The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  “Whose idea was it to enter this tournament?” asked Sigrid.

  “Little T.J. Someone shows her in Daily News and she says, ‘We are both so good, Vassily. Let us go and win lots of capitalistic dollars.’”

  He looked at them doubtfully. “This is joke. She calls me big socialist bear; I say she is little capitalistic pig.”

  His broad face clouded. “I love her very much, Officers. They do not let me see her at hospital so I am staying here and I am playing cards but also I am watching. Yet here are so many! Tell me what to watch for,” he entreated. “Let me help you catch who hurts my comrade’s little girl.”

  They thanked him for his offer but admitted they weren’t sure what to watch for themselves.

  “We aren’t even certain whom the bomb was meant for,” said Sigrid. “Did she ever speak of any enemies? Any problems with her work or in her personal life?”

  “Work we do not talk about,” Ivanovich stated flatly. “It is not proper. Sometimes she does say how busy day it is, like I say how is weather, but no more. She very much likes her Navy job and wishes she can go to sea or have ship, but never yet do they let her.”

  “Is she bitter about that?” asked Lieutenant Knight.

  “Sometimes, you bet! More times, she accepts. You ask of personal life, Lieutenant Harald. She is knowing I am old-fashion about women.”

  “So she didn’t go into detail about the men in her life?”

  Ivanovich nodded. Delicately, the big Russian explained that he knew T. J. Dixon was a normal woman with the usual appetites. But her career meant more than marriage, and she discreetly embraced the old sailors’ tradition of someone in every port. Currently in New York’s busy harbor were a Dave, a Judd, and an Eli.

  “We know about those,” Lieutenant Knight told Sigrid. “Incidentally, there’s a Bob, too. She must be some lady.”

  “She iss lady!” growled Ivanovich, ready to defend the injured T.J.’s honor. “And she is gentleman, too, when comes the end. Someone start to love her too much, someone marriage speaks—” His large callused hand made a swift chopping motion. “She cut it off clean! Always I say to her, sure you good officer, but you are woman, too. You need someday a home, a husband, babies. And she laugh and say she have little Molly, but now she and Molly fight and—”

  “Molly?” exclaimed Sigrid and Knight in one breath.

  “Daughter of her dead cousin,” said Vassily Ivanovich. “In Florida she is living.”

  “Molly Baldwin?”

  “Da, da. You are knowing her?”

  “That’s why her name sounded familiar this afternoon,” groaned Alan Knight. “I’m a dunderhead! I read it in Dixon’s file last night but it never sunk in.”

  “Tell us about Molly Baldwin, please,” said Sigrid.

  “What is to tell?” asked the bewildered Ivanovich, cocking his grizzled head at their interest. But he complied.

  Molly Baldwin was Commander Dixon’s much younger cousin, orphaned six or eight years earlier, he told them. T.J. had been close to Molly’s widowed mother and took a great interest in the child. After the child’s mother died, T.J. had sent her to prep school and then college.

  Each was the other’s only relative and Ivanovich thought Molly had satisfied any maternal yearnings T.J. might have possessed.

  “Yet you said they fought?” probed Sigrid.

  Not really fought, Ivanovich quibbled. With much gesturing of his beefy hands and with their assistance on various idiomatic English phrases which escaped him, he managed a picture of the usual mother-daughter generation clash. On the one hand was T.J. Dixon, career-oriented, purposeful in her goals, her personal life separate from her professional.

  On the other hand was young Molly, pretty and loving but also weak willed and indecisive. And not very industrious. She had drifted from one major to another through college, from chemistry to biology to history, no career in mind, her grades barely sufficient to earn a degree in sociology at the last minute. Once out of school, she seemed to expect her older cousin to continue her allowance as she took and lost a succession of modest jobs.

  Finally last summer, Commander Dixon had thrown up her hands in exasperation. “In a dress shop Molly is working and one time too many she comes late, so they tell her to leave and T.J. gives her money enough for one month to live and says, ‘No more, kiddo. This is last red penny you have from me as long as I live.’ Then Molly says ugly things and they finish.” Ivanovich shook his head meaningfully.

  “They aren’t in touch now?”

