Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (27 page)

“Not a throwaway, but something to scare off burglars? I like it,” said Sandy Yow. “A civil service type that got the gun through a friend and didn’t want the hassle of registering it. Then he stuck it in a dresser drawer or something till Cluett got in his way.”

We kicked it back and forth. Rawson didn’t vote, just followed the talk around the table a few minutes, then put on his glasses, opened a new folder, and went over the highlights of the Charlotte Fischer case for the benefit of the four newcomers: how a friend had told the Fischer woman that she’d run a check of the weapon four years ago, how she’d missed her bus and what the trainman saw when he pulled in the station, as well as the possibility that the skell who’d been nesting there had seen it all.

He’d had a memo that T.A.’d spotted the guy a couple of times yesterday, at Grand Central and again at Times Square, but they couldn’t grab him.

Rawson peered over his glasses at me. “I want you to take a personal interest in this bird, Sergeant. Keep track of the sightings. They may help us establish his pattern of movement. If he has one.”

I nodded and he went on to the forensic report on Fischer.

“Forensic didn’t give us much more on Lotty Fischer than they gave Vaughn on Mick Cluett.” He skimmed through the highlights of the report. “They just confirm the motorman’s statement—it happened too fast for her to struggle. One thing though: she was wearing a fuzzy red coat with distinctive wool and polyester fibers that shed easily. Lab says it’s a strong probability that her assailant will have some of those fibers on the clothes he was wearing when he pushed her. On his pants, on his jacket, and certainly on his gloves.”

“Hell,” I said. “If the coat sheds that much, those fibers could be all over the building. We could have them on our own clothes by now.”

“Maybe not,” said Yow. “January wasn’t all that cold. She may not have worn the coat many times this season.” She glanced at Rawson. “Want me to check it out?”

Rawson nodded, then closed the folder and laid his glasses on top of it. “Forensic will probably nail him down for us once we have a suspect in custody, but it won’t help us pick him out of the haystack. The obvious question is how big’s our haystack?”

He called across the room to the P.A.A., a tiny gray-haired woman who worked the screen from her electric wheelchair. “Got anything yet, Mrs. Delbridge?”

“It’s all very rough, but I can get you started.” Her husky voice was deep as a man’s. Surprising in that little body.

She scrolled long lists of names across her screen, punched at the keyboard and suddenly the printer sprang into noisy life. As we waited, Delbridge turned her chair around and rolled over to us.

“I’ve done a global search and pulled the names of everybody assigned here four years ago,” she said. “Then I pulled the names of everybody assigned in the same two precincts with Detective Cluett for the past two years—I made it two years because I figured that if Cluett was killed because of a case, it would likely be something still pending.”

This Delbridge was a self-important little hacker who was going to dot every I and cross every damn T. I caught myself drumming my fingers on the armrest of my chair. Been me at this point, I’d have told her to cut to the chase, but Rawson sat back like we had all day.

“Right now, I’m printing up six copies of every name that duplicated,” Delbridge said.

“How many names?” Yow and Flick spoke at the same time, so I wasn’t the only one getting antsy.

“This is just sworn police personnel. I can’t get the rest of the civilian records till tomorrow.”

“That’s okay, Delly,” said Rawson, giving her one of his God-you’re-wonderful smiles. “How many names for starters?”

“Fifty-one.”

We all perked up at that. For some reason, I’d expected hundreds.

Fifty-one was nothing. We could do a quick and dirty on fifty-one in a matter of days.

The printer went silent, Delbridge wheeled over to it, ripped off the pages, then wheeled back to us and passed them around the table. I’d seen several of the names before but not counting one patrol officer from the Six-Four, McKinnon’s name was the only one I could put a face to. But then I’d never worked Manhattan.

Right away, Rawson told us to cross off for now the names of six people who’d been newly assigned to the precinct after Fischer ran the Browning through her computer. To be safe, Delbridge had bracketed the incident with a six-months space on either side. Made me want to check the motor on her chair, see if she was carrying a spare battery.

Rawson made a big show of thanking her for her careful thoroughness, but said we’d put on the back burner for now any personnel who’d either retired or been reassigned in the two years before their tours overlapped Cluett’s October-to-January stint here. Eleven names.

The sergeant knew that one of the clerks had married one of the patrol officers last Sunday. They weren’t due back from their honeymoon in the Caribbean till sometime that afternoon. Two more gone.

“That gets us down to thirty-one,” said Flick.

“Thirty-two,” Delbridge corrected with prissy disdain.

“Huh? Oh, yeah.” Flick’s radish face got a little pinker.

For the first rough screening, we agreed a name had to meet the two major criteria: a tour of duty in the Twelfth four years ago when Lotty Fischer ran the gun check, plus either a tour between October and January, when Cluett was here, or else assignment in Sheepshead this past year.

We narrowed the list to twenty-six names and Delbridge started pulling personnel files that had physical data.

The trainman had described the person who pushed Lotty Fischer as apparently Caucasian, average build, and approximately six inches taller than his victim. Since she’d been five three, that meant someone around five nine, give or take an inch.

