The Right Jack

by Margaret Maron

  He looked at her closely. "You don't seem the worse for wear. I thought you'd look like I feel."

  "I don't know why everyone seems to assume I had too much wine last night," Sigrid said stiffly.

  She would have said more, but their driver swerved abruptly with a sharp blast of his horn at a cab that had encroached on his lane. Monday morning rush hour traffic clearly held no terrors for him.

  "Petty Officer Schmitt's my regular driver," said Knight unnecessarily.

  The driver's eyes met Sigrid's in the mirror. "Ma'am." *

  Sigrid gravely returned his nod.

  ***

  headquarters, her first order ot business was to call the hospital. Tillie's conditions continued to improve, they told her.

  Her office was too small to hold everyone working on the Maintenonb ombing, so at 9:06 they carried their coffee cups and doughnuts into one of the conference rooms.

  At 9:07, a fingerprint technician licked powdered sugar from his fingers and said, "I'm afraid I have bad news, Lieutenant. The FBI sent us the prints we requested and Ted Flythe's are nowhere close to Frederick Hamilton's." j

  "Dead end," sighed Lowry. Sigrid was dismayed. "You're certain?"

  "Yes, ma'am. See for yourself." She studied the photographic enlargements of both sets of prints. Small arrows had been superimposed on distinguishing loops and whorls. Sigrid was no expert in this area, but even she could see that none of the comparison points matched. "That's not all," said the fingerprint technician. "I requested the prints of all known Red Snow members and Flythe's don't match any of them. Sorry, ma'am." It was a bitter disappointment. Sigrid's assumption of a Red Snow link between John Sutton and Ted Flythe had infected them all. Consciously or unconsciously, they'd let similar assumptions affect the diligence withw hich they'd looked at other possible suspects that weekend.

  Because Haines Froelick seemed a harmless dilettante. Peters and Eberstadt had only gone through the motions in checking his background; Elaine Albee shared Sigrid's instinctive rejection of Val Sutton as a killer-"Besides, she wasn't anywhere near the Maintenon yesterday," said Albee-and those who'd heard of Molly Baldwin's lies about her relationship to Commander Dixon had marked the girl as an uncomplicated, self-centered airhead, much as Vassily Ivanovich was their idea of a comic Russian.

  "There's nothing comic about an ex-demolition expert with a KGB son," said Sigrid, setting her blue mug on the table with a firm thunk. "Let's stop thinking in stereotypes and start at the beginning again. Comments? Suggestions?"

  "Well, we know how much money Zachary Wolferman left Froelick," said Peters, "but what about Commander Dixon if the girl's her closest relative?"

  "Nothing like six million," drawled Lieutenant Knight, "but I'd say notm uch under six hundred thousand."

  "What?"

  "Damned if I didn't join the wrong service!" Lowry whispered

  "We ran a check on her financial records," Knight said. "As a single officer with twenty-two years in service, she's been putting a right tidy sum in her credit union account every month. She seems to have inherited some rental property in Miami a few years back and there were some stock certificates. One way or another, I'd say at least a good half million."

  Sigrid looked at him suspiciously. "Did you check her financial records before or after you learned of Ivanovich's KBG connection?"

  "After," he admitted, returning her gaze blandly. "Standard operating procedure, Lieutenant."

  "Did you learn anything else you'd care to share with us?" she asked dryly.

  "No, but I was going over my notes just now and if you remember, Ivanovich told us that Molly Baldwin began college as a chemistry major."

  "That's interesting," said Jim Lowry.

  "Chemistry might give her the knowledge to cook up something explosive."

  "I think it's right interesting how Ivanovich stuck it in his testimony," countered Knight. "Sort of spreads the wealth around a little."

  "From each according to his ability?" Sigrid murmured. "Perhaps."

  They continued to pool the scraps of information collected over the weekend, seeking a new pattern. The M.E. had sent the results of Pernell Johnson's autopsy and Sigrid skimmed the report, then passed it around the table.

  "From the bruises on the body, Cohen thinks Johnson was first immobilized with something like a karate chop to his neck and diaphragm, then strangled with his tie."

