The Right Jack

by Margaret Maron

  She was a winsome child, not pretty exactly, but with a sunny intelligent charm that shone through her shock over Johnson's death. They soon learned that she was a part-time employee at the hotel and a full-time student at Hunter College. She hadn't actually dated Johnson yet, "But we were working at it. We'd taken a couple of breaks at the same time. He was a little younger than me, but pretty sharp. Had his act together. I liked that."

  They had snatched a few minutes in passing since Friday night, she told them; had even planned to meet for lunch today; but if Pernell had known anything important about the explosion, he'd given her no indication of it.

  "And he would have," Terri Pratt assured them. "At least I think he would. He talked about everything else that happened that night."

  At the end, Sigrid thanked her and added, "We're very sorry about your loss, Miss Pratt."

  The girl shook her head. "We weren't that far yet. Things were just starting between us and there was so much else we needed to do first: school, work. Pernell wanted to start a chain of small resort hotels in Florida. He'd have done it, too. He could've done anything." Her face drooped as she spoke of what would now never be. "He was so-ooh, I don't know. Innocent? And very, very sweet."

  Her voice shook as the finality of his death sank in.

  ***

  In the lull after Molly Baldwin brought them the pairings sheets and went back to her work, Alan Knight suggested that they might as well grab a bite to eat while they waited for the cribbage players to regroup after their own lunch break. The hotel's coffee shop was jammed, so he and Sigrid went to the tavern across the street, where Sigrid let herself be persuaded that a large mug of rich dark ale could substitute for the pain tablets she'd forgotten to bring with her.

  Sandwiches there were pricey but generous. The corned beef was sliced thinly and laid on an inch thick, the mustard was dark and spicy, the dill pickles crisp and tender.

  As they ate, Alan regaled her with exaggerated tales of his upbringing in a Southern household tucked in amongst six sisters. He seemed to have decided on a big sister-kid brother scenario for their temporary partnership and Sigrid could feel herself being drawn in. His knack for instant friendship was seductive to someone who found getting past the initial barriers difficult.

  Kinship was a whole different mattert hough, even this artificial kinship. Her mother possessed rafts of uncles, aunts, and cousins and so had her father, which meant Sigrid had grown up accustomed to having strangers suddenly introduced as Uncle this or Great-aunt that, people who by blood were entitled to speak to her familiarly, chaff her on her shyness, or ask personal questions that would be a gross impertinence in someone unrelated. Brothers she had never known, but Alan Knight was not unlike some of her Lattimore or Harald cousins and unconsciously she found herself reacting to him in the same manner, so that when he asked her why she had joined the police force, instead of replying that it was none of his business, she answered him honestly.

  "Probably a combination of genes and aptitude. My father was a policeman killed in the line of duty when I was a child. I barely remember him, but I guess I grew up thinking it was an honorable profession. And I've always liked puzzles-word games, jigsaws, solitaire, any kind of logic problems."

  "The Norwegian with a dog livesn ext door to the man who smokes Parliaments?" smiled Knight.

  "So who owns the zebra?" She nodded. "And when I was a child, I used to tangle a ball of twine deliberately and then spend hours undoing the knots. Bringing a little corner of the world back to order, I suppose. Who knows? I've never analyzed it much."

  She sipped the last of her ale. "Why did you join the Navy? To get away from women?"

  He laughed. "You sure don't find many on shipboard yet."

  "Are you making it a career?"

  "I didn't plan to, although, I'm working on my second tour of duty right now. With seven kids, we all had to scrape around for tuition. If you sign up for ROTC, they give you four years of college for four years service. I'm being ordered to Naples in December. Join the Navy, and see the world. It's not a bad life."

  "Commander Dixon seemed to like it," Sigrid said. "What will happen to her now, do you suppose?"

  "The Navy will take care of her. Military hospitals must know everything

  Back at the hotel, the crime scene technicians were packing up their equipment, having collected all the physical bits of evidence they could find. It wasn't much. Or rather, it was too much. Too many people had used the room since its last cleaning. Trying to sort out what might be pertinent from the mass of fingerprints, fibers, and cigarette butts would be almost impossible.

