The Right Jack

by Margaret Maron

  "Sorry, guys," she said shakily. "I keep thinking I'm cried out and then something sets me off again."

  Nauman shoved his chair closer to hers and held out her forgotten cup of tea.

  She took a deep swallow. "Don't you want more coffee, Sigrid? I'm sure they've probably made a fresh pot by now."

  "No, thank you. Describe Fred Hamilton, please." Her words were blunt and businesslike.

  "Yes, of course. Let's see… about six feet tall, dark hair that he wore shoulder-length, muscular build. The sexiest eyes I've ever seen. I was teasing John about that-was it just last night? God! It seems so long ago."

  Again her eyes pooled and Sigrid felt such a rush of compassion that she was almost paralyzed. "You and your husband discussed Hamilton last night? Who brought him up? You or he?"

  "He did," Val replied, puzzled by her harsh tone. "He asked if I remembered Fred and I said yes, he was a smolderings expot. We were kidding about it; you know how it is."

  Only as an outside observer did Sigrid know that teasing intimacy between wife and husband. She nodded stiffly.

  "We were on our way out to the Maintenon while we were talking and I asked John if he thought Fred and Brooks Ann would ever turn themselves in-so many have over the years, you know-and John…"

  She frowned as she remembered. "He said that it was odd I should ask or something like that and then a cab stopped for us and we wound up talking about other things."

  "But the way he said it?" Sigrid probed.

  Val nodded her sleek brown head. "The way he said it was as if he'd heard something about Fred recently."

  Sigrid leaned back in the deep leather chair. "Val, I asked you before but I want you to think again very carefully. Did you converse with Ted Flythe last night?"

  "No, why?"

  Sigrid made a noncommittal gesture and Val looked to Nauman for enlightenment.

  He shrugged. "I suppose she wants to know if he reminded you of anybody besides that Tris Yorke."

  "Reminded? You think Ted Flythe is Fred Hamilton?" They could almost see her mind sorting and comparing. "They're both the same height and coloring," she mused. "Flythe has a beard and Fred was always clean-shaven with much longer hair."

  "You said Hamilton had sexy eyes," said Sigrid. "One of my officers said the same about Flythe's."

  "They're similar," Val admited, "but I don't think he's Fred."

  "He'd be the right age," said Nauman, playing devil's advocate. "Early forties, I'd put him."

  "No," Val said, with conviction. "I know it's been ages, but even if Flythe is Fred, why would he come back and kill John after all this time? They had an ideological split, not a blood feud."

  " Hamilton is still wanted by the FBI," Sigrid told her. "The amnesty program covered draft evaders, not murderers. Even if the deaths of those children were unpremeditated, it's still manslaughter.

  There's no statute of limitations to run out. Your husband might be one of the few who could definitely identify him."

  "But I knew Fred, too. Why wasn't I killed?"

  "You said you were never in SDS. You weren't close to anyone in the group except your husband," Sigrid said. "He might not remember you."

  "People change in sixteen or seventeen years, Val," said Nauman.

  Sigrid flipped through her earlier notes. "Flythe told me he graduated from a now defunct college in Michigan. Carlyle Union. Does that ring any bells?"

  "No."

  "He also said that he's guided several tour groups around Europe. Did you and Professor Sutton ever travel overseas?"

  "Sure, but not with any tour group. We always rented a car and poked around on our own."

  "What about some of the others who were supposed to have been killed in that Red Snow explosion? Could Flythe be any of them?"

  "That I can't help with at all." Val shook her head. "Fred and Brooks Annw ere the only two from McClellan as far as we ever heard. There was a black girl from the Panthers whom we'd met at one of the rallies, but I think her body was definitely identified. Oh, and there was a kid-what was his name? Victor? Victor Earle! He was with Red Snow near the end, but he wasn't in the lake house when the rest were killed. We heard he was in Canada or Sweden."

  "What happened to him?"

