Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) (6 page)

That I knew. Lazy and incompetent as Cluett was, the most I’d ever heard of him taking was an occasional pastrami sandwich to look the other way on some minor infractions. Pads exist. No point pretending they don’t. The most you can do is keep breaking them up before they get too organized and entrenched. Opportunity’s always knocking, but I think Cluett stayed straight because crooked was harder; too damn complicated to remember who knew what. Honesty probably wasn’t Cluett’s best policy, just the easiest.

Her fingers had gone back to picking at the afghan.

“You probably know better than me, Jarvis—you were his boss—but it seems to me that maybe a man’s better off doing what he likes, what he’s good at, than trying to get what he thinks he ought to want.”

“The Peter Principle.” Sometimes Davidowitz seemed to think out loud to himself.

We both looked at him.

“Some guy named Peter,” he explained. “He said people always get promoted past the level of their competence.”

He heard what he’d said and tried to backpedal. “Not that Mick was incompetent. I mean, that is,
Peter
meant that if a person’s doing a good job, he’ll usually get promoted on up the ladder till he lands in a job where he’s no good. I mean where he’s
not as
good. Mick was a
great
patrol cop, so he gets promoted and . . .”

His explanation of the Peter Principle petered out pretty lamely and Irene Cluett couldn’t seem to decide whether to take Hy the right way or get mad about it on her late husband’s behalf.

“He
was
a good patrol cop,” she said huffily. “And if he was such a bad detective, why’d Captain McKinnon borrow him from you?”

She sure as hell had a point there. Why
did
McKinnon ask for Cluett by name? I hadn’t paid all that much attention at the time, just been mildly tickled that Manhattan had pulled his name out of the hat. I was sure they’d mistaken him for some other, sharper detective. Now I remembered Cluett’s face when I told him he was being specialed across the East River.

“Good old Mac!” he’d said, sucking in his gut and trying to look like a real cop for a change. “I broke him in, you know. Knew from the very beginning he was going to do okay.”

“Yeah?” I’d asked as I initialed the temporary transfer.

“Now he’s a big-time captain and he wants me, Mickey Cluett.”

“How’d it go over there?” I asked Irene. As his boss I should know without asking, but I honestly couldn’t remember. Oh, sure, I remembered the first day he was back, asking him how he’d liked Manhattan duty. He’d muttered something about things being the same all over, which it mostly is.

I heard him shoot the breeze with a couple of the guys about a homicide/suicide mixed up with drugs. Gory, but getting commonplace even down to the pile of blood-drenched money they’d confiscated. “A wad of hundreds big enough to bloat a goat,” he’d bragged. And he’d worked that case where some dancer got herself killed on stage in front of an audience. That was a hair more interesting, but I’d still let it go in one ear and out the other.

Evidently, Irene had, too.

“He thought it was going to be something special,” she said, “but it wound up just being a longer commute and more court hassle. He was supposed to go back over and testify on a couple of things and you know how he hated that.
And
it wasn’t really working for Mac either. He had to take orders from a woman—a chit of a lieutenant who wasn’t even born when Mickey first joined the force.”

Hy Davidowitz half-smiled. “Yeah, I heard him say he once bounced her on his knee when she was a baby.”

There was nothing nostalgic in Irene’s tone. Instead, I caught an echo of Cluett’s sour resentment.

“I’m a woman myself,” she said, “and I’m for equal pay and all that, but I just don’t think it’s right for any police officer to have to take orders from a woman. In fact, I don’t think women even belong on the force. Not on the street anyhow. You put a woman in the same patrol car with one of these young buckos and send them out on night duty—”

She shook her head at so much opportunity for sin and sex but before she could get going on what sounded like an old sore point, her daughter appeared at the door again.

“Sorry to interrupt, Ma, but Father Ambrose is here and he needs to talk to you about Pop’s mass.”

It was as good a time to leave as any. I guessed we’d probably got all we were going to get from Irene that night.

Back at the car, Hy radioed in. Everything was quiet at the station, so I let him drop me at the nearest subway stop. I’d promised Terry I’d pick up some shrimp salad for supper. I’d also promised to get home on time.

Oh well. One out of two’s not too bad for a cop.

CHAPTER 6

Midtown was clogged with the beginning of rush hour traffic. As Lieutenant Sigrid Harald drew near Lou’s Foto Finish, a van parked illegally at the top of a bus stop flashed its left rear blinker and pulled out in front of her. She automatically slid her car into the space he’d vacated.

Just as automatically, she flipped down the sun visor to display the emblem that identified this as a police officer’s car even though she wasn’t on duty. Taking advantage of her position to bend the law on minor things such as double-parking or parking at fire hydrants always gave Sigrid Harald a twinge of guilt. Obscurely, she’d promised herself that if she ever stopped feeling guilty, she’d stop doing it. Not that twinges of guilt made it alright, of course, but surely they proved that she didn’t feel
entitled
to break the law.

As always when she found herself looping back and forth between guilt and morality, a Pavlovian reaction made her remember the moral struggles of an old school friend.

