The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  Roman Tramegra’s age and self-absorption quickly overcame Sigrid’s usual awkwardness in making friends. Indeed, the avuncular manner with which he treated her made his presence comfortable enough so that after her apartment building went co-op, she agreed to a trial lease on a larger apartment which Tramegra, through arcane family connections, had located on the lower West Side.

  When she returned from Europe, Anne had not approved. If Sigrid wished to share an apartment, her mother had hoped it would be with someone romantically interested. “Where’s the future in this?” she scolded when Roman had tactfully retired after dinner to his refurbished maid’s quarters beyond the kitchen. “I know you two are supposed to overlap only in the kitchen, but he’ll always be in and out if you have visitors. It’s worse than a chaperone. It’s like living with your grandmother.”

  “Not really,” Sigrid had smiled, scraping the remains of Roman’s eggplant parmesan into the garbage disposal. “Grandmother’s a good cook.”

  “You know what I mean,” Anne had said darkly.

  But Anne was accustomed to Roman’s presence now, so what could have set her off this morning? Time enough to worry when Anne returned from South America, Sigrid decided.

  With that, she sat up, swung her legs off the bed and was halfway across the room before dizziness overtook her. Sheer willpower got her to the bathroom, where she splashed cold water on her face, but her head was reeling and her legs wobbly before she made it back to bed. Her arm throbbed torturously now and willpower no longer helped.

  Disgusted with herself for being so weak, Sigrid pushed the call button.

  The nurse who promptly responded was the same young oriental woman from the early morning hours. “Awake so soon?” she asked cheerfully, then moved to check Sigrid’s pulse and temperature. “Your arm, it hurts very much now, yes?”

  “Yes,” Sigrid admitted.

  “You are very silly not to call me sooner,” the nurse reproved. “The doctor would not leave the medicine if he did not think you needed it.”

  Still scolding, she expertly rolled Sigrid over, swabbed her hip with alcohol, and inserted the hypo so deftly that her patient barely felt it.

  By eight, breakfast and bath were concluded and the doctor, a man who seemed to have modeled his bedside manner after Genghis Khan or Ivan the Terrible, had retaped her arm, pronounced it satisfactory, and given her some pills to keep the pain in abeyance.

  “And take ’em,” he’d snarled. “They’re nonaddictive, so you don’t get any Brownie points for a stiff upper lip.”

  By eight-thirty, rain was sluicing down her window and she’d begun to give up on whomever her mother had sent out with her clothes. There was no television in the room, but an aide brought in a newspaper which had the Maintenon explosion all over the front page and Sigrid quickly skimmed the scanty details.

  The blast had occurred shortly after nine P.M. at the rear of one of the ballrooms where, according to the paper, a cabbage tournament was in progress.

  (Irritably and half-subliminally, Sigrid noted that proofreading seemed to be a dying craft.)

  Those dead at the scene were Zachary A. Wolferman and John Sutton; in critical condition were T.J. Dixon and Charles Tildon; five others were listed as serious but stable.

  No motive for the bombing had been advanced and, except for the usual crazies, no one had claimed credit. Police refused to speculate whether it was politically motivated or inspired by purely personal animosities.

  There were side stories on Wolferman’s considerable financial holdings and on Sutton as a former SDS activist and contemporary historian. It was reported that Sutton’s wife and Wolferman’s cousin were among those also present at the tournament. Mrs. Sutton had collapsed upon seeing her husband’s body and was currently in seclusion with their two children, ages four and seven.

  As the clock ticked toward nine, Sigrid impatiently tossed the paper aside and examined once more the clothes she’d arrived at the hospital in. The jacket was impossibly stiff with her dried blood, but the gray slacks and black print shirt merely looked oil-stained. There was no way she’d be able to hook her bra or put her hair up unaided; still, if she could get someone downstairs to flag her a cab, she could probably make it home without any help from Anne’s unreliable courier.

  She eased out of the hospital gown and was reaching for her shirt when the door swooshed open and a tall lean man whose thick white hair stood up in angry tufts stopped in her doorway to glare at her with piercing blue eyes.