  Nevertheless, they would go through the motions.

  "Oh, and we did find this," said one, and handed over Zachary Wolferman's schilling to Detective Eberstadt, a heavyset officer entering middle age. He sucked in his stomach and slipped the coin into his watch pocket for safekeeping.

  ***

  there is about prosthetics and therapy.

  She may have a choice between fulld isability or retraining."

  It sounded awful to Sigrid. Better than the alternative, he remindedh er.

  ***

  Down in the Bontemps Room, Ted Flythe called the players to order. A telephone conference with his superior at Graphic Games had left the ball in his court and now he bounced it on to them. "We have two options," he told them. "There are sixty-four players still in contention and you sixty-four have the vote. You can draw lots and have a winner-take-all playoff, or you can call it quits and split the prize money. It comes to just over a hundred and fifty each."

  There was hasty consultation among the weary and beleaguered players. The vote went overwhelmingly in favor of calling it quits before anyone else got killed.

  Graphic Games' Second Annual New York City Cribbage Tournament was officially over.

  22

  THE tournament may have been over, but questioning the cardplayers dragged on into midafternoon. It could have been worse. Of the three hundred or so players, less than twenty were positive that they had seen Pernell Johnson after the break began.

  Jill Gill was the player to pinpoint his last movements. Others had seen the young busboy policing the ash stands out on the landing-"I felt so guilty/' confessed one woman. "He'd just picked three butts out of the sand and here I came with another!"-but only Dr. Hill could tell Elaine Albee, "It was exactly 10:41. I looked at my watch because our break was supposed to last fifteen minutes. Almost nobody'd started back inside though, so I thought I'd still have time to duck into the ladies'.

  "You know how you'll look around for the nearest inconspicous door? Well, I saw the busboy pass through a doorn ext to the elevators and I started to follow and then I saw 'No admittance,' so I went elsewhere."

  If anyone else had seen young Johnson after 10:41, they weren't saying.

  The service landing beyond that door was not visible from the service door at the rear of the Bontemps Room; but LeMays, the busboy who'd used the corridor and freight elevator to fetch more cups from the kitchen, swore the area was deserted when he went down at eleven o'clock.

  He and two others agreed that Ted Flythe had left by the rear hall shortly after the break began. They didn't think he had returned that way. Nor could any of the Graphic Games people alibi Flythe. It was generally agreed that he did not return to the Bontemps Room and call for order until 10:55.

  Fourteen minutes between the last glimpse of Pernell Johnson and the next view of Ted Flythe.

  "You could go anywhere in this building and back again in fourteen minutes." Alan Knight frowned. "Aren't you going to question him?"

  "Not yet," said Sigrid, touching her hair in absent-minded uneasiness. Roman had used a gentler hand than hers when helping to pin up her hair earlier that morning and she didn't trust the dark mass not to come sliding down. "If he's Fred Hamilton, it's taken more than good luck to stay out of prison all these years."

  "ESP?"

  "Or the science of body language or
whatever else you want to call it," she said patiently. "No, he can't read minds, but he's probably good at picking up unconscious signals like voice tones or eye tension. We'll know for sure when the prints come in tomorrow, and then we'll arrest him and do our questioning where there's no chance of his disappearing for another fifteen years, okay?"

  "You're the expert."

  "And you're not?"

  Knight shrugged. "Look, they gave me a sailor suit, a cram course at Newport, and told me to go read a couple of books. I'm pretty intelligent but whether that qualifies me for Intelligence, I couldn't say. I probably shouldn't tell you this, buty ou're my first real field operation."

  "Somehow that doesn't surprise me," she said.

  By then, it was nearly four, most of the players had gone, and the Graphic Games crew were packing up the last of their boards and dismantling the display cases out in the hall.

  Feeling somewhat guilty because she'd avoided his Sunday dinner, Sigrid phoned Roman Tramegra to ask if he'd like something from the deli for supper.

  "Don't bother, my dear. I've held the veal."

