“Anyhow, after she left, Mr. Flythe—who’s not exactly Homely Henry either, is he?—he reviewed the official rules and then we started to play. I had fantastic luck: three double-double runs in a row! We’d finished our first game and my opponent was shuffling when I glanced down the table and saw that Commander Dixon had pushed her chair back and was looking under the table as if she’d dropped something. That’s precisely when the bomb went off. After that, it was merry hell for a few minutes.”
All laughter had faded from Jill Gill’s plump face. “I’m not a medical doctor, but I’ve had first aid training, of course. There were a pediatrician and a chiropractor in the room. We did what we could until the ambulances came—made a tourniquet for Commander Dixon’s arm, lifted the table off that police detective, put a pressure bandage on another man’s head—but those two at the very end of the table, Professor Sutton and Mr. Wolferman—they must have died almost immediately. It was hours before the ringing in my ears went away.”
She took a deep breath. “Anyhow, your people arrived soon after, so you know the rest.”
“Thanks, Jill,” said Sigrid. “Too bad you didn’t get here when the doors opened. You might have noticed someone changing the boards at your table.”
Sigrid had known Jill Gill long enough to discount her disclaimers about her powers of observation. She had learned, to her occasional discomfort, that very little went on in front of those absurd glasses that the scientist didn’t notice.
“I’ve never been early for anything in my entire life,” Jill Gill said regretfully.
A small hand bell tinkled at the front of the room to signal the beginning of a new round and she stood reluctantly. “Better go now. Why don’t you and Oscar come for dinner next week?”
“You’re going to be late for your next deal,” Sigrid said.
Dr. Gill laughed. “You don’t get out of it that easily. I’ll call Oscar tonight. “
She trotted away on bright red high heels, her long wool skirt twirling around ankles surprisingly trim for such a plump woman.
Elaine Albee promptly assumed her most professional attitude and tried to look as if she hadn’t found Dr. Gill personally interesting as she summarized for the lieutenant the statements she and Jim Lowry had collected in the last few hours.
The smudged seating chart lay on the table before them. Albee had highlighted with a yellow marker the names of everyone questioned thus far.
A contestant near the end of Table 5, on the opposite side from Jill Gill, had noticed that Tillie had bent down under the table immediately before the explosion.
“That’s probably what kept Tillie from being killed outright,” Albee speculated. “The table was between him and the bomb when it went off.”
So far, no one seemed to have seen the cribbage boards switched.
They had located Haines Froelick’s opponent, though, a young electrician who spoke of the older man’s politeness and told the detectives that nothing in Mr. Froelick’s demeanor had indicated nervousness or jumpy anticipation. The electrician was of the impression that Mr. Froelick had not immediately realized his cousin’s proximity to the blast, but admitted that once the explosion occurred, he hadn’t noticed Mr. Froelick again. Everything was too chaotic.
Val Sutton’s opponent, a Japanese businessman named Eisaku Okawara, offered similar testimony when Jim Lowry brought him over to the witness table between rounds. Mr. Okawara spoke excellent English and conscientiously tried to answer their questions, but confessed that occidental facial nuances were a mystery to him. Mrs. Sutton had played skillfully; she had been friendly and smiling. When the blast occurred, she had immediately jumped to her feet and cried, “John!”
Mr. Okawara thought she had rushed toward the back of the room. He himself had prudently made for the main doors and was standing just inside when Madame Ronay and other hotel staff arrived. There had been much screaming and confusion. Madame Ronay had tripped over the little gilt tripod that held the seating chart. Busboys had rushed past, trampling it beneath their feet as they hurried with fire extinguishers to put out the flames. Then had come the firemen, police, and medical personnel, and Mr. Okawara had slipped away to his room on the sixth floor without seeing Mrs. Sutton again.
He had been distressed this morning to read in the papers that her husband was one of those killed in the blast.
They let him return to his cards. In the lull, Sigrid caught the eye of one of the busboys and requested a glass of water.
