Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (2 page)

“My
people are busting their butts to cover Cluett’s,” Sigrid had said icily.

“Well maybe you should take a page out of their notebook.” Anger stiffening every muscle of his large frame, he’d stood up then to show that their interview was over. “Get off Cluett’s case, Harald and maybe you could learn something from him.”

This from a man who expected a hundred and ten percent from the rest of his subordinates?

At first, Sigrid had thought it was because Cluett was one of the veterans from McKinnon’s days as a rookie, but she’d never heard the captain reminisce about the good old days. In fact, it was only a few short months since her discovery that McKinnon and her own father had once been partners and close friends, a friendship that ended when Leif Harald was gunned down in the line of duty when she was quite young. McKinnon had spoken of him but once and then only after she’d stumbled over the connection by accident.

And he certainly didn’t seem to find much time for Cluett. Although he’d counseled—in point of fact,
ordered
—patience and understanding, Sigrid had seen him cut the older man short whenever Cluett wandered from cases in hand and began to talk of bygone times.

Almost as if he were afraid of what Cluett might remember?

She lifted her eyes from the glass of bourbon in her hand and found that Cluett had stopped following the banter of the younger detectives on the other side and had turned his heavy body toward her. His mouth was crammed with popcorn and more spilled from his other hand as he held out the bowl to her. She took a few of the salty kernels and passed the bowl along to Tillie.

Cluett washed the last of his popcorn down with a long swallow of beer and continued to gaze at her until she could no longer avoid his stare.

“So!” she said, forcing a cheerful note since this was the last time she’d ever have to deal with him. “It’s back to the Six-Four for you?”

“Back to Sheepshead Bay,” he nodded. He leaned back in the chair beside her. His watery eyes were drink-glazed now and a grain of popcorn added a fresh spot of grease to the yellow V-necked sweater that protruded over his girth beneath a gray jacket that was at least one size too tight. His words seemed more for his own ears than hers and were barely distinguishable above a Mel Torme standard that provided a mellow background for the voices of their colleagues.

“No more old Mickey Cluett to kick around, treat like dirt.”

Sigrid stiffened.

“Yeah, you’re your daddy’s daughter. A couple of times I wondered. He was such a hell of a guy and you—” The old detective took another swig of his Molson and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “But yeah, Leif Harald could look at you with that same go-screw-yourself look. Freeze a man’s balls. If he still had any.”

“See here, Cluett—”

“Aw, what the hell,” he said wearily. He found the kernel of popcorn on the overhanging ledge of his belly and rolled it between a meaty thumb and forefinger. “Forget it. Shouldn’t of said nothing. Sorry.”

He lapsed into beery silence as Mel Torme’s velvet fog segued into the opening chords of Peggy Lee’s “It Never Entered My Mind.”

Across the table, Elaine Albee gurgled with laughter at something Bernie Peters had said; and beyond them, a sixsome of civilian workers clinked their full glasses in raucous toast.

Sigrid lifted her own glass, grateful that none of the others seemed to have heard Cluett. Unfortunately, the older man’s resentful apology made him turn maudlin.

“We were working outta the old One-Six when you were born. Me and Leif and Mac. Even bounced you on my knee a time or two. Now here you are a lieutenant and Mac’s a captain and I’m just a detective second class. If your daddy hadn’t got his self killed, maybe he’d be your captain now ’stead of Mac.”

Sigrid saw Tillie begin to tune in on Mick Cluett’s inebriated maunderings and she tried to shut them off. “That was a long time ago,” she began.

Cluett gave a defeated wave of his thick hand. “Yeah, yeah, and you don’t want to hear. Don’t blame you. Who wants to hear that her daddy’s own partner was—”

Suddenly Captain McKinnon loomed up behind him and clasped him on the shoulder in heavy familiarity. With a loud scraping noise, he pulled out the chair between Tillie and Sigrid and his gruff voice cut through the bluesy music, blanketing all conversation. “Sorry I’m late people. This round’s on me.”

CHAPTER 2

Three weeks later they learned that Mick Cluett had missed his forty years on the force by exactly sixty-one days.

January had given way to February, which promptly inflicted its usual misery on the city. As snow and sleet alternated with bone-chilling rains, the concrete canyons of lower Manhattan did their annual imitation of a wind tunnel designed to test some gigantic arctic flying device. Lieutenant Harald’s face was numb with cold when she returned to headquarters after a late lunch that day and punched the elevator button.

Despite fleece-lined boots, her toes felt frozen and a heavy camel hair coat hadn’t prevented a lump of ice from settling between her shoulder blades, which was probably why it took her so long to pick up on the elevator chatter.

Every day another officer seemed to come down with flu, bronchitis, or that debilitating misery known as walking pneumonia; so when she overheard a hoarse-voiced computer clerk speak of a wreath for poor old Mickey Cluett, Sigrid assumed that his out-of-shape cardiovascular system hadn’t been able to fight off winter’s germs.

One of the Police Administrative Aides sneezed and another P.A.A. blew her reddened nose dispiritedly. “They’ll be taking up a collection for my wreath next,” she said as the elevator creaked to a stop.

Sigrid escaped from their virus-ridden company and made it back to her own office without being sneezed upon a second time. As she sorted through the messages on her desk, Detective Tildon joined her, his round face solemn.

“Did you hear about Mick Cluett, Lieutenant?”

