Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (8 page)

“We’re not,” Anne said sharply. “When he showed up in your hospital room last fall, that was the first time I’d spoken to him since the day of your father’s funeral. Today is the second time.”

“Why?”

“I told you. He called me.”

“No, I mean why have you never talked to him since Dad was killed? They worked together every day. They must have been close. Unless . . .” For the first time since learning that her father and her boss had been partners, the thought occurred to her: “Didn’t they like each other?”

“Of course they did. They were best friends—David and Jonathan. Smith and Wesson.”

Sigrid did not consider herself very good at picking up on nuances, but she sensed something darker beneath her mother’s flippancy. She had such vague disconnected memories of her father and only one of those memories included other big tall men in uniforms like his. Yet she had grown up with no recollection of having heard McKinnon’s name and she certainly hadn’t recognized him when she first began working for him almost two years ago.

“A cop doesn’t walk away from his best friend’s wife and child the week that friend gets killed. Why did McKinnon?”

“I told him to.” Anne had gone back to fiddling with the honey spoon. She scooped a viscous heap from the jar, then held the spoon above the rim so that the thick golden honey flowed back down into the jar.

“Because Dad was killed and he wasn’t?”

“Something like that. It was all mixed up in my mind, honey. I honestly don’t blame him any more.”

“Any more?”

“That Leif died and he didn’t,” she said with an impatient twitch of her shoulder.

Last autumn Mick Cluett had tried to talk about her dad and she’d cut him off, thought Sigrid. Just as she’d cut him off at that farewell get-together last month. What would he have said?

“I pulled Dad’s file last fall,” she told Anne. “Did you know Mick Cluett was their backup?”

“I’m surprised you had to read it. Didn’t Mickey tell you all about it himself?” Anne asked bitterly, as the last golden drops fell from the spoon. “He showed up at our apartment that evening still wearing the uniform drenched with your father’s blood, roaring drunk, and telling anyone who’d listen how he’d cradled Leif’s head in his arms as he died.”

“Is that why Captain McKinnon called you today?”

“Probably. I didn’t ask. Let it go, Siga. I don’t want to talk about the past anymore.” She stuck the spoon back in the honey jar and stood briskly. “Let’s see what Mama sent us this year, okay?”

Sigrid knew it would be useless to push for more information tonight. Anne seldom let herself be pinned down very long and from here on would find a dozen ways to keep changing the subject. But the thought of McKinnon calling to tell Anne about Cluett’s death was bewildering; and despite Anne’s determined cheerfulness, Sigrid wasn’t in the mood for one of Grandmother Lattimore’s annual attempts to turn her into a candidate for Hymen’s altar.

“What is it this year?” she said sourly, as Anne opened a large white envelope stuck with commemorative North Carolina stamps and addressed to both of them in Jane Lattimore’s flowing Spencerian script. “A check for miniskirts and four-inch heels?”

Whenever Mrs. Lattimore sent money, she usually included clothing ads from
The New York Times
or
Vogue
and she expected to see the results on her next visit to the city. A dutiful granddaughter, Sigrid always spent the money as ordered—half her closet space was devoted to clothes as frivolous as peacock feathers—but she’d seldom worn them before Oscar Nauman entered her life and even now wasn’t completely comfortable wearing them with him.

Anne slit open the envelope and extracted two smaller ones. A mischievous gurgle of laughter escaped her as she scanned the contents. “You’re not going to like this,” she grinned.

“What?” Sigrid asked apprehensively.

“She’s sent us matching gift certificates. For
Imagine You!”

“Imagine You!?”
She didn’t like the sound of the name. “What’s that? A beauty salon? Dress shop?”

“A very expensive Fifth Avenue fashion consultant. We’re going to have our colors done.”

“Oh God!” Sigrid groaned.

CHAPTER 7

By 9:30 P.M. on that Wednesday night, Lotty Fischer had cleared most of the work left in her In-basket. When she returned from her supper break, she picked up the names Wally Abronski had left for her and logged in again. This was part of the job’s fun. From her computer terminal, she could access dozens of data banks around the country. One of the first things she’d done four years ago was locate everything available on all her favorite stars. She knew where John Travolta lived, what kind of car Tom Cruise drove in real life, how many speeding tickets the Mets had amassed between them, and which players had been charged with DWI.

Her fingers flashed over the board as she keyed in the name of the boy Wally’s daughter was seeing. No outstanding warrants in his name. She tried him with DMV. One speeding ticket last year. His Social Security number did not begin with the 110 which indicated New York so she checked a reference book on her desk and saw that it must have been issued in Missouri. A few dozen more keystrokes and she was querying Missouri’s DMV.

Nothing.

She repeated the process with the father’s name and immediately scored a direct hit. At that very moment, the man was wanted in St. Charles, Missouri for aggravated assault, a nonfamily incident involving a gun. The entry ended IMMED CONFIRM RECORD WITH ORI. In this case, the originating office was that of the St. Charles County sheriff’s department.

