The Right Jack

by Margaret Maron

  The best space-age microsurgical procedures had failed and the only alternative left to them was but ac ouple of levels up from the sort of butchery.practiced in the Stone Age.

  "No point in letting it go gangrenous," the surgeon told his staff grimly. "Might as well get it over with."

  13

  BY four-thirty, Elaine Albee's yellow marks on the pairings lists indicated that they had seen and spoken with everyone in the Bontemps Room who had been anywhere near Table 5 the night before. They had even spoken to several from the front tables who hadn't come close but who wanted to go on record as being opposed to terrorist tactics and personally outraged that such things could happen here. The detectives had listened to a dozen different theories of how the boards were switched and when and why, but no one said, 'Yes, I saw it happen.'

  Someone would have to chase down the tournament contestants who hadn't returned today, listen to more theories, and hope that one of the missing had witnessed something tangible. In the meantime. Lieutenant Harald was ready to call it a day.

  "Unless something unexpected turnsu p, I'll see you nine o'clock in my office Monday morning," she told Lowry and Albee. "We'll compare notes with Peters and Eberstadt. Will you have anything from your people?" she asked Lieutenant Knight.

  "Probably," he answered. "What about Molly Baldwin? Want me to contact her?"

  "No, I'd like to see her face myself when we tell her we know she lied."

  From across the ornate room, Jill Gill waved good-bye to Sigrid as they left the cribbage players in the midst of the afternoon's final round before the supper break. They walked down the Maintenon's wide graceful staircase. Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee offered lifts back downtown. When Sigrid shook her head and Alan Knight drawled a vague refusal, the detectives headed across the lobby for the elevator to the hotel's basement garage.

  Outside, the slashing rain made the hour feel later than it really was. Sigrid sheltered under the Maintenon's canopy to get her bearings, unsure of the nearest subway entrance.

  "Buy you a drink. Lieutenant?" asked Alan Knight.

  Across the street a comfortable looking tavern promised a warm dry interior with wide oak tables and man-sized drinks. The offer was tempting.

  "A nice tall Dickie-and-Coke would be welcome right now," she told him regretfully, "but I can't mix alcohol with the stuff I'm taking for my arm."

  "A raincheck then," he said with one of his appealing lopsided smiles. "I'm sure there must be a long story to explain why a Yankee cop drinks bourbon and Co'-Cola."

  "I have a Southern grandmother, that's all. It's in the genes. See you Monday, Lieutenant Knight."

  He touched the brim of his white cap in a half salute and darted across the street alone, dodging curbside puddles.

  By the time Sigrid splashed the short distance to Grand Central Station, her blue scarf was sliding down, so she tugged it off and crammed it into the pocket of her jacket, letting her hair hang loose. A seat near the rear wall of the crosstown shuttle kept her arma way from traffic and the downtown train wasn't very crowded either, so she made it to her stop on lower West Side without getting jostled. There, she climbed the damp and dirty metal steps up to street level to find the rain had slackened to a misty drizzle.

  No sign of the sun though. If anything, the leaden skies looked as if they were only catching their second wind and would soon pour down even more rain. She knew she ought to call Roman, ask if there were groceries she should pick up on her way for supper tonight or tomorrow, but the apartment-she still thought of it as the new apartment-was several blocks from the subway, tucked among the commercial buildings near the dilapidated piers that lined the Hudson. She was afraid that rain would arrive before she did if she lingered along the way.

  As it was, she had just unlocked the tall wooden street gate when the heavens opened and a new flood descended. She splashed across the flagstones to the sheltered doorway.

  Sigrid was no gardener, but Roman

  Tramegra fancied himself a Renaissance man on a modest scale and would enthusiastically turn his hand to any task. ('Renaissance man indeed!' sniffed Grandmother Lattimore when she swept into town for one of her semiannual trips north. 'More what we always called a jackleg, if you ask me, which you won't, I suppose.') At any rate, Roman had transformed the tiny courtyard into a formal herb garden. At least it started out formal. By October the scented geraniums had grown tall and leggy, the borage and bee balm flopped, and the purple basil and coleuses Roman had stuck in for color were tattered and going to seed.

