THE RIGHT JACK
Margaret Maron
Copyright © 2011 by Margaret Maron.
Original publication 1987. All rights reserved.
All characters in this book are fictitious.
Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
For David C. Brown, who was born with a deck of cards in his hand—shut up and deal!
My thanks to Carl Honeycutt, Peter Klausmeyer and Harold Medlin for their help with certain technical details.
INTRODUCTION TO THE EBOOK EDITION
The Right Jack is the fourth book in my Sigrid Harald series. The title is a cribbage term, but you don’t have to know this card game to enjoy the book even though it takes place at a cribbage tournament in an exclusive Manhattan hotel.
Six cards are dealt to each of the two players. Each contributes two cards, facedown, to the “crib.” Then the cards are cut and one card is turned up on the deck. Say it’s the five of hearts. If either hand contains the jack of hearts—i.e., the “right jack”—that person gets to peg an extra point on the cribbage board between them.
When one of the boards explodes and two people are killed outright, Lt. Sigrid Harald, NYPD, must discover which was the intended victim—their “right jack.”
As noted before, I began this series more than twenty years ago, which means that subways took tokens, telephones were tethered to the wall, and a police investigation could take shortcuts that would not stand up in today’s courts. Smoking was everywhere allowed, rotting piers still lined Manhattan’s western edge, and it was still fairly unusual for women to serve aboard combatant ships. (Indeed, it would be another three years before the first woman was given command of a ship.)
Nevertheless, human emotions are timeless and a young Navy officer is the unwitting catalyst that brings the coolly detached Sigrid Harald closer to artist Oscar Nauman.
—Margaret Maron
June 2011
PROLOGUE
In the main kitchens two levels below the Hotel Maintenon’s glittering lobby, the midday rush was winding down. In the dessert and pastry kitchen next door, however, an orderly bustle continued as exquisite raspberry tarts, miniature éclairs, and tiny cream puffs were tucked into individual lace cups and arranged on large silver trays. Two almond cakes and a silver platter of thinly sliced fruitcake sat beside four dark chocolate multilayered tortes which awaited a final ribbon of buttercream icing across their satiny tops.
In less than half an hour, tea would be served in the beautiful Cristal Galerie just off the Maintenon’s mezzanine, so the staff hurried with its finishing touches. Upstairs, the huge silver urns would already be filled with fresh boiling water and slender tea hostesses in white silk blouses and long black velvet jumpers would be giving the room a final check, assuring themselves that there were no smudges on any of the beveled mirrors that lined the walls between gilded pilasters, that none of the tall vases of cut flowers had dropped petals over the ivory brocaded chairs, and that the tins of tea—all twenty-two different varieties—were full and lined up alphabetically beside the urns.
Trays of triangularly cut sandwiches filled with shrimp salad, watercress, smoked salmon and the Maintenon’s special blend of herbed cream cheese had already been sent up to the serving pantry behind the elegant room, where hot buttered scones also waited in a specially heated basket. The cozy aroma of warm raisins permeated the area.
Downstairs, in the pastry kitchen, workers had begun to load the tea carts, frivolous-looking but sturdy contrivances of silver and glass, which would be wheeled through the Cristal Galerie for the teatime dessert course, tempting New York sophisticates and tourists alike to forget about diets and calories and give themselves up to sybaritic indulgences. Tiny silver pots de creme nestled beside a cut-glass bowl of poires au gratin and a woven silver basket of fresh strawberries.
At a nearby counter, a newly apprenticed assistant chef was so absorbed in his task of cutting a bunch of sugared grapes into individual clusters that he failed to notice when a sudden silence fell over the room.
“Gently, gently, mon petit!” said a sharp voice.
The youth turned, realized who had spoken and became so flustered that he dropped the scissors he had been using.
