07-Past Imperfect

by Margaret Maron

Elaine had shed her heavy coat and pushed up the sleeves of her black turtleneck sweater, but the warmth of the building was making her sleepy. She leaned back in her chair and covered a wide yawn with her hands.

  It was infectious and Jim found himself yawning, too. “I’ll start the paperwork,” he offered. “Why don’t you hit the sack?”

  Elaine thought longingly of the lumpy bunk down in the women’s dorm, but shook her head. Their desks were placed back to back and she smiled at him across the double width so piled with papers that it was difficult to say where his desk ended and hers began. “We’ll split it so we can both sack out quicker.”

  A suggestive grin spread across his attractive face. “My place or yours?”

  “You wish!” she jeered, but a dimple lurked in her cheek as she rollered fresh paper into her typewriter and unfolded the list of passengers’ names and addresses the transit officer had given her, each one neatly numbered and printed in block letters that were thoroughly legible for a change.

  Too often she was forced to search back and forth through an officer’s handwritten reports as if it were some sort of code, comparing an unknown squiggle to a known one elsewhere on the page: was that a 2 or the way he wrote 7s? was this a U or a sloppy O? a small R or an uncompleted N? Give Officer Magnetti A+ for penmanship, she thought, and a gold medal for making life a little easier on everyone who had to read his reports.

  Jim watched as she studied the list, her blonde hair glistening under the overhead light, and he wondered if they’d ever get it together or if she would always keep him at arm’s length. They’d been partners for almost a year now, yet their off-duty relationship had never progressed beyond casual after-work drinks, an occasional dinner or, more frequently, movies. Lainey was a nut about musical comedies from the thirties and forties and she wanted to see them on a full-sized screen, not on a rented video.

  Or was that because she didn’t want to be alone with him, in her apartment or his? The only caresses she allowed were chaste kisses and friendly hugs. The one time they’d come close to passion, she’d broken away. “Do we really want this?” she’d asked him, taking long deep breaths to steady herself.

  “Yes!” he’d said, reaching out.

  But she’d gathered up her coat and purse. “I like working with you, Jim,” she’d said. “Let’s don’t wreck it.”

  He’d sulked for a week, but deep down, he suspected she was right. The sex would be good, damn good; but sooner or later, it would get in the way.

  They’d both seen it happen to others—lovers paralyzed by fear for the beloved’s safety; ex-lovers too bitter to keep functioning. Sooner or later, one of the careers went in the toilet.

  Usually the woman’s.

  So he didn’t really blame her for being cautious, but sometimes—like tonight—when her eyes had tired shadows beneath them and all the lipstick was gone from those soft lips and she absently kneaded the back of her stiff neck, he wanted to take her in his arms and just hold her gently while she slept.

  Did that mean he was falling out of lust and into love?

  The thought made him uneasy. He pushed it from his mind and tried to concentrate on tonight’s homicide, but as he began filling in the departmental forms, Lainey suddenly interrupted.

  “How many passengers were on the train?”

  “I counted eight. Why?”

  “I counted eight, too. And that includes—” She looked down at the name she’d scribbled on her notepad earlier. “Patrick D. Newhouse. He’s the one who saw the running perp.”

  “So?”

  “So there’re eight names on Magnetti’s list. We kept Newhouse behind for further questioning, so he’s not on the list. He makes nine.”

  “Maybe we miscounted.”

  She tilted her head consideringly. “Both of us? Come on, Jim. The conductor told me that she went through the train and put all the passengers together in one car. All eight passengers. And she didn’t open the car doors till help came.”

  “Everyone said that the only people on the platform were Fischer and whoever pushed her,” Jim mused. “He went over the turnstile and up the steps and I can’t see him hanging around to wait for us. So what’s left?”

  It hit them at the same time.

  “Wino!”

  “Bum!”

  Despite all of Transit Authority’s efforts, when the temperature dropped, the homeless persistently sought shelter in subway stations and tunnels. Bums and derelicts, the mental cases, the druggies and alkies—many were drawn to the relative warmth and illusory safety of the dark tunnels. Every winter, a handful would manage to trip against the third rail and electrocute themselves or became disoriented and lie down on the tracks so that trainmen like Hank Pyle would have nightmares the rest of their lives.

