Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (4 page)

5:37 P.M.

There was a raw tickle in the back of her throat and the subway car seemed warmer than usual. Maybe her mother was right, Lotty thought. Maybe she was coming down with something more serious than a head cold and should’ve called in sick. Except that the computers at work were already understaffed and it would back everything up and make even more paperwork for her cop friends if she stayed out, too.

Crowds of homeward-bound commuters jostled each other on the platform as Lotty waited for the train doors to open.

The ending of their work day meant the beginning of hers.

Like a fish swimming upstream against the current, she let them surge past her. Another cascade of humanity flowed down the damp concrete steps from the street, but she kept to the right wall and doggedly continued upward. Once she’d gained the sidewalk, a vicious gust plastered her new red coat to her small body and tried to whip away the ends of her red wool head scarf. She shifted the strap of her shoulder bag and pulled the scarf ends tighter, grateful that she only had a few short blocks to walk in this icy wind. Spring couldn’t get here too fast to suit her.

5:43.

Even though the days were getting longer, darkness had already fallen. Streetlights turned the overcast sky a pinkish orange but neon store fronts were a blaze of cheerful color.

Lotty ducked into one of the stores, a kosher Chinese deli, for a carton of eggdrop soup to go with the tuna salad she’d packed for her supper. “At least promise me you’ll get something hot,” her mother had said.

Lotty smiled indulgently as she paid for the soup and hurried back outside. Twenty-two years old and Mom still couldn’t quit treating her like a little girl off to school with her lunch money clutched in her hand. She worried that Lotty wouldn’t eat properly, wasn’t dressed warmly enough, wasn’t safe going back and forth alone on the subway.

To tell the truth, thought Lotty, she wasn’t all that crazy about taking the subway home alone herself. That was the only drawback with this position. She liked the hours, had asked for them in fact so that her invalid mother never had to be alone except for that half-hour gap between the time she had to leave for work and the time her father got home from his own job.

It was supposed to be a four-to-midnight shift like the standard police rotation, but because the computer section was understaffed, she had been on six-to-two for the last week and a half. This meant going down into a subway station that was even more deserted than at midnight when others on the regular rotation might also be homeward bound. Certainly no rush hour crowds at two A.M. and no safety in numbers.

Once or twice, one of the guys working midnight-to-eight had walked her down and waited till the train came and then made sure she was in a car with a conductor. Usually though, she chickened out and took a bus. It was three times as slow, but felt six times safer.

She’d been promised that her four-to-midnight would be restored as soon as they hired more people. By the end of the month, for sure, Personnel had promised. Like summer, it couldn’t come too soon for Lotty.

She entered the building and flashed a friendly smile at the familiar face of the uniformed officer behind the high booking desk.

5:58. She’d made it with two minutes to spare.

Across the drafty entrance hall, four blue-clad officers waited for the elevator and a couple of them teased her about cutting it close.

Lotty laughed, loosened her coat and pulled back the scarf. Her long chestnut hair gleamed in the overhead light and the delicate scent of her floral shampoo mingled with the men’s after-shave and the smell of gun oil and leather. She was not beautiful. Her nose was much too big for her small face and she still struggled with acne, but her body was sweetly shaped, her smile came easily, she was younger than the other civilian clerks who worked in this building, and she had always been as friendly as a two-month-old puppy.

This was her fourth year on the job, and she still loved it. Loved the horseplay and us-against-them feeling of solidarity, the excitement of helping an ongoing investigation even if her part was mostly simple number-crunching: license checks, arrest records, the serial numbers on stolen goods.

As the elevator doors opened, an older uniformed officer emerged. “Hey, Lotty,” he said. “You gonna have time to check out somebody for me tonight?”

“If it’s as slow as last night, sure, Wally,” she answered. “Might be after ten though.”

“That’s okay.”

They went into the small room behind the main desk where her terminal was located; and while Lotty hung her coat and scarf on a nearby hook and put her purse and supper in the drawer of her desk, Officer Wally Abronski scribbled two names on her pad.

“This is the kid that my daughter’s started seeing and this is his old man. I just want to make sure he’s okay, you know?”

“No problem,” she assured him, settling into her chair.

She cleared the computer screen, typed in the four digits of her personal security code number and reached for the first arrest worksheet of the night. The digital clock above her desk registered 18:00:59 and she mentally translated it into civilian time: fifty-nine seconds past six P.M.

Lotty’s fingers danced upon the keyboard and no premonitions troubled her thoughts. As she entered arrests and ran mechanical checks distanced from the dark deeds she recorded by a subconscious awareness that she sat in a warm, well-lighted building peopled by police officers who would, in theory, lay down their lives for her life, Lotty Fischer felt blissfully safe and protected.

CHAPTER 5

[Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

At the academy, they tell us every life’s got equal value.

Sounds nice but like so many nice-sounding things, it ain’t necessarily so. A rich man’s murder gets more attention than a poor man’s, white gets more than black unless the newspapers and TV get into it, and when a cop gets himself killed—even if the cop’s an old fart like Michael Cluett—the investigation takes precedence over every routine homicide already in the works. Labs process physical evidence quicker, FBI checks go faster, and the man’s body gets posted and released to the undertaker in hours.

