Read Past Imperfect (Sigrid Harald) for Free Online

night, how she’d phoned her daughter early this morning and how she’d felt when someone from the Six-Four rang her doorbell and gave her the bad news; then I asked, “Did he have any problems with anybody lately, Irene? Anybody that might have wanted to get back at him?”
    She cut her eyes at me sharply. “Wasn’t it a mugging?”
    I shrugged. “His pockets were empty. That’s why it took those rookies so long to identify him. But when we searched the bum that heard the shot, he had Mick’s watch and a handful of loose change. That’s all though. We found Mick’s wallet in the bay, near the gun. It still had forty-three dollars in it and all his credit cards.”
    “Not a mugging,” she repeated slowly. Her body had been a soft lump of flesh inside that shapeless dark wool dress. Now there was a hint of muscle that made her seem to sit a little straighter. “Somebody killed Mickey on purpose?”
    “We’re not ready to go that far yet,” I cautioned.
    She didn’t argue, just sat there thinking. I’d have said “cowlike” a minute earlier, now it felt more like those pale blue eyes were reading through a list of names, pause here, slide past whole columns there. She ticked them off on her fingers.
    “The head mechanic over at the Chrysler place. The car’s still under warranty but he don’t want to fix the power steering. Three-ten a month car payments and the thing turns like a tank, Mickey says. They had hard words Saturday. Mickey was going to take it in again tomorrow. He says—said—he’s going to give him one more chance and then he’s getting some of the guys from the beat to hassle him about cars double-parked on the sidewalk in front of the garage.”
    Davidowitz interrupted her for the man’s name.
    “Frank’s all I ever heard,” she said; but she knew the garage’s location. Davidowitz carefully listed it on the top sheet of his legal pad.
    “The Gelson kid next door,” Irene continued. “We think he may be dealing. He flew off the handle when Mickey and my brother asked him how come so many kids were hanging out back there in their garage.”
    “This Gelson kid have a first name?” asked Davidowitz.
    “Edward.” She watched him write it out. “He’s about seventeen, but big and strong from lifting weights. Got a fresh mouth on him, too. All about how he knows his rights and Mickey’s got no right to say who can come in their garage and who can’t.”
    “Anybody else?” I asked.
    She shook her head slowly, paused, then shook her head again.
    I recognized the hesitation and pushed. “You sure, Irene? It might not seem like anything, but you’ve been a cop’s wife long enough to know how people can do crazy things for stupid reasons.”
    “You said a true mouthful there, Jarvis,” she nodded. “It doesn’t really seem like it could be anything, but there’s his cousin Neal. Neal O’Shea. We lent him five hundred dollars when he lost his job back at Thanksgiving so he and Marie could buy Christmas for their kids. He’s working again but we still haven’t seen a penny. Mickey only asked him about it once, but he took it wrong and we’ve heard he’s been bad-mouthing Mickey to his brothers.”
    Davidowitz took down the cousin’s name and address.
    A sum total of three names. After a lifetime of opportunity to make enemies, could any man really go out with only three? On the other hand, assume for a minute that three’s all, is that good, bad, or indifferent?
    Mick Cluett hadn’t been much of a detective. Lazy, sloppy, always behind in his paperwork. Always played catch-up with his notes and teetered on the skinny edge of perjury if he had to testify in court. Resented others’ success. In short, not particularly interested in the job beyond picking up his paycheck and making his forty. We couldn’t figure out why forty was the magic number for him. Certainly didn’t mean a bigger pension. And it wasn’t like he was getting serious respect or saving the free