His fellow employees held their breath, watching the shapely blonde woman who had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
To the uninitiated eye, there was nothing intimidating about the Maintenon’s owner. To her guests, Madame Lucienne Ronay could be, and usually was, Gallic charm personified. Her staff, who knew a different side of the French coin, called her “La Reine” behind her back because of her regal off-with-his-head manner when any employee was caught debasing the impeccable standards she set for her hotels. And the guillotine blade could fall at any moment, since Madame did not remain safely aloof in her throne room on the thirtieth floor, where the executive office lay. She prowled her kingdom relentlessly, bestowing the largess of a radiant smile when pleased or, more often, slicing a malefactor into tattered shreds with her sharp tongue.
Today, it pleased her to be merciful and she stooped gracefully for the dropped scissors and gave the terrified youth a gentle reproof as she demonstrated the Maintenon way to snip sugar-coated grapes . . .
“Regardez. Thus and thus we do, mon petit. More gently so the sugar it does not shatter. Comprenez-vous? You see?”
“Yes, Madame,” replied the chastened worker.
“Bien!” She returned the scissors and, with a benevolent smile for the rest of the staff, exited from the dessert kitchen. A palpable easing of tension swept over the room as Madame Ronay’s employees returned to their preparations for high tea.
“Like so we do, comprenez-vous?” mimicked a pastry chef, twirling a tray of petits fours on fingertips above his head before depositing them safely on the glittering glass-and-silver serving cart.
The others laughed but there were several nervous glances toward the door, and the tea carts were fully loaded and on their way up to the Cristal Galerie before everyone felt free to relax.
CHAPTER 1
As chairman and majority stockholder of Maritime National Bank, Zachary Wolferman commanded sophisticated global resources to keep him abreast of current economic trends. Reports came by teletype and satellite, came hour by hour, even minute by minute if he so desired, to tell him what was happening in the money markets of London, Bonn, or Tokyo.
Yet in times of real decision making, when storms of adversity threatened, Mr. Wolferman preferred to cast other straws upon the wind.
It was not enough to read the Wall Street Journal or Economics Today, Mr. Wolferman was fond of lecturing his fellow board members. Nor was it enough to study the four-color graphs and charts of which those energetic young chaps assigned to strategic planning were so proud. No, said Zachary Wolferman, gravely shaking his silvery head, to find out where the economy was really going, one must get down and rub elbows with the common folk, listen to what the man in the street was saying.
The thought of the fastidious and aristocratic Zachary Wolferman rubbing elbows with ordinary people amused the youngest member of the board.
And how, he was once audacious enough to inquire, did Mr. Wolferman go about meeting such people? Did he invite the paper boy in for a drink or leave his limousine and chauffeur at home occasionally and take a cab?
“Those are good possibilities,” Mr. Wolferman conceded approvingly, “but cribbage is better. It’s an old sailors’ game, you know. My grandfather Augustus was quite fond of it. Learned it as a gunner’s mate during the Cuban blockade back in 1898. Taught it to my cousin Haines and me when we were boys. As a matter of fact, it was his cribbage winnings that
led him into banking.”
Since Augustus Wolferman had parlayed a sailors’ dime savings plan into one of the country’s largest financial institutions, the newest board member wondered if perhaps he ought to look into the game.
At six-fifteen of that same Friday evening, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald was still at her desk. A slender, dark-haired woman with changeable gray eyes and erect carriage, she plowed steadily and efficiently through the paperwork which had piled up in the last three days.
Her small office was standard city issue: a square box painted off-white, a fluorescent light recessed behind frosted glass in the ceiling, two scuffed green file cabinets with bookshelves above them, a fairly new dark green steel desk, for herself a swivel chair with armrests, a couple of mismated straight chairs for visitors, wire In- and Out-baskets, typewriter, wastebasket, a clotheshook behind the door. Except for an administrative flow chart and a map of New York City, the walls were as bare of ornamentation as the lieutenant’s ringless fingers. There were no plants on the window ledge behind her desk, no clutter of knickknacks. Instead, it held a neat row of police bulletins and manuals kept firmly in place by a no-nonsense metal bookend. The hard white glare of the overhead light was softened by a sturdy brass desk lamp with a green glass shade, the only nonstandard piece of office equipment.