Before leaving my office to direct the search of the mucky bottom beneath the footbridge across Sheepshead Bay, I’d already gotten a phone call from the M.E.’s office with their preliminaries. An inch-by-inch examination of the bridge gave us nothing; but I knew that by tomorrow morning—tomorrow evening at the latest—I’d find on my desk all the printouts of any computer records the FBI had on that palm-size Browning semi-automatic we pulled from the inlet. Nothing much to tell the family yet. At least I wouldn’t have to stonewall questions about when the undertaker could claim the body.

It was just past sunset—or what would’ve been sunset if the sun’d ever made it through the frigid gray sky—as Hy Davidowitz and I got out of our unmarked car and walked down to the two-family house off Hampton Avenue that Cluett and his wife had shared with her brother and his family. Two blue-and-whites were double-parked in front.

“Days are getting longer,” Davidowitz said. His dark droopy mustache gives his round face a vague resemblance to Fu Manchu. At thirty-seven he’s built like one of those blue steel mailboxes you find on every other street corner and he’s been just as solid whenever I’ve needed him.

“Soon be spring again,” I agreed. The years keep getting shorter the older I get.

Somebody’d hung a big showy spray of white chrysanthemums and stiff white satin ribbons beside the front door just in case the neighbors couldn’t guess by all the cars and steady stream of people in and out that there’d been a death in the house.

As we approached the steps, a couple of uniforms came through the doorway. Dark blue caps were pulled low against the frigid February twilight. One slim, a rookie about twenty-five; the other a middle-aged harness bull grown bulky on the job.

“Hello, Sarge,” they said. “Davidowitz.”

I couldn’t remember the older officer’s name but knew he was from an adjacent precinct. We stopped to talk a minute before ringing the bell.

“How’re they doing in there?” Hy Davidowitz asked him.

“’Bout like you’d expect,” he answered. His colleague zipped his black leather jacket and pulled the collar up around his ears. “His children are doing okay, but Irene keeps breaking up. Married forty-two years—” He shook his head. “It blows a big hole in her life.”

“Any leads yet?” asked the younger officer. “We heard you found the gun.”

“The lab says it looks like he bought it with a .380 JHP and we got a .380 auto out of the bay,” I answered. We did a shuffly version of the Texas two-step and moved past each other so that Davidowitz and I stood at the half-open door while the other two paused on the walk. “The confirm’ll probably be there by the time we get back to the shop and we’ve already put it on the wire.”

In the chilly night air, those chrysanthemums by the door smelled like every funeral I’ve ever been to. A sort of crisp vegetable odor like the celery and parsley at Kwan Te’s grocery around the corner from my house. Not unpleasant exactly, but nothing to do with the smell of real flowers and certainly nothing to soothe or comfort a person. Not like the flowers around my granny’s front porch when my sister and I were kids and our parents sent us to spend the summer down on her New Jersey truck farm. Her hard black hands’d had green fingertips and she’d grown lavender and stock, washtubs full of petunias, masses of sweet peas, lilacs and spicy carnations in the spring, followed by roses that perfumed the hot summer days and night-blooming nicotiana.

Quick takes of high school botany flicked through my head, along with muddled thoughts of ozone layers, pesticides, and genetic engineering. What’s been done to flowers that they never smell sweet anymore?

Inside the house was what I expected: living room and dining room jammed with people, one or two uniforms, but mostly civilians.

And mostly women. Birth and death, it’s always mostly women. Cluett’s daughter and two daughters-in-law went back and forth almost like hostesses at a reception. While we were there, they kept a steady stream of strong hot tea coming, and every few minutes they came around to check that everybody had all the cream and sugar and paper napkins they needed. Keeping busy.

I recognized Cluett’s sons with a couple of men who were later introduced as his brothers. The men seemed stiff and half-embarrassed. They moved awkwardly between the crowded living room and kitchen and talked in low tones with neighbors who brought sympathy and plates of food.

Almost everyone had dirty smudges on their foreheads and at first I wondered if this was some sort of white-man’s funeral ritual I’d never heard of before. Eventually it hit me that today was Ash Wednesday. The whole family had been to mass and received the mark.

Took me a minute to pick out Irene Cluett. She sat on the gold velour couch supported by a pair of horsey-faced women. One of them wore the self-important look of A Member of the Family. The other had on one of those chopped-off black things that passes these days for a nun’s veil. Irene Cluett sat between them with a glazed expression on her homely flat face. “Bearing up,” Granny would call it.

Weird how much a husband and wife can start to look alike after years of marriage. She looked so much like Cluett she could have been his twin sister: thirty pounds overweight, slack gray hair cut short and parted on the same side, only hers was held in place by a plain blue plastic barrette. Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed and when she recognized us, her lower lip started quivering.

I was Cluett’s boss, but I’d only met his wife at official social functions, occasional summer picnics in Prospect Park or at widely spaced PAL events. She’d been civil every time, no half-hidden hostility, but none of that buttering-up that some of the younger wives use when they think it’ll help their husbands’ careers.

Maybe she’d always known Cluett’s career was past help.

Tonight was partly an official expression of departmental sympathy and partly because Mrs. Cluett had to be questioned as a necessary part of our investigation. Two birds, one stone. I’d expected nothing more than formal politeness, and it surprised the hell out of me when she teared up at the sight of my face. She held out both hands to mine and put her broad cheek up for me to kiss it.