The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald)

by Margaret Maron

  “Flythe’s?”

  “And Johnson’s.”

  “Later. I’d rather you sat in on the interview with Molly Baldwin, if you don’t mind. You can be the good cop and keep your handkerchief handy. If all else fails,” she added dryly, “I’ll even tell her you aren’t married.”

  “She looks too scared to care,” he grinned, pleased with this first sign of her letting down barriers. “I guess you got that about Miami?”

  “With you and our Russian friend practically waving flags how could I not?”

  Inside the d’Aubigné Room, Sigrid paused by one of the technicians who was dusting the table where the body had been found, looking for usable prints. She gave him Flythe’s card, explained what she wanted, and received his promise to develop any fingerprints on the card for comparison with Fred Hamilton’s when the FBI passed them on.

  A photographer was dispatched to the Bontemps Room. “Make it look as if you’re merely following the usual routine,” Sigrid told her, “but try to get a clear profile and full frontal of Flythe without letting him know it.”

  “Gotcha,” the girl grinned.

  “I mean it,” Sigrid said seriously. “If he’s who I think he is, he made J. Edgar Hoover’s list fifteen years ago. I don’t want him scared into bolting.”

  “He won’t feel a thing,” the photographer promised. “Trust me, ma’am.”

  While Sigrid heard progress reports and detailed an officer to locate Pernell Johnson’s girlfriend among the maids, Alan Knight had gone on ahead, ostensibly to put Miss Baldwin at ease.

  Molly tried to return the smile the naval officer gave her as he put his hat down on the table, smoothed his straw-colored hair, and opened the note pad. He was very friendly looking, she thought, and abruptly found herself wishing he was a police officer and not a Navy lieutenant, one of her cousin’s colleagues.

  By now she knew that he hadn’t known Teejy, but he couldn’t have missed hearing that awful Russian bellowing about being T.J. Dixon’s cousin; so the mere fact that he was in the Navy made things even more unsettling.

  “Do you want coffee or something?” he asked solicitously. “I could probably send for it, if you like.”

  “No, nothing,” she said. He seemed so nice. Maybe this wouldn’t be too bad, after all. “Will it be much longer, do you think? There’s so much—”

  “I’m sure it won’t be. Lieutenant Harald’s very thorough, but you don’t have to worry. You just tell her what you did this morning and that’ll be that. They say she can be pretty rough at times, but as long as you’re telling the truth, you’ll be fine. Okay?”

  Molly’s heart sank. “Okay,” she murmured faintly.

  Her small hands clenched into involuntary fists in her lap as she watched Lieutenant Harald’s approach. The tall policewoman seated herself across the table. Her wide gray eyes were unsmiling and her voice was professionally cool as she said, “Now then, Ms. Baldwin.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Earlier that day, Sigrid had spoken to Alan Knight of professionalism and objectivity, yet it was not objectivity but the experienced value of thoroughness that now made her question Molly Baldwin as carefully as any of the others. At this point, she truly believed that John Sutton was the intended target of Friday night’s explosion; therefore she saw no point in shilly-shallying over minor points.

  “Why did you lie about your relationship with Commander Dixon?” she asked the girl baldly.

  “I didn’t! I really wasn’t sure at first it was her and then when I knew . . .” Her voice died away under Sigrid’s openly skeptical gaze.

  “I—It’s not what you think,” Molly stammered.

  Alan Knight gave her an encouraging smile. “We’re sure it’s not, Miss Baldwin, but you have to admit it’s a little odd.”

  Molly turned to him gratefully. “You see, Teejy—that’s what I’ve always called her—we had this awful fight last summer. I was really having trouble finding a decent job after college and she got really uptight and cut off my allowance just like that! It wasn’t fair. So I got mad and we hadn’t written or anything since. It was a totally unreal summer. I was so broke. Then I landed a job at one of the resort hotels and that led to this. My training probation’s up next month. Everything was going pretty good and I thought Madame Ronay would probably offer me a permanent position but I didn’t want to tell Teejy until I knew for sure.”

  “So on Friday night you were still angry with Commander Dixon?” asked Sigrid.

  “Oh, that’s not why I didn’t say we were cousins.”

  “Then why, Ms. Baldwin?”

  “Because of the tournament,” she said, as if it were obvious.

  “When I saw her name on the pairings chart, I freaked. I didn’t know what to do. She’s crazy about cards and the tournament’s not supposed to be open to family members of the staff and Teejy’s my family, see?”

  Clearly they did not.

  “Well, I couldn’t pop up two days before the tournament started when it was too late for her to get her entry fee back and all and say ‘Here I am and you can’t play because I work here,’ now could I?”

  Was the girl as naive as she appeared? wondered Sigrid. Did she really think the term “immediate family” covered a cousin she hadn’t spoken to in over a year?

  “I was petrified that Madame or Mr. Flythe would find out.”

  Evidently she was that naive.

  “Ms. Baldwin—”

  “Oh, I know it was wrong of me, but what else could I do? I left a message on Teejy’s answering machine to pretend not to know me if we met unexpectedly and she did. And then when the bomb went off— It’s been so horrible for me! I haven’t known what to do.”

  Her pretty blue eyes began to resemble rain-drenched forget­me-nots again.

  Sigrid glanced at Alan Knight. There was a faint expression of distaste on his face and she gave him a nudge under the table. Immediately, he made soothing noises and proffered his handkerchief.

  “Please, you won’t tell them, will you?” she asked, dabbing at her eyes.

  “Only if it becomes unavoidable,” Sigrid assured her expressionlessly.

  “The hospital won’t give me any details over the telephone,” moaned Molly. “I guess I could have gone down, but if she was unconscious, that wouldn’t do her any good, would it? And I was afraid you’d have someone there, you see, and then you’d know.”

  She looked at Alan Knight timidly. “She’s going to be okay, isn’t she? I mean, she’s not going to die or anything?”

  “No,” Knight said tightly. “They expect her to live.”

  “Oh great!” she said with an exaggerated sigh of relief.

  Hastily, Sigrid asked, “Lieutenant Knight, would you ask somebody to get us something to drink? I’d like coffee. Black. Ms. Baldwin?”

  “Ginger ale, please.”

  Wordlessly, Knight went himself.

  So much for good cop/bad cop, thought Sigrid.

  By the time he returned, with their beverages on a tray and his distaste on hold, she had led Molly back over Friday night again. The girl still insisted that she hadn’t particularly noticed Pernell Johnson’s movements. She did, however, remember Ted Flythe’s.

  “He rushed around and helped change the ashtrays with the rest of us. The cut-glass ones are so much prettier, but harder to clean and with card players— Mr. George has to put out fresh ones every three hours. Those people smoke like chimneys.”

  Alan Knight glanced at Sigrid, who acknowledged with a slight nod how easy Flythe might have found it to switch one cribbage board while everyone else was switching hundreds of ashtrays.

  “Let’s move on to today,” said Sigrid. “Several people say you spoke to Pernell Johnson at the service door shortly before the ten-thirty break.”

  “That’s right. I didn’t know his name though. I was asking him to keep an eye on the ash stands on the landing. Madame Ronay has a thing about dirty sand. People can be so messy. They drop chewing gum off th
ere, or leave candy wrappers. So I asked him to tend them during the break.”

  “And did he?”

  “I guess I forgot to look.”

  “Madame Ronay stopped in at the Bontemps Room during the break to look for you. She says you weren’t there then.”

  “No, I’d gone down to my office.”

  “But she’d just come from there and didn’t find you.”

  “We must have just missed each other. Mr. Flythe had given me the copies you wanted of the pairings and after I spoke to the busboy, I went on down the back way. I put the sheets in a folder for you, took care of some things on my desk, and then returned by the grand staircase about forty-five minutes later.”

