Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (17 page)

I circled the garage and inspected everything before I sat down on the couch in front of a small electric heater with red-hot coils. “How come your friends aren’t here today? Lifting weights, beating on the drums?”

“There’s a wake next door, for chrissake.” He picked up an acoustic guitar, perched on an arm of the couch, and began to strum the shiny steel strings.

“Yeah, but from what I hear that shouldn’t make a difference. You weren’t exactly Mick Cluett’s favorite neighbor.”

“Tell it to my old man,” Eddie Gelson muttered as idle chords filled the garage. “Look, we weren’t trying to bug him, you know? We put up soundproofing, kept the amps turned down, and we didn’t play after ten. What more’d he want? Don’t we have rights, too? I mean, Jesus H. Christ!” His hand crashed the guitar in a burst of ear-jangling discord.

“You’re a big kid,” I said. “Tall as Cluett, too. Ever try to punch him out?”

“Hell, no, man!” His hand fell away from the guitar and he sounded shocked. “My dad would’ve killed me.”

I tried to recall the last time I questioned a kid who would admit that he gave a happy damn about how his father might react.

“When did you see Cluett last?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Monday, maybe.”

“You sure you didn’t see him night before last?”

“When he got it? No way, man. It was too cold to go out and my drummer has the flu. Besides, I had a history test yesterday and I stayed in to study.”

“Your parents will confirm this?”

“Sure.” The baby blues shone with such blatant honesty that I knew he was lying.

“When will they be home?”

“Mom doesn’t get in before six, and my dad’s working late this week.”

“I can come back,” I told him.

“Look, I really was here the whole night,” Eddie said. “But out here, not in the house. It’s more private. I study, practice my guitar, listen to my tapes—”

“—smoke a little pot?” I needled.

“—and sometimes I fall asleep out here. My folks turn in early and this way, I don’t bother them. But their bedroom’s on the back here and they can see my light and they’d hear if I cranked my car. It roars like a tiger.”

He seemed to think this clinched his alibi.

“They sleep with the windows open these cold nights?”

“Well, no, but—”

“So they wouldn’t know if you slipped out and walked over to Sheepshead Bay?”

“Walked?”

I had to laugh. This generation will jog, run, or lift weights till sweat pours from their bodies, as long as the purpose is purely exercise. If it’s a matter of getting from point A to point B, however, feet don’t enter into the calculation except as applied to gas pedal or brake.

“Cluett walked back and forth all the time,” I said.

“Yeah, well,” said Eddie Gelson, like that just proved what a jerk Mick Cluett had been.

He went back to playing chords on his guitar; and no matter how hard I pounded, he stuck to his story. Friends had dropped by for a while after dinner; otherwise, he’d been there alone the whole evening from eight till around two A.M.

“Studying for six straight hours?”

“I told you. Sometimes I fall asleep. I remember hearing the headlines at eleven and then the next thing I knew it was ten till two. I unplugged everything and went in to bed. And you can ask my mom about that, because she yelled at me about it yesterday morning, okay?”

For the moment, I knew it’d have to be.

Back outside in the freezing wind, I decided that as long as I was here, I might as well see Irene Cluett again. See if she knew anything about whoever it was Cluett had expected to see at the Shamrock.

I cut across both drives with snow stinging my face; but just as I raised my hand to knock on Irene’s back door, it was opened by a stocky man with a broom in his hand. He wore black knitted mittens and stocking hat and seemed as startled as me, so startled that he gave a high-pitched giggle.

“Oops! Didn’t know anybody was out here. I was just coming to sweep the steps. Keep it clear. Easier to sweep than to shovel and scrape, right?” He giggled again.

“Right,” I said. “I’m here to see Irene. She in?”

Before the man could answer, a little boy pushed past him and began to whine, “Daddy, Tiffy won’t let me play. She says I’m a baby. Make her let me play. I want to play!”

“In a minute, Shawn, all right?”

“But I want to pla-ay. Now!”

“Daddy’s talking to someone, Shawn.” He half-turned and called into the kitchen, “Marie, you wanna call Shawn back in there before he’s up all night with an earache again? Go to Mommy, Shawn. She’ll play with you.”

“She will not!” said a shrill female voice that was almost drowned out by the brat yelling, “But I wanna play with the others.”

I leaned against the porch railing and waited for somebody to take charge.

The door was suddenly yanked open and an annoyed young woman said, “Shawn, you get your tail in here right this minute before I—” Then she saw me and raised an eyebrow at her husband. He giggled nervously. “Honey, this is somebody to see Irene. Mr.— I’m sorry. I didn’t get the name.”

“Vaughn,” I said. “Detective Vaughn.”

“Oh, sure,” said the young woman. She picked up her whining son, settled him on her hip and said, “Irene’s in the den. Come on in.”

She took me past people drinking tea at the kitchen table and into the den where I’d spoken to Irene the evening before.

She was lying back in the same white vinyl recliner. Pink chenille robe, fuzzy pink bedroom slippers, and her feet up on the footrest. A teenage granddaughter was curling her flat gray hair and I remembered that tonight was the first night of the official wake at a nearby funeral home.