  “Only yesterday T.J. is thinking maybe she is too hard on Molly. She is still little girl, says T.J. Since they fight, she is not hearing from Molly and this hurts T.J. very much.”

  “Have you ever met Molly Baldwin?”

  “No. Pictures I see, but Molly real, never.”

  He was astounded when Sigrid told him that Molly Baldwin worked here at the hotel and had, in fact, been present last night and again today.

  “You’re sure Commander Dixon didn’t know?” she asked.

  “No. This I swear.”

  He wanted to thresh out their revelation detail by detail, but Sigrid patiently led him back to the night of the explosion.

  Grudgingly, Ivanovich told of meeting Commander Dixon at a nearby restaurant for a light supper, then on here to the Maintenon. He told of her chance meeting with the banker Zachary Wolferman, of their subsequent conversation with his cousin Haines Froelick, and Mr. Wolferman’s beautiful memory of a young German governess with a voice exactly like T.J.’s.

  “Was there anyone else she knew here?”

  “No one, Lieutenant. We talk, then they say for everyone to sit down, so we do. Then we play and then Boom!”

  At a hospital several blocks away, the surgeon pushed back from the conference table. The charts and X-rays only confirmed what he’d earlier feared.

  The grafts weren’t taking. Blood had quit circulating, oxygen was no longer reaching Commander Dixon’s arm.

  The best space-age microsurgical procedures had failed and the only alternative left to them was but a couple of levels up from the sort of butchery practiced in the Stone Age.

  “No point letting it go gangrenous,” the surgeon told his staff grimly. “Might as well get it over with.”

  CHAPTER 13

  By four-thirty, Elaine Albee’s yellow marks on the pairings lists indicated that they had seen and spoken with everyone in the Bontemps Room who had been anywhere near Table 5 the night before. They had even spoken to several from the front tables who hadn’t come close but who wanted to go on record as being opposed to terrorist tactics and personally outraged that such things could happen here. The detectives had listened to a dozen different theories of how the boards were switched and when and why, but no one said, “Yes, I saw it happen.”

  Someone would have to chase down the tournament contestants who hadn’t returned today, listen to more theories, and hope that one of the missing had witnessed something tangible. In the meantime, Lieutenant Harald was ready to call it a day.

  “Unless something unexpected turns up, I’ll see you nine o’clock in my office Monday morning,” she told Lowry and Albee. “We’ll compare notes with Peters and Eberstadt. Will you have anything from your people?” she asked Lieutenant Knight.

  “Probably,” he answered. “What about Molly Baldwin? Want me to contact her?”

  “No, I’d like to see her face myself when we tell her we know she lied.”

  From across the ornate room, Jill Gill waved good-bye to Sigrid as they left the cribbage players in the midst of the afternoon’s final round before the supper break. They walked down the Maintenon’s wide graceful staircase. Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee offered lifts back downtown. When Sigrid shook her head and Alan Knight drawled a vague refusal, the detectives headed across the lobby for the elevator to the hotel’s basement garage.

  Outside, the slashing rain made the hour feel later than it really was. Sigrid sheltered under the Maintenon’s c
anopy to get her bearings, unsure of the nearest subway entrance.

  “Buy you a drink, Lieutenant?” asked Alan Knight.

  Across the street a comfortable looking tavern promised a warm dry interior with wide oak tables and man-sized drinks. The offer was tempting.

  “A nice tall Dickle-and-Coke would be welcome right now,” she told him regretfully, “but I can’t mix alcohol with the stuff I’m taking for my arm.”

  “A raincheck, then,” he said with one of his appealing lopsided smiles, “I’m sure there must be a long story to explain why a Yankee cop drinks bourbon and Co’-Cola.”

  “I have a Southern grandmother, that’s all. It’s in the genes. See you Monday, Lieutenant Knight.”

  He touched the brim of his white cap in a half salute and darted across the street alone, dodging curbside puddles.

  By the time Sigrid splashed the short distance to Grand Central Station, her blue scarf was sliding down, so she tugged it off and crammed it into the pocket of her jacket, letting her hair hang loose. A seat near the rear wall of the crosstown shuttle kept her arm away from traffic and the downtown train wasn’t very crowded either, so she made it to her stop on the lower West Side without getting jostled. There, she climbed the damp and dirty metal steps up to street level to find the rain had slackened to a misty drizzle.

