The Right Jack

by Margaret Maron

  The girl's brown eyes widened and for a moment, Ted Flythe thought she was going to go sulky on him. Instead, she gracefully rolled onto the floor, sashayed across the room to gather up her clothes, and with a hip-swinging, exaggerated shuffle toward the bathroom, said, "yessuh, Mr. Bossman! Coming right up! I'se haulin' jest as fast as I kin haul. Yessuh!"

  As her sassy little round bottom disappeared behind the door, Flythe grinned appreciatively. He might just have to add her name and number to his rotary file. Let's see now, was she Marcie or Trish?

  ***

  The windows of Vassily Ivanovich's efficiency apartment overlooked the United Nations complex. With the sashes thrown wide, the big Russian was puffing through his daily exercise routine, a variation of the Royal Canadian Air Force plan with a dozen deep knee bends thrown in for good measure. Not bad for an old man, he thought, as he duck-walked back and forth in the cool morning air.

  On the dresser was a long message from his son back in Moscow. Ivanovich accepted philosophically the evidence that his friendship with an American naval officer was under scrutiny and the subject of communiqués back and forth, but he did think his son would have more understanding of what he'd intended this trip to be. Alexei's message was almost schizoid in its effort to admonish and exhort without giving anyone any ammunition to use against either of them.

  Ah well, thought Ivanovich. The boy is yet young.

  He closed the windows but lingered fora moment to contemplate the gleaming buildings, of the UN, buildings that hadn't even existed when he and his old friend roared into port near the end of the war. Already there were those who said it should be torn down, moved to another country, that nothing good had come from the millions of words spoken there these forty years.

  The year was beginning to turn. Perhaps even now snow was falling on the Valdai Hills above his village. Perhaps it was time to go home.

  But first there was one thing more to be done.

  ***

  The efficient Miss Vaughan had left several sheets of messages neatly stacked on Zachary Wolferman's gleaming desk in the study. Breakfast over-despite Emily's coaxing, he'd only wanted tea and a few bites of toast-Haines Froelick turned the pages slowly, mechanically noting each name. Many of them recalled fleeting memories of times past; of weekends, dinners, long-ago parties or

  ***

  committee meetings.

  A longish message from Zachary's lawyer caught his eye. It would appear that at some time in the past, his cousin had prepared detailed instructions for his own funeral. Mr. Froelick read them carefully. As far as he could tell, the arrangements he'd begun yesterday were in accordance with Zachary's wishes: the correct church, the desired undertaker, even the pallbearers. Entombment would, of course, be in the family vault in Greenwood. As a final request, Zachary had asked that two small objects of sentimental value be entombed with him. One was a gold locket containing the picture of a girl who died of influenza in 1939; the other was an Austrian schilling that he'd carried as a good luck piece.

  Emily and Miss Vaughan had located the locket, and Mr. Froelick opened it to look at the sweet young face inside. Zachary always said Maria's death robbed him of the only girl he could ever marry, but Mr. Froelick privately believed that even had Maria lived, she could not have gotten him to the altar.

  The schilling, however, was anotherm atter. He and Zachary were mischievous lads climbing upon an equestrian statue in Graz one rainy summer day when Zachary found the coin tucked beneath a massive hoof. As soon as he touched it, the sun came out and Zachary declared it was an omen. After that, he carried the schilling all the time.

  Zachary was not exactly superstitious, Haines had decided, but certainly that schilling had taken on certain quasi-mythical proportions over the years.

  It had given him the confidence to do his best on school examinations and turning it between his fingers seemed to help him focus on the right decisions at work; so it was only fitting that Zachary should face the next world with his schilling in his pocket, thought Mr. Froelick.

  According to Miss Vaughan's tidy memo, the housekeeper had been unable to locate it, so Miss Vaughan had spoken by telephone to a police sergeant in charge of personal property and learned that while the police were holding Mr. Wolferman's wallet, wristwatch, rings, and other small items found uponh is person Friday night, they had no schilling.