Again she greeted me warmly and I told her why I’d returned. She was surprised to hear that Mickey might have gone out to the Shamrock expecting to meet someone and she had no idea who it could’ve been.

“But I know you won’t give up till you find out.” She squeezed my hand hard. “And you’ll be at the funeral parlor tonight, won’t you? Such beautiful flowers the department sent. They let me see him this morning. He looks good, Jarvis. Dress uniform. Wait’ll you see him.”

Her eyes filled with tears.

They were going to wake him three nights and I knew I’d have to put in an appearance at least once, but the last thing I wanted to do that night was fight my way back through a snowstorm to the funeral home to see a stiff Mick Cluett in his dress uniform. Before I could think up a tactful excuse, Irene was distracted by her daughter, who came in with three dresses that looked like army tents on coat hangers.

“Which one you want to wear tonight, Ma?”

I left with Irene deciding whether dark red, dark green or navy blue was best for the first of three nights.

At the front door, I was waylaid by the guy with the broom.

“I think you want to talk to me,” he said. Again that high-pitched nervous giggle.

“I do?” I pulled on my gloves and was winding around my neck the blue cashmere muffler Terry made me for Christmas.

“I’m Neal O’Shea, Mickey’s cousin. Marie—that’s my wife—she heard that Irene told you Mickey and me were on the outs.” He gave the top steps a halfhearted swipe with the broom.

I looked at him with more interest. About five eight, I estimated. Probably late twenties or early thirties.

Neal O’Shea was the first person I’d yet met that came close to Kitty Jozell’s vague description of the person who’d met Cluett after he left the Shamrock Tuesday night. A few inches shorter, stocky but still thinner than Cluett and certainly young enough to walk across a street vigorously. He even had the black knitted cap.

The wind was biting, but I sensed that O’Shea preferred to keep our conversation outside, away from the ears of his relatives.

“Why don’t we go warm up my car?” I suggested.

O’Shea followed me down the walk, sweeping the snow as we went. At the curb, the wind had begun building low drifts that were already higher than my boot tops. The plows hadn’t hit the side streets yet and the white stuff was nearly three inches deep on the level. No sign of letup either. If anything, it was snowing even harder.

The department-issued car was like the inside of a refrigerator and I had to jiggle the vents to get the defroster going. O’Shea swept off the windshield and back window, then he propped his broom against the fender and crawled in beside me.

“I don’t know why Irene wanted to tell you that about Mickey and me,” he griped. For a minute he sounded like his son the whiner.

“She only said that you resented it when Cluett asked you to repay the money he’d loaned you,” I said.

“Yeah?” O’Shea looked relieved. “The way Marie heard it, she was practically accusing me of killing Mickey myself.” He giggled. “Me a killer!”

“So there weren’t any hard feelings?”

“Not like you’re talking about. I mean, no man likes to have somebody dunning him every week, right? Mickey knew I was good for it. But I got laid off at the warehouse at Thanksgiving and we got behind in the bills. And there was Christmas, then Shawn got sick—nothing serious, just earaches, thank God—but you know what doctors and antibiotics cost, right? Always something with kids.

“So when Mickey started dunning me as soon as I started the new job, I might’ve said a few things out of turn, but everybody in the family knows I loved Mickey and he loved me like a brother. Look at how he lent me the money. I know it wasn’t enough to bloat a goat but you don’t do that with people you think are going to shoot you, right?”

“Bloat a goat” seemed to be the Cluett family’s favorite term for a lot of money. I remembered how Cluett used it to describe any thick wad of bills.

“Anyhow,” said O’Shea, “soon as I heard, I scraped together a hundred and brought it right over to Irene and I told her she’d have every penny before the summer.”

He reached for the door handle. “Guess I better get back inside before Marie thinks you’ve arrested me,” he giggled.

“Just a minute, Mr. O’Shea,” I said. “Cluett expected to meet someone at the Shamrock Tuesday night. Was it you?”

“Not me.” The nervous titter went up another notch. “Shawn was still getting over his earache. Marie’d been up with him two nights in a row, so I took over for her Tuesday night.”

My ex and I never had kids so I couldn’t speak from experience, but I thought I’d heard Terry talk about how quick Adam’s winter ailments always reacted to antibiotics. If that bratty kid had been on medication for three days, maybe he’d actually slept through Tuesday night as soundly as I was willing to bet Marie O’Shea had.

Nearly five when I got back to the station and went up to my office to jot down notes on the interviews while they were still fresh. Several messages waited on my desk: Hy Davidowitz had made it home safely. Fabrizio had skidded into a bus as he came off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and expected to be a little late getting to work. Then Kirkwood came in with a funny expression on his face.

“Did you hear?”

It’d been a long day. “Hear what?”

“The gun that killed Mick. Some P.A.A. over in New York ran a check on it a couple of years ago.”

“And?”

“And they don’t know why.”

Kirkwood has a warped sense of humor. Normally I’d let him spin it out, but reports were piled on my desk and snow was piling up outside. “Cut to the chase,” I snapped.