The Right Jack

'Have you ever worn bangs?' she asked.

At 12:35, the car door opened and Sigrid got in beside him. Alan Knight lowered his newspaper and his jaw dropped.

'Don't say a word!' Sigrid said in a strangled voice. 'Not a single word. I mean it, Alan.'

A light misting rain had begun and Sigrid stared through the windshield, straight out at the steel gray water. One of the half-day charter boats had returned but it was not the Margie Q.

'Couldn't I please say just one word?'

'Well?'

'Wow!' he breathed.

She looked at him anxiously. 'Honest? Do you like it?' f

'It's terrific,' he assured her. 'God, it looks great! I can't believe you really did it.'

Gone was the bun and the pulled-back severity. The silky dark hair was now feathered and full on top and very short on the sides and back. Wisps of bangs softened her high forehead. Freed of the heavy mass of hair, the newly defined shape of her head sat more elegantly on her long neck.

She ran the tips of her fingers through the ragged bangs experimentally. 'It's going to be easier to take care of, I think. Ida showed me how to use a blow-dryer to give it more body.'

'Ida?'

'The beautician. She was really rather nice.'

'I bet she could sell Chryslers to the Japanese,' said Alan, peering at her more closely. In the overcast daylight, it was hard to tell. 'Are you wearing blusher?'

'What do you know about blusher?'

'My six sisters,' he reminded her. 'And is that eye shadow too?'

Sigrid tilted the rearview mirror so shec ould examine her face. 'It's not too much, is it? I've never felt comfortable with makeup before, but Ida took some of the mystery out of these things.'

She opened the pink plastic bag she'd brought from the shop to show Knight an assortