07-Past Imperfect

by Margaret Maron

  “Fine, fine. What’s up?”

  Oersted laughed. “Always straight to the point, eh, Mac?”

  “And?” He finished taping the top of the door and began on the side.

  “I got a phone call yesterday afternoon.”

  “Don’t play games with me, Tom,” said Mac. He remembered now. Oersted had always been Leif’s friend, not his.

  “It was Leif’s kid. I’d almost forgotten he had one. Little Siga. All grown up now and following in Leif’s footsteps. A lieutenant, she tells me.”

  “Yeah, she works for me now.”

  “So she said. She told me about Mick Cluett, too. I missed it on the news. Damn shame. He should’ve done his twenty and got out like me.”

  McKinnon was silent, the masking tape ignored, as he waited for Oersted to say why he’d called.

  “She tracked me down through the Viking Association,” said Oersted. “Wants to talk to somebody who knew her old man. I told her you were his partner, but she doesn’t want to ask you. How come, Mac?”

  “Who knows?” he answered.

  “So what’ll I tell her? About you and Leif?”

  “Whatever you want,” McKinnon said, “so long as you limit it to the things you know for a fact.”

  “Listen,” Oersted said hastily, “As far as I’m concerned, it’s water over the dam, but I’m supposed to see her tomorrow night. I just thought you ought to know that she’s asking.”

  “Had to happen sooner or later,” said McKinnon. But after he’d hung up, he felt as gray and bleak as the sky beyond the glass door and he wished Oersted hadn’t told him.

  “Your lovely skin is like skim milk,” crooned Berthelot. “See how the dusty rose loves you and yet the salmon fights with the blue undertones?”

  “Oooh, yes!” breathed Gillian. Despite her New England accent the young woman had been defined as a Southern Summer. (Not to be confused with an Eastern Summer or a California Summer, Sigrid had learned.)

  The white circular conference table was littered with swatches of colorful fabrics and trays of costume jewelry that ranged from Social Register restrained to Red Light gaudy as Berthelot analyzed each woman in turn and set her small problems of finding which colors and styles fit within the new parameters he had set for her.

  For Sigrid, the worst part so far had been when it was her turn to stand beneath a clear white spotlight while Berthelot peered at her skin, face, and eyes through a magnifying glass and then described her physical attributes one by one.

  “Such queenly height! The carriage of an empress. Marvelous facial planes. Wait till you see how we sculpt your face! Clear porcelain skin. Everyone see Sigrid’s blue undertones?”

  Murmured assents from the other three women.

  “And the grace of your neck. Like a swan. Women would have killed for a neck like that in ages past! Wonderful legs! Never hide them in pants. You must wear full, flowing skirts that make a dramatic statement.”

  The man was a cheerleader. Improbable compliments fell from his lips in never-ending variety. Listening to him, thought Sigrid, one would think we’re all Miss America candidates.

  Gillian’s young plump body had been praised for its vitality, its harmony of line; Anne’s petite frame brought ecstatic murmurs of “dynamic excitement.” No mention was made of the wrinkles lining Phyllis’s “piquant” face, but “This white hair will have to go. You’re much too young to have your autumn fires quenched. Back to red for you!”

  “I was never a redhead,” Phyllis protested weakly.

  “Then it’s time you became one,” Berthelot told her airily as he flung a length of copper silk over her head and created an elegant turban.

  To Sigrid’s astonishment, she saw that he was right. She couldn’t begin to say why, but the copper did indeed liven Phyllis’s skin and eyes in a way that her white hair did not.

  She reached into the pile of fabrics on the table and chose three nearly similar shades of red—one had just enough blue to lean toward purple, one had a hint of orange, the third was equally balanced—and held them against her face, one at a time, comparing them in the oval stand mirror provided for each woman. Maybe it really was like one of those color problems Nauman set for his art students each fall, a visual puzzle no more difficult or arcane than progressive permutations of an ordinary color wheel.

  Of course, the names were sheer nonsense, she’d decided. Her coloring was almost exactly the same as Anne’s, yet Anne had been decreed a California Winter while she was an Eastern Winter.

