The Right Jack

Five past six.

'If I'm not up by eight-thirty, please call me,' she told Roman and headed back down the hall for bed.

14

THE Sutton apartment was less than ten minutes away from Sigrid's, a block off Bleecker Street. Most of the mourners had gone by the time she and Oscar Nauman arrived shortly after nine o'clock, although four or five of John Sutton's graduate students still conversed in low tones around the dining room table and an emaciated young woman with a chalk-white complexion and gold-enameled fingernails-one of Val Sutton's colleagues from the Feldheimer, Nauman told Sigrid-sat on the couch reading a bedtime story to the Suttons' young son and daughter.

Both children had solemn dark eyes and straight black hair and they leaned sleepily against the woman's almost anorexic body. The smaller child, a little girl, had detached a wooden hippopotamus from the woman's chunky necklace and was dreamily walking it back and forth across the flowers printedo n her nightgown.

'She's waiting for you in his study,' said the student who had admitted them.

Oscar Nauman led the way down the narrow hall, tapped at a door, and opened it without waiting.

The outer rooms of the apartment were furnished in what Sigrid privately tagged bohemian artsy-nubbly handwoven fabrics, earthtone ceramic jugs and bowls, and statuettes cast in bronze and iron. On the walls, abstract oils and stylized photographs were interspersed with batik hangings and South American Indian artifacts.

John Sutton's study was more traditionally academic. A heavy oak desk faced the door and several comfortable chairs were placed before two walls lined with bookshelves in which leather-covered volumes were jammed beside paperbacks and scholarly journals. There was a Peruvian rug on the floor, though, and framed political posters on the third wall supported the presidential campaigns of Eugene McCarthy, Robert Kennedy, and Dick Gregory, among others. A floor-to-ceiling corkboard filled the wall behindt he desk, displaying a thumbtacked collage of snapshots, newspaper clippings, political cartoons, and protest buttons for the last twenty years.

Val Sutton sat curled on a leather chair that had been pulled up before the black tiled fireplace. A coal fire blazed in the small grate. She looked up as they entered and Sigrid immediately recognized whose genes the two children had inherited. As Nauman had said earlier, Val Sutton could not be considered conventionally beautiful; yet there was an intense, exotic vibrancy about her: high cheek bones and alert brown eyes in a triangular face, thick black hair clipped level with her chin line, a lithe and sensuous body.

The widow greeted Nauman in a husky voice, but her eyes were for the woman behind him. Even in her grief she could be curious about this police officer whom Oscar had described as a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Wonder Woman. She half remembered that when Riley Quinn was poisoned at Vanderlyn College back in the spring, John had come home amused that Oscar seemed smitten by a police lieutenant. Knowingt he caliber of women the artist was usually attracted to, Val expected someone not only intelligent, but physically striking as well.

What she saw was a woman in her early thirties, almost as tall as Oscar, with a spinsterish angularity beneath nondescript clothes, a long neck, and a mouth too generous for her thin face. On the other hand, her wide eyes were an interesting smoky gray and they held a quiet watchfulness which made Val think that perhaps Oscar hadn't exaggerated after all.

'Come sit by the fire,' she invited. 'I know it's too early in the season, but I just can't seem to get warm tonight.'

Nauman pulled a third chair closer for himself and, with the familiarity of an old friend, concentrated on lighting an intricately carved meerschaum pipe.

'Oscar told me you were injured last night, too,' Val Sutton said. 'Does it bother you much?'

The husky voice suited her. Nauman had said she was musical and Sigrid could imagine how effective a ballad might be in that timbre.

'The sling makes it look worse than it feels, thanks,' she replied.

Interviewing a murder victim's next-of-kin usually meant an awkward beginning, but here in this bookish lamplit room, with a fire on the hearth and the comforting aroma of Nauman's mellow pipe, it seemed quite natural to lean forward in the brown leather chair and say, 'I'm very sorry about your husband's death.'

'Oscar says you don't know if John was the intended victim.'

Sigrid looked at the catlike face closely. 'Do you?'

'He'd damn well better be!' There was passionate intensity in Val Sutton's low voice and her dark eyes flamed.

'Why do you say that?'

'Because it can't have been for nothing! I couldn't stand that. I'd rather it be someone who hated him, who felt threatened by him, who wanted something he had-a reason. I don't care how insane and stupid the reason is, but I don't think I can bear it if John is dead just because he happened to be there at that damn table.'

Tears glittered in the firelight and she brushed them away impatiently. 'If it's John they were after, there will be something we can do.'

'Did someone hate him?' asked Sigrid.

'John was the kindest, funniest, most thoughtful-' The vibrant voice broke, then steadied. 'Before last night, I would have said he didn't have an enemy in this world. But he's dead now, isn't he? So there must have been at least one enemy. And you'll find him for me.'

'Mrs. Sutton-':

'Please. Call me Val and let me call you Sigrid. Oscar's talked so much about you last night and today, I feel we're already friends.'

'Val then. I don't know what Nauman's told you, but the New York Police Department's not the Northwest Mounted Police. We don't always get our man.'

'You will this time,' Val Sutton predicted firmly. 'We'll take John's life apart-his friends, his students, his parents-everyone who ever knew him will help. Somewhere, somebody will remember something.'

'Let's begin with you then,' said

Sigrid. 'Nauman and your husband were at the Maintenon on Wednesday. Did he tell you about it?'

Val shook her head and her lustrous hair swung like heavy silk. 'No, he didn't really have a chance. I was at a conference up in Boston. Left Tuesday and didn't get back until yesterday morning. We talked on the phone Thursday night, but that was mostly about the children and what time my train was due in.'

'Nauman says your husband briefly met Ted Flythe on Wednesday. He had the impression that Professor Sutton kept glancing at Flythe as if he might have known him.'

'Or was at least reminded of someone,' Nauman clarified.

Again Val shook her head. 'That's what you said this afternoon, Oscar, and I keep thinking about Mr. Flythe and how he looked last night and he's no one I ever remember seeing. I'll ask around tomorrow, though.' her voice was steely. 'Most of John's old friends from our McClellan days will be at the funeral.'

Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. 'Whaty ou just said, Oscar-that Flythe might have reminded John of someone. There was a guy in SDS. Not at McClellan, but from Syracuse or Cornell. He had a pointed beard like Flythe's. Maybe that's what Sam meant?'

She jumped to her feet and crossed swiftly to the large oak desk.

'Sam?' Nauman was puzzled.

'Sam Naismith. When I phoned him this afternoon to ask if he'd be one of the pallbearers, he was so shocked; he said he'd just been talking to John one night this week; that they were mulling over the old days.'

She had seated herself behind the desk and pulled the phone close while flipping rapidly through a roller-card index.

'I wasn't paying attention,' she muttered, 'Sam? This is Val again. Hang on a minute, will you?'

She placed the receiver in an amplifying device that acted like a two-way speaker and allowed Sigrid and Nauman to follow the conversation.