Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (31 page)

His sense of urgency suddenly diffused by what he read in her eyes, Jarvis Vaughn sat back with legs outstretched, ankles crossed, hands clasped behind his head.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” he said, “only we called ’em stickers.”

Now that there was all the time in the world, now that he knew she would be telling him, he spoke of his granny’s truck farm down on the Jersey coast, of her sweet-smelling flowers and sweet-tasting corn and luscious vine-ripened tomatoes and the treachery of New Jersey stickers.

Sigrid described the summer she was eight and then she took a deep breath as she had all those years ago. This was going to hurt worse than pulling sandspurs from her bare foot. A hell of a lot worse. But she had done it without flinching back then and she would do it now.

In a stoic’s monotone, she told him what she’d suspected after reading his Brooklyn interviews and his summation of Cluett’s last notes. She also told him about the wild-goose chase on which she’d sent Cameron Stewart.

“She knows someone in the main division down at the World Trade Center and he ran the name through all their computer banks without any luck, but we’ll have to wait till tomorrow to query IRS.”

The snitch was one of the regulars. A coward, but a braggart, too.

Especially when it was as safe as this. Besides, what could a goddamned bird imitator do to him?

He fed a quarter into the phone and a few minutes later, he was saying, “Word’s on the street that you guys wanna talk to Jerry the Canary. I know where he’s roosting tonight. You interested? I ain’t saying over the phone. I gotta have some money tonight. Meet me at the usual place.”

CHAPTER 28

Sigrid and Jarvis Vaughn walked back through the snow together to the precinct house. Neither detective made friends easily, but sharing a pastrami sandwich and childhood memories seemed to have bridged the usual reserve.

Irrational, thought Sigrid, yet she did feel she could trust Vaughn in a way she couldn’t trust Sergeant Rawson. As they parted at the elevator, he promised not to say anything to Rawson and she said she’d let him know as soon as she learned anything the next day.

The squad room was empty. Eberstadt and Peters had finished their shift before five o’clock, and Hentz and Urbanska must be out questioning witnesses or running down leads. She pulled off her heavy coat and laid it over the back of a nearby chair.

The door to her office was cracked and although she’d switched everything off when she left to meet Oersted, the green glass shade of her brass desk lamp cast a pool of light across her papers. She pushed open the door and saw Captain McKinnon standing in the shadows by the window.

Oersted’s slimy insinuations had been temporarily displaced by her session with Vaughn; but at the sight of McKinnon, they suddenly flooded back into her mind in all their ugliness.

She started to flip on the fluorescent light overhead, then let her hand drop. “Captain?”

He turned and she saw that he held the silver-framed picture of Leif Harald in his blue winter uniform. At her voice, McKinnon glanced again at the youthful face of his dead partner, then put the picture back where he’d gotten it and moved away so that she could take her usual place behind the desk.

“Tom Oersted called me yesterday,” he said, sitting heavily in the other chair. The lamplight softened his rugged features, but his words came harshly.

“I know.” Dreading this emotional confrontation, yet trying not to let herself be paralyzed by it, Sigrid dipped into the little pottery bowl beside the picture and began to manipulate the linked circles of the first puzzle ring her fingers touched. “He said you warned him not to tell me anything he didn’t know for a fact.”

When McKinnon didn’t speak, she lifted her eyes from the ring to his face. “Did you set my father up to be killed?”

His face was impassive. “Is that what Oersted said?”

“He said those were the rumors at the time.”

“They were lies,” McKinnon said flatly.

“Was it a lie that he slept with other women?”

McKinnon shifted in the chair. “Lieutenant—”

“Was it?” she asked coldly.

“No.”

“Or that you and Mother—”

The puzzle ring was clenched so tightly in her hand that the delicate circles were bent into twisted ovals and left their imprint on her palm. She heard McKinnon let out a deep breath and realized that he was as tense as she. She also realized that he was not denying it.

“Did Oersted make it sound shabby and sordid?”

Sigrid shrugged. “You mean it wasn’t? She was your partner’s wife and you went after her. Then you set my father up so you could have her, only Mother didn’t fall into your arms afterwards.”

“That’s not—”

“She might make love with her husband’s partner,” Sigrid interrupted bitterly, “but she wouldn’t marry his murderer.”

“Damn it, that’s not the way it was!” His fist slammed down so heavily on her desk that Leif Harald’s picture fell forward onto her metal stapler and the glass shattered.

Appalled, McKinnon grabbed for it; and as he tried to set it upright, one of the shards of glass sliced the meaty pad of his right thumb. Instantly, bright red blood dripped onto the picture.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “God, I’m sorry.”

Rattled, Sigrid dropped the silver rings and pushed a box of tissues toward him. “Put pressure on it,” she ordered and rummaged in her desk for the first-aid kit she kept there. She found a small bottle of alcohol as well and, ignoring McKinnon’s protests, sloshed it over his thumb, then drew the cut edges together with a wide Band-aid. A second and third Band-aid secured the first.

“I don’t think it’ll need stitches,” she said. “Fingers always bleed a lot.”