Kathie deNobriga had been a committed activist who marched and fasted and boycotted specific products on behalf of downtrodden farm laborers and sweatshop workers the whole country over, but grapes were her Achilles heel. Others might be addicted to peanut butter or chocolates; Kathie kept a bowl of grapes in her room and nibbled on whatever was in season from September to June. Yet, when Chavez called for a boycott on behalf of California grapeworkers, she valiantly dumped the grapes and refilled her bowl with apples and bananas.

Sometime later, Sigrid had spotted a little pile of twigs and seeds among the oranges on Kathie’s nightstand. “I thought you gave up grapes for the duration.”

Sheepishly, Kathie had opened the lower drawer on her nightstand and brought out a bag of luscious purple bunches. “I’ve gone back to eating them, only now I sneak and that makes me feel really guilty, so I’m not enjoying them as much and that makes up for it don’t you think?”

Remembering that bit of existential sophism, Sigrid left the visor down, locked the car and hurried past the people waiting in frozen resignation at the bus stop.

A bell above the door tinkled as she entered the lab. Lou Bensinger lifted his head from the proof sheet he was examining and smiled at her through the large magnifying glass.

“Ah, New York’s finest’s finest! Come to sell me tickets to the Policeman’s Ball, my darling?”

Lou Bensinger had teased her since she was twelve and was one of the few people she felt at ease bantering with.

“Only five hundred a pair, too, Lou. If I promise to dance every horah with you, how many tickets will you buy?”

Trudy, his wife of forty years, came in from a back room. “Another Harald female come to flirt with my husband yet?” She circled the counter and gave Sigrid a big hug. “Too long since I’ve seen you!”

She was even shorter than Lou, but she clasped the younger woman by both arms and looked up at her critically. “Ho, now, what’s this?”

At once Sigrid realized that she hadn’t been in the lab since she’d had her long dark hair cut short. She gave a self-conscious shrug, but Trudy Bensinger was delighted.

“Turn! Turn!” she commanded and Sigrid obediently did a three-sixty. “I like! So who’s the lucky man?”

“Why must a man be involved when a woman cuts her hair?” Sigrid countered. “I merely thought it was time for a change.”

“It is, it is! And I know just the change you need. My cousin Selma’s boy. The divorce, it wasn’t his fault. A doll he is. A lawyer, too. I’ll give him your number, okay?”

Remembering some of those cousins’ sons (not to mention nephews, godsons, and the younger brothers of various in-laws) that Trudy had tried to foist off on her over the years, Sigrid hastily said, “No, please, Trudy. Actually, I
am
seeing someone right now.”

“And when are we meeting this young man?”

“Oh, it’s nothing like that.”

“Then you can talk to Selma’s boy.”

“I’d better tell Mother I’m here,” said Sigrid, retreating down the rear hall.

“Coward!” Lou called after her.

Sigrid found her mother in the lab’s common workroom. Lou’s Foto was a holdout against unnecessary high-tech gadgetry, and Anne was using a manual paper cutter on her last batch of photographs.

“Siga?” She frowned and turned to check the clock on the wall behind her. “You early or am I late?”

“Some of each. I was able to get away on time for a change.”

She watched as Anne Harald briskly aligned the edge of a picture then pulled down cleanly on the blade. Her mother’s expertise often surprised strangers. Someone this decorative was not usually expected to be competent as well. And even in jeans and sneakers and a shaggy old gray sweater, with most of her lipstick eaten off and chemical stains on her fingers, Anne Harald remained a thoroughly decorative woman.

She examined with a critical eye the picture she’d finished blocking then handed it and another over to Sigrid. “You said you wanted copies. Happy birthday.”

Sigrid took the top one and looked down into her own eyes. Not really, of course. Her eyes were a slate gray that could look silver under certain conditions but Leif Harald’s had been a clear light blue. This black-and-white photo turned his blue eyes silver, though. Spaced as widely as hers, too, and shaped the same. Over the years, so many family friends and relatives had pulled her features apart one by one in an attempt to explain how someone so physically plain and awkward could have sprung from two such attractive parents that Sigrid knew exactly which attribute she’d inherited from each.

From Leif had come the eyes, thin nose, high cheekbones, silky straight hair, and her height, five ten in her stocking feet. From Anne came the changeable gray of her eyes, the darkness of her hair and a jutting chin. Neither side of the family claimed the mouth that was too wide, the neck that was too long, nor the crippling self-consciousness that had kept her tongue-tied with shyness even after she grew up.

The first picture was a three-quarters view of her father, dressed for patrol in what would have been winter blues, the jacket unbuttoned and half open. He had his hand in one pocket, his hat and nightstick in the other, and she could see the big handle of his holstered service revolver as he leaned against a door frame and smiled into Anne’s camera—a confident young Viking, off to tame urban dragons, captured on film by his young wife. He couldn’t have been much more than twenty-six or twenty-eight himself.

The next picture must have been snapped a moment or two later.

The jacket was buttoned now, but she had crawled into the picture, a solemn, wide-eyed infant, who looked up into his laughing, indulgent face and reached for his hat with the shiny badge.

“You’re sure five-by-seven is what you want?” asked Anne. “No problem to make them eight-by-tens.”

“No, these are perfect,” said Sigrid. “Thanks. But I thought you said you didn’t have negatives.”

“I didn’t,” she said shortly. “I had to copy the positives and make new negatives. That’s why they’re not as crisp as they should be.”