  No sign of the sun though. If anything, the leaden skies looked as if they were only catching their second wind and would soon pour down even more rain. She knew she ought to call Roman, ask if there were groceries she should pick up on her way for supper tonight or tomorrow, but the apartment—she still thought of it as the new apartment—was several blocks from the subway, tucked among the commercial buildings near the dilapidated piers that lined the Hudson. She was afraid that rain would arrive before she did if she lingered along the way.

  As it was, she had just unlocked the tall wooden street gate when the heavens opened and a new flood descended. She splashed across the flagstones to the sheltered doorway.

  Sigrid was no gardener, but Roman Tramegra fancied himself a Renaissance man on a modest scale and would enthusiastically turn his hand to any task. (“Renaissance man indeed!” sniffed Grandmother Lattimore when she swept into town for one of her semiannual trips north. “More what we always called a jackleg, if you ask me, which you won’t, I suppose.”) At any rate, Roman had transformed the tiny courtyard into a formal herb garden. At least it started out formal. By October the scented geraniums had grown tall and leggy, the borage and bee balm flopped, and the purple basil and coleuses Roman had stuck in for color were tattered and going to seed.

  Not that Sigrid cared. Nature in any form seldom interested her except as it interfered with her normal routine. As she fumbled for the door key, it did occur to her that the marble Eros that Roman had lugged home in late August looked a bit uncomfortable standing there naked in this first chill rain of autumn.

  She was a little chilly herself but as she opened the door, she saw a light in the kitchen, heard Roman banging saucepans and cutlery as he unloaded the dishwasher, and best of all, she smelled the homey aroma of his most successful soup.

  Roman Tramegra aspired to gourmet chefdom. He bought the freshest raw materials and would spend hours slicing, peeling and dicing. But he chased a will-o’-the-wisp of creativity around the kitchen with Portuguese wines, Chinese herbs, Greek cheese, or French mustards, constitutionally unable to follow a recipe without yielding to the temptation to improve it.

  Few of his creations were totally inedible and over the course of time Sigrid had learned to be diplomatic. She did not like to cook and possessed an undemanding appetite. Before Roman Tramegra entered her life, she either stopped by a take-out place, fished something from the grocer’s freezer, or opened a can of soup. There were times when Roman’s culinary excesses made her long for those simpler meals—she would never get used to his broccoli-and-chutney curry for instance—but she usually repented when he miraculously came up with something absolutely delicious.

  Such as the mushroom and barley soup she could now smell simmering on the stove in the green-and-white tiled kitchen they shared.

  “Is it soup yet?” she asked from the doorway, shaking the rain from her soft dark hair.

  “Sigrid, my dear! How are you? How is your arm? Why didn’t you call? I’ve been so worried about you! Anne said you were simply slashed to ribbons.”

  His voice was several tones deeper than anyone’s Sigrid had ever heard, yet he still managed to talk in italics half the time.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “A little tired, though. And ravenous.”

  “Then sit, sit!” Roman boomed, clearing a space at the breakfast counter with one swoop of his arm. He wore a long white linen shirt over tailored gray denim slacks with rolled cuffs and a heavy silver and turquoise necklace that clanked against the ceramic topped counter when he bent across to layout a bowl and spoon. He was a large man, in his mid-forties. Not fat exactly, but with an aura of softness about him akin to that of a large pampered Persian cat. He moved like one, too, with a certain finicky grace and deliberation.

  His sandy hair was thinning on top and the high dome of his hairline was echoed by the arch of his eyebrows and the curve of his hooded eyes.

  “Let me wash up first,” Sigrid told him and strode down the hall to her room, where she eased the jacket off over her bandaged arm and unbuckled the gun harness. She brushed her hair, freshened up in the bath, and returned to the kitchen in time to watch Roman ladle the thick fragrant soup into her bowl.

  He demanded to hear all about the stabbing. Sigrid skimmed over the high spots, then asked, “Did you move my car?”

