Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (16 page)

“Never. Oh, there might have been a couple of guys at work that Lotty could’ve liked, but she wouldn’t let herself get interested in anybody right now,” said Marla. “See, she was really pretty except for her nose, but most guys couldn’t see past it. We talked it all out in August after Sid dumped her.

“She said there was no point spending money on fancy clothes or makeup, and why go out with guys just to get dumped again as soon as a prettier face came by? She decided she wasn’t going to get involved with anybody again till she’d saved up enough for a nose job, and that was going to be this summer.”

New York is a collection of parallel villages and the inhabitants of each can be surprisingly parochial. Most New Yorkers rarely venture outside the parameters defined by work and home. They use the same bus or subway route to travel back and forth, they patronize particular dry cleaners, hairstylists or grocery stores in their neighborhood, they often wait till a movie opens at one of the theaters within a five- or six-block radius, they choose a park or beach as “their” park or beach, and they frequent one particular library branch instead of another that might have better hours or a larger selection. They do these things with such regularity that they keep running into the same people over and over, citizens of the same village by virtue of having made similar choices.

This is why, in a city of seven million inhabitants, New Yorkers constantly amaze their small-town friends when they walk down a teeming Manhattan street and greet as many familiar faces as would the friends themselves back home.

Every New Yorker knows his own subway line, of course, and can ride it with his eyes closed, keeping tabs on where he is by the squeals in the curves and whether the doors open up on the left or right. Most commuters can fall asleep on the train and wake up the instant the train pulls into their stop. But when faced with the need to get from a familiar place to one unfamiliar, even New Yorkers ask for directions. Those detailed maps are not placed in every car solely for the use of tourists.

As the Seventh Avenue local rumbled along beneath Broadway, Jim Lowry, a confirmed East Sider ever since he left his parents’ Pennsylvania apple farm, hung onto an upright steel pole and studied the map.

“We change at Times Square,” said Elaine Albee, denizen of the West Side, as she placidly added to her notes.

“Just checking. I always get screwed up taking the shuttle.”

From the car behind theirs, a slender black man entered and began to coax an oddly appealing tune from a long wooden recorder. He wore brown wool socks pulled up over his pantlegs and lashed with leather thongs. His shaggy brown jacket was tied across his thin shoulders like a cape and he wore a brown slouch hat that almost covered dark eyes dancing with mischievous merriment. An impudent child of Pan, he paused in front of Elaine and began to pipe an elusively familiar melody.

Jim had adopted the I-don’t-see-a-thing blank stare of jaded New Yorkers, and the piper glanced from his stony face to Elaine’s attentive smile. Elaine laughed out loud when she realized the name of the tune; and as he finished and swept off his hat, she gladly tossed in several of the loose coins she carried in her pockets for street performers who touched or amused her.

“What was he playing?” asked Jim when the musician had passed into the next car; but Elaine shook her head and laughed again as their train slid into the Times Square station.

Despite his name, Steven Greenapple did not look like a sylvan wanderer. If anything, he appeared stolid and unimaginative when they got off the train at the subway station near their office and spotted him waiting on the platform. A stocky man, with a broad plain face, he wore the usual blue uniform of the Transit Authority police. But the T.A. clerk to whom they’d spoken earlier had described Greenapple as a serious enthusiast of the city’s underground spaces—the abandoned “ghost stations” or miles of unused tunnels—and he did look disappointed when he realized they merely wanted to locate a specific person, not book a guided tour of the tunnels in this area.

“We’re looking for someone who would have been in a position to see the platform,” Jim explained, as Elaine walked down to the very end and peered into the darkness of the dirty black tunnel. “Aren’t there ledges and niches just beyond the light?”

“Oh sure,” said Greenapple. “We just discovered like a three-room apartment at the Franklin Avenue station over in Brooklyn—complete with a La-Z-Boy recliner, hibachi pot and a pile of
Wall Street Journals.
But if your killer was standing about here when he pushed her—” The bloodstains down on the ties below marked the spot. “—then a witness down there wouldn’t have been close enough to get a make on him.”

He stood quite still, considering the station. “You sure he wasn’t stretched out on the bench there? Sometimes people think a drunk is just a pile of papers or old rags till they go to sit down.”

“Eight people plus the trainman and the conductor swear that the station was empty except for the victim and the man who pushed her,” said Elaine as she rejoined them. “The only reason we know this Gerald Byrd was even—”

“Gerald Byrd?” asked Greenapple. “Now where have I heard that—”

A broad grin suddenly lit his homely face.

“You know the name?” she asked.

“Jerry the Canary!” he exclaimed. “Has to be.”

He turned and seemed to examine the main entrance. “You’re right about most guys flopping down in the tunnel somewhere; but Jerry’s what you might call a bird of a different feather altogether. C’mon.”

He strolled along slowly as he talked, looking up into the sooty girders overhead, until he halted directly in front of the turnstiles.

“I was right,” he grinned. “Look!”

Jim and Elaine followed his pointing finger and saw an irregular hump among the straight edges of filthy black I-beams and crossbraces, about fifteen feet up. Unless one were looking for it, the bundle of dark rags—clothes? blankets?—was completely unnoticeable.

