Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (19 page)

Sigrid frowned. “Viking Association?”

“It’s one of the department’s benevolent associations like the Irish and Italians have, only smaller, I guess. For police officers of Scandinavian descent.”

Oblivious to her raised eyebrow, he skimmed the paper and read aloud some of the phrases. “March in Norwegian Constitution Day Parade, vacation in the fjords . . . dinner dance . . . annual fishing trip in June . . .”

He had a sudden absurd picture of Lieutenant Harald equipped with rod and reel on a party boat full of tipsy Vikings. He felt her gray eyes upon him and flushed crimson.

As if she’d read his thoughts, she took the flyer from his hand and dropped it in her wastebasket.

“I don’t think so,” she said dryly.

As they went over the reports that she wanted pushed the next day, the private line on her telephone rang and Tillie waited while she answered.

After listening for a long moment, she reached for her desk calendar and flipped the page to the next day. “Your office? Certainly. Yes, sir, I will.”

From where Tillie was sitting, he could see that she’d penciled in “McK” at the ten o’clock hour. “Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

She leaned back in her chair and wedged one knee against the desk.

“I know your shift’s over at four, Tillie, but I want every file on every case that Michael Cluett worked while he was here and I want them on my desk by eight-thirty tomorrow morning.”

“Ma’am?”

She looked at him coldly. “Was I unclear, Tildon? Which part did you not understand?”

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said and beat a hasty, and very puzzled, retreat.

Alone in her office, Sigrid pondered what Captain McKinnon had just told her over the phone. She thought of the warm camaraderie that existed out there in the squad room at this moment and wondered how much longer it would last.

CHAPTER 17

[Detective Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn]

Friday morning. Still cold, but the wind had stopped. So had the snow.

The house has three bedrooms on the second floor and mine’s the middle-sized one on the back. I could stand at the window and look out across garage roofs mounded with snow. No clouds. A sky as blue as the Lady Washington hollyhocks on the cover of the new Burpee catalog that was waiting when I got home the night before. By tomorrow there’d probably be three layers of soot. At that moment, though, the sun on the snow dazzled everything till it looked like the pearly gates of heaven Granny used to sing about when she was happy.

In the yard downstairs, a scrawny gray cat slinked through the picket fence, walked across the snowdrifts to where the wind had exposed a bit of earth, and relieved itself under my Rose of Sharon tree.

My tree, my yard, my dirt. Still wasn’t used to it.

Marva Lee never wanted any part of a house. Her idea of living’s a hotel with twenty-four-hour room service, so the marriage’d been over almost two years when Terry came to me at Christmas and talked me into going in on this house with her. Troy Avenue in East Flatbush. Used to be an all-white blue-collar neighborhood. Now it’s three-quarters black and getting yuppified.

It’d be an investment, she said. Security for both of us. Rental apartment on the top that she and Adam would move into if I ever married again ’cause she sure as hell never planned to again.

“It’d be good for Adam to have you around—be good for you, too,” she said. “You can even quit grieving over Granny’s farm and grow your own flowers and tomatoes.”

Cats might be a problem. I tried to remember what Granny had done about cats.

Or maybe cats weren’t a problem if you lived on a five-acre truck farm. Enough dirt for everybody.

I pulled on warm-up pants and jacket and knocked on Terry’s door as I passed.

“I’m up! I’m up!” Little Miss Sunshine.

“You lie like a rug,” I called back.

She hasn’t changed from when she was twelve and our parents used to send me to roust her out. If she was really up, she’d be grumpy. Cheerful was to make me think she was wide awake.

I went on down to the kitchen and found Adam eating cold cereal and reading a library book Terry’d brought home for him.

“Must be a good book,” I said as I started the coffee.

He grinned, those new front teeth shining. “You bet your britches, Claude!”

“You sassing me, boy?”

“Beats me, Claude!” he giggled, tickled that I was asking the right questions. He almost bounced in his chair, waiting for me to go again.

I knew there were at least two more Claude books in the series but I couldn’t remember titles. “Finish your cereal,” I told him. “I’ve got snow to shovel.”

He went into gales of laughter. “If you say so, Claude!”

The brand new snow shovel Terry had given me for Christmas was out in the furnace room. I’d never worked one before. You don’t shovel much snow in a twenty-story apartment building. But it didn’t strike me as something that took too much brains. I could hear some of the neighbors out there shoveling, the rasp of metal against concrete. Once I got out there and got the hang of it, it went pretty fast. Wasn’t like I had to do a half-mile. Just the steps, walk, and a stretch of sidewalk as wide as the house in front. A bit longer in the back. Enough to work up a sweat though, even in the cold.

Good exercise, I thought, as I went up to shower and shave. “I could get into this home-owner schtick,” I told Terry when I passed through the kitchen.

“I suppose it’ll be cows and chickens next?”

“Fat chance, Claude!” Adam called to her as he left for school.

A message was waiting at the office from the captain who’d specialed Cluett over to New York. He thought we ought to meet.

His office at ten.

