One Coffee With (14 page)

Driving uptown, Sigrid was bemused. Burning the candle at both ends, indeed! As if she spent the nights dancing in chiffon until dawn. Had it been Duckett or Lyles, the two who most resented her presence in the department, she would have looked for the insult buried in the gibe.
But McKinnon?
No matter how she looked at that last exchange, there was only one conclusion: the captain had felt fatherly toward her. It was a novel idea.

And strangely warming.
She could never remember getting that sort of reaction from a man. Her father’s uncles had offered a kindly solicitude that arose more from duty than from choice. Looking back on it, Sigrid didn’t blame them. All had possessed grandchildren of their own, and she knew—regretfully but objectively—that she had not been a lovable child. In formal greeting or departure she had given the ritual kisses that the family expected, but never had she hugged one of them impulsively. Too, on those long-ago Sunday afternoons she had been eclipsed whenever Cousin Hilda came over from her house just down the street.

Cousin Hilda had been plump and winsome with silver blond curls and delft-blue eyes, and she had always elbowed Sigrid aside to hold Great-uncle Lars’s hand on those walks to the zoo. Carelessly, lavishly, she bestowed kisses at the slightest provocation.
The family pet.
And the more demonstrative Hilda had
been,
the more touch-me-not Sigrid must have seemed.

Hilda had grown into a blithe young matron, still as plump and merry as in childhood. Married to an insurance broker or a C.P.A.—Sigrid could never remember which—she now lived in Port Jefferson out on Long Island with a family of plump and merry children. Four of them, the last time Sigrid heard.

While I’ve grown into a dried-up old maid, she told herself. She peered through the windshield, momentarily distracted from her thoughts by a dilemma familiar to all drivers: the misty night air had deposited enough moisture on the glass to bead up soot and grime and to make seeing difficult, but was it really misting enough to wash all the dirt away if she turned on the wipers? The windshield was now so obscured that further debate became academic. She pushed the washer button and wipers simultaneously, and one feeble stream of water jetted up.
Just enough to make a complete smear when the blades swished back and forth.

I remember to get
gas,
she told herself savagely, I remember to check the oil and the transmission fluid, so why the hell can’t I remember to keep the washer bottle filled?

And no, dammit, it was not misting enough to clean the glass.

Briefly she wondered if Cousin Hilda ever had these mundane automotive aggravations, or did acquiring a C.P.A. husband free you from that?

Which brought a rueful smile to her lips, because however much she might wish she were less stiff in social situations, no way did she envy Cousin Hilda’s life.
She was chagrined by the circuitous path her thoughts had taken, all because Captain McKinnon had given her a couple of casual fatherly words in passing.

The mist thickened into a slow drizzle, and now the wipers managed to clear the windshield. She enjoyed driving through the streets at night. Especially in midtown when she was in no hurry to get home. Traffic had begun to pick up as movies and theaters emptied out onto the sidewalks. There were more cabs, buses and private cars and knots of people descending into the subway. Few people cared to go down alone at night anymore, which was a shame. Violence or the fear of violence kept so many from utilizing fully the only sensible way of getting around the five boroughs; but violence was a fact of life, and it was futile to feel that spasm of anger.

“Do what you can and don’t let the rest eat on you.” All rookies got that lecture. Good advice. If you could follow it during your shift, pass everything along when you left and keep your eyes averted when you were off duty, there would be fewer policemen nursing ulcers. As it was, every precinct house in the city could furnish enough antacid remedies to stock a small drugstore.

A smell compounded of gasoline fumes, buttered popcorn and wet pavement slid in through her slightly opened window as she stopped for a red light at Times Square. The drizzle was starting to take itself seriously; might almost be called a true rain; yet the boy and girl who passed dreamily in front of her car were oblivious to it, to the changed, lights, to everything except each other.

Sigrid drove on automatically, her mind only halfaware of the mechanics of driving. Without noticing where her thoughts had drifted, she found herself going over the earlier part of the evening as she contrasted Captain McKinnon’s kindly air of solidity with Oscar Nauman’s brusqueness.

