07-Past Imperfect Read online

  CHAPTER 13

  [Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

  Even with overhead heaters hanging from the beams above each work station, the Chrysler dealer’s garage in Sheepshead Bay felt like a drafty barn to Davidowitz and me.

  The Chrysler mechanics wore brown twill coveralls, but their arms and chests were padded-looking, like they wore two or three layers underneath. The concrete floor was splotched with motor oil and transmission fluid. Probably never warmed up before summer, especially since the two bay doors kept opening and closing as they shuttled cars in and out.

  A damn noisy place, too. Screeching power tools, banging to loosen rusted muffler clamps, the clang as a steel wrench or loose hubcap clattered to the floor, and those heavy metal bay doors rumbling up and down on their tracks.

  The sleet had changed to wet snow and each car came in with a mound of icy slush on hood, roof, and trunk.

  I held an antacid mint on my tongue and watched a harried-looking guy of early middle age duck under a blue LeBaron convertible that was raised up on a hydraulic lift. He said something to the mechanic, who nodded and then reached up into the LeBaron’s underside again with a power wrench.

  He rounded a rolling tool chest, kicked a loose lug nut back to the young black mechanic who’d just dropped it, and walked up to us. “You wanted to see me?”

  He had on coveralls, too, but a dark green tie was knotted at the neck of his plaid shirt beneath. Brown hair clipped short, thinning on top though. Wrinkles around his eyes. I put his age somewhere in the early forties.

  “You Frank Ambrosini?” asked Davidowitz. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the pressurized air hose directly behind them. “The service manager here?”

  “Who’s asking?” Not hostile, just wary.

  Davidowitz introduced us and I said, “One of your customers was shot yesterday. We’d like to—”

  “You gotta speak up,” said Ambrosini, tapping his ear.

  “Got somewhere quieter we can talk?” Davidowitz asked loudly.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Ambrosini and took us across the noisy service area, past a large black luxury car that had its motor hanging by chains over the open hood. Clean drop cloths were draped over the fenders and front grill to protect the shiny finish from spills and scratches. It reminded me of TV medical documentaries. They draped patients like that so that only a small part of the body was left exposed for the surgeon’s knife. Judging by the facial expressions of the two mechanics at work on the motor, this was going to be an equally expensive operation.

  The service manager took us into a glass-fronted cubicle. Grimy clipboards hung beside the door. Each held a thin sheaf of grease-smudged checklists, work orders, and time sheets, all waiting to have their prices added to the final bills. Inside the cubicle, desk and shelves were piled high with more papers, parts catalogs and service manuals. A calendar on every wall. Very educational to see how each Miss February illustrated a different socket wrench or air pressure gauge.

  Only one extra chair. Davidowitz waved aside Ambrosini’s offer to find another and leaned against the door frame.

  It was only marginally quieter with the door closed. Engine smells fought with stale cigarette butts. Ambrosini slid into his chair behind the desk, pulled out a fresh cigarette, lit it, took a deep draw on it and looked at us curiously. “So. What can I do for you guys?”

  “One of your customers was shot and killed night before last,” I said.

  “Yeah, I heard about that. Too bad.”

  “We heard you and he’d had some words.”

  “So?”

  “So we thought we’d come and ask you about it.”

  “Ask me what?”

  “Michael Cluett was murdered, Mr. Ambrosini.” I was trying to stay patient.

  “So what’s that got to do with me?” His face held a blank, open expression.

  Too blank and open? Davidowitz and I looked at each other.

  “Oh, hey, wait just a minute now!” Cigarette ashes went flying as Ambrosini wagged his hands in protest.

  “You did have words with him, didn’t you?”

  Ambrosini shrugged. “Well, yeah. But hell! If I went out and shot every customer that jaws off about our service here—”

  “You give bad service?” Davidowitz put in.

  “’Course not. But a guy that thinks he can throw his weight around just because he’s a cop—”

  “You don’t like cops?” I asked, deliberately badgering him.