  “Anne drove it over when she came for your clothes early this morning. She left it double-parked, but I drove it down to your garage. This place was a madhouse this morning. First Anne, then Oscar—I see he did deliver your clothes. I thought you two were coming straight back here. I waited till almost eleven and then I simply had to fly.”

  “Sorry. We must have just missed you. Something came up,” said Sigrid, blowing gently on her first spoonful of steaming soup.

  Without asking if she wanted it, Roman fixed her a small bowl of torn endive, parsley, and Bibb lettuce and cut a thick slice of brown bread which he smeared liberally with cream cheese. By then Sigrid was eating with such obvious relish that he said, “It’s early for dinner, but I may as well join you. I shall make my anised veal for our entrée and—”

  “None for me, thanks,” Sigrid said hastily. “Soup’s all I want tonight.”

  “Perhaps tomorrow then,” he said, leaving Sigrid to wonder if she could pretend to forget and send out for pizza or something. She had never acquired a taste for anise except in black jellybeans. Certainly not in veal and sour cream.

  “Oscar was quite exercised about the explosion at the Hotel Maintenon. Was that what delayed you?” Roman asked. “Do say you’re working on that.”

  “Now, Roman,” she warned.

  It was getting harder to deflect his excessive interest in her work. He was so certain that one ingenious murder mystery would free him from the magazine articles and fillers with which he supplemented his small private income but so far as he knew, only the dull and routine had come her way since the spring and he had begun to despair of the unimaginative ways by which so many New Yorkers dispatched one another.

  “I hoped you might be able to tell me something—off the record, of course,” he said wistfully. “Surely there’s more than was in the paper? A multimillionaire killed, your colleague wounded, the glamorous Lucienne Ronay hovering in the wings! Is she really as beautiful as her pictures?”

  “More,” said Sigrid, happy that she could share that much at least. “I’m told she gave another dazzling performance last night. Jill Gill was there, by the way. She’s one of the cribbage contestants. “

  “Jolly good,” beamed Roman, whose cultured midwestern accent was overlaid by an Oxbridge accent that sounded suspiciously like too many old Peter
Lawford movies to Sigrid. “She’ll be able to describe all those delicious little details of dress and jewels that pass right over your practical head.”

  Roman Tramegra was the soul of tact and Sigrid knew he would never intentionally insult her. Yet, she found his blithe assumption that she was totally oblivious to all feminine artifice somewhat wounding. Just because she seldom wore makeup herself, just because she felt gawky shopping for clothes and didn’t fuss with her hair every ten minutes, didn’t mean that she was never interested in how other women achieved their glamorous effects.

  “I noticed,” she told him sharply. “Lucienne Ronay had on a very expensive, very attractive off-white dress this afternoon, long gold-and-pearl earrings, and several chunky gold bracelets. Her shoes were the same color as her dress, her hair was down about her face, and she wore a perfume that smelled like some sort of flowers.”

  Roman’s spoon dropped back into the bowl with a surprised clunk.

  “Very good, my dear Watson. The flowers are mignonettes.”

  “Mignonettes?”

  “Her husband commissioned a perfume company in the Mediterranean to blend a special fragrance just for her.”

  Sometimes Sigrid wondered if her friend possessed a photographic memory. He claimed not to, yet he seemed a walking storehouse of trivia, with tidbits on almost every aspect of twentieth century pop culture. Sigrid recalled having once read about Lucienne Ronay’s husband herself but details eluded her.

  “He was something of a Svengali, wasn’t he?”

  “I think you mean Pygmalion,” Roman corrected. “Svengali was an evil hypnotist; Pygmalion was a sculptor who created his perfect mate. G.B. Shaw, of course. And My Fair Lady, only that came later. That was Maurice Ronay though—Pygmalion and Professor Henry Higgins with the tiniest touch of Howard Hughes. A bit of a recluse with an eccentric sense of humor. He was a wealthy real estate investor, years older than she and she was a little nobody, a peasant girl he found sleeping on the beach at Cannes, so the story goes. He brought her home with him, scrubbed off the dirt and found her so beautiful that he taught her how to walk and talk and carry herself, bought her clothes and jewels, and finally married her.