  Not that Sigrid cared. Nature in any form seldom interested her except as it interfered with her normal routine. As she fumbled for the door key, it did occur to her that the marble Eros that Roman had lugged home in late August looked a bit uncomfortable standing there naked in this first chill rain of autumn.

  She was a little chilly herself but as she opened the door, she saw a light in the kitchen, heard Roman banging saucepans and cutlery as he unloadedt he dishwasher, and best of all, she smelled the homely aroma of his most successful soup.

  Roman Tramegra aspired to gourmet chefdom. He bought the freshest raw materials and would spend hours slicing, peeling and dicing. But he chased a will-o'-the wisp of creativity around the kitchen with Portuguese wines, Chinese herbs, Greek cheese, or French mustards, constitutionally unable to follow a recipe without yielding to the temptation to improve it.

  Few of his creations were totally inedible and over the course of time Sigrid had learned to be diplomatic. She did not like to cook and possessed an undemanding appetite. Before Roman Tramegra entered her life, she either stopped by a take-out place, fished something from the grocer's freezer, or opened a can of soup. There were times when Roman's culinary excesses made her long for those simpler meals

  – she would never get used to his broccoli-and-chutney curry for instance

  – but she usually repented when he miraculously came up with somethinga bsolutely delicious.

  Such as the mushroom and barley soup she could now smell simmering on the stove in the green-and-white tiled kitchen they shared.

  "Is it soup yet?" she asked from the doorway, shaking the rain from her soft dark hair.

  "Sigrid, my dear! How are you? How is your arm? Why didn't you call? I've been so worried about you! Anne said you were simply slashed to ribbons."

  His voice was several tones deeper than anyone's Sigrid had ever heard, yet he still managed to talk in italics half the time.

  "I'm okay," she said. "A little tired, though. And ravenous."

  "Then sit, sit!" Roman boomed, clearing a space at the breakfast counter with one swoop of his arm. He wore a long white linen shirt over tailored gray denim slacks with rolled cuffs and a heavy silver and turquoise necklace that clanked against the ceramic topped counter when he bent across to lay out a bowl and spoon. He was a large man, in his mid-forties. Not fat exactly, but with an aura ofs oftness about him akin to that of a large pampered Persian cat. He moved like one, too, with a certain finicky grace and deliberation.

  His sandy hair was thinning on top and the high dome of his hairline was echoed by the arch of his eyebrows and the curve of his hooded eyes.

  "Let me wash up first," Sigrid told him and strode down the hall to her room, where she eased the jacket off over her bandaged arm and unbuckled the gun harness. She brushed her hair, freshened up in the bath, and returned to the kitchen in time to watch Roman ladle the thick fragrant soup into her bowl.

  He demanded to hear all about the stabbing. Sigrid skimmed over the high spots, then asked, "Did you move my car?"

  "Anne drove it over when she came for your clothes early this morning. She left it doubled-parked, but I drove it down to your garage. This place was a madhouse this morning. First Anne, then Oscar-I see he did deliver your clothes. I thought you two were coming straight back here. I waited till almost eleven and then I simply had to fly."

  "Sorry. We must have just missed you. Something came up," said Sigrid, blowing ge
ntly on her first spoonful of steaming soup.

  Without asking if she wanted it, Roman fixed her a small bowl of torn endive, parsley, and Bibb lettuce and cut a thick slice of brown bread which he smeared liberally with cream cheese. By then Sigrid was eating with such obvious relish that he said, "It's early for dinner, but I may as well join you. I shall make my anised veal for our entrée and-"

  "None for me, thanks," Sigrid said hastily. "Soup's all I want tonight."

  "Perhaps tomorrow then," he said, leaving Sigrid to wonder if she could pretend to forget and send out for pizza or something. She had never acquired a taste for anise except in black jellybeans. Certainly not in veal and sour cream.

  "Oscar was quite exercised about the explosion at the Hotel Maintenon. Was that what delayed you?" Roman asked. "Do say you're working on that."

  "Now, Roman," she warned.

  It was getting harder to deflect hise xcessive interest in her work. He was so certain that one ingenious murder mystery would free him from the magazine articles and fillers with which he supplemented his small private income but so far as he knew, only the dull and routine had come her way since the spring and he had begun to despair of the unimaginative ways by which so many New Yorkers dispatched one another.

