07-Past Imperfect

by Margaret Maron

  The sandy-haired man sat on the edge of the fountain and chirped and twittered to such an appreciative (and moneyed) group that by the time he saw two boys in blue approaching from Columbus Avenue, he had collected enough to buy food and a warm bed at the Paradiso for at least a week.

  Melting into the crowd with his pictures tucked into a deep pocket, Jerry the Canary wondered if maybe he’d been wrong staying underground all winter. If they were gonna keep hassling him, he told himself, maybe he’d just migrate to the streets early this year.

  CHAPTER 22

  The temperature plummeted and snow began falling again well before daybreak Sunday morning. As if determined to disguise the city’s filth, it draped a fresh white blanket over the unmelted piles of dirty snow which still lingered from Thursday, covered rotting piers and the stripped cars abandoned near those piers, hid all the paper trash caught in the shrubs and iron railings of vest-pocket parks around the island, and lent the twisty narrow streets of Greenwich Village the illusion of a nineteenth-century village again. The Sanitation Department fought back, of course, immediately deploying salt trucks and plows. Yet, because it was still the weekend, only the main transverse roads were cleared from the East River to the Hudson; and Washington Square began to take on a Currier and Ives beauty that promised to delight any Sunday strollers hardy enough to venture out.

  West Tenth was one of the streets that hadn’t yet been plowed or salted, and as Sigrid picked her way toward Hudson Street, an optimistic cross-country skier schussed past, heading for the waterfront.

  Sigrid was an urban creature, never one to sing anthems to the beauties of nature. If she had a sport, it was swimming in a heated indoor pool, not skiing frigid peaks, that attracted her; yet waiting at her bus stop, she tipped her head up to let the dry, powdery flakes fall on her face and when her bus arrived, she took a window seat so that she could go on looking at the snow.

  The heaters on this bus barely functioned; the other passengers’ breaths came in puffs of steam; yet she was warmed by the memory of sledding with Nauman up in Connecticut, and for the first time since dropping him off at La Guardia last Tuesday, she admitted to herself that she missed him and wished he were back in town.

  How much more pleasant it would be if she were on her way to meet him rather than facing up to what waited for her at work. She knew she should spend this commuting time on planning—if not for diffusing the tensions bound to arise when knowledge of the special task force leaked out, then certainly for her meeting with Tom Oersted at seven.

  Instead, as the bus lurched and swayed from one stop to another, she continued to watch the snow.

  Bernie Peters looked up in surprise as Matt Eberstadt entered the squad room shortly before eight.

  “I thought you were going to call in sick,” he said.

  “Yeah, well after what Pam told Frances, I thought I’d better get in here and pull my weight,” Matt said testily.

  “Huh?”

  “Frances says Pam thinks it’s my fault you don’t have time for the kids.” He hung his quilted jacket next to Bernie’s and headed for the coffee pot.

  “Oh, jeez!” Bernie groaned. “I’m sorry, Matt. I guess I sorta let her think I was working a coupla times when I didn’t go straight home.”

  “Thanks a lot, pal.”

  “I know, I know, but jeez, Matt, sometimes I hate to walk in the door, you know? The kids are always whining and Pam acts like it’s my fault they tire her out. Maybe I shouldn’t have let her go back to work. How’d you keep Frances home all these years?”

  Matt snorted at the idea of making Frances do anything she didn’t want to.

  “It was her decision. She sat down and figured it out once and by the time she added everything in—fast food, baby sitters, extra clothes for her, bus fare, kicking us into a higher tax bracket—you know how much she’d have cleared at a nine-to-five job? Forty-four dollars a week. She decided it wasn’t worth the aggravation.”

  “Wish she’d have a talk with Pam for me,” said Bernie.

  “It’s different with the young women today, I guess,” Matt said, uncomfortably. Pam Peters was fifteen years younger than Frances, prettier, and probably hell on wheels in bed; but he wouldn’t trade a dozen spoiled brats like Pam for one level-headed Frances.

  “It’ll get better as the kids get older,” he told his partner.

  “I guess,” Bernie said gloomily. “How’d the game go last night? Kenny start?”