  She had then taken it upon herself to call the undertaker, who disavowed any knowledge of the coin's existence. Her call to the Hotel Maintenon had been equally unsuccessful she wrote. Could Mr. Froelick suggest further places to look?

  Mr. Froelick could not. Unless perhaps it had been flung under a table Friday night and lay hidden among the debris? Possibly it was still in that room. He seemed to recall that premises were often sealed by the police in cases like this. But surely not for very long when they were part of a public hotel? Even now, the Maintenon's personnel might be sweeping or vacuuming or whatever they did. He could telephone but messages relayed through a third party would not convey the urgency of the situation.

  Surely he owed this much to Zachary?

  Sighing, he touched an intercom button on the desk and spoke to the kitchen. "Emily? Would you ask Willis to bring the car around, please?"

  ***

  With her three-inch heels tucked inside an attaché case and scuffed sneakers on her feet, Molly Baldwin dashed for her bus as the driver eased off the brake.

  The Sunday morning was still too fresh and sunny to have eroded the driver's temper, so he kept the door open and let her hop on instead of grinding away from the curb as he might have on a busier rainy weekday.

  "That was awfully nice of you," Molly smiled, dropping her coins into the meter. She always exaggerated her disappearing Florida drawl for bus drivers and cabbies. It usually made them more helpful, she'd found. She hated to be snarled at, though goodness knows she'd had to learn to take it since coming to New York.

  Not that Madame Ronay snarled, she thought, taking a seat near the middle of the lurching bus; but she certainly could make life miserable when she was displeased about anything. If she knew about Teejy-

  Molly shut her mind to that avenue of thought. Madame Ronay didn't know.

  And neither did Ted Flythe. And all she had to do was keep a firm grip on herself and remember that this cribbage tournament would end tonight and, with it, all her problems.

  17

  BY the time Sigrid had walked up to West Twenty-third Street and back down again, her headache was gone and color had returned to her thin cheeks. She even slipped her arm out of the sling and went to look over the shoulder of the artist who sat on the rotting pier at the foot of her street. The artist looked up, gave her a friendly smile, and kept sketching. A horn tooted along West Street. Sigrid paid no attention until it tooted again and someone called, "Lieutenant? Lieutenant Harald!"

  She turned and saw Alan Knight loping across the traffic lanes to join her. His driver, the same bewildered yeoman, pulled gratefully alongside the empty curb and cut the engine.

  "I've been all the way down to Battery Park looking for you," Knight called as he neared her. "Your friend said you were walking along the water but he didn't know what direction.".

  "Up," Sigrid gestured.

  "Down's right nice, too," he drawled, matching her long strides. "They've got a real pretty park there."

  Sigrid observed the crisp crease in the trouser legs of his dark blue uniform. "Are you on duty today or has something come up?"

  "Both. I had a report waiting on my desk first thing this morning." There was an embarrassed look on his face.

  "And?"

  "You know those pictures Vassily Ivanovich showed us of his sons yesterday? Remember that nice boy who pulled a few strings so his sweet old papa could enjoy a vacation in America?"

  Sigrid nodded.

  "KGB," Knight said bitterly.

  "Well, he did tell us his son was something in the Party," Sigrid recalled.

  "Go
on and say it."

  "Say what?"

  "I told you so."

  "I never said Ivanovich was connected with the KGB."

  "No, but you said he might not be asi nnocuous as he looks."

  "Yes," Sigrid admitted.

  "You were right. We've just learned that Ivanovich was the Russian equivalent of an EOD during the war."

  "What's that?"

  "Explosive Ordnance Demolition."

  "Someone who dismantles bombs?" Lieutenant Knight nodded. "Among other things."

  "Then he'd know how to put one together."

  "I don't see how we missed it. Or how Commander Dixon ever got a security clearance with what amounts to a Russian godfather in her background."

  "Maybe she didn't know," Sigrid suggested reasonably as she paused to let three joggers pass. "Her father died over twenty-five years ago and if the two men hadn't corresponded since forty-eight or forty-nine-well, she was just a child then. She didn't try to keep him secret when he contacted her last spring, did she?"

