Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (9 page)

The lock was so stiff from the cold that her key would not turn at first; and for a moment, she feared she’d have to ring for Roman Tramegra, her housemate, to buzz her in. Fortunately, the key turned on her next try. She stepped inside the tiny courtyard and let the gate swing to behind her.

Here, everything was frozen as stiffly as the lock: a dormant dogwood rose from a bed of dead herbs and flowers, a young pear tree that Roman had espaliered against a wall seemed lifeless, and brittle ivy leaves growing over the front of the house rustled with metallic whispers as she passed. The little marble Eros which Roman had lugged home last summer looked utterly forlorn and abandoned. It made Sigrid think of all the homeless who would not find shelter tonight and she shivered despondently. This was no night for anyone not made of marble to spend outside, and she felt incredibly fortunate that she could turn a key in her own door and find warmth and comfort on the other side.

Roman had left a light on over the stove in the kitchen, a sure sign that he’d also left her a plate in the refrigerator, but Roman himself did not appear.

Their apartment had been added to the rear of a commercial building that fronted the next street over and it formed a chunky L around the small courtyard. The short arm of the L held the kitchen and what had been the maid’s quarters when the owner, a sister to Roman’s elderly godmother, had lived here between her many marriages. Since Sigrid had no interest in cooking, Roman had taken that part of the house for his own and was honestly convinced that his being there made no difference, that he certainly didn’t impinge on her life.

In truth, after so many years alone, it was a little like finding herself saddled with a combination of bachelor uncle and some sort of large furry pet. He offered unsolicited advice, hot meals which she could accept or ignore without his taking it personally, and an aura of comfort which she rather welcomed but had never created for herself. Although she had been solitary by choice until accident threw them together last summer, it was pleasant to come home and find Roman puttering in the kitchen, experimenting with the herbs and spices he couldn’t resist buying. (His results weren’t always edible but hope sprang eternal in his heart.)

Not tonight though.

She had not told Roman of her birthday, so the door between the kitchen and his rooms was closed. A sliver of light shone from beneath it and Sigrid heard the muted tap of his typewriter. Since Christmas he’d been doggedly trying to write a mystery novel and every morning he had questions about the technicalities of a homicide investigation. Fortunately, he did not ask her opinion of his plot’s plausibility and Sigrid had no intention of giving it even if solicited. She knew quite well the relative fragility of the human body compared to bullets, tempered steel or even blunt instruments wielded with determination; but daggers made of brittle icicles struck her as highly preposterous.

She hung her coat on the halltree, then paused in the living room to pour a glass of cassis, which she took to her bedroom to drink in private celebration of another birthday.

The message light was blinking on the answering machine beside her bed and when she pressed the play button, Oscar Nauman’s warm voice filled the room. Only yesterday she’d dropped him off at the airport, where he’d met Elliott Buntrock, one of the hottest freelance curators in the art world, and caught a plane to the West Coast. Nauman knew that her machine held a sixty-minute tape and he wasn’t a bit self-conscious about speaking as if she were there with him. And not just speaking but fulminating at length about the idiocy of holding the College Art Association’s (or any other association’s, for that matter) winter meeting in Los Angeles so that you had to keep remembering what time it was where sensible people lived and what kind of ersatz city was this anyhow and why the hell had he let Buntrock talk him into going in the first place?

Monologues came easily to Nauman. As chairman of the Art Department at Vanderlyn College, he was used to lecturing dazzled students; and his reputation as one of the leading abstract artists of the postwar years had made him confident and forthright, occasionally even careless, in his sweeping pronouncements.

Sigrid sipped her cassis and smiled. She had heard his opinions of Buntrock before. Elliott Buntrock fancied himself on the cutting edge of the art world and was already looking for a book editor to publish the first volume of his collected writings. As Nauman fumed, she undressed, hung up her clothes and put on a scarlet gown of warm brushed wool.

“—and Buntrock’s got me moderating a panel called
‘Wither
Postmodernism?’” His tone dripped scorn on Buntrock’s mild pun. “A bunch of bozos who paint portraits of Mickey Mouse descending a staircase or have things that slither around the floor. That smart-aleck stuff seems so thin to me now. Ah, well, they said the same about us forty years ago. As you get older, you forget how—”

Abruptly he broke off with a chuckle. “Aren’t you glad I called three thousand miles to tell you this? What time is it there, Siga? It’s noon here and I miss you like hell.”

Her machine switched off.

“I miss you like hell.”
That was as romantic as Nauman ever got in words, Sigrid thought, but her eyes went to the framed silverpoint that hung above her bookcase. He had drawn her portrait on fine blue-gray paper as if her angular features were a subject for Dürer or Holbein, and the portrait warmed her like cassis whenever she looked at it.

Sigrid swallowed the last of her liqueur and got ready for bed. She had planned to read herself to sleep, but her hand touched the box Anne had given her and she unwrapped the pictures of her father, looked long at them, and then set them on her nightstand.

She wished she could remember him more clearly, that she had been old enough to know him as a person, not as a shadowy figure of other people’s memories and family anecdotes. So blond and handsome. And Anne so dark and beautiful. Everyone said the brief marriage between Yankee policeman and Southern belle had been a once-in-a-lifetime romantic love match; and certainly Anne had never remarried, had never seemed the least bit interested in anyone again, so far as Sigrid knew. Not that there hadn’t been opportunity and plenty of men to choose from. Anne was an outrageous flirt and loved to spar and fence, but it was a game and her male friends quickly understood it had to remain a game if they wanted to keep her friendship.

