The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald) Page 13
Sigrid turned from the collage feeling depressed. Her arm hurt she was tired, and she wished that the year wasn’t heading into winter. Just then Nauman came through the door bearing a tray with cups of steaming coffee and wedges of warm apple pie beneath melted cheddar. “Room service,” he smiled at her.
On the tape, John Sutton orally reminded himself, “Check with Sam and Letty. Find out if anybody ever really saw Fred Hamilton or the Farr girl after Red Snow blew themselves up.”
CHAPTER 15
“Fred Hamilton and the Farr girl?” Sigrid asked.
“Brooks Ann Farr,” said Val Sutton, who had returned from settling her children for the night and now nursed a hot cup of milky tea. Sigrid sat with her note pad balanced on the arm of the deep leather chair across from Val’s.
“Her family was supposed to be quite wealthy,” said Val. “I remember hearing that Brooks Ann went to a prep school in Switzerland and that she’d been accepted at Vassar and Wellesley both, but she’d fought with her parents and decided to go to McClellan to spite them.”
“What was she like?”
“A nebbish.” Val shrugged. “Bright enough, I suppose, but mostly average: average height, a little on the heavy side, mousy brown hair, round face that usually had a sour look on it. She was always finding fault with everything and everybody.
“Except Fred. Fred Hamilton walked on water. She was an absolute doormat for that man. Half the things Fred got credit for, Brooks Ann did. He’d be mouthing off, throwing out all these theories about what SDS should be doing, and the next day she’d have mimeographed a stack of position papers based on what he’d spouted the night before.
“I doubt Fred gave a damn about her, but he was a user and he certainly used her. John said she used to cash the monthly allowance check her parents sent and give it all to Fred. I was in a drugstore once and saw her steal a box of tampons because she didn’t have enough money to buy them. John used to spend time with her. I think he felt sorry for her because she was so crazy about Fred and Fred was always quoting Ben Franklin behind her back.”
“Reasons for Preferring an Elderly Mistress?” asked Oscar.
“Only John said that Fred changed it to homely mistress or doggy mistress.”
“‘Eighth and lastly, they are so grateful,’” Nauman quoted for Sigrid’s enlightenment.
There was a pensive silence. A lump of coal slipped through the grate and fell upon the hearth in a shower of glowing sparks.
“Poor Brooks Ann,” Val sighed. “She probably was grateful. Fred was a leader. He could stir kids up, make them ready to storm the barricades. And he certainly was sexy.”
She watched Sigrid jot a few words on her pad. “Most of this is second hand,” she warned. “I barely knew either of them except for what John told me over the years. I never went to any SDS meetings and I’d only been seeing John a month or two before Fred went underground. Brooks Ann was just one of several girls hanging around him. The others were prettier—more verbal—Brooks Ann sort of faded into the woodwork.”
She spoke with the unconscious condescension of one who had never faded into any background. Anne Harald would probably enjoy photographing the dramatic angles of her catlike face, Sigrid thought, or those eyes, deepened into dark pools by the skillful application of mascara, Val’s beauty lay in the way she held her head, in the way she moved, in the innate knowledge of her sexuality. As a child she must have been as odd-looking as I was, Sigrid thought despairingly, so how did she end up with so much assurance?
She drew a heavy line across the width of her note pad and carefully printed Fred Hamilton’s name beneath.
“I get the impression that Hamilton was a little older?”
“He was,” Val nodded, her heavy dark hair swinging forward. “Older than most of us anyhow. He was a senior, but more like twenty-four or twenty-five because he’d dropped out years before to join the Peace Corps. I think his father was an executive in chemicals or defense contracts and Fred couldn’t get along with him, so he wouldn’t ask his parents for money when he came back.”
“He took his girlfriend’s money instead,” Sigrid observed.
“Put like that it does sound hypocritical,” Val admitted, “but nobody twisted Brooks Ann’s arm. And remember, it seemed like poetic justice back then to let the Establishment support the protesters, too.”
She stood and moved to the tray on the desk to pour herself another cup of tea. Her slender body was stooped with fatigue.
“It all gets so confused,” she said, adding milk and sugar to the blue porcelain cup. “Sometimes I think I must be getting old. They say the older you get, the more conservative you become. I remember when the first bombs went off in a Brooklyn draft board. I wasn’t particularly radical, but I thought, Hey, right on! Let them get a taste of warfare. But today, when abortion clinics get bombed, I’m outraged.”
“Because you condone abortion and you didn’t condone the draft?” Sigrid suggested.
“Or because they’re on the Right and we were on the Left?” Val mused, turning to face her. “I don’t think so. We were trying to stop the killing.”
“Pro-lifers say the same,” Oscar observed mildly.
“Oh God, Oscar, you’re not going to equate abortion with the draft? Young men were forced to go to Vietnam. Women aren’t forced to have abortions. It’s not the same.”
“I didn’t say it was,” he protested. “I happen to think women have a right to their bodies.”
