The Right Jack

1

AS chairman and majority stockholder of Maritime National Bank, Zachary Wolferman commanded sophisticated global resources to keep him abreast of current economic trends. Reports came by teletype and satellite, came hour by hour, even minute by minute if he so desired, to tell him what was happening in the money markets of London, Bonn, or Tokyo.

Yet in times of real decision making, when storms of adversity threatened, Mr. Wolferman preferred to cast other straws upon the wind.

It was not enough to read The Wall Street Journal or Economics Today, Mr. Wolferman was fond of lecturing his fellow board members. Nor was it enough to study the four-color graphs and charts of which those energetic young chaps assigned to strategic planning were so proud. No, said Zachary Wolferman, gravely shaking his silvery head, to find out where the economy was really going, one must get down and rub elbows with the common folk, listen to what the man in the street was saying.

The thought of the fastidious and aristocratic Zachary Wolferman rubbing elbows with ordinary people amused the youngest member of the board.

And how, he was once audacious enough to inquire, did Mr. Wolferman go about meeting such people? Did he invite the paper boy in for a drink or leave his limousine and chauffeur at home occasionally and take a cab?

"Those are good possibilities," Mr. Wolferman conceded approvingly, "but cribbage is better. It's an old sailors' game, you know. My grandfather Augustus was quite fond of it. Learned it as a gunner's mate during the Cuban blockade back in 1898. Taught it to my cousin Haines and me when we were boys. As a matter of fact, it was his cribbage winnings that led him into banking."

Since Augustus Wolferman had parlayed a sailors' dime savings plan into one of the country's largest financial institutions, the newest board member wondered if perhaps he ought to look into the game.

At six-fifteen of that same Friday evening. Lieutenant Sigrid Harald was still at her desk. A slender, dark-haired woman with changeable gray eyes and erect carriage, she plowed steadily and efficiently through the paperwork which had piled up in the last three days.

Her small office was standard city issue: a square box painted off-white, a fluorescent light recessed behind frosted glass in the ceiling, two scuffed green file cabinets with bookshelves above them, a fairly new dark green steel desk, for herself a swivel chair with armrests, a couple of mismated straight chairs for visitors, wire In- and Out-baskets, typewriter, waste basket, a clothes hook behind the door. Except for an administrative flow chart and a map of New York City, the walls were as bare of ornamentation as the lieutenant's ringless fingers. There were no plants on the window ledge behind her desk, no clutter of knickknacks. Instead, it held a neat row of police bulletins and manuals kept firmly in place by a no-nonsense metal bookend. The hard white glare of the overhead light was softened by a sturdy brass desk lamp with a green glass shade, the only nonstandard piece of office equipment.

There were no photographs on the desk, no whimsical paperweights or tooled leather desk sets. Other than the desk lamp, the only items that might have given a perceptive stranger some clue to Lieutenant Harald's personality were a magnifying glass, her coffee mug and a tangle of brass, steel and silver rings heaped in a small glass bowl.

The magnifying glass was used to study crime scene photographs in greater detail, but it was bound in nonutilitarian polished brass. The pottery coffee mug was cylindrical in form, more upright then squat, and glazed in a deep blue-green. A narrow band of slightly darker blue diamonds circled the cup an inch from the top. The diamond shapes were so closely toned to the mug's overall color that one had to look very closely to see them. Most visitors to Lieutenant Harald's office, even those who shared coffee, never noticed the subtle, inlaid pattern.

They did notice the little bowl of puzzle rings, however and the lieutenant's habit of absent-mindedly fitting the interlocking circles of metal into a single band at times when her mind was focused elsewhere.

This evening, the puzzle rings were left untouched as she completed the last entry on a particularly bleak case. A mother and three daughters, ranging in age from two to eight, had been found dead in a shabby TriBeCa apartment. All four had died of knife wounds, and the uniformed officers first on the scene had initially called it in as a homicide.

A few hours later, an autopsy told them that the mother, two days shy of her twenty-fifth birthday, had committed suicide. A reconstruction of events proved that she had carefully slipped the same sharp knife into each small body, then tenderly tucked them all into bed.