Sigrid switched off the lamp and lay wide-eyed in the darkness, troubled by unanswered questions. Why had Captain McKinnon never spoken to her of his dead partner? And why hadn’t she let Mick Cluett talk to her?

She fell into uneasy sleep.

The telephone rang. Sharp and insistent.

Nauman?

The blue electronic digits of her clock radio read 2:12. She brought the phone to her ear.

“Hey, Jen, wake up! Guess what?” laughed an exultant male voice. “Your brother’s a father! You’re an aunt! Allie had the baby! Isn’t it
great?
Jen?”

“I’m sorry,” Sigrid told him. “I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

“I do? Oh, gee, I’m really sorry. I guess I’m so excited I must have misdialed. I hope I didn’t wake you?”

“That’s okay.”

“Anyhow,” the man told her happily, “it’s a
girl!
Alice Sue. Isn’t that great?”

“Congratulations,” Sigrid murmured.

She returned the phone to its place and lay back with a sleepy smile. Wind hammered on the windows of her room, a night as cold and hard as the night of her birth, Anne had said. Sigrid knew she’d arrived just before midnight and they said that Leif Harald had wakened half the east coast with the news.

She hoped that someday someone would tell little Alice Sue how excited her own father had been by her birth.

CHAPTER 9

2 A.M. Dead of night. Wind whipped down the deserted sidewalks. It swept the gutters clean of plastic bags and foam cups, flung discarded newspapers and fast-food cartons from wire trash baskets, and sent empty beer cans rattling through the streets. With every fresh gust, traffic signs strained and creaked against the metal utility poles, signal lights swung wildly over each intersection, and the little awning over the door of the Chinese kosher deli bellied and snapped.

The deli was dark now, the newsstand shuttered, and as she hurried toward her bus stop, Lotty Fischer was alone on the street. At two A.M. on a bitter winter night, with the threat of snow in the air, even vehicular traffic dwindles to an occasional cab or private car. Two blocks away from headquarters, there was a small food store that stayed open all night. Realistically, it was too far from the bus stop for her to shelter in while waiting, but the wind cut like icy knives and she couldn’t bear to wait outdoors.

She hadn’t meant to take her eyes from the window, but the clerk behind the counter was friendly and bored and Lotty didn’t feel she could ignore him. Not when she was using his store for a waiting room. So she had chatted about the cold and indulged his opinions of the Knicks and the Rangers. Before she knew it, her bus was barreling down the street, less than a block away.

Flinging a hasty “Goodnight!” over her shoulder, she ran from the store, dodged a cab and cut across the street on a long diagonal.

Too late.

The bus roared past her stop without even slowing down.

Lotty Fischer seldom cursed but she felt like cutting loose as she raced after the bus. She was positive that the driver had seen her dash across the street yet he hadn’t even touched his brakes. Running in these new boots was hard, but she’d catch him if he stopped for the next light and damned if she wouldn’t give that s.o.b. a piece of her mind.

As if to cock a snoot at her curses and threats, the bus rolled through a yellow at the next intersection, found green lights and empty lanes as far ahead as the eye could see and soon was only a set of dirty exhaust fumes and disappearing red taillights.

A trolling taxi slowed beside her and the driver looked over inquiringly, but Lotty shook her head angrily. Almost immediately she changed her mind, but again she was too late. He was history, too.

Now that she’d decided to spring for a cab to her transfer point uptown, no more empty ones appeared. All were either taken or off-duty.

The wind rasped her nose and cheeks and Lotty pulled her scarf higher until only her eyes could be seen between the folds of red wool. The wind cut into the bridge of her nose, making her sinuses ache and forcing her to walk with her back to the wind wherever she safely could. She looked back at the warm pink-and-orange neon sign of the all-night store, nearly three blocks behind her, and hesitated.

After two A.M., the buses ran every thirty-five to forty minutes and if she missed her crosstown connection, there went another forty minutes.

It could take two hours to get home. And on a night like this.

Her best bet now was to walk back to Lexington and grab the subway. That would get her home in twenty-five minutes flat.

Okay, Lotty, she told herself. If you don’t find a cab before you get to the Lexington stop, you’ll take the train.

Pessimistically, she put a gloved hand in her pocket and pulled out a token just in case a train might be pulling in as she reached the turnstile.

The heels of her new winter boots clicked along the chilled sidewalk.

She kept close to the curb, well away from the shadowy recesses of darkened storefronts, but even the street people seemed under cover elsewhere this arctic night. She reached the subway without seeing anyone else on foot.

And still no empty cab.

She wavered at the top of the iron steps that led underground and heard only silence below.

Lotty’s personal nightmare was a roving band of teenage males. Color or race didn’t matter; they all terrified her. It wasn’t just their potential for physical violence that unnerved her, but their arrogant cruelty. Their glee in degrading and humiliating anyone who fell outside their definition of beauty. Too often wolf whistles from behind had turned into snickers and brutal “Is that a hose or a nose?” jokes. She always held her breath whenever more than two young men entered her train car and she never went down into a station alone if she heard loud male laughter or sounds of raucous horseplay floating up to the street.