  "No." Lieutenant Knight glanced at her with disappointment. "I thought you'd be excited to hear that Vassilym ight be our bomber."

  "I'm interested," Sigrid agreed, resuming her pace, "but it may not pertain. John Sutton seems the more logical target to me."

  "The professor? Why?"

  "It's beginning to look as if he recognized a Red Snow survivor."

  "A who?"

  Belatedly Sigrid recalled that Knight had not joined them at headquarters yesterday until after the discussion about the radical group that blew themselves up in the summer of 1970, so she summarized for him the facts and speculations they had about Fred Hamilton and Red Snow and how John Sutton had been so deeply involved in the war protest movement out at McClellan State that he could probably have recognized anyone from those days.

  "Like Ted Flythe?" Knight suggested shrewdly.

  "Mrs. Sutton didn't think so when I raised the possibility last night."

  "How's she handling it?" Alan Knight's handsome face was immediately sympathetic.

  "She's handling it," Sigrid said bluntly. Her voice remained cool and matter-of-fact, betraying no hint of how grief-wrenched she'd felt watching Val Sutton and her small son last night. She carefully confined her narrative to the pertinent facts. "And even though she doesn't think he's Hamilton, we'll get his fingerprints from FBI files and compare them with Flythe's."

  A pair of sailboats slipped by them, headed downriver. Their pristine white sails ballooned in the steady breeze. A clatter of rotors passed overhead, and Knight shaded his eyes to follow the helicopter's flight until it dropped down out of sight at the heliport many blocks north.

  "In a way, I hope you're wrong," he said, tugging at the brim of his hat. "I hope it turns out to be Ivanovich."

  "For Commander Dixon's sake?" asked Sigrid, recalling how determined Val Sutton had been that her husband be the intended victim.

  "Yeah," He walked along beside her in silence, then stopped to face her, his chiseled features bleak. "They hadt o take her arm off."

  "When?"

  "Last night. They tried to graft in new blood veins, but it didn't work."

  Sigrid listened mutely, then strode on without comment. She had not met Commander T. J. Dixon, had not even seen a photograph, unless one counted the snapshot Vassily Ivanovich carried of her as a baby. Yet everyone commented on her prettiness; a feminine woman who enjoyed her beauty and used it to keep at least four men interested. How could she adapt to such a monstrous loss? Would she accept it philosophically, or would she withdraw into isolation, feeling mutilated and hideously disfigured?

  Lieutenant Knight trailed along beside her and her silence began to fuel his youthful indignation. The naval officer possessed the Southern charm that remains a birthright of all young adults-male and female-reared by mothers to whom manners are almost more important than morals and who install both in their children with equal vigor. He was by nature friendly and easygoing and willing to meet anyonem ore than halfway, but he couldn't see that Lieutenant Harald had budged an inch beyond the first five minutes of their introduction yesterday.

  If anything, she was becoming steadily more distant.

  He remembered his young yeoman clerk this morning. Her tender blue eyes had pooled with tears when she relayed the hospital report, repeating how dreadful it was and how sorry she felt for Commander Dixon until he'd finally seized on the information about Ivanovich to clear out of the office for a few hours.

  So it certainly wasn't that he wanted Lieutenant Harald to burst into tears, he told himself. But not to say a word? To keep walking like T. J. Dixon's arm was nothing more than a piece of meat to be thrown in the river?

  He'd worked with some hard-nosed senior women officers in his five years with the Navy, but he'd found that if he was friendly and properly respectful of their rank, they soon climbed down and opened up, while this one-

  Oblivious to his growing resentment.

  Sigrid moved through the sunlit morning almost blindly as she thought how devastated the commander would be when she recovered enough to realize that she'd lost her arm by a fluke, a bad coincidence of time and place. She thought of how bothersome her own arm was, yet it was only wounded and would soon heal.

  She turned to Lieutenant'tKnight abruptly. "How much of her arm did they amputate?"