  “What the hell kind of Valkyrie theatricals were you trying to pull last night? Wrestling with knife-bearing madmen! You idiot—you could have been killed.”

  The exasperated, warring emotions which this man could arouse in her held Sigrid speechless for a moment, then abruptly realizing her nakedness, she pulled a sheet around her thin body.

  Her gesture increased his fury, and he slammed her own overnight case down on the hospital bed.

  “I’m here to bring you clothes, dammit, not strip you,” he snarled. As he turned and stomped out of the room, he flung over his shoulder, “I’ll wait at the front entrance. Ten minutes.”

  And that, Sigrid realized wryly, explained why Anne had gone all chirpy and twittering earlier. Awkwardly getting to her feet, she opened the case and found a knit suit in autumn shades of rust and gold.

  For years Sigrid had owned two sets of clothes: the serviceable, severely cut and neutrally colored suits she invariably chose for herself and the brighter, more feminine things Anne chose for her to wear whenever they made duty visits south. Sigrid had never enjoyed clothes, but it was easier to wear Anne’s selections than listen to Grandmother Lattimore’s complaints that “Sigrid simply isn’t trying.”

  “Gilding the turnip” had always been Sigrid’s private feelings on the subject and Anne usually bowed to the inevitable, but Oscar Nauman’s appearance that morning seemed to have impelled her to pick from the Carolina side of her daughter’s closet.

  Why he should have been at her apartment that early in the morning, Sigrid had no idea. Nothing about the man was safely predictable anyhow, except that if a panel of randomly selected art critics or scholars were asked to list America’s top five artists, one could be sure that Oscar Nauman’s name would appear on every list. His paintings were so eagerly snapped up that he could have long since resigned his position as chairman of Vanderlyn College’s art department and lived on the proceeds; but money slipped through his fingers and he loved teaching too much to give it up even though he grumbled considerably about the time it took from his painting.

  And time was passing, Sigrid would occasionally remember. The thought gave her inexplicable regret. Oscar Nauman must be nearing sixty, yet he retained the vigor and virility of a much younger man. Indeed his freewheeling spirit frequently made Sigrid feel ages older than he.

  They had met this spring during a homicide investigation at the college when there was a possibility that Nauman had been the intended victim. The end of the case had been the beginning of their prickly relationship. She did nothing to encourage him, nothing of which she was conscious, yet he kept turning up at odd times, keeping her emotionally off-balance, poking and prodding until she felt like a science fair project while he endeavored to change her dress, her palate, and her taste in art. No matter how rudely she resisted, he refused to be driven away and kept walking in and out of her life as if it were simply an extension of his own.

  She wasn’t quite sure why she permitted it.

  Slowly, she dressed herself in the rust and gold suit, repacked the drab bloodstained things, and was waiting under the hospital canopy when Oscar Nauman splashed up in his yellow, much­abused MG.

  The morning was still gray with rain so he had the top up. The inside of the car smelled of damp leather and the clean blend of turpentine, cologne and pipe tobacco that she had come to associate with him.

  “Sorry about this damn top,” he apologized.

  “I like it. You don’t drive
like Richard Petty when it’s up.”

  She hated his competitive driving, especially since Manhattan’s streets belonged mostly to kamikaze cabbies, cumbersome busses and lane-hogging delivery vans. How Nauman hung onto a driver’s license was something she’d quit wondering about. She had personally been present at four separate issuances of careless­and-reckless citations. Either the computer hadn’t yet tagged him as a scofflaw or someone in DMV kept cleaning up his record for him. Probably the latter, since Nauman’s circle of acquaintances was even wider than her peripatetic mother’s.

  Nauman seemed to have forgotten his earlier anger. On good behavior now, he drove at a moderate speed, obeying all the laws. At the first stop light, he twisted in his seat to study her.

  “How bad is it really?” he asked, turning her bandaged left hand gently in his.