The nurse, Kitty Jozell, had told Davidowitz and me that the person she’d seen join Cluett appeared slightly shorter and not as stout. Not old either, but that was at night from at least a block away and she couldn’t be sure what was physical build and what was bulky winter clothing.

Even so, since Cluett had been five eleven and weighed two-twelve at the time of his death, the two descriptions were roughly similar.

Using the more detailed files Delbridge had procured, we threw out the grossly fat, the short, and the over-six-footers. Rawson knew many of the people currently assigned here by sight and he was able to personally delete three markedly black blacks, one unmistakable Chinese-American, and a property clerk with a noticeable limp.

By midafternoon, the list was down to thirteen names.

Delbridge expected to find at least a dozen civilian employees, and she could probably double it again if she added in casual social workers, various inspectors, and other supervisory types who were in and out several times a year.

But we’d start with those thirteen names. Rawson got on the horn to the desk sergeant downstairs and told him to round up the first few and send them up one at a time.

In the meantime, Sandy Yow had called Fischer’s parents and came up with our first piece of luck: The night she died was the first and only time Lotty Fischer had worn her new red coat to work, so those red fibers stood to help us after all.

CHAPTER 24

Now that Field Internal Affairs had taken over the case, Sigrid knew she should leave it alone; yet as long as any of her own people were involved, she couldn’t resist taking a precautionary look at the possible nature of that involvement.

Once again Tillie’s penchant for detail came in good stead. Sergeant Rawson and his special task force now had physical custody of all files of the cases that Cluett had worked; but while she might not have the reports, thanks to Tillie and his backups for backups, she did have copies of all the index sheets contained in each case folder.

These listed items submitted for evidence, such as photographs, property vouchers, and lab reports. More importantly, they also listed the daily reports turned in by each investigator, so that Sigrid could reconstruct who had worked what and when. She was supposed to be off today, but if she chose to use her own time playing connect-the-dots instead of heading for the pool or working the diagramless crossword puzzle in the Sunday
Times,
it was no one else’s business, she told herself, knowing she was rationalizing, knowing I.A.D. would not agree if Sergeant Rawson found out and chose to make an issue of it.

Nevertheless, she worked steadily through the sheets, pausing here and there as certain memories surfaced between the numbered lines of jargon and abbreviations.

Here was that case back in October where a young dancer had been impaled on an iron fence during a well-attended performance. Cluett had worked that one, along with Eberstadt and Peters, although Albee and Lowry had carried most of the load there. Cluett did manage to nail down one damning bit of evidence and he’d been in at the kill, but it was nothing the rawest rookie couldn’t have handled.

The accused was coming up for trial at the end of the month. She knew Cluett had been subpoenaed to testify about that one minor point because Albee had grumbled that he’d kept her on the phone almost an hour trying to refresh his memory of the case from his sketchy notes.

What a poor excuse for a detective the man had been! Sloppy paperwork, bad work habits, always looking to shave a half hour off his shift. A potentially bad influence on the others. Look how his laziness had caused Dinah Urbanska to screw up.

Sigrid knew that everyone thought she’d been too rough on the younger woman, that Cluett should have been given that command discipline, not Urbanska. It was clearly too late for a c.d. to help Cluett straighten up, but Sigrid had hoped that rapping Urbanska’s knuckles so sharply at the beginning of her career as a detective might keep her on the straight and narrow, might keep her from taking an older officer’s word that it was okay to risk a case just to do someone a minor favor, might teach her that every favor carried a price tag.

It must have seemed like such a little white lie to Urbanska. Cluett had developed indigestion that evening and he’d left her to do the paperwork connected with their shift so he could cut out early. As a result, Urbanska had created an official record to which she’d signed her name that she was the one who’d witnessed the suspect doing something Cluett had told her he’d seen, something really quite minor at the time.

Who could know that the case would eventually hinge on that small point?

But during discovery, when a defense lawyer asks for and is given access to all the written records, that small discrepancy had been noticed and what should have been a watertight case suddenly sprang a leak.

At least Urbanska had sensibly owned up to the lie before it went to trial. Everyone knew at least one horror story where some officer in a similar situation had perjured himself and wound up bounced from the force and serving a suspended sentence.

The perp had walked, of course.

As she read through the index lists, Sigrid couldn’t help wondering if Cluett had left them any other little time bombs. That murder at the Erich Breul House, for instance. He’d been the one to search the victim’s apartment and had reported finding nothing pertinent; but even though she was confident they’d charged the right person for the murder, she’d occasionally felt there was a piece missing from that particular puzzle.

Matt Eberstadt and Bernie Peters had been in on the Breul House case; and Eberstadt, Peters, and Cluett had also worked the homicide/attempted suicide where a midlevel crack dealer had shot his lover before turning the gun on himself. Unfortunately, he’d dipped into his own stash first, and even though he tried three times, none of his bullets had hit a vital organ.

There’d been blood all over that apartment, on the confetti of money that had littered the floor, on the phone with which he’d called for help, soaked into the bed where they’d found him when his rescuers smashed in the door. The index listed property vouchers for all those small bills: 1,123 ones, 702 fives, 836 tens, 872 twenties, 449 fifties, 53 hundreds.