Margaret Maron - The Right Jack

Not that Sigrid cared. Nature in any form seldom interested her except as it interfered with her normal routine. As she fumbled for the door key, it did occur to her that the marble Eros that Roman had lugged home in late August looked a bit uncomfortable standing there naked in this first chill rain of autumn.

She was a little chilly herself but as she opened the door, she saw a light in the kitchen, heard Roman banging saucepans and cutlery as he unloadedt he dishwasher, and best of all, she smelled the homely aroma of his most successful soup.

Roman Tramegra aspired to gourmet chefdom. He bought the freshest raw materials and would spend hours slicing, peeling and dicing. But he chased a will-o'-the wisp of creativity around the kitchen with Portuguese wines, Chinese herbs, Greek cheese, or French mustards, constitutionally unable to follow a recipe without yielding to the temptation to improve it.

Few of his creations were totally inedible and over the course of time Sigrid had learned to be diplomatic. She did not like to cook and possessed an undemanding appetite. Before Roman Tramegra entered her life, she either stopped by a take-out place, fished something from the grocer's freezer, or opened a can of soup. There were times when Roman's culinary excesses made her long for those simpler meals

– she would never get used to his broccoli-and-chutney curry for instance

– but she usually repented when he miraculously came up with somethinga bsolutely delicious.

Such as the mushroom and barley soup she could now smell simmering on the stove in the green-and-white tiled kitchen they shared.

"Is it soup yet?" she asked from the doorway, shaking the rain from her soft dark hair.

"Sigrid, my dear! How are you? How is your arm? Why didn't you call? I've been so worried about you! Anne said you were simply slashed to ribbons ."

His voice was several tones deeper than anyone's Sigrid had ever heard, yet he still managed to talk in italics half the time.

"I'm okay," she said. "A little tired, though. And ravenous."

"Then sit, sit!" Roman boomed, clearing a space at the breakfast counter with one swoop of his arm. He wore a long white linen shirt over tailored gray denim slacks with rolled cuffs and a heavy silver and turquoise necklace that clanked against the ceramic topped counter when he bent across to lay out a bowl and spoon. He was a large man, in his mid-forties. Not fat exactly, but with an aura ofs oftness about him akin to that of a large pampered Persian cat. He moved like one, too, with a certain finicky grace and deliberation.

His sandy hair was thinning on top and the high dome of his hairline was echoed by the arch of his eyebrows and the curve of his hooded eyes.

"Let me wash up first," Sigrid told him and strode down the hall to her room, where she eased the jacket off over her bandaged arm and unbuckled the gun harness. She brushed her hair, freshened up in the bath, and returned to the kitchen in time to watch Roman ladle the thick fragrant soup into her bowl.

He demanded to hear all about the stabbing. Sigrid skimmed over the high spots, then asked, "Did you move my car?"

"Anne drove it over when she came for your clothes early this morning. She left it doubled-parked, but I drove it down to your garage. This place was a madhouse this morning. First Anne, then Oscar-I see he did deliver your clothes. I thought you two were coming straight back here. I waited till almost eleven and then I simply had to fly ."

"Sorry. We must have just missed you. Something came up," said Sigrid, blowing gently on her first spoonful of steaming soup.

Without asking if she wanted it, Roman fixed her a small bowl of torn endive, parsley, and Bibb lettuce and cut a thick slice of brown bread which he smeared liberally with cream cheese. By then Sigrid was eating with such obvious relish that he said, "It's early for dinner, but I may as well join you. I shall make my anised veal for our entrée and-"

"None for me, thanks," Sigrid said hastily. "Soup's all I want tonight."

"Perhaps tomorrow then," he said, leaving Sigrid to wonder if she could pretend to forget and send out for pizza or something. She had never acquired a taste for anise except in black jellybeans. Certainly not in veal and sour cream.

"Oscar was quite exercised about the explosion at the Hotel Maintenon. Was that what delayed you?" Roman asked. "Do say you're working on that."

"Now, Roman," she warned.

It was getting harder to deflect hise xcessive interest in her work. He was so certain that one ingenious murder mystery would free him from the magazine articles and fillers with which he supplemented his small private income but so far as he knew, only the dull and routine had come her way since the spring and he had begun to despair of the unimaginative ways by which so many New Yorkers dispatched one another.

"I hoped you might be able to tell me something-off the record, of course," he said wistfully. "Surely there's more than was in the paper? A multimillionaire killed, your colleague wounded, the glamorous Lucienne Ronay hovering in the wings! Is she really as beautiful as her pictures?"

"More," said Sigrid, happy that she could share that much at least. "I'm told she gave another dazzling performance last night. Jill Gill was there, by the way. She's one of the cribbage contestants."

"Jolly good," beamed Roman, whose cultured midwestern accent was overlaid by an Oxbridge accent that sounded suspiciously like too many old Peter Lawford movies to Sigrid. " She'll bea ble to describe all those delicious little details of dress and jewels that pass right over your practical head."

Roman Tramegra was the soul of tact and Sigrid knew he would never intentionally insult her. Yet, she found his blithe assumption that she was totally oblivious to all feminine artifice somewhat wounding. Just because she seldom wore makeup herself, just because she felt gawky shopping for clothes and didn't fuss with her hair every ten minutes, didn't mean that she was never interested in how other women achieve their glamorous effects.

" I noticed," she told him sharply. "Lucienne Ronay had on a very expensive, very attractive off-white dress this afternoon, long gold-and-pearl earrings, and several chunky gold bracelets. Her shoes were the same color as her dress, her hair was down about her face, and she wore a perfume that smelled like some sort of flowers."

Roman's spoon dropped back into the bowl with a surprised clunk.

"Very good , my dear Watson. The flowers are mignonettes."

"Mignonettes?"

"Her husband commissioned a perfume company in the Mediterranean to blend a special fragrance just for her."

Sometimes Sigrid wondered if her friend possessed a photographic memory. He claimed not to, yet he seemed a walking storehouse of trivia, with tidbits on almost every aspect of twentieth century pop culture. Sigrid recalled having once read about Lucienne Ronay's husband herself but details eluded her.

"He was something of a Svengali, wasn't he?"

"I think you mean Pygmalion," Roman corrected. "Svengali was an evil hypnotist; Pygmalion was a sculptor who created his perfect mate. G. B. Shaw, of course, And My Fair Lady , only that came later. That was Maurice Ronay though-Pygmalion and Professor Henry Higgins with the tiniest touch of Howard Hughes. A bit of a recluse with an eccentric sense of humor. He was a wealthy real estate investor, years older than she, and she was a little nobody , a peasant girl he found sleeping on the beach at Cannes, so the story goes. He brought her homew ith him, scrubbed off the dirt and found her so beautiful that he taught her how to walk and talk and carry herself, bought her clothes and jewels, and finally married her.