“You were probably just entering grade school,” said Flythe. “You sure I can’t get you a drink?”
“No, thanks. We were wondering about Sunday morning.”
“What about it?”
“Did you know the kid that was killed? Pernell Johnson?”
“Not by name. I’d seen him around all weekend though.”
“Talk to him much?”
Flythe shook his head. “No need to. Miss Baldwin and the room steward—What’s his name? George? They kept that side of the tournament running smoothly. I’ll say that for the Maintenon. Graphic Games got its money’s worth. Lucienne Ronay runs a class operation. Those fancy ballrooms.”
“We heard you liked the bedroom, too,” said Eberstadt, with a slow wink that was like a visual nudge.
Flythe gave an airy man-of-the-world wave of his hand. “No point letting opportunity knock and not get up to answer,” he grinned.
“The last time anyone seems to have seen Johnson alive was about the middle of the break on Sunday morning,” said Lowry. “About 10:41. Did you run into him after the break began?”
“Nope, can’t say that I did.” Flythe drained his glass and looked at Eberstadt’s. “Ready for another suds?”
“No, thanks. Let me get this straight, now. When you left the tournament, you went out the back exit, right?”
“Right. There’s an elevator behind the one in the lobby and I took it up to my room. Had to change my shirt because of one of those ditsy kids. I didn’t even know she was there. I turned around right after the break started and she had one of those goddamned permanent markers in her hand—getting ready to make someone a new name tag she said—and put a black line three inches long right across the front of a new forty-five-dollar shirt. And don’t think that didn’t go on the expense account I turned in yesterday.”
“Did the girl go up with you?” asked Eberstadt, with an insinuating smile. “Help you find a fresh shirt or something?”
“Naw. I didn’t have time for a long hunt.” He laughed.
“So in fact,” said Lowry, “you were away from the Bontemps Room from, shall we say, 10:25 to 10:55? With no one to confirm your movements?”
“Hey, wait a minute! What the hell are you playing at?”
“Oh, we’re not playing, Mr. Flythe. Pernell Johnson was killed sometime between 10:41 and eleven o’clock A.M. and you can’t seem to prove where you were.”
“Jesus H. Christ!” groaned Flythe. “I’ll show you the goddamn shirt!”
Lowry followed him to the bedroom, his hand inconspicuously close to the gun under his jacket. But Flythe rummaged through a basket of dirty laundry and came up with a crumpled shirt. It did indeed have a long black ink stain across the front.
“You think I’d lie about a dumb thing like this?”
“I don’t know,” said Eberstadt from the doorway, where he stood with the framed diploma in his big hands. “You lied about a dumb thing like a college, why not murder?”
“What the bloody hell—?”
“Knock it off, Flythe,” said Lowry impatiently. “Alfred Theodore Flythe—the real Alfred Theodore Flythe—graduated in 1907. If you look closely, you can see where you changed the zero to a six. You never went to Carlyle. Why did you lie about it?”
Ted Flythe sank down on his unmade bed and put a pillow over his head. They heard a steady string of muffled heartfelt curses, and they waited till he started repeating himself.
“Who’s Alfred Theodore Flythe?” asked Eberstadt.
Flythe sat up. “Me. And my grandfather. I was named for him. Look, you gotta understand: every job you go into today, doesn’t matter how sharp you are, how much chutzpah you’ve got, the first thing they want to know is, have you got your college degree? You think it takes a college education to handle a bloody cribbage tournament? So I tell ’em I graduated from this little college that went bankrupt in the seventies, show ’em the old sheepskin, and I’m in. They’re never going to look it up. They don’t really care. They’re just checking off boxes on their questionnaire.”
They went back into the living room. Eberstadt accepted another beer and they turned Flythe inside out, but got nothing further out of him. He insisted that he’d never seen John Sutton before that first chance encounter last Wednesday and that the only place he’d gone during the Sunday morning break was straight upstairs to his room for a fresh shirt and back down again.
It was only seven o’clock when they gave up. Lowry borrowed Flythe’s phone and rang Elaine Albee’s apartment again.
Still no answer.
CHAPTER 29
Vassily Ivanovich had been on his way out of his apartment near the UN when Elaine Albee and Alan Knight caught him. The big Russian invited them back inside for a glass of rosé.
“No more vodka or slivovitz,” he apologized. “Now I am having to watch my blood pressure.”
He explained he was on his way to the hospital. “Molly Baldwin and me, we have long talk yesterday and she explains to me so much foolishness for her job. She cries very hard when I tell her it is foolishness. All is understood now and last night they let me see T.J. This morning I go, and tonight I go. Next week I go home.”
“To Russia?”
“Da. To Russia. My delegation here is finished.”
He did not take offense when they questioned him again about his movements Sunday morning. It was almost as if he did not realize he could be seriously considered for the murders. Asked why he was late getting back to the tournament after the break he said he’d made a phone call to a member of his trade delegation and had been put on hold for longer than he’d anticipated.
