The Right Jack

4

IT was a little past nine and Sigrid and her mother were already late when Anne Harald finally located her airline ticket jumbled into one of her camera cases. The editor of a large magazine was gambling that a certain elderly Peruvian poet would finally win a Nobel prize in literature and had made arrangements for Anne to do an extensive photo-interview with him before he dropped dead of old age.

They came rushing down from Anne's apartment, Sigrid feeling guilty because she'd taken advantage of her NYPD tag and parked in front of a fire hydrant. As they hurried from the bright lobby down a sidewalk shadowed by oak trees that still held their leaves in Mid-October, Sigrid noticed a young couple standing just below street level in one of the unlit areaways.

They were partially screened by a low hedge, but something in the girl's demeanor triggered a subconscious response and Sigrid hesitated at the top of the steps.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, peering into the shadows.

"N-no," the girl stammered. "N-no thing!"

Her bloodless face belied her words. There was glittering hostility in the young man's upward glance and an even stronger impression of wrongness in the way he gripped the girl's arm.

Sigrid reached into her purse for some ID even as the man was saying, "You heard her, lady, so bug off, huh?"

"I'm a police officer," Sigrid told the frightened girl. "Are you sure there's nothing-"

The filthy obscenities that streamed from the youth's mouth startled her almost as much as the flickering switchblade which suddenly appeared in his hand. Before her own hand could disengage the ID and close around her gun, he had darted up the shallow steps.

She automatically flung her arm out to deflect the slashing blade and, ash e crashed past her, the snub-nosed.38 came free. Deliberately aiming low, Sigrid sent him howling to the pavement with one shot.

Behind her, in the shadows, the girl began to scream hysterically.

With a startled cry, Anne Harald dropped her cases on the sidewalk and ran toward Sigrid, who clutched the iron railing feeling curiously giddy and light-headed.

"Oh my God!" Anne murmured and Sigrid followed her mother's eyes to her own left arm. It was still numb, but the streetlights revealed the dark stain that soaked through the thin sleeve of her jacket and dripped onto the steps. Blood also ran freely from a cut on the palm of her left hand.

All stiffness drained out of her legs and she sank down on the steps. "My radio," she told Anne as mounting waves of dizziness washed over her. "Tell them-officer needs assistance… assailant needs ambulance…"

"I don't believe this!" Anne cried. "Bleeding like a stuck pig and still you talk like a policeman."

She whirled and ran for Sigrid's car; but for once, as if on cue, a patrol car appeared when needed.

As the uniformed officers fashioned rough tourniquets for her arm and for the wounded man's leg, Sigrid tried to hold onto consciousness, but the girl's terrified cries turned into low sobs that were rather lulling against the street noises and Sigrid lost her tenuous thread of awareness before the ambulance arrived.

As the anaesthesia wore off, there was a memory of violence and pain, then an uneasy disoriented feeling of being in an unfamiliar place.

Even more disorienting was the sound of her mother's voice, angry and intense.

Her eyelids still felt too heavy to open, but returning alertness brought with it the smell of antiseptic and alcohol, so she must be in a hospital. But who else was in the room and why did her mother sound so awkward and harsh? Fear, yes. Sorrow and anger, too; but Sigrid had never heard this particular quality in her mother's voice before.

Even past fifty, Anne Lattimore Harald remained petite and slender. Short hair almost untouched with gray covered her head in a soft cap of dark curls; her skin was still soft and smooth except for the laugh lines around her luminous dark eyes and generous mouth, and thirty-five years in the North hadn't been enough to erase all the magnolia from her voice. Flirting was second nature to her. Women's Lib arrived too late to persuade Anne Harald that vinegar could be as potent as honey or that a woman shouldn't use feminine wiles to get whatever she needed.

Certainly it had helped her get her foot in the door after Leif Harald was killed, when she had struggled to support herself and her toddler daughter with camera and typewriter. These days Anne could afford to pick and choose assignments-several of her critically acclaimed photo journal pieces had won national awards-but that easy, laughing charm was still part of her professional technique. Her warmth could thaw the frostiest politicians, and the resulting photographs often revealed more than her subjects intended, to the great delight of her editors.