“I could bring you juice, coffee, or tea if you’d rather,” offered the slim young black man in a soft Southern voice.
“No, thank you, water’s all I want,” she said, and when he returned with it, she asked, “Were you on duty here last night?”
“Yes, ma’am. In fact, I was the one that put out the fire. I was just coming in the door when it happened and as soon as I saw the smoke, I grabbed the fire extinguisher there beside the door and ran right over.”
“That was quick thinking.”
“Well, it was just a small fire,” the youth said modestly. Sigrid shook a tablet from the bottle in her pocket, washed it down with the water, and returned the glass to the young black man. “Before they started playing last night, did you see anyone moving the cribbage boards at Table 5? Picking them up or anything?”
“No, ma’am. They already asked us that. Most folks were up at the front or standing ’round the hospitality table eating and drinking. ’Course, I wasn’t watching every minute because I had to take out dirty glasses and bring in clean ones, so I guess somebody could have. I didn’t see ’em though.”
Sigrid thanked him again for her water and turned back to answer a question from Jim Lowry. Beyond his shoulder, she saw Lieutenant Knight re-enter the Bontemps Room, closely followed by Molly Baldwin. The assistant manager looked exhausted and Sigrid decided she’d settle the point Jill Gill had raised and then let the girl go home before she fell asleep on her feet.
As the busboy moved away, he remembered how old George had praised him for acting so quickly and how the boss lady would likely give him a bonus. And he remembered something else as well. He turned back, but that police lady was already busy with other people. Besides, he thought, it was such a little thing. She probably already knew about it anyhow.
He hesitated and the room steward appeared at his shoulder. “Over there, Johnson. Someone’s spilled a cup of coffee. Step to it!”
“Yessir, Mr. George,” he said smartly and hurried off.
CHAPTER 12
Only a few minutes had passed since Sigrid swallowed the pain tablet, but already she could feel its effect. The ache in her arm hadn’t yet begun to diminish, but at least it had stopped building. In the meantime, she tried to ignore her discomfort and listen intelligently while Lieutenant Knight perched on the edge of a gilt and purple silk chair and described his visit to the graphic studio down in the hotel’s lower levels.
It was near the secretarial pool, he reported, that service area provided as a courtesy for business travelers who required light typing or access to a computer terminal or a fax machine during their stays in the city; just down the hall and around a corner from the barber shop and valet services.
“The calligrapher, a Mr. Gustaffason, says they finished matting the seating chart Wednesday afternoon. It sat on that tripod-easel doodad at the front of their studio all evening and was sent upstairs around eleven-thirty Thursday morning. The studio isn’t locked and this Gustaffason seems like a popular, looseygoosey character, so there’s probably a steady stream of people in and out. Dozens could have seen it.”
It was no more than she expected, Sigrid told him, and beckoned to Molly Baldwin, who stood wearily before one of the more exuberant murals. She looked as if she longed to step inside its meadowed depths and curl up on the grass beside one of those fat sheep around whom giddy shepherdesses frolicked with their serenading swains.
“I know you’re tired,” Sigrid told her, “so I won’t keep you muc
h longer. I forgot to ask you before: do you know Commander Dixon?”
The girl looked at them stupidly.
“The female naval officer who sat next to Professor Sutton,” prompted Lieutenant Knight helpfully.
“Oh.” Her voice was flat. “Sorry. My mind’s almost quit functioning. No, I thought I told you. I didn’t know any of the contestants. Unless it was like Professor Sutton; somebody I’d met in the course of my work and whose name didn’t register. I don’t remember meeting her here, though. Or Mr. Wolferman or that policeman or any of the others either.”
“One of the players thought that Commander Dixon kept looking at you last evening as if she knew you,” said Sigrid.
“Really?”
“It was during Mr. Flythe’s discussion of the game rules after everyone was seated.”
