The Right Jack (Sigrid Harald) Read online

  “The professor? Why?”

  “It’s beginning to look as if he recognized a Red Snow survivor.”

  “A who?”

  Belatedly Sigrid recalled that Knight had not joined them at headquarters yesterday until after the discussion about the radical group that blew themselves up in the summer of 1970, so she summarized for him the facts and speculations they had about Fred Hamilton and Red Snow and how John Sutton had been so deeply involved in the war protest movement out at McClellan State that he could probably have recognized anyone from those days.

  “Like Ted Flythe?” Knight suggested shrewdly.

  “Mrs. Sutton didn’t think so when I raised the possibility last night.”

  “How’s she handling it?” Alan Knight’s handsome face was immediately sympathetic.

  “She’s handling it,” Sigrid said bluntly. Her voice remained cool and matter-of-fact, betraying no hint of how grief-wrenched she’d felt watching Val Sutton and her small son last night. She carefully confined her narrative to the pertinent facts. “And even though she doesn’t think he’s Hamilton, we’ll get his fingerprints from FBI files and compare them with Flythe’s.”

  A pair of sailboats slipped by them, headed downriver. Their pristine white sails ballooned in the steady breeze. A clatter of rotors passed overhead, and Knight shaded his eyes to follow the helicopter’s flight until it dropped down out of sight at the heliport many blocks north.

  “In a way, I hope you’re wrong,” he said, tugging at the brim of his hat. “I hope it turns out to be Ivanovich.”

  “For Commander Dixon’s sake?” asked Sigrid, recalling how determined Val Sutton had been that her husband be the intended victim.

  “Yeah.” He walked along beside her in silence, then stopped to face her, his chiseled features bleak. “They had to take her arm off.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. They tried to graft in new blood veins, but it didn’t work.”

  Sigrid listened mutely, then strode on without comment. She had not met Commander T.J. Dixon, had not even seen a photograph, unless one counted the snapshot Vassily Ivanovich carried of her as a baby. Yet everyone commented on her prettiness; a feminine woman who enjoyed her beauty and used it to keep at least four men interested. How could she adapt to such a monstrous loss? Would she accept it philosophically, or would she withdraw into isolation, feeling mutilated and hideously disfigured?

  Lieutenant Knight trailed along beside her and her silence began to fuel his youthful indignation. The naval officer possessed the Southern charm that remains a birthright of all young adults—male and female—reared by mothers to whom manners are almost more important than morals and who instill both in their children with equal vigor. He was by nature friendly and easygoing and willing to meet anyone more than halfway, but he couldn’t see that Lieutenant Harald had budged an inch beyond the first five minutes of their introduction yesterday.

  If anything, she was becoming steadily more distant.

  He remembered his young yeoman clerk this morning. Her tender blue eyes had pooled with tears when she relayed the hospital report, repeating how dreadful it was and how sorry she felt for Commander Dixon until he’d finally seized on the information about Ivanovich to clear out of the office for a few hours.

  So it certainly wasn’t that he wanted Lieutenant Harald to burst into tears, he told himself. But not to say a word? To keep walking like T.J. Dixon’s arm was nothing more than a piece of meat to be thrown in the river?

  He’d worked with some hard-nosed senior women officers in his five years with the Navy, but he’d found that if he was friendly and properly respectful of their rank, they soon climbed down and opened up, while this one—

  Oblivious to his growing resentment, Sigrid moved through the sunlit morning almost blindly as she thought how devastated the commander would be when she recovered enough to realize that she’d lost her arm by a fluke, a bad coincidence of time and place. She thought of how bothersome her own arm was, yet it was only wounded and would soon heal.

  She turned to Lieutenant Knight abruptly. “How much of her arm did they amputate?”

  “How much does it take, Lieutenant?”

  His hostility took her by surprise.

  “I guess police officers get like doctors after a while,” he said.

  “What—?”

  “Cold. Detached. Objective!” His soft Southern drawl heaped scorn on the word. “Doctors can tell you about watching a baby die like I’d tell you about the Mets losing to St. Louis. They say it’s ’cause they can’t let themselves feel; that they’d burn out if they grieved over every patient. After a while, they don’t have to worry. They’ve got no feelings left.” His bitterness was scalding.

  “Is that what happened to you, Lieutenant Sigrid Harald of the New York Police Department?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said icily, without stopping.

  “Is that how you quit being a woman with a woman’s softness and a woman’s tender heart?”

  Goaded now, Sigrid turned on him, her gray eyes blazing.

  “I’m a professional investigator, Lieutenant. It’s my job to stay detached and objective. Will grieving replace Dixon’s arm or bring Val Sutton’s husband back to life? Will crying keep whoever did this obscene thing from doing it again? I don’t think so, Lieutenant. And what’s more, if I had a sick child, I’d rather have a doctor cold enough to keep fighting against death than one too choked up to work, so you can take your tender little chauvinistic heart and go to hell!”

  She jerked away from him, striding across the dilapidated pier, to the very edge, where she stood staring down into the murky water that lapped against the rotting pilings. She wished the water was cleaner, the day warmer, and that she could just dive in and swim toward the sun until all the churning inside her was washed away.

