Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald)

Copyright © 2012 by Margaret Maron.

All rights reserved. (First published 1991.)

All characters in this book are fictitious.

Any resemblance to real persons,

living or dead,

is purely coincidental.

For Toby and Margaret Maron Quaranto,

who have proved over the years that water may indeed be as thick as blood.

By Margaret Maron

Margaret Maron
is the author of twenty-eight novels and two collections of short stories. The following works currently are available for e-readers and other electronic devices.

Sigrid Harald Novels

Past Imperfect

Corpus Christmas

Baby Doll Games

The Right Jack

Bloody Kin

Death In Blue Folders

Death Of A Butterfly

One Coffee With

Short Stories

Bewreathed

With This Ring

Deborah’s Judgment

www.margaretmaron.com

INTRODUCTION

Past Imperfect
, the 7th in this series, was written in 1990 and I continue to be amazed by all the societal changes in twenty short years. Times Square had not yet become Disneyfied. Sex shops and porn movies abounded there, and tourists were pestered with handbills promising illicit good times in nearby hotel rooms that could be rented by the hour. Every third person was a smoker and smoking was allowed in restaurants, offices, and some movie theaters. The Twin Towers still stood. Subway cars and stations were grungy, and black graffiti covered both the walls and the trains. And the homeless were everywhere (something sadly happening once again, if for different reasons.)

On a lighter note, it was trendy for women to “get their colors done,” i.e., to learn if they were a Winter, Spring, Summer or Autumn and to choose a wardrobe based on those designations. Those familiar with Sigrid Harald’s indifference to clothes and mirrors can imagine her reaction when her Grandmother Lattimore gifts her with such a makeover.

— Margaret Maron, 2012

CHAPTER 1

The Urban Renewal Society on a raw January night was basically no different from a dozen other middle-class bars that dotted lower Manhattan. There was the same smell of booze and tobacco mingled with damp woolen overcoats, the same gleaming mirrors and glass shelves of multihued bottles behind a long oak bar, the same small square tables at the front and larger round ones at the rear, the same smoky blues drifting in and out between voices, laughter, the tinkle of ice on glass.

Many New York bars, though, used pulldown steel mesh to protect against break-ins. The Urban Renewal Society’s barred door had once secured a holding cell in a now-vanished precinct station. Some bars had pictures of prize fighters on their walls; others, depending on their clientele, displayed prominent politicians, movie stars, or TV celebrities. The Urban Renewal Society catered unabashedly to cops and its walls were a rogues’ gallery of uniformed police officers. Scrawled across the pictures were words of affectionate derision: “To Sal and Mike, who now have a license to steal.” Or “To Mike—good luck keeping Sal’s hand out of the till!” These were interspersed with signed photographs of four of the last six police commissioners plus one elegantly tailored inspector now retired from Scotland Yard, an impassive-looking Navaho Tribal Police officer, and a beautiful blonde SBI agent from North Carolina.

Amid old-fashioned handcuffs, nightsticks, whistles, and other police paraphernalia from bygone days, the two ex-cops who owned the place had hung a somber wooden plaque with the names and badge numbers of former customers, men and women both, who’d been killed in the line of duty.

Over the cash register hung a twenty-dollar bill, a twenty tendered for a round of drinks on opening day and framed for good luck because it was the first bill to slide across the gleaming new bar.

Counterfeit, of course.

“—another Miller Lite for the returning hero and me,” said Matt Eberstadt, who was just sober enough to remember he was supposed to avoid extra calories. “And gin and tonic for the new millionaire.”

The barman was devoid of curiosity and merely repeated the big detective’s order, “Two Miller Lites, one GT, what else?”

“Scotch for the Gold Dust Twins, a Molson for the dear departing, and—and—” He blinked beerily at the thin gray-eyed woman who sat opposite him at Urban Renewal’s largest rear table. “And bourbon and Coke for the lieutenant!” he finished with a triumphant grin.

“Geez, Eberstadt,” grumbled Bernie Peters, fishing in his glass for the slice of lime as the waiter headed back toward the bar. “If I’d wanted the whole world to know about my win, I’d have rented that moving sign at Times Square.”

Eberstadt’s rumpled face registered hurt and Jim Lowry, whose sandy brown hair was nowhere near the gold of the woman seated beside him, said, “Aw, come on, Bernie. Tell us how much. You can trust us. We’re family.”