None of the neighbors could even begin to suggest a reason why. They said the mother was widowed and a loner. Kept herself to herself and was a conscientious parent. No child neglect there and no string of weekend 'uncles' for her daughters, thank you. Maybe a little too strict with them, said her baffled neighbors, and always quoting the Bible to anyone who tried to strike up a conversation.

In the end, it was the Bible that answered their questions. It was the most expensive thing in that threadbare apartment: white leather, gold-edge pages, a red silk ribbon marker, and big enough to rest on a pulpit and preach the coming of Judgment Day. Passages from Jeremiah and Revelations had been heavily underlined and it was stuffed with scrawled slips of paper that precisely documented the deterioration of a mind.

Quite literally, she had killed her daughters to save their souls and then, unable to live on without them, had killed herself.

Sigrid Harald sighed, closed the folder and put it in the Out-basket. She covered her typewriter and neatened her desk; then taking a black-and-gray plaid jacket from the clothes hook, she switched off the light and walked out into the main office. To her surprise she found Tillie still at his desk.

Detective Charles Tildon was half a head shorter than she and a few years younger, a mild unimaginative man who had made plainclothes by sheer methodical attention to detail. He thrived on paperwork, something most officers avoided whenever possible, and could be relied upon to put down everything he'd seen during an investigation, no matter how trivial. There were times when his insistence upon the minute could be exasperating but, on the whole, Lieutenant Harald preferred his careful approach over some of the brighter but more lackadaisical officers. No criminal court case had ever been thrown out because Tillie broke the chain of evidence.

On the other hand, he was the archetypal family man and she could count on the fingers of one hand the times she'd known him to stay late voluntarily on a Friday evening.

"Still working?" She paused at his desk and was puzzled to see he was only killing time with a deck of cards.

Tillie gathered in the two hands he'd dealt and began shuffling again, his round face hopeful beneath a mat of sandy brown hair. "You don't happen to play cribbage, do you, Lieutenant?"

Sigrid Harald looked at the unfamiliar board, a cheap plastic affair hinged in the middle so that it could fold into a box to hold a deck of cards.

"Sorry," she said. "Solitaire and bridge are the only card games I know."

"My father-in-law, Marian's dad-he's a nut about it. Every other Sunday when we go over to their house, he brings out the board and we have a go at it. He taught Chuck this summer. Chuck's good at it, too."

Tillie laid out another pair of hands and Sigrid sensed an air of gloom in his manner.

"You don't want your son to play cards?"

"It's not that! Cards are okay and cribbage is mostly addition anyhow. See, you score points by adding up runs and pairs and combinations of fifteen."

He pointed to the five cards in front of him: the jack of hearts, five of diamonds, the six and nine of spades, and, off to one side, the four of hearts.

"Face cards count ten, so the jack and five make fifteen for two points-" Tillie lifted a little peg on the plastic board and advanced it two holes. "The four, five, and six add up to fifteen for another two points; six and nine for two more; then the four, five, six make a run of three for three points. Finally, since my turn card was a heart and I have the heart jack that's another point." -i,

He pegged the other eight points. ›?

"You get two points every time your cards hit fifteen on the nose: seven and eight; two, three, ten; two sevens and an ace-"

To keep him from reeling off every combination in the deck, Sigrid nodded to show that she understood. "Chuck's what now? Nine? Third grade? This looks like excellent arithmetic drill."

"It is," Tillie admitted. "He got to be a whiz at factoring fifteens this summer. If your opponent misses any of his points you can peg them for yourself. Chuck never misses."

"So?"

"There's a cribbage tournament up at the Maintenon this weekend," Tillie explained glumly. "The first round starts at eight tonight. Forty dollars entry fee, ten thousand for first prize. Marian's dad's too old to play straight through two-and-a-half days and Chuck's too young. You have to be fourteen to enter. So they pooled their money and entered me instead. I don't even like the game that much," he concluded unhappily. "I just play because Walt and Chuck like it; so much."

In Sigrid's estimation, bridge was the only card game that weighted a player's skill more heavily than his luck in the deal and cribbage certainly didn't look to be an exception. She said as much.

"You can't peg points if you aren't dealt any," she added reasonably.