  “I don’t like cops that try to muscle me into fixing something that ain’t broke just because he’s a cop.” Ambrosini sat up stiffly in his chair. “No sir, I don’t like that one little bit. Would you?”

  “How was he muscling you?”

  Ambrosini gave a sour laugh. “I gotta tell a couple of detectives the hundred and one ways a cop on the beat can give grief to legitimate businesses? Give me a break.”

  He gave us the not-too-subtle threats he said Cluett had made about ticketing every less-than-legally parked car on the street or sidewalk outside the garage bay doors, how Cluett had hassled them about EPA-mandated guidelines for proper oil and grease disposal and anything else he could think of, merely because he’d thought the power steering was too stiff on his new car.

  “That’s just the way that car handles. All in his head, believe me. But he kept bitching till I finally told him where he could shove it. That’s all I did though. You don’t believe me, ask anybody here. I was steamed, sure, but I don’t go off half-cocked. Look, this guy was around here every week with something new. He wanted a personal mechanic, like a personal banker, you know?”

  Knowing Cluett, I could imagine.

  “If that’s true,” I said, “can you tell us where you were between ten P.M. and midnight on Tuesday night?”

  As it so happened, Ambrosini could. He stood up, opened the door to his office and shouted over the din, “Hey, George!”

  The wiry young brother was bent over an engine at the middle work station. He straightened and looked our way.

  “C’mere a minute.”

  He wiped his hands on a bright orange flannel and came over.

  “These guys wanna know what I was doing between ten and midnight Tuesday.” Ambrosini grinned as he stubbed out his cigarette in an overflowing ashtray shaped like a rubber tire.

  The kid grinned back. “We were still celebrating at Gino’s,” he told us. “Man, you shoulda been there! I rolled a perfect game Tuesday night. Twelve goddamn strikes in a row! We creamed Arnie’s Awnings.”

  While Davidowitz spoke to the other members of Coney Island Chrysler’s bowling team, I wrote down Gino’s address; but my heart wasn’t in it.

  The Shamrock was a bar and grill that faced the bay on Emmons Avenue. Nets and dried starfish on the walls; a huge sailfish over the bar. In summer, fishermen and tourists jammed the big main dining room for fresh seafood or stood outside on the sidewalk to eat clams on the halfshell served through the open window. They closed off the big room during the week, but even on a winter day like this there was enough business to keep the bar and side grill open. Thick cigar smoke. One of the regulars had just become a grandfather for the first time and an open box lay on the bar. The pink-and-gold bands had “It’s A Girl!” printed on them.

  The bar had more people than I expected to see this early in the day and certainly more than had been at Gino’s, where we confirmed Ambrosini’s alibi. Not quite two o’clock and half the stools and several of the booths were full. The windows were steamed over and just the smell of beer and hot grease frying the shrimp made Davidowitz and me remember how long it’d been since our doughnuts and coffee.

  The Shamrock was a neighborhood gathering place and even though we didn’t live in this particular neighborhood, we’d both been in before. Talk flowed easily from one table to the next, with occasional banter addressed to the bartender and two waitresses loud enough for the whole room to hear.

  None of them had been working Tuesday ni
ght. “But Roger’ll be here in about twenty minutes,” one of the women said.

  “Roger?” asked Davidowitz.

  “The night guy. He’s coming in early so I can go pick up my kids before the snow gets too deep. They’re saying six to eight inches if it stalls.”

  “They are?” Davidowitz lived in Nassau and hated driving the Sunrise Highway in snow.

  “Relax,” I told him. “They say that every time we get a few flakes.” We took our beers over to a booth and ordered the combination plate: fried oysters, shrimp, and flounder, with french fries and a salad on the side. Hy’s mustache was soon flecked with beer foam and bits of lettuce. That’s the trouble with face hair. At mealtimes you look like a garbage pail that needs emptying.

  We’d almost finished eating when a shaggy barrel of a man came through the door, stamping snow from his boots and shaking his thick black hair free of wet flakes. He looked a little familiar and gave us the high sign when one of the women nodded in our direction. A few minutes later, he came over carrying one of those red plastic baskets full of fried shrimp and a mug of draft beer. He pulled a chair up to the end of our booth, sat down and began to eat.

