Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (10 page)

But tonight she was so cold and tired, she decided she could put up with crude remarks if that were all she’d have to take.

And after all, she asked herself, was there really any reasonable risk of physical danger? Conventional wisdom said that street violence rose and dropped with the mercury, so an icy February night should be safer than an August noon, right?

Right, she told herself.

Nevertheless, despite the self-administered pep talk, she shifted her subway token to her left hand and closed the fingers of her right hand around her keys so that they formed a set of brass claws.

And tomorrow, she promised herself, she was going to tell Personnel that she’d had it with these hours. If they didn’t put her back on four-to-midnight, starting Monday night, she’d quit.

Lying flat on his stomach, Jerry the Canary came awake through layers of wine-laced sleep. As instantly cautious as any wild bird on its nest, he lay motionless, alert to the happy female voice that floated from directly beneath him up to where he lay undetected among the shadowy gridwork of heavy steel beams that supported the thick arches above the subway platform.

“—hate to take the train after midnight by myself,” the woman was saying in high, light tones. “Awful to be such a wimp.”

“Then it’s lucky I got called in,” said the other voice. It sounded male, lower and huskier.

The rest of their words were lost as they passed away from him. The Canary heard their footsteps and voices echo hollowly against the white tiled walls, and he cautiously turned his head to watch.

A man and a woman.

She had on a bright red fuzzy coat and scarf; he wore a bulky dark jacket, dark warm-up pants, and some sort of knitted cap.

Talking easily, they walked down another few feet and paused just out of earshot. The Canary yawned and snuggled a bit deeper into his blankets. Camouflaged up here in the sooty filthy ironwork, fifteen feet above the tracks, he’d learned that small movements were usually safe. Only big ones got noticed. And even then it was usually only the very young who spotted him: babies lying in their mothers’ arms or toddlers strapped into strollers. Adults didn’t look up much and they didn’t pay much attention when their kids did.

Even the transit cops. They periodically swept a station’s toilets and tracks for drunks and skells, but he always pitched his nests high above the center of the station, near the main turnstiles, and they never noticed him.

Sleepily, he watched the man position himself at the very edge of the platform. The woman stood close to him, yet they didn’t touch like lovers. Occasionally, the man leaned out over the tracks to stare down the tunnel, his eyes passing over the Canary without registering the recumbent human form.

The Canary yawned again. Soon, a soft vibration along the length of the iron beam announced the train’s approach. The vibration grew to a rumble.

He felt the rush of colder air that was pushed through the tunnel ahead of the incoming train.

Saw the woman turn to watch its arrival.

Heard the shrill scream of metal against metal as the train began to brake.

Saw the man give a mighty shove.

Heard her scream rise above the train’s.

CHAPTER 10

The trainman was taking refuge in anger. “That’s it,” he told any cop who would listen. “I swear to God that’s
it!
They can take this cruddy job and shove it. I’ll clean sewers for a living before I’ll drive one of these Gee-dee trains another Gee-dee foot.”

He was a skinny little white man and the more he talked, the angrier he became and the more his voice twanged with the accents of Appalachia. “Shoot fire, I’ll haul my whole family back to Pocahontas County, West Virginia and dig coal with my bare hands afore I let ’em do me like this again!”

The conductor was a plump young black woman, dressed like him in a navy blue uniform and black leather jacket, and she watched him uneasily. “Come on, Hank. Nobody’s trying to get you.”

“You shut up!” he snarled, drawing himself into a defensive rigidity, his back pressed tightly against the white tiled wall.

The conductor turned back to the two detectives. “He doesn’t mean it,” she apologized for her coworker. “Not really. It’s just— Well, this is the second time in two years for him and it’s kinda hard on a person.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Pyle,” said Detective Elaine Albee. “But if you’ve been through this before, then you know we have to keep asking you questions till we get it all down.”

Privately she thought that anger was probably healthier than some reactions she’d seen from people who’d unwittingly precipitated another’s death. Better to get mad than go mad. Twice this had happened to him? God!

It was the second time for her, too, that she’d been called out to this kind of homicide and she hated to think it was becoming an everyday part of city life.

At least the body wasn’t cut to ribbons or decapitated like that last one. The victim here had been slammed into the channel between the rails so the wheels hadn’t actually cut her. Small consolation. Albee tried not to picture that other teenage youth in light summer slacks and white shirt, but images kept coming. There was still plenty of this woman’s blood, on the rails, on the ties, soon to be tracked across the platform when the M.E.’s people carried her up to the ambulance that waited amid the cop cars and blue lights clustered around the entrance at street level.

Transit’s detectives had wound up handling that other one. A quick in-and-outer it’d been. Two guys in a shoving match over a girl. The shover, when they caught up with him, had professed horror at what he’d done, had pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, and had drawn a two-year suspended sentence.

This one sounded different.