  "How much does it take, Lieutenant?"

  His hostility took her by surprise.

  "I guess police officers get like doctors after a while," he said.

  "What-?"

  "Cold. Detached. Objective" His soft Southern drawl heaped scorn on the words. "Doctors can tell you about watching a baby die like I'd tell you about the Mets losing to St. Louis. They say it's 'cause they can't let themselves feel; that they'd burn out if they grieved over every patient. After a while, they don't have to worry. They've got no feelings left." His bitterness was scalding. "Is that what happened to you,

  Lieutenant Sigrid Harald of the new York Police Department?"

  "I don't know what you're talking about," she said icily, without stopping.

  "Is that how you quit being a woman with a woman's softness and a woman's tender heart?"

  Goaded now, Sigrid turned on him, her gray eyes blazing. "I'm a professional investigator, Lieutenant. It's my job to stay detached and objective. Will grieving replace Dixon 's arm or bring Val Sutton's husband back to life? Will crying keep whoever did this obscene thing from doing it again? I don't think so, Lieutenant. And what's more if I had a sick child, I'd rather have a doctor cold enough to keep fighting against death than one too choked up to work, so you can take your tender little chauvinistic heart and go to hell!"

  She jerked away from him, striding across the dilapidated pier, to the very edge, where she stood staring down into the murky water that lapped against the rotting pilings. She wished the water was cleaner, the day warmer, and that she could just dive in and swim toward thes un until all the churning inside her was washed away.

  Her arm throbbed viciously and she slipped it back into the sling and pressed it with her free hand to ease the pounding.

  Knight had followed her and he sat down on one of the nearby pilings. "I'm sorry," he said. "I guess I spoke out of line."

  Sigrid shrugged and continued staring down into the river, grateful for once that her hair was loose and that the wind kept blowing it across her face and hid what she never willingly allowed anyone to see.

  On the next pier over, an oriental man walked out almost to the end carrying a large bundle of red material. He was accompanied by a small girl in pigtails, who frolicked about him like a puppy. They were obviously father and daughter and he called warnings as she ran too near the edge, while her laughter bubbled out in lilting joy.

  While Sigrid and Knight watched, the man placed his red bundle on the pier and began working on it. Curious gullsw heeled overhead.

  Knight. glanced over at Sigrid. "I'm sorry," he said again. "I keep forgetting that all women do
n't show-"

  "All women don't do anything," Sigrid said between clenched teeth. "No more than all men."

  "Hey, I'm no chauvinist," he protested. "I like women. Really."

  Still unsettled and now annoyed at herself that she'd lost her temper, Sigrid brushed aside his protest. "Forget it. It's not important."

  On the next pier, the long mass of red cloth grew a ferocious golden dragon's face and became first a limp red wind sock and then a swelling sinuous dragon with streamers that caught the wind as it clawed its way into the sky. The child clapped her hands gleefully as it dipped and soared against the blueness like a wild untamed beast straining against its leash. At one point, it toyed with disaster and skimmed the surface of the water, then a twitch of the line sent it climbing again.

  It was innocent and graceful and without realizing it, Sigrid began to relax.

  "I'm not really a chauvinist pig,"Alan Knight said coaxingly. "Thick-headed at times maybe, but not sexist."

  "No?" Sigrid gave him a jaundiced look, for he suddenly reminded her of some of her Lattimore cousins when they meant to wheedle her into trying something she didn't particularly want to do. Whenever the charm switched on, she'd learned to tread warily.

  Sensing a slight softening in her manner, Knight smiled persuasively and held up three fingers, with his thumb and pinkie touching. "Scout's honor. I truly do like women."

  Sigrid brushed her hair back behind her ears and looked down into his deep brown eyes.

  "That must make your wife very happy," she said sardonically.

  Beneath the brim of his hat, his handsome face became unexpectedly flushed. "Uh-Well, you see, I'm not exactly married."

  She shot a telling glance at the gold band on his left hand.

  "I've never been married," said Knight.

  "Then why-?"