07-Past Imperfect Read online

  PAST IMPERFECT

  BY

  MARGARET MARON

  Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Maron.

  All rights reserved. (First published 1991.)

  All characters in this book are fictitious.

  Any resemblance to real persons,

  living or dead,

  is purely coincidental.

  For Toby and Margaret Maron Quaranto,

  who have proved over the years that water may indeed be as thick as blood.

  By Margaret Maron

  Margaret Maron is the author of twenty-eight novels and two collections of short stories. The following works currently are available for e-readers and other electronic devices.

  Sigrid Harald Novels

  Past Imperfect

  Corpus Christmas

  Baby Doll Games

  The Right Jack

  Bloody Kin

  Death In Blue Folders

  Death Of A Butterfly

  One Coffee With

  Short Stories

  Bewreathed

  With This Ring

  Deborah’s Judgment

  www.margaretmaron.com

  INTRODUCTION

  Past Imperfect, the 7th in this series, was written in 1990 and I continue to be amazed by all the societal changes in twenty short years. Times Square had not yet become Disneyfied. Sex shops and porn movies abounded there, and tourists were pestered with handbills promising illicit good times in nearby hotel rooms that could be rented by the hour. Every third person was a smoker and smoking was allowed in restaurants, offices, and some movie theaters. The Twin Towers still stood. Subway cars and stations were grungy, and black graffiti covered both the walls and the trains. And the homeless were everywhere (something sadly happening once again, if for different reasons.)

  On a lighter note, it was trendy for women to “get their colors done,” i.e., to learn if they were a Winter, Spring, Summer or Autumn and to choose a wardrobe based on those designations. Those familiar with Sigrid Harald’s indifference to clothes and mirrors can imagine her reaction when her Grandmother Lattimore gifts her with such a makeover.

  — Margaret Maron, 2012

  CHAPTER 1

  The Urban Renewal Society on a raw January night was basically no different from a dozen other middle-class bars that dotted lower Manhattan. There was the same smell of booze and tobacco mingled with damp woolen overcoats, the same gleaming mirrors and glass shelves of multihued bottles behind a long oak bar, the same small square tables at the front and larger round ones at the rear, the same smoky blues drifting in and out between voices, laughter, the tinkle of ice on glass.

  Many New York bars, though, used pulldown steel mesh to protect against break-ins. The Urban Renewal Society’s barred door had once secured a holding cell in a now-vanished precinct station. Some bars had pictures of prize fighters on their walls; others, depending on their clientele, displayed prominent politicians, movie stars, or TV celebrities. The Urban Renewal Society catered unabashedly to cops and its walls were a rogues’ gallery of uniformed police officers. Scrawled across the pictures were words of affectionate derision: “To Sal and Mike, who now have a license to steal.” Or “To Mike—good luck keeping Sal’s hand out of the till!” These were interspersed with signed photographs of four of the last six police commissioners plus one elegantly tailored inspector now retired from Scotland Yard, an impassive-looking Navaho Tribal Police officer, and a beautiful blonde SBI agent from North Carolina.

  Amid old-fashioned handcuffs, nightsticks, whistles, and other police paraphernalia from bygone days, the two ex-cops who owned the place had hung a somber wooden plaque with the names and badge numbers of former customers, men and women both, who’d been killed in the line of duty.

  Over the cash register hung a twenty-dollar bill, a twenty tendered for a round of drinks on opening day and framed for good luck because it was the first bill to slide across the gleaming new bar.

  Counterfeit, of course.

  “—another Miller Lite for the returning hero and me,” said Matt Eberstadt, who was just sober enough to remember he was supposed to avoid extra calories. “And gin and tonic for the new millionaire.”

  The barman was devoid of curiosity and merely repeated the big detective’s order, “Two Miller Lites, one GT, what else?”

  “Scotch for the Gold Dust Twins, a Molson for the dear departing, and—and—” He blinked beerily at the thin gray-eyed woman who sat opposite him at Urban Renewal’s largest rear table. “And bourbon and Coke for the lieutenant!” he finished with a triumphant grin.

  “Geez, Eberstadt,” grumbled Bernie Peters, fishing in his glass for the slice of lime as the waiter headed back toward the bar. “If I’d wanted the whole world to know about my win, I’d have rented that moving sign at Times Square.”

  Eberstadt’s rumpled face registered hurt and Jim Lowry, whose sandy brown hair was nowhere near the gold of the woman seated beside him, said, “Aw, come on, Bernie. Tell us how much. You can trust us. We’re family.”