  “Yeah. Played sixteen minutes and scored four for six with three assists. Tip even got in for two minutes: Oh for two from the field; but he got the front end of a one-and-one, so Frances said they were both pretty excited.”

  “You didn’t go?”

  Matt shook his head. “She thought I ought to get straight to bed.” Bernie looked at him critically. “You sound a little better. How do you feel?”

  “Okay,” said Matt. “Nothing like a good night’s sleep.”

  He promptly yawned.

  As they began setting out the day’s priorities, the hall door opened and Tillie arrived with a sheaf of computer printouts.

  “What’re you doing here?” asked Matt. “I thought you weren’t supposed to pull shift duty for another month.”

  “I’m not. This is just some extra stuff the lieutenant needs, so I thought I’d better—”

  At that moment, the lieutenant herself entered and promptly disappeared into her office with Tillie.

  Matt and Bernie exchanged puzzled glances.

  “Wonder what that’s about?” said Bernie.

  Matt shrugged.

  “Thanks for getting this for me so promptly,” Sigrid told Tillie, looking over the material he’d rooted out for her.

  “No trouble, Lieutenant,” he said, though Marian hadn’t been all that thrilled that he’d volunteered to cut into their weekend.

  As he watched the lieutenant skim through his findings, he realized there was a change in her appearance this morning. Her hair? It’d taken a little getting used to when he came back last month and found that she’d had her dark hair cut short. Till then, she’d worn it long and skinned back in an unbecoming knot at the nape of her neck. Now it feathered lightly around her face, softened it somehow. In fact, now that he considered it, her whole nature seemed softer since his return to duty. Oh, not that she couldn’t still freeze like an arctic blast straight off the North Pole if somebody screwed up, but it was as if cutting her hair had cut away some of the stiffness she’d possessed since she took over this job.

  Unaware of his scrutiny, Sigrid shook her head and looked up. “More than I thought we’d have, Tillie.”

  According to Jarvis Vaughn, a Brooklyn nurse said that Cluett, five eleven and overweight, had been met by someone slightly shorter and not as broad.

  According to Lowry and Albee, the motorman thought Lotty Fischer’s killer was white, of average build, and had stood somewhere between five eight and five ten.

  There in the personnel records for their unit which Tillie had pulled, Sigrid was dismayed to see that not only had four of her people been stationed here four years ago, they also fit the physical parameters of the description:

  Det. Matthew Eberstadt, 5’10”, 198

  Det. Samuel Hentz, 5’9”, 165

  Det. Bernard Peters, 5’8”, 170

  Det. Dinah Urbanska, 5’8”, 140

  The last name surprised her. “I thought Urbanska came from the Nine-Oh.”

  “She did,” said Tillie. “But when she graduated from the Academy, this was her first assignment. She was here seven months before pulling duty in the Nine-Oh.”

  “I see.” She laid her hand on the printouts. “I wish we had copies of those case records,” she sighed.

  Tillie cleared his throat and his cherubic face took on a slightly guilty glow.

  “You didn’t!” Her voice was stern but a smile twitched her lips.

  Tillie turned even pinker. “I thought if we needed to refer back to something . . .” he
started to explain.

  “You copied all the files?”

  “Just the index sheets,” he confessed and went to get them.

  “Your performance rating just went from Excellent to Superior,” she said as Tillie put the records on her desk. “I don’t suppose we can stop speculation. Hentz, Urbanska, Eberstadt, and Peters are going to be under a lot of pressure until it’s cleared up.”

  “Want me to tell them?” he offered.

  “Thanks, Tillie, but I’ll do it. You go finish your weekend.”

  Sigrid followed him out into the squad room and when he was gone, walked over to Eberstadt and Peters.

  “What’s happening, Lieutenant?” asked Matt Eberstadt. Subliminally, he, too, noted a difference in her appearance this morning but had he tried to articulate it, he would merely have said she looked nice in the royal purple jacket she wore over a white turtleneck sweater and black slacks. Most of the time the lieutenant’s clothes were as drab as a winter day.

