The Right Jack

Her voice shook as the finality of his death sank in.

In the lull after Molly Baldwin brought them the pairings sheets and went back to her work, Alan Knight suggested that they might as well grab a bite to eat while they waited for the cribbage players to regroup after their own lunch break. The hotel's coffee shop was jammed, so he and Sigrid went to the tavern across the street, where Sigrid let herself be persuaded that a large mug of rich dark ale could substitute for the pain tablets she'd forgotten to bring with her.

Sandwiches there were pricey but generous. The corned beef was sliced thinly and laid on an inch thick, the mustard was dark and spicy, the dill pickles crisp and tender.

As they ate, Alan regaled her with exaggerated tales of his upbringing in a Southern household tucked in amongst six sisters. He seemed to have decided on a big sister-kid brother scenario for their temporary partnership and Sigrid could feel herself being drawn in. His knack for instant friendship was seductive to someone who found getting past the initial barriers difficult.

Kinship was a whole different mattert hough, even this artificial kinship. Her mother possessed rafts of uncles, aunts, and cousins and so had her father, which meant Sigrid had grown up accustomed to having strangers suddenly introduced as Uncle this or Great-aunt that, people who by blood were entitled to speak to her familiarly, chaff her on her shyness, or ask personal questions that would be a gross impertinence in someone unrelated. Brothers she had never known, but Alan Knight was not unlike some of her Lattimore or Harald cousins and unconsciously she found herself reacting to him in the same ma

"Probably a combination of genes and aptitude. My father was a policeman killed in the line of duty when I was a child. I barely remember him, but I guess I grew up thinking it was an honorable profession. And I've always liked puzzles-word games, jigsaws, solitaire, any kind of logic problems."

"The Norwegian with a dog livesn ext door to the man who smokes Parliaments?" smiled Knight.

"So who owns the zebra?" She nodded. "And when I was a child, I used to tangle a ball of twine deliberately and then spend hours undoing the knots. Bringing a little corner of the world back to order, I suppose. Who knows? I've never analyzed it much."

She sipped the last of her ale. "Why did you join the Navy? To get away from women?"

He laughed. "You sure don't find many on shipboard yet."

"Are you making it a career?"

"I didn't plan to, although, I'm working on my second tour of duty right now. With seven kids, we all had to scrape around for tuition. If you sign up for ROTC, they give you four years of college for four years service. I'm being ordered to Naples in December. Join the Navy, and see the world. It's not a bad life."

"Commander Dixon seemed to like it," Sigrid said. "What will happen to her now, do you suppose?"

"The Navy will take care of her. Military hospitals must know everything

Back at the hotel, the crime scene technicians were packing up their equipment, having collected all the physical bits of evidence they could find. It wasn't much. Or rather, it was too much. Too many people had used the room since its last cleaning. Trying to sort out what might be pertinent from the mass of fingerprints, fibers, and cigarette butts would be almost impossible.

Nevertheless, they would go through the motions.

"Oh, and we did find this," said one, and handed over Zachary Wolferman's schilling to Detective Eberstadt, a heavyset officer entering middle age. He sucked in his stomach and slipped the coin into his watch pocket for safekeeping.

there is about prosthetics and therapy.

She may have a choice between fulld isability or retraining."

It sounded awful to Sigrid. Better than the alternative, he remindedh er.

Down in the Bontemps Room, Ted Flythe called the players to order. A telephone conference with his superior at Graphic Games had left the ball in his court and now he bounced it on to them. "We have two options," he told them. "There are sixty-four players still in contention and you sixty-four have the vote. You can draw lots and have a wi

There was hasty consultation among the weary and beleaguered players. The vote went overwhelmingly in favor of calling it quits before anyone else got killed.

Graphic Games' Second A

22

THE tournament may have been over, but questioning the cardplayers dragged on into midafternoon. It could have been worse. Of the three hundred or so players, less than twenty were positive that they had seen Pernell Johnson after the break began.

Jill Gill was the player to pinpoint his last movements. Others had seen the young busboy policing the ash stands out on the landing-"I felt so guilty/' confessed one woman. "He'd just picked three butts out of the sand and here I came with another!"-but only Dr. Hill could tell Elaine Albee, "It was exactly 10:41. I looked at my watch because our break was supposed to last fifteen minutes. Almost nobody'd started back inside though, so I thought I'd still have time to duck into the ladies'.

"You know how you'll look around for the nearest inconspicous door? Well, I saw the busboy pass through a doorn ext to the elevators and I started to follow and then I saw 'No admittance,' so I went elsewhere."

If anyone else had seen young Johnson after 10:41, they weren't saying.

The service landing beyond that door was not visible from the service door at the rear of the Bontemps Room; but LeMays, the busboy who'd used the corridor and freight elevator to fetch more cups from the kitchen, swore the area was deserted when he went down at eleven o'clock.

He and two others agreed that Ted Flythe had left by the rear hall shortly after the break began. They didn't think he had returned that way. Nor could any of the Graphic Games people alibi Flythe. It was generally agreed that he did not return to the Bontemps Room and call for order until 10:55.

Fourteen minutes between the last glimpse of Pernell Johnson and the next view of Ted Flythe.

"You could go anywhere in this building and back again in fourteen minutes." Alan Knight frowned. "Aren't you going to question him?"

"Not yet," said Sigrid, touching her hair in absent-minded uneasiness. Roman had used a gentler hand than hers when helping to pin up her hair earlier that morning and she didn't trust the dark mass not to come sliding down. "If he's Fred Hamilton, it's taken more than good luck to stay out of prison all these years."

"ESP?"

"Or the science of body language or whatever else you want to call it," she said patiently. "No, he can't read minds, but he's probably good at picking up unconscious signals like voice tones or eye tension. We'll know for sure when the prints come in tomorrow, and then we'll arrest him and do our questioning where there's no chance of his disappearing for another fifteen years, okay?"

"You're the expert."

"And you're not?"

Knight shrugged. "Look, they gave me a sailor suit, a cram course at Newport, and told me to go read a couple of books. I'm pretty intelligent but whether that qualifies me for Intelligence, I couldn't say. I probably shouldn't tell you this, buty ou're my first real field operation."