The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  She stood before her open closet, barefooted, in an ice-blue satin teddy—once past boot camp, female personnel seldom followed the Navy’s advice on lingerie, and Commander Dixon had a decidedly feminine streak. At forty, her hair was prematurely white, but the rest of her body was that of a younger woman. Every muscle was firm, every curve allured, nothing sagged.

  While part of her mind weighed a dark red gown with a square neckline against a rich royal blue sari, the other part puzzled over the strange message that had been left on her answering machine.

  It was the first communication with her only relative since their bitter quarrel last year, and Commander Dixon had played the message over several times, analytically dissecting the girl’s words as thoroughly as any arcane code.

  “Teejy? It’s me.” The use of that childhood name argued a willingness to let bygones be bygones, didn’t it? “I won’t tell you where I am or what I’m doing right now . . .” Beneath her young cousin’s infuriatingly complaisant surface lurked a surprising amount of stubborn pride, Commander Dixon had discovered. This was another example. “. . . but we may run into each other soon.” Did that mean the girl planned to come to New York or did she think T.J. was due to visit Florida? “Anyhow, if we do, please pretend you don’t know me. It’s very important. I’ll explain soon, okay?”

  It was not okay, thought Commander Dixon and had immediately dialed the area code for Miami. After two rings, there was a series of familiar electronic tones and a pleasant mechanical voice said, “We’re sorry. The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please consult your—”

  Commander Dixon had hung up and replayed her cousin’s message.

  “Please pretend you don’t know me.”

  There was a trace of urgency in the request, but she didn’t sound upset or in trouble. In fact, thought Commander Dixon, for the first time the girl actually sounded as if she might have found a little backbone this past year.

  Maybe she was finally growing up.

  Pleased with that thought, the commander turned back to her closet. The sari was more flattering, she decided at last, but the gauzy blue stole had a tendency to slip. It might prove a distraction, and Commander T.J. Dixon was too competitive to let herself be handicapped by feminine vanity.

  “—so that by 1969, the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, was in disarray and ready for takeover by student activists who were more radical than the moderate pacifists or even the Maoists. They took their name from a line in Bob Dylan’s song, Subterranean Homesick Blues; you know, that bit about not needing a weatherman to know how the wind blows. The Weathermen aimed to bring the war home to Americans and graphically demonstrate what it was like to live with violence and terrorism in their own streets.”

  John Sutton touched the pause button on his tape recorder and sat back in his desk chair to focus his memory on those tumultuous and exhilarating days.

  In 1969, he had been a graduate student at McClellan State, one of the battlegrounds for the Weathermen. Now he was a professor of history at Vanderlyn College, a branch of the New York City University system, and, to his own bemusement, teaching a course on the Sixties and Seventies to kids who were in first or second grade when Richard Nixon was forced out of the White House.

  The course was immensely popular and so was John Sutton. A local television station’s evening news program had even featured him on one of their pop culture segments, belaboring the irony of a man just turning forty already teaching events in his own personal life as formal history.

  Sutton pressed the record button. “The typical Weathermen were white, middle to upper-middle class, well educated, and in revolt against materialistic values. They tended to be idealistic and impatient with the very real, but very slow, gains the peace movement was making. Privileged themselves, they were determined to extend those privileges to blacks, Hispanics, and the ghetto poor. These were terrific goals and I’m not knocking them. Hell! That’s why I joined SDS in the first place. But the Weathermen—” John Sutton’s voice became wry.

  “Many of the far-left leaders were subconsciously aping their own Establishment parents in thinking they knew what was best for the cause. They could be just as spoiled and willful, accustomed to getting their own way, and they didn’t quite understand why the rest of us wouldn’t fall right in behind their banners. And let’s be blunt: not all radicals were in the movement for purely altruistic reasons. Some were grooving on the heady excitement of power for its own sake, for the thrill of being outside the law. They arbitrarily decided the student movement would either become confrontational and violent or it would cease to exist.

  “In the fall of 1969, they destroyed all the SDS records and went underground. The bombings that followed that winter and—”

  The door of Sutton’s study swung open. “Come on, John,” scolded Val Sutton. “Shake a leg or we’re going to be late.”