  Knight had been following her story on his sketched floor plan. “It could have happened like that,” he said. “As many exits and elevators and halls as this place has, you could play ring­around-the-rosy all day.”

  “Madame Ronay spent some time in her office, too,” said Sigrid. “Is that near yours?”

  Molly gave a feminine hoot. “My office is in that warren back of the main desk. La R—I mean, Madame Ronay’s is up on thirty, next to the boardroom. On thirty, even the broom closets are bigger than my office.”

  “So from approximately ten-thirty till eleven-thirty, you were at your desk alone?”

  Molly Baldwin nodded her curly brown head.

  “Did you see anyone, speak to anyone along the way?”

  “Gee, I don’t know. You know how it is: you just nod or wave; you don’t stop to talk every time. There was the desk clerk, of course, and the bell captain. There’re always people coming or going.”

  “In your office, too?”

  “Well, no. Clerical staff don’t have to work on Sundays. Just a skeleton crew down in the secretarial pool in case of emergencies. They mostly goof off or read or knit ’cause nothing ever happens on Sunday.”

  “Now, Ms. Baldwin, you’ve told us that you did not know Pernell Johnson except by sight and only as a staff member employed here at the hotel. Is that correct?”

  As Sigrid’s voice became more official, Molly tensed again. “That’s right,” she said anxiously.

  “We’ve heard that he recently moved here from Miami. That’s where you’re from, too, isn’t it?”

  “But I didn’t know him,” Molly protested. “Miami’s huge. That’s like saying I ought to know you because we both live in New York.”

  “So, in fact, he gave no indication that he’d ever seen you around Miami either?”

  Molly Baldwin shook her head.

  “Very well, Ms. Baldwin,” Sigrid concluded. “If you’ll bring me those pairings sheets, I think that’ll be all for now.”

  The girl looked at Alan Knight entreatingly. “Would you tell them about me at the hospital?” she asked. “My name, I mean, and that I’m Commander Dixon’s cousin so they won’t give me a hard time about letting me see her?”

  “Certainly, Ms. Baldwin,” he said formally.

  “Oh, thank you,” she breathed, and slipped away to fetch the papers.

  “Aren’t you going to tell her?” Sigrid asked.

  “Let her find it out at the hospital,” said Knight. “Did I apologize for thinking you were callous about Commander Dixon? And Dixon’s her only relative, for God’s sake.”

  One of the uniformed officers whom Sigrid had instructed earlier came over with a slender young black girl in tow.

  “Lieutenant Harald, this is Miss Terri Pratt, the victim’s friend.”

  She was a winsome child, not pretty exactly, but with a sunny intelligent charm that shone through her shock over Johnson’s death. They soon learned that she was a part-time employee at the hotel and a full-time student at Hunter College. She hadn’t actually dated Johnson yet, “But we were working at it. We’d taken a couple of breaks at the same time. He was a little younger than me, but pretty sharp. Had his act together. I liked that.”

  They had snatched a few minutes in passing since Friday night, she told them; had even planned to meet for lunch today; but if Pernell had known anything important about the explosion, he’d given her no indication of it.

  “And he would have,” Terri Pratt assured them. “At least I think he would. He talked about everything else that happened that night.”

  At the end, Sigrid thanked her and added, “We’re very sorry about your loss, Miss Pratt.”

  The girl shook her head. “We weren’t that far yet. Things were just starting between us and there was so much else we needed to do first: school, work. Pernell wanted to start a chain of small resort hotels in Florida. He’d have done it, too. He could’ve done anything.” Her face drooped as she spoke of what would now never be. “He was so—oh, I don’t know. Innocent? And very, very sweet.”

  Her voice shook as the finality of his death sank in.

  In the lull after Molly Baldwin brought them the pairings sheets and went back to her work, Alan Knight suggested that they might as well grab a bite to eat while they waited for the cribbage players to regroup after their own lunch break. The hotel’s coffee shop was jammed, so he and Sigrid went to the tavern across the street, where Sigrid let herself be persuaded that a large mug of rich dark ale could substitute for the pain tablets she’d forgotten to bring with her.

