Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (29 page)

Or so he said.

Oh, well, hell, I guess I’d be the same if some dude started tossing my unit.

I thanked him nicely and asked him to send in his partner.

Detective Bernie Peters. Twenty-eight. Body of a guy meant to be six foot, short legs kept him at five eight. Good build, but no bronze Adonis. Love handles and what was going to be a thick middle in another five years if he didn’t watch the doughnuts and french fries.

We got the alibi or, in his case, the non-alibi out of the way at the start.

“Wish I could say I was out dancing at the V.F.W., Sarge, but I was home both nights with only my wife and kids to vouch for me.”

Just like Eberstadt except that the Peters kids were too young to tell time, much less know the days of the week. Woodhaven was only a few minutes further from Sheepshead Bay than Ozone Park.

I moved on to the murdered girl.

“Yeah, I knew Lotty Fischer,” he said. “I hadn’t given it much thought, but Matt Eberstadt reminded me that we came about the same time. She was always friendly, always had a good word.”

He sat at ease. Legs apart. One hand on the table, the other on his lap.

“She ever do you any favors?”

“Favors? Like with the computer?”

I nodded.

“You mean the gun,” he said flatly. “Not that. But she did run a check for priors on an old guy that clipped my car a couple of years back. He wanted to pay for my repairs out of his own pocket so it wouldn’t go through his insurance company. Turned out he had enough moving violations that DMV probably would have pulled his license if I’d reported him. At his age he might not’ve got it back.”

I grinned. “Guess you got a couple of extra dents ironed out while you were at it?”

He gave a sheepish shrug. “He could afford it.”

“So what it boils down to is that you and Fischer were pretty tight?”

“No, not really. Just friendly. You know: ‘How ya doing? How’s it going?’ Like with most of the P.A.A.’s. Nice bunch, most of ’em.”

He didn’t really want to bad-mouth Cluett or any of his colleagues, but he did mention how Cluett seemed to get on the looey’s nerves.

“In fact,” he said, as if he’d just noticed it, “he seemed to rub most women the wrong way. Not just the lieutenant, but Urbanska when she got the command discipline. And Albee, too. Especially since he went back to Brooklyn.”

“Command discipline?”

“Oh, jeez.” He looked unhappy with himself for letting that slip out. “Maybe you’d better ask Urbanska. I don’t know all the details.”

“Yeah, sure, you don’t,” I said, but let it ride. “What about the other one? Albee? How’d he bug her from Brooklyn?”

“One of their cases is going to court soon and he was on the phone a half a dozen times trying to fill in the blanks in his notepad. Same thing with one of our cases. Jeez, you’d think a guy that worried about getting in the burn box would’ve taken better notes to start with.”

Tell me about it, I thought. Cluett hated court because any halfway sharp lawyer could make him look like a jackass, flipping back and forth in his notes, looking for stuff he hadn’t bothered writing down like he should’ve at the scene of the crime.

“But you got along with him okay?”

“Sure. He was easy to get along with. You just told yourself that when you were paired with Cluett, you had an empty suit on the job with you. Long as you did all the work, no problem.”

A smartass, but he sure had Cluett pegged.

Detective Dinah Urbanska. Looking at those sturdy muscular calves and thighs inside dark blue slacks, you figured she had to’ve played field hockey in high school or been a lifeguard out at one of the beaches. Klutzy though. She banged the table leg pulling up her chair, then dropped her pencil on the floor and almost knocked over the table trying to get it. If she was the one pushed Fischer, she could probably claim it was an accident. Don’t know about a jury, but I’d buy it. Five eight, golden brown hair pulled up in a fat knot on the top of her head, golden skin, smooth and elastic. Yeah, she fit the physical type we were looking for all right. Worse, no alibi.

“We worked the day shift on Tuesday and Wednesday,” she said, which meant she was off-duty during the relevant hours.

She’d caught an early movie with a friend Tuesday evening, then headed home to Brooklyn alone around nine. She said she’d taken the R train at Eighth Street for Borough Hall, but there was no way to prove she hadn’t changed at Canal or DeKalb for the D train to Sheepshead Bay. I made a note to check whether there’d been any unusual delays on the D train that night.

The bartender at the Shamrock had thought Cluett expected to meet somebody before ten. If Urbanska’d been with a friend till nine, the subway was the only way she could’ve made it to Sheepshead Bay with time to hang around waiting for him. Even a cab would’ve been cutting it too close.

Wednesday night?

“I stayed in and watched television,” she said stonily. No roommates, no doorman, no way to prove she did. Or didn’t.

She admitted she’d been angry when Cluett led her into screwing up. The command discipline had cost her three days vacation time plus going down in her record. “Lieutenant Harald was right, though. I knew it was wrong when I did it and I didn’t think ahead. The perp walked because I let myself be used to cover Cluett’s ass.”

Unlike Eberstadt and Peters, Urbanska claimed she never met Lotty Fischer the first time she worked the precinct.

According to the records, she came in one short month before Fischer did her thing with the computer. Interesting. Fischer would have been eighteen, Urbanska twenty-one. She wouldn’t have been the first rookie that thought she needed insurance in case she panicked and pulled her piece at the wrong time.