  "Could the girl have handled that?" Peters asked, ignoring Elaine Albee's glare.

  "He wasn't very big, was he?" said Lowry, reading from the medical report. "Five-six, a hundred and twenty pounds, slender build. You could have taken him, Lainey."

  "I could take you, hotshot, but I'veh ad training. Has Baldwin?"

  "Find out," said Sigrid. "From the top then: We know that Ted Flythe handed Molly Baldwin the pairings sheet with all the players listed sometime in midweek-"

  "Tuesday morning," Knight reminded her.

  "-So if Baldwin didn't read through the names and learn then that her cousin would be playing, she certainly knew by Thursday when the chart came back from hotel's graphics studio and Flythe reprimanded her for leaving it in a public area for anyone to see."

  "Which might have been deliberate on her part," said Detective Eberstadt, disappointed to find no more doughnuts in the box Albee had brought. "More of that spreading the wealth around."

  Sigrid agreed and continued through her notes. "Now a cribbage board was taken from the unlocked display case-a case Baldwin conveniently forgot to lock-the same day. That gives her a day and a half to construct the bomb."

  "Did she have a chance to switch boards?" asked Peters.

  "Absolutely," Albee and Lowry chimed in unison… They paused to grin at each other, then Elaine Albee continued.

  "She was in charge of all the arrangements for the d'Aubigné Room and she was the one who ordered the steward, Mr. George, to use the wrong ashtrays. He'd suggested the plainer ones, but she overrode him; and sure enough, as soon as Lucienne Ronay stepped into the room for a last-minute check, she ordered them changed."

  "George said he tried to tell Baldwin that's what would happen," said Lowry, picking up the narrative, "but she wouldn't listen. You could make a good case for her planning it to happen that way."

  "If she's it, she either switched the boards then," Eberstadt offered, "or counted on it looking like that's when it was done so that everyone had the opportunity."

  "The busboy probably noticed, so he had to be killed, too," Lo wry concluded.

  "Maybe it wasn't just ash stands she spoke to him about," said Alan Knight, contributing his own scenario. "Whati f she told him to meet her in the d'Aubigné Room, perhaps on the pretext of getting started on clearing the room? She doesn't have a real alibi for that time period."

  "That we know of," Sigrid cautioned. "Albee, Lowry, speak to the desk clerks who were on duty yesterday. See if they can confirm her story. Any further thoughts on Molly Baldwin?"

  There were murmured negatives around the conference table.

  "Moving on to Haines Froelick then. Peters, why don't you and Eberstadt give us what you have for him?"

  "Like we said Saturday, he seems harmless enough," said Peters. "Used to living well at the Quill and Shutter Club off Park Avenue. Probably spends more on camera equipment than wine, women, or song, but that could be because he doesn't have as much money as he used to."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah," said Matt Eberstadt, who had consumed three jelly doughnuts and was now virtuously sweetening his coffee with a packet of artificial sugar. "We haven'ta ctually seen his bank statements, but we get the strong impression that money's been a little tight for Froelick these last couple of years-like his income wasn't keeping up with inflation."

  "Whose is?" asked Peters, who had no idea how he and his wife were going to fit a third baby into their budget. "Anyhow, six million will buy a lot of cameras. You've seen Froelick. He's ordinary looking, well-dressed; hundreds like him go in and out of the M
aintenon every day. There's nothing to say he'd be noticed if he wandered through the hall where they were coming and going, getting ready for the tournament. The seating chart was out in the hall by the display cases for anybody to stop and read, right? With the cases unlocked, it wouldn't take more than fifteen seconds to reach in and grab the cribbage board stick it in his pocket and be on his way."

  "Those boards are at least a foot long," Albee objected.

  "Well, up his sleeve then," Peters said impatiently. "Or inside his newspaper." Young though he was, Peters wasn't entirely happy with female colleaguesa nd sometimes his disapproval slipped out. "The point is, a man like Froelick is so ordinary, he's almost invisible."

  "And what about that fishy story of his yesterday?" asked Jim Lowry skeptically. "Wandering around the hotel looking for a dime to bury with his cousin? Sounds like a good excuse to get back in the d'Aubigné Room."