The girl’s fingers began to twine around the same brown curl as she struggled to remember where she had been at that point. “I must have been on the far side of the room then, going over arrangements with the room steward. There were dozens of people between us. Are you sure your witness wasn’t mistaken?”
“She could have been,” Sigrid conceded. “Or perhaps Commander Dixon was interested in the steward or another of your people. From the angle, though, it would almost have to be someone standing up, wouldn’t it?”
The girl shrugged listlessly and Sigrid accepted the inevitable. “That will be all for now, Ms. Baldwin. Thank you for your help today. We’ll probably talk again another time.”
“You’re sure there’s nothing else I can do right now? I don’t mind, Lieutenant. Really I don’t.”
Even as she spoke, she had to stifle an involuntary yawn.
“I’m sure,” said Sigrid.
As Molly Baldwin left them, Lieutenant Knight looked at Sigrid critically. “Didn’t you just get out of a hospital this morning?”
Sigrid nodded stiffly.
“Then shouldn’t you take a break? If you don’t mind me saying, you look like you’re pushing the edge.”
“I’m quite all right,” she told him. But she did stand to flex her neck and shoulders and, as long as she was up, she decided to call Metro Medical and check on Tillie’s condition.
The telephone was at the end of the hall in a secluded alcove.
Awkwardly clutching the phone with her wounded hand, she inserted coins and punched out the number she had hastily scrawled on a scrap of paper that morning. The hospital switchboard passed her from one extension to another until at last she was plugged in to the intensive care waiting room and heard Marian Tildon’s voice on the other end of the wire.
Tillie’s wife sounded tired but buoyant with relief. “You caught me on my way home for a few hours’ sleep,” she told Sigrid. “Oh Lieutenant, it’s wonderful! Charles is out of the coma! He said my name. He knew who I was!”
Until that moment Sigrid had not realized how worried she had been about Tillie. Hearing Marian’s report, she felt some of the day’s tension drain away.
Up in Zachary Wolferman’s comfortable Central Park apartment, Haines Froelick was succumbing to the housekeeper’s care. A hot cup of tea and then straight to bed had been Emily’s motherly decree.
Outside the tall narrow windows, October seemed poised to jump from Indian summer to true autumn. Curtains of rain swooped across the park below and sheeted the gold and scarlet leaves with cold water.
It had been a horrid day, Mr. Froelick thought, splashing in and out of the limousine in the rain, making arrangements for Zachary’s body. The conference with the undertaker and another later with the minister, the notices to the papers, and the telephone that never stopped ringing. Fortunately, good old Emily had sensibly suggested that he ask Maritime National to send someone up and now a capable young lady, a Miss Vaughan, sat in Zachary’s study and listened to their friends’ condolences and courteously promised to relay them to Mr. Froelick.
Then after lunch had come those two awful police detectives in their damp wool jackets with so many questions: Who hated Zachary? Who wanted him dead? Whom had he recognized at the Maintenon last night? And then their interest in his photography: What sort of cameras did he own and didn’t one almost need a degree in chemistry to develop one’s own film? And each of his answers had been greeted with such skepticism . . .
Now he lay awake in the guest bedroom. Emily had tearfully offered to put fresh linens on Zachary’s bed, but he wasn’t quite ready for that yet.
It would come, of course, thought Mr. Froelick. Zachary had made no secret of his will. This was all his now. Zachary’s apartment, his housekeeper, his chauffeur, his limousine, his villa in Florence, his chalet in Switzerland, his money. Zachary had been more than generous, but accepting his generosity had sometimes chafed.
No more of that. No more worrying and watching the dwindling buying power of his own tiny trusts.
No more long walks with the man who’d been a brother to him, though. No one to share childhood memories or match wits with over a cribbage board either.
He sighed and buried his head in the lavender-scented pillow and as he fell asleep, he told himself philosophically that every silver cloud had a dark lining.
