Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Hampton Avenue that Cluett and his wife had shared with her brother and his family. Two blue-and-whites were double-parked in front.
    “Days are getting longer,” Davidowitz said. His dark droopy mustache gives his round face a vague resemblance to Fu Manchu. At thirty-seven he’s built like one of those blue steel mailboxes you find on every other street corner and he’s been just as solid whenever I’ve needed him.
    “Soon be spring again,” I agreed. The years keep getting shorter the older I get.
    Somebody’d hung a big showy spray of white chrysanthemums and stiff white satin ribbons beside the front door just in case the neighbors couldn’t guess by all the cars and steady stream of people in and out that there’d been a death in the house.
    As we approached the steps, a couple of uniforms came through the doorway. Dark blue caps were pulled low against the frigid February twilight. One slim, a rookie about twenty-five; the other a middle-aged harness bull grown bulky on the job.
    “Hello, Sarge,” they said. “Davidowitz.”
    I couldn’t remember the older officer’s name but knew he was from an adjacent precinct. We stopped to talk a minute before ringing the bell.
    “How’re they doing in there?” Hy Davidowitz asked him.
    “’Bout like you’d expect,” he answered. His colleague zipped his black leather jacket and pulled the collar up around his ears. “His children are doing okay, but Irene keeps breaking up. Married forty-two years—” He shook his head. “It blows a big hole in her life.”
    “Any leads yet?” asked the younger officer. “We heard you found the gun.”
    “The lab says it looks like he bought it with a .380 JHP and we got a .380 auto out of the bay,” I answered. We did a shuffly version of the Texas two-step and moved past each other so that Davidowitz and I stood at the half-open door while the other two paused on the walk. “The confirm’ll probably be there by the time we get back to the shop and we’ve already put it on the wire.”
    In the chilly night air, those chrysanthemums by the door smelled like every funeral I’ve ever been to. A sort of crisp vegetable odor like the celery and parsley at Kwan Te’s grocery around the corner from my house. Not unpleasant exactly, but nothing to do with the smell of real flowers and certainly nothing to soothe or comfort a person. Not like the flowers around my granny’s front porch when my sister and I were kids and our parents sent us to spend the summer down on her New Jersey truck farm. Her hard black hands’d had green fingertips and she’d grown lavender and stock, washtubs full of petunias, masses of sweet peas, lilacs and spicy carnations in the spring, followed by roses that perfumed the hot summer days and night-blooming nicotiana.
    Quick takes of high school botany flicked through my head, along with muddled thoughts of ozone layers, pesticides, and genetic engineering. What’s been done to flowers that they never smell sweet anymore?
    Inside the house was what I expected: living room and dining room jammed with people, one or two uniforms, but mostly civilians.
    And mostly women. Birth and death, it’s always mostly women. Cluett’s daughter and two daughters-in-law went back and forth almost like hostesses at a reception. While we were there, they kept a steady stream of strong hot tea coming, and every few minutes they came around to check that everybody had all the cream and sugar and paper napkins they needed. Keeping busy.
    I recognized Cluett’s sons with a couple of men who were later introduced as his brothers. The men seemed stiff and half-embarrassed. They moved awkwardly between the crowded living room and kitchen and talked in low tones with neighbors who brought sympathy and plates of food.
    Almost everyone had dirty smudges on their foreheads and at first I wondered if this was some sort of white-man’s funeral ritual I’d never heard of before. Eventually it hit me that today was