  "They couldn't prove he'd taken part in the bombing of that day-care center and draft board in Chicago, but when he came back to the States in the mid-Seventies, they hit him with drug smuggling and possession of illegal arms or something. I'm pretty sure he stood trial and drew a sentence, though he must be out by now." She shrugged helplessly. "I'm sorry. I just can't remember. It was so long ago. Anyhow, Victor couldn't be Flythe. He was much shorter and already starting to lose his hair on top."

  Nevertheless, Sigrid added Victor Earle's name below Tristan Yorke's on her short list. It wouldn't hurt to learn Earle's whereabouts. The odds weren'tf avorable that he was involved; still, he might recognize Flythe or be reminded of someone who looked like Flythe. And it wouldn't hurt to ask for Fred Hamilton's prints either. They had to start somewhere. Sooner or later, surely something would connect if Sutton were the intended target.

  They discussed the possibilities a few minutes more and might have talked even longer except that the door opened abruptly and a sobbing little boy hurled himself across the room and flung himself onto Val's lap. His face was swollen with sleep and his hair was as rumpled as his striped pajamas.

  "I want Daddy to come home," he cried. "I don't want him to be dead. I want Daddy to come home!"

  "So do I, Jacky," his mother murmured brokenly, smoothing his dark hair, so like hers. "So do I."

  The rain had subsided to a cool, fragrant mist when Nauman finally parked on the deserted street outside Sigrid's walled

  ***

  garden. Her bandaged arm made getting out of the low car awkward, so he held the door and offered a strong hand up.

  The streetlight down the block glistened on the wet leaves plastered along the sidewalk and haloed Bauman's silver hair as he unlocked her gate and handed back the key.

  Moved by an inexplicable need, Sigrid touched his face with her fingertips and lifted her lips to his for a long intense moment.

  Naument held her thin body as lightly as if she were a woodland creature that might suddenly turn and flee and looked down into her troubled gray eyes. In the six months that he had known her, it was the first time that she had initiated an embrace.

  "Hello?" he said, pleased and yet puzzled.

  "I-It's-Oh damn it all, Nauman!" she murmured with her face against his shoulder.

  "That's okay, love, I know," he soothed. His fingers tangled in her fine soft hair. "Come home with me, Siga?"

  He felt the negative movement of herh ead. "Want me to stay with you?"

  "No," she said regretfully, and pushed away from him and opened the wooden door with a deep breath. "I don't know what's the matter with me. I'm being totally unprofessional."

  "You're being human," he said gently. "It's allowed."

  "Yes. Well." Her voice was wry as she moved through the gate.

  The moment had passed. Oscar turned to go. At the curb, he glanced back. The door remained open and he could still see her shadowed form silhouetted against the lights of her apartment.

  "Sure you won't change your mind?"

  "No."

  Her low clear voice was again as cool as the damp October night and the garden door clicked shut between them.

  16

  THE wind shifted in the night, pushing the rain clouds out to sea, and dawn brought crystalline blue skies and dryer air. As the sun came up, a clean autumnal freshness blew through the city's glass and stone forests.

  Exhausted physically and emotionally, Sigrid had gone straight to bed the night before, but she slept badly, coming awake between uneasy dreams. Each waking took her longer to slide back under and the bedclothes twisted and tangled around her restless body. She almost never rose early by choice, yet by the time the odor of coffee drifted down the hall to
her room, she had been lying wide-eyed and tense for more than an hour and she wearily kicked back the covers to join Roman over the Sunday Times.

  Since moving in together, their Sunday mornings were usually quiet and companionable with the radio tuned to a classicalm usic station and the luxurious sense of lazy hours stretching ahead free of all responsibilities.

  Armed with coffee, juice, and a plate of jelly doughnuts, Roman would attack the thick newspaper from the end and munch steadily through to the front, pausing occasionally to dab away some powdered sugar and to read aloud a columnist or a comment that annoyed or amused him. He kept notecards beside his plate so he could jot down any stray sentence or quirky fact that struck him as the basis for a magazine article.

  For her part, Sigrid usually bit into a French cruller and began at page one, moved on to the News of the Week in Review, zigged with the book reviews while Roman zagged with the magazine, then skimmed the other sections before diving happily into the puzzle page.

