Margaret Maron - The Right Jack

"Did you hear any of Sutton's conversation with the man from the games company?" she asked. "Did they seem to know each other?"

"Wasn't much of a conversation. What I heard of it seemed to be the usual-'How are you? Looking forward to Friday night. How many players do you expect?' That sort of thing. But you know," he mused, "it was odd."

"Yes?"

"After he and Lucienne Ronay moved off and all the time Ms. Baldwin was babbling on about how the hotel would arrange the tables for the CUNY dinner, John kept glancing over toward him, like there was something about the guy that puzzled him."

"Did he say what?"

"No. He finally shrugged as if it wasn't important and started trying to be nice to the linguistics jerk from Brooklyn College."

AN explosives expert was summing up as Sigrid entered the conference room at headquarters and Captain McKinnon waved her to an empty chair near his while the expert continued.

Judging from the crumpled napkins, soda cans and coffee cups, and the deli smells of pastrami and onions and mustard still redolent in the air, this session had begun with lunch.

Elaine Albee and Jim Lowry were among the dozen officers seated around the long table. Sigrid had worked with the two younger detectives before and had watched with a slightly jaundiced eye the more-than-professional relationship developing between them. Lowry discreetly pantomimed that he'd get Sigrid a cup of coffee if she wished, but she shook her head and turned her attention to the bomb expert.

He had covered a chalk board with diagrams of possible ways the bomb had been wired. Precisely how the detonation had been accomplished appeared open to question, since only slivers of wires, cherry wood, and battery fragments remained after the violence of the explosion.

On the table before her lay one of the cribbage boards which the bomb squad had picked up at the Maintenon. Milled from heavy close grained cherry, it was twelve inches long by four inches wide by three-fourths inch thick, divided lengthwise on top by a curving pattern of two parallel rows of pegging holes. One row for each player, thought Sigrid, recalling the details Tillie had told her about the game. Each row contained one hundred twenty pegging holes so that whichever player pegged a hundred and twenty-one points first would win.

The hardwood must have been difficult to work, but with a fine drill it would have been possible to hollow out quite a nice-sized chamber on the bottom. An hour or so of painstaking effort and the chamber would have become roomy enough to hold a small wad of explosive and some sort of trigger mechanism.

When everything was taped into place, a piece of cardboard was probably cut to cover the hollow and the green felt backing neatly reglued. To the casual eye there would have been nothing to distinguish that cribbage board from the one Sigrid was holding.

"No traces of radio or clock components," the bomb expert was saying, "so we don't think it was detonated by remote control or timer switches. Witnesses say play had begun about twenty minutes before the blast, so it was probably a switch that closed a simple circuit from batteries to the explosive itself. It takes about twenty minutes to play a game-in fact, some of the contestants were already beginning their second-so the switch probably involved a game-marking peg. Pull it up and zing went the springs of his heart. Or, just as easy, push it into the hole that stood for the first win and he turns out all his lights."

"Any ideas about who?" McKinnon's face was grim.

The expert shrugged. "Anybody who wants to spend an hour with a couple of technical encyclopedias could pick up the theory. And any bright ten-year-old could make the stuff with the right chemicals.

"One thing, though," he added. "Whoever did it has probably done it before. There's a certain finesse here. This bomb wasn't meant to kill more than the one or two people in direct contact with this particular cribbage board. I don't care how many nuts call in and claim to have struck a blow for the freedom of caged canaries or death to all cribbage players-"

"A private kill?" nodded McKinnon. "I wondered why the Feds weren't busting down our doors."

"He could just as easily have blown up the whole ballroom if he'd wanted to," the expert hedged.

"And you think he's done it before?" asked Elaine Albee, a fragile-looking blonde who'd made detective last year after bringing in three Central Park muggers single-handedly.

"Look, people, this stuff packs a hell of a wallop. More than an amateur realizes, so amateurs always wind up with overkill. This guy used just enough to do the job.

I don't say he's a professional killer, but I do say he's experienced."

"Like a demolition worker," suggested Lowry as he doodled an exploding cribbage board on his note pad.

"Or an ex-frogman," said the expert, who'd helped mine Haiphong Harbor.

"Or one of those Mideast crazies," someone contributed.

"Or maybe," suggested someone else, "a disgruntled bank teller with a grudge against Maritime National."

"I'll run my data through the FBI's computers," said the explosives expert. "Maybe we'll get lucky."

"In the meantime," Captain McKinnon told his troops, "we do it the old-fashioned way, people-shoe leather and interviews. Peters, what've you got on Wolferman?"

"Wolferman, Zachary Augustus, of Central Park South," said Detective Peters, reading from his notes. "Caucasian male, age sixty-one, unmarried. Chairman of the board and principal stockholder in Maritime National Bank. According to his lawyer, after all the debts and some hefty bequests to distant relatives.

servants, and various charities, the residual beneficiary is a cousin, Haines Froelick. The lucky Mr. Froelick will probably wind up with around six million."

With two pre-school daughters and a third child on the way, Bernie Peters was lucky if he had six dollars left over between paychecks and his wistful sigh echoed around the room. Almost palpable in the air were visions of Caribbean resorts, sleek cars, and expensive baubles.

"The cousin was at the Maintenon last night, too, wasn't he?" asked McKinnon.

"Yes, sir. Mr. Wolferman's housekeeper said they spent a lot of time together. Met for dinner and played cribbage two or three nights a week. They were in last year's tournament out on Long Island and the year before that at one down in Raleigh. Housekeeper says they bickered a lot but that they were as close as brothers. Mr. Froelick's parents died when he was a kid and his aunt, Wolferman's mother, sort of adopted him."

"What's Froelick's financial standing?"

"I haven't gotten that far on him yet, but he has rooms at the Quill and Shutter Club about two blocks from Wolferman. I figure he's not living on food stamps."

"Quill and Shutter? Is he a writer?"

"Amateur photographer. Putters around in the club's darkroom and gets some of his pictures in group exhibitions once in a while."

Mr. Wolferman's housekeeper had proudly shown Peters a collage of hand-colored Polaroid prints of herself in her best black silk with her grandmother's cameo at her neck, a collage that had won Mr. Froelick first prize for best nonprofessional work in the club's annual exhibition four years ago.

The housekeeper was younger than her late employer and his cousin, yet she seemed to look upon them both with a sort of maternal indulgence. "Not a bit of harm in either of them," she had told the detective, wiping away genuine tears. "Who could have done such a wicked thing?"

"The housekeeper can't name a single person that didn't like him. Chauffeur says the same. Ditto the lawyer."

"Everybody has enemies," rasped McKinnon.

"Maybe the cousin was in a hurry to inherit," said Jim Lowry.

"And what does an elderly Park Avenue club man know about building bombs?" Albee objected.