Margaret Maron - The Right Jack

The things they had chosen somehow seemed frivolous and incongruous now.

"We didn't know-" Knight began awkwardly, then glanced at Sigrid for help.

"Are there any books you'd like?" asked Sigrid. "Can we bring you anything from your apartment?"

"Thank you both, but I'm sure Molly will do it."

She smiled at the back scratcher and kaleidoscope and seemed charmed by Sigrid's cherry tree inside the glass dome. "I was stationed in Japan for two springs," she told them, mesmerized by the tiny pink petals that swirled around the tree. " Washington, too, of course."

But the gift wrap and tape on the small box defeated her. "I can't." she said wretchedly. "It takes two hands."

She lifted her left hand. "I can't write with this."

Her eyes focused on her slender fingers, at the chipped red enamel; and she gave a strangled sob. "I can't even take off my own nail polish."

Afterward, Alan Knight was to insist that somebody must have rubbed a magic lantern and that the girl who suddenly appeared in the doorway with a small valise and an enormous bouquet of asters and fall chrysanthemums must have been a genie.

"Commander Dixon?" she chirped. "Hi! A Mr. Haines Froelick sent me. I'm from Elizabeth Arden. Mr. Froelick thought a nice facial might cheer you up.

I can do your nails, too, if you want."

"Now there's a man who clearly knows a thing or two about hospital presents," said Knight, as he and Sigrid waited for the elevator to take them down.

AS they hurtled downtown in the gray Navy station wagon assigned to Lieutenant Knight, Sigrid found herself increasingly exasperated. "That's hardly a logical decision," she told him.

"I don't care," Knight replied. "Anyhow, it may not be logical, but it's certainly reasonable."

He peered out at a passing street sign. "Weren't we supposed to turn there, Schmitty?"

"No, sir," said their patient helmsman as he navigated the tricky waters of Greenwich Village.

"You can't dismiss Froelick as a suspect simply because he did something nice for Commander Dixon," Sigrid said.

"The hell I can't! If you can take Molly Baldwin off your list because she's too immature, I can take Haines Froelick off mine because he's thoughtful. Somebody empathic enough to send over a beautician is too damn decent to bomb a roomful of people." Pleased with his circuitous logic. Knight grinned at her.

Unconvinced, Sigrid leaned back, shaking her head. "How long did you say you've been doing intelligence work?"

"This the right place, ma'am?" asked Petty Officer Schmitt, drawing up before the gracious Greenwich Village brown-stone that housed the Sutton apartment.

"This is it."

Before leaving the hospital, Sigrid had checked in with headquarters and learned that Nauman had left a message that Val Sutton was back and wanted to see her.

When Sigrid rang the doorbell on the second floor, Nauman himself answered.

"That was quick." His welcoming smile dimmed as Alan Knight loomed up behind her.

"Sir," said Knight, touching his hat in a half salute.

"I see you're still babysitting," Nauman muttered in Sigrid's ear.

A bearded graduate student with a giggling Sutton tot on each shoulder passed them in the hall headed for the kitchen. The children had become somewhat jaded by the presence of so many people in the last few days and paid no attention to the new arrivals.

In the study, Val Sutton was leafing through a stack of sympathy cards. She wore a loose black sweater dress belted with a gold chain, and a pot of vivid yellow chrysanthemums brightened the cold hearth.

"I don't mind 'Our thoughts are with you' or 'in your time of sorrow,' but I'll be damned if I'll look at 'God has a purpose!'" she said, kiting the offensive message towards the fireplace. "How can they drivel that disgusting pap? Laying John's murder on God!"

A pudgy rumpled man in baggy corduroy pants and even baggier rust-color sweater rescued the cards from the sooty hearth. "A little more charity, Val," he admonished mildly. "They mean well."

"When the world has reduced itself to a polluted ball of rubble, the last man will probably erect a stone that reads 'They meant well,'" she replied; yet the shadow of a sardonic smile softened the bitter words and her smile widened as

Nauman appeared in the doorway with Sigrid and Alan Knight.

She greeted Sigrid warmly and was introduced to Knight, but Sigrid immediately noticed how tired she looked. Something about her face had hardened. She was still exotic, still resembled a sleek expensive cat, but something was gone, thought Sigrid. Youth? No, not youth exactly, nor confidence either… Vulnerability, she decided. Val Sutton was in the process of growing a chip-proof shell and unless something intervened, it would slowly harden around her like the chrysalis of one of Jill Gill's butterflies, smooth and beautiful and utterly impervious to rain or sun.

And the man knew it, she thought, extending her hand to the one Val was introducing as Sam Naismith.

"We met by phone Saturday night," Sigrid reminded them.

"Sam's going to act as John's literary executor," said Val. "Finish John's book."

"Won't that be rather difficult?"

"Val's rounding up all his notes for me," said Naismith, with a gentle smile. "And don't forget that John and I roomedt ogether at McClellan, so we shared a lot of the same experiences."

"Sam spent the weekend phoning all over the country to locate Tris Yorke," said Val, motioning them to take chairs.

"I'm sorry you went to that trouble," said Sigrid. "We learned this morning that Ted Flythe's definitely not Fred Hamilton. The fingerprints are completely different."

"But Hamilton 's really alive!" said Naismith. "I finally tracked Tris down at a wilderness camp he's running for terminally ill kids near Niagara Falls. Back in 1970, when he was working at a country hospital as a C.O.-"

"C.O.?" asked Alan Knight, wondering how a war protester became a hospital's commanding officer.

"Conscientious objector," explained Naismith. As a college professor, he had grown inured to the realization that his recent history was terra incognita to a younger generation. "Those who could prove that they objected to the war on long-held conscientious grounds were allowed to perform alternate service. Tris worked as an orderly in a littleh ospital in upstate New York."

Resuming the main thread of his story, he said, "Two days after the explosion at Cayuga Lake, Fred Hamilton and the Farr girl showed up at his place looking like a couple of singed chickens. Tris said at first he didn't want to help them because of the draft board bomb that killed the kids, but Fred talked him around. Told Tris it wasn't his fault, that it was all a miscalculation on someone else's part. Tris finally bought it. He got them clothes and papers and drove them up to Montreal himself."

" Montreal?"

"Yeah. Fred spoke fluent French-he'd worked in French Guiana with the Peace Corps-and he figured he could blend in there. That was Tris Yorke's last sight of Fred."

Sigrid leaned back in the leather armchair, her fingertips lightly touching across her lap. "It's interesting, but I'm afraid it doesn't really get us any closer to who booby-trapped that cribbage board. Flythe's fingerprints were compared with all known Red Snow members and there's no match. We brought pictures-"

Alan Knight extracted them from his briefcase. The police photographer had done an excellent job. Her black-and-white eight-by-tens showed Ted Flythe both full-faced and in profile; his hooded eyes, sensuous lips, and pointed beard were sharply detailed.

"Red Snow aside, have you seen this man elsewhere?" Sigrid asked. "We're running a background check, but nothing's come in yet. Remember, Val? He said he graduated from a small college in Michigan. Carlyle Union. He says he's done a little of everything, including guiding European tours."