Davidowitz shrugged when I told him. “What’d you expect? That he was going to come over to Brooklyn? Captains do not come to sergeants, or haven’t you noticed? Anyhow,” he added, stroking his droopy mustache, “you know the answer to Mick’s death is over there. We were going anyhow, weren’t we?”

Sometimes he’s too goddamn reasonable.

Cluett’s desk and locker had been cleaned out and his personal effects would be sent to Irene. Davidowitz had rounded up Cluett’s current notes and worksheets and they were as messy as I expected. Someone’d had to sort it all out and as his boss, I’d elected myself and done most of it the night before. Cases were still pending. If his notes were complete though, his death shouldn’t affect the outcome of any pending files.

We got all the case notes on Cluett’s homicide in order and Davidowitz made an extra copy in case we wound up swapping with the Twelfth, then we took the train over.

When we walked into Captain McKinnon’s office, we found three officers from the precinct detective unit with him: a skinny brunette, a good-looking blonde, and a white male about six years younger than me.

“Thanks for coming,” said McKinnon, all professional courtesy. As if it’d been an invitation and not a quasi-command. Introductions. The skinny one was a Lieutenant Harald, the other two were Detectives Albee and Lowry. I gave them Davidowitz.

Handshakes all around.

There was the usual chitchat. The skinny lieutenant sat tight as the captain asked us if we wanted anything hot to drink. She had even less than me to say about the cold and snow and how many inches we’d got, all that small talk stuff while you wait for the rookie in blue to pass around the coffee and get out. I could feel her giving off tense vibes, but nobody else seemed to notice so maybe that was her normal mode.

The captain was built like Davidowitz: not fat, but plenty big and solid.

The looey was about my age. Thin face, interesting eyes. No rings on her fingers. Married to the job? No curves under the black slacks or baggy gray jacket. Almost as flat-chested as me.

Albee. Blonde. More laid-back. Sharp in black leather boots and a loose royal blue sweater.
Not
flat-chested. Rings on her fingers, though nothing on the important finger.

Lowry. About six-foot-nothing, one-seventy. No wedding band either. Something cooking with him and the blonde? I never partnered with a woman, so it’s hard to judge sometimes.

Just as I was beginning to wonder what the holdup was, someone opened the door and peered in. Another white male. Easy smile, crinkly brown hair, twinkly brown eyes, expensive hand-tooled cowboy boots. Twinkly eyes always make me check my back.

The tension level immediately went up three notches.

“Come in, Rawson,” said McKinnon. “I believe you know Lieutenant Harald, Detectives Lowry and Albee?”

There were mutual
Yeah, sures,
then McKinnon turned to us. “Sergeant Vaughn and Detective Davidowitz from the Six-Four, Sheepshead Bay. Sergeant Rawson, F.I.A.U.”

My nerves suddenly turned into piano wires, too.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

You don’t take a legal course at John Jay College of Criminal Justice without getting some Latin thrown at you. Not much sticks, but this was one of those things you only have to hear once to remember forever:
Who polices the police?

Answer: That great Internal Affairs Division in the sky. And who is its vicar on earth?

The precinct’s Field Internal Affairs Unit.

Sergeant Rawson.

No wonder the looey was so uptight.

“Tell you what,” said Rawson, hitching up a chair like he was just folks. “Why don’t you begin like I’m not here?”

“Fine,” said McKinnon.

Everybody was stiff getting started. I suspected that Albee and Lowry weren’t sure why they were there; but I knew it was you-show-me-yours-and-I’ll-show-you-mine even though I had a feeling it wasn’t going to belong to either of us very long. Since Cluett was killed first, McKinnon asked me to start.

I gave the captain the copy we’d made of the case and laid out what we had: Cluett’s wallet recovered with everything, including cash and credit cards intact; the lack of suspects with solid motives in Cluett’s personal life; the nurse’s eyewitness account of seeing someone meet up with him a little after ten on Tuesday night; and finally that Browning .380 semi-automatic. The postmortem had turned up two wounds. The first shot was from behind. It’d pierced the heart, ricocheted off a rib and torn up some abdominal organs.

“Powder burns indicate the gun was pressed up against his coat,” I said. “The second shot was to the right temple, probably after he was down. Powder traces for that one show the gun approximately two feet away.”

“We put it on the net for the usual check,” Davidowitz said. “No record of previous owners or that it’d ever been used in a crime.”

“But the Bureau keeps a record of every serial number requested,” McKinnon said heavily, “and they bounced it back to Central Data Wednesday night.”

He looked down the table to Lowry and Albee. “Seems Lotty Fischer ran a check on the gun four years ago.”

They still didn’t get it. “And?”

“There’s no record of why she checked it out. Just that she did. Lieutenant?”

She didn’t make a big production out of it. “I went over to Central Data last night and spoke to the people on duty Wednesday night. The clerk that processed the Bureau’s reply finally admitted that she was a friend of Lotty Fischer’s. She says she talked with Fischer around ten that night and, in the course of the conversation, casually mentioned Fischer’s connection with the murder gun.”