  “Carol says you wanna ask me about Tuesday night and Mick Cluett.” He looked at our empty gasses. “’Nother round?”

  “No, thanks,” I said. We introduced ourselves. He was Roger Sorrell.

  “You knew Mick pretty well?”

  “Sure.” Sorrell popped a couple of shrimp in his mouth and talked as he chewed. “He was here three or four nights a week. You coulda knocked me over with one of those plastic drink stirrers when I heard he got shot.”

  Hefty swigs of beer alternated with mouthfuls of shrimp and french fries as Sorrell described Mick Cluett’s last visit to the Shamrock. It’d been a slow Tuesday night, bitter cold, so Sheba, the dog, had come into the bar with him as a matter of course.

  “She behaves herself. Goes to sleep on his foot and doesn’t wake up till it’s time to go. We used to kid him that she was his seeing eye dog—they’re the only ones you’re supposed to let in a place that serves food—but he never got blind drunk. Two beers, three at the most were all he ever had.”

  According to Sorrell, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the evening. Mick Cluett had arrived and departed around his usual times. “Although, come to think about it, he did look at the clock a coupla times and when he got up to leave, he said something about somebody not coming.”

  “Could you be more specific? Did he use a name?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “As near as I can remember, it was a coupla minutes past ten. He drained his glass and said—Sorrell closed his eyes to concentrate—‘Looks like he’s not coming, so I might as well call it a night.’ I was watching the game, not paying him much attention. He paid his tab, put on his coat and put Sheba back on the leash and that was it.”

  “Anybody leave around the same time he did?” I asked, patting my pockets for my antacids. Seafood tastes great going down, but fried stuff always weighs heavy on my stomach.

  Sorrell concentrated. “Yeah, come to think of it, one of the nurses from the hospital.”

  He turned heavily in the chair. “Hey, Carol. What’s the name of that nurse that comes in once in a while? Red hair starting to go gray, nice laugh. Kitty?”

  “Kitty Jozell,” the barmaid answered easily.

  “Know where she lives?”

  Both shrugged.

  “Nearby though,” said Carol. “Probably around on Voorhies ’cause I know we’re on her way home from the hospital.”

  Davidowitz hoisted his burly form from the booth and went in search of the men’s room and telephone. “I’ll see if she’s in the book,” he told me.

  A few minutes later, he reported back. There was only one K. Jozell in the Brooklyn directory and the address was almost around the corner. He’d punched her number and a woman answered on the fifth ring.

  “I could tell by her voice that I woke her up, but she was nice about it,” said Davidowitz. “She doesn’t think she can help us much, but as long as we’re at the Shamrock, she said we might as well come ahead.”

  Kitty Jozell’s apartment was in one of those plain buildings erected all over New York in the mid-fifties: a twelve-story brick-and-glass box sufficient for the demands of no-frills housing. No doorman, just rows of push buttons in an outer lobby. Probably unlocked every morning and evening by the super, who probably lived on the ground floor.

  Davidowitz pressed the nurse’s number and when her voice came through the speaker, he identified himself and the inner lobby door unlocked with a loud buzz. As we made the elevators, the doors opened to one of the cars. A young Asian woman stepped out, pulling a shopping cart with one hand and a small child with the other. Her eyes went from the damp flakes on our overcoats and hats to the glass doors beyond, where the air was white with swirling snow.

  “Oh my God,” she groaned.

  The child was too bundled up for me to tell if it was a boy or girl, but a pleased look of anticipation lit up its blackberry eyes and I found myself smiling as the elevator took us up.

  “You build snowmen when you were a kid, Hy?”

  But Davidowitz was worrying about the long drive home. “I knew I should’ve put the tire chains on before I came in today.”

  “Will you quit that?” I told him. “It’s supposed to stop before dark.” Our elevator came to a smooth stop and Kitty Jozell was waiting for us in the open doorway of 8-B.