Nauman was older than McKinnon as calendars run; but there was a curiously youthful, unfinished quality about the artist. He was a mature man, no little-boy-not-grown-up, yet he had retained an indefinable youthful quality. As if he
were
still in a state of becoming.
As if the world still held new surprises, new possibilities, after all these years.

Probably the artistic temperament, Sigrid thought scornfully; but a sudden impulse made her head the car crosstown toward her mother’s apartment.

She told herself it was time to anyhow. Whenever Anne was out of town, Sigrid stopped by to pick up mail and to make sure everything was okay. It was her duty, she told herself firmly, and curiosity about what Oscar Nauman had looked like fifteen years ago had nothing to do with it.

C
HAPTER
10

Her mother’s current apartment
was in one of the newer high rises overlooking the Hudson River. Some women shift furniture; Anne Harald kept all the same pieces of furniture in approximately the same positions and restlessly shifted apartments instead. Her friends had long since learned to enter her new telephone and street numbers in their address books in light, easily erased pencil. Anne had inhabited Manhattan Island from the Battery to Harlem. She’d even crossed the East River once and tried Brooklyn Heights, but that was a short-lived experiment. Shorter still had been a sojourn in Connecticut. The U-Haul rental truck had deposited Anne and her chattels in a picturesquely rustic cottage on a Tuesday afternoon. An identical truck had carried everything back to Manhattan the following Friday morning.

These frequent moves had been so much a part of Sigrid’s childhood that she no longer recalled that they had begun immediately after Leif’s funeral. By now it was just another quirk of Anne’s personality; easier to shrug one’s shoulders and accept it than to try to understand.

This year’s building was all glass and steel. Its ground floor as impersonal as a bank and quite bare except for the slight softening effect of low fernfilled planters along the front walls, a colorful mosaic floor and a few backless leather benches clumped together in the center of the lobby. At the rear were elevators and banked mailboxes. The whole place was as brightly lit as an all-night diner and even less inviting, but it was virtually mugger proof. To compensate for the lack of a doorman, tenants could inspect everything behind those floor-toceiling glass walls before unlocking the street door and letting themselves in, and there were no shadowy culs-de-sac where a rapist could lurk undetected.

Closed-circuit televisions on the main door and in the elevator videotaped everyone coming or going, and it was useless to tell her mother that the tapes probably weren’t checked unless a tenant actually got mugged. Anne was convinced that a watchman or somebody monitored them, and unless she
were
in a tearing hurry, she always blew kisses to the cameras or thumbed her nose or modeled a new dress.

“They must get so bored just watching people galumph in and out as if they’re going to their own funerals,” she would say.

Whenever her mother was brightening up a hypothetical watchman’s day, Sigrid would stand to the far side of the elevator and pretend not to know her.

It was raining briskly when Sigrid slipped inside the lobby and paused long enough to empty Anne’s mailbox. Some of the letters had been forwarded through five or six addresses. She took a selfservice elevator to the eighteenth floor and let herself into a front apartment.

Anne Harald’s image stood just inside the vestibule with arms outstretched. A fellow photographer had cleverly matched front and back views, blown them up, then laminated them together into a rigid sheet of acrylic
to form a life-sized cutout doll who welcomed her visitors the way Anne welcomed life—with open arms; dimples flashing; short hair an exuberance of dark curls; her slender body still petite and shapely at fifty.

Anne herself used the thing as a hat stand, draping it in scarves, light meters and paraphernalia cases, but it was too lifelike for Sigrid’s taste. She always hurried past it when making her tours of inspection.

Things were normal that evening. Nothing dramatic like burst water pipes or signs of forced entry: although a stranger might have had difficulty distinguishing between a burglar’s ransacking and Anne’s normal going-away clutter. Every drawer was slightly ajar, and every surface overflowed.

