Margaret Maron - The Right Jack

"They say everything that man touched turned into gold and his little peasant was no exception. He married her because she was beautiful and sexy, he said, and then she turned out to have brains too."

"I remember that," said Sigrid. She went around to the stove and clumsily helped herself to more soup. "Didn't her husband put together some sort of real estate deal here in Manhattan about eight or nine years ago and those three hotels were part of the package he didn't want?"

"Quite right," he agreed, holding out his own bowl for more. "They were like three nice old dowagers: still respectable, but drab and a bit tatty around the edges."

"My great-aunts used to stay at the La Vallière when it was the Carstairs," Sigrid remembered.

" Everyone's great-aunt stayed at the Carstairs," said Roman. "Monsieur Ronayw as going to dump it, along with what are now the Montespan and the Maintenon, when his charming wife announced that she was tired of being a plaything and wanted to work. So he gave her the three hotels for a Christmas present and she became something of a Pygmalion herself: cleaned them up, gave them elegant new dresses, and transformed them into three perfect jewels."

"Nice what you can do with money," Sigrid observed, savoring the warm buttery mushrooms in her soup.

"It always takes money to make it," Roman agreed. "But why not? They say she paid back his loan before he died."

"She does seem to have a flair for running hotels," Sigrid acknowledged. "Everything was under control today. No sign of any explosion except in the immediate vicinity of the bomb itself."

"Everyone says she's so pragmatic, that she's a termagant and a slave-driver, and perhaps she is. But underneath, she must have a romantic nature."

"Because she's so beautiful?"

"Outward beauty is only a manifestation of inner loveliness," he intoned in hiss olemn bass voice. "The names she chose for her hotels reveal everything."

"Do they?" Sigrid was weak on French history.

"Maintenon, Montespan, and La Valliere, my dear, were the mistresses of the Sun King, Louis XIV. I wrote an article on them when the hotels were rechristened. Sold it as a sidebar to Newsday , I think. Let me see now… Louise de La Vallière came first. She's the one they named the lavaliere necklace for. She was supplanted by Françoise de Montespan, who was three years older; Montespan in turn was replaced by Françoise de Maintenon, who was six years older still. She was almost fifty when she and the king were secretly married. She had beauty and intellect and held the king's heart until his death.

"If you think of it, Lucienne Ronay is much like de Maintenon herself. She was no infant when she married Maurice Ronay and-"

The telephone on the nearby wall interrupted his discourse. This phone and the one in Sigrid's bedroom werei n her name. Roman had a separate line in his quarters. Sigrid lifted the receiver to her ear. "Hello?"

"Val says you haven't been by to question her yet," said Oscar Nauman.

"No, I thought I wouldn't bother her until tomorrow."

"She won't be there tomorrow," he told her. "She and the children are flying home with John's body tomorrow morning and they won't be back till after the funeral. I thought you'd want to know."

"I do." Sigrid weighed her weariness against the need to interview Val Sutton while the night's horrors were still fresh in the new widow's mind. "Perhaps I'd better call her and arrange a time."

"I told her to expect us at nine if she didn't hear from me. She's beat."

"Me, too," Sigrid confessed.

"So take a nap," Nauman said sensibly. "That's what Val's doing. I'll pick you up at eight-forty-five. Okay?"

"Okay." It might be a little unorthodox, but if Val Sutton were given to hysterics, Sigrid wanted someone like Nauman there to help.

She looked at the clock.

Five past six.

"If I'm not up by eight-thirty, please call me," she told Roman and headed back down the hall for bed.

THE Sutton apartment was less than ten minutes away from Sigrid's, a block off Bleecker Street. Most of the mourners had gone by the time she and Oscar Nauman arrived shortly after nine o'clock, although four or five of John Sutton's graduate students still conversed in low tones around the dining room table and an emaciated young woman with a chalk-white complexion and gold-enameled fingernails-one of Val Sutton's colleagues from the Feldheimer, Nauman told Sigrid-sat on the couch reading a bedtime story to the Suttons' young son and daughter.

Both children had solemn dark eyes and straight black hair and they leaned sleepily against the woman's almost anorexic body. The smaller child, a little girl, had detached a wooden hippopotamus from the woman's chunky necklace and was dreamily walking it back and forth across the flowers printedo n her nightgown.

"She's waiting for you in his study," said the student who had admitted them.

Oscar Nauman led the way down the narrow hall, tapped at a door, and opened it without waiting.

The outer rooms of the apartment were furnished in what Sigrid privately tagged bohemian artsy-nubbly handwoven fabrics, earthtone ceramic jugs and bowls, and statuettes cast in bronze and iron. On the walls, abstract oils and stylized photographs were interspersed with batik hangings and South American Indian artifacts.

John Sutton's study was more traditionally academic. A heavy oak desk faced the door and several comfortable chairs were placed before two walls lined with bookshelves in which leather-covered volumes were jammed beside paperbacks and scholarly journals. There was a Peruvian rug on the floor, though, and framed political posters on the third wall supported the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Dick Gregory, among others. A floor-to-ceiling corkboard filled the wall behindt he desk, displaying a thumbtacked collage of snapshots, newspaper clippings, political cartoons, and protest buttons for the last twenty years.

Val Sutton sat curled on a leather chair that had been pulled up before the black tiled fireplace. A coal fire blazed in the small grate. She looked up as they entered and Sigrid immediately recognized whose genes the two children had inherited. As Nauman had said earlier, Val Sutton could not be considered conventionally beautiful; yet there was an intense, exotic vibrancy about her: high cheek bones and alert brown eyes in a triangular face, thick black hair clipped level with her chin line, a lithe and sensuous body.

The widow greeted Nauman in a husky voice, but her eyes were for the woman behind him. Even in her grief she could be curious about this police officer whom Oscar had described as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Wonder Woman. She half remembered that when Riley Quinn was poisoned at Vanderlyn College back in the spring, John had come home amused that Oscar seemed smitten by a police lieutenant. Knowingt he caliber of women the artist was usually attracted to, Val expected someone not only intelligent, but physically striking as well.

What she saw was a woman in her early thirties, almost as tall as Oscar, with a spinsterish angularity beneath nondescript clothes, a long neck, and a mouth too generous for her thin face. On the other hand, her wide eyes were an interesting smoky gray and they held a quiet watchfulness which made Val think that perhaps Oscar hadn't exaggerated after all.

"Come sit by the fire," she invited. "I know it's too early in the season, but I just can't seem to get warm tonight."

Nauman pulled a third chair closer for himself and, with the familiarity of an old friend, concentrated on lighting an intricately carved meerschaum pipe.

"Oscar told me you were injured last night, too," Val Sutton said. "Does it bother you much?"