  “I’m afraid you two are in for some bother.” As concisely as possible, she explained how Lotty Fischer’s death linked to Cluett’s and how both were going to be handled by a special task force under I.A.D. aegis.

  Bernie looked stunned. “They think one of us killed Cluett?”

  “That’s not what I said. At the moment, lacking any other leads, they’ll be looking at everyone who ever worked with Cluett and who was also stationed here in this precinct, however briefly, when Lotty Fischer ran the gun check four years ago.”

  “That’s Matt and me both,” said Bernie, starting to bristle.

  “It’s also Captain McKinnon, Hentz, Urbanska, and several others,” she snapped. “Don’t get paranoid, Peters. You have plenty of company and when they don’t luck out in the first go-round, then I’m sure they’ll extend the circle and it’ll include even more.”

  “But they do think the perp’s a cop,” Matt said heavily.

  “Not necessarily. There are a lot of civilian possibilities.”

  “Do Hentz and Urbanska know?” asked Bernie.

  “I’ll be talking with them when they check in at four. In the meantime,” she said as she stood to go, “I want everyone to carry on as normally as possible under the circumstances.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Bernie grumbled when she’d left. “What do you think, Matt?”

  “I think I don’t want to be here when Hentz gets in.” He tossed Bernie his jacket and pulled on his own. “Let’s roll.”

  Down the hall from Sigrid’s homicide unit, Sergeant Rawson had commandeered a large room that had been used for other special task forces.

  Already a computer and printer, a couple of typewriters, and a copier had been moved in to go with the chairs, tables, and empty file cabinets kept in the room. The clerical aide Rawson had flown in from another precinct sat in her wheelchair before the screen, steadily inputting data gleaned from preliminary reports.

  Six detectives sat at the table, four male, two female. Five white, one black.

  “We’re it?” asked one.

  “For now,” said Rawson. “If we need another pair, I could probably push for it. On the other hand, it’s not like we’ve got a serial killer or some other high-profile type on the loose. The media haven’t made the connection between the two deaths. They’re still mauling that poor schmuck of a bus driver, so we don’t have them breathing down our necks yet. If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll wrap it up good and solid before they tumble.”

  Rawson turned to Jarvis Vaughn “You have the forensic report on Cluett?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  CHAPTER 23

  [Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

  Wasn’t much of a report. The forensic guys had done their job; not their fault everything came up negative. Powder burns showed that one shot had been fired from behind. Through Cluett’s coat. A second from above, through his right temple. No sign that Cluett had fought or struggled, so no tissue under his nails, no bruised knuckles to suggest he’d marked his assailant, no unusual fibers on his clothes, no helpful brand-name shoe tracks through his blood, no stray hairs from the beard of a redheaded man with a limp or whatever the hell a Sherlock Holmes would have discovered.

  Ditto with the footbridge, a public place with the usual collection of tossed trash. Every match and cigarette butt, every gum wrapper and hotdog napkin had been bagged and tagged and maybe would link to a suspect if and when we had a suspect. By themselves, they were useless to point us in any direction.

  Only the gun was of any help and even that was a question mark. A Browning .380. Standard semi-automatic. According to the company’s home office in Utah, that serial number was manufactured twelve years ago, shipped to a wholesaler’s in New Jersey and sold at Bwana Braverman’s, a sporting goods store “For Discriminating Sportsmen” in Perth Amboy.

  Bwana Braverman’s got smiles around the table.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I called down there yesterday. They still had the purchase record of the individual who bought it. One Douglas Mytster, who says the gun was stolen seven years ago. He thought at first we were calling to say we’d recovered it.”

  “He for real?” asked the quiet guy from Queens. Eastman.

  “Who knows?” I answered. “Off the top, I buy it. We checked with the Perth Amboy police. Mytster said he reported the theft and they did have a record of it. On the other hand, it was listed ‘serial number unknown’ so it never made it into the computer as a stolen piece. Sometime over the last eight years it walked from Perth Amboy to Sheepshead Bay.”