  "I hoped you might be able to tell me something-off the record, of course," he said wistfully. "Surely there's more than was in the paper? A multimillionaire killed, your colleague wounded, the glamorous Lucienne Ronay hovering in the wings! Is she really as beautiful as her pictures?"

  "More," said Sigrid, happy that she could share that much at least. "I'm told she gave another dazzling performance last night. Jill Gill was there, by the way. She's one of the cribbage contestants."

  "Jolly good," beamed Roman, whose cultured midwestern accent was overlaid by an Oxbridge accent that sounded suspiciously like too many old Peter Lawford movies to Sigrid. "She'll bea ble to describe all those delicious little details of dress and jewels that pass right over your practical head."

  Roman Tramegra was the soul of tact and Sigrid knew he would never intentionally insult her. Yet, she found his blithe assumption that she was totally oblivious to all feminine artifice somewhat wounding. Just because she seldom wore makeup herself, just because she felt gawky shopping for clothes and didn't fuss with her hair every ten minutes, didn't mean that she was never interested in how other women achieve their glamorous effects.

  "I noticed," she told him sharply. "Lucienne Ronay had on a very expensive, very attractive off-white dress this afternoon, long gold-and-pearl earrings, and several chunky gold bracelets. Her shoes were the same color as her dress, her hair was down about her face, and she wore a perfume that smelled like some sort of flowers."

  Roman's spoon dropped back into the bowl with a surprised clunk.

  "Very good, my dear Watson. The flowers are mignonettes."

  "Mignonettes?"

  "Her husband commissioned a perfume company in the Mediterranean to blend a special fragrance just for her."

  Sometimes Sigrid wondered if her friend possessed a photographic memory. He claimed not to, yet he seemed a walking storehouse of trivia, with tidbits on almost every aspect of twentieth century pop culture. Sigrid recalled having once read about Lucienne Ronay's husband herself but details eluded her.

  "He was something of a Svengali, wasn't he?"

  "I think you mean Pygmalion," Roman corrected. "Svengali was an evil hypnotist; Pygmalion was a sculptor who created his perfect mate. G. B. Shaw, of course, And My Fair Lady, only that came later. That was Maurice Ronay though-Pygmalion and Professor Henry Higgins with the tiniest touch of Howard Hughes. A bit of a recluse with an eccentric sense of humor. He was a wealthy real estate investor, years older than she, and she was a little nobody, a peasant girl he found sleeping on the beach at Cannes, so the story goes. He brought her homew ith him, scrubbed off the dirt and found her so beautiful that he taught her how to walk and talk and carry herself, bought her clothes and jewels, and finally married her.

  "They say everything that man touched turned into gold and his little peasant was no exception. He married her because she was beautiful and sexy, he said, and then she turned out to have brains too."

  "I remember that," said Sigrid. She went around to the stove and clumsily helped herself to more soup. "Didn't her husband put together some sort of real estate deal here in Manhattan about eight or nine years ago and those three hotels were part of the package he didn't want?"

  "Quite right," he agreed, holding out his own bowl for more. "They were like three nice old dowagers: still respectable, but drab and a bit tatty around the edges."

  "My great-aunts used to stay at the La Vallière when it was the Carstairs," Sigrid remembered.

  "Everyone's great-aunt stayed at the Carstairs," said Roman. "Monsieur Ronayw as going to dump it, along with what are now the Montespan and the Maintenon, when his charming wife announced that she was tired of being a plaything and wanted to work. So he gave her the three hotels for a Christmas present and she became something of a Pygmalion herself: cleaned them up, gave them elegant new dresses, and transformed them into three perfect jewels."

  "Nice what you can do with money," Sigrid observed, savoring the warm buttery mushrooms in her soup.

  "It always takes money to make it," Roman agreed. "But why not? They say she paid back his loan before he died."

  "She does seem to have a flair for running hotels," Sigrid acknowledged. "Everything was under control today. No sign of any explosion except in the immediate vicinity of the bomb itself."

  "Everyone says she's so pragmatic, that she's a termagant and a slave-driver, and perhaps she is. But underneath, she must have a romantic nature."

  "Because she's so beautiful?"

