The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  “They say everything that man touched turned into gold and his little peasant was no exception. He married her because she was beautiful and sexy, he said, and then she turned out to have brains too.”

  “I remember that,” said Sigrid. She went around to the stove and clumsily helped herself to more soup. “Didn’t her husband put together some sort of real estate deal here in Manhattan about eight or nine years ago and those three hotels were part of the package he didn’t want?”

  “Quite right,” he agreed, holding out his own bowl for more. “They were like three nice old dowagers: still respectable, but drab and a bit tatty around the edges.”

  “My great-aunts used to stay at the La Vallière when it was the Carstairs,” Sigrid remembered.

  “Everyone’s great-aunt stayed at the Carstairs,” said Roman. “Monsieur Ronay was going to dump it, along with what are now the Montespan and the Maintenon, when his charming wife announced that she was tired of being a plaything and wanted to work. So he gave her the three hotels for a Christmas present and she became something of a Pygmalion herself: cleaned them up, gave them elegant new dresses, and transformed them into three perfect jewels.”

  “Nice what you can do with money,” Sigrid observed, savoring the warm buttery mushrooms in her soup.

  “It always takes money to make it,” Roman agreed. “But why not? They say she paid back his loan before he died.”

  “She does seem to have a flair for running hotels,” Sigrid acknowledged. “Everything was under control today. No sign of any explosion except in the immediate vicinity of the bomb itself.”

  “Everyone says she’s so pragmatic, that she’s a termagant and a slave-driver, and perhaps she is. But underneath, she must have a romantic nature.”

  “Because she’s so beautiful?”

  “Outward beauty is only a manifestation of inner loveliness,” he intoned in his solemn bass voice. “The names she chose for her hotels reveal everything.”

  “Do they?” Sigrid was weak on French history.

  “Maintenon, Montespan, and La Vallière, my dear, were the mistresses of the Sun King, Louis XIV. I wrote an article on them when the hotels were rechristened. Sold it as a sidebar to Newsday, I think. Let me see now . . . Louise de La Vallière came first. She’s the one they named the lavaliere necklace for. She was supplanted by Françoise de Montespan, who was three years older; Montespan in turn was replaced by Françoise de Maintenon, who was six years older still. She was almost fifty when she and the king were secretly married. She had beauty and intellect and held the king’s heart until his death.

  “If you think of it, Lucienne Ronay is much like de Maintenon herself. She was no infant when she married Maurice Ronay and—”

  The telephone on the nearby wall interrupted his discourse.

  This phone and the one in Sigrid’s bedroom were in her name. Roman had a separate line in his quarters. Sigrid lifted the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

  “Val says you haven’t been by to question her yet,” said Oscar Nauman.

  “No, I thought I wouldn’t bother her until tomorrow.”

  “She won’t be there tomorrow,” he told her. “She and the children are flying home with John’s body tomorrow morning and they won’t be back till after the funeral. I thought you’d want to know.”

  “I do.” Sigrid weighed her weariness against the need to interview Val Sutton while the night’s horrors were still fresh in the new widow’s mind. “Perhaps I’d better call her and arrange a time.”

  “I told her to expect us at nine if she didn’t hear from me. She’s beat.”

  “Me too,” Sigrid confessed.

  “So take a nap,” Nauman said sensibly. “That’s what Val’s doing. I’ll pick you up at eight-forty-five. Okay?”

  “Okay.” It might be a little unorthodox, but if Val Sutton were given to hysterics, Sigrid wanted someone like Nauman there to help.

  She looked at the clock.

  Five past six.

  “If I’m not up by eight-thirty, please call me,” she told Roman and headed back down the hall for bed.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Sutton apartment was less than ten minutes away from Sigrid’s, a block off Bleecker Street. Most of the mourners had gone by the time she and Oscar Nauman arrived shortly after nine o’clock, although four or five of John Sutton’s graduate students still conversed in low tones around the dining room table and an emaciated young woman with a chalk-white complexion and gold-enameled fingernails—one of Val Sutton’s colleagues from the Feldheimer, Nauman told Sigrid-sat on the couch reading a bedtime story to the Suttons’ young son and daughter.