  “Not bad,” she answered, reclaiming her hand. “There’s no nerve damage. The knife cut into some arm muscle, but they’ve stitched it all up and if I keep it in a sling, it’s supposed to stop hurting in four or five days.”

  The light changed and Nauman allowed a cab to cut in front of him unchallenged.

  “Your mother exaggerates a bit, doesn’t she?” He smiled. “I expected black eyes, bruises, and slash marks all over.”

  “Mother enjoys dramatics.”

  “And you didn’t actually wrestle with that guy?”

  “No.”

  “But you did shoot him.” Nauman had been truly shocked the first time he realized that she always carried a gun.

  “Yes.”

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “It’s the first time I’ve ever shot someone,” Sigrid said slowly. “I always wondered how I’d feel if I ever had to. Now that it’s happened, I don’t know.”

  The windshield wiper on her side swished back and forth erratically, smearing raindrops, and she stared blankly through the obscured glass.

  “I guess I’m glad I didn’t kill him.”

  “But you would have?”

  “Yes.”

  They’d had this discussion before.

  “He may have been poor and he may not have a father, but that boy wasn’t looking for food or love or even money to feed a drug habit last night, Nauman. It was violence pure and simple. He was there to rape that girl and he was ready to knife anyone who got in his way.”

  She leaned back against the headrest wearily. “Do me a favor, will you? Swing past Metro Medical?”

  “What’s wrong?” The little car swerved as Nauman’s attention swiftly shifted to her pale face. “Are you bleeding? Your stitches come loose?”

  “No, it’s—Look out!” she cried and braced herself as the left fender kissed the side of a passing van. The driver gave them an obscene gesture and roared ahead while Nauman sheepishly wheeled back to the center of his own lane.

  “Sorry about that, but why Metro Medical?”

  “My partner’s there. Tillie. He was nearly killed in that explosion at the Maintenon last night.”

  “That’s why I tried to find you this morning.”

  Sigrid was puzzled. “Because of Tillie?”

  “No, John Sutton. He was killed in that blast. He teaches—taught at Vanderlyn. He and Val—his wife—met in a seminar I gave one summer at McClellan. I’ve known them for years.”

  “I’m sorry, Nauman.”

  “Just the damn waste,” he said, showing his anger and grief.

  “John was one of the best. Genuine idealist. Intelligent. And Val—I went as soon as I heard. Falling apart. Told her you’d, but your mother said slashed and anyhow so crazy . . .”

  When upset or distracted, Oscar Nauman’s speech became almost telegraphic as his mind raced ahead, forcing his tongue to omit words in order to keep up.

  “SDS, of course, but that was years. He’s teacher. Real teacher. So why?”

  By now, Sigrid could follow his words with a fair degree of comprehension. “Maybe he wasn’t the intended target,” she suggested. “Don’t forget that a man named Wolferman, a banker, was killed, too. And others are in critical condition.”

  “Somebody killed him without caring?”

  That would be the sticking point, Sigrid knew. Nauman was an old-style liberal with a touching belief that, given adequate housing, full bellies, and meaningful work, mankind would automatically live the Golden Rule. The existence of pure amoral evil was not something the liberal mind liked to admit.

  “The police care,” she reminded him quietly.

  CHAPTER 6

  Metro Medical Center was one of the city’s newer hospitals, with shiny scrubbable polymer surfaces, bright colors, and, judging by the flow of people through its halls, a user-friendly attitude toward visitors. While Nauman circled the area to look for a parking space, Sigrid was directed up to a waiting room on the eighth floor where she found Marian Tildon surrounded by her sober-faced parents and several friends.

  Normally Tillie’s wife was a vivacious redhead, with an aura of wiry strength to her small-boned figure; but after a night in and out of the intensive care unit, where tubes and electronic monitors held her husband’s life together, there was no sparkle left in her face and her green eyes were dull as she stared in bewilderment at Sigrid’s bandaged hand and arm sling.

  “Were you there, too, Lieutenant?”

