Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (11 page)

“Nope. I sure b’lieve he was clean-shaven, though,” said Pyle. “I b’lieve I’d remember any hair on his face.”

When it was her turn to be interviewed, the conductor, Oletta Bass, described her impression of someone—”I’m pretty certain it was a man”—running away from the train as they jolted to a rougher than usual stop, but she hadn’t seen the couple on the platform at all. Nor had she even realized that they’d hit someone till Hank Pyle had erupted from his compartment at the front of the train, praying and yelling and kicking the train, the steel I-beams, the tiled walls, anything that stood still.

“Hank’s a really good motorman and most of the time he’s okay to work with, but I’ve noticed it before,” she confided to Elaine. “Those little white hillbillies can sure lose it when things screw up.”

One of the passengers had been standing at the door, waiting to exit, and he’d seen a running figure, too. All that had registered were the same nondescript dark clothes—baggy pants, knitted hat, and bulky three-quarters jacket—that the others had described.

All agreed that the man was white and that he’d sprinted over the turnstile and up the steps like someone reasonably young and in good physical shape.

None of the three were sure they’d be able to pick him out of a lineup or that they’d give him a second look if they passed him in the street tomorrow.

They shouldn’t be too pessimistic, Elaine told them, even though she privately shared those doubts. Maybe they’d get lucky. Maybe their description would turn out to fit the victim’s husband or boyfriend. They might feel differently if they were given someone specific to identify.

They looked at her dubiously, but didn’t argue as she passed them back over to Transit.

When Elaine joined Jim Lowry and the others, they’d finally found the dead woman’s purse. There’d been nothing in her pockets except a few loose coins, a couple of subway tokens and some soiled tissues. A purse was indicated, but there was no sign of one and they had begun to theorize that her killer had taken it. Then someone thought to shine a light up under the train and there it was. When they’d backed the train off the body, the strap of the black corduroy shoulder bag had been snagged and pulled away from the immediate vicinity.

At last the victim had a name: Charlotte C. Fischer, age twenty-two. Height, five three. Eyes, hazel. And she carried a police department ID badge.

“Charlotte Fischer?
Lotty?”
Horror quickened Elaine Albee’s words. “There’s a Lotty-somebody that works in Records. Civilian. Remember, Jim? Shorter than me, reddish brown hair?”

“Yeah, vaguely. Works the night tours, right? Cute figure but big schn—” He caught himself, feeling suddenly loutish to mention the dead woman’s nose.

Her body had already been removed but the two detectives were remembering her bloody, smashed features and Elaine let out a deep breath. “Lotty,” she said and this time it was a statement, not a question.

The two detectives from Transit looked at each other and the older man gave a sour grin.

“Okay,” he said. “We won’t fight you over this one since she’s one of your people. Just keep us posted, okay?”

CHAPTER 11

The crime scene people had finished. Their floodlights had been unplugged and hauled upstairs to the van, leaving the subway station to its usual dimness. The yellow ribbons were taken down, most of the uniforms had departed, another motorman had arrived to move the train, and people from the Transit Authority were doing what was necessary to eradicate the remaining traces of Lotty Fischer’s violent end. By the beginning of rush hour, only commuters who paid attention to all the details of the story on the morning newscasts would realize that this was the station where a young computer clerk had met her death.

Jim Lowry came back from the telephone. “We were right,” he told Elaine Albee. “Lotty Fischer left work around two.”

“Why so late?” Elaine asked as she pulled on gloves and wound her blue scarf tightly around the collar of her heavy coat. “Overtime?”

“No. They’ve been shorthanded, so she was working six-to-two tours till they could hire more clerks.” He pulled on his own gloves as they passed through the turnstile and headed up to their car. “She was single. Still lived at home. They say her father’s already called twice, really worried about her. They’re going to send someone around to break it to her parents.”

“Good,” said Albee. The relief she felt was mirrored in Jim Lowry’s face. Telling a victim’s family was one of the hardest things about the job.

As the two detectives reached the street, a uniformed transit officer handed Albee a sheet of paper.

The wind tried to rip it from her grasp. “What’s this?”

“The names and addresses of those eight passengers that were on the train,” he reminded her.

“Oh, right.” She gave a quick glance at the nameplate pinned to his heavy jacket. “Thanks, Magnetti.”

The early morning air felt even colder than before and something between a thin sleet and powdery snow had begun. It stung their cheeks and made their eyes tear.

“Brr!” said Albee, diving for the car.

Lowry slid in beside her and immediately started the engine to get the heater and defroster going. The windshield had begun to ice over.

“Backtrack her now?” he asked.

“Might as well try,” she agreed.

Driving slowly, they circled each one-way block, finding nothing open along the route Lotty Fischer probably walked till they came to Lundigren’s Twenty-Four Hour Delicatessen.

They double-parked in front of the lighted entrance. The door was locked, but after looking them over, the beefy middle-aged man inside buzzed them in, a procedure that was becoming more commonplace these days.

“Help you?” he asked.

They showed him their badges, explained why they were there, and described Lotty Fischer.

The clerk’s eyes widened. “I heard the sirens and saw the blue lights down there at the subway, but it never dawned on me that— Red coat, red scarf? Oh jeez, yeah, sure, she was in here. A coupla minutes past two it was.”

“Alone?” asked Albee.

“Yeah. She was waiting for the bus. She was in here two or three times a week. Late. Usually right after midnight when there’s more people in and out; you guys changing shift, you know? Last coupla weeks, it’s been later. Bad time of night for a young kid like that, but she said it was just till they hired another girl and she liked working nights. Her mother was sick or something and this way she could be home while her dad worked.”

He told them how Lotty had dashed from his store at about ten past two. He’d watched from the window as she missed her bus by inches. “The scuzzbag musta seen her, but he never stopped. You know the way they are. She chased him down the street and then I couldn’t see no more, but I knew the bastard wasn’t going to stop.”

He scratched his ample belly through a tan button-up sweater and shook his head regretfully. “Ah jeez, it’s too bad. So she tried to take the train and somebody pushed her under? Christ almighty! It’s getting crazy, just crazy. She was such a nice kid, too. Goddamn nuts! Who’d want to do that?”

“When she ran for the bus,” said Lowry, “did you notice anybody following her?”

“Nope. A few cars on the street, of course, but nobody on foot.”

As Lowry and Albee drove the short distance back to headquarters, the snow and sleet thickened and heavy yellow sanitation trucks were beginning to salt the streets.

In the cubbyhole of an office behind the front desk, Lotty Fischer’s terminal screen was blank. The space was normally shared by three other Police Administrative Aides working in rotation, so it bore no marked individuality. No personal papers or photographs, nothing to get a handle on how she’d lived or why she’d died.

Personnel on the midnight-to-eight tour were perturbed by a death so close to home. All agreed that Lotty had seemed like a nice and helpful person, but none appeared to know her well enough to suggest why she’d been killed.

Temporarily at an impasse, Jim and Elaine returned to their own office on the next floor.

“You think it was someone who knew her?” asked Jim.

“Don’t you? The motorman said they were standing close together. You don’t stand that near a stranger on an otherwise empty platform, do you?”

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?”