Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (14 page)

“Relax,” I told him. “They say that every time we get a few flakes.” We took our beers over to a booth and ordered the combination plate: fried oysters, shrimp, and flounder, with french fries and a salad on the side. Hy’s mustache was soon flecked with beer foam and bits of lettuce. That’s the trouble with face hair. At mealtimes you look like a garbage pail that needs emptying.

We’d almost finished eating when a shaggy barrel of a man came through the door, stamping snow from his boots and shaking his thick black hair free of wet flakes. He looked a little familiar and gave us the high sign when one of the women nodded in our direction. A few minutes later, he came over carrying one of those red plastic baskets full of fried shrimp and a mug of draft beer. He pulled a chair up to the end of our booth, sat down and began to eat.

“Carol says you wanna ask me about Tuesday night and Mick Cluett.” He looked at our empty gasses. “’Nother round?”

“No, thanks,” I said. We introduced ourselves. He was Roger Sorrell.

“You knew Mick pretty well?”

“Sure.” Sorrell popped a couple of shrimp in his mouth and talked as he chewed. “He was here three or four nights a week. You coulda knocked me over with one of those plastic drink stirrers when I heard he got shot.”

Hefty swigs of beer alternated with mouthfuls of shrimp and french fries as Sorrell described Mick Cluett’s last visit to the Shamrock. It’d been a slow Tuesday night, bitter cold, so Sheba, the dog, had come into the bar with him as a matter of course.

“She behaves herself. Goes to sleep on his foot and doesn’t wake up till it’s time to go. We used to kid him that she was his seeing eye dog—they’re the only ones you’re supposed to let in a place that serves food—but he never got blind drunk. Two beers, three at the most were all he ever had.”

According to Sorrell, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the evening. Mick Cluett had arrived and departed around his usual times. “Although, come to think about it, he did look at the clock a coupla times and when he got up to leave, he said something about somebody not coming.”

“Could you be more specific? Did he use a name?”

“Sorry,” he said. “As near as I can remember, it was a coupla minutes past ten. He drained his glass and said—Sorrell closed his eyes to concentrate—‘Looks like he’s not coming, so I might as well call it a night.’ I was watching the game, not paying him much attention. He paid his tab, put on his coat and put Sheba back on the leash and that was it.”

“Anybody leave around the same time he did?” I asked, patting my pockets for my antacids. Seafood tastes great going down, but fried stuff always weighs heavy on my stomach.

Sorrell concentrated. “Yeah, come to think of it, one of the nurses from the hospital.”

He turned heavily in the chair. “Hey, Carol. What’s the name of that nurse that comes in once in a while? Red hair starting to go gray, nice laugh. Kitty?”

“Kitty Jozell,” the barmaid answered easily.

“Know where she lives?”

Both shrugged.

“Nearby though,” said Carol. “Probably around on Voorhies ’cause I know we’re on her way home from the hospital.”

Davidowitz hoisted his burly form from the booth and went in search of the men’s room and telephone. “I’ll see if she’s in the book,” he told me.

A few minutes later, he reported back. There was only one K. Jozell in the Brooklyn directory and the address was almost around the corner. He’d punched her number and a woman answered on the fifth ring.

“I could tell by her voice that I woke her up, but she was nice about it,” said Davidowitz. “She doesn’t think she can help us much, but as long as we’re at the Shamrock, she said we might as well come ahead.”

Kitty Jozell’s apartment was in one of those plain buildings erected all over New York in the mid-fifties: a twelve-story brick-and-glass box sufficient for the demands of no-frills housing. No doorman, just rows of push buttons in an outer lobby. Probably unlocked every morning and evening by the super, who probably lived on the ground floor.

Davidowitz pressed the nurse’s number and when her voice came through the speaker, he identified himself and the inner lobby door unlocked with a loud buzz. As we made the elevators, the doors opened to one of the cars. A young Asian woman stepped out, pulling a shopping cart with one hand and a small child with the other. Her eyes went from the damp flakes on our overcoats and hats to the glass doors beyond, where the air was white with swirling snow.

“Oh my God,” she groaned.

The child was too bundled up for me to tell if it was a boy or girl, but a pleased look of anticipation lit up its blackberry eyes and I found myself smiling as the elevator took us up.

“You build snowmen when you were a kid, Hy?”

But Davidowitz was worrying about the long drive home. “I knew I should’ve put the tire chains on before I came in today.”

“Will you quit that?” I told him. “It’s supposed to stop before dark.” Our elevator came to a smooth stop and Kitty Jozell was waiting for us in the open doorway of 8-B.

She was a natural redhead, beginning to go gray and not fighting it.

She wore a dark purple wool robe tightly cinched at her trim waist and her shoulder-length hair had been combed, but her face was bare of makeup and a slight puffiness around her green eyes confirmed that she’d been asleep when Davidowitz phoned.

“Sorry,” she said, masking a yawn, “but I worked an eleven-to-seven last night.”

