Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (28 page)

Sigrid could still see Cluett and Peters sitting at the kitchen table sorting the pile of blood-soaked bills they’d collected into neat, if sticky, stacks. The counting had taken longer than it once would have. Since it wasn’t known whether either of the principals had ever been tested for AIDS, Cluett and Peters had pulled on three pairs of rubber gloves before they touched the blood-drenched money and it’d made their fingers clumsy.

Sigrid knew that the crack dealer’s trial was due to begin next month. It was such an open-and-shut case that they’d expected an automatic plea bargain. Instead the accused man had decided to waste more taxpayer dollars and to plead self-defense.

Then there was the Negus homicide Cluett and Lowry had worked with Sam Hentz and Dinah Urbanska when Albee was out with the flu immediately after Christmas.

Alfred Negus had returned from a business trip to the luxurious Gramercy Square apartment he shared with his sixteen-month-old daughter Erica and his wife Helene. Negus had found his young daughter, stiff with rigor mortis, floating facedown in their bathtub and no sign of his wife, the owner of a pricey boutique in the Village.

With no sign of a struggle and only the wife’s coat and purse missing, the detectives had at first theorized that Helene Negus might have left the baby alone in the bath, returned to find it drowned, and had then fled in panic from a mixture of grief and guilt.

Negus insisted that his wife would never have left their daughter unattended; and while the detectives had heard it all before, they had handled the investigation with care and diligence. Their professionalism paid off when Cluett, Hentz, and Urbanska accompanied Negus to his wife’s boutique and discovered her body stashed in one of the dressing rooms. Nearby, they found a gaping hole in the wall and scattered jewelry. (Urbanska had created another legend for klutzy behavior when she trod on a gold and amethyst earring and walked away with it embedded in the crepe sole of her shoe.)

Forensic soon helped them piece it all together. Thieves had gained entrance to the Negus apartment, abducted Mrs. Negus before she could take little Erica from the bath, and had forced her to open up her store. From there, they had proceeded to take sledgehammers and smash their way into the tightly protected jewelry store next door without setting off any of its sophisticated alarms. Even though the owner had prudently locked his most valuable gems in his small vault, the thieves had still walked away with a quarter-million in gold jewelry and lesser gems.

They hadn’t meant to kill Mrs. Negus, one of them explained when he was caught pawning his share of the loot the following week, “But she wouldn’t shut up about her goddamned brat, so Arnie stuffed a gag in her mouth.”

While they filled their shopping bag with expensive jewelry, strewing brooches and earrings underfoot in their haste, Mrs. Negus had suffocated on the gag.

“Arnie” hadn’t yet been located, but his partner had immediately pleaded guilty to grand larceny and two counts of involuntary manslaughter and was already serving time.

Lowry and Urbanska had done every line of paperwork on that case.

Hentz had been in charge of the investigation and it was the only way he could be certain it’d get done right.

Hentz had grumbled about having to use Cluett the three months he was in the Twelfth, especially after Cluett’s slapdash laziness had gotten Dinah in trouble.

Nevertheless, she couldn’t see that there was anything here for Sergeant Rawson to fasten on. Surely Cluett’s death was rooted in Brooklyn. That’s where he lived, where he’d spent the last twenty years of his career.

Unless it was something from even further back?

She closed the last set of index records and came to the copy of the duplicate file Sergeant Vaughn had given McKinnon on Friday. She’d almost forgotten she had it and Rawson hadn’t thought to collect it when he took the original from Vaughn.

Sigrid often deplored the profligate use of copying machines. Even when bureaucracy had been limited by stencils and carbon paper, they had circulated too many irrelevant documents marked “For Your Information.” With the arrival of a copier in every office, the bales of paper that flowed across her desk seemed to grow exponentially each year. But occasionally, she had cause to applaud their invention. Without a photocopier, she probably would not be reading such a complete file.

She rapidly scanned the accounts Vaughn and Davidowitz had written of their interviews with Cluett’s widow, the cousin—that “bloat a goat” phrase was one she’d heard Cluett use about the hundreds and fifties of drug money they’d confiscated—the next-door neighbor, the car mechanics, and the regulars at the Shamrock. There was a summation of Cluett’s last few cases and even a photocopy of the scribbled notes where he’d pestered Albee and Peters, trying to fill in missing gaps before he had to get up and swear to them in court.

She closed the last folder and swiveled in her chair to gaze out her window. The exterior glass hadn’t been washed since autumn and a film of gray soot made the gray day even duller. The powdery snow fell with a steady hypnotic persistence as Sigrid considered each member of her unit in the hard cold light of known facts. She still thought Cluett’s killer would prove to be someone connected with the Six-Four in Brooklyn, but there was one point that had snagged her attention, almost like a small jagged tear in a fingernail and just as easily smoothed away if she could put her hands on an emery board.

Unfortunately, this was Sunday. Now who—?

A friend—Anne’s friend, actually—came to mind. Cameron Stewart. Through hard work, a thick skin, relentless optimism, and a genuine talent for making friends among the secretaries and administrative assistants who keep a system functioning, Cammie Stewart had risen high in the city’s bureaucracy. True, her expertise lay in the social services, but Sigrid was confident that Cammie would know some workaholic who could be called on a Sunday.