  “Which one’s the ringer here?” Elaine wondered, scrutinizing each name. Everything looked kosher. Fortunately, Magnetti appeared to be a by-the-book officer. If those small notations in the margins meant anything, he must have asked everyone for an ID. Surely, “NYDL, SS, Con Ed” stood for New York drivers license, Social Security card and a ConEd electric bill.

  She passed the list over to Jim along with her interpretation. “What do you think?”

  “Sounds logical to me. And two names with no ID: Mary Smith of the Bronx and Gerald Byrd of West Forty-fourth Street. Mary Smith? Who’s she kidding?” He reached for his telephone and dialed the number.

  It was answered on the second ring and Elaine listened as he said, “Mrs. Smith? Mary Smith? Uh, this is Detective Lowry calling about the train accident you were in earlier tonight. I’m sorry to bother you again, but would you mind going over it for me while things are fresh in your mind?”

  Evidently, thought Elaine, there really was a Mary Smith and she did mind going over it again, judging by the way Jim rolled his eyes at her. But he was good at talking people around and soon he had Mrs. Smith describing as many of her fellow passengers as she could remember.

  Might as well get on with it, Elaine thought, and used her own phone to call the number Magnetti had written down for Gerald Byrd.

  There was one ring, a mechanical click, then an answering machine announced that she’d reached the box office of a popular, long-running Broadway hit. She immediately remembered seeing a large poster advertising that play just inside the subway station tonight, a poster with a phone number big enough to be read fifteen feet away.

  Fast on his feet, Elaine thought as she waited for Jim to finish with Mary Smith and get off the phone so she could tell him. Cute, too. Phantom of the Opera indeed.

  Not their usual skell.

  So who was this Gerald Byrd?

  CHAPTER 12

  Thursday morning dawned gray and dreary and a fine sleet pinged the clerestory windows of Sigrid’s bedroom when she arose.

  Out in the kitchen, Roman padded back and forth between coffee maker and refrigerator, pouring coffee, pouring tumblers of crimson juice, exhilarated by the winter weather, from which he expected to draw direct inspiration for his ski lodge murder mystery.

  Sigrid, who had to leave for work in less than forty minutes, was still in her robe. Roman, who would probably be staying in all day, was dressed like a Forties Hollywood director’s idea of Working Author: baggy corduroy slacks, heavy English sweater with leather elbow patches, a paisley scarf loosely tucked into the collar. His thinning brown hair was neatly combed over the high dome of his head and his soft face was smoothly shaven.

  Getting up early was always difficult for Sigrid and she seldom wanted to talk before her second cup of coffee. Usually it didn’t matter. She would simply sit with her slender fingers laced around the hot mug and Roman would read snippets from the morning paper and keep adding fresh coffee. Eventually, something he read or said would provoke her to speech.

  So far this morning, all that had truly penetrated her consciousness as she sat at the green-tiled breakfast counter were the thin flakes of snow falling on the brick courtyard outside their kitche
n window. Soon she would have to decide whether or not to leave the car garaged and take a bus to work. It was only three short blocks over to Hudson Street and the uptown M10 connected with the crosstown bus that would take her practically to her office door and then she could—

  She became aware that Roman had quit murmuring generalities and was waiting for an answer to a specific question.

  “Sorry, Roman. I don’t think I heard you.”

  “I said, which do you like best?”

  “Which what do I like best?”

  He sighed good naturedly. “Do drink your juice, dear child, and I’ll get you more coffee. I thought you were awake.”

  “I am awake,” she said, turning away so he couldn’t see her yawn. “Awake enough to recognize sarcasm when I hear it. Tell me again: which what?”

  “Book title. If you recall, it takes place in the dead of winter, which would be a marvelous title except that it’s been used about five times in the last ten years. I looked it up at the library yesterday. Fatal February, too. That would have been my next choice. I’ve narrowed it down to Winterkill, Death Thaw, and Warmed Each Winter. If you saw those on a book jacket, which would you pick up first?”