“So do I,” Sigrid said slowly. “Even so, I can’t quite reconcile some parts of it. I don’t believe abortion’s murder; yet if someone assaults a pregnant woman and kills her unborn child, I do think that’s manslaughter. I guess I don’t have a good definition of when life begins. Not like the right-to-lifers.”
“I hate that term!” Val said passionately. “When villages full of babies were carpet-bombed in Vietnam, where were the right-to lifers? When babies starve all over Africa, when babies go hungry right here in our own rat-infested slums, where are these so-called life-lovers? They care nothing about the quality of life once a baby’s born, just that it gets born. They’re so sure God’s on their side!”
“Val—” said Nauman.
“No, Oscar, don’t. I have to work this out, because that’s what bothers me. We were just as positive our views were moral, that we were working for something good even if the way we worked . . .” She looked at them, her face ravaged. “Did we set precedents?”
“You’re afraid you created an atmosphere that made violence an acceptable part of civil disobedience?” Sigrid asked.
“Yes!” Val said gratefully. “And not just public protest, but private, too. Has it gone full circle?”
Her dark eyes filled with tears again. “Is that what killed John?” she asked hoarsely.
“Of course not,” said Oscar. He crossed the Peruvian rug to put his arms around Val and hold her tightly while she wept softly against his chest.
Sigrid picked up the poker and punched at the fire. Carefully she raked the fiery chunks into a neat pile, then leveled them again into a glowing bed. Only the week before, she had flown down to North Carolina for the funeral of a close cousin and Val’s grief rekindled her own so abruptly that she could not turn around and watch.
Presently the sobs behind her subsided. Val blew her nose and came back to her chair by the hearth.
“Sorry, guys,” she said shakily. “I keep thinking I’m cried out and then something sets me off again.”
Nauman shoved his chair closer to hers and held out her forgotten cup of tea.
She took a deep swallow. “Don’t you want more coffee, Sigrid? I’m sure they’ve probably made a fresh pot by now.”
“No, thank you. Describe Fred Hamilton, please.” Her words were blunt and businesslike.
“Yes, of course. Let’s see . . . about six feet tall, dark hair that he wore shoulder-length, muscular build. The sexiest eyes I’ve ever seen. I was teasing John about that—was it
just last night? God! It seems so long ago.”
Again her eyes pooled and Sigrid felt such a rush of compassion that she was almost paralyzed. “You and your husband discussed Hamilton last night? Who brought him up? You or he?”
“He did,” Val replied, puzzled by her harsh tone. “He asked if I remembered Fred and I said yes, he was a smoldering sexpot. We were kidding about it; you know how it is.”
Only as an outside observer did Sigrid know that teasing intimacy between wife and husband. She nodded stiffly.
“We were on our way out to the Maintenon while we were talking and I asked John if he thought Fred and Brooks Ann would ever turn themselves in—so many have over the years, you know—and John . . .”
She frowned as she remembered. “He said that it was odd I should ask or something like that and then a cab stopped for us and we wound up talking about other things.”
“But the way he said it?” Sigrid probed.
Val nodded her sleek brown head. “The way he said it was as if he’d heard something about Fred recently.”
Sigrid leaned back in the deep leather chair. “Val, I asked you before but I want you to think again very carefully. Did you converse with Ted Flythe last night?”
“No, why?”
Sigrid made a noncommittal gesture and Val looked to Nauman for enlightenment.
He shrugged. “I suppose she wants to know if he reminded you of anybody besides that Tris Yorke.”
“Reminded? You think Ted Flythe is Fred Hamilton?” They could almost see her mind sorting and comparing. “They’re both the same height and coloring,” she mused. “Flythe has a beard and Fred was always clean-shaven with much longer hair.”
“You said Hamilton had sexy eyes,” said Sigrid. “One of my officers said the same about Flythe’s.”
“They’re similar,” Val admitted, “but I don’t think he’s Fred.”
“He’d be the right age,”· said Nauman, playing devil’s advocate. “Early forties, I’d put him.”
“No,” Val said, with conviction. “I know it’s been ages, but even if Flythe is Fred, why would he come back and kill John after all this time? They had an ideological split, not a blood feud.”
“Hamilton is still wanted by the FBI.” Sigrid told her. “The amnesty program covered draft evaders, not murderers. Even if the deaths of those children were unpremeditated, it’s still manslaughter. There’s no statute of limitations to run out. Your husband might be one of the few who could definitely identify him.”
“But I knew Fred, too. Why wasn’t I killed?”
“You said you were never in SOS. You weren’t close to anyone in the group except your husband,” Sigrid said. “He might not remember you.”
“People change in sixteen or seventeen years, Val,” said Nauman.
Sigrid flipped through her earlier notes. “Flythe told me he graduated from a now defunct college in Michigan. Carlyle Union. Does that ring any bells?”
“No.”
“He also said that he’s guided several tour groups around Europe. Did you and Professor Sutton ever travel overseas?”
“Sure, but not with any tour group. We always rented a car and poked around on our own.”
“What about some of the others who were supposed to have been killed in that Red Snow explosion? Could Flythe be any of them?”
“That I can’t help with at all.” Val shook her head. “Fred and Brooks Ann were the only two from McClellan as far as we ever heard. There was a black girl from the Panthers whom we’d met at one of the rallies, but I think her body was definitely identified. Oh, and there was a kid--what was his name? Victor? Victor Earle! He was with Red Snow near the end, but he wasn’t in the lake house when the rest were killed. We heard he was in Canada or Sweden.”
“What happened to him?”
“They couldn’t prove he’d taken part in the bombing of that day-care center and draft board in Chicago, but when he came back to the States in the mid-Seventies, they hit him with drug smuggling and possession of illegal arms or something. I’m pretty sure he stood trial and drew a sentence, though he must be out by now.” She shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry. I just can’t remember. It was so long ago. Anyhow, Victor couldn’t be Flythe. He was much shorter and already starting to lose his hair on top.”
Nevertheless, Sigrid added Victor Earle’s name below Tristan Yorke’s on her short list. It wouldn’t hurt to learn Earle’s whereabouts. The odds weren’t favorable that he was involved; still, he might recognize Flythe or be reminded of someone who looked like Flythe. And it wouldn’t hurt to ask for Fred Hamilton’s prints either. They had to start somewhere. Sooner or later, surely something would connect if Sutton were the intended target.
They discussed the possibilities a few minutes more and might have talked even longer except that the door opened abruptly and a sobbing little boy hurled himself across the room and flung himself onto Val’s lap. His face was swollen with sleep and his hair was as rumpled as his striped pajamas.
“I want Daddy to come home,” he cried. “I don’t want him to be dead. I want Daddy to come home!”
“So do I, Jacky,” his mother murmured brokenly, smoothing his dark hair, so like hers. “So do I.”
The rain had subsided to a cool, fragrant mist when Nauman finally parked on the deserted street outside Sigrid’s walled garden. Her bandaged arm made getting out of the low car awkward, so he held the door and offered a strong hand up.
The streetlight down the block glistened on the wet leaves plastered along the sidewalk and haloed Nauman’s silver hair as he unlocked her gate and handed back the key.
Moved by an inexplicable need, Sigrid touched his face with her fingertips and lifted her lips to his for a long intense moment.
Nauman held her thin body as lightly as if she were a woodland creature that might suddenly turn and flee and looked down into her troubled gray eyes. In the six months that he had known her, it was the first time that she had initiated an embrace.
“Hello?” he said, pleased and yet puzzled.
“I—It’s—Oh damn it all, Nauman!” she murmured with her face against his shoulder.
“That’s okay, love, I know,” he soothed. His fingers tangled in her fine soft hair. “Come home with me, Siga?”
He felt the negative movement of her head. “Want me to stay with you?”
“No,” she said regretfully, and pushed away from him and opened the wooden door with a deep breath. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m being totally unprofessional.”
“You’re being human,” he said gently. “It’s allowed.”
“Yes. Well.” Her voice was wry as she moved through the gate.
The moment had passed. Oscar turned to go. At the curb, he glanced back. The door remained open and he could still see her shadowed form silhouetted against the lights of her apartment.
“Sure you won’t change your mind?”
“No.”
Her low clear voice was again as cool as the damp October night and the garden door clicked shut between them.
CHAPTER 16
The wind shifted in the night, pushing the rain clouds out to sea, and dawn brought crystalline blue skies and dryer air. As the sun came up, a clean autumnal freshness blew through the city’s glass and stone forests.
Exhausted physically and emotionally, Sigrid had gone straight to bed the night before, but she slept badly, coming awake between uneasy dreams. Each waking took her longer to slide back under and the bedclothes twisted and tangled around her restless body. She almost never rose early by choice, yet by the time the odor of coffee drifted down the hall to her room, she had been lying wide-eyed and tense for more than an hour and she wearily kicked back the covers to join Roman over the Sunday Times.
Since moving in together, their Sunday mornings were usually quiet and companionable with the radio tuned to a classical music station and the luxurious sense of lazy hours stretching ahead free of all responsibilities.
For her part, Sigrid usually bit into a French cruller and began at page one, moved on to the News of the Week in Review, zigged with the book reviews while Roman zagged with the magazine, then skimmed the other sections before diving happily into the puzzle page.
One could almost chart how long each had been awake by their respective places in the paper and by the number of pastries still in the bakery box on the table.
Today, however, Sigrid could not concentrate. A dull headache at the base of her skull echoed the faint ache in her arm and she felt thick-tongued and clumsy. She phoned the hospital and learned that Tillie was to be moved out of intensive care that afternoon. It was too early for any of the day shift to be at headquarters yet, so she returned restlessly to the newspaper.
Diagramless crosswords were her favorite puzzles, but even finding a pair of them at the back of the magazine section couldn’t divert her this morning.
What she really wanted, what she truly needed, was a long session in the nearest swimming pool. Since childhood, swimming had been her principal exercise. She was not a team player, jogging bored her, and sweating heavily in a workout class had never appealed; but slicing through water, pushing herself physically until an almost mindless euphoria enfolded her, never failed to release all tensions and leave her mentally refreshed.