  As they paused for lunch, Sigrid tried to imagine what she was going to look like transformed into Berthelot’s idea of a New York February.

  If asked to describe himself, Matt Eberstadt would have replied that he was as honest and moral as the next man. Perhaps less concerned about the state of his immortal soul than his wife Frances; but in his opinion that didn’t mean much. Women always sweated the small stuff more than men anyhow. Convenient parking wasn’t an infringement of the law in his eyes, merely one of the minor perks that went with the job, and he didn’t give it a second thought as he pulled into the curb in front of the air terminal and flipped down his sun visor. All he cared about was making sure there was enough police ID on his car to render it immune from tickets or towing while he went inside to meet his wife.

  The plane from Atlanta was on time and when Frances came through the doorway into the waiting room, he was so glad to see her that he rushed forward to take her bags and fold her in his arms.

  They were not ordinarily a publicly demonstrative couple and Frances brushed his lips with hers and said, “Goodness! I believe you did miss me!”

  She had limited herself to a couple of carry-on pieces so they didn’t have to waste time standing around the baggage carousel. Frances Eberstadt was a sensible woman little given to intuition and imagination; but when they were in the car and driving away from the airport, she looked at Matt’s drawn face with concern and said, “Is everything okay at home? The boys behave themselves while I was gone?”

  “Oh, sure,” he replied, maneuvering through the traffic patterns that surrounded JFK until he was in the correct lane. “Well, except for Tuesday night.”

  They had talked every day by phone, so she’d already heard about the boys staying out till nearly one in the morning while he’d driven all over Ozone Park looking for them, earlier in the week.

  “I think I might have caught a cold then,” he said.

  Instantly, her hand was on his forehead. “You do feel a little warm.”

  He caught her hand and brought it to his lips. “I missed you, kid. The house always feels cold when you’re not there.”

  Pleased, Frances patted his thigh. “As soon as we get home I’m going to fix you a nice hot bowl of soup. And then straight to bed for you.”

  “What about the boys’ basketball game?” Matt protested weakly. “We promised we’d go. Kenny thinks the coach might let him start tonight. You don’t want to miss that.”

  “No,” agreed Frances, who had once led her high school basketball team in field goal percentages. “But there’s no need for us both to stay home if you’re going to be sleeping.”

  To ease her conscience, she added, “I’ll tell Pam to tell Bernie that you’re going to call in sick tomorrow.”

  The moment of truth had arrived, Berthelot told the group. Analysis over, now was the time to implement their discoveries. Back to the working area of the salon they would now go. Hair would be cut and styled, stripped and dyed; and individual palettes of makeup colors would be blended to complete their total metamorphosis into the gorgeous butterflies they’d heretofore kept hidden inside cocoons of timidity.

  As Berthelot pronounced final categories (Phyllis was a California Autumn), each woman’s earlier attendant reappeared to take a checklist of styling instructions from Berthelot before leading her charge away.

  Sigrid was willing to agree that she should perhaps go through her closet and weed out any clothes with a yellow-b
ased color, but she’d be damned if she’d spend the afternoon having “ashy highlights” added to her hair while Anne was having the flicks of gray removed from hers and she said as much when the other three women had been led out and only she and Berthelot and Carina were left in the conference room.

  Berthelot signaled the platinum blonde attendant to wait outside.

  “Ah, Sigrid, Sigrid, Sigrid,” he crooned, more in sorrow than in anger when they were alone. “Why do you resist me so? All morning, you have fought me. So much negativity. Why?”

  “I can’t do this. It feels too artificial. Too sybaritic.”

  “But of course it’s sybaritic. Why are you here if not to enjoy this experience?”

  “It wasn’t my idea,” Sigrid muttered. “Today’s a gift. From my grandmother. I don’t know how much she paid but—”

  “Money!” the little man exclaimed. “You think of this day in terms of money?”

  “Don’t you?” Sigrid asked coldly.

  Berthelot drew himself up to his full five foot five. “My fee is no secret. An all-day seminar with me, Berthelot, is six hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “Six hundred?” Sigrid was appalled.

  “And fifty,” he snapped.