It was not something they could easily check, but Elaine remembered another possibility, the theft of the cribbage board, and asked, “Did you work on Thursday, Mr. Ivanovich? Between noon and three, say?”
“Thursday? Da. We meet with export group from Georgia. We have same state. In our south, too,” he beamed at them. “They want to sell us new fish they make there. Crawdudes.”
“I think you mean crawdads,” said Alan Knight with a perfectly straight face.
“We meet at ten, have lunch at one, make first agreements at four.”
“And that’s something I can check out,” said Knight as he and Elaine left Ivanovich’s apartment in Tudor City, that enclave of pseudo–French-Gothic buildings on the East River across from the UN.
They strolled north along a tree-lined street that was so quiet they might have been in one of the outer boroughs of the city. Lights glowed softly behind the leaded glass windows around them and midtown bustle seemed far away. As they paused on the bridge above Forty-second Street to watch the early evening traffic pass below them, the night breeze off the river was cool with a lurking undertone of coming winter.
Alan bent his fair head to Elaine’s and his drawl was as warm as a summer night in Georgia. “I know a little place down in Chelsea where they make a shrimp tempura that’s almost as good as chicken-fried shrimp back home. Do you like Japanese food?”
“Ye-ess,” she said slowly.
“But what?”
She looked at her watch. “I half-promised Jim Lowry—”
“If it’s not a whole promise by five, it doesn’t count.”
“Is that the way it works down South?” she dimpled.
“Oh, we’re much more formal in the South. Half-past three’s the cutoff point for half-promises.”
“Tell the kids I like the pictures,” Tillie said, looking at the crayoned drawings taped to the wall beside his bed.
“You sound better tonight,” said Marian’s warm voice in his ear.
He positioned the phone more comfortably on the pillow beside his head. “I am. I ought to be. Sleeping through your visit this afternoon. You should have waked me.”
The three older kids got on the phone then and talked a few minutes—Chuck about football, Shelly about a drawing she would make of Chuck in his uniform, and Carl about Halloween, still two weeks away. A
t three, this would be his first real trick-or-treat experience and he was both fearful and excited about the scary costumes and all the candy he could eat.
One-year-old Jenny hadn’t quite got the hang of telephones yet, but Marian reported that she was smiling after he’d spoken to her and he could hear her “Da-da-da-da!” in the background.
“Get a good night’s sleep, darling, and I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Marian.
“I will,” he promised and hung up.
Not sleepy yet, he reached for the folder Lieutenant Harald had brought the day before.
Piers Leyden stood in front of one of his large figure paintings regaling critics from Art News and The Loaded Brush with his scatological anecdotes. This one was about a reclining female nude painted larger than life size which somehow wound up sharing a rotunda at Vanderlyn College with a retirement tea for a dean’s secretary.
“So the president’s secretary called the art department’s secretary and said my picture would have to go. The only place their refreshment table would fit was against the same wall and they didn’t want to chance pubic hairs falling in their silver punch bowl!”
Sigrid had heard the story earlier, in the spring when she investigated that murder in the Vanderlyn art department, but she laughed again with the rest because Leyden had a lusty delivery.
Leyden’s work was nowhere near as firmly established as Nauman’s, but a growing interest in the “new realism” had jammed his opening with fellow artists, critics, dealers, students, friends, and groupies. There even seemed to be a serious collector or two in the crowd. His dealer had talked him into hanging a couple of already-sold works which they had red-dotted as a sort of pump-priming tactic, and several other pictures already sported little red dots of their own.
An orange-haired woman in a short blue dress, oversized olive sweater and army boots stood talking to a platinum blonde with black lipstick and black fingernail polish and a thin young man, closely shaved and barbered, who wore an immaculate white dinner jacket and matching white sneakers trimmed in rhinestones.
“Buntrock at the Friedinger told me they were ready to make a move toward the new realism soon and that I’d better get in while I could,” the orange-haired woman announced importantly.
“I told you that months ago,” retorted white sneakers with a covetous glance at Leyden’s wonderful “Nude on a Cerise Rug,” which his friend had just purchased. “If you’d acted when I told you, you could have picked that up for two thou less.”
Sigrid found herself swept on and pushed up against a chalk drawing on pale blue paper. Amid curved lines vaguely suggestive of rounded blue clouds was a single small dark circle with soft lines radiating from the center, rather like a child might draw a starburst. Stylized stars? From a realist like Piers Leyden?
“You have to step back a few feet to get the full impact,” said Nauman’s voice behind her.
Obediently Sigrid stepped back and it became immediately obvious that the small dark circle was an anal view from pointblank range.
“Oh,” she said, and turned to Nauman with a smile.
“You cut your hair.”
She felt self-conscious again. “Yes.”
“Earrings, a real dress, even silk stockings.”
“They tell me gentlemen prefer Hanes,” she said, striving for lightness.
“Very nice,” he said, but there was an odd quality in his voice.
“Don’t you like it?” she asked, puzzled.
“Oscar Nauman!” cried a jovial little Frenchman. “Tell me, mon frère, what do you think of Kissie Riddle’s new abstracts?”
