Margaret Maron - The Right Jack

"Molly Baldwin?" – i

" Da, da . You are knowing her?"

" That's why her name sounded familiar this afternoon," groaned Alan Knight. "I'm a dunderhead! I read it in Dixon 's file last night but it never sunk in."

"Tell us about Molly Baldwin, please," said Sigrid.

"What is to tell?" asked the bewildered Ivanovich, cocking his grizzled head at their interest. But he complied.

Molly Baldwin was Commander Dixon's much younger cousin, orphaned six or eight years earlier, he told them. T. J. had been close to Molly's widowed mother and took a great interest in the child. After the child's mother died, T. J. had sent her to prep school and then college.

Each was the other's only relative and Ivanovich thought Molly had satisfieda ny maternal yearnings T. J. might have possessed.

"Yet you said they fought?" probed Sigrid.

Not really fought, Ivanovich quibbled. With much gesturing of his beefy hands and with their assistance on various idiomatic English phrases which escaped him, he managed a picture of the usual mother-daughter generation clash. On the one hand was T. J. Dixon, career-oriented, purposeful in her goals, her personal life separate from her professional.

On the other hand was young Molly, pretty and loving but also weak willed and indecisive. And not very industrious. She had drifted from one major to another through college, from chemistry to biology to history, no career in mind, her grades barely sufficient to earn a degree in sociology at the last minute. Once out of school, she seemed to expect her older cousin to continue her allowance as she took and lost a succession of modest jobs.

Finally last summer, Commander Dixon had thrown up her hands in exasperation.

"In a dress shop Molly is working and one time too many she comes late, so they tell her to leave and T. J. gives her money enough for one month to live and says, 'No more, kiddo. This is last red penny you have from me as long as I live.' Then Molly says ugly things and they finish." Ivanovich shook his head meaningfully.

"They aren't in touch now?"

"Only yesterday T. J. is thinking maybe she is too hard on Molly. She is still little girl, says T. J. Since they fight, she is not hearing from Molly and this hurts T. J. very much."

"Have you ever met Molly Baldwin?"

"No. Pictures I see, but Molly real, never."

He was astounded when Sigrid told him that Molly Baldwin worked here at the hotel and had, in fact, been present last night and again today.

"You're sure Commander Dixon didn't know?" she asked.

"No. This I swear."

He wanted to thresh out their revelation detail by detail, but Sigrid patiently led him back to the night of the explosion.

Grudgingly, Ivanovich told of meeting Commander Dixon at a nearby restaurant for a light super, then on here to the Maintenon. He told of her chance meeting with the banker Zachary Wolferman, of their subsequent conversation with his cousin Haines Froelick, and Mr. Wolferman's beautiful memory of a young German governess with a voice exactly like T. J.'s.

"Was there anyone else she knew here?"

"No one, Lieutenant. We talk, then they say for everyone to sit down, so we do. Then we play and then Boom !"

At a hospital several blocks away, the surgeon pushed back from the conference table. The charts and X-rays only confirmed what he'd earlier feared.

The grafts weren't taking. Blood had quit circulating, oxygen was no longer reaching Commander Dixon's arm.

The best space-age microsurgical procedures had failed and the only alternative left to them was but ac ouple of levels up from the sort of butchery.practiced in the Stone Age.

"No point in letting it go gangrenous," the surgeon told his staff grimly. "Might as well get it over with."

BY four-thirty, Elaine Albee's yellow marks on the pairings lists indicated that they had seen and spoken with everyone in the Bontemps Room who had been anywhere near Table 5 the night before. They had even spoken to several from the front tables who hadn't come close but who wanted to go on record as being opposed to terrorist tactics and personally outraged that such things could happen here. The detectives had listened to a dozen different theories of how the boards were switched and when and why, but no one said, 'Yes, I saw it happen.'

Someone would have to chase down the tournament contestants who hadn't returned today, listen to more theories, and hope that one of the missing had witnessed something tangible. In the meantime. Lieutenant Harald was ready to call it a day.

"Unless something unexpected turnsu p, I'll see you nine o'clock in my office Monday morning," she told Lowry and Albee. "We'll compare notes with Peters and Eberstadt. Will you have anything from your people?" she asked Lieutenant Knight.

"Probably," he answered. "What about Molly Baldwin? Want me to contact her?"

"No, I'd like to see her face myself when we tell her we know she lied."

From across the ornate room, Jill Gill waved good-bye to Sigrid as they left the cribbage players in the midst of the afternoon's final round before the supper break. They walked down the Maintenon's wide graceful staircase. Jim Lowry and Elaine Albee offered lifts back downtown. When Sigrid shook her head and Alan Knight drawled a vague refusal, the detectives headed across the lobby for the elevator to the hotel's basement garage.

Outside, the slashing rain made the hour feel later than it really was. Sigrid sheltered under the Maintenon's canopy to get her bearings, unsure of the nearest subway entrance.

"Buy you a drink. Lieutenant?" asked Alan Knight.

Across the street a comfortable looking tavern promised a warm dry interior with wide oak tables and man-sized drinks. The offer was tempting.

"A nice tall Dickie-and-Coke would be welcome right now," she told him regretfully, "but I can't mix alcohol with the stuff I'm taking for my arm."

"A raincheck then," he said with one of his appealing lopsided smiles. "I'm sure there must be a long story to explain why a Yankee cop drinks bourbon and Co'-Cola."

"I have a Southern grandmother, that's all. It's in the genes. See you Monday, Lieutenant Knight."

He touched the brim of his white cap in a half salute and darted across the street alone, dodging curbside puddles.

By the time Sigrid splashed the short distance to Grand Central Station, her blue scarf was sliding down, so she tugged it off and crammed it into the pocket of her jacket, letting her hair hang loose. A seat near the rear wall of the crosstown shuttle kept her arma way from traffic and the downtown train wasn't very crowded either, so she made it to her stop on lower West Side without getting jostled. There, she climbed the damp and dirty metal steps up to street level to find the rain had slackened to a misty drizzle.

No sign of the sun though. If anything, the leaden skies looked as if they were only catching their second wind and would soon pour down even more rain. She knew she ought to call Roman, ask if there were groceries she should pick up on her way for supper tonight or tomorrow, but the apartment-she still thought of it as the new apartment-was several blocks from the subway, tucked among the commercial buildings near the dilapidated piers that lined the Hudson. She was afraid that rain would arrive before she did if she lingered along the way.

As it was, she had just unlocked the tall wooden street gate when the heavens opened and a new flood descended. She splashed across the flagstones to the sheltered doorway.

Sigrid was no gardener, but Roman

Tramegra fancied himself a Renaissance man on a modest scale and would enthusiastically turn his hand to any task. ('Renaissance man indeed!' sniffed Grandmother Lattimore when she swept into town for one of her semiannual trips north. 'More what we always called a jackleg, if you ask me, which you won't, I suppose.') At any rate, Roman had transformed the tiny courtyard into a formal herb garden. At least it started out formal. By October the scented geraniums had grown tall and leggy, the borage and bee balm flopped, and the purple basil and coleuses Roman had stuck in for color were tattered and going to seed.