The Right Jack

6

METRO MEDICAL CENTER was one of the city's newer hospitals, with shiny scrubbable polymer surfaces, bright colors, and, judging by the flow of people through its halls, a user-friendly attitude toward visitors. While Nauman circled the area to look for a parking space, Sigrid was directed up to a waiting room on the eighth floor where she found Marian Tildon surrounded by her sober-faced parents and several friends.

Normally Tillie's wife was a vivacious redhead, with an aura of wiry strength to her small-boned figure; but after a night in and out of the intensive care unit, where tubes and electronic monitors held her husband's life together, there was no sparkle left in her face and her green eyes were dull as she stared in bewilderment at Sigrid's bandaged hand and arm sling.

"Were you there, too, Lieutenant?" Briefly, Sigrid explained she'd acquired her wounds elsewhere. "How is he?"

"They've been letting me go in for ten minutes every hour," Marian replied, automatically glancing at her wristwatch. "He opened his eyes when I was in last time, but I'm not sure he recognized me."

"I think he did. Mare," soothed her mother.

Marian Tildon stood up. "They allow two of us in at a time, Lieutenant. Would you like to see him?"

They walked down a hall painted melon and turquoise to a pair of bright yellow double doors. Marian took a deep breath and pulled one open.

Sigrid had never been inside an intensive care unit before and her first thought was how mechanized it seemed. It reminded her of the modern diagnostic garage where she had her car serviced occasionally-the semicircle of bays around a central console, with a snarl of tubes and hoses hanging down. The tubes and hoses at the garage held oil, air, and brake and transmission fluid, while here the tubes carried oxygen, saline solution, or hemoglobin.

Two nurses sat inside a hollow circular counter at the center of the large room with an uninterrupted view of the electronic monitors connected to each of the fourteen stations radiating out from the middle. A strong medicinal odor hung in the air.

There were no regular hospital beds. Instead, patients lay on what looked like armless lounge chairs upholstered in creamy yellow plastic, extended to semi-reclining position and elevated so that the nurses could work on each without bending.

Sigrid followed Marian across the room to where Tillie lay swathed in so many bandages that she did not at first recognize him. His face was discolored, his lips swollen, his eyes half-open but unfocused.

Marian leaned over and kissed his bare shoulder gently. "Charles, darling, Lieutenant Harald's here."

There was no change in Tillie's expression, but Marian whispered that the nurses had told her that surgery patients could often hear and comprehend even if they couldn't respond, so Sigrid drew nearer and tried to keep her voice brisk and matter-of-fact.

It was a very long ten minutes, made more difficult by watching the other woman attempt an upbeat manner while her voice trembled and tears spilled down her cheeks.

Through it all, Tillie did not move or react.

When their time was up and they were back out in the hall again, Marian's composure crumpled. She rested her head against the cool wall and fought against sobs that wracked her trim body while Sigrid stood paralyzed by the awkwardness that always seized her whenever raw emotions were laid bare.

Her mother or grandmother or any of the Lattimore women, for that matter, would have automatically gathered the grieving woman in their arms and made soothing, comforting noises. Sigrid had seen them do it as effortlessly and naturally as they breathed, but she could only stand frozen.

"Can I get you a damp towel?" Sigrid asked, gesturing toward a nearby door.

Marian choked back a final sob. "No,i t's all right now. I'll come."

Inside.the tiled restroom, she splashed cold water on her face, then rummaged in her purse for a comb and lipstick. "I'm sorry," she apologized, slashing bright orange onto her lips. "I know crying doesn't help, but-"

"You probably need sleep," Sigrid said pragmatically. "Weren't you awake all night?"

"It's not just that." Marian stared at Sigrid's reflection in the mirror over the pink washbasins. "I mean, I can accept what Charles does. How he makes our living. He's a policeman. Policemen lay their lives on the line every time they go to work. Okay, I accept that. I've even learned to live with it. But this? No. No, I can't! He wasn't even on duty last night. He was just an ordinary citizen minding his own business and he was almost killed."

"You sound like my mother," Sigrid said. "That's what she told Captain McKinnon last night."

"And he told her a cop is never off duty, right?". Sigrid nodded.

"Well, he's wrong!" Marian said fiercely, turning to face her. "Is Charles a good detective?"

