Margaret Maron - The Right Jack

"That's okay, love, I know," he soothed. His fingers tangled in her fine soft hair. "Come home with me, Siga?"

He felt the negative movement of herh ead. "Want me to stay with you?"

"No," she said regretfully, and pushed away from him and opened the wooden door with a deep breath. "I don't know what's the matter with me. I'm being totally unprofessional."

"You're being human," he said gently. "It's allowed."

"Yes. Well." Her voice was wry as she moved through the gate.

The moment had passed. Oscar turned to go. At the curb, he glanced back. The door remained open and he could still see her shadowed form silhouetted against the lights of her apartment.

"Sure you won't change your mind?"

"No."

Her low clear voice was again as cool as the damp October night and the garden door clicked shut between them.

THE wind shifted in the night, pushing the rain clouds out to sea, and dawn brought crystalline blue skies and dryer air. As the sun came up, a clean autumnal freshness blew through the city's glass and stone forests.

Exhausted physically and emotionally, Sigrid had gone straight to bed the night before, but she slept badly, coming awake between uneasy dreams. Each waking took her longer to slide back under and the bedclothes twisted and tangled around her restless body. She almost never rose early by choice, yet by the time the odor of coffee drifted down the hall to her room, she had been lying wide-eyed and tense for more than an hour and she wearily kicked back the covers to join Roman over the Sunday Times .

Since moving in together, their Sunday mornings were usually quiet and companionable with the radio tuned to a classicalm usic station and the luxurious sense of lazy hours stretching ahead free of all responsibilities.

Armed with coffee, juice, and a plate of jelly doughnuts, Roman would attack the thick newspaper from the end and munch steadily through to the front, pausing occasionally to dab away some powdered sugar and to read aloud a columnist or a comment that annoyed or amused him. He kept notecards beside his plate so he could jot down any stray sentence or quirky fact that struck him as the basis for a magazine article.

For her part, Sigrid usually bit into a French cruller and began at page one, moved on to the News of the Week in Review, zigged with the book reviews while Roman zagged with the magazine, then skimmed the other sections before diving happily into the puzzle page.

One could almost chart how long each had been awake by their respective places in the paper and by the number of pastries still in the bakery box on the table.

Today, however, Sigrid could not concentrate. A dull headache at theb ase of her skull echoed the faint ache in her arm and she felt thick-tongued and clumsy. She phoned the hospital and learned that Tillie was to be moved out of intensive care that afternoon. It was too early for any of the day shift to be at headquarters yet, so she returned restlessly to the newspaper.

Diagramless crosswords were her favorite puzzles, but even finding a pair of them at the back of the magazine section couldn't divert her this morning.

What she really wanted, what she truly needed, was a long session in the nearest swimming pool. Since childhood, swimming had been her principal exercise. She was not a team player, jogging bored her, and sweating heavily in a workout class had never appealed; but slicing through water, pushing herself physically until an almost mindless euphoria enfolded her, never failed to release all tensions and leave her mentally refreshed.

The knife wounds in her arm and hand placed pools off-limits, though, and just knowing she could not swim for several weeks knotted the muscles in her neck even tighter.

On the radio, the anxious drive of a Bach harpsichord concerto was starting to affect her like fingernails scraped across a blackboard.

Abruptly, she shoved the paper aside and went and changed into jeans and a bulky blue sweater.

"I'm going to walk along the river," she told Roman. "If anyone calls, tell them I should be back around noon."

"If you pass a deli, pick up some water biscuits," Roman said, without looking up from a fascinating article on a recently published Sumerian dictionary which could probably be understood by less than three hundred scholars worldwide. As the Bach concerto tinkled to an end, he began a reminder to himself on a notecard-'Where have all the Sumerians gone?'-and hesitated, his cluttered mind puzzled. Now what made him want to add 'long time passing' to that question?

The city of New York began as a seaport and it remains an importantg ateway to the country, but at one time the Hudson was as clogged with traffic as Fifth Avenue at lunchtime. Tugs, ferries, fireboats, garbage scows, excursion boats, police launches, yachts, and barges jostled beneath the bows of huge freighters and sleek-lined passenger ships like the Nieuw Amsterdam , the Liberté , the Michelangelo , the Queen Mary , or the Independence . Weekly listings of arrivals and departures once filled many column inches of newsprint.

In those days, champagne corks popped while streamers, balloons, and brilliant confetti swirled down from railings to piers. Whistles blew, gangplanks lifted, and the great ships moved majestically out into the channel past flags from every seagoing nation in the world. A hundred busy piers had lined the West Side of Manhattan Island from the Battery up to West Fifty-ninth Street.

Now those piers which remained lay rotting and abandoned, fenced off with warning signs. The glamour and excitement of travel had shifted to LaGuardia and Kennedy. Instead of days on the Queen Mary , the rich andc lever crisscrossed the Atlantic in hours on the Concorde .

Sigrid's street led straight down to the river and was lined with commercial buildings whose declining fortunes matched those of the docks. Until recently the elevated West Side Highway had stood here, speeding cars above the trucks that serviced the piers and jammed the intersections of West Street below. Time had taken a toll on it, too. Declared unsafe for vehicular traffic, huge sections of the highway had been pulled down and hauled away, opening up a wide, if not exactly lovely, vista of the docks and terminals of Hoboken and Jersey City across the river.

City planners had hoped to create Westway here eventually, a massive four-mile landfill with an underground highway and a riverfront esplanade of parks and high-priced residential and commercial buildings. But the project had bogged down in the courts and at present, the area was surprisingly deserted.

A young black artist sat with watercolors and sketchpad on one of the pilings,a nd an elderly man stood with a dog leash in his hand while his beautiful Labrador frisked along the edge of the pier. Otherwise, except for a handful of joggers and Sunday strollers, Sigrid had the place to herself.

The wind still blew from the north-northeast and the cool pungent air held a tang of salt mixed with creosote. Taking deep breaths, Sigrid headed upriver into the wind.

A hundred blocks north, Pernell Johnson finished his early morning cereal, quietly rinsed his bowl and spoon, and left them in the dishrack to dry as his aunt had taught him. He folded his blanket and sheet and closed up the couch he slept on. It folded with a loud screech of hinged springs and he glanced at the closed door apprehensively. There was still no sound from the bedroom where his aunt slept.

It would be another hour before Quincy Johnson rose for church. As an assistant housekeeper at the Maintenon, she nol onger had to work Sundays except in short-handed emergencies. Pernell hoped to be gone before she was awake enough to make him promise he'd get home in time for Sunday-night services.