  One could almost chart how long each had been awake by their respective places in the paper and by the number of pastries still in the bakery box on the table.

  Today, however, Sigrid could not concentrate. A dull headache at theb ase of her skull echoed the faint ache in her arm and she felt thick-tongued and clumsy. She phoned the hospital and learned that Tillie was to be moved out of intensive care that afternoon. It was too early for any of the day shift to be at headquarters yet, so she returned restlessly to the newspaper.

  Diagramless crosswords were her favorite puzzles, but even finding a pair of them at the back of the magazine section couldn't divert her this morning.

  What she really wanted, what she truly needed, was a long session in the nearest swimming pool. Since childhood, swimming had been her principal exercise. She was not a team player, jogging bored her, and sweating heavily in a workout class had never appealed; but slicing through water, pushing herself physically until an almost mindless euphoria enfolded her, never failed to release all tensions and leave her mentally refreshed.

  The knife wounds in her arm and hand placed pools off-limits, though, and just knowing she could not swim for several weeks knotted the muscles in her neck even tighter.

  On the radio, the anxious drive of a Bach harpsichord concerto was starting to affect her like fingernails scraped across a blackboard.

  Abruptly, she shoved the paper aside and went and changed into jeans and a bulky blue sweater.

  "I'm going to walk along the river," she told Roman. "If anyone calls, tell them I should be back around noon."

  "If you pass a deli, pick up some water biscuits," Roman said, without looking up from a fascinating article on a recently published Sumerian dictionary which could probably be understood by less than three hundred scholars worldwide. As the Bach concerto tinkled to an end, he began a reminder to himself on a notecard-'Where have all the Sumerians gone?'-and hesitated, his cluttered mind puzzled. Now what made him want to add 'long time passing' to that question?

  ***

  The city of New York began as a seaport and it remains an importantg ateway to the country, but at one time the Hudson was as clogged with traffic as Fifth Avenue at lunchtime. Tugs, ferries, fireboats, garbage scows, excursion boats, police launches, yachts, and barges jostled beneath the bows of huge freighters and sleek-lined passenger ships like the Nieuw Amsterdam, the Liberté, the Michelangelo, the Queen Mary, or the Independence. Weekly listings of arrivals and departures once filled many column inches of newsprint.

  In those days, champagne corks popped while streamers, balloons, and brilliant confetti swirled down from railings to piers. Whistles blew, gangplanks lifted, and the great ships moved majestically out into the channel past flags from every seagoing nation in the world. A hundred busy piers had lined the West Side of Manhattan Island from the Battery up to West Fifty-ninth Street.

  Now those piers which remained lay rotting and abandoned, fenced off with warning signs. The glamour and excitement of travel had shifted to LaGuardia and Kennedy. Instead of days on the Queen Mary, the rich andc lever crisscrossed the Atlantic in hours on the Concorde.

  Sigrid's street led straight down to the river and was lined with commercial buildings whose declining fortunes matched those of the docks. Until recently the elevated West Side Highway had stood here, speeding cars above the trucks that serviced the piers and jammed the intersections of West Street below. Time had taken a toll on it, too. Declared unsafe for vehicular traffic, huge sections of the highway had been pulled down and hauled away, opening up a wide, if not exactly lovely, vista of the docks and terminals of Hoboken and Jersey City across the river.

  City planners had hoped to create Westway here eventually, a massive four-mile landfill with an underground highway and a riverfront esplanade of parks and high-priced residential and commercial buildings. But the project had bogged down in the courts and at present, the area was surprisingly deserted.

  A young black artist sat with watercolors and sketchpad on one of the pilings,a nd an elderly man stood with a dog leash in his hand while his beautiful Labrador frisked along the edge of the pier. Otherwise, except for a handful of joggers and Sunday strollers, Sigrid had the place to herself.

  The wind still blew from the north-northeast and the cool pungent air held a tang of salt mixed with creosote. Taking deep breaths, Sigrid headed upriver into the wind.