  "Outward beauty is only a manifestation of inner loveliness," he intoned in hiss olemn bass voice. "The names she chose for her hotels reveal everything."

  "Do they?" Sigrid was weak on French history.

  "Maintenon, Montespan, and La Valliere, my dear, were the mistresses of the Sun King, Louis XIV. I wrote an article on them when the hotels were rechristened. Sold it as a sidebar to Newsday, I think. Let me see now… Louise de La Vallière came first. She's the one they named the lavaliere necklace for. She was supplanted by Françoise de Montespan, who was three years older; Montespan in turn was replaced by Françoise de Maintenon, who was six years older still. She was almost fifty when she and the king were secretly married. She had beauty and intellect and held the king's heart until his death.

  "If you think of it, Lucienne Ronay is much like de Maintenon herself. She was no infant when she married Maurice Ronay and-"

  The telephone on the nearby wall interrupted his discourse. This phone and the one in Sigrid's bedroom werei n her name. Roman had a separate line in his quarters. Sigrid lifted the receiver to her ear. "Hello?"

  "Val says you haven't been by to question her yet," said Oscar Nauman.

  "No, I thought I wouldn't bother her until tomorrow."

  "She won't be there tomorrow," he told her. "She and the children are flying home with John's body tomorrow morning and they won't be back till after the funeral. I thought you'd want to know."

  "I do." Sigrid weighed her weariness against the need to interview Val Sutton while the night's horrors were still fresh in the new widow's mind. "Perhaps I'd better call her and arrange a time."

  "I told her to expect us at nine if she didn't hear from me. She's beat."

  "Me, too," Sigrid confessed.

  "So take a nap," Nauman said sensibly. "That's what Val's doing. I'll pick you up at eight-forty-five. Okay?"

  "Okay." It might be a little unorthodox, but if Val Sutton were given to hysterics, Sigrid wanted someone like Nauman there to help.

  She looked at the clock.

  Five past six.

  "If I'm not up by eight-thirty, please call me," she told Roman and headed back down the hall for bed.

  14

  THE Sutton apartment was less
than ten minutes away from Sigrid's, a block off Bleecker Street. Most of the mourners had gone by the time she and Oscar Nauman arrived shortly after nine o'clock, although four or five of John Sutton's graduate students still conversed in low tones around the dining room table and an emaciated young woman with a chalk-white complexion and gold-enameled fingernails-one of Val Sutton's colleagues from the Feldheimer, Nauman told Sigrid-sat on the couch reading a bedtime story to the Suttons' young son and daughter.

  Both children had solemn dark eyes and straight black hair and they leaned sleepily against the woman's almost anorexic body. The smaller child, a little girl, had detached a wooden hippopotamus from the woman's chunky necklace and was dreamily walking it back and forth across the flowers printedo n her nightgown.

  "She's waiting for you in his study," said the student who had admitted them.

  Oscar Nauman led the way down the narrow hall, tapped at a door, and opened it without waiting.

  The outer rooms of the apartment were furnished in what Sigrid privately tagged bohemian artsy-nubbly handwoven fabrics, earthtone ceramic jugs and bowls, and statuettes cast in bronze and iron. On the walls, abstract oils and stylized photographs were interspersed with batik hangings and South American Indian artifacts.

  John Sutton's study was more traditionally academic. A heavy oak desk faced the door and several comfortable chairs were placed before two walls lined with bookshelves in which leather-covered volumes were jammed beside paperbacks and scholarly journals. There was a Peruvian rug on the floor, though, and framed political posters on the third wall supported the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Dick Gregory, among others. A floor-to-ceiling corkboard filled the wall behindt he desk, displaying a thumbtacked collage of snapshots, newspaper clippings, political cartoons, and protest buttons for the last twenty years.

  Val Sutton sat curled on a leather chair that had been pulled up before the black tiled fireplace. A coal fire blazed in the small grate. She looked up as they entered and Sigrid immediately recognized whose genes the two children had inherited. As Nauman had said earlier, Val Sutton could not be considered conventionally beautiful; yet there was an intense, exotic vibrancy about her: high cheek bones and alert brown eyes in a triangular face, thick black hair clipped level with her chin line, a lithe and sensuous body.