  She was a natural redhead, beginning to go gray and not fighting it.

  She wore a dark purple wool robe tightly cinched at her trim waist and her shoulder-length hair had been combed, but her face was bare of makeup and a slight puffiness around her green eyes confirmed that she’d been asleep when Davidowitz phoned.

  “Sorry,” she said, masking a yawn, “but I worked an eleven-to-seven last night.”

  She let us into an attractive studio apartment. The Murphy bed had been folded up but an edge of flowered coverlet had been caught in the crack; and the coffee table that doubled as a nightstand still held a water glass, a box of tissues, and a half-worked crossword puzzle. A wire hanger hooked over the kitchen doorway held her white uniform, and crumpled white panty hose lay on the kitchen counter. Otherwise, the apartment was neat and cozy, with bright chintzes and one of the healthiest looking polypody ferns I’d ever seen.

  “How often do you fertilize it?” I asked her.

  “Oh, do you grow ferns?” she said.

  “Nothing like that one,” I had to admit.

  “You have to mist them twice a week, but only feed them twice a year or you’ll burn the rhizomes.”

  Davidowitz cleared his throat. Real detectives aren’t supposed to get off on hanging baskets. He started questioning Ms. Jozell.

  She was a special-duty nurse at a nearby hospital over on Ocean Parkway, which explained her erratic hours. And yes, she occasionally stopped in at the Shamrock on her way home.

  Night before last? Tuesday?

  “I checked my calendar when you called,” she said. “I probably left the hospital around nine-fifteen, nine-twenty.”

  “You don’t keep regular hours?”

  “I told you: I’m special-duty, not regular staff.” She hesitated and her green eyes seemed to look inward for a minute. “My patient died. I filled out the necessary papers and then left. I’m not much for whisky, but it seems to help me sleep if I drink a stiff scotch after a shift like that.”

  Her slim fingers played with the fringed belt of her purple robe, curling and uncurling it. “He was only thirteen.”

  We gave her a moment, then I said, “About the Shamrock. Do you remember seeing Michael Cluett when you left?”

  “The police officer that was shot? Old guy, fat, with a dog?”

  I nodded.

  “I didn’t know him by name,” she said, “but he was there almost every time I’ve stopped by for a drink. He left just ahead of me.”

  “Alone?”
r />   “With the dog,” she repeated. “I was about a half-block behind him and I turned the corner at Ocean Avenue about the time he was crossing Emmons toward the footbridge. It was pretty cold and I remember wondering if dogs feel it as much as humans and thinking about my patient dying so young and there was this old guy. Not to say that maybe Jeffy wouldn’t have grown up to be an old boozer, too, some day. Next century.”

  She gave us another apologetic smile. “Sorry. You don’t want to hear this. Anyhow, just as I was turning my corner, I saw him—Cluett?—stop and look off to his right. I don’t know if the guy called to him or if he was waiting for the dog to do his business or what, but he stopped down there under the light and someone crossed the street and they walked on together. I went on down Ocean and that was the last I saw of him.”

  Davidowitz looked up from his notepad. “About what time would you say that was, Ms. Jozell?”

  “Ten-ten,” she answered promptly. “There was a two-hour special that came on at nine that Jeffy and I’d planned to watch together.”

  Her voice wobbled slightly, but she caught herself. “I checked my watch and thought maybe I’d catch the end of it for him. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

  “Not really,” I said. It struck me that Kitty Jozell was probably a very good nurse to have around if you were young and scared and deathly ill. “The person that met Cluett—was it a man?”

  “I think so.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why I have that impression. Everybody wears pants and bulky jackets, but I don’t know . . . something about the walk maybe? Honestly, I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

  She couldn’t give us much of a description. Dark clothes, some sort of cap. “I can’t even tell you if he was black or white.”

  Height? Weight? Age?

  A little shorter than Cluett, she thought, and not as broad. Again, though, it was hard to tell in winter clothes, wasn’t it? As for age, she didn’t think he walked like an old man but that was as far as she could go.