On the Upper West Side, in an apartment she shared with two other young women, Molly Baldwin hung up the telephone and finished toweling her short brown hair. She’d gotten soaked in the downpour, but that was the least of her worries. She had learned nothing from the call and would probably never learn anything if she didn’t go over and identify herself.
But if she did that—
What would Ted Flythe say? He might not make an issue out of it, but Madame Ronay would. If La Reine found out, she would probably fire her and then it would all have been for nothing and how could she stay in New York?
On the other hand, how could she explain? Much less justify?
Almost whimpering with indecision, Molly Baldwin did what she’d been doing for most of her twenty-three years when faced with a dilemma: she crawled into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
The parade of cribbage-playing witnesses continued through the afternoon in the Bontemps Room. Two more besides Jill Gill had noticed Commander Dixon’s wandering attention during Flythe’s lecture on cribbage rules. The room steward, Raymond George, was questioned at length, but denied knowing her.
Vassily Ivanovich, however, was quite another matter. Not only did he admit knowing Commander Dixon when they spoke to him during a break in the competition, he insisted upon it. “Since T.J. Dixon is a little girl I am knowing her.”
“Would you like an interpreter or someone from your legation here?” they asked.
The big Russian was scornful. Did they doubt his linguistic abilities? “Me, I speak very good the English,” he informed them proudly.
Ivanovich was the embodiment of the Russian Bear: big, burly, and expansive. He had small bright blue eyes, short gray hair, and a flat, florid face. He wore American style clothes—a dark tweed sports jacket, a green wool shirt buttoned to the neck, no tie, and brown corduroy pants—but something about their fit gave them a vaguely Slavic cast.
“Her papa and I are good friends from the war. We are all Navy together,” he said, including Alan Knight in his statement. “You are working with her, Lieutenant Knight?”
“Not exactly with her,” Knight hedged.
“ONI?” Ivanovich guessed shrewdly, revealing an unexpected familiarity with the Office of Naval Intelligence.
For a moment, various possibilities seemed to give him pause, then he shrugged broadly. “What the hell? My people know and your people know we are friends. They know we do not talk secrets. Me, I have no secrets.”
In heavily accented English, Vassily Ivanovich described how he had met Commander Dixon’s father during World War II.
“He is on minesweeper in the North Atlantic; I am on little ship blown up by German U-boat. They stop for us.”
Chief Dixon had shared his quarters, his tobacco, and his cribbage deck with the young Russian
sailor; and by the time the minesweeper reached Murmansk, they were warm friends. A chance meeting a few months later in Reykjavik, followed by a riotous shore leave of mythic proportions in New York, sealed the friendship in blood.
Not to mention scotch and vodka, gin and slivovitz, and a few margaritas that got mixed in by mistake.
They had somehow managed to keep in touch through the war years, but the various thaws and freezes of postwar Soviet-American relations eventually made their friendship impractical, if not dangerous. After 1948, they ceased to correspond.
Ivanovich pulled out a plump plastic folder of photographs and showed them the son who was an agricultural minister near Minsk and the son who was a rising member in the Party. That was the one who had pulled a string or two to get his father attached to a Soviet trade delegation so that the long-retired Ivanovich could enjoy one last American fling.
There were pictures of his deceased wife, the sons’ wives, himself surrounded by four baby-bear grandchildren, and, stuck between several family pictures, one of his old friend Dixon with his pretty little daughter on his lap—Commander T.J. Dixon at the tender age of two.
Sigrid was inexpressibly touched by the child’s beauty, knowing that the small left arm which lay so confidently on her father’s might soon be lost.
“So,” Vassily Ivanovich was saying, “last winter, before I come to America, I write to my old comrade and after many weeks, little T.J. writes back he is dead twenty-six years in boiler explosion, but she is commander now and also in New York. We meet, we talk about what hell-raisers are her papa and me when we young. She is like daughter to me here and she is also very good cribbage player. One day each week we take lunch together and we play. Just like in old days with her papa.”
The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald) Page 10