  “Sure, sure,” Peters jeered.

  “Leave him alone,” said the blonde as a mischievous dimple flashed in her smooth cheek. “He’s afraid we’ll tell the little wife. Afraid she’ll spend it all again.”

  “And am I wrong?” Bernie Peters leaned around Eberstadt’s bulky figure to confront the young detective face-to-face. A very attractive face, too, but Bernie usually reacted to her needling too automatically to register Elaine Albee’s blonde prettiness anymore.

  “Look what happened last month,” he complained. “I win three hundred and she buys Christmas presents for the kids like it was three thousand. If I tell her I won nineteen—”

  He caught himself and leaned back in the leather-padded oak chair. “Nineteen hundred?” Tillie was seated on Peters’s left and his round face, thinner now and still pale after his long hospital stay, was as wistful as his voice.

  Detective Peters looked from one openly curious colleague to another before giving a rueful, hands-up shrug. “Nineteen thousand.”

  “Holy Mother of Mary!” sighed Mick Cluett.

  “Before taxes,” Peters warned, though a sheepish grin spread over his pleasantly homely features.

  A flash of naked envy swept around the table, then their indrawn breaths and raised eyebrows turned to congratulations, laughter, and offers to sell him gold mines, Florida swamplands, and halvsies in a used Lamborghini Elaine Albee had been drooling over since mid-December.

  “You could drive it all week and I’d just use it on the weekends,” she said generously.

  “Forget it,” Peters told her. “I’m getting a mini-van. Taking delivery on it this weekend.”

  The barman returned with their drinks and a fresh bowl of popcorn, and Matt Eberstadt passed the check over to his newly flush partner.

  “See what I mean?” Peters took it like a good sport, but he shook his head as he drew out his wallet. “You guys are worse than Pam.”

  “You’re really not going to tell her?” asked Elaine Albee.

  “I’ll tell her. I just won’t tell her how much.” He fixed them with an earnest look. “And you gotta promise not to either, okay? Now that she’s back working part-time, she thinks our money troubles are over. I’ll let her have a thousand to blow on the house, but if she knew the real figure—”

  Normally Lieutenant Sigrid Harald didn’t let Bernie Peters’s patronizing attitude toward his wife annoy her. If it were left to her, none of them would know anything of each other’s private affairs; but tonight, she’d had just enough bourbon to loosen her usual constraint.

  “Won’t she find out when you file your tax returns?” she asked coolly.

  “Pam?” The younger man snorted. “Tax forms give h
er a headache. She signs where I tell her to and says she’ll bake me a cake with a file in it if the IRS ever runs me in.”

  As the others laughed and continued to pelt Peters with suggestions for new investments and pleas to borrow his lucky coin when next they bought their own lottery tickets, Lieutenant Harald sipped her fresh drink and considered the empty chair on her right, next to Tillie’s. Captain McKinnon should have been here by now. She glanced at her watch surreptitiously and wondered if she could just make a few pro forma remarks and leave.

  Although no longer as awkward in social situations as she’d been even a year ago, the lieutenant still wasn’t comfortable at these off-duty gatherings. She was genuinely glad that Tillie had finally returned to full duty after his near-fatal encounter with a bomb back in October, and she was equally glad to be sending Mick Cluett back to Brooklyn to finish out the forty years he was determined—against all logic—to serve; but as far as she was concerned, a brisk handshake in the office would have been sufficiently demonstrative for both events.

  Unfortunately, Elaine Albee’s spontaneous let’s-have-a-party had popped out in Captain McKinnon’s hearing and their big gruff boss had said, “Good idea, Albee. Set it up and we’ll be there, right, Harald?”

  “Certainly, sir,” she’d answered neutrally.

  For some reason, Captain McKinnon seemed to value Michael Cluett, a sag-bellied old-timer who, in Sigrid Harald’s opinion, should have been encouraged to retire ten years ago. Instead of specialing in some young go-get-’em when Tillie’s accident left them shorthanded, McKinnon had specifically requested Cluett’s services and had even growled at Sigrid when she told him baldly that it would take three Cluetts to replace one Tillie.

  “Has he refused a direct order?” snapped McKinnon.

  “No, sir.”

  “Does he do what you ask him?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then I don’t see what you’ve got to gripe about, Harald.”

  “Because that’s all he does, Captain—exactly what’s ordered or asked. No initiative, no drive.”

  “If you can’t motivate your people, Lieutenant—”

  “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 joi
ned 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.