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

world from crime. Oh, he’d do what you asked, but damn if you didn’t always have to ask. He was already in place when I transferred in and I was stuck with him, part of the job. Like the lousy coffee and the never-ending paperwork. Not so bad that you’d take the trouble to get rid of it once and for all—and even if I’d manipulated his clearance rates, getting rid of Cluett would have been a hell of a lot of trouble given all the job security mechanisms in place—no, he was just one more of those ongoing irritations life sends you to keep you from being too pleased with your lot.
    Incurable, endurable, Granny used to say.
    “Nobody else, then?” I asked Irene. “No trouble with work or anything?”
    She looked blank and shook her head. “He never really talked about the job. Oh, maybe if it was something on the news and Barbara or one of the boys asked him about it, he’d say what he’d seen or heard. He should’ve retired after thirty, but he was so set on making forty. He went on the job when he was twenty-one and he said he was going to stay till he was sixty-one. Just like his uncle Michael, God rest him. It wasn’t easy for him. Years ago, he used to talk more and, of course, we were proud of him when he finally made detective, but seems like it didn’t mean as much to him. He said—”
    Irene put her hand to her mouth, like a kid who’s spoken out of turn and spilled a family secret.
    “He said what?” I prodded.
    She gave a what-the-hell? shrug. “He said that the only reason he made detective was because Chief Buckthorn wanted to stick it to Willie McMahon.”
    So he’d known about that, had he? I felt a sickly wave of shame wash over me even though that little bit of departmental politics was over and done with before I came on the job. Willie McMahon was my predecessor and he and the then chief—also gone before my time—had gone head-to-head in monumental clashes, if all the stories were true. I hadn’t been in Willie McMahon’s old office three days before I heard how Buckthorn had promoted Mick Cluett onto the detective squad just to spite McMahon. Whenever I got particularly pissed with Cluett, I had to remember that it really wasn’t his fault for being where he was bound to screw up.
    “The best time for Mickey was back when he was still riding patrol over in New York. He liked it when they’d give him a rookie to break in. But after a few years, when some of his rookies were getting promotions and making detective, he seemed to think he ought to try for detective, too. And with four kids, we could always use the money. He was never on the pad, Jarvis.”
    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