"Yes."

"Well, he's an even better father. And husband. When he's with us, he could be an insurance salesman or a dry cleaner or a-a plumber for all we hear about police work. When he's with us, he is off duty and I don't give a damn what McKinnon says. It isn't fair!"

"That bomb last night," she asked. "Did they mean to kill Charles?"

"I don't know," Sigrid answered. "I'm sorry. At this point, all I really know is what was in the paper."

"But you'll be working on it? Or will your arm-?"

"I'll be working on it," Sigrid promised grimly.

Oscar Nauman was not in the lobby when she got back downstairs, but through the front glass doors Sigrid glimpsed his yellow sportscar creeping past the hospital. She hurried down the rain-soaked sidewalk and caught up with him at the corner light.

"Have you been circling all this time?" she asked, sliding in beside him.

"This was only my second trip around. I figured you'd be up there a few minutes so I stopped off at the deli and got some kaiser rolls and cold cuts for lunch. My place or yours?"

"Mine, but I'm not hungry."

"Yes, you are," he told her. "You just don't realize it yet."

There was no sign of Roman Tramegra when they reached her apartment on the westernmost edge of Greenwich Village. At least no sign of Roman in the flesh. He had been there recently, witness the fresh bouquet of herbs on the counter, and he planned to return soon if the hunk of frozen veal thawing in the sink could be trusted.

By tacit agreement, the cheerful green-and-white tiled kitchen was primarily Roman Tramegra's domain and that would-be gourmet chef had indulged his love of gadgets and appliances. Birchwood counters topped mint green cabinets and held Roman's mixer, food processor, blender, coffee grinder and coffee maker, each ready to whir into action at the flick of his pudgy fingers. Pottery jars bristled with wooden spoons, wire balloon whisks, ladles, spatulas and various utensils whose purpose Sigrid couldn't begin to guess. Opposite the enormous white refrigerator stood a six-burner chrome and porcelain range with an oven big enough to roast a young pig. Copper pots and iron skillets depended from a rack overhead and copper wire baskets filled with onions, peppers and lemons hung above the stainless-steel double sink. A dozen different knives were racked beside the thick wooden chopping block and a four-shelf spice cabinet was jammed with jars of exotic spices and herbs.

Roman's denim apron had been tossed across one of the tall white bar stools. Oscar Nauman added his own raincoat to the heap and began to cut the rolls. He planned to slather them with a concoction of mustard, olive oil and freshly chopped rosemary that he and Roman had invented one afternoon when Sigrid was late getting home.

While Nauman rummaged in the refrigerator, Sigrid went through the dining and living rooms and down the hall to her bedroom. This part of the apartment reflected her own taste. The clean-lined furniture was comfortable to use, if bland to the eye: a white linen couch, oatmeal-colored chairs, uncluttered surfaces. Little by little, though, Roman Tramegra was sneaking in a few softening touches.

Arguing that the dining room was an extension of the kitchen, Roman had felt justified in persuading Sigrid to buy the refectory table he'd discovered in a secondhand thrift shop. 'It's perfect for your chair,' he'd told her.

The chair in question was a massive carved affair with handrests formed of small wooden cat heads which Sigrid had unaccountably lugged home last spring when she found it abandoned on the sidewalk near her old apartment building. Roman had reupholstered the back and seat in a dark red velvet and that made a perfect excuse for bringing in two room-sized oriental rugs in soft red tones.

Behind the couch a row of windows looked out into their small courtyard and Roman had filled that space with ferns and palms and a baby Norfolk Island pine. It was nothing to do with her, Sigrid warned him. "I've murdered my last plant. Either I water things too much or not enough and I'm tired of throwing out pots of dead vegetation."

So far the plants seemed to be flourishing.

Through the years, Anne had given her several framed photographs and Nauman had recently presented her with a playful sketch done in vivid gouaches, and these added vibrant color to the rooms.

Her bedroom, however, remained free of anyone else's touch. Except for a floor-to-ceiling bookcase and a dark green carpet, no brilliant hues had crept in here. Her comforter was off-white, as were her lampshades. An armchair near the bookcase was an indeterminate beige, and on a nearby wall hung black-and-white line drawings, reproductions from the Morgan Library's collection. Sigrid did not believe in yoga or meditation, yet there were times when she retreated to this bare room and sat looking into those ascetic late Gothic faces until her own calm was restored.