  Her heart sank,

  "Is the tournament over?" he asked. "Why don't you ask Dr. Gill to join us? There's enough."

  Fortunately, Jill Gill had not yet departed. "He probably wants me to vet his cockroach article," she said cheerfully when Sigrid relayed the invitation. "I told him I would."

  "Cockroaches?" asked Alan Knight curiously.

  ***

  "Five hundred spine-chilling words on an insect that can and does live anywhere man can. I believe he hopes to sell it to The National Enquirer. Can't you see the headline now? 'Biological Time Bomb Already in Place.'" She smiled at Sigrid through her rhinestone-and-turquoise glasses. "I'll be happy to come."

  "It's anised veal," Sigrid warned.

  "I can eat anything the roaches eat."

  "Me, too," said Alan Knight, with a hopeful expression on his handsome face.

  Sigrid was taken off guard.

  "Oh let him come," laughed Jill, pulling on a bright red sweater. "He'll balance the table and anyhow, Roman will love him. He's never done an article about the Navy, has he?"

  It was true that Roman would like having fresh brains to pick. But more importantly, thought Sigrid, four people sharing a meal originally planned for two should certainly ensure no leftovers.

  ***

  In the end, five sat down to dine on Roman's creation. Nauman turned up unexpectedly with a bottle of wine and some tapes and chapter notes which he thought might interest Sigrid from John Sutton's office at Vanderlyn College. To help Val, he had volunteered to clean out her husband's desk and pack up his books and personal effects. Nauman had also brought along some snapshots he found of the Suttons' McClellan days, including one fuzzy group pose.

  "There's John," he said, "and I think that's Fred Hamilton."

  "He doesn't look much like Ted Flythe," said Knight, peering over Sigrid's shoulder at the faded photograph.

  "Ted Flythe?" asked Dr. Gill from the kitchen sink where she was peeling avocados for Roman. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel and leaned across the breakfast counter where they were clustered in order to see, too. "Why would Professor Sutton have a picture of Ted Flythe?"

  "There's a possibility that he was once part of a terrorist underground organization that began out at McClellan

  State." Sigrid explained the Red Snow connection as he turned the picture so that Jill Gill could get a good look and tapped the figure in the foreground. "What do you think?"

  The entomologist adjusted her harlequin-shaped glasses and examined it closely. "The eyes are similar," she agreed.

  "Cut the hair, add a beard and fifteen years," Sigrid said.

  "Insufficient data," Jill replied and went back to peeling avocados. "Don't you have fingerprints or something?"

  "They should be coming tomorrow. "r

  "Then tomorrow you'll know for sure, won't you?" Jill observed sensibly.

  Unperturbed by three extra mouths to feed, Roman was doing a loaves-and-fishes act with salad greens, avocados, and mushrooms. He flourished two large Vidalia onions and in his deep bass voice queried, "Who's unalterably opposed to onions?"

  Alan Knight flashed an insouciant grin in Sigrid's direction. "Anybody planning to do some kissing later?" he drawled.

  "Where did you find Huck Finn?" asked Nauman, draping his long body onto the couch.

  "Does he strike you as Huck Finn?" Sigrid asked absently. "I've been thinking he's more barefoot boy with cheek."

  They had repaired to the living room alone after dinner with John Sutton's tapes and notes, and Sigrid was distracted with extension cords for her portable tape cassette player.

  From the direction of the kitchen came the rumble of Roman's voice interspersed with Jill and Alan's lighter tones. Roman was reading aloud from his cockroach article while the two guests cleaned the kitchen and made ribald observations on the mating habits of Blatella germanica.

  Dinner had been a cheerful and slightly rowdy meal, not unusual when people are meeting for the first time and talking over and around each other in layered degrees of familiarity. Oscar and Jill had known each other for years, Sigrid first met all three last spring, and she and Roman had become accidental roommates back

  ***

  in the summer; yet this was the first time the four had dined together. And, of course, this was Nauman and Tramegra's first meeting with Alan Knight.