  "It was a schilling," Albee corrected.

  "The coin was found," Sigrid reminded them.

  "Yeah," said Eberstadt, "and the housekeeper started crying when we took it over yesterday afternoon. Claims Wolferman always carried it."

  "Just the same, Froelick could have put it there before he killed Johnson," said Elaine Albee. "Then if anyone came in before he'd lured the busboy there-hey! Maybe that's how he got Johnson there in the first place. Everybody says he was a helpful kid. If some old gentleman came up to him and spun out a story about a lost lucky coin, it would be just like Johnson to stop whatever he was doing and go help look for it."

  "Nobody saw the kid go down theh all, so who's to say Froelick wasn't with him?" mused Peters, trying to compensate for his earlier shortness.

  "We'll ask Dr. Gill if she noticed," said Albee. She knew she was smarter than Peters and seldom took offense at his latent chauvinism.

  "Okay," said Sigrid, overlooking their byplay. "That gives us Froelick and Baldwin as possibilities. Each could have rigged a bomb in order to inherit a cousin's wealth and then killed Johnson yesterday because he saw-or they thought he saw-them do it. Now what about the Russian? Lieutenant Knight?"

  He shrugged. "Obviously we haven't had a chance to talk to Commander Dixon yet, so all we have is Ivanovich's version of their friendship. It jibes, though, with what's been observed: he and Dixon 's father did meet in the Second World War as he described, he does have a picture of Commander Dixon as a baby, and they've maintained frequent contact since he arrived in New York in July.

  "As far as we can ascertain, Ivanovich is unofficially retired. His duties witht he delegation are almost nonexistent and look like a polite fiction to justify what's essentially a nice long capitalistic vacation."

  As Knight paused to drink from a foam coffee cup, Sigrid was inwardly amused to note his drawl almost disappeared when he spoke officially.

  "He may look like a friendly Russian teddy bear," she said, "but without a Red Snow link for Flythe, Vassily Ivanovich is our only sure expert in handling high explosives. Could he have been sent here simply because he once was friendly with Dixon 's father and could get close to her without arousing suspicion?"

  "It's possible," said Knight. ^

  "What about her work?" asked Elaine Albee. "Does Dixon work with secret documents or something? Is anything missing?"

  Knight hesitated. "I can't go into a lot of detail. There's not a lot to go into, actually. Most of her work is in a supervisory capacity and deals with computer-generated-well, call it code work. So there aren't any documents per se."

  "Floppy disks? Software?" asked Lowry.

  "Her people have been working double shifts since Friday night trying to check. If anything's been compromised, they haven't found it. And just for the records, there's never been the slightest question of Commander Dixon's loyalty or integrity. Her people say that if Ivanovich had made the smallest overture no matter how subtle, she'd have reported it immediately.

  "On the other hand," he said with a wry grin, "that's what every spy's friends and co-workers have said."

  "Makes security officers old before their years, I'm told," Sigrid said with such dryness that Jim Lowry began to wonder for the first time if maybe Tillie'd been right about the lieutenant having a sense of humor.

  "The problem with Ivanovich, though," she continued, "is that he's at least six-three and doesn't look like Peters' invisible man. If Ivanovich had been lurking around the Maintenon's display cases Thursday, they certainly would have spotted him."

  Elaine began riffling through her notes.

  "I can't find it right this minute, but someone-oh, here it is. One of the players was ticked off because Ivanovich got up and walked out on their match a few minutes after eleven o'clock."

  "Yes, he followed us out into the hall," Sigrid said.

  "What annoyed the man was that Ivanovich was late getting back after the break. If you're more than five minutes late, it's supposed to be an automatic forfeit; but the guy decided to be nice about it and then, two hands into their match, Ivanovich just split."

  Alan Knight recalled the timetable. "Pernell Johnson was last seen at ten-forty-one. Flythe called for order around ten-fifty-five, so that makes it no earlier than eleven o'clock for Ivanovich to sit down to play." The drawl was back. "Looks like a few cribbage players'll have to be questioned again; see if any of 'em saw what Comrade Ivanovich was doing during that time."