  “Mm?” He switched off the tape recorder and peered at his watch. “Val? Do you remember Fred Hamilton and Brooks Ann Farr?”

  “Personally or from afar?” she asked, pushing back her chocolate brown hair so that she could fit a gold earring into her left earlobe.

  “Either,” he said, admiring the graceful swing of her hair.

  It was thick and lustrous and absolutely straight. Until recently, she’d worn it shoulder length and combed away from her thin, catlike face, but the previous day she’d come home with a blunt cut that just brushed level with the line of her chin and half-veiled her face when her head tilted forward. He still wasn’t used to the alluring novelty.

  Val couldn’t resist a small bit of preening. Clavdia’s charged the earth for a new styling session but getting one’s husband to look at one like that after ten years of marriage was worth every dime.

  “No, I didn’t know McClellan’s most-wanted alumni personally,” she told him affectionately. “You were the one in SDS, love, not me. I only marched or sat-in or sang. But I do remember them. Fred was dark and brooding, a smoldering sexpot; Brooks Ann was a lumpy sophomore, dreadful acne, and lank brown hair that always looked like she hadn’t rinsed out all the shampoo. The original dishwater blonde. Meow.”

  Val Sutton leaned across the desk and straightened her husband’s tie. “Come on, love. Mrs. Herlbut’s already in with the kids and we’ve really got to go. Now.”

  He smiled and allowed himself to be coaxed from the chair. “I never knew you thought Fred Hamilton was sexy.”

  “Ravishing,” she assured him as she handed him his jacket from the hall stand and slipped on her own, an intricately embroidered Chinese import of heavy gold satin. “If they hadn’t gone underground when they did—”

  “You’d have signed up for his bomb-making course?”

  Their laughter muted as they abruptly remembered the bombs Fred Hamilton and his followers had planted that violent winter of 1970. The four children who were killed outright, the woman left blind, the man who’d eventually died after two years in a coma.

  “Do you suppose they’ll ever surface?” Val asked as John tried to flag a taxi in front of their Greenwich Village apartment.

  “It’s odd you should ask that,” he frowned.

  Val looked at him questioningly, but he was distracted by the balky door on the battered yellow cab that slid to a stop at the curb; and once they were both settled inside, their thoughts turned to the cribbage tournament ahead.

  “Hotel Maintenon,” Sutton told the cabbie, then reached for his wife with an exaggerated leer. She fluttered her eyelashes at him and slipped closer; but when his hand began to wander too freely, she clasped it firmly and said, “Now pay attention, class: how many points for three sixes and a pair of threes?”

  CHAPTER 2

  After a comfortable dinner at their club, Zachary Wolferman and his cousin, Haines Froelick, entered Mr. Wolferman’s limousine for the short ride to the Maintenon.

  Mr. Froelick’s mother had died shortly before he finished his first year at prep school and his au
nt, Mr. Wolferman’s mother, had instructed the boy to look upon her thenceforward as his own mother.

  Some women have such generous hearts that each new demand merely enlarges their capacity for love. Fitting a second child into her crowded social calendar meant a halving of Mrs. Wolferman’s maternal devotion, but half of almost nothing made little difference to seven-year-old Zachary.

  He was so pleased to acquire a live-in chum for the summer holidays that he barely noticed any diminution of his busy mother’s affection. Lacking other siblings, the two boys grew up as close as brothers.

  Mr. Wolferman, of course, had filled his appointed slot at Maritime National; Mr. Froelick, with a modest income from various family trusts and a disinclination for hard work, had devoted his life to photography and assorted charitable works. Both had remained bachelors.

  They played cribbage with a zest unabated since old Augustus taught them the game the summer they were ten, and they began keeping a cumulative score their thirtieth summer. Mr. Froelick had enjoyed a run of luck lately so the tally currently stood at 8,132 to 8,105, but Mr. Wolferman had placed higher in last year’s tournament, making one of the last thirty-six finalists before being eliminated by a pharmacist.

  “By a pharmacist from somewhere in Brooklyn,” he was reminiscing to his cousin Haines. “Flatlands? Flatbush? Flat­something. Interesting chap. He was the reason I took that flyer in Westmachter Pharmaceuticals.”