  Both children had solemn dark eyes and straight black hair and they leaned sleepily against the woman’s almost anorexic body. The smaller child, a little girl, had detached a wooden hippopotamus from the woman’s chunky necklace and was dreamily walking it back and forth across the flowers printed on her nightgown.

  “She’s waiting for you in his study,” said the student who had admitted them.

  Oscar Nauman led the way down the narrow hall, tapped at a door, and opened it without waiting.

  The outer rooms of the apartment were furnished in what Sigrid privately tagged bohemian artsy-nubbly handwoven fabrics, earthtone ceramic jugs and bowls, and statuettes cast in bronze and iron. On the walls, abstract oils and stylized photo­ graphs were interspersed with batik hangings and South American Indian artifacts.

  John Sutton’s study was more traditionally academic. A heavy oak desk faced the door and several comfortable chairs were placed before two walls lined with bookshelves in which leather­ covered volumes were jammed beside paperbacks and scholarly journals. There was a Peruvian rug on the floor, though, and framed political posters on the third wall supported the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Dick Gregory, among others. A floor-to-ceiling corkboard filled the wall behind the desk, displaying a thumbtacked collage of snapshots, newspaper clippings, political cartoons, and protest buttons for the last twenty years.

  Val Sutton sat curled on a leather chair that had been pulled up before the black tiled fireplace. A coal fire blazed in the small grate. She looked up as they entered and Sigrid immediately recognized whose genes the two children had inherited. As Nauman had said earlier, Val Sutton could not be considered conventionally beautiful; yet there was an intense, exotic vibrancy about her: high cheekbones and alert brown eyes in a triangular face, thick black hair clipped level with her chin line, a lithe and sensuous body.

  The widow greeted Nauman in a husky voice, but her eyes were for the woman behind him. Even in her grief she could be curious about this police officer whom Oscar had described as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Wonder Woman. She half remembered that when Riley Quinn was poisoned at Vanderlyn College back in the spring, John had come home amused that Oscar seemed smitten by a police lieutenant. Knowing the caliber of women the artist was usually attracted to, Val expected someone not only intelligent, but physically striking as well.

  What she saw was a woman in her early thirties, almost as tall as Oscar, with a spinsterish angularity beneath nondescript clothes, a long neck, and a mouth too generous for her thin face. On the other hand, her wide eyes were an interesting smoky gray and they held a quiet watchfulness which made Val think that perhaps Oscar hadn’t exaggerated after all.

  “Come sit by the fire,” she invited. “I know it’s too early in the season, but I just can’t seem to get warm tonight.”

  Nauman pulled a third chair closer for himself and, with the familiarity of an old friend, concentrated on lighting an intricately carved meerschaum pipe.

  “Oscar told me you were injured last night, too,” Val Sutton said. “Does it bother you much?”

  The husky voice suited her. Nauman had said she was musical and Sigrid could imagine how effective a ballad might be in that timbre.

  “The sling makes it look worse than it feels, thanks,” she replied.

&nbs
p; Interviewing a murder victim’s next-of-kin usually meant an awkward beginning, but here in this bookish lamplit room, with a fire on the hearth and the comforting aroma of Nauman’s mellow pipe, it seemed quite natural to lean forward in the brown leather chair and say, “I’m very sorry about your husband’s death.”

  “Oscar says you don’t know if John was the intended victim.”

  Sigrid looked at the catlike face closely. “Do you?”

  “He’d damn well better be!” There was passionate intensity in Val Sutton’s low voice and her dark eyes flamed.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because it can’t have been for nothing! I couldn’t stand that. I’d rather it be someone who hated him, who felt threatened by him, who wanted something he had—a reason. I don’t care how insane and stupid the reason is, but I don’t think I can bear it if John is dead just because he happened to be there at that damn table.”