Sigrid had been too young at the time of her father's death to remember him clearly. She had only unconnected memories of a tall uniformed blond man who'd swung her upon his shoulder, his laughter. She had never been jealous of the men with whom her mother flirted so openly, precisely because Anne was open, her flirting never quite intimate; her quicksilver elusiveness kept men her friends and nothing more.

If there had been truly romantic entanglements since Leif Harald's death, Sigrid was not aware of them.

As she grew into gawky adolescence, Sigrid had watched her mother with despairing envy, wishing over and over that she had inherited some of Anne's graceful Southern poise, something her Grandmother Lattimore kept insisting was Sigrid's natural birthright. "All the Lattimores have it, honey, and I'm sure you do, too, if you'd just sit back and let it flow."

Although no longer as tongue-tied as in childhood, Sigrid knew she still seemed stiff and cold in social situations; almost as cold and stiff as Anne's voice was now in this hospital room.

Sigrid struggled to focus on their words as her grogginess lifted. The man's voice was a placating rumble under her mother's ragged tones, but there was something familiar about it. Doctor? Sleep pulled at her, but she resisted.

"She could have been killed," Anne was saying angrily. "And she wasn't even on duty."

"A police officer's never completely off duty, Anne. You know that."

Startled, Sigrid's eyes flew open. "Captain McKinnon!" she said hoarsely.

Anne pushed past the big man who stood at the foot of Sigrid's bed and touched her daughter's hair. "Oh, honey, you had me so scared. Are you okay? How do you feel?"

Captain McKinnon gave her an appraising smile. "Finally with us, Harald? I was beginning to wonder if they'd knocked you out for good."

McKinnon had never seen his buttoned-up and normally efficient subordinate looking this vulnerable. Her dark hair had loosened around her thin face and those wide gray eyes held bewilderment and uncertainty. "How's the arm feel?"

Sigrid looked down at her left arm. It seemed to be tightly taped now from shoulder to elbow. Another sterile bandage was wrapped on her hand, which ached dully and more painfully than her arm. An IV drip was attached to her right arm. There had been a man, she thought, and a knife. Reality wavered, then she remembered that he'd slashed her arm.

"How bad is it?"

"You lost gallons of blood," said her mother. Anne's words faded and Sigrid struggled to hold on to them. "I forget how many stitches they said."

"No permanent damage," the captain assured her easily. "I asked the doctor."

Sigrid's boss was built like an overgrown teddy bear, but his tongue could be sharper than a grizzly's claws when he chewed someone out. In the time that she'd worked under him, Sigrid had come to respect the big rumpled man, yet he made her uneasy and she didn't know why. He was scrupulously fair and treated her like his other officers. Still, he seemed to expect something more of her. An indefinable tension cracked in the air whenever he called her in to discuss a case, more tension than her own prickly nature usually elicited. It wasn't because she was a female officer, she'd decided. There were other women in the department and she hadn't noticed that vague air of expectation when McKinnon dealt with them.

Even more puzzling was her mother's present reaction. Anne had many virtues, but they were certainly not domestic. Her apartments always looked as if they'd just been ransacked by burglars, nothing matched or was color-coordinated, yet here she was straightening Sigrid's sheets, aligning the water carafe with its drinking glass on the nightstand, twitching the curtains. Sigrid almost expected to see her whip out a dustcloth and start polishing the headboard.

First anger and now this fidgeting self-consciousness from a woman who'd learned how to twist men around her little finger before she started kindergarten?

"That was good work tonight," McKinnon said.

"Is the suspect okay?" Her throat was dry.

"He'll survive. Probably even be break dancing next month. You shot him through the calf."

"Good."

"Dear God in heaven!" Anne exploded. "A crazy man almost cuts your arm off and you worry if you've hurt him?"