"You only count those up after the hand's played," said Tillie. He launched into a complicated description of the strategy needed to play your cards so that you scored runs and pair and fifteens off your opponent, yet prevented him from scoring off your cards.

Sigrid nodded and murmured in the right places, but her heart wasn't in it and she sneaked a glance at her watch.

"It sounds interesting, Tillie, but-"

"I could teach you," he offered eagerly. "I'm just waiting till it's time to catch the subway up to the hotel. Unless you have something else on?"

"Sorry," she said, thrusting her arms into the rumpled plaid jacket. "I'm afraid I do."

She was almost out of the door when conscience overtook her. Tillie was usually so cheerful, but the possibility of letting his son and father-in-law down seemed to be making him edgy and unhappy. Someone had once accused her of insensitivity and cruelty to small furry creatures. Not that Tillie, even with his trusting blue eyes, was a small furry creature. All the same…

Sighing, she turned back and said, "I have to drive uptown. Why don't you let me drop you near the Maintenon? You could forget about cribbage for an hour, eat a good dinner, and then go in fresh and win."

Tillie's cherubic face brightened. "Great. And that'll give me time to tell you how the crib works. Each person is dealt six cards, see, and then you both contribute two to the crib, face down, and the dealer gets to count those when you've finished playing the first four and-"

Tillie's penchant for detail was an asset when investigating murder. As pure conversation, it could border on the tedious.

Resigned, Sigrid followed him from thé office.

Commander T. J. Dixon, United States Navy, shucked her dark blue-black uniform with its neat gold stripes, crisp white shirt and dark blue tie and somewhat absent-mindedly considered what to wear that night. One could probably dress as for a civilian business event; on the other hand, the cribbage tournament was being held at the elegant Hotel Maintenon and surely the eight P.M. opening session argued for a dressier formality?

She stood before her open closet, barefooted, in an ice-blue satin teddy-once past boot camp, female personnel seldom followed the Navy's advice on lingerie, and Commander Dixon had a decidedly feminine streak. At forty, her hair was prematurely white, but the rest of her body was that of a younger woman. Every muscle was firm, every curve allured, nothing sagged.

While part of her mind weighed a dark red gown with a square neckline against a rich royal blue sari, the other part puzzled over the strange message that had been left on her answering machine.

It was the first communication with her only relative since their bitter quarrel last year, and Commander Dixon had played the message over several times, analytically dissecting the girl's words as thoroughly as any arcane code.

'Teejay? It's me.' The use of that childhood name argued a willingness to let bygones be bygones, didn't it? 'I won't tell you where I am or what I'm doing right now… ' Beneath her young cousin's infuriatingly complaisant surface lurked a surprising amount of stubborn pride. Commander Dixon had discovered. This was another example. '… but we may run into each other soon.' Did that mean the girl planned to come to New York or did she think T. J. was due to visit Florida? 'Anyhow, if we do, please pretend you don't know me. It's very important. I'll explain soon, okay?'

It was not okay, thought Commander Dixon and had immediately dialed the area code for Miami. After two rings, there was a series of familiar electronic tones and a pleasant mechanical voice said, 'We're sorry. The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please consult-'

Commander Dixon had hung up and replayed her cousin's message. 'Please pretend you don't know me.'

There was a trace of urgency in the request, but she didn't sound upset or in trouble. In fact, thought Commander Dixon, for the first time the girl actually sounded as if she might have found a little backbone this past year. Ta

Maybe she was finally growing up.

Pleased with that thought, the commander turned back to her closet. The sari was more flattering, she decided at last, but the gauzy blue stole had a tendency to slip. It might prove a distraction, and Commander T. J. Dixon was too competitive to let herself be handicapped by feminine vanity.

'-so that by 1969, the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, was in disarray and ready for takeover by student activists who were more radical than the moderate pacifists or even the Maoists. They took their name from a line in Bob Dylan's song, Subterranean Homesick Blues', you know, that bit about not needing a weatherman to know how the wind blows. The Weathermen aimed to bring the war home to Americans and graphically demonstrate what it was like to live with violence and terrorism in their own street.'

John Sutton touched the pause button on his tape recorder and sat back in his desk chair to focus his memory on those tumultuous and exhilarating days.

