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 dinner, and then go in fresh and win.'
Tillie's cherubic face brightened. 'Great. And that'll give me time to tell you how the crib works. Each person is dealt six cards, see, and then you both contribute two to the crib, face down, and the dealer gets to count those when you've finished playing the first four and-'
Tillie's penchant for detail was an asset when investigating murder. As pure conversation, it could border on the tedious.
Resigned, Sigrid followed him from the office.
Commander T. J. Dixon, United States Navy, shucked her dark blue-black uniform with its neat gold stripes, crisp white shirt and dark blue tie and somewhat absent-mindedly considered what to wear that night. One could probably dress as for a civilian business event; on the other hand, the cribbage tournament was being held at the elegant Hotel Maintenon and surely the eight P.M. opening session argued for a dressier formality?
She stood before her open closet, barefooted, in an ice-blue satin teddy-once past boot camp, female personnel seldom followed the Navy's advice on lingerie, and Commander Dixon had a decidedly feminine streak. At forty, her hair was prematurely white, but the rest of her body was that of a younger woman. Every muscle was firm, every curve allured, nothing sagged.
While part of her mind weighed a dark red gown with a square neckline against a rich royal blue sari, the other part puzzled over the strange message that had been left on her answering machine.
It was the first communication with her only relative since their bitter quarrel last year, and Commander Dixon had played the message over several times, analytically dissecting the girl's words as thoroughly as any arcane code.
'
It was not okay, thought Commander Dixon and had immediately dialed the area code for Miami. After two rings, there was a series of familiar electronic tones and a pleasant mechanical voice said, 'We're sorry. The number you have reached is no longer in service. Please consult-'
Commander Dixon had hung up and replayed her cousin's message. '
There was a trace of urgency in the request, but she didn't sound upset or in trouble. In fact, thought Commander Dixon, for the first time the girl actually sounded as if she might have found a little backbone this past year. Ta
Maybe she was finally growing up.
Pleased with that thought, the commander turned back to her closet. The sari was more flattering, she decided at last, but the gauzy blue stole had a tendency to slip. It might prove a distraction, and Commander T. J. Dixon was too competitive to let herself be handicapped by feminine vanity.
'-so that by 1969, the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, was in disarray and ready for takeover by student activists who were more radical than the moderate pacifists or even the Maoists. They took their name from a line in Bob Dylan's song,
John Sutton touched the pause button on his tape recorder and sat back in his desk chair to focus his memory on those tumultuous and exhilarating days.
In 1969, he had been a graduate student at McClellan State, one of the battlegrounds for the Weathermen. Now he was a professor of history at Vanderlyn College, a branch of the New York City University system, and, to his own bemusement, teaching a course on the Sixties and Seventies to kids who were in first or second grade when Richard Nixon was forced out of the White House.
The course was immensely popular and so was John Sutton. A local television station's evening news program had even featured him on one of their pop culture segments, belaboring the irony of a man just turning forty already teaching events in his own person life as formal history.
Sutton pressed the record button. 'The typical Weathermen were white, middle to upper-middle class, well educated, and in revolt against materialistic values. They tended to be idealistic and impatient with the very real, but very slow, gains the peace movement was making. Privileged themselves, they were determined to extend those privileges to blacks, Hispanics, and the ghetto poor. These terrific goals and I'm not knocking them. Hell! That's why I joined SDS in the first place. But the Weathermen-' John Sutton's voice became wry.
'Many of the far-left leaders were subconsciously aping their own Establishment parents in thinking they knew what was best for the cause. They could be just as spoiled and willful, accustomed to getting their own way, and they didn't quite understand why the rest of us wouldn't fall right in behind their banners. And let's be blunt: not all radicals were the movement for purely altruistic reasons. Some were grooving on the heady excitement of power for its own sake, for the thrill of being outside the law. They arbitrarily decided the student movement would either become confrontational and violent or it would cease to exist.
'In the fall of 1969, they destroyed all the SDS records and went underground. The bombing that followed that winter and-'
The door of Sutton's study swung open. 'Come on, John,' scolded Val
Sutton. 'Shake a leg or we're going to be late.'.
'Mm?' He switched off the tape recorder and peered at his watch. 'Val? Do you remember Fred Hamilton and Brooks Ann Farr?'
'Personally or from afar?' she asked, pushing back her chocolate brown hair so that she could fit a gold earring into her left earlobe.
'Either,' he said, admiring the graceful swing of her hair.
It was thick and lustrous and absolutely straight. Until recently, she'd worn it shoulder length and combed away from her thin, catlike face, but the previous day she'd come with a blunt cut that just brushed level with the lie of her chin and half-veiled her face when her head tilted forward. He still wasn't used to the alluring novelty.
Val couldn't resist a small bit of preening. Clavida's charged the earth for a new styling session but getting one's husband to look at one like that after ten years of marriage was worth every dime.
'No, I didn't know McClellan's most-wanted alumni personally,' she told him, affectionately. 'You were the one in SDS, love, not me. I only marched or sat-in or sang. But I do remember them. Fred was dark and brooding, a smoldering sexpot; Brooks Ann was a lumpy sophomore, dreadful acne, and lank brown hair that always looked like she hadn't rinsed out all the shampoo. The original dishwater blonde. Meow.'
Val Sutton leaned across the desk and straightened her husband's tie. 'Come on, love. Mrs. Herlbut's already in with the kids and we've really got to go. Now.'
He smiled and allowed himself to be coaxed from the chair. 'I never knew you thought Fred Hamilton was sexy.'
'Ravishing,' she assured him as she handed him his jacket from the hall stand and slipped on her own, an intricately embroidered Chinese import of heavy gold satin. 'If they hadn't gone underground when they did-'
'You'd have signed up for his bomb-making course?'
Their laughter muted as they abruptly remembered the bombs Fred Hamilton and his followers had planted that violent winter of 1970. The four children who were killed outright, the woman left blind, the man who'd eventually