“Innocuous awning stripes,” Oscar said sourly. “Vuzak.”
They passed into the gallery’s crowded middle room where Doris Quinn, Leyden’s inamorata, presided over the wine punch and toasted brie with a proprietary air. Lovely as ever, she wore a russet-colored jumpsuit and lots of heavy gold bracelets and chains. (In the picture behind her, she knelt on an oriental rug her late husband had given her for an anniversary present and wore nothing except a knowing smile.)
“Lieutenant Harald?” she exclaimed. “Why, I almost didn’t recognize you. You look stunning!”
Praise from Caesar was praise indeed, thought Sigrid. She accepted a glass of the wine punch with murmured thanks while the little French gallery owner continued to badger Nauman for a kind word about the show he had currently mounted.
All around them swirled the darting glances, the languid handshakes, the empty kisses, the knowing faces mouthing profound judgments and invidious comparisons between Leyden’s current show, his past shows, his future:
“He’s ready to take off.”
“What a rich complex of architectonic imponderables.”
“Notice the resonant ambiguities in the reds.”
“His strategies work, darling.”
“What panache!”
“What presence!”
“What energy!”
“What crap!” muttered Nauman as he was carried off by a group that included Elliott Buntrock, perhaps the hottest curator in town at the moment.
“Now, Oscar,” Buntrock said sternly. “Stop calling it crotch art and tell me: who mentored Leyden? You?”
Nauman gave a bitter laugh. “Bob Guccione probably, but neither of them will admit it.”
While Nauman was trapped, Sigrid drifted around the gallery, conscientiously looking at Leyden’s new pictures. She didn’t know the right catch phrases and she didn’t care for very much on the current scene, having long since given her heart to the clean, uncluttered purity of the late Gothic.
A craggy Hans Baldung head, for example, spoke volumes more to Sigrid than any Piers Leyden full-figured odalisque.
“Ready to go?” asked Nauman, abruptly reappearing on her second circuit of the rooms.
He was silent in the elevator going down, but once they were out on the sidewalk, he made a great show of looking up and down the street. “What? No battlecruisers to sail you away tonight?”
Sigrid gazed at him a long moment; then it came to her and she was incredulous. “You’re jealous!”
“You’re damn right I’m jealous!” he scowled. “For six months! Didn’t I know? A swan hiding under all those prickly gray feathers. Didn’t I say? And you fighting every attempt— No matter how much bread I scattered on the water—”
His angry metaphors outran his tongue. “Then little Sammy Sailor comes floating by and hey, presto!”
Others had descended from the Leyden opening and Sigrid became aware of curious faces. “Stop it, Nauman,” she said. “You’re making a scene.”
“And what about Knight? Did he make you beautiful or did he just make you?”
“You’re insulting,” she said icily. “If there hadn’t been a half-bottle of wine to a gallon of soda in that punch upstairs, I’d say you were drunk.”
“An excellent suggestion!” he said and stomped away.
CHAPTER 30
Sigrid changed her mind as the taxi cruised down the avenue. She didn’t want to go home to Roman’s curious face, she wasn’t hungry enough to have dinner out, and there was no movie she wanted to see. Headquarters might have been an alternative, but dressed like this she would provoke even more curious looks. What she really wanted was a quiet, nonthreatening person who would talk about common unemotional things until she quit feeling as if she wanted to burst into tears.
Half of any solution lies in formulating the problem.
She leaned forward and asked the driver to take her to Metro Medical.
Visiting hours were not over until nine o’clock, so the hospital was still abuzz with daytime chatter, snatches of television music and the rattle of juice carts.
Sigrid had decided that if Tillie were asleep, she wouldn’t disturb him. Happily, she found him awkwardly endeavoring to replace the telephone on the bedside table and his mild blue eyes registered surprise as he recognized her.
“Lieutenant! But he said— I just tried to call you.
He said you were out.”
“I am,” she said dryly.
“I’m glad you came by,” he beamed, waving a piece of paper.
The expression on his bruised face was one that Sigrid had come to expect whenever he discovered a significant bit of data that everyone else had overlooked.
“What is it, Tillie? What have you found?”
“You said it would be easier if you knew for sure who the bomb was meant for, right?”
“Right.” Sigrid knew he savored the telling, so she did not spoil his enjoyment by rushing him.
“Well, look at this pairings roster you got from Graphic Games. Look at Wolferman.”
Sigrid looked. “Zachary Wolferman, Number 101,” she read.
“Now the commander.”
“Commander T.J. Dixon, Number 102.”
“And me?”
“Charles Tildon, Number 102.”
“Now look at Professor Sutton.”
“John Sutton, Number 161?”
“Somebody must have changed the six to a zero. You still have the seating chart from Friday night, don’t you?”
“The one that was on that little easel affair? I’m sure we do. It’s a bit smudged and crumpled though. It got knocked over and stepped on a few times.”
“You should still be able to tell. Somebody had to change Sutton’s number to 101 and somebody else’s to 161. One of those two numbers ought to be visible.”
The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald) Page 24