She turned back to her desk and looked up the telephone number.

Cammie had her answering machine switched on, but as soon as Sigrid identified herself to the tape, the older woman’s voice cut in. “Sigrid! How ARE you? WHERE are you? How’s Anne?”

When all the who, when, what, where, how questions subsided, Sigrid told her what she wanted to know. Cammie went silent and Sigrid could almost hear her riffling through a mental Rolodex.

“I thought maybe a federal clerk?” she suggested.

“On Sunday?” Cammie snorted. “No, best to go right to the source. Now let me think . . . hmm. You going to be there for the next half hour? Okay, say the name again. Spelled like it sounds?”

Sigrid spelled the name.

“And the date?”

“I’m not really sure. Sometime since Christmas anyhow.”

“Okay. If it can be done today, I should have an answer for you in an hour. Ninety minutes tops.”

After the connection had been broken, Sigrid went back to watching the snow. If she were lucky, Cammie would soon call back and tell her that she had an overactive imagination and that the random dots she’d connected in her mind did not produce a real picture.

The telephone remained silent.

There was work she could be doing, reports to read, assignments to fill. Instead, she fished around in the bowl of puzzle rings on her desk till she found a six-circle chain of silver links that took intense concentration to stack together into a single smooth band.

And still the phone did not ring.

Eventually, a gnawing sensation in her stomach reminded Sigrid that she’d worked through lunch again; and when she realized that she’d been hearing voices in the outer office for the last half hour or so she gratefully left her silent phone and went out.

Sam Hentz had a stony expression on his face, Urbanska looked apprehensive and Eberstadt and Peters looked guilty.

Instantly she guessed why. “You told them?” she asked curtly.

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” said Bernie Peters. “We thought you already had.”

She let it pass and turned to the other two. “I shouldn’t have to remind you this is just standard routine,” she said. “We’ve all been involved in enough investigations to know that the first canvass always covers everybody tangentially involved. I expect you to carry on with business as usual.”

Then the door opened and Sergeant Rawson stepped into the room. His twinkly brown eyes swept over them and he consulted the clipboard he carried. “Which one of you’s Eberstadt?” he asked.

Matt Eberstadt stood up warily.

“Wonder if you’d mind stepping down the hall a minute?” Rawson said genially.

And in Sigrid’s office, her private telephone line began to ring.

CHAPTER 25

[Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

Of the people who’d worked with Cluett between October and January, Detective Matthew Eberstadt was our first plainclothes; so when Rawson opened the door and pointed him to my end of the table, the big crowded room got quiet for a split second before everybody went back to what they were doing.

Rawson roamed around like a high school teacher grading on the curve. Eastman was pulling data from the files of cases Cluett had worked. Flick and the two women, Yow and Obler, were spread out around the room busy with the boys and girls in blue. Delbridge went back to playing with her computer. An unlit cigarette dangled from her lips. (Even though she was teacher’s pet, Rawson wasn’t kidding about smoke-filled rooms and about twice an hour, Delbridge motored down the hall for a cigarette break with Eastman, the only other smoker on the team.)

From the personnel sheet Delbridge had obtained, I knew that Eberstadt lived in Ozone Park, just over the Brooklyn line in the edge of Queens. Forty-five, three kids ranging from sixteen to twenty-one. Height and weight put him just inside the physical description we had of Fischer’s killer, and—most importantly—he’d been stationed in this house five and a half years.

He took the chair opposite me and folded his arms in front of him on the edge of the table. Probably twenty-five pounds overweight, but he carried it pretty well except for the spare tire and bags under his eyes. One of those long faces and half-bald heads where the hairline goes right back to the top of his head and then curly gray hair the rest of the way. Upfront about knowing Fischer.

“Sweet kid,” he said. “A year older than my daughter. Really makes you think. I used to kid around with her when she started working downstairs, the way I’d kid with Margie. She used to turn red every time I teased her about boyfriends. The way Margie did.”

“She liked you?” I asked. “Trusted you?”

“I guess.”

“Would have done you favors like check out a new neighbor for priors?”

“Sure,” he said, and beat me to the punch. “And she’d have run a piece’s number through for me, too. If I’d asked. Which I didn’t.”

“You know I gotta ask you,” I said.

“Yeah, I know.” He leaned back in his chair. “Tuesday and Wednesday were my regular days off. I was home both nights.”

“Your wife and kids can swear to that?”

“Not really.” He pushed his chair back so he could cross his legs.

“The boys were there, but my daughter moved to Atlanta last weekend and my wife went down to help her. She got back yesterday afternoon.”

He gave off odd vibes. I mean, Terry’s always leaving those pop psychology books lying around and you can’t leaf through too many of them without seeing drawings of how to read body language. The way he sat there, leaning away from me with his arms and legs crossed, this was somebody with something to hide.

Unless it was only because he’d been a cop long enough to know how wives and kids will lie for the old man? Uptight because it wasn’t a stronger alibi?

I moved on to Cluett and we went over the cases they’d worked together. All routine. No surprises. If Cluett and Eberstadt’d had any run-ins, if Cluett and anybody’d had run-ins, Eberstadt hadn’t heard about it.