  Conversation had ranged from insects to Lucienne Ronay, from nouvelle cuisine to art nouveau, from naval maneuvers to marine zoology-whereupon Alan Knight suggested to Roman that he might get a good article out of crawdads.

  Nauman's salad fork paused in midair. "What the hell's a crawdad?"

  "You don't know what a crawdad is?" grinned Knight, who'd been a bit awed earlier to realize who Nauman was.

  "No, I don't know what a crawdad is."

  Somehow this clash of cultures so delighted Sigrid that she burst into infectious laughter.

  Roman chose that moment to bring on his entrée. "Here we are: veau d'anise avec étables verts," he announced in his mangled French.

  "What?" asked Nauman. "No chitlins or harmony grits?"

  During dinner they had finished Oscar's bottle of wine, opened a second, and

  Sigrid had now brought the remains of a third to.the living room with them.

  "Should you be drinking this much with your medication?" Oscar asked when she spread John Sutton's notes next to the tape player on the low table before them and held out her glass.

  "Nope," she said happily. "But I haven't taken a pill since morning, so more wine, garçon."

  "I've never seen you tipsy before."

  "I'm not tipsy." She took a slow sip of the amber wine and reconsidered. "Relaxed, perhaps, but definitely not tipsy."

  She turned on the tape player, slipped off her shoes, and leaned back lightly against his shoulder with her feet tucked under her.

  Pleasantly surprised by her unaccustomed initiative, Oscar shifted slightly so that she fit more comfortably into the curve of his arm while John Sutton's voice filled the room.

  23

  MONDAY began brightly enough, although the kitchen radio was predicting rain by the afternoon.

  Sigrid was in good spirits as she poured herself a glass of juice. She'd slept well and for the first time since Friday night's incident, her arm barely ached. With her hair tightly braided and pinned into a secure knot at the nape of her neck, she felt more like herself than at any time since the knifing.

  Roman had again helped with her hair, but he was a mixed blessing this morning, surprised that she felt as cheerful, and unconvinced that she wasn't hiding a headache or a hangover.

  "I did not have too much to drink last night and I did not pass out," she told him firmly. "I barely slept Saturday night and then worked all day yesterday. That's the only reason I fell asleep on the couch."

  Roman sniffed.

  Sigrid supposed she deserved
his skepticism. True, it had been a little disconcerting to wake up sometime in the middle of the night in the living room with the apartment dark and silent and a blanket tucked around her, but she'd been too drowsy to care. She'd simply stumbled sleepily to her room, shed her clothes, and crawled into bed where she promptly zonked out again.

  "What time did everyone leave?" she asked Roman.

  "Around ten. I wanted to wake you, but Oscar wouldn't let me. He said he had an early meeting this morning and Jill was yawning, too, so he took her home then."

  The street gate buzzed and Roman went over to push an electric button that released the latch. "That'll be young Horatio Hornblower. He told me he'd pick you up this morning."

  But the figure who opened the gate was neither Alan Knight nor the yeoman driver. This sailor was dark and wiry, the sleeve of his navy-blue jumper had a couple of extra hash marks, and hise yes squinted across the courtyard as if he were staring through the briny spray from a fo'c'sle deck, whatever that was. Sigrid was weak on Navy terminology.

  She opened the door.

  "Lieutenant Knight sent me, ma'am," he said in as flat a North Jersey accent as Sigrid had ever heard. "He said you'd be expecting him."

  "I'll be right out," said Sigrid and hurried down the hall to put on her gun and load the pockets of her jacket with wallet, ID, and other necessities for the day. In passing, she snagged a thin zippered leather folder that held her notes on the bombing and was out the door before Roman could remind her to carry an umbrella.

  As she pulled the gate shut, the driver jumped out of the gray station wagon and held the door next to the curb for her to enter. Alan Knight was in the far corner with a suspiciously pasty look on his face.

  "You look awful," Sigrid said by way of greeting. "Are you all right?"

  "It's going," he answered, popping another digestive mint into his mouth. "I always thought I could eat anything, but for some.reason, I keep tasting licorice this morning."