Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) Read Online Free PDF

Ash Wednesday. The whole family had been to mass and received the mark.
    Took me a minute to pick out Irene Cluett. She sat on the gold velour couch supported by a pair of horsey-faced women. One of them wore the self-important look of A Member of the Family. The other had on one of those chopped-off black things that passes these days for a nun’s veil. Irene Cluett sat between them with a glazed expression on her homely flat face. “Bearing up,” Granny would call it.
    Weird how much a husband and wife can start to look alike after years of marriage. She looked so much like Cluett she could have been his twin sister: thirty pounds overweight, slack gray hair cut short and parted on the same side, only hers was held in place by a plain blue plastic barrette. Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed and when she recognized us, her lower lip started quivering.
    I was Cluett’s boss, but I’d only met his wife at official social functions, occasional summer picnics in Prospect Park or at widely spaced PAL events. She’d been civil every time, no half-hidden hostility, but none of that buttering-up that some of the younger wives use when they think it’ll help their husbands’ careers.
    Maybe she’d always known Cluett’s career was past help.
    Tonight was partly an official expression of departmental sympathy and partly because Mrs. Cluett had to be questioned as a necessary part of our investigation. Two birds, one stone. I’d expected nothing more than formal politeness, and it surprised the hell out of me when she teared up at the sight of my face. She held out both hands to mine and put her broad cheek up for me to kiss it.
    “Oh, Jarvis!” she sobbed and clutched my hands in hers like we were old friends. “Are you handling his case personally? You’ll find who shot my poor Mickey down in cold blood, won’t you?”
    “You know we will, Mrs.—er, Irene,” I assured her awkwardly. To cover, I pulled Hy over. “You’ve met Detective Davidowitz, haven’t you?”
    Davidowitz took her limp hand. “Sorry for your troubles, ma’am.” (He’s picked up that useful, all-purpose condolence from the Irish.) “Bless you both,” she said brokenly. “This is my cousin, Sister Bernadette, and my brother’s wife, Gina Callahan.”
    The two women nodded and murmured, then the elderly nun began to hoist herself from the gold velour cushions. “Take my place, Sergeant Vaughn,” she offered.
    “No, no, you stay right here,” said Irene Cluett and called to her daughter, “Barbara, bring your father’s friends a chair.”
    People sprang for some of the folding chairs the undertaker had supplied, but I waved them aside. “Please don’t bother,” I said. “I’m sorry, Mrs.—um, Irene, but is there someplace we can talk alone?”
     
    The Cluett den had probably been the Cluett daughter’s bedroom.
    There was something girly about the rosebud wallpaper and even though the daybed was heaped with green cushions on a matching slipcover, you could tell it’d started life as a single bed.
    Four teenage kids, three boys and a girl, were sprawled before an expensive color television, but they jumped to their feet and edged past as their grandmother led us into the room.
    In front of the television were two white vinyl recliners separated by a lamp table that held the remote control, a box of Kleenex, and the only reading material I’d yet noticed in the whole house: a current TV Guide and a couple of National Enquirers. The wall above the television was plastered with family pictures: from turn-of-the-century photographs of stiff-faced old-timers to fat little Cluett grandbabies sitting on the laps of Easter Bunnies, Santa Clauses, and even a Saint Patrick’s Day leprechaun.
    The rose-sprigged wallpaper behind the two recliners was bare except for a brightly colored picture of the Sacred Heart. A pale-skinned, blond Christ, I noted, pissed at myself for noting. Jesus as Anglo-Saxon white bread instead of Semite bagel