  Briefly, Sigrid explained she’d acquired her wounds elsewhere. “How is he?”

  “They’ve been letting me go in for ten minutes every hour,” Marian replied, automatically glancing at her wristwatch. “He opened his eyes when I was in last time, but I’m not sure he recognized me.”

  “I think he did, Mare,” soothed her mother.

  Marian Tildon stood up. “They allow two of us in at a time, Lieutenant. Would you like to see him?”

  They walked down a hall painted melon and turquoise to a pair of bright yellow double doors. Marian took a deep breath and pulled one open.

  Sigrid had never been inside an intensive care unit before and her first thought was how mechanized it seemed. It reminded her of the modern diagnostic garage where she had her car serviced occasionally—the semicircle of bays around a central console, with a snarl of tubes and hoses hanging down. The tubes and hoses at the garage held oil, air, and brake and transmission fluids, while here the tubes carried oxygen, saline solution, or hemoglobin.

  Two nurses sat inside a hollow circular counter at the center of the large room with an uninterrupted view of the electronic monitors connected to each of the fourteen stations radiating out from the middle. A strong medicinal odor hung in the air.

  There were no regular hospital beds. Instead, patients lay on what looked like armless lounge chairs upholstered in creamy yellow plastic, extended to semi-reclining position and elevated so that the nurses could work on each without bending.

  Sigrid followed Marian across the room to where Tillie lay swathed in so many bandages that she did not at first recognize him. His face was discolored, his lips swollen, his eyes half-open but unfocused.

  Marian leaned over and kissed his bare shoulder gently. “Charles, darling, Lieutenant Harald’s here.”

  There was no change in Tillie’s expression, but Marian whispered that the nurses had told her that surgery patients could often hear and comprehend even if they couldn’t respond, so Sigrid drew nearer and tried to keep her voice brisk and matter-of-fact.

  It was a very long ten minutes, made more difficult by watching the other woman attempt an upbeat manner while her voice trembled and tears spilled down her cheeks.

  Through it all, Tillie did not move or react.

  When their time was up and they were back out in the hall again, Marian’s composure crumpled. She rested her head against the cool wall and fought against sobs that wracked her trim body while Sigrid stood paralyzed by the awkwardness that always seized her whenever raw emotions were laid bare.

  Her mother or grandmother or any of the Lattimore women, for that matter, would have automatically gathered the grieving woman
in their arms and made soothing, comforting noises. Sigrid had seen them do it as effortlessly and naturally as they breathed, but she could only stand frozen.

  “Can I get you a damp towel?” Sigrid asked, gesturing toward a nearby door.

  Marian choked back a final sob. “No, it’s all right now. I’ll come.”

  Inside the tiled restroom, she splashed cold water on her face, then rummaged in her purse for a comb and lipstick. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, slashing bright orange onto her lips. “I know crying doesn’t help, but—”

  “You probably need sleep,” Sigrid said pragmatically. “Weren’t you awake all night?”

  “It’s not just that.” Marian stared at Sigrid’s reflection in the mirror over the pink washbasins. “I mean, I can accept what Charles does. How he makes our living. He’s a policeman. Policemen lay their lives on the line every time they go to work. Okay, I accept that. I’ve even learned to live with it. But this? No. No, I can’t! He wasn’t even on duty last night. He was just an ordinary citizen minding his own business and he was almost killed.”

  “You sound like my mother,” Sigrid said. “That’s what she told Captain McKinnon last night.”

  “And he told her a cop is never off duty, right?”

  Sigrid nodded.

  “Well, he’s wrong!” Marian said fiercely, turning to face her. “Is Charles a good detective?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, he’s an even better father. And husband. When he’s with us, he could be an insurance salesman or a dry cleaner or a–a plumber for all we hear about police work. When he’s with us, he is off duty and I don’t give a damn what McKinnon says. It isn’t fair!

  “That bomb last night,” she asked. “Did they mean to kill Charles?”

  “I don’t know,” Sigrid answered. “I’m sorry. At this point, all I really know is what was in the paper.”