While Oscar busied himself with lunch, Sigrid changed into more suitable working clothes of gray slacks, white shirt, and a baggy off-white corduroy blazer with deep pockets that had seen her through several springs and autumns. With her left arm out of commission, she decided to dispense with her shoulder bag; so that meant a gun harness worn under her jacket with the rest of the items she normally carried stuffed in her pockets.

Getting dressed was difficult enough; doing anything with her shoulder-length hair was impossible, for she could not reach behind with both hands. She wound up carrying a blue scarf out to Oscar, who had unloaded a tray of sandwiches onto her dining room table.

"Would you mind?" she asked, trying to gather her hair into position with her right hand.

"Sit down. I don't know why you don't just leave it loose," he grumbled. He liked her hair and thought it a waste that she kept it so confined. "What's the point of long hair the way you treat it?"

"It's easier to take care of." She bent her head so he could get at the job better. "I don't have to keep getting haircuts every two weeks or worry about it flopping in my face. I can braid it, pin it back, and forget it."

She did not like to be touched, so Oscar resisted kissing the vulnerable nape of her slender neck, but he stubbornly took his time tying the scarf. "There's more to hair than just keeping your neck warm."

"A woman's crowning glory?" Sigrid gibed.

"Something like that," he said, fluffing up the bow loops of the silk scarf.

"Haven't you learned by now that I'm never going to turn into a sex object, much less a swan?" she asked and reached back to flatten some of the bow's exuberance. Oscar's face as he sat down across the table from her was so exasperated that Sigrid couldn't help smiling.

"Poor Nauman. Why do you keep bothering with me?"

"Damned if I know," he smiled back. "Want some ale?"

"Yes, but I'd better not mix alcohol and whatever's in this painkiller."

Her arm had begun to throb again and she went back into the kitchen for a glass of cold milk to wash down the tablet. She found that she was as hungry as Nauman had predicted and for a few minutes they devoted their attention to the food.

"Tell me about John Sutton," she demanded when the first edge was off their hunger. "What were you doing out at McClellan?"

"It was one of those interdisciplinary seminars, a sort of academic happening in support of the peace movement. John was president of McClellan's SDS that year. Val was a cute little undergraduate full of innocence and optimism. Flower children hoping to better the world. I was old enough to know better, but I was just as naive. We thought we could make a difference."

"And you did, didn't you?" She took a second sandwich and cut it in half. "The war ended."

"Not soon enough," he said and sat lost in dark memory until Sigrid pushed half her sandwich at him. He looked at it, then began to munch absent-mindedly.

"John Sutton," she prodded.

"Bright. Wacky sense of humor. Played the guitar. Used to make up parodies of Bob Dylan songs-the whiney ones. Val played the autoharp. Quick ear. They hadn't met before, but one night when he played for us, she started echoing his tunes, then embellishing them. Solemn as a churchwarden the whole time. Her face-" Nauman took another bite of his sandwich, waiting for the right words to convey the odd attraction of Val Sutton's face. "What are those cats that look like Siamese except they're all brown? Burmese? Abyssinian?"

Sigrid shrugged, not being a pet owner.

"Think of a triangular face that's a cross between Nefertiti and an Abyssinian cat, with sleek brown hair falling to her waist. That was Val. You'll see. Not beautiful. Men don't notice her right away; but once they do,, they don't forget her. John never had a chance."

He grinned, describing how artfully Val had managed John's wooing; how John, if he had been aware of her wiles, hadn't struggled against them.

Sigrid, who had never so far as she knew turned any man's head but Nauman's, listened and briefly wondered how it must feel to have such power over someone's heart.

"John loved to argue. We had several all-night sessions that summer, but I'd almost lost touch with them when he and Val came east four or five years ago. Vanderlyn's history department offered him an associate professorship and Val audited some of my classes. She's one of the curators at the Feldheimer and a pretty fair Sunday painter herself. I've lent them my place up at Connecticut several times and John and I've served on some committees together. The Mickey Mouse ones. They don't think we take the so-called important ones seriously enough. Administration usually does what it wants anyhow and why the hell they have to waste our time-"

"John Sutton," Sigrid interrupted, having heard tirades against Vanderlyn's administration before. "Who were his enemies?"

