Margaret Maron - The Right Jack

"Yes?"

"He's married, isn't he? I mean, I'm sort of getting mixed signals. You know? And I don't waste time on married men."

Sigrid looked at the younger officer. There was a gun strapped under her arm and she was a good cop, but at the same time her blonde curls were stylishly clipped, a bright blue cotton sweater echoed her eyes, and there were pretty gold studs in her ears. Albee was feminine, forthright, and unafraid of emotional entanglements; and for a moment Sigrid felt a pang of sympathy for Jim Lowry.

"There hasn't been a legal divorce," she said carefully, "but I don't think they're living together."

"Thanks, Lieutenant," said Albee and darted on.

Alan Knight was just typing a final paragraph as Sigrid entered her office. She took one of the side chairs and began to read through the notes, trying to make an orderly pattern in her mind. This was where she missed Tillie the most. Careful and methodical, he was excellent at spotting minute details that slipped past her. There were times when she could skim across mountain tops, but not without Tillie building careful bridges beneath her, shoring up intuition with concrete specifics.

But if the killer's identity were anywhere revealed in this sheaf of notes, Sigrid couldn't see it. She sighed and set the pages aside. "Who do you like for it?" she asked Knight.

"Seems to me that it's a toss-up between Baldwin and Flythe, with Baldwin winning on points."

"How?"

"Well, they both had opportunity, I think; but Baldwin 's got the motive. She probably goofed and put the board at the wrong place. She's not the most efficient

person I've ever met."

"No, but is she the most coldblooded?"

"Why not?" Look how she's more worried about losing her job than about her cousin losing her arm. Or so she'd have us believe . I think she's ashamed to look Dixon in the eye myself," he said indignantly, frowning down at the typewriter.

"That's just immaturity," Sigrid argued. "Think about it, Alan. Whoever booby-trapped that cribbage board had to know he would be killing at least two people. He knew there would be even more wounded, seriously wounded-eyes, limbs-and he didn't care. To kill one person, he was willing to kill or maim a dozen others. We're not talking about schoolgirl self-centeredness. This is a compete disregard for human life."

"Like Red Snow when they bombed that draft board in Chicago?"

"And didn't notice-or care-that there were children on the other side of that partition." Sigrid nodded. "There has to be a link. Flythe has to be connected somehow."

She handed back the sheaf of notes. "There's a Xerox machine at the end of the hall. Would you copy these? And where's that sketch you made of the Maintenon's floor plan? We'll need a duplicate of that, too."

"What are you going to do?" Knight asked, smoothing out his crumpled drawing.

"When I called the hospital this morning, they said Tillie was conscious and able to talk and watch television. If he can watch television, he can read. Maybe he'll see something we've missed. After all, he was there Friday night."

TILLIE'S hospital room was painted a cheerful melon, several vases of flowers sat on the dresser, get-well cards were taped to the wall beside his bed, and a cluster of silvery helium balloons bobbled near the ceiling with colorful ribbons streaming down.

There were bruises on his round face and he was extensively taped and bandaged, but he was able to press the control that lowered and raised his bed, to manipulate the channel selector for the television on the opposite wall, and, with slightly more difficulty, to answer the telephone on his bed table.

Eyes are the windows of the soul, someone once said, but Sigrid had never recognized the truth of that remark until she saw the friendly intelligence shining in Tillie's gaze and remembered the blank stare she'd seen there Saturday.

"Marian told me you'd been hurt, too," he said when greetings were over and Alan Knight had been introduced.

"It's healing properly," Sigrid said. She'd stopped by the doctor's on their way over and he'd put on fresh dressings. "What about you?"

"You know what they say-it only hurts when I laugh. As long as I'm still, it's okay. Everything feels tight. And I keep falling asleep. That's the concussion, I guess."

"Do you remember much about Friday night?"

"Everything. The doctor says some people don't with a concussion, but I do."

Methodically, Tillie reconstructed the whole evening, beginning with the lamb chops he'd had for dinner after Sigrid dropped him off at the Maintenon Friday night and ending with groping under the table to find the peg Commander Dixon had dropped.

"How is she?" he asked. "The paper said she was in critical condition, too."

"We'll probably go over when we leave here," Alan Knight said. "She wasn't quite as lucky as you, Detective Tildon. They had to amputate her right arm."

"Oh, Jesus!" Tillie said, shocked. "She was so nice. Beautiful, too. That red dress. When I read her name on the seating chart, I thought she'd be a man, of course. Commander T. J. Dixon. And she laughed and asked did I expect someone with tattoos up and down his arms."

His voice wavered and his eyes became watery. "Her arms were so white and smooth."

Sigrid knew how close to the surface lay the emotions of someone seriously ill or wounded. "Tillie-" she said helplessly.

"We've brought you all the notes of our interviews," Knight interposed smoothly. "Lieutenant Harald said you'll spot whatever we might be missing."

Tillie was diverted. "Did she?"

He listened quietly while they went through the notes, explained to him the diagrams and photographs, and discussed who had alibis and who didn't. He agreed with Sigrid that a Red Snow connection seemed more likely than a KGB plot or a girlish attempt to speed up an inheritance, and discounted the possibility that the bomb had been meant for him or Commander Dixon, "After going to that much trouble, they wouldn't put the rigged board at the wrong place."

A nurse came in as he spoke and asked if they would mind waiting outside in the hall.

"We've finished," Sigrid said, thinking that Tillie looked too tired to continue anyhow. She got to her feet. "Don't try to do too much, Tillie. Just get better."

"Don't worry, Lieutenant," he said, leaning back into the pillows. "I'll be out of here soon."

They went down a modern hallway painted turquoise and white, but the smells were old-fashioned regulation hospital, a blend of disinfectants, antiseptics, and floor wax.

"I hate these places," said Knight.

"Morgues are worse," Sigrid told him.

Commander Dixon's hospital lay across town and while Petty Officer Schmitt made child's play out of mid-day traffic,

Alan Knight fretted about arriving empty-handed.

"We ought to take her something," he said for the third time. "What about magazines?"

"Hospital volunteers provide them. What about flowers?"

"Flowers are a cliché."

"Clichés don't become clichés unless a lot of people like them," Sigrid observed calmly.

"You were just in the hospital. What did you miss most?"

"I wasn't in long enough to miss anything, but I was laid up at school once with a broken leg and someone brought me a back scratcher. You know, one of those little hands carved out of a long piece of rattan or bamboo? It was the most practical thing they gave me. I could even slide it down inside the cast."

Knight leaned forward. "There's a Japanese place off Fifth Avenue," he told Schmitt. "Two more blocks and hang a left."

"Yes, sir."

While Alan Knight rattled around at the rear of the store for a back scratcher, Sigrid discovered a shelf of snow domes, those crystal balls usually filled with flecks of white that children love to shake, then watch as the flecks settle over a wintry scene like falling snow. These were like none she'd ever seen. Instead of a fir tree or a snowman, the glass ball held a miniature cherry tree in full bloom; and when she shook it, tiny flecks of pink swirled like drifting blossoms.