Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (30 page)

“No.” This man was supposed to be Leif’s close friend, yet it sounded as if he’d barely known Anne. So many questions ran through her head. “I mentioned your name to her.”

“And she didn’t remember me?” He crushed the butt in the large glass ashtray. “Shouldn’t surprise you. Your mother was a nice girl and I was one of the big bad wolves.”

“What does that mean?”

“You married?”

Sigrid shook her head.

“Doesn’t matter. Maybe it doesn’t happen with women, but you must have seen it with some of your male colleagues. There’s the groupies.” He gestured toward the main bar with his glass of scotch.

Sigrid didn’t bother to turn and look. She knew that places like this attracted unattached women who liked to hang out with cops and listen to them talk shop, women who found it erotic to rub against a man wearing a gun. Even the terminology was sexual. His weapon. His piece. Hard iron. Is that your gun, big guy, or are you just glad to see me?

“Groupies are fun to play with, but you don’t marry them, or have kids with them,” Oersted continued. “For that you want a nice girl, someone from the neighborhood or parish, someone who wouldn’t be caught dead in a cop bar unless she’s with you, only you’d never bring her here where the other guys might open her eyes. Instead you marry her and try to keep your marriage in a separate compartment. It’s like you make this agreement: you don’t tell about the slime you walked through your last tour and she doesn’t ask what truck the goodies fell off of. You talk about the kids, the house, what’s on television, everything except the job.”

Sigrid thought of Tillie and Marian, of Bernie Peters and his wife Pam, whom she’d never met. She’d heard both men speak of shielding their wives and children from some of the realities of the job. Hentz was divorced, like a dozen others she could name, marriages down the drain. McKinnon had never married. Only Matt Eberstadt sounded as if he and his Frances treated each other like adults.

“You’re not married either?” she asked.

“Now I am. Then, I went through two wives in a hurry because I couldn’t leave it at the station house like Leif could. Mac was the only one he could trust to leave it behind, too. Or some old hair bag like Cluett. I guess I was too wild. I remember you, though.”

“You do?”

“I drove him home a few times when Anne was in class and he had to pick you up at the baby-sitter’s. Rosie Bloomgardner. I never forgot that silly name.” He smiled as he lit another cigarette. “Remember her?”

Sigrid tried, but nothing came.

“Well, you were just a baby then. And now you’re a lieutenant already. Too bad you aren’t black, too. You’d probably be a captain or a deputy inspector by now.” He caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for another scotch. “You ready?” he asked Sigrid.

Her glass was still half-full and she shook her head, tight-lipped, her hands clenched into fists beneath the table.

She didn’t know which grated more, the casualness of his racist and sexist remark or the easy assumption that she shared that view. She told herself he was a dinosaur from another age, that she wouldn’t change him by exploding, that she was here to learn whatever this man could tell her about her father. If she got up now and walked away from the table in anger, she knew she’d soon be asking herself if she’d left because Tom Oersted was a bigot who said no more than she’d heard a thousand times since her promotion or if it were because she really didn’t want to know? She had loved her father. Everyone in the family said he’d possessed an easygoing tolerance and a knack for friendship. Why not accept that Leif had liked Oersted for reasons that had nothing to do with the man’s values and attitudes?

“Is that why Mother didn’t know your name? Because Dad kept everything compartmentalized?”

“Look,” said Oersted. “You said on the phone you wanted to know about him. You want the truth?”

At that moment Sigrid quit trying to like him for her father’s sake.

“That’s a loaded question, isn’t it?” she asked coldly. “Obviously the only answer is yes, but it implies that the truth will hurt.”

He laughed. “Ask your questions. I’ll answer anything I know for sure, but not things I don’t know.”

“Again, that implies there are things you suspect. Bad things?”

He shrugged. “What’s bad to you?”

She had to know the worst. “Was he dishonest? On the take?”

“No, nothing like that,” said Oersted. Smoke curled from his nose. “Actually, he was a damn good cop. Foolhardy at times, the way he’d go wading in to break up a street fight or a barroom brawl, or worse, get between a husband and wife when one had a knife and the other a baseball bat. And smart, too. He and Mac could see patterns, make connections better than anybody I ever saw. Look how quick they got the gold shields. Took me eight years.”

“Were you ever partners?”

“Not after he made plainclothes. Before that, yeah, we pulled tours together. After, it was him and Mac all the way.” He said it nonchalantly, but Sigrid sensed an undertone of remembered jealousy.

“Did they work as well together?”

“Better. They really were a good match.” Oersted said it slowly, as if looking back from such a long distance were giving him new perspective. “Like pencil and paper, you know? Better together than separately. One brought out the strengths of the other.” He gave an ironic chuckle. “Leif and I brought out each other’s worst and we both knew it.”

“How?”

A burst of laughter from the bar floated above the bluesy music. Sigrid glanced over and saw a voluptuous redhead flirting with three guys from Narcotics. “Was he cheating on my mother?”

Oersted seemed amused by the chaste term. “Is the Pope Catholic?”

Sigrid suddenly felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach.

“Hey, you really didn’t know, did you?” asked Oersted. His voice seemed to come from a long way off.