“Oh, jeez,” said Wally when she told him. “I didn’t really think you’d get a hit. I was just playing safe. Oh jeez, Dee’s gonna kill me. She really likes this guy and here I’ve fingered his old man.”

He ripped off the printout and went away to set the appropriate wheels in motion.

Shortly before ten, her friend Jennifer phoned over from central data processing. They gossiped for a couple of minutes, then Jennifer said, “Oh, by the way: that cop that got shot over in Sheepshead Bay?”

“Mmm?” Lotty remembered hearing it mentioned during the supper break. She thought she might have seen him in passing, with some of the homicide detectives, but he was no one she’d formally met and she couldn’t really put a face to Michael Cluett’s name.

“We got in a notice tonight that you once ran a check on the gun that killed him.”

“I did?” she asked, interested. “When?”

“Almost four years ago.” Candace read off the date.

“What was it in connection with?”

“Doesn’t say. Better check it out though. Someone’ll probably be around tonight or tomorrow to ask you about it.”

“Give me the serial number,” said Lotty and wrote it down on her pad, along with the gun’s make, a Browning .380 semiautomatic.

It took a while to reconstruct that evening, but it’d happened when she was still new at the job and conscientiously noting everything in the log. When she’d finished, Lotty stared blankly at her computer screen.

One gun check in the middle of a three-hour stint with license numbers? That meant it probably wasn’t official.

It was coming back to her. Her natural friendly helpfulness coupled with who was asking. She could even remember the earlier conversation that had triggered the check.

A white patrol officer in the Bronx had run into a dark alley after a fleeing man reported to be armed. At the end of the alley, he’d turned with a menacing gesture as if to fire. The officer fired first; the man was killed.

Except that the “gun” in the man’s hand turned out to be a stolen video tape and the “man” was a fourteen-year-old black youth.

Between the press and angry community leaders, the patrol officer had been suspended indefinitely.

Unfairly, many thought.

Lotty could remember some of the frustrated comments. “In the dark, fourteen looks like twenty-five.”

“Why’d he run, if he wasn’t guilty of something?”

“The kid was a thief, wasn’t he?”

“Just a matter of time before he upped it to armed robbery. Hell, I say Kearns probably saved the state a hundred thou.”

“You don’t see ’em giving him a medal, do you?” snorted one of the old-line officers. “That’ll never happen to me,” he added with heavy significance. “If I ever kill somebody, he’s damn sure going to have a gun by the time the TV cameras get there.”

There had been a moment of silence.

“Hey, now, wait a minute,” a young officer objected. “That’s really asking for trouble.”

“Yeah? Go tell it to Kearns.”

Three nights later, Lotty was asked to run a check on that serial number.

By then they’d heard that Kearns had two small children with a third one on the way. They also heard that he hadn’t drawn a sober breath since they’d suspended him and that his wife had taken the kids and gone back to her parents in Pennsylvania.

Lotty ran the number through without comment. It had come back clean.

Now she sat at the terminal and gazed unseeingly at the blinking cursor.

Maybe the gun had been stolen since then, she thought. Maybe it’d been lost. Or sold.

She gave a mental shrug and reached for the phone book. The simplest way to find out was to just ask. The clock above her desk read 22:36:15. Nevertheless, she looked up the number, dialed it, and was pleased when the phone was answered on the first ring.

Almost as if her call were expected.

CHAPTER 8

After leaving her mother’s apartment, Sigrid had intended to see a new Polish film recommended by Oscar Nauman, but on the drive over to the East Side, she passed a small revival house and saw that
Rebecca,
one of her all-time favorites, was listed on the marquee. It’d been several years since she’d seen it on a big screen and she yielded to impulse. After all, she told herself, did anyone actually need East European profundity on one’s birthday?

There were many who couldn’t read Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel or watch the Hitchcock film without becoming exasperated by the heroine’s timidity and insecurity, but Sigrid thought that du Maurier had captured exactly the paralysis that can inhibit a self-conscious woman. God knows she’d experienced those same inhibitions enough times herself, she thought. She settled happily into one of the theater’s dusty velour seats with a box of popcorn and watched an odious Mrs. Van Hopper bully Joan Fontaine around Monte Carlo.

After the film, she browsed in a bookstore down the street till it closed at ten, treating herself to paperback reprints of two books she’d been meaning to read for some time, Carolyn Heilbrun’s
Writing a Woman’s Life
and a favorably reviewed Isak Dinesen biography. Even so, it was only twenty minutes past ten when she handed her car keys to the parking attendant at the garage near her apartment.

A derelict had been sprawled on a steaming grate in front of the garage as she drove in. As she left, she saw a uniformed officer helping him into his patrol car. With the mercury hovering in the teens tonight, police all over the city would be hustling as many of the homeless as they could into the public shelters.

The walk home was bitter cold, past shuttered businesses and a failed hotel. As Sigrid hurried down Christopher Street, hugging her books and the picture frames to her chest like a small shield, a frigid wind blew straight off the river and needled her face like slivers of Arctic ice. She was glad to turn the corner of her own nondescript street and reach the gate to Number 42½, a sturdy green wooden door set in a high brick wall.