  “That’s obscene! That much money frittered away on skin colors and makeup charts and clothing styles to fit some idiotic category? Out there on the street, hungry people are freezing, while in here—”

  “Yes?” he asked dangerously.

  “I’m sorry.” She drew the collar of the robe up tightly around her neck. “I knew I shouldn’t have come. This place makes me feel like Marie Antoinette just before the deluge. I can’t stay.”

  “You will stay.” Berthelot stamped his foot. “The makeup and lotions and colors are frivolous, you think? And you are Mother Theresa?”

  “No, as a matter of fact, I’m a—”

  “Silence! I do not wish to know. What you do is irrelevant. What you are, what I am is important. You look at me and you see a simpering old fairy, playing the fool so bored women will spend their money with me, no?”

  “I’m sorry,” Sigrid repeated. “I didn’t mean to insult you.”

  “But you have!” he said huffily. “Cosmetics frivolous? Perhaps. But do they not each year send ten fine young people from the projects to—”

  He caught himself, shook his head and walked away. “This you did not hear! Forget I have said this,” he ordered imperiously, clearly annoyed with himself for his outburst. “What I—how I choose to amuse myself, to puff my ego with my money—n’importe. But my clients—what do you know of the suffering my clients endure before they find the courage to come to me?”

  “Suffering?” Sigrid’s scorn was undermined by the altruism Berthelot had almost revealed, but her skepticism remained. “Courage?”

  “A matter of degree, of course, but suffering—yes, and courage, too—comes in many forms. A woman who feels herself unlovely in a world which places physical beauty above so much else, does she not suffer?” He gave a Gallic shrug. “Be honest, ma chérie. Your grandmama clearly loves you and has given you a gift which costs you nothing but courage to accept. And if courage is not needed, why are you so afraid to let me bring out your true beauty?”

  He looked up at her, an absurd, flattering court jester of a man. And yet . . .

  “No dye,” she said, wavering.

  “Only to bring out those glorious highlights? No? Very well,” he agreed. “No dye.”

  “And no mousse.”

  “No mousse.” Beaming, he opened the door and called for Carina.

  “We have reached a compromise,” he told her. “No dye for Sigrid. But,” he added, “we will reshape her eyebrows.”

  CHAPTER 20

  By the time his shift ended Saturday afternoon, Bernie Peters felt he’d wrapped up a solid case against Zachary Caygill, the beefy bartender soon to be formally charged with the brutal stabbing of Harold Jackson.

  “It’ll take one very slick lawyer to convince the jury that the signet ring Cohen took out of Jackson’s body has nothing to do with Caygill,” Bernie Peters told Sam Hentz as he finished up his paperwork.

  Caygill was not one of those heart-of-gold bartenders beloved by customers and coworkers alike, and Bernie had found three witnesses willing to swear they’d seen Caygill wearing the ring the evening before Jackson’s death. Two of the three could also testify that Caygill had not been wearing the ring the next day.

  “I still think it’s odd,” said Dinah Urbanska. She spread her sturdy fingers, on which three rings were firmly wedged. “I’ve never had any of my rings fall off.”

  “Probably the only thing,” Sam said, tossing over an earring that had gone flying when Dinah tugged off her woollen cap upon arrival a few minutes earlier.

  “Yeah, well,” said Bernie, “according to one of the witnesses, he’s put on a lot of weight this past year and had to start wearing the ring on his pinkie a couple of months ago.”

  “Ever had your hand in fresh blood, kid?” asked Sam. Dinah made a face and shook her head.

  “Slippery as motor oil,” he told her succinctly.

  The telephone rang on the squad’s line and Dinah answered automatically. “Detective Unit. Urbanska. Sorry, they’re off today. Can I—?” She listened intently. “Yeah? Okay. I’ll tell them.”

  She hung up and began to scrabble through the papers on her desk for a proper memo form. “That was Transit,” she told the two men. “They spotted that witness Lowry and Albee want. Jerry the Canary. He was doing his bird imitations on one of the Grand Central Station platforms, but he got away before they could grab him.”

  “Which platform?” asked Sam.