  “Warmed Each Winter,” she murmured.

  Roman frowned. “Do you really like that best?”

  “Not especially. But I would pick it up because I’d wonder what it meant.”

  “It’s from an Edna Millay sonnet. I wonder if that’s a good idea though? In case the estate won’t give permission to quote for free. Do you know that a friend of mine wanted to quote five lines from a Mel Torme song and they asked five thousand dollars! That’s more than his whole bloody advance.”

  “Millay,” Sigrid reminded him.

  “Millay,” he agreed. “I don’t remember the exact words, but it’s something to the effect that if we do not stop killing each other, man’s blood will simply keep warming the ground each winter.”

  She tried another sip of cranberry-raspberry juice. It made a pleasant change from the orange juice Roman usually set before her, and Sigrid savored the unfamiliar blend of sweet and tart. Rather like Roman’s conversation at times. She wondered if his preoccupation with scarlet blood had influenced his choice of juices this morning. “Is there a lot of blood in your book?”

  “Oh, my, yes,” he rumbled. “Not on the ground exactly. But the deeds are committed with icicle daggers and the first victim bleeds all over the white bearskin rug in the ski lodge. The second one—”

  “You don’t think the title’s too poetic for a murder mystery?”

  “I know, I know. It really ought to be something short and pungent,” Roman agreed. He had a magpie mentality that gathered snippets of trivial information that he was forever trying to weave into saleable articles; and he was now off on the meaning of February, how the Februa were Roman festivals of general expiation and atonement.

  “The Anglo-Saxons, on the other hand,” he sniffed, “were always thinking of their bellies instead of their souls. They called it Sprout-Kale. Time to plant cabbage. But I digress. I had hoped that the encyclopedia entry on February would suggest a pertinent title. Alas.”

  “Surely a line from the book itself should trigger a title?” asked Sigrid.

  “Perhaps. But a title’s not even the worst of it,” Roman confessed gloomily. “I’ve made my killer so clever that I’m not sure my sleuth will be able to figure it out. And of course, once the icicles melt, there’s no physical evidence left. I shall have to pick your brains, my dear, for some fancy footwork.”

  Sigrid shook her head. “I keep telling you, Roman. It isn’t fancy footwork that solves most homicides: it’s just plain old-fashioned boring legwork: asking a hundred different people ‘Did you see?’ or ‘Did you hear?’ and the hundred and first says, ‘Oh, gee, yeah, I guess I did.’ Or someone gets tired of being pushed around and they say, ‘That no-good’s been on my case. He did it to me and now I’m going to do him;’ and they come in and make a statement. Acting on that information, we make arrests. I’m afraid it isn’t very puzzling.”

  He looked so disappointed that Sigrid took pity on him and gave him an encapsulated version of Locard’s Theory of Transfer.

  Roman was enchanted. “So every murderer leaves something of himself at a crime scene and takes something of the crime scene away with him even if all that’s transferred are a few grains of sand or some fabric fibers? Hmm-mm. Grains of sand may be difficult in a snowstorm.”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” Sigrid said.

  “Maybe if I combine it with the ransom money,” he mused. “I looked that up, too. In so many sloppily written mysteries, a husband or wife will be told to put a half-million in small bills in a plain paper bag and leave it under the third park bench past the Civil War monument.”

  “So?”

  “My dear child, do you know how much a half-million in fives and tens would weigh? About a hundred and fifty pounds. That’s seventy-five thousand pieces of paper! And you have to hope that fives and tens are small enough because if you tried to do it in ones—”

  Sigrid left him punching numbers on his pocket calculator and went in to dress.

  Before signing into their separate dorms in the wee hours of the morning, Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry had agreed that the first thing on their agenda would be locating Gerald Byrd. The second would be the bus driver who had roared past Lotty Fischer last night.