  “With a stop-off over here,” Yow interjected. Sandy Yow. Reddish brown hair, big hips and a bigger mouth. Her partner, Kay Obler, had dark hair and a bad overbite and seemed to let Yow do most of the talking for both of them.

  “Forensic doesn’t say much about the gun itself except that it hadn’t been taken care of,” I said. “General surface rust with heavy rust buildup on the trigger guard. Barrel was fouled, the clip had a slight dent and there were only two rounds left in it. In fact, the slide had jammed and that may be why the perp threw it in the bay before he finished emptying it in Cluett’s head.”

  “Any partials on the magazine or cartridges?” asked Rawson.

  “One print so smudged, that even if we had a full set of the perp’s lying beside it, you wouldn’t get enough ridge characteristics to take to court. On the other hand, they did find fibers inside the magazine housing and on the clip itself.”

  “What sort of fibers?”

  “Wool. Pure virgin lambswool.”

  Eastman objected. “You said Forensic thought the gun had been neglected. That sounds like someone with sheepskin gun wipes.”

  He had a point. Most of us use whatever clean soft cloth comes to hand—old cotton T-shirts are good—to oil and lubricate our pieces but you can spend ten or twelve bucks and buy wipes of natural sheepskin if you’re gung-ho enough.

  “Unless he had a jacket lined with sheepskin and the piece picked up the fibers that way,” the brunette suggested softly.

  I didn’t think so. “They were saturated with gun oil,” I said, “and up inside the magazine.”

  “Speculation?” asked Rawson.

  It had all the earmarks of a throwaway to me and that’s what I told him.

  Throwaways, drop guns, put-down pieces, whatever you call them, I call them dumb-ass stupid. Okay, so one of a cop’s worst nightmares is blowing away an unarmed suspect; our criminal justice system is still based on the premise “what would a reasonable man have done under those circumstances?” You chase a suspect you have reason to believe could have a gun and he makes a move you interpret as putting you or a fellow citizen in deadly jeopardy, then that’s a good-faith shooting and the odds are on your side that your actions will be upheld whether or not the suspect actually had a gun.

  But try to cover your butt by dropping an untraceable gun near the suspect or sticking it in his cold dead hand, and you’re begging for trouble.

  Premeditated murder includes
malice, forethought, and deliberately altering the crime scene, and every one of those is present with a drop gun. You’d think a professional would give a little forethought to the eighty different ways he’ll be linked with that gun once an investigation really heats up, but sometimes cops can be as dumb as John Q. Public.

  “Doesn’t have to be a throwaway,” said Eastman. “In fact, with rust and fouling, it sounds more like a civilian’s gun to me.”

  “Me, too,” said Roy Flick. He’d been sitting beside me like a big silent radish. A face as round and red as a radish, too. (High blood pressure?) He quit doodling handguns on his notepad and said, “We all have off-duty or backup guns, right? And don’t we clean them every time we clean our duty gun? It’s like polishing shoes—you don’t do one pair and stop. You do ’em all. Maybe even the wife and kids’ shoes, too, while you’re at it. I say anybody carrying a throwaway would automatically clean it when he cleaned his other guns. He certainly wouldn’t let rust build up on the trigger guard.”

  “Not a throwaway, but something to scare off burglars? I like it,” said Sandy Yow. “A civil service type that got the gun through a friend and didn’t want the hassle of registering it. Then he stuck it in a dresser drawer or something till Cluett got in his way.”

  We kicked it back and forth. Rawson didn’t vote, just followed the talk around the table a few minutes, then put on his glasses, opened a new folder, and went over the highlights of the Charlotte Fischer case for the benefit of the four newcomers: how a friend had told the Fischer woman that she’d run a check of the weapon four years ago, how she’d missed her bus and what the trainman saw when he pulled in the station, as well as the possibility that the skell who’d been nesting there had seen it all.

  He’d had a memo that T.A.’d spotted the guy a couple of times yesterday, at Grand Central and again at Times Square, but they couldn’t grab him.

  Rawson peered over his glasses at me. “I want you to take a personal interest in this bird, Sergeant. Keep track of the sightings. They may help us establish his pattern of movement. If he has one.”