Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (5 page)

“Oh, Jarvis!” she sobbed and clutched my hands in hers like we were old friends. “Are you handling his case personally? You’ll find who shot my poor Mickey down in cold blood, won’t you?”

“You know we will, Mrs.—er, Irene,” I assured her awkwardly. To cover, I pulled Hy over. “You’ve met Detective Davidowitz, haven’t you?”

Davidowitz took her limp hand. “Sorry for your troubles, ma’am.” (He’s picked up that useful, all-purpose condolence from the Irish.) “Bless you both,” she said brokenly. “This is my cousin, Sister Bernadette, and my brother’s wife, Gina Callahan.”

The two women nodded and murmured, then the elderly nun began to hoist herself from the gold velour cushions. “Take my place, Sergeant Vaughn,” she offered.

“No, no, you stay right here,” said Irene Cluett and called to her daughter, “Barbara, bring your father’s friends a chair.”

People sprang for some of the folding chairs the undertaker had supplied, but I waved them aside. “Please don’t bother,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mrs.—um, Irene, but is there someplace we can talk alone?”

The Cluett den had probably been the Cluett daughter’s bedroom.

There was something girly about the rosebud wallpaper and even though the daybed was heaped with green cushions on a matching slipcover, you could tell it’d started life as a single bed.

Four teenage kids, three boys and a girl, were sprawled before an expensive color television, but they jumped to their feet and edged past as their grandmother led us into the room.

In front of the television were two white vinyl recliners separated by a lamp table that held the remote control, a box of Kleenex, and the only reading material I’d yet noticed in the whole house: a current
TV Guide
and a couple of
National Enquirers.
The wall above the television was plastered with family pictures: from turn-of-the-century photographs of stiff-faced old-timers to fat little Cluett grandbabies sitting on the laps of Easter Bunnies, Santa Clauses, and even a Saint Patrick’s Day leprechaun.

The rose-sprigged wallpaper behind the two recliners was bare except for a brightly colored picture of the Sacred Heart. A pale-skinned, blond Christ, I noted, pissed at myself for noting. Jesus as Anglo-Saxon white bread instead of Semite bagel and how did that make Davidowitz feel?

The fancy gold frame had some faded fronds of palm leaves sticking out of the top. Probably put up there on Palm Sunday a year ago and due to be replaced in a few weeks. Christmas didn’t seem like more than just a couple of weeks back and all of a sudden here it was Ash Wednesday again. Soon be spring.

As if by habit, Irene Cluett headed straight to the first chair and patted the arm of the other white recliner. “Sit here, Jarvis,” she said.

She didn’t have to tell me it was Cluett’s. I knew from the rump-sprung look of the seat that it had to be his favorite chair.

Felt weird to put my skinny behind where his fat ass must have wallowed just last night, but I pulled the chair around to face her as Davidowitz lowered his bulky form gingerly onto the daybed.

There was a pink crocheted afghan on the back of Irene’s chair and she draped it over her legs even though the room felt warm to me. I loosened my overcoat and stuffed my gloves in a pocket. Davidowitz slid out of his coat altogether. He took out one of the four or five rolled-up yellow legal pads we all go through on a case and smoothed it flat for taking notes.

Without us asking, Irene had already started talking about Cluett’s last evening—the pot roast and potato dumplings she’d made for his supper—“He likes everything I cook but I do believe that’s really his favorite so I’m glad I fixed it. His last meal. He really enjoyed it, too. Only I made string beans and he always likes cabbage better even though it doesn’t agree with him.” She looked confidentially at Davidowitz. “Gas.”

She described the television programs they’d watched, then how he’d gone out to walk the dog at eight-thirty.

“Did he always walk the dog at the same time?” I asked.

She pursed her thin lips in thought. “It depends. If he’s going over to Sheepshead for a beer, he usually leaves then. If it’s just to let Sheba do her duty, then he’ll stay on the block and go out around bedtime, ten-thirty or so.”

“How often did he walk across the bay?”

“Three or four nights a week,” she sighed. Her fingers were so swollen—arthritis?—that the joints looked like links of tiny little white bratwursts as she plucked at the flowers on the afghan in her lap. “What can I tell you? He’s not supposed to drink much on account of his weight pulling on his heart, but the doctor says he needs to walk and when he walks, he winds up over at the Shamrock. Most times it’s only one beer and out and I figure he probably walks that off coming home so it’s probably not all that bad for him, don’t you think? I mean just one beer?”

“Probably not,” agreed Davidowitz. He’s the good-hearted one.

We let her tell it in her own words—the way she’d gone to bed mad at Cluett when he didn’t come home by the usual ten-thirty, something that might happen once every three or four months. How the dog woke her up around midnight pawing at the back door, which had made her even madder.

“Cold as it was, leaving Sheba outdoors like that? No consideration for a poor dumb animal. Not that she has to wait outside the Shamrock. They let her come in with Mickey in the wintertime if nobody complains, but still— Of course I didn’t know.” She wiped fresh tears from her eyes. “I thought he was probably too loaded to walk home so he’d gone to Barbara’s and Sheba’d gotten away from him and all the time I was mad at him, he was lying out there on the freezing sidewalk and—”

Irene fumbled for the box of tissues on the lamp table and loudly blew her nose. A minute later, her daughter pushed open the door and looked in. “You okay, Ma? Can I get you anything?”

“No, no, I’m fine. Unless—” She looked at Davidowitz and me. “Don’t you want a cup of tea or something?”

We declined. The daughter gave us worried glances, but left without saying anything else.