  “Uptown Lexington,” she said, placing the memo where Albee would see it when next she checked in.

  “Hardly worth bothering with,” said Bernie. “Dollars to doughnuts he was passed out and didn’t see a damn thing Thursday morning.”

  “Bet he did,” said Dinah. “Why would he run if he didn’t?”

  The two men shared a look of vast experience; then Sam said, “Come on, kid, use your brain. Guys like him always have reasons to run. Mostly in their heads. That doesn’t make him a witness. And speaking of witnesses,” he continued, turning back to the work at hand, “that baby-in-the-dumpster canvass has turned up three possibles. You can check them out tonight while I—”

  “I’m outta here,” said Bernie. He zipped up his heavy parka and left them to it.

  “Ah-h-h,” sighed Anne Harald when their waiter had brought them drinks and then gone away again with their dinner orders. She leaned back against the cushioned banquette in the midtown restaurant they’d chosen. “I’d forgotten how exhausting getting beautiful could be.”

  Sigrid smiled and lifted her bourbon and Coke. “Here’s to beauty.”

  “Berthelot alone has looked on Beauty bare,” said Anne, raising her own drink.

  “I thought that was Euclid.”

  “Do you suppose Euclid ever stepped inside the Greek equivalent of Imagine You!?”

  “I doubt if the ancient Greeks had an equivalent,” Sigrid said. She took a sesame breadstick from the basket and snapped it in two, sending a shower of small seeds and crumbs across the white tablecloth. Lunch had looked perfectly elegant, but the porcelain plates had held only skimpy fruit salads, and plain Perrier with slices of lime had filled the crystal goblets. Sigrid was ready for some real food and drink. She buttered the tip of the breadstick and bit it off.

  “What do you want to bet there wasn’t an Athenian Berthelot hawking kohl and henna around the Aegean and telling those Greek women that the gods hated naked eyes and gray hair?” Anne touched her own hair ruefully. “It’s not too dark, is it?”

  “No,” Sigrid answered truthfully. “It looks right on you.”

  “I should have taken some Before pictures so Mama could see the difference.” Her eyes swept over Sigrid. “I do like what he did with yours.”

  Sigrid had gone in with ha
ir so short that there wasn’t an awful lot Berthelot could do with it, but he’d managed an asymmetrical cut that gave a slightly different emphasis to the sweep of her forehead. She usually felt defensive when her mother looked at her like that, as if through a camera’s range finder or close-up lens, but after a full day of being turned and prodded and hearing every physical feature objectively dissected in minute analysis, one more observation didn’t bother her.

  “Actually, I like it, too,” she admitted, reaching for a second breadstick.

  Anne passed her the butter again. “Thanks for going through with this. For a minute there after lunch, I thought you were going to bolt or blow up.”

  “When did I ever bolt or blow up?”

  “Shall I start with your second birthday and the red ribbon Mama wanted to tie in your hair?” Anne asked sweetly. “Or skip directly to Christmas dinner when Aunt Lucille asked you for the eight-hundredth time if you minded not having a husband and children?”

  “Blasting Aunt Lucille doesn’t count,” Sigrid protested. “Anyhow, you didn’t exactly set an example of patient fortitude when she started on all the men you could have married since I grew up and—” She lapsed into Aunt Lucille’s cultivated Southern drawl. “—‘left you all by your lonesome in an empty nest with not a soul to love.’”

  As the waiter brought their lemon-roasted chicken and poured their wine, they smiled at each other and Sigrid felt a sudden rush of genuine affection.

  The realization surprised her. She knew she’d always loved Anne, but as a child automatically loves the most important person in her life, especially if that person returns the love in whatever helter-skelter fashion. Tonight seemed different. It was as if she were for the first time seeing Anne from her own eye level instead of looking up from a child’s perspective toward a being of glamour and limitless power. It could have been because they were both pleasantly tired from sharing a day mixed with frivolity and physical self-analysis; or maybe, thought Sigrid, it was because somewhere in the past six months, since Nauman came into her life, she’d almost quit comparing herself unfavorably to Anne and had gradually learned to accept her not as a mother alone but as a friend. A rather dear friend, in fact.