Film cartridges were jumbled in with sliding piles of professional journals, unanswered letters, discarded panty hose, airline itineraries and butt-filled ashtrays. Anne’s departures were perennially hurried. Schedules always surprised her.

“The plane leaves at noon?” she’d wail. “But
it’s
eleven now! Who’s got a car? Where’s my coat?
My camera bags?”

Some people found her disorganized, chaotic air appealing. Sigrid preferred order and calm; but because she’d lived apart from her mother since college, it was not a source of friction any longer. Now they could look at each other fondly—if somewhat quizzically—across the generation gap.

Like many untidy people, Anne Harald kept surprisingly meticulous records. Five large steel file cabinets followed in her wake wherever she moved. Couches, tables, bric-a-brac and rugs had become battered and shabby from occupying hap-hazard spaces on those do-it-yourself moves organized and executed by the youthful neophyte photographers who clustered around Anne; but the file cabinets were always the last on and first off those rental trucks. Admittedly Anne’s filing system was peculiarly her own and not always logical; but sooner or later she could lay her hands on any of her negatives, or her magazine and newspaper articles from the last twenty-five years.

Under the S’s was a file with Sigrid’s name on it, begun in her fifth year because Anne had obtained and then managed to misplace three separate copies of her daughter’s birth certificate, and the kindergarten wouldn’t enter Sigrid without proof that she’d been born the proper number of years before. The folder still contained Sigrid’s immunization and dental records and the pediatrician’s careful listing of childhood diseases, report cards and—though Anne always denied being sentimental—every Mother’s Day card Sigrid had ever labored over in grade school and all her letters from boarding school and college, which strangely touched Sigrid the first time she had stumbled upon her folder.

She located the old Life article on her first try, pulled it out and started to close the drawer when another folder nearer the front caught her eye.

It was labeled simply “Leif”, and it was not very thick. Inside were a couple of letters addressed to Miss Anne Lattimore in her father’s masculine scrawl, a birth certificate, diplomas, a driver’s license, a medal and its accompanying posthumous citation, some police-department forms dealing with death benefits and a handful of pictures.

Sigrid had seen most of the pictures before but not in several years. She had difficulty locating her father in a group-graduation pose, one skinhead rookie out of a whole class of uniformed lookalikes. There was a formal studio portrait—how very young he looked—and a close-up of herself at six months, sitting on his lap, wearing his patrolman’s hat and gnawing on the handle of his service pistol.

In the last picture he was as she could just barely remember him: laughing directly into the camera, his fair hair slicked back, tall and handsome and utterly self-assured. A man’s hand rested on his shoulder, and a closer look revealed that someone had been cropped from the picture.
Odd.
Idly she wondered who it was, and why he’d been cut way. Along the right border was a date and in her mother’s hasty script the words: “First day in plain clothes.”

Two months before he’d been gunned down.

It was disorienting to look at the date and suddenly realize that she was now older than he had been. Somehow one never expects to grow older than one’s parents. It upset life’s natural order. Then she remembered the time when she was still in uniform and had been sent to tell an elderly mother that her son had been killed in a car wreck that evening. The old woman had just stared at her numbly, shaking her head over and over in mute denial that finally came out in soft bewildered cries, “But he isn’t old enough. He’s not old enough to die.”

Sigrid knew it must feel much more unnatural to outlive a child than a parent; nevertheless, she gave a final uneasy glance at her father’s unlined face before replacing the folder and closing the drawer. The Life article she kept out to take back to her own apartment, where she could relax finally with
a bourbon
and cola, her one southern mannerism.

As she moved through the apartment switching off lights, Sigrid was suddenly alerted to a furtive noise at the front door. Adrenaline flowing, but without panic, she quickly doused the remaining lights and positioned herself behind it. Another soft click and it opened slowly. Light from the hallway spilled in along with a case of some sort. A figure
followed,
someone who carried a small penlight that flashed along the floor and walls and hesitated on the Anne-figure hat rack.

Moving to catch him off balance, Sigrid yanked the door all the way back.