There were no photographs on the desk, no whimsical paperweights or tooled leather desk sets. Other than the desk lamp, the only items that might have given a perceptive stranger some clue to Lieutenant Harald’s personality were a magnifying glass, her coffee mug and a tangle of brass, steel and silver rings heaped in a small glass bowl.
The magnifying glass was used to study crime scene photographs in greater detail, but it was bound in nonutilitarian polished brass. The pottery coffee mug was cylindrical in form, more upright than squat, and glazed in a deep blue-green. A narrow band of slightly darker blue diamonds circled the cup an inch from the top. The diamond shapes were so closely toned to the mug’s overall color that one had to look very closely to see them. Most visitors to Lieutenant Harald’s office, even those who shared coffee, never noticed the subtle, inlaid pattern.
They did notice the little bowl of puzzle rings, however, and the lieutenant’s habit of absent-mindedly fitting the interlocking circles of metal into a single band at times when her mind was focused elsewhere.
This evening, the puzzle rings were left untouched as she completed the last entry on a particularly bleak case. A mother and three daughters, ranging in age from two to eight, had been found dead in a shabby TriBeCa apartment. All four had died of knife wounds, and the uniformed officers first on the scene had initially called it in as a homicide.
A few hours later, an autopsy told them that the mother, two days shy of her twenty-fifth birthday, had committed suicide. A reconstruction of events proved that she had carefully slipped the same sharp knife into each small body, then tenderly tucked them all into bed.
None of the neighbors could even begin to suggest a reason why. They said the mother was widowed and a loner. Kept herself to herself and was a conscientious parent. No child neglect there and no string of weekend “uncles” for her daughters, thank you. Maybe a little too strict with them, said her baffled neighbors, and always quoting the Bible to anyone who tried to strike up a conversation.
In the end, it was the Bible that answered their questions. It was the most expensive thing in that threadbare apartment: white leather, gold-edge pages, a red silk ribbon marker, and big enough to rest on a pulpit and preach the coming of Judgment Day. Passages from Jeremiah and Revelations had been heavily underlined and it was stuffed with scrawled slips of paper that precisely documented the deterioration of a mind.
Quite literally, she had killed her daughters to save their souls and then, unable to live on without them, had killed herself.
Sigrid Harald sighed, closed the folder and put it in the Out-basket. She covered her typewriter and neatened her desk; then taking a black-and-gray plaid jacket from the clotheshook, she switched off the light and walked out into the main office. To her surprise she found Tillie still at his desk.
Detective Charles Tildon was half a head shorter than she and a few years younger, a mild unimaginative man who had made plainclothes by sheer methodical attention to detail. He thrived on paperwork, something most officers avoided whenever possible, and could be relied upon to put down everything he’d seen during an investigation, no matter how trivial. There were times when his insistence upon the minute could be exasperating but, on the whole, Lieutenant Harald preferred his careful approach over some of the brighter but more lackadaisical officers. No criminal court case had ever been thrown out because Tillie broke the chain of evidence.
On the other hand, he was the archetypal family man and she could count on the fingers of one hand the times she’d known him to stay late voluntarily on a Friday evening.
“Still working?” She paused at his desk and was puzzled to see he was only killing time with a deck of cards.
Tillie gathered in the two hands he’d dealt and began shuffling again, his round face hopeful beneath a mat of sandy brown hair. “You don’t happen to play cribbage, do you, Lieutenant?”
Sigrid Harald looked at the unfamiliar board, a cheap plastic affair hinged in the middle so that it could fold into a box to hold a deck of cards.
“Sorry,” she said. “Solitaire and bridge are the only card games I know.”