  “I believe I read that the trial begins next month,” commented Mr. Froelick, still piqued because he’d been eliminated in the fourth round of play last year after being dealt three nineteen­point hands in a row.

  There was silence in the limousine.

  “It wasn’t his fault that Westmachter’s quality control was so abominable,” Mr. Wolferman said defensively. “They were doing quite well until that batch of tainted pills.”

  The gleaming limo pulled up at the East Forty-seventh Street entrance to the Hotel Maintenon.

  “You needn’t bother about later, Willis,” said Mr. Wolferman. “Mr. Haines and I will take a cab.”

  He knew how much his cousin hated taxis. However, if one planned to venture among common people, one might as well make a thorough job of it. Haines could jolly well lump it, he thought, nodding graciously to the uniformed doorman who held the polished glass slab open for them.

  Lucienne Ronay would have been insulted had she known that Mr. Wolferman entered her establishment with a vague expectation of someone about to go slumming. Of her trio of beautifully appointed hotels, the Maintenon was Madame Ronay’s favorite, the central jewel in the necklace of properties she had inherited from her late husband.

  On the other hand, she shared something of Mr. Wolferman’s ambivalence toward the cribbage tournament booked into her d’Aubigné Room this weekend. It was not the Maintenon’s usual cup of souchong, but the room had been available, Graphic Games had not quibbled about the cost, and Lucienne Ronay was as pragmatic as any Frenchwoman when it came down to dollars and francs on her balance sheets.

  From her observation post on the second-floor balcony, she viewed the main entrance and lobby and could not resist comment as tournament players began to straggle up the wide marble staircase.

  “We might wish for more tweeds and silks,” she told Molly Baldwin, one of her trainee assistants, “but polyester will buy our caviar this weekend, ma petite.”

  Her diamond and emerald earrings sparkled against the smooth line of her cheek as she glanced down complacently at the vibrant green of her silk taffeta. There was a lush Elizabethan feel to the gown. The tight bodice and shockingly low neckline made the most of her small waist and magnificent bosom, while the long full sleeves restored a semblance of modesty.

  Molly Baldwin, dressed in a simple dark blue sleeveless sheath with crystal earrings, felt like a drab little mouse by comparison.

  Of course, Lucienne Ronay’s extravagant clothes and lavish jewels were part of her glamorous public persona. Her guests expected it and would indeed have felt slightly cheated if Madame Ronay suddenly began to dress like a denizen of Wall Street. Besides, gray flannel would ill-become someone so very blonde, so generously proportioned, who sprinkled even business conversations with intimate French phrases and who moved in a mist of fragrance created just for her by an exclusive parfumeur.

  Skillful makeup widened her hazel eyes and lent an illusion of high cheekbones to a face that was basically round and might even have been ordinary had it not been for the personality that animated it. Makeup also hid any trace of wrinkles, even though Madame Ronay occasionally bemoaned the fact that she was only a year or so away from fifty.

  Fifty! Molly Baldwin thought despairingly. She would gladly have doubled her own twenty-three years if she thought there was a chance that age would leave her with La Reine’s poise and beauty.

  Misinterpreting Molly’s sigh, Madame Ronay smiled indulgently. “Nervous, cherie? Is not everything as the so handsome Mr. Flythe has ordered?”

  Her tone was light, but the question was serious. And she expected a positive answer.

  Coordinating the cribbage tournament was Molly’s first solo assignment at the Maintenon. She wished it had been something else, but assistant manager trainees did not question La Reine’s assignments. There had been a thousand details to oversee: the hospitality tables, the coolers of wine, the urns of coffee, trays of hors d’oeuvres, the fresh flowers, the scheduling of waiters and busboys for the weekend, the sound system, the proper number of linen-covered tables, sufficient chairs—the list seemed endless.

  Fortunately, Theodore Flythe of Graphic Games had proved easy to work with (Madame was right: he was extremely handsome); but even if he’d been fussy and demanding, Molly would have risked displeasing him sooner than Madame Ronay, who possessed a regal intolerance for incompetence.