  There were a million if onlys attached to every violent death, a thousand branching choices that might have led away from death or missed it by inches; and there was nothing yet to tell them that Lotty’s killer might not have stalked her down anyhow at another time and place. At this moment, however, gazing bleary-eyed at each other over their take-out breakfast in the squad room, Elaine and Jim were convinced that Lotty Fischer would still be alive if the driver of that bus had only stopped, and they were looking forward to finding the bastard.

  Bernie Peters and Matt Eberstadt weren’t due in till four, and Lieutenant Harald seemed to be running late; but several of those working the morning shift had met the friendly young P.A.A. and exchanged pleasantries with her or waited while she ran a routine check on something, and there was much head-shaking over her ghastly end.

  Detective Tildon offered to handle the routine in-house part of the investigation, to speak to her coworkers downstairs, see if there were any leads at this end that they might have missed last night. He also planned to contact the train passengers in case any could help them get a fix on Gerald Byrd, if that were indeed his name. In fact, Tillie had already copied their list and added it to one of the many neat, methodical piles of paper on his desk.

  After a cribbage board exploded next to him during a tournament at one of Manhattan’s poshest hotels, Tillie had spent nearly a month in the hospital, then another two months at home, and the files had suffered in his absence. He still wasn’t back up to full physical strength, but the doctors had agreed to let him come back to work if he’d pull straight eight-to-fours and promise not to try any strenuous activity.

  It was working out quite well. Tillie was a careful and conscientious worker who thrived on detail, forms, and timetables, and he had almost restored the order that had been missing since he was wounded.

  Everyone liked Tillie and they welcomed his return; not because he was genuinely likeable—which he was—but because he was also the one person who got along well with Lieutenant Harald, a boss who was never going to have to worry about making responses to teary-eyed testimonials at her retirement dinner. Every detective in the squad had felt the sharp edge of her tongue while Tillie was out. Since he was back, she seemed much less uptight and considerably more tolerant of minor lapses.

  Nevertheless, if there were legitimate reasons to be out and working before she arrived . . .

  By the time Jim Lowry had washed down a second raspberry doughnut and Elaine Albee had eaten all her peach yogurt, Tillie had persuaded Transit to give him the name and address of
the only driver who could have passed up Lotty Fischer at the pertinent time.

  “He worked a midnight-to-eight,” Tillie said.

  “Good,” said Elaine Albee as she put on her coat.

  Jim Lowry gave a grim smile. “We’ll check the subway station first, see if we can get a line on this Byrd bird. That should give our bus-driving bastard just enough time to get to sleep good before we land on him with both feet.”

  “Have fun, children,” said Tillie, “and don’t forget your galoshes.”

  Foul weather always added to the number of subway riders, but rush hour had crested by the time Jim and Elaine arrived at the fatal station. Although a steady stream of people continued to pass through the turnstiles, there were two workers inside the token booth and business had eased up enough that one put up a “Next window please” sign and came out to talk to them.

  “Not that I can tell you anything that’ll help. There’s no one on duty here that late.” The T.A. clerk was a large fat woman with fair skin that was splotched by acne. “And I don’t know about Sam,” she added, nodding toward her coworker who glanced out at them occasionally through the glass of the ticket kiosk, “but I don’t walk onto that platform ’cept to catch my train home. The circus could camp in these tunnels for all I know. Tell you who might could help you though. Stevie Gr—”

  An incoming train blanked the name and Jim Lowry had to roar to be heard above the shrill clangor.

  “Stevie Greenapple,” she yelled back. “One of our cops.”

  The train moved out of the station and her voice dropped back to normal. “I bet Stevie knows every flop hole in every tunnel from Thirty-fourth Street to South Ferry. The tunnels are a real hobby with him, ’specially the ghost stations. He’s down here sometimes even when he doesn’t have to be. It’s an education just to hear that man talk about some of the things that’ve gone on down here from the time they started with the first trains. Bet he could tell you if there’s anybody using this station regular.”

  Unfortunately, neither she nor the other worker knew Greenapple’s schedule, so Elaine called Tillie and added it to his growing list of things to do. Then she and Jim caught the next downtown train, transferred to an F train and soon emerged on the Lower East Side to find that the thin snow had thickened into soft white flakes.