McKinnon's attention flickered to the woman and back to Sigrid. "We're pretty certain he's the perp who's raped at least seven women in the last three months. This one we'll nail so tight no lawyer'll get him off. I'll want your report tomorrow afternoon."

Sigrid nodded, but Anne blazed up again. "Tomorrow?"

"Mother, please."

"No, maybe she's right." The big man nodded. "Day after tomorrow will be soon enough. You take it easy tomorrow."

He hesitated, then spoke again. "I might as well tell you. Somebody set off a bomb in the Hotel Maintenon tonight."

At first it didn't register. She looked at Captain McKinnon apprehensively. "Detective Tildon-?"

McKinnon nodded grimly. "Two people DOA, two more hanging on by a toenail. Tildon's over at Metro Medical Center. I stopped in on my way here."

White-faced, Sigrid held her breath until McKinnon added, "He's still in surgery but they think he'll make it."

Anne abruptly turned her back on them and went to stare out the window.

McKinnon's face betrayed his exhaustion. "I'd better get back up to the Maintenon," he said. Had lieutenant Harald been any other of his officers, the captain would have stooped over and given her a clumsy, reassuring pat. Yet even wounded and sedated, her habitual reserve made his own hand hesitate until the moment passed.

As if sensing his ambivalence, Sigrid detained him with anxious eyes. "Who's going to handle it, Captain?"

"Me, right now." He looked down at her. "You want this one, don't you?"

"Yes."

There was nothing declamatory or dramatic in her simple affirmative, but the resolution.in her tone was unmistakable. McKinnon glanced at Anne's back uneasily. "Let's wait and see how quickly you get back on your feet."

As he moved to go, Anne remained rigid by the window. He paused in the doorway. "I'm sorry it had to be like this, Anne, but even so, it was good to see you again."

She turned and faced him coldly. "Good-bye, Captain."

In the split second before the door closed behind McKinnon, Sigrid could have sworn she saw his shoulders droop beneath the whiplash finality in her mother's word.

She looked up at Anne curiously. "I didn't realize you two knew each other."

"We don't."

"Oh, stop it, Mother," Sigrid said wearily. "I'm a police officer, a trained observer, remember?"

"He and Leif used to be partners."

Sigrid was stunned. "And?"

"And nothing. They were partners and your father was killed and this is the first time I've met him since the funeral."

"But you hate him. Why? Was it something to do with Dad's death?" Abruptly, Sigrid realized she'd never been told many of the actual details. "What really happened? Was it the captain's fault?"

"I don't know what really happened," Anne said raggedly. "I wasn't there." Sudden tears misted her thick eyelashes. "All I know is that your father was killed and McKinnon wasn't even wounded." She ran a tired hand through her curls. "Honey, I'm bushed. Home to bed for me."

"What about El Diego?"

"He'll just have to wait. I can't go jetting off with my only child slashed to ribbons."

"Don't be dramatic, Mother. I'm perfectly capable of managing."

"Oh Lord, don't I know it!" Anne sighed. How very apt that old tale of a hen's bafflement when she discovered she'd hatched a duckling…

Since infancy, Anne had known how pretty she was. It was a matter of record and not conceit. All the Lattimore women, sisters, mother, aunts, and cousins were beauties: in that family, mere prettiness was taken for granted. Therefore, when she went north to study photography and almost immediately married a stunningly handsome New Yorker who looked like a direct throwback to Viking forebears, everyone assumed their child would be something special.

Yet even a geneticist couldn't have predicted Sigrid's rearrangement of parental genes. She had Leif's height, nearly six inches taller than her mother, but her skinny angularity lacked his athletic gracefulness. She had also inherited his thin nose and high cheekbones, and her wide eyes were shaped like his blue ones, but their changeable gray color came from Anne. Her hair was dark like Anne's, yet absolutely straight and so silky fine that Sigrid had long ago quit trying to do anything with it. She kept it braided into a severe knot at the nape of her neck and could put it up in two minutes flat without the aid of a mirror.