  Tears glittered in the firelight and she brushed them away impatiently. “If it’s John they were after, there will be something we can do.”

  “Did someone hate him?” asked Sigrid.

  “John was the kindest, funniest, most thoughtful—” The vibrant voice broke, then steadied. “Before last night, I would have said he didn’t have an enemy in this world. But he’s dead now isn’t he? So there must have been at least one enemy. And you’ll find him for me.”

  “Mrs. Sutton—”

  “Please. Call me Val and let me call you Sigrid. Oscar’s talked so much about you last night and today, I feel we’re already friends.”

  “Val then. I don’t know what Nauman’s told you, but the New York Police Department’s not the Northwest Mounted Police. We don’t always get our man.”

  “You will this time,” Val Sutton predicted firmly. “We’ll take John’s life apart—his friends, his students, his parents—everyone who ever knew him will help. Somewhere, somebody will remember something.”

  “Let’s begin with you then,” said Sigrid. “Nauman and your husband were at the Maintenon on Wednesday. Did he tell you about it?”

  Val shook her head and her lustrous hair swung like heavy silk. “No, he didn’t really have a chance. I was at a conference up in Boston. Left Tuesday and didn’t get back until yesterday morning. We talked on the phone Thursday night, but that was mostly about the children and what time my train was due in.”

  “Nauman says your husband briefly met Ted Flythe on Wednesday. He had the impression that Professor Sutton kept glancing at Flythe as if he might have known him.”

  “Or was at least reminded of someone,” Nauman clarified.

  Again Val shook her head. “That’s what you said this afternoon, Oscar, and I keep thinking about Mr. Flythe and how he looked last night and he’s no one I ever remember seeing. I’ll ask around tomorrow, though.” Her voice was steely. “Most of John’s old friends from our McClellan days will be at the funeral.”

  Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “What you just said, Oscar—that Flythe might have reminded John of someone. There was a guy in SDS. Not at McClellan, but from Syracuse or Cornell. He had a pointed beard like Flythe’s. Maybe that’s what Sam meant?”

  She jumped to her feet and crossed swiftly to the large oak desk.

  “Sam?” Nauman was puzzled.

  “Sam Naismith. When I phoned him this afternoon to ask if he’d be one of the pallbearers, he was so shocked; he said he’d just been talking to John one night this week; that they were mulling over the old days.”

  She had seated herself behind the desk and pulled the phone close while flipping rapidly through a roller-card index.

  “I wasn’t paying attention,” she muttered as her fingers punched out an area code.

  There was a brief pause, then she said, “Sam? This is Val again. Hang on a minute, will you?”

  She placed the receiver in an amplifying device that acted like a two-way speaker and allowed Sigrid and Nauman to follow the conversation.

  “Sam, a police officer is here looking into John’s death. We need to ask you some questions.”

  “Sure, honey,” rumbled a solicitous male voice. “Fire away.”

  “You said you and John talked this week. When?”

  “Wednesday night.”

  Sigrid stood and approached the speaker. “Mr. Naismith, this is Lieutenant Harald of the New York Police Department. Did you call Professor Sutton or—”

  “He called me, Lieutenant. Said he was getting together some lectures about the protest movement and wanted to refresh his memory. We were in SDS at McClellan together a million years ago.”

  “Sam,” said Val Sutton, “do you remember a guy who used to visit on campus from one of the upstate New York schools—Syracuse or Cornell? He had long hair and a beard.”

  “Who didn’t?” chuckled Naismith.

  “No, but his beard was cut to a sharp point. And his hair was always in a pony tail. I think his name was Chris or Crist—”

  “Tris,” Naismith said flatly. “Tristan Yorke.”

  “That’s the name! Tristan Yorke. Did John ask about him?”

  “Not really. I was the one who brought him up, Val, not John.”

  “In what connection, Mr. Naismith?” asked Sigrid .