“Two young women, both new to the job, and you’re gonna tell me you never talked?” I asked.

She looked me straight in the eye. “You talk to every middle-aged black officer you come across?”

That hurt. Since when’s thirty-seven middle age?

Detective Samuel Hentz. Trim and dapper in a pinstripe shirt and a sharp charcoal suit. Dark hair with a touch of gray at the temples. Dinah Urbanska’s middle-aged partner. Forty. Divorced, no kids. Upper West Side address. Five nine, one sixty-five. Like Urbanska, a possible fit with the physical description we had.

Admitted knowing Lotty Fischer, but claimed their dealings had been strictly professional and that he’d never asked for or gotten special electronic favors.

Contempt for Cluett’s unprofessionalism. Didn’t say it, but I read contempt for me, too, maybe because I’m black, maybe because I didn’t get rid of Cluett as soon as I hit the Six-Four. Hard to tell. One uptight dude.

No alibi for either night.

As we finished the interview, the telephone rang across the room and Yow called over to me, “A patrol unit spotted the Canary in Union Square, but he ran as soon as they got out of the car.”

“That your witness?” asked Hentz.

I didn’t answer and he gave a sour laugh. “Oh, right. I keep forgetting I’m a suspect now.”

While I’d interviewed the plain brown wrappers, the others had tentatively cleared five or six blue bags who claimed to have checkable alibis.

I added Eberstadt and Peters’s wives to their follow-up checklist.

“What about Captain McKinnon?” I asked Rawson. “You want to interview him or me?”

“I’d better do it,” he groaned.

CHAPTER 26

Located around the corner and half a block down from her office, the Urban Renewal Society was not as private as Sigrid might have wished, but snow was beginning to pile up; and as her boots crunched through the white ankle-deep powder, she was glad Tom Oersted had suggested they meet there. He hadn’t called to cancel, so she assumed their meeting was still on.

On this snowy Sunday evening, the crowds seemed thinner. She recognized several faces scattered through the dim smoke-filled bar, but none that obligated her to anything beyond a nod as she crossed the main room to a side booth out of the flow of traffic yet in view of the door. An unfamiliar version of
Mood Indigo
was playing in the background. Sultry, but uninsistent.

No sooner had she slipped off her coat and ordered a drink than she saw a tall flaxen-haired man of late middle age enter and scan the room. When his eyes met hers, he immediately came over.

“Mr. Oersted?” She half rose.

“No, don’t get up.” He took off his heavy camel hair overcoat and hung it on a hook beside their booth. Beneath the coat was a turtleneck sweater that looked like an expensive import, handknit in shades of blue and green. He stuffed gloves and scarf into the coat pockets and spoke of the blustery snowstorm, but all the while his clear blue eyes examined her with candid curiosity.

“Damn! Little Siga. All grown up and as beautiful as Anne.” Sigrid’s royal purple jacket was one of the colors on Berthelot’s “Eastern Winter” chart, and she had taken pains with her makeup before leaving the women’s locker-room. Somehow it had seemed important, as if making a good impression on Oersted would honor her father’s memory. Nevertheless, even though she knew she looked rather nice for her, that was still nowhere near her mother’s level. Blatant flattery usually offended her but he probably meant well, and she was willing to concede that the years might have dimmed his memory of Anne as effectively as they had dimmed Anne’s of him.

He slid into the other side of the booth. “I didn’t expect to see so much of Leif in you. You’re dark like Anne, but Lord, Lord! Your eyes are exactly like his. Bet you’re tall, too?”

“Yes.”

The waiter returned with her drink and while Oersted detailed precisely how much splash he wanted in his scotch, Sigrid studied his face.

She knew he was sixty-one and that he’d gone through the Academy with her father and McKinnon. Time had honed away the soft planes of youth and left him with deep creases beside his eyes and around a mouth that smiled easily. He was very much as she imagined Leif would be had he lived: tall, yellow hair half faded to white; still flat-bellied though, still handsome. The last Viking raid was a thousand years in the past, yet something genetic in his careless sprawl, in the reckless thrust of his jaw, recalled those seagoing marauders.

He patted his pockets and drew out a crumpled pack of cigarettes and a disposable lighter. “Smoke?”

Sigrid shook her head.

“Mind if I do?”

“No.” She disliked the smell of cigarette smoke on her clothes and in her hair, but it was one of the givens of police work and unless the air around her was blue enough to set off smoke alarms, she tried not to let it bother her.

Tom Oersted inhaled deeply, then looked around the tavern with evident enjoyment. “This place takes me back. There’s at least one cop bar in every precinct, isn’t there? And Leif and I must have hit every single one of them in our day.”

“Really?” That surprised her somehow. Even though she knew her father had been friendly and outgoing, no one had ever described him as a barfly.

Oersted’s scotch arrived. He tasted it and gave the waiter a thumbs-up sign of approval before turning back to Sigrid. “How’s Anne?” he asked. “Still living in New York or did she go back to—where was it? Georgia? Virginia?”

“North Carolina. No, she travels a lot, but New York’s still her home base. She’s a freelance photojournalist.”

“That’s right. I remember Leif talking about her studying photography.” He moved the ashtray so his smoke wouldn’t hit her. “She never remarried then?”