  Her arm throbbed viciously and she slipped it back into the sling and pressed it with her free hand to ease the pounding.

  Knight had followed her and he sat down on one of the nearby pilings. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I spoke out of line.”

  Sigrid shrugged and continued staring down into the river, grateful for once that her hair was loose and that the wind kept blowing it across her face and hid what she never willingly allowed anyone to see.

  On the next pier over, an oriental man walked out almost to the end carrying a large bundle of red material. He was accompanied by a small girl in pigtails, who frolicked about him like a puppy. They were obviously father and daughter and he called warnings as she ran too near the edge, while her laughter bubbled out in lilting joy.

  While Sigrid and Knight watched, the man placed his red bundle on the pier and began working on it. Curious gulls wheeled overhead.

  Knight glanced over at Sigrid. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I keep forgetting that all women don’t show—”

  “All women don’t do anything,” Sigrid said between clenched teeth. “No more than all men.”

  “Hey, I’m no chauvinist,” he protested. “I like women. Really.”

  Still unsettled and now annoyed at herself that she’d lost her temper, Sigrid brushed aside his protest. “Forget it. It’s not important.”

  On the next pier, the long mass of red cloth grew a ferocious golden dragon’s face and became first a limp red wind sock and then a swelling sinuous dragon with streamers that caught the wind as it clawed its way into the sky. The child clapped her hands gleefully as it dipped and soared against the blueness like a wild untamed beast straining against its leash. At one point, it toyed with disaster and skimmed the surface of the water, then a twitch of the line sent it climbing again.

  It was innocent and graceful and without realizing it, Sigrid began to relax.

  “I’m not really a chauvinist pig,” Alan Knight said coaxingly. “Thick-headed at times maybe, but not sexist.”

  “No?” Sigrid gave him a jaundiced look, for he suddenly reminded her of some of he
r Lattimore cousins when they meant to wheedle her into trying something she didn’t particularly want to do. Whenever the charm switched on, she’d learned to tread warily.

  Sensing a slight softening in her manner, Knight smiled persuasively and held up three fingers, with his thumb and pinkie touching. “Scout’s honor. I truly do like women.”

  Sigrid brushed her hair back behind her ears and looked down into his deep brown eyes.

  “That must make your wife very happy,” she said sardonically.

  Beneath the brim of his hat, his handsome face became unexpectedly flushed. “Uh— Well, you see, I’m not exactly married.”

  She shot a telling glance at the gold band on his left hand.

  “I’ve never been married,” said Knight.

  “Then why—?”

  “The ring? I bought it in a pawnshop and started wearing it in college.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, look at me.”

  Bewildered, she looked him over completely and saw nothing to alter yesterday’s original impression. Lieutenant Alan Knight was a remarkably attractive specimen of American malehood.

  She said as much.

  “Yeah, now,” he said without vanity. “Up until my sophomore year in college, I was an Alfred E. Neumann lookalike: my ears stuck out like jug handles, my front teeth made Bugs Bunny’s look good, I was as tall as I am right now, but weighed a hundred and ten sopping wet, and I had cowlicks fore and aft—goofiest looking face outside a comic strip.”

  Sigrid lowered herself to the dock and leaned back against the next piling with her left knee drawn up and her right leg dangling over the edge.

  “What happened your sophomore year?”

  “I worked on my uncle’s tobacco farm, ate my aunt’s cooking all summer, and put on twenty-five pounds. It seemed to make everything fit together. Then before I went back to college, my sisters hauled me down to their beauty shop and they found a way to cut my hair so it didn’t look like a haystack in a hurricane. All of a sudden, I looked pretty much like I do now.”

  “And that was bad?”

  “Scared the living bejesus out of me,” he replied earnestly. “I told you I like women and I do. I grew up in a household with six sisters, a terrific mom, and more aunts than I can count, but I never had a sweetheart. Girls at school used to tell me all their problems ’cause they knew I’d understand. They never wanted to go out with me, though. As far as they were concerned, I was just good old dumb-looking Alan. They kept telling me I was almost like a brother to them, only no girl wanted to date her brother.”

  Across the way, the pigtailed child had her hand on the thick cord that bound the majestic dragon to the earth, and they could hear her lilting tones as she cajoled her father to let her fly it solo.

  Alan Knight leaned down to scoop up a handful of loose gravel scattered along the pier and began plinking it into the water.

  “When I got back to college that fall, I didn’t know what hit me. I sort of liked it, having girls like me—who wouldn’t? But I also didn’t know how to handle it. Most guys, the guys that girls go after, have time to get used to how to act. From kindergarten, most of them; and certainly by junior high; and there I was, all the way in college, for God’s sake.”

  Sigrid smiled.

  “Yeah,” he said self-mockingly. “Funny as hell, right? And the worst thing about it was that after a while I missed having girl friends. I don’t mean lovers, but friends who are girls. Sorry, I guess I should say women.”

  “I’m not hung up on semantics,” Sigrid said mildly.