Sigrid finished her drink in two gulps and looked around for the waiter. “No.”

“I’d have thought Anne or Mac would’ve told you by now, especially since—but then, that’s right: they didn’t marry, did they?”

“What?”

The room seemed to tilt and Sigrid sat very still until it righted itself again.

“What the hell?” said Oersted.

As he finished his own drink, Sigrid suddenly realized that he knew she found him distasteful.

“Mac told me not to tell you anything except what I knew for a fact.” There was deliberate and satisfied malice in the glint of his eye and the curl of his lip. “This is a fact, Lieutenant: when Leif bought it, word got around that Mac had set him up so he could have Anne.”

He stood up and threw some bills on the table to cover their drinks. “But they never married, so I guess it was just an ugly rumor, right?”

CHAPTER 27

Once when she was eight years old and spending the summer with Grandmother Lattimore while Anne was on an assignment in Europe, Sigrid had run barefooted onto a clump of hard dry sandspurs. It was not the first time her soft city feet had encountered those vicious spiked burrs but this was the worst. Not one, but at least a dozen pierced the soles of her feet like tiny needles; and as she drew back from the clump, walking on her heels so as not to press them deeper, the first sharp awareness of pain gave way to anxiety over the pain to come. Each sandspur had six or eight points, each point was barbed like a tiny fishhook; and as much as they hurt going in, they hurt even worse coming out. She hobbled over to a safe patch of grass under a tree and lay down on her back to stare up into the tree, losing herself among the thousand leaves and twigs, concentrating on leaves and clouds that seemed to float on the surface of a sky as blue and limpid as a gulf reef. Her feet no longer hurt and so long as she did not touch the sandspurs, they wouldn’t. She floated like a leaf on limitless blue sky, suspended between pain for almost an hour, until at last—

“Hey, Lieutenant! You okay?”

Abruptly, clouds and trees disappeared and her senses were assaulted with the smell of cigarette smoke, toasted barley and hot pastrami, the sound of Benny Goodman’s solo clarinet, and the sight of Sergeant Jarvis Vaughn’s chocolate brown eyes looking down at her. Sigrid pulled herself back to the present.

“I—I— Yes, I’m fine,” she stammered. But she still felt slightly disoriented, as if she should be brushing grass and leaves off the back of T-shirt and shorts instead of gesturing for Vaughn to sit down and join her in this now-crowded tavern.

“You sure?” He pushed aside the money Oersted had left on the table and set down the glass and sandwich plate he’d brought over from the bar. After another long look at her pale face, he signaled for the waiter. “Buy you another drink, Lieutenant? You look like you could use it.”

“Actually,” said Sigrid, “I think what I could use is some food.”

“Take half of mine,” Vaughn said. “It’s more than I want.”

In truth, sandwiches at the Urban Renewal Society were gargantuan and Sigrid felt no compunction in accepting his offer. She bit into the warm meat and savored the tang of spicy mustard against her tongue. “Just a large glass of ice water,” she told the waiter.

Vaughn put some of his potato chips on the napkin she was using for a plate. “If you want to talk, I’m a pretty good listener.”

Sigrid smiled. “I bet you are. No, I’m okay now. Really. You through for the day?”

“Not quite. I have a few more things to read through.”

“Who’d Rawson pick for the task force?” she asked, taking another bite of the sandwich.

Vaughn gave names and postings. Sigrid had met Henry Eastman and Sandy Yow in passing, but knew none of them personally, although she’d heard of everyone. “Did you make much progress today?”

“Now, Lieutenant, you know I can’t talk specifics.”

“No?” She ate a salty potato chip and looked at him shrewdly. “Then why are you sitting here at this table?”

His thin brown face relaxed in laughter. “They said you were a pistol.”

As he finished his half of the pastrami sandwich, he crumpled his napkin on the plate and said, “This is when I really miss cigarettes. After a meal. Relaxes everybody. Gives you something to do with your hands and eyes.”

“Lets you segue into a grilling before the other person knows what’s happening?” Sigrid asked sardonically.

“You got it.”

“I don’t like taking my unit apart person by person,” she told him. “They’re good officers, not—”

“Even good officers fall. You know that.”

“So I’m learning.” Her eyes darkened in private thought, then she shook her head impatiently. “Of course I know it. I’ve been on the job long enough to know it’s no Sunday School choir. They know it, too. That’s why it could tear us apart. So don’t you ask me to start theorizing and pointing the finger at any of my people till you’ve cleared every civilian and uniform here in the Twelfth and at the Six-Four and even then—” She took a long steadying swallow of her ice water.

Vaughn put his elbow on the table, propped his chin on his fist and his voice was almost gentle. “It’s that strong a suspicion, huh?”

She looked at him mutely and her gray eyes were sad.

He leaned across the table as if to drag it from her. “If we found the Canary tomorrow, who would you nominate for the lineup, Lieutenant?”

In the warm smoky room, her chilled glass left wet rings on the shiny pine tabletop and she moved it to form a design of interlocking circles.

“When you were a child, Sergeant, did you ever step on a sandspur with your bare foot?”