  Sandwiches there were pricey but generous. The corned beef was sliced thinly and laid on an inch thick, the mustard was dark and spicy, the dill pickles crisp and tender.

  As they ate, Alan regaled her with exaggerated tales of his upbringing in a Southern household tucked in amongst six sisters. He seemed to have decided on a big sister-kid brother scenario for their temporary partnership and Sigrid could feel herself being drawn in. His knack for instant friendship was seductive to someone who found getting past the initial barriers difficult.

  Kinship was a whole different matter though, even this artificial kinship. Her mother possessed rafts of uncles, aunts, and cousins and so had her father, which meant Sigrid had grown up accustomed to having strangers suddenly introduced as Uncle this or Great-aunt that, people who by blood were entitled to speak to her familiarly, chaff her on her shyness, or ask personal questions that would be a gross impertinence in someone unrelated. Brothers she had never known, but Alan Knight was not unlike some of her Lattimore or Harald cousins and unconsciously she found herself reacting to him in the same manner; so that when he asked her why she had joined the police force, instead of replying that it was none of his business, she answered him honestly.

  “Probably a combination of genes and aptitude. My father was a policeman killed in the line of duty when I was a child. I barely remember him, but I guess I grew up thinking it was an honorable profession. And I’ve always liked puzzles—word games, jigsaws, solitaire, any kind of logic problems.”

  “The Norwegian with a dog lives next door to the man who smokes Parliaments?” smiled Knight.

  “So who owns the zebra?” She nodded. “And when I was a child, I used to tangle a ball of twine deliberately and then spend hours undoing the knots. Bringing a little corner of the world back to order, I suppose. Who knows? I’ve never analyzed it much.”

  She sipped the last of her ale. “Why did you join the Navy? To get away from women?”

  He laughed. “You sure don’t find many on shipboard yet.”

  “Are you making it a career?”

  “I didn’t plan to, although I’m working on my second tour of duty right now. With seven kids, we all had to scrape around for tuition. If you sign up for ROTC, they give you four years of college for four years service. I’m being ordered to Naples in December. Join the Navy, see the world. It’s not a bad life.”

  “Commander Dixon seemed to like it,” Sigrid said. “What will happen to her now, do you suppose?”

  “The Navy will take care of her. Military hospitals must know everything there is about prosthetics and therapy. She may have a choice between full disability or retraining.”

  It sounded awful to Sigrid.

  Bette
r than the alternative, he reminded her.

  Back at the hotel, the crime scene technicians were packing up their equipment, having collected all the physical bits of evidence they could find. It wasn’t much. Or rather, it was too much. Too many people had used the room since its last cleaning. Trying to sort out what might be pertinent from the mass of fingerprints, fibers, and cigarette butts would be almost impossible.

  Nevertheless, they would go through the motions.

  “Oh, and we did find this,” said one, and handed over Zachary Wolferman’s schilling to Detective Eberstadt, a heavyset officer entering middle age. He sucked in his stomach and slipped the coin into his watch pocket for safekeeping.

  Down in the Bontemps Room, Ted Flythe called the players to order. A telephone conference with his superior at Graphic Games had left the ball in his court and now he bounced it on to them. “We have two options,” he told them. “There are sixty-four players still in contention and you sixty-four have the vote. You can draw lots and have a winner-take-all playoff, or you can call it quits and split the prize money. It comes to just over a hundred and fifty each.”

  There was hasty consultation among the weary and beleaguered players. The vote went overwhelmingly in favor of calling it quits before anyone else got killed.

  Graphic Games’ Second Annual New York City Cribbage Tournament was officially over.

  CHAPTER 22

  The tournament may have been over, but questioning the card players dragged on into midafternoon. It could have been worse. Of the three hundred or so players, less than twenty were positive that they had seen Pernell Johnson after the break began.