  “No,” she told her employer, looking down at the players who were now streaming through the lobby. “Everything seems to have fallen into place. It’s always amazing that it does.”

  “Out of so much chaos, order?” The older woman nodded serenely. She had spent enormous amounts of time and money in assembling and training her staff, and when it did not move like well-oiled machinery, the balky cog soon found itself out on the street.

  Molly Baldwin had learned this very quickly. She had also learned that what Madame Ronay didn’t know couldn’t be used against anyone. Especially since the only two times the imperturbable Mr. Flythe had been annoyed were both her fault.

  The Maintenon provided a lavish setting, but Graphic Games saw to the actual tournament equipment: the boards, the playing cards, and the scoring sheets. Since the tournament was also an advertising ploy, three long display cases along the wide hall outside the d’Aubigné Room were filled with samples of Graphic Games products. There were exquisitely detailed chess sets, board games that could be stored on one’s bookshelves and then unfolded into large intricate playing surfaces, old familiars like Chinese checkers whose marbles were subtly colored metamorphic rocks and quartzites, and, of course, each case featured one of Graphic Games’ beautiful cherry cribbage boards.

  Molly had ordered the cases brought up from storage. They were beveled glass boxes on mahogany legs, banded in brass, and the maids had polished them to the gleam of burnished gold and crystal. One of the seamstresses had produced some dark blue velvet that made an effective backdrop for the game pieces and Mr. Flythe had arranged everything to his satisfaction on Thursday morning.

  On Thursday afternoon, it was discovered that one of the cribbage boards was missing.

  Molly Baldwin was stricken. She hadn’t thought to lock the cases and, conscious of her guilt, she listened to a mild lecture by Mr. Flythe and came away shocked. It had not previously registered that the hand-enameled chess set was cast in solid silver, nor that a Chinese checkers game could cost several hundred dollars. Chastened, she had hurriedly located keys to the cases, but when she returned to lock the barn doors, she found Mr. Flythe even more vexed th
an previously.

  “Miss Baldwin, I’m certain I made it clear that the pairings were not to be posted until immediately before the room opened tomorrow night,” he’d fumed.

  The tournament was limited to five hundred players, and those names had been fed into a computer at Graphic Games for random pairing. Mr. Flythe retained a copy of the print-out and had given one to Molly, who had passed it on to the Maintenon’s visual arts man. He, in turn, had drawn a seating diagram, mounted both the pairing list and diagram on velvet-covered tagboard, and set the board upon a delicate brass display easel just inside the ballroom sometime on Thursday.

  Molly vaguely recalled Mr. Flythe’s original admonitions, but she really didn’t understand his insistence on such secrecy and said so. Besides, she added reasonably, the list was inside the ballroom, not out in the public areas where any passerby might read it. None of the staff could be interested in who played whom and at which table—staff members and their families were strictly barred from the tournament—so surely no harm was done?

  Mr. Flythe had gazed upon her troubled blue eyes and earnest young face and his wrath had melted. Mr. Flythe was at least fifteen years older than Miss Baldwin, but he had been with Graphic Games less than a year and this was his first solo tournament, too—although he had no intention of letting Miss Baldwin know that.

  Instead, he had raked his dark beard into a neat point, smiled at Miss Baldwin and invited her to dinner.

  Now, as Lucienne Ronay swept along the upper hall for a final inspection of the d’Aubigné Room, Molly followed like a nervous shadow. La Reine would flit around the room to twitch a tablecloth into smoother drapes or position a pink satin matchbook stamped with the Maintenon’ s silver crest into the exact center of an ashtray, but with a little luck that was all she would find to fault Miss Baldwin with tonight.

  CHAPTER 3

  Like the Cristal Galerie, the d’Aubigné Room was clearly designed and furnished by someone enamored of the decorative arts which had flourished under the Bourbons. Proto-baroque motifs first seen under Henry IV were indiscriminately mixed with the rocaille of Louis XVI. Florid paintings of Greek gods and goddesses en famille alternated with mirrored panels, and both were framed by fanciful scrolls, wreaths and shells carved of gilded plaster. Nymphs in plaster relief sported chastely on the coved ceiling amid dazzling chandeliers.