She let us into an attractive studio apartment. The Murphy bed had been folded up but an edge of flowered coverlet had been caught in the crack; and the coffee table that doubled as a nightstand still held a water glass, a box of tissues, and a half-worked crossword puzzle. A wire hanger hooked over the kitchen doorway held her white uniform, and crumpled white panty hose lay on the kitchen counter. Otherwise, the apartment was neat and cozy, with bright chintzes and one of the healthiest looking polypody ferns I’d ever seen.

“How often do you fertilize it?” I asked her.

“Oh, do you grow ferns?” she said.

“Nothing like that one,” I had to admit.

“You have to mist them twice a week, but only feed them twice a year or you’ll burn the rhizomes.”

Davidowitz cleared his throat. Real detectives aren’t supposed to get off on hanging baskets. He started questioning Ms. Jozell.

She was a special-duty nurse at a nearby hospital over on Ocean Parkway, which explained her erratic hours. And yes, she occasionally stopped in at the Shamrock on her way home.

Night before last? Tuesday?

“I checked my calendar when you called,” she said. “I probably left the hospital around nine-fifteen, nine-twenty.”

“You don’t keep regular hours?”

“I told you: I’m special-duty, not regular staff.” She hesitated and her green eyes seemed to look inward for a minute. “My patient died. I filled out the necessary papers and then left. I’m not much for whisky, but it seems to help me sleep if I drink a stiff scotch after a shift like that.”

Her slim fingers played with the fringed belt of her purple robe, curling and uncurling it. “He was only thirteen.”

We gave her a moment, then I said, “About the Shamrock. Do you remember seeing Michael Cluett when you left?”

“The police officer that was shot? Old guy, fat, with a dog?”

I nodded.

“I didn’t know him by name,” she said, “but he was there almost every time I’ve stopped by for a drink. He left just ahead of me.”

“Alone?”

“With the dog,” she repeated. “I was about a half-block behind him and I turned the corner at Ocean Avenue about the time he was crossing Emmons toward the footbridge. It was pretty cold and I remember wondering if dogs feel it as much as humans and thinking about my patient dying so young and there was this old guy. Not to say that maybe Jeffy wouldn’t have grown up to be an old boozer, too, some day. Next century.”

She gave us another apologetic smile. “Sorry. You don’t want to hear this. Anyhow, just as I was turning my corner, I saw him—Cluett?—stop and look off to his right. I don’t know if the guy called to him or if he was waiting for the dog to do his business or what, but he stopped down there under the light and someone crossed the street and they walked on together. I went on down Ocean and that was the last I saw of him.”

Davidowitz looked up from his notepad. “About what time would you say that was, Ms. Jozell?”

“Ten-ten,” she answered promptly. “There was a two-hour special that came on at nine that Jeffy and I’d planned to watch together.”

Her voice wobbled slightly, but she caught herself. “I checked my watch and thought maybe I’d catch the end of it for him. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”

“Not really,” I said. It struck me that Kitty Jozell was probably a very good nurse to have around if you were young and scared and deathly ill. “The person that met Cluett—was it a man?”

“I think so.” She hesitated. “I don’t know why I have that impression. Everybody wears pants and bulky jackets, but I don’t know . . . something about the walk maybe? Honestly, I wasn’t paying that much attention.”

She couldn’t give us much of a description. Dark clothes, some sort of cap. “I can’t even tell you if he was black or white.”

Height? Weight? Age?

A little shorter than Cluett, she thought, and not as broad. Again, though, it was hard to tell in winter clothes, wasn’t it? As for age, she didn’t think he walked like an old man but that was as far as she could go.

We thanked her for her help and apologized again for bothering her.

I gave her my card and she promised to call if she remembered anything more.

None of us expected that she would.

Back at street level, snow was piling up on the sidewalk, although traffic kept the street itself pretty clear. As we walked back to the car, we passed several guys already out with brooms and shovels to keep their storefronts clear.

Three-ten. Nearly another hour till our shift ended. Still time to check on the neighbor kid who’d smart-mouthed Cluett, but Davidowitz was really antsy, so I said, “Why don’t you head on home, Hy? I can see the kid by myself.”

“You sure?” He looked around for the nearest bus stop.

I brushed snow off the windshield and said, “Sure, go ahead,” but I was talking to myself. Davidowitz was already half a block away and out in the street flagging down a bus.

I put the car in drive and cautiously headed for Manhattan Beach.

CHAPTER 14

If the idea was to inconvenience the bus driver who had ignored Lotty Fischer’s attempt to board last night, Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee had timed it well. After two or three polite pushes on the intercom to 3-C got no response, Lowry planted his thumb on the small black button beside the name
T. Inskip
until a groggy male voice growled obscenities from the speaker.

“Police,” Lowry growled back and continued to push until the man buzzed them through the locked door. The building was a remodeled tenement with no elevator and they climbed the steep steps up to the third-floor landing, where they had another lengthy ring on the doorbell.

There came the sound of several bolts and locks being turned, and a door opened across the hall to reveal an elderly man in slippers and robe. He held in his arms an enormous silky cat the color of orange marmalade, and cat and man stared at the police detectives in disapproval. “Teddy’s gonna be pissed as hell wit’ you two and you wake ’im up.”