The Right Jack

then I simply had to fly.'

'Sorry. We must have just missed you. Something came up,' said Sigrid, blowing gently on her first spoonful of steaming soup.

Without asking if she wanted it, Roman fixed her a small bowl of torn endive, parsley, and Bibb lettuce and cut a thick slice of brown bread which he smeared liberally with cream cheese. By then Sigrid was eating with such obvious relish that he said, 'It's early for dinner, but I may as well join you. I shall make my anised veal for our entree and-'

'None for me, thanks,' Sigrid said hastily. 'Soup's all I want tonight.'

'Perhaps tomorrow then,' he said, leaving Sigrid to wonder if she could pretend to forget and send out for pizza or something. She had never acquired a taste for anise except in black jellybeans. Certainly not in veal and sour cream.

'Oscar was quite exercised about the explosion at the Hotel Maintenon. Was that what delayed you?' Roman asked. 'Do say you're working on that.'

'Now, Roman,' she warned.

It was getting harder to deflect hise xcessive interest in her work. He was so certain that one ingenious murder mystery would free him from the magazine articles and fillers with which he supplemented his small private income but so far as he knew, only the dull and routine had come her way since the spring and he had begun to despair of the unimaginative ways by which so many New Yorkers dispatched one another.

'I hoped you might be able to tell me something-off the record, of course,' he said wistfully. 'Surely there's more than was in the paper? A multimillionaire killed, your colleague wounded, the glamorous Lucienne Ronay hovering in the wings! Is she really as beautiful as her pictures?'

'More,' said Sigrid, happy that she could share that much at least. 'I'm told she gave another dazzling performance last night. Jill Gill was there, by the way. She's one of the cribbage contestants.'

'Jolly good,' beamed Roman, whose cultured midwestern accent was overlaid by an Oxbridge accent that sounded suspiciously like too many old Peter Lawford movies to Sigrid. 'She'll bea ble to describe all those delicious little details of dress and jewels that pass right over your practical head.'

Roman Tramegra was the soul of tact and Sigrid knew he would never intentionally insult her. Yet, she found his blithe assumption that she was totally oblivious to all feminine artifice somewhat wounding. Just because she seldom wore makeup herself, just because she felt gawky shopping for clothes and didn't fuss with her hair every ten minutes, didn't mean that she was never interested in how other women achieve their glamorous effects.

'I noticed,' she told him sharply. 'Lucienne Ronay had on a very expensive, very attractive off-white dress this afternoon, long gold-and-pearl earrings, and several chunky gold bracelets. Her shoes were the same color as her dress, her hair was down about her face, and she wore a perfume that smelled like some sort of flowers.'

Roman's spoon dropped back into the bowl with a surprised clunk.

'Very good, my dear Watson. The flowers are mignonettes.'

'Mignonettes?'

'Her husband commissioned a perfume company in the Mediterranean to blend a special fragrance just for her.'

Sometimes Sigrid wondered if her friend possessed a photographic memory. He claimed not to, yet he seemed a walking storehouse of trivia, with tidbits on almost every aspect of twentieth century pop culture. Sigrid recalled having once read about Lucienne Ronay's husband herself but details eluded her.

'He was something of a Svengali, wasn't he?'

'I think you mean Pygmalion,' Roman corrected. 'Svengali was an evil hypnotist; Pygmalion was a sculptor who created his perfect mate. G. B. Shaw, of course, And My Fair Lady, only that came later. That was Maurice Ronay though-Pygmalion and Professor Henry Higgins with the tiniest touch of Howard Hughes. A bit of a recluse with an eccentric sense of humor. He was a wealthy real estate investor, years older than she, and she was a little nobody, a peasant girl he found sleeping on the beach at Cannes, so the story goes. He brought her homew ith him, scrubbed off the dirt and found her so beautiful that he taught her how to walk and talk and carry herself, bought her clothes and jewels, and finally married her.

'They say everything that man touched turned into gold and his little peasant was no exception. He married her because she was beautiful and sexy, he said, and then she turned out to have brains too.'

'I remember that,' said Sigrid. She went around to the stove and clumsily helped herself to more soup. 'Didn't her husband put together some sort of real estate deal here in Manhattan about eight or nine years ago and those three hotels were part of the package he didn't want?'

'Quite right,' he agreed, holding out his own bowl for more. 'They were like three nice old dowagers: still respectable, but drab and a bit tatty around the edges.'

'My great-aunts used to stay at the La Valliere when it was the Carstairs,' Sigrid remembered.

'Everyone's great-aunt stayed at the Carstairs,' said Roman. 'Monsieur Ronayw as going to dump it, along with what are now the Montespan and the Maintenon, when his charming wife announced that she was tired of being a plaything and wanted to work. So he gave her the three hotels for a Christmas present and she became something of a Pygmalion herself: cleaned them up, gave them elegant new dresses, and transformed them into three perfect jewels.'

'Nice what you can do with money,' Sigrid observed, savoring the warm buttery mushrooms in her soup.

'It always takes money to make it,' Roman agreed. 'But why not? They say she paid back his loan before he died.'

'She does seem to have a flair for running hotels,' Sigrid acknowledged. 'Everything was under control today. No sign of any explosion except in the immediate vicinity of the bomb itself.'

'Everyone says she's so pragmatic, that she's a termagant and a slave-driver, and perhaps she is. But underneath, she must have a romantic nature.'

'Because she's so beautiful?'

'Outward beauty is only a manifestation of inner loveliness,' he intoned in hiss olemn bass voice. 'The names she chose for her hotels reveal everything.'

'Do they?' Sigrid was weak on French history.

'Maintenon, Montespan, and La Valliere, my dear, were the mistresses of the Sun King, Louis XIV. I wrote an article on them when the hotels were rechristened. Sold it as a sidebar to Newsday, I think. Let me see now… Louise de La Valliere came first. She's the one they named the lavaliere necklace for. She was supplanted by Francoise de Montespan, who was three years older; Montespan in turn was replaced by Francoise de Maintenon, who was six years older still. She was almost fifty when she and the king were secretly married. She had beauty and intellect and held the king's heart until his death.

'If you think of it, Lucienne Ronay is much like de Maintenon herself. She was no infant when she married Maurice Ronay and-'

The telephone on the nearby wall interrupted his discourse. This phone and the one in Sigrid's bedroom werei n her name. Roman had a separate line in his quarters. Sigrid lifted the receiver to her ear. 'Hello?'

'Val says you haven't been by to question her yet,' said Oscar Nauman.

'No, I thought I wouldn't bother her until tomorrow.'

'She won't be there tomorrow,' he told her. 'She and the children are flying home with John's body tomorrow morning and they won't be back till after the funeral. I thought you'd want to know.'

'I do.' Sigrid weighed her weariness against the need to interview Val Sutton while the night's horrors were still fresh in the new widow's mind. 'Perhaps I'd better call her and arrange a time.'

'I told her to expect us at nine if she didn't hear from me. She's beat.'

'Me, too,' Sigrid confessed.

'So take a nap,' Nauman said sensibly. 'That's what Val's doing. I'll pick you up at eight-forty-five. Okay?'

'Okay.' It might be a little unorthodox, but if Val Sutton were given to hysterics, Sigrid wanted someone like Nauman there to help.

She looked at the clock.