“That he died? Yes, I gathered,” she replied, trying to read a name someone had scrawled on a message notice. “Is this Eberstadt’s handwriting? If he’s not going to write legibly, he ought to print everything. Too bad about Cluett. What was it? Pneumonia?”

“You didn’t hear?” Tillie’s mild blue eyes shifted from the memo to her face. “He was killed. Shot.”

“Shot?” A line-of-duty death was the last thing she expected for Michael Cluett.

“Last night,” said Tillie, pleased to have captured her complete attention. “They found him early this morning, just three blocks from his house in Manhattan Beach.”

Knowing his superior’s hazy grasp of geography in the outer boroughs, he elucidated, “That’s the Sheepshead Bay area—east end of Coney Island.”

“What happened? Who shot him?”

“Unknown. Off-duty, though. Eberstadt talked to a guy over with the Six-Four and he said they don’t have much yet, but he heard they’ve got a diver working around the footbridge that goes across the bay to Emmons Avenue.”

Tillie gave an involuntary shiver at the thought of diving into Sheepshead Bay today.

In her rookie year, Sigrid had briefly toyed with the idea of volunteering for diver training. Swimming was still her only concession to physical exercise for its own sake and she swam four or five times a week year-round, but that was in heated enclosed pools. Having to go into any of the icy waters surrounding New York, even if protected by a wet suit, was definitely not high on her list of how to spend a February afternoon.

She walked out into the squad room, trailed by Tillie, who speculated aloud on the chances of those divers finding anything more than rusty crab traps and broken beer bottles.

As Sigrid passed the coffee maker, Dinah Urbanska stepped back to make room and a box of artificial sweeteners went flying.

Urbanska had made detective only six months ago. A powerfully built young woman, five eight, a hundred forty pounds, with golden brown hair that she kept knotted on the top of her head, Urbanska had proved her dedication, intelligence, and physical endurance with seven years of patrol work before coming to the Twelfth. But she was like a coltish palomino in the squad room. Cups leaped from her hands and upended on someone else’s desk; at her touch, books slid off shelves, staplers flew apart and reports jumbled. One of her cases, fortunately a minor one, had been thrown out of court because she screwed up a key bit of evidence.

Red-faced, she picked up the packets of sweetener. “It was awful about Detective Cluett,” she said, and Sigrid recalled that the younger woman had worked a couple of cases with the old officer.

“My friend in the Six-Four thinks they might have a witness,” said Matt Eberstadt, looking up from his desk. He handed the lieutenant a report he’d just finished and sheepishly deciphered the message he’d taken for her earlier.

“An eyewitness?” Bernie Peters leaned back in his chair at the adjoining desk. His voice was still hoarse from his own bout with bronchitis. “You didn’t tell us they had a witness.”

Eberstadt rubbed the bald spot in front of his rapidly disappearing hairline and shrugged. “Vinnie didn’t know any details—he’s not working the case—he just knows they’re acting like whoever did it might’ve thrown the gun in the bay there. Somebody heard a splash. That’s why they called in divers.”

“Probably turn out to be a beer bottle,” said Sam Hentz.

Hentz was something of a problem for Sigrid. A dapper, almost natty dresser, he was a thoroughgoing professional who had expected to get her job and thought she’d only been promoted in because of her sex. He was even more chauvinistic than Bernie Peters, though more subtle in expressing it. When Hentz’s regular partner retired and Sigrid paired him with Dinah Urbanska, she expected the fledgling detective to come back clawed and shredded.

So far, it hadn’t happened. Urbanska’s clumsiness drove everyone else up the wall; but for some quixotic reason, Sam Hentz had endless patience with her. He was a good teacher, too, one who took time to explain the details, thereby giving her a chance to develop her own investigator’s skills. To Sigrid’s surprise, the temporary arrangement seemed apt to become permanent.

Most of the time, Hentz remained as aloof as before, but today the violent irony of Cluett’s end drew him into their conversation.

They batted it around a few minutes more as Jim Lowry returned from court and Elaine Albee drifted back from Records, where she’d been researching some aspects of a current case. Lowry hadn’t heard of Cluett’s death and had to be brought up to speed, while Albee had picked up a few extra details from a record clerk whose aunt was a friend of Mick Cluett’s next-door neighbor. The young blonde officer smoothed the crease in her russet corduroy slacks as she perched on the edge of Eberstadt’s desk to share the clerk’s aunt’s account.

“She said Cluett went out to walk the dog and when he didn’t come back right away, his wife got mad and went on to bed without waiting up for him. Jeanie’s aunt’s friend said that walking the dog was Cluett’s excuse for slipping over to his favorite bar a couple of nights a week. The dog woke Cluett’s wife an hour or two later, scratching at the back door and whining, and she got up to let it in, but she was still mad so she didn’t worry about him till she got up this morning and realized that he’d never come home.

“She called her daughter over on Ocean Avenue to ask if he’d spent the night there—that’s what he did if he got especially bombed—and she’d just hung up the receiver when someone from the Six-Four rang her doorbell and gave her the bad news.”

“Poor lady,” Tillie said soberly. His own wife had gone through something similar back in October and she’d told him how it felt to pick up a telephone and hear someone from the department tell you your husband’s hurt. Marian’s caller had been mercifully terse, the whole message delivered in seconds, yet it’d seemed to her that all eternity had been compressed in that brief instant between hearing that Tillie’d been in an incident—her immediate, time-stopping certainty that Tillie was dead—and then hearing that he was in a hospital still alive.