They looked down at the picture and saw that his crimson blood had seeped into the cracked glass and stained Leif Harald’s face and chest. The glass could be replaced but the photograph was ruined; and even though Anne now had a negative, Sigrid knew she would never ask her mother to make another copy.

McKinnon gave a weary sigh and sat back down. For the first time, he looked his full age.

“We should have talked months ago, but I was afraid you’d put in for a transfer if you knew; and frankly I wanted you here. After all these years, I thought if we ran into each other casually, Anne and me, maybe we could put things back together, be friends again if nothing else.”

As he spoke Sigrid began to remove the bits of broken glass from her desktop to her wastebasket, piece by individual piece.

“It finally happened last October,” said McKinnon. “In your hospital room. Only she wouldn’t talk to me. That’s why I specialed in poor old Mickey Cluett. Stupid thing to do, but I knew he could be a motor mouth at times and I thought if he tumbled to who you were and started telling you some of the old tales, the good ones—”

He stood up and began to pace back and forth in the confined space. “When your dad and I got out of the Academy, Mickey Cluett had charge of the rookies. He broke us in on patrol, showed us the ropes, and he was around after we got our gold shields, too. He liked Leif and he was crazy about Anne and her Southern accent. He was there the night they met. She ever tell you about it?”

“Dad thought she and another guy were robbing someone’s car at one o’clock in the morning and he threatened to arrest them,” said Sigrid.

“Yeah. Somebody from her photography class. They’d gotten back late from a trip up the Hudson and when the guy went to get her cameras out of the trunk, he accidentally closed the lid on his keys. For some reason, Anne thought she could pop the lock. By the time Mickey and Leif rolled up, all they’d done was dent the lid good; but Leif said they looked guilty as hell in the headlights.”

An overlooked shard of glass twinkled on the desk top as she watched him pace, and she delicately transferred it to the wastebasket.

“He was always such a talker, Mickey. I was sure he’d tell you—”

“He tried,” Sigrid said. “I never let him.”

She tilted her head back and forth, but no more glass could be seen. “What would he have told me about Dad’s death?”

“Leif and I’d been working the murder of a showgirl with mob connections. Mary-Ell Wright. At first we thought it had something to do with kickbacks the club owner was paying to one of the bosses and Mary-Ell got in the middle. Then we realized it was sexual. Pure and simple jealousy. One of the small-time mugs. Gianni Gold. Little short guy, a bagman for Benny DelVecchio. We knew him. Leif did, anyhow. He ran, we put out the word on the street, and someone fingered him. The Ambassador Hotel, one of those flop shops off Lexington these days and pretty ratty even back then.”

He looked down at the bandage on his thumb. The gauze pad showed a blur of red, but the bleeding seemed to have stopped. There was a straight-back wooden chair next to the bookcase. McKinnon pulled it out and straddled the seat, resting his arms on the back.

“Mickey was still riding patrol and he drove us over. I wanted more backup, but Leif just laughed at me and said Gianni Gold was a little mouse who’d come squeaking out of his hole as soon as he knew we were there. Mickey was all the backup we needed, he said.

“We left him watching the front and went in. The desk clerk gave us the room number but he must have called up, because as soon as Leif banged on the door and said, ‘Police,’ Gianni put three slugs through it. If we hadn’t been standing off to the side, we’d have bought it right then and there. For some reason, Leif thought that was funny as hell. He started laughing and yelling, ‘Hey, come on, Gianni! It’s me, Harald.’ We could hear the guy whimpering, like a little kid, and Leif kicked the door open and told Gianni to come on out.

“He was still whimpering and whining, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ and we saw him come out from behind the dresser with the gun in his hand almost dragging on the floor. He wasn’t much taller than the dresser and I guess it struck Leif funny ’cause he put his gun away. He just couldn’t take the poor little schnook seriously.

“There was Gianni looking like a kid on his way to a licking and there stood Leif, grinning, with his hand out for the gun, and he said, ‘What the hell you doing playing with guns, Gianni?’ And Gianni seemed to go off his nut. Maybe it was because Leif was so tall and good-looking, like the guys Mary-Ell always went for; or maybe it was because Leif didn’t give him any respect at all. Who knows? Anyhow, Gianni got red in the face and said, ‘Don’t laugh at me! Nobody’s ever gonna laugh at me again!’ and then he jerked the gun up and shot twice more just as Mickey came barreling down the hall. I got off two shots, too, but it was too late to save Leif.”

For a moment, McKinnon sat with his shoulders slumped, his face buried on his arms.

“You froze?” Sigrid asked.

McKinnon straightened. “I didn’t freeze. Leif was in the line and it took me too long to get clear.”

“No subconscious wish fulfillment?”

“I didn’t want him dead,” he said evenly. “It wasn’t the dark ages. Even well-bred Southern women got divorced then.”

“Except that Mother still loved him.”

“Yeah.” His voice rasped with remembered grief. “God help us, we both did.”

For some time after McKinnon stood up and walked out of her office, Sigrid sat looking at her father’s picture, ruined by McKinnon’s blood.

She thought about Anne, all those years of moving every few months. Had she been running away from guilt or was it her way of dealing with the loss of love?

Which love?

Sigrid reached for the phone, then jumped as it went off beneath her hand.