“My father-in-law, Marian’s dad—he’s a nut about it. Every other Sunday when we go over to their house, he brings out the board and we have a go at it. He taught Chuck this summer. Chuck’s good at it, too.”
Tillie laid out another pair of hands and Sigrid sensed an air of gloom in his manner.
“You don’t want your son to play cards?”
“It’s not that. Cards are okay and cribbage is mostly addition anyhow. See, you score points by adding up runs and pairs and combinations of fifteen.”
He pointed to the five cards in front of him: the jack of hearts, five of diamonds, the six and nine of spades, and, off to one side, the four of hearts.
“Face cards count ten, so the jack and five make fifteen for two points—” Tillie lifted a little peg on the plastic board and advanced it two holes. “The four, five, and six add up to fifteen for another two points; six and nine for two more; then the four, five, six make a run of three for three points. Finally, since my turn card was a heart and I have the heart jack that’s another point.”
He pegged the other eight points.
“You get two points every time your cards hit fifteen on the nose: seven and eight; two, three, ten; two sevens and an ace—” To keep him from reeling off every combination in the deck, Sigrid nodded to show that she understood. “Chuck’s what now? Nine? Third grade? This looks like excellent arithmetic drill.”
“It is,” Tillie admitted. “He got to be a whiz at factoring fifteens this summer. If your opponent misses any of his points you can peg them for yourself. Chuck never misses.”
“So?”
“There’s a cribbage tournament up at the Maintenon this weekend,” Tillie explained glumly. “The first round starts at eight tonight. Forty dollars entry fee, ten thousand for first prize. Marian’s dad’s too old to play straight through two-and-a-half days and Chuck’s too young. You have to be fourteen to enter. So they pooled their money and entered me instead. I don’t even like the game that much,” he concluded unhappily. “I just play because Walt and Chuck like it so much.”
In Sigrid’s estimation, bridge was the only card game that weighted a player’s skill more heavily than his luck in the deal and cribbage certainly didn’t look to be an exception. She said as much.
“You can’t peg points if you aren’t dealt any,” she added reasonably.
“You only count those up after the hand’s played,” said Tillie. He launched into a complicated description of the strategy needed to play your cards so that you scored runs and pairs and fifteens off your opponen
t, yet prevented him from scoring off your cards.
Sigrid nodded and murmured in the right places, but her heart wasn’t in it and she sneaked a glance at her watch.
“It sounds interesting, Tillie, but—”
“I could teach you,” he offered eagerly. “I’m just waiting till it’s time to catch the subway up to the hotel. Unless you have something else on?”
“Sorry,” she said, thrusting her arms into the rumpled plaid jacket. “I’m afraid I do.”
She was almost out the door when conscience overtook her. Tillie was usually so cheerful, but the possibility of letting his son and father-in-law down seemed to be making him edgy and unhappy. Someone had once accused her of insensitivity and cruelty to small furry creatures. Not that Tillie, even with his trusting blue eyes, was a small furry creature. All the same . . .
Sighing, she turned back and said, “I have to drive uptown. Why don’t you let me drop you near the Maintenon? You could forget about cribbage for an hour, eat a good dinner, and then go in fresh and win.”
Tillie’s cherubic face brightened. “Great. And that’ll give me time to tell you how the crib works. Each person is dealt six cards, see, and then you both contribute two to the crib, face down, and the dealer gets to count those when you’ve finished playing the first four and—”
Tillie’s penchant for detail was an asset when investigating murder. As pure conversation, it could border on the tedious.
Resigned, Sigrid followed him from the office.
Commander T.J. Dixon, United States Navy, shucked her dark blue-black uniform with its neat gold stripes, crisp white shirt and dark blue tie and somewhat absent-mindedly considered what to wear that night. One could probably dress as for a civilian business event; on the other hand, the cribbage tournament was being held at the elegant Hotel Maintenon and surely the eight P.M. opening session argued for a dressier formality?
The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald) Page 1