  ***

  A hundred blocks north, Pernell Johnson finished his early morning cereal, quietly rinsed his bowl and spoon, and left them in the dishrack to dry as his aunt had taught him. He folded his blanket and sheet and closed up the couch he slept on. It folded with a loud screech of hinged springs and he glanced at the closed door apprehensively. There was still no sound from the bedroom where his aunt slept.

  It would be another hour before Quincy Johnson rose for church. As an assistant housekeeper at the Maintenon, she nol onger had to work Sundays except in short-handed emergencies. Pernell hoped to be gone before she was awake enough to make him promise he'd get home in time for Sunday-night services.

  God'd been mighty good to him lately, he thought, as he eased the front door open and hurried down the dark hall to the elevator, but God knew a man needed a little fun, too, and there was that foxy little gal that took her break the same time he did. A couple of years older and going to college full time, but the way she'd been looking at him all week, he just knew she'd say yes if he asked her to the movies tonight. Movies were all he could afford right now, but soon, very soon, there was going to be a lot more jingle in his jeans, he thought, happily pushing through the outer doors and into the sunlit Harlem street.

  Wrapped in daydreams of innocent lust and avarice, Pernell Johnson loped toward the nearest subway station, unconsciously whistling jazzed-up snatches of the one tune that always bubbled up through layers of rock, soul, and rap whenever life seemed particularly blissful-'Cany ou tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?'

  ***

  In her penthouse atop the Maintenon, Lucienne Ronay sipped the last of her breakfast tisane and placed the fragile porcelain cup back on her bed tray. As if on cue, the maid returned from the pink marble bathroom where she'd filled the tub and sprinkled special bath beads over the warm water.

  With a ritual "Will that be all, ma'am?" she lifted the breakfast tray from Madame Ronay's lap and silently exited.

  Lucienne Ronay stretched luxuriously between the pale silken sheets, then threw back the down-filled comforter and drifted over to the windows that looked out over a breathtaking array of midtown skyscrapers. It was a view of which she never tired and one of the reasons she'd coaxed her husband into letting her take over these hotels he hadn't wanted to bother with.

  Maurice! She still missed his strong presence.

  Since his death, other men had wanted to spoil her, adore her, use her. Occasionally she even let them. How unimportant they were, though. How infantile. Maurice Ronay had bullied her with his power, laughed at her tantrums, then tak
en her breath away with grand romantic gestures. Yet they both knew he had not loved her as much as she loved him.

  She found herself thinking about Leona Helmsley, a rival hotelier with whom she was often, to their mutual displeasure, compared. Leona was wealthier. Was she also more fortunate in her marriage?

  Madame sighed and resolutely put away the self-indulgent tristesse that Maurice's memory always evoked. She was Lucienne Ronay now, La Reine, with a kingdom to guard and administer.

  That explosion Friday night could have been a disaster, she knew. Fortunately, there was no structual damage and once the mess was finally cleared away today, they would know better what would need doing. Perhaps it was time the d'Aubigné Room were completely refurbished anyhow?

  Allowing the cribbage tournament had been a lapse of judgment she would never repeat, but order would soon be restored and thank heavens the public had short memories of where disasters occurred.

  She loosened the ribbons of her negligee, felt the lacy folds slip along her ripe body to the floor, and walked naked to her bath.

  Her complacency would have been shattered had she but known what the day held in store for the Maintenon.

  ***

  Eighteen floors below the penthouse, in the suite Graphic Games had booked for the use of tournament personnel this weekend, Ted Flythe knotted his tie, then leaned across the bed to smack the bare rump that protruded from the tumbled covers.

  "Up and at 'em, sunshine!" he said briskly.

  "What time is it?" came the sleepy mumble.

  "Time to haul ass."

  She rolled over and struggled to lookc ute and pouty and seductive all at the same time. "Come back to bed, Teddy."

  Flythe repressed a sigh. Why did these stupid cows always act as if one night changed all the guidelines?

  He slipped on his jacket and said, "Rule one: Don't call me Teddy. Rule two: No fraternization during business hours. Rule three: When I say haul ass, I expect it to be hauled. Subito!"