“That’s far enough!” she told the dark figure silhouetted in the bright doorway. “Hands on the wall mister, feet spread.
Now!”

The penlight jerked across her face, touched on the gun she held in her right hand. There was a sharp intake of breath,
then
the penlight wavered and slipped to the floor from limp fingers. The man himself followed close behind, crumpling softly, almost noiselessly.

Sigrid had never had anyone faint on her before. Bemused, she switched on the lights again, pulled the man all the way across the threshold, then closed the door and turned to examine her catch.

Male Caucasian she thought, automatically falling into official-report jargon.
Age?
Early forties?
Hair (what there was of it) a sandy brown, almost no gray. Long on the sides and probably usually brushed forward to augment a hairline that had receded to the dome of his head. Eyes closed now, of course. Well nourished but not actually fat. He was dressed rather like someone out for a day of elephant hunting in the Serengeti: wide-brimmed canvas hat, rumpled khaki safari suit, open-necked shirt and leopard-print silk scarf. Instead of boots he wore fawn-colored suede shoes with thick crepe soles.

Since he wasn’t actually carrying an elephant gun
,  Sigrid
put her own .38 away and slipped her hand inside his breast pocket. She came out with a wallet, an airline folder and a passport. Passport and wallet indicated that the man was Roman Tramegra, age forty-two. According to the ticket stubs in his Alitalia folder, his flight had arrived at Kennedy International an hour or so earlier; but the whole trip had originated with a flight from Sardinia.

Which came very near to explaining everything.
Her mother was at last report in Italy on assignment for Eyewitness. The newsmagazine planned to devote a fall issue to the state of worldwide violence and terrorism, and Anne and two other freelance journalists were gathering background material and local color on how kidnapping had become almost a cottage industry in Italy.

Another of Anne’s displaced persons, and she had just terrified him into fainting.

Ever since Sigrid could remember, an odd assortment of characters had wandered in and out of her mother’s life. Anne attracted them the way some people attract stray dogs and cats; and just as an animal lover always manages to find good homes for his waifs, Anne was equally successful at finding homes or jobs or sanctuary of some sort for her strays. Sigrid wondered what category Roman Tramegra would fall into.

She rolled him onto a small Turkestan rug and dragged it across the vinyl-tile floor to a couch in the living room. There she shoved aside a couple of Anne’s geopolitical maps, hoisted him onto the couch and slid cushions under his feet. Returning from the bathroom with a cold cloth for his forehead, she found him blinking heavy-lidded blue eyes in her direction.

“Oh, good, you’re awake,” she said. “Can I get you something?
Coffee, tea or bourbon?”

“Don’t bother. You’ve done quite enough already,” he said coldly, sitting up and adjusting the leopard-print scarf at the neck of his shirt. His voice was unexpectedly deep, a bit pompous and with more than a touch of affronted dignity.

“Look,” Sigrid told him, “I do apologize for what happened. My mother didn’t tell me she was lending the apartment, and I thought you’d picked the lock. I’m sorry.”

He smoothed the long piece of side hair carefully into place across the top of his head. “She said you were a policewoman, so I quite understand your reaction. Please don’t give it another thought.
My fault for not ringing the doorbell first.
Still it never occurred to me that anyone was inside. Anne said the place was here going idle, and I thought—” He took a deep breath and gave her an abashed smile, which made him look more human. “I’m simply chattering, aren’t I? I always talk too much when I’ve been upset. Reaction, I expect. You mentioned tea. I do hope
it’s
souchong.”

Sigrid shook her head. “Lipton.”

“Loose?” he asked clutching at straws.

“Sorry, only tea bags, I’m afraid,” Sigrid said gravely, privately amused rather than insulted by the man’s air of having landed among savages.

There was a brief internal struggle, then he shrugged his shoulders in a what-more-can-one expect gesture of resignation. “Tea bags will be fine.”