“Sure, sure,” Peters jeered.

“Leave him alone,” said the blonde as a mischievous dimple flashed in her smooth cheek. “He’s afraid we’ll tell the little wife. Afraid she’ll spend it all again.”

“And am I wrong?” Bernie Peters leaned around Eberstadt’s bulky figure to confront the young detective face-to-face. A very attractive face, too, but Bernie usually reacted to her needling too automatically to register Elaine Albee’s blonde prettiness anymore.

“Look what happened last month,” he complained. “I win three hundred and she buys Christmas presents for the kids like it was three thousand. If I tell her I won nineteen—”

He caught himself and leaned back in the leather-padded oak chair. “Nineteen
hundred?”
Tillie was seated on Peters’s left and his round face, thinner now and still pale after his long hospital stay, was as wistful as his voice.

Detective Peters looked from one openly curious colleague to another before giving a rueful, hands-up shrug. “Nineteen thousand.”

“Holy Mother of Mary!” sighed Mick Cluett.

“Before taxes,” Peters warned, though a sheepish grin spread over his pleasantly homely features.

A flash of naked envy swept around the table, then their indrawn breaths and raised eyebrows turned to congratulations, laughter, and offers to sell him gold mines, Florida swamplands, and halvsies in a used Lamborghini Elaine Albee had been drooling over since mid-December.

“You could drive it all week and I’d just use it on the weekends,” she said generously.

“Forget it,” Peters told her. “I’m getting a mini-van. Taking delivery on it this weekend.”

The barman returned with their drinks and a fresh bowl of popcorn, and Matt Eberstadt passed the check over to his newly flush partner.

“See what I mean?” Peters took it like a good sport, but he shook his head as he drew out his wallet. “You guys are worse than Pam.”

“You’re really not going to tell her?” asked Elaine Albee.

“I’ll tell her. I just won’t tell her how much.” He fixed them with an earnest look. “And you gotta promise not to either, okay? Now that she’s back working part-time, she thinks our money troubles are over. I’ll let her have a thousand to blow on the house, but if she knew the real figure—”

Normally Lieutenant Sigrid Harald didn’t let Bernie Peters’s patronizing attitude toward his wife annoy her. If it were left to her, none of them would know anything of each other’s private affairs; but tonight, she’d had just enough bourbon to loosen her usual constraint.

“Won’t she find out when you file your tax returns?” she asked coolly.

“Pam?” The younger man snorted. “Tax forms give her a headache. She signs where I tell her to and says she’ll bake me a cake with a file in it if the IRS ever runs me in.”

As the others laughed and continued to pelt Peters with suggestions for new investments and pleas to borrow his lucky coin when next they bought their own lottery tickets, Lieutenant Harald sipped her fresh drink and considered the empty chair on her right, next to Tillie’s. Captain McKinnon should have been here by now. She glanced at her watch surreptitiously and wondered if she could just make a few pro forma remarks and leave.

Although no longer as awkward in social situations as she’d been even a year ago, the lieutenant still wasn’t comfortable at these off-duty gatherings. She was genuinely glad that Tillie had finally returned to full duty after his near-fatal encounter with a bomb back in October, and she was equally glad to be sending Mick Cluett back to Brooklyn to finish out the forty years he was determined—against all logic—to serve; but as far as she was concerned, a brisk handshake in the office would have been sufficiently demonstrative for both events.

Unfortunately, Elaine Albee’s spontaneous let’s-have-a-party had popped out in Captain McKinnon’s hearing and their big gruff boss had said, “Good idea, Albee. Set it up and we’ll be there, right, Harald?”

“Certainly, sir,” she’d answered neutrally.

For some reason, Captain McKinnon seemed to value Michael Cluett, a sag-bellied old-timer who, in Sigrid Harald’s opinion, should have been encouraged to retire ten years ago. Instead of specialing in some young go-get-’em when Tillie’s accident left them shorthanded, McKinnon had specifically requested Cluett’s services and had even growled at Sigrid when she told him baldly that it would take three Cluetts to replace one Tillie.

“Has he refused a direct order?” snapped McKinnon.

“No, sir.”

“Does he do what you ask him?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I don’t see what you’ve got to gripe about, Harald.”

“Because that’s all he does, Captain—exactly what’s ordered or asked. No initiative, no drive.”

“If you can’t motivate your people, Lieutenant—”