In 1969, he had been a graduate student at McClellan State, one of the battlegrounds for the Weathermen. Now he was a professor of history at Vanderlyn College, a branch of the New York City University system, and, to his own bemusement, teaching a course on the Sixties and Seventies to kids who were in first or second grade when Richard Nixon was forced out of the White House.

The course was immensely popular and so was John Sutton. A local television station's evening news program had even featured him on one of their pop culture segments, belaboring the irony of a man just turning forty already teaching events in his own person life as formal history.

Sutton pressed the record button. 'The typical Weathermen were white, middle to upper-middle class, well educated, and in revolt against materialistic values. They tended to be idealistic and impatient with the very real, but very slow, gains the peace movement was making. Privileged themselves, they were determined to extend those privileges to blacks, Hispanics, and the ghetto poor. These terrific goals and I'm not knocking them. Hell! That's why I joined SDS in the first place. But the Weathermen-' John Sutton's voice became wry.

'Many of the far-left leaders were subconsciously aping their own Establishment parents in thinking they knew what was best for the cause. They could be just as spoiled and willful, accustomed to getting their own way, and they didn't quite understand why the rest of us wouldn't fall right in behind their banners. And let's be blunt: not all radicals were the movement for purely altruistic reasons. Some were grooving on the heady excitement of power for its own sake, for the thrill of being outside the law. They arbitrarily decided the student movement would either become confrontational and violent or it would cease to exist.

'In the fall of 1969, they destroyed all the SDS records and went underground. The bombing that followed that winter and-'

The door of Sutton's study swung open. "Come on, John," scolded Val

Sutton. "Shake a leg or we're going to be late.".

"Mm?" He switched off the tape recorder and peered at his watch. "Val? Do you remember Fred Hamilton and Brooks Ann Farr?"

"Personally or from afar?" she asked, pushing back her chocolate brown hair so that she could fit a gold earring into her left earlobe.

"Either," he said, admiring the graceful swing of her hair.

It was thick and lustrous and absolutely straight. Until recently, she'd worn it shoulder length and combed away from her thin, catlike face, but the previous day she'd come with a blunt cut that just brushed level with the lie of her chin and half-veiled her face when her head tilted forward. He still wasn't used to the alluring novelty.

Val couldn't resist a small bit of preening. Clavida's charged the earth for a new styling session but getting one's husband to look at one like that after ten years of marriage was worth every dime.

"No, I didn't know McClellan's most-wanted alumni personally," she told him, affectionately. "You were the one in SDS, love, not me. I only marched or sat-in or sang. But I do remember them. Fred was dark and brooding, a smoldering sexpot; Brooks Ann was a lumpy sophomore, dreadful acne, and lank brown hair that always looked like she hadn't rinsed out all the shampoo. The original dishwater blonde. Meow."

Val Sutton leaned across the desk and straightened her husband's tie. "Come on, love. Mrs. Herlbut's already in with the kids and we've really got to go. Now."

He smiled and allowed himself to be coaxed from the chair. "I never knew you thought Fred Hamilton was sexy."

"Ravishing," she assured him as she handed him his jacket from the hall stand and slipped on her own, an intricately embroidered Chinese import of heavy gold satin. "If they hadn't gone underground when they did-"

"You'd have signed up for his bomb-making course?"

Their laughter muted as they abruptly remembered the bombs Fred Hamilton and his followers had planted that violent winter of 1970. The four children who were killed outright, the woman left blind, the man who'd eventually died after two years in a coma.

"Do you suppose they'll ever surface?" Val asked as John tried to flag a taxi in front of their Greenwich Village apartment.

"It's odd you should ask that," he frowned.

Val looked at him questioningly, but he was distracted by the balky door on the battered yellow cab that slid to a stop at the curb; and once they were both settled inside, their thoughts turned to the cribbage tournament ahead.

"Hotel Maintenon," Sutton told the cabbie, then reached for his wife with an exaggerated leer. She fluttered her eyelashes at him and slipped closer; but when his hand began to wander too freely, she clasped it firmly and said, "Now pay attention, class: how many points for three sixes and a pair of threes?"