The call for help had come at 2:35. Their official shift was long over and sensible officers would have already gone home to bed, but the paperwork had run over and supper had turned into such an animated discussion of basketball that they’d decided they might as well bunk down at the station since they were on turnaround. They were still in the squad room when the call came and because the subway stop was so close to the office, they’d arrived within minutes, even before the transit cops who were now trying to claim jurisdiction.

The crime scene techs had just finished a job in the garment district, so they’d hopped right up on it, too.

The station had been cordoned off immediately. (Sometimes it seemed to Albee that half of New York was tied up in yellow ribbons or set off-limits by blue police barriers.) Portable floodlights had been rushed in and the orderly examination and documentation begun. Strobe lights were still going off, though with lessening frequency. The print and television reporters and gotten their pictures and quotes and had now moved on to a messy three-car wreck on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Elaine Albee loosened the blue wool scarf wound around her neck and glanced at her watch. 3:05 A.M.

The eight passengers on the train had been questioned by Transit Authority cops, their names and addresses recorded, then those who wished had been vanned to the next stop. At the moment, other trains were being rerouted past this stop, but T.A. expected everything to be back to business as usual before the morning rush hour.

While Jim Lowry went down on the tracks with the Medical Examiner, Albee took the trainman, Hank Pyle, into one of the empty train cars where it was warmer, for more detailed questioning. A T.A. cop who insisted on his right to sit in on the interview had brought him coffee; and Pyle sat with his thin legs apart, the foam cup cradled in his hands between his legs as he went over the ghastly experience once more.

According to Pyle, there’d been no warning of anything out of the ordinary while entering the station.

“Weekends you might have more riders; but during the week, this is usually the deadest part of the night.” He heard what he’d said and gave a sour laugh. “Deadest. Yeah.”

The coffee steamed up as he unsnapped the lid. “Some stops nobody’ll get on or off so it wasn’t unusual to see just two people. Yeah, I saw ’em good. They were standing a lot closer to the edge than you’d want ’em to, but people do that all the time. Gee-dee jerks,” he added resentfully.

Pyle lifted the coffee cup to his lips, then lowered it again between his thin legs without drinking.

“I was braking like always and just before I pulled even with ’em, she just flew off the platform right in front of me. No time to stop. No time to yell— No time to— Never again though! Hear me, Lord! I swear on the body of Christ Jesus who died for our sins I’ve driven my last train. It can sit here and rust to dust for all I care.”

“The man who pushed her,” Elaine said softly. “Close your eyes and try to see him again for us.”

Pyle took a deep breath and shut his eyes.

“How tall is he?” she asked.

Pyle’s brow furrowed, then he shrugged.

“Taller than the woman?” Elaine persisted. “Shorter?”

“Taller. I could see part of his face above her head.”

“How much of his face?”

Eyes still closed, Pyle placed his open hand flatly between his mouth and nose. “From about here up.”

“And he was standing directly behind her?”

Pyle nodded.

Elaine wrote it on her notepad:
Perp approx. 6” taller than victim.

“What about his build, Pyle?” asked the transit cop. “Fat? Thin?”

“’Bout average, I’d say.”

“And his clothes?” Elaine asked.

Pyle’s pale blue eyes flew open. “Shoot fire, lady! You think I was noticing his Gee-dee clothes when I was getting ready to smash a woman to applesauce?”

“You’re the only person who got a good look at the guy,” Elaine said. “You want us to get him, don’t you?”

“After what he did to me? Doggone right I do!”

“Then concentrate!” she snapped. “Quit feeling sorry for yourself, and give a thought about what he did to her.”

Abashed, Pyle screwed his eyes tightly shut in his narrow face and Elaine could see the effort of his struggle to recall. The transit cop started to speak but she chopped him off with a quick hand gesture.

“Relax,” she coaxed. “Just take it slow and easy. Look at his head. Is he wearing anything on it? A hat or cap?”

“Hey, yeah! It’s black. One of those stocking caps like my mama used to knit for me. No tassel though.”

“Look at his coat,” said Elaine. “Long? Short?”

“In between,” said Pyle. “Dark. Not black though. Blue maybe? And sort of puffy. Like one of them down jackets. And baggy black pants.”

“Shoes? Boots?”

Eyes still closed, he shook his head apologetically. “Sorry, ma’am. I can’t seem to see ’em. But them pants—”

“Yes?”

“They musta been warm-up pants, ’cause I seem to see ’em nip in at the ankles.” He hesitated. “Maybe he was wearing black sneakers.”

A few feet over, on the inner set of tracks, an express train thundered through the station, drowning out Elaine’s next words and vibrating their own train.

“You’re doing fine,” she repeated when she could be heard again. “Just a few more questions, okay? One more time, try to remember his face. Can you see his eyes?”

“Sort of,” the trainman said hesitantly. “They’re just eyes and nose and mouth. Nothing special. The cap was pulled down over his ears so I couldn’t see ’em. Or his hair.”

“Beard? Mustache?”