  “John said he’d gotten up to the point in his research where the Weathermen splintered off of SDS and went underground. We knew some who went that route. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a group called Red Snow?”

  “I’ve heard.”

  “Well, you probably know that their leader, Fred Hamilton, was from McClellan. They blew themselves up in a camp on Lake Cayuga the summer of 1970, but rumor had it that a couple of them got out alive. Some people said Fred was the one who got away, along with his girlfriend. Others said Fred was blown into a zillion bits of fish food and it was a pair of converts from California. John asked me who I thought might know for sure and we hit on Tris Yorke. He was in the Cayuga area and he used to help some of the conscientious objectors who wanted to go to Canada to evade the draft, you know, put ’em up for a night or two and then drive them over the border. If anybody knew who really survived the Red Snow blast, it’d probably be Tris.”

  “Could any former Red Snow members have a grudge against Professor Sutton?” asked Sigrid. She was watching Val Sutton’s grim face.

  “There were some hard feelings at the time,” Naismith said reluctantly. “They got ticked off because SDS wasn’t as confrontational as they thought it ought to be, but I never heard of them killing each other because of it. Besides, there can’t be more than two former Red Snow members, remember? Frankly, I’ve always believed that those other two who’re supposed to have jumped from a balcony probably drowned just like the Xavier girl did. Otherwise we’d have heard something by now. Like I told John, nobody stays underground this long.”

  “Did he agree with you?”

  “Oh, you know John—well, no,” Naismith caught himself abruptly, “I guess you didn’t. Anyhow, he’d yes you to death and then go merrily on his own damn way. Nobody’s mentioned Tris in years, but John made me promise I’d throw out a few lines and see if I could locate him.”

  “You’ll keep trying, won’t you?” Val’s voice rasped.

  “If you want me to, honey.”

  “I do.”

  They went back over the conversation the two men had exchanged Wednesday night, but nothing else suggested itself. John Sutton had not mentioned cribbage, the Maintenon, or Ted Flythe. So far as Naismith knew, Sutton’s call had been motivated purely by his desire to nail down all elements of the Red Snow episode for his lectures. Naismith promised to keep trying.

  “See you tomorrow,” he told Val.

  “Tomorrow,” Val said huskily.

  She lifted the telephone receiver from the amplifier and had just replaced it on the cradle when the door opened and her thin, pale-skinned friend said, “Can you come for a few minutes, Val? They want you to tuck them in.”

  “I’ll be right there.” S
he paused in the doorway of the study.

  “John’s last notes are there on the tape recorder, Lieuten—Sigrid. You might want to listen to them. Feel free to poke around in his desk, too. Maybe you’ll see something I’ve missed. Oscar, don’t you want something to eat or drink? People brought so much food. And wine. I won’t have to buy any rosé or Chablis for a year,” she said wanly. “Or there’s coffee.”

  “Go kiss your kids good night,” ordered Nauman gently. “We can fend for ourselves.”

  When she had gone, he asked Sigrid if she wanted anything.

  “Coffee would be good,” she said and circled the desk to push the tape recorder’s play button,

  John Sutton had possessed a pleasant baritone voice and an easy style of delivery that helped explain why he’d been such a popular teacher. On this tape he’d been enthusiastic, factual, and confidential all at once, with touches of humor or self-deprecation to lighten the heavy spots. Although older and presumably wiser, he didn’t belittle the idealism of the late sixties and early seventies. He could acknowledge its weaknesses, but he had also been superb at communicating the excitement of the times, the almost tribal closeness and heady optimism of kids who believed they could change things for the better, could make a difference, could replace guns with flowers and politicians with statesmen.

  As the tape unwound, Sigrid studied the collage behind John Sutton’s desk. It was like a multilayered scrapbook. Among the things that caught her eye were several old Doonesbury cartoons, a copy of the famous Kent State photograph, a banner headline NIXON RESIGNS!, and, over on the edge, a simple white button inscribed Imagine . . . 1940–1980.