“Jerry’s the only one I know who builds nests,” said Greenapple. Proprietary pride shone in his voice.

“Jerry the Canary has a less-than-gilded cage,” said Elaine, peering up at the bedding he’d abandoned in his sudden decampment last night.

“Oh, that’s not how he got the name,” Greenapple told her. “I doubt if many cops know that Jerry never sleeps at street level. They call him the Canary because he panhandles for money by doing bird imitations. He can sound like any bird you want to name, and he’s got pictures, too. Goes over pretty good. In nice weather. People don’t stand around in the winter for him, so he works the trains till we chase him. Usually he has enough to rent a flop. With all the SRO’s going, though . . .”

Greenapple’s voice trailed off, but it was a familiar situation and one that was getting worse. There were many complex reasons why more people became homeless and took to the streets each year, but one big factor was that scores of buildings throughout the city had converted from low-income single-room occupancy to upscale, high-priced co-ops. As a result, hundreds now occupied space that had once housed thousands.

Jim Lowry stepped off the short distance to where Lotty Fischer and her killer had stood and looked back up at Gerald Byrd’s nest. They would pull a tape on it, but he’d bet it was no more than forty feet.

No wonder the homeless man had seized the opportunity to get away before someone spotted him. From that perch, he certainly could have had a clear bird’s-eye view of the killer.

CHAPTER 15

[Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

The concrete Cluett drive was separated from the Gelson blacktop by a two-foot strip of frozen grass; and the two garages at the rear of the yards were like Siamese twins sharing the same wall. Both garages had been built back when cars were a lot shorter and taller. Cluett had bumped out the front wall so he could still garage his car, but the Gelsons had just blacktopped their whole backyard for a car park.

As I pulled up nose-to-nose with a shiny late-model station wagon parked at the front curb, I figured family and friends must still be offering Irene physical support. Three more cars lined the Cluett drive, and someone had swept and shoveled the sidewalk.

Nobody’d laid a shovel on the Gelson drive yet, though a car had driven in after the snow started, judging by the fresh tread marks. A beat-up Volkswagen, oversized tires, no fenders. A purple paint job that must have come out of a spray can. Dozens of faded plastic flowers epoxied to the roof and hood. Probably looked like hot shit at Plum Beach in August, but on this gloomy February day under a layer of pristine snow, it just looked like shit.

I’d deliberately parked on the wrong side of the street and I flipped down the sun visor to warn any cruising snow plows that this particular vehicle was on OFFICIAL POLICE BUSINESS and better not get plowed under.

Both houses were two-story detached bricks that sat back from the street in a yardful of fifty-year-old trees and shrubs. Yuppification had so far missed this half of the block. Not that these houses looked shabby—the bushes were pruned, the shutters and trim weren’t yelling for paint—but they were dowdy. No structural changes had been made since the front walls were “modernized” with picture window surgery in the fifties.

No response when I pushed the Gelsons’ front bell, so I trudged down the drive and around to the back door and saw that someone had recently walked from the garish little VW to the back stoop and from the stoop, back and forth to a small door cut into one of the garage’s original old-fashioned double doors. I followed the footprints and rapped on the smaller door.

“Who is it?” called a male voice.

“Police.”

“Po
lice?”
The voice suddenly sounded younger and I heard scrambling noises like boxes or heavy furniture were being shoved around inside the garage.

“Hey, man, you got a search warrant?” the voice demanded. Everybody knows his rights these days. Too bad they don’t care as much about the responsibilities that go with rights.

“Do I need one?”

The door opened a narrow crack and one blue eye squinted at me. A warm sweetish smell went drifting past. “What do you want?”

“Edward Gelson?”

“Yeah?”

“I want to ask you a few questions about Michael Cluett.”

“What if I told you to go jerk yourself?”

“Then I send a couple of officers over and they’ll bring you to me at the station,” I said pleasantly.

The blue eye tried to glare, couldn’t hold it.

“What’s it going to be, Eddie?” I was getting impatient. “I’m not here to bust you for smoking a little pot; but you keep me freezing my butt out here in this snowstorm much longer and I’m gonna haul
your
butt down to the station.”

The door swung open and the mush head stepped back to let me in. Your typical all-American asshole. From the tip of his little pug nose to his druggie little daydreams of making it as a rock star.

Not that he’d left any joints left lying around; only the tattletale smell that permeated the place. His playhouse matched the VW: dingy gray carpet, lumpy green couch pushed against one wall, rock posters on the pressed fiberboard panels that provided soundproofing for the drums and guitars arranged around a synthesizer.

“Who plays?” I asked mine host.

“Me and my friends,” the kid said sullenly.

Irene Cluett said Eddie Gelson was seventeen, but this guy was built like a man five years older. Nearly six feet tall and at least a seventeen-inch neck. Real biceps under a loose orange-and-black Princeton sweatshirt; muscular thighs and calves inside his tight jeans.

Beyond the couch, I saw a weight bench with a set of barbells resting across the steel support. A chinning bar hung from two heavy hooks overhead. “You and your friends work out, too?”

“Sometimes. What’d you want to ask me about Cluett?”