  “Walked?”

  I had to laugh. This generation will jog, run, or lift weights till sweat pours from their bodies, as long as the purpose is purely exercise. If it’s a matter of getting from point A to point B, however, feet don’t enter into the calculation except as applied to gas pedal or brake.

  “Cluett walked back and forth all the time,” I said.

  “Yeah, well,” said Eddie Gelson, like that just proved what a jerk Mick Cluett had been.

  He went back to playing chords on his guitar; and no matter how hard I pounded, he stuck to his story. Friends had dropped by for a while after dinner; otherwise, he’d been there alone the whole evening from eight till around two A.M.

  “Studying for six straight hours?”

  “I told you. Sometimes I fall asleep. I remember hearing the headlines at eleven and then the next thing I knew it was ten till two. I unplugged everything and went in to bed. And you can ask my mom about that, because she yelled at me about it yesterday morning, okay?”

  For the moment, I knew it’d have to be.

  Back outside in the freezing wind, I decided that as long as I was here, I might as well see Irene Cluett again. See if she knew anything about whoever it was Cluett had expected to see at the Shamrock.

  I cut across both drives with snow stinging my face; but just as I raised my hand to knock on Irene’s back door, it was opened by a stocky man with a broom in his hand. He wore black knitted mittens and stocking hat and seemed as startled as me, so startled that he gave a high-pitched giggle.

  “Oops! Didn’t know anybody was out here. I was just coming to sweep the steps. Keep it clear. Easier to sweep than to shovel and scrape, right?” He giggled again.

  “Right,” I said. “I’m here to see Irene. She in?”

  Before the man could answer, a little boy pushed past him and began to whine, “Daddy, Tiffy won’t let me play. She says I’m a baby. Make her let me play. I want to play!”

  “In a minute, Shawn, all right?”

  “But I want to pla-ay. Now!”

  “Daddy’s talking to someone, Shawn.” He half-turned and called into the kitchen, “Marie, you wanna call Shawn back in there before he’s up all night with an earache again? Go to Mommy, Shawn. She’ll play with you.”

  “She will not!” said a shrill female voice that was almost drowned out by the brat yelling, “But I wanna play with the others.”

  I leaned against the porch railing and waited for somebody to take charge.

  The door was suddenly yanked open and an annoyed young woman said, “Shawn, you get your tail in here right this minute before I—” Then she saw me and raised an eyebrow at her husband. He giggled nervously. “Honey, this is somebody to see Irene. Mr.— I’m sorry. I didn’t get the name.”

  “Vaughn,” I said. “Detective Vaughn.”

  “Oh, sure,” said the young woman. She picked up her whining son, settled him on her hip and said, “Irene’s in the den. Come on in.”

  She took me past people drinking tea at the kitchen table and into the den where I’d spoken to Irene the evening before.

  She was lying back in the same white vinyl recliner. Pink chenille robe, fuzzy pink bedroom slippers, and her feet up on the footrest. A teenage granddaughter was curling her flat gray hair and I remembered that tonight was the first night of the official wake at a nearby funeral home.

  Again she greeted me warmly and I told her why I’d returned. She was surprised to hear that Mickey might have gone out to the Shamrock expecting to meet someone and she had no idea who it could’ve been.

  “But I know you won’t give up till you find out.” She squeezed my hand hard. “And you’ll be at the funeral parlor tonight, won’t you? Such beautiful flowers the department sent. They let me see him this morning. He looks good, Jarvis. Dress uniform. Wait’ll you see him.”

  Her eyes filled with tears.

  They were going to wake him three nights and I knew I’d have to put in an appearance at least once, but the last thing I wanted to do that night was fight my way back through a snowstorm to the funeral home to see a stiff Mick Cluett in his dress uniform. Before I could think up a tactful excuse, Irene was distracted by her daughter, who came in with three dresses that looked like army tents on coat hangers.

  “Which one you want to wear tonight, Ma?”

  I left with Irene deciding whether dark red, dark green or navy blue was best for the first of three nights.

  At the front door, I was waylaid by the guy with the broom.

  “I think you want to talk to me,” he said. Again that high-pitched nervous giggle.

  “I do?” I pulled on my gloves and was winding around my neck the blue cashmere muffler Terry made me for Christmas.

  “I’m Neal O’Shea, Mickey’s cousin. Marie—that’s my wife—she heard that Irene told you Mickey and me were on the outs.” He gave the top steps a halfhearted swipe with the broom.

  I looked at him with more interest. About five eight, I estimated. Probably late twenties or early thirties.

  Neal O’Shea was the first person I’d yet met that came close to Kitty Jozell’s vague description of the person who’d met Cluett after he left the Shamrock Tuesday night. A few inches shorter, stocky but still thinner than Cluett and certainly young enough to walk across a street vigorously. He even had the black knitted cap.

  The wind was biting, but I sensed that O’Shea preferred to keep our conversation outside, away from the ears of his relatives.

  “Why don’t we go warm up my car?” I suggested.

  O’Shea followed me down the walk, sweeping the snow as we went. At the curb, the wind had begun building low drifts that were already higher than my boot tops. The plows hadn’t hit the side streets yet and the white stuff was nearly three inches deep on the level. No sign of letup either. If anything, it was snowing even h
arder.

  The department-issued car was like the inside of a refrigerator and I had to jiggle the vents to get the defroster going. O’Shea swept off the windshield and back window, then he propped his broom against the fender and crawled in beside me.

  “I don’t know why Irene wanted to tell you that about Mickey and me,” he griped. For a minute he sounded like his son the whiner.

  “She only said that you resented it when Cluett asked you to repay the money he’d loaned you,” I said.

  “Yeah?” O’Shea looked relieved. “The way Marie heard it, she was practically accusing me of killing Mickey myself.” He giggled. “Me a killer!”

  “So there weren’t any hard feelings?”

  “Not like you’re talking about. I mean, no man likes to have somebody dunning him every week, right? Mickey knew I was good for it. But I got laid off at the warehouse at Thanksgiving and we got behind in the bills. And there was Christmas, then Shawn got sick—nothing serious, just earaches, thank God—but you know what doctors and antibiotics cost, right? Always something with kids.

  “So when Mickey started dunning me as soon as I started the new job, I might’ve said a few things out of turn, but everybody in the family knows I loved Mickey and he loved me like a brother. Look at how he lent me the money. I know it wasn’t enough to bloat a goat but you don’t do that with people you think are going to shoot you, right?”

  “Bloat a goat” seemed to be the Cluett family’s favorite term for a lot of money. I remembered how Cluett used it to describe any thick wad of bills.

  “Anyhow,” said O’Shea, “soon as I heard, I scraped together a hundred and brought it right over to Irene and I told her she’d have every penny before the summer.”

  He reached for the door handle. “Guess I better get back inside before Marie thinks you’ve arrested me,” he giggled.

  “Just a minute, Mr. O’Shea,” I said. “Cluett expected to meet someone at the Shamrock Tuesday night. Was it you?”