As Sigrid started for the kitchen, he exclaimed, “How careless of me! I almost forgot I have a letter for you.” He fumbled in his breast pocket.
“Gone!
My wallet—”

“There on the coffee table,” she said; and as he drew himself up, she said defensively, “For all I knew, you could have been a thief.”

“And you thought I might have been carrying my own Wanted Poster, Miss Harald?” he said icily. Then in another of his abrupt about-faces, he asked curiously, “Do they?”

Sigrid was caught off guard. “Do they what?”

“Thieves.
Do they ever carry clippings of their exploits? You know: ‘Tiffany’s robbed of half a million in diamonds during daring morning theft.’
Things of that nature.”
He had found the letter m his wallet and handed it to her as he waited for her answer.

“I really don’t know,” she said nonplussed. “I suppose it’s possible, but I’ve never heard of it. I’ve never worked Burglary, though.”

“I may do a detective novel. I’m a writer, you see,” he confided, padding down the hall behind her as she headed for the kitchen. “I could have the criminal keep a scrapbook with newspaper clippings of all his nefarious deeds, and after he was caught, there would be a marvelous denouement with my detective realizing that he hadn’t known half the crimes my gangster had committed. He’d be simply flabbergasted!”

Tramegra beamed at her. “You’ll probably find me a complete nuisance before I’ve finished, Miss Harald, but I warn you I’m going to pick your brain for technical details. They’re very important in a book. Attention to detail is what separates the careful writer from the hack, you know.”

His accent was an amalgam of cinema British, Boston Yankee and American Midwest, and he was still burbling as Sigrid pointed him in the direction of the bathroom to freshen up.

In the kitchen she filled the kettle, unearthed a seldom used teapot, rinsed out the dust and put in two tea bags, their tagged strings dangling over the edge. As she waited for the water to boil, she read Anne’s letter:

Cagliari, April 12

Siga, dear,

Sorry not to have written before. Italy’s got weird. The kidnappings would be funny if none of them were violent. Can you believe that a carabiniere’s wife was held for $110 last week? None of us go anywhere alone, and we dress and look like retired schoolteachers without a soul in the world to pay even a $10 ransom.

Sigrid paused for a moment to imagine what her mother’s idea of a retired schoolteacher would be. She doubted Anne could make herself look that dowdy.

But I’ll write you all about it another time because this is supposed to be introducing Roman Tramegra. I’ve told him he can use my place while I’m gone. That’ll save you having to come over. Be nice to him. He’s had a very difficult time lately—someone rooked him of his money, and he doesn’t want to talk about it. Not that you would ask, I know, but you
do
have a way of looking at people until they feel so guilty that they start babbling too much.

There, you see? You’ve even got me doing it long-distance.

Anyhow, Romey’s a dear, sweet man. And he
does
need a place to stay while he researches his novel—something to do with a man who falls in love with a holographic image or something like that. (He seemed to think I’d know how holograms work just because I’m a photographer. When I don’t even know how a reflex camera works!)

See you sometime next month. Shall I bring you a sheepskin rug?

Love,

Mother

The kettle whistled stridently. Sigrid filled the teapot, added sugar and a jar of nondairy creamer to the mug and spoon already on the tray and carried it into the living room.

Tramegra had exchanged his jacket and scarf for a dark brown cardigan. Again Sigrid noted
a softness
about him, though he could not be called fat.
An impression of fragile bones beneath a covering of soft flesh.
Then she remembered a large, soft Persian cat her southern grandmother had owned—that was what Roman Tramegra reminded her of—a large, soft, pampered cat, amiable, but always with a slight reserve of dignity behind the amiability.

He moved aside a bowl of dead flowers and gathered up a handful of odds and ends to clear a space on the coffee table for the tray Sigrid carried.

“Ah, tea,” he exclaimed. “How welcome it is! And you mustn’t apologize for the imitation cream. No one could produce fresh milk on such short notice.” Still there was an involuntary lift of his eyebrow when he noticed the mug instead of a china cup and saucer, as if she really might make apology for that lapse. Manners triumphed, however, and he said, “Aren’t you joining me?”