  Albee grinned and said she'd be plumb tickled to do that little old thing.

  "Has anyone spoken to Johnson's aunt?" asked Sigrid sharply. There wasn o criticism in her tone but the others shifted uncomfortably as her slate-colored eyes swept around the table.

  "I'll go,"' volunteered Jim Lowry, somewhat nettled with Elaine for flirting with Knight.

  "That brings us back to Ted Flythe. Even without a Red Snow connection, he's still in the running. He was in the hotel Wednesday morning when the CUNY professors met to discuss their dinner, he had ample opportunity to steal a cribbage board from the display and switch it when the ashtrays were being changed, and so far as we know he doesn't have an alibi for those missing fourteen minutes when Johnson was killed. Somewhere we might find that his path has crossed Sutton's."

  Matt Eberstadt cleared his throat. "Now that everything's up for grabs again, what about the possibility that the bomb was meant for Tillie?"

  "I don't know," Sigrid said doubtfully. "We haven't seen any linkage. On the other hand, if the commander hadn't dropped a peg so that her chair was pushed away from the table and Tilliew as actually under the table when the bomb went off, they probably would have been killed, too."

  "It would certainly help if we knew who the real target was," Albee complained.

  "The right jack," said Knight.

  They looked at him curiously.

  "It's a cribbage term," he explained. "When you're counting up points after the hand's been played, if a jack in your hand matches the suit of the turned card, you get an extra point. It's called the right jack."

  "So all we have to do is find out what suit the turned card is?" Elaine Albee smiled.

  "You got it, honeybunch."

  24

  WHILE Alan Knight used her typewriter to type up his notes from all their interviews that weekend, Sigrid went to Captain McKinnon's office to deliver a progress report. She had never felt entirely at ease with him and had tried in the past to cover it with strict professionalism. Knowing now that he and her father had once been partners, that he must have recognized her the moment she was assigned to him and yet had never spoken of it-all these combined to make her more distant than ever.

  A gruff man who did not lightly suffer fools, McKinnon was usually accessible to his staff. 'If my door's open,' he was wont to say, 'then walk in. If it's closed, stay out.'

  The door was open today and Sigrid paused on the threshold while her boss finished speaking to one of the clerks.

  As the other man left, McKinnon beckoned for Sigrid to enter. "Close the door and have a seat."

  She closed the door, but
remained standing. "This will only take a moment. I wanted to post you on the status of the Maintenon homicides."

  "I understand Detective Tildon's better," he said, sounding equally stiff. He was large and solid and he filled the battered leather chair behind the wide cluttered desk. His big hand absently shuffled papers.

  "Yes, he was moved out of intensive care into a regular room yesterday. I plan to see him after lunch today."

  "And that Navy commander. Too bad about her arm. How's your arm?" he asked, glancing at the loose sling.

  "It feels much better. My doctor's going to take a look at it today."

  "Not rushing things too much, are you?"

  "No, sir."

  The crisp monosyllables seemed to bring him back to the official nature of her visit. "Okay, what do you have?"

  As she succinctly outlined the facts learned, people interviewed, alibis established, and theories they had formed, McKinnon leaned back in his chair and listened with half his attention, while the other half studied her face.

  An odd combination of her parents, he thought. Leif's tall slender build and Anne's coloring, although Anne's eyes were more hazel than gray.

  His thoughts flew back across the years. 'She's such a serious little thing,' he remembered saying as he watched Leif and Anne's baby daughter try to wind the musical toy he'd brought for a Christmas present.

  'It's her eyes,' Anne had laughed. 'They're too big for her face right now. Our baby owlet. She'll grow into them.'

  Anne had knelt gracefully on the carpet to turn the blue knob. As a nursery tune tinkled from the toy radio, the child's large gray eyes caught the glow of the Christmas tree and her solemn little face had beamed in delight.

  "Will that be all, Captain?" Sigrid repeated, and a tinge of color flushed her thin cheeks, as if she were aware of his scrutiny and his memories.

  "No, that's not all," he growled. "Ands it down, dammit!"

  She sat and gazed at him warily.