"I never heard that he had any. John was bright and opinionated, but not mean. Like last Wednesday when the CGC met and-"

"The what?"

"The Condensed CUNY Committee. That's what John called us. I've told you how the university tries to promote the idea that the different branches around the city are one big happy family?"

Sigrid supposed so. She couldn't work up much interest in the politics of the City University of New York. Keeping up with politics within the NYD was tedium enough.

"So CUNY subsidizes faculty dinners at one of the big hotels and we have to shell out some of our own money to break bread together and pretend we know each other. Except that the combined faculty's so large that it gets boiled down to senior members and one year it's for liberal arts and the next for the sciences, that sort of thing. This year it's the arts and John and I were sent to meet with delegates from the other schools at the Maintenon on Wednesday to set things up and there was this jackass from Brooklyn College who-"

"Wait, wait!" Sigrid thumped the table gently. "The Maintenon? John Sutton was at that hotel two days before he died?"

"Right, but it's not what you're thinking. The guy from Brooklyn was mad, but I can't see a linguistics professor going back to Brooklyn, whipping up a bomb, and sneaking back to plant it."

"Forget about the linguistic professor. Just tell me everything about Wednesday, from the moment you and Sutton stepped into the place until you left."

Sigrid procured a note pad while Oscar obediently cast his mind back to Wednesday morning.

"We met in the lobby of the hotel shortly before ten. There were about fifteen of us. We met with a Ms. Baldwin, who looks about twelve but had all the facts and figures. Told us how much it would be with cocktails before and wine during, and the difference in price if we had vichyssoise instead of fruit compote with crème fraîche

– you sure you want to hear all this?"

Sigrid nodded.

"After the menu was settled, we all trooped up to have a look at the rooms available that weekend. The first would have been too crowded, the second was okay. Typical Cool Whip on the walls."

"Cool Whip?"

"Well, Sutton called it whipped cream. I thought it was more like the imitation stuff: you know, huge pictures of wistful dandies in lace pushing swings full of eighteenth-century airheads in an atmosphere of giddy abandon. Gods and goddesses. Lots of frothy pastel colors. The sort of things decorators drag in to go with the gilt and red velvet." His voice became mincing as he spoke into a imaginary telephone. "I need two and a half dozen Fêtes galantes and six billet doux. Cool Whip," he repeated firmly.

"So what happened next?"

"There were guys bustling around, setting up long tables, and Ms. Baldwin asked if anybody played cribbage because this was where some games company was holding its tournament Friday night. Sutton said yes, he was a contestant; and about that time the man who was running the tournament came in with Lucienne Ronay, so Ms. Baldwin introduced him to Sutton-Flit or Flyte or something like that-and presented the famed Madame Ronay to the rest of us. She informed us how honored she was that we'd selected the Maintenon and that was when the jerk from Brooklyn unctuously piped up and said, 'It seems we've also selected a very charming corner of the eighteenth century as well, Madame Ronay. We've been admiring your pictures. Are they the originals they appear to be?'

"And John said, 'Appearances can be deceiving. This one's still wet.'

"And everybody laughed."

Nauman drained his glass. "Then Madame Ronay and what's his name went on about their business and we took another vote on whether all the arrangements were approved and the committee adjourned. That was it."

Sigrid leaned back in her chair with her elbows on the armrests and started to tent her fingertips before her as she usually did when concentrating, but the position was uncomfortable with her taped arm and she had to rest it on the table instead.

"Did you hear any of Sutton's conversation with the man from the games company?" she asked. "Did they seem to know each other?"

"Wasn't much of a conversation. What I heard of it seemed to be the usual-'How are you? Looking forward to Friday night. How many players do you expect?' That sort of thing. But you know," he mused, "it was odd."

"Yes?"

"After he and Lucienne Ronay moved off and all the time Ms. Baldwin was babbling on about how the hotel would arrange the tables for the CUNY dinner, John kept glancing over toward him, like there was something about the guy that puzzled him."

"Did he say what?"

"No. He finally shrugged as if it wasn't important and started trying to be nice to the linguistics jerk from Brooklyn College."