We let Irene finish describing her night, how she’d phoned her daughter early this morning and how she’d felt when someone from the Six-Four rang her doorbell and gave her the bad news; then I asked, “Did he have any problems with anybody lately, Irene? Anybody that might have wanted to get back at him?”

She cut her eyes at me sharply. “Wasn’t it a mugging?”

I shrugged. “His pockets were empty. That’s why it took those rookies so long to identify him. But when we searched the bum that heard the shot, he had Mick’s watch and a handful of loose change. That’s all though. We found Mick’s wallet in the bay, near the gun. It still had forty-three dollars in it and all his credit cards.”

“Not a mugging,” she repeated slowly. Her body had been a soft lump of flesh inside that shapeless dark wool dress. Now there was a hint of muscle that made her seem to sit a little straighter. “Somebody killed Mickey on purpose?”

“We’re not ready to go that far yet,” I cautioned.

She didn’t argue, just sat there thinking. I’d have said “cowlike” a minute earlier, now it felt more like those pale blue eyes were reading through a list of names, pause here, slide past whole columns there. She ticked them off on her fingers.

“The head mechanic over at the Chrysler place. The car’s still under warranty but he don’t want to fix the power steering. Three-ten a month car payments and the thing turns like a tank, Mickey says. They had hard words Saturday. Mickey was going to take it in again tomorrow. He says—said—he’s going to give him one more chance and then he’s getting some of the guys from the beat to hassle him about cars double-parked on the sidewalk in front of the garage.”

Davidowitz interrupted her for the man’s name.

“Frank’s all I ever heard,” she said; but she knew the garage’s location. Davidowitz carefully listed it on the top sheet of his legal pad.

“The Gelson kid next door,” Irene continued. “We think he may be dealing. He flew off the handle when Mickey and my brother asked him how come so many kids were hanging out back there in their garage.”

“This Gelson kid have a first name?” asked Davidowitz.

“Edward.” She watched him write it out. “He’s about seventeen, but big and strong from lifting weights. Got a fresh mouth on him, too. All about how he knows his rights and Mickey’s got no right to say who can come in their garage and who can’t.”

“Anybody else?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly, paused, then shook her head again.

I recognized the hesitation and pushed. “You sure, Irene? It might not seem like anything, but you’ve been a cop’s wife long enough to know how people can do crazy things for stupid reasons.”

“You said a true mouthful there, Jarvis,” she nodded. “It doesn’t really seem like it could be anything, but there’s his cousin Neal. Neal O’Shea. We lent him five hundred dollars when he lost his job back at Thanksgiving so he and Marie could buy Christmas for their kids. He’s working again but we still haven’t seen a penny. Mickey only asked him about it once, but he took it wrong and we’ve heard he’s been bad-mouthing Mickey to his brothers.”

Davidowitz took down the cousin’s name and address.

A sum total of three names. After a lifetime of opportunity to make enemies, could any man really go out with only three? On the other hand, assume for a minute that three’s all, is that good, bad, or indifferent?

Mick Cluett hadn’t been much of a detective. Lazy, sloppy, always behind in his paperwork. Always played catch-up with his notes and teetered on the skinny edge of perjury if he had to testify in court. Resented others’ success. In short, not particularly interested in the job beyond picking up his paycheck and making his forty. We couldn’t figure out why forty was the magic number for him. Certainly didn’t mean a bigger pension. And it wasn’t like he was getting serious respect or saving the free world from crime. Oh, he’d do what you asked, but damn if you didn’t always have to ask. He was already in place when I transferred in and I was stuck with him, part of the job. Like the lousy coffee and the never-ending paperwork. Not so bad that you’d take the trouble to get rid of it once and for all—and even if I’d manipulated his clearance rates, getting rid of Cluett would have been a hell of a lot of trouble given all the job security mechanisms in place—no, he was just one more of those ongoing irritations life sends you to keep you from being too pleased with your lot.

Incurable, endurable,
Granny used to say.

“Nobody else, then?” I asked Irene. “No trouble with work or anything?”

She looked blank and shook her head. “He never really talked about the job. Oh, maybe if it was something on the news and Barbara or one of the boys asked him about it, he’d say what he’d seen or heard. He should’ve retired after thirty, but he was so set on making forty. He went on the job when he was twenty-one and he said he was going to stay till he was sixty-one. Just like his uncle Michael, God rest him. It wasn’t easy for him. Years ago, he used to talk more and, of course, we were proud of him when he finally made detective, but seems like it didn’t mean as much to him. He said—”

Irene put her hand to her mouth, like a kid who’s spoken out of turn and spilled a family secret.

“He said what?” I prodded.

She gave a what-the-hell? shrug. “He said that the only reason he made detective was because Chief Buckthorn wanted to stick it to Willie McMahon.”

So he’d known about that, had he? I felt a sickly wave of shame wash over me even though that little bit of departmental politics was over and done with before I came on the job. Willie McMahon was my predecessor and he and the then chief—also gone before my time—had gone head-to-head in monumental clashes, if all the stories were true. I hadn’t been in Willie McMahon’s old office three days before I heard how Buckthorn had promoted Mick Cluett onto the detective squad just to spite McMahon. Whenever I got particularly pissed with Cluett, I had to remember that it really wasn’t his fault for being where he was bound to screw up.

“The best time for Mickey was back when he was still riding patrol over in New York. He liked it when they’d give him a rookie to break in. But after a few years, when some of his rookies were getting promotions and making detective, he seemed to think he ought to try for detective, too. And with four kids, we could always use the money. He was never on the pad, Jarvis.”