The Right Jack

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 ma

"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 di