In fact, Sigrid seldom looked in mirrors. She well knew that her neck was too long, her mouth too wide, her chin too strong. By the age of thirteen she'd decided once and for all that she would never be attractive. From that time on, mirrors had stopped being important.

Of course, thought Anne, none of this would have mattered if only her daughter had caught the Lattimore knack of easy self-assurance. At least half the famous women she photographed every year had serious beauty flaws, but they believed themselves lovely and a willing world accepted their own valuations.

She blamed herself for Sigrid's lack of physical self-confidence. In those first few years after Leif's death, she'd moved around so restlessly, changing apartments the way other women change furniture, too unhappy to see what her frenetic life style was doing to an already introspective child.

"I should never have sent you off to that boarding shool when you were so young," she said mournfully. As if to compensate for past maternal lapses, Anne poured a fresh glass of water from the carafe and held it to Sigrid's lips.

Sigrid sipped obediently and then lay back upon the pillow. "It didn't hurt for you to leave me then and it's not going to hurt now," she said, following the main points of her mother's illogical thought processes with the ease of long practice. "Go home, Mother. Get some sleep and then get on a plane. I'll be fine."

Her arm throbbed and she was too tired for more talk. "If you really want to do something for me just get my car away from that fire hydrant and don't forget to leave a note telling me where you've put it."

"I'm not that disorganized," Anne protested and they both smiled, remembering.

"Good night, honey," Anne said softly and Sigrid smelled the familiar scent of jasmine as her mother bent to kiss her, then left.

Pain stabbed her left arm, her hand burned, and her right arm was beginning to hurt, too, from the intravenous' apparatus. To complicate matters, Sigrid realized that she was going to have to sleep on her back, a thoroughly disagreeable prospect for one who always slept on her stomach.

She delayed the ordeal for a few minutes, replaying in her mind the scene that had just taken place between her mother and her boss.

What an odd coincidence that she should wind up working for her father's onetime partner. That at least explained the tension she'd always sensed with him, his air of undefined expectation. He must have thought it strange that she never mentioned her father to him, but why had he waited for her to bring it up first?

She scrunched her shoulders deeper into the pillow, trying to get comfortable as she considered her relationship with detective Tildon. She was shaken and angered that he'd been hurt tonight, but although they worked well together they knew almost nothing about each other's personal lives. She was sure it would have been different with her father and McKinnon.

Anne never talked about those days, but relatives who enjoyed telling Sigrid what a love match her parents' marriage had been had also described Leif Harald as possessing a genial friendliness as open and spontaneous as his wife's. Those two would surely have made McKinnon a part of their lives; yet she, their daughter, had grown up with no recollection of ever having heard McKinnon's name. Nor, in that handful of snapshots her mother kept, had there been a picture of the two men together, although Sigrid seemed to recall half a picture of her young father laughing into the camera and someone's hand on his shoulder. McKinnon's?

What really happened, she wondered, that day her father died? Why had Anne cut McKinnon out of their lives as neatly as she had scissored him out of that picture?

Both arms hurt badly now and Sigrid began to long for sleep's release. She tried naming the fifty states in alphabetical order and when that failed, she began a chronological listing of presidents and vice-presidents, a proven soporific. She had just reached Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax and was drowsily fumbling for Grant's second vice-president when the door to her room whooshed open on pneumatic hinges and a young Asian nurse entered to remove the IV needle from her right arm.

Sigrid gratefully flexed it and the nurse smiled sympathetically. "Feels better, yes?"

"Yes."

"And your other arm, please? Your doctor, he has left pain medicine if it hurts too much."

"Not yet," Sigrid said stoically, easing onto her stomach.

The nurse tucked in the blanket and rolled the IV stand out while Sigrid gave up on Grant's second term and moved on to Rutherford B. Hayes and William Wheeler… James A. Garfield and… Chester A. Arthur. No vice-president for Arthur and then came Grover Cleveland and Henderson? No, Hendricks. Thomas Hendricks…

The throbbing of her arm took on its own metronomic rhythm and she fell into an uneasy sleep.