  “No? Anyhow, every time I’d try to be friends with a female, she’d either slap me down or expect us to go to bed together. It got to be such a hassle that I bought the ring and told everybody it was a secret marriage and that she’d promised her parents to finish school out west somewhere first. That took a lot of pressure off right away.”

  “I shouldn’t have thought a ring had that much power anymore.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “What happens when you’re attracted to someone?” she asked curiously.

  “I take it off. Or I tell her my wife and I are separated at the moment.”

  “So you have your cake and eat it, too.”

  “At least I’m not trying to pretend the cake doesn’t exist,” he said; then added boldly, “Why are you?”

  “In case you hadn’t noticed,” she answered flatly, “I’m not a college sophomore. I did all the growing up and filling out I’m ever going to do and, unlike you, I didn’t turn into a swan.”

  “But women are different,” he said. “There’s so much you can do to help the swanning along.”

  “Oh Lord, don’t start on the hair-makeup-sexy clothes bit.”

  She pulled both knees up sharply and rested her strong chin on them.

  “Why not? What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything, and frankly, Lieutenant, I can’t see that it’s any of your business.”

  “The guy you’re living with— Is he the one trying to get you to nibble some of the cake?”

  “Oh for God’s sake,” Sigrid groaned and swung herself up to leave.

  “That’s what my sisters always used to say when I got uncomfortably near the truth,” he called, striding after her.

  “I’m surprised they didn’t smother you in your crib,” she muttered as he caught up with her.

  “They tried. Mother wouldn’t let them.” He smiled at her persuasively.

  She did not smile back.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I’ve insulted you. You’re right. It’s none of my business if you don’t like cake. Truce?”

  Her suspicious gray eyes probed his. The mischief that had lurked there a few minutes ago was gone now and he seemed serious again.

  “I think it might be better if you worked with someone else in the department,” she said doubtfully.

  “I don’t. Besides, your partner’s still out and your captain mentioned you were short-handed. Why don’t we head on up to the Maintenon,” he suggested craftily, “and get Flythe’s fingerprints?”

  Sigrid glanced at her watch. Roman usually served Sunday’s main meal in the middle of the day. If she stretched it out a little, she could probably miss his anised veal completely.

  “First we’ll drop in on Molly Baldwin,” she told him.

  Behind them, the crimson dragon with the golden face stalked sea gulls far out over the water.

  CHAPTER 18

  During the week, Manhattan lives up to the image set forth in a thousand books, movies, songs, and sermons. It is indeed a money-grubbing, smart-talking, elbow-shoving, glitzy, rude, sophisticated, dirty, elegant, international metropolis. But on Sunday mornings, it becomes an astonishingly small town. Except for the Times Square area which never completely shuts down, the rest of the island grows hushed and lazy. Wall Street is a ghost canyon, footsteps echo through Grand Central Station, families stroll leisurely to church along empty sidewalks, and best of all, if you happened to be a nervous young sailor who learned to drive on a dirt road in rural New Hampshire, the streets unclog on Sunday mornings and become wide boulevards.

  He and Lieutenant Knight had dropped the skinny lady police officer off at a green door in a high brick wall, then gone searching through the food stores along Hudson Street.

  “Water biscuits?” he’d asked.

  “Big round crackers,” explained Lieutenant Knight, and gave him a brief history of what food used to be like on clipper ships.

  By the time they returned with her crackers, the lady officer had changed from jeans into gray slacks and a navy blue jacket. Soon they were zipping along up Tenth Avenue, catching green lights all the way.

  Now this was more like it, thought the yeoman.

  Tenth Avenue became Amsterdam Avenue as they sped north paralleling the park. Upon approaching the West Nineties, he slowed down and eventually turned left to pull up before the address Lieutenant Harald gave him.

 
“We shouldn’t be long,” said Lieutenant Knight as the two officers got out of the car.

  In fact, they were back in less than three minutes, the time it took to lean on the intercom button in the lobby until they roused one of Molly Baldwin’s late-partying roommates and were told that Miss Baldwin herself had left for work at least two hours ago.

  “Never mind,” said Alan Knight when Sigrid started to apologize for taking them out of the way. “It was a good idea to try to catch her off guard. To the hotel?”

  “To the hotel,” she agreed.

  “To the hotel!” echoed their neophyte driver. With renewed confidence he boldly cut across Central Park, cruised down Lexington Avenue, and swerved in at the hotel’s curb with style and panache.

  It was exactly three minutes past eleven.

  They found the Bontemps Room much as they had left it yesterday, although some of the older players beneath the glittering chandeliers were beginning to look a bit weary around the edges. They had been split into two groups after the mid-morning break at ten-thirty. The smaller section competed for the main prize, now reduced to seven thousand dollars; the others were playing for small but numerous consolation pots.

  Sigrid saw that Jill Gill was still in the running for the main prize. The entomologist gave her a distracted wave, but her attention was all on the cards.

  “They have to keep at it if we’re going to finish by five,” Ted Flythe told them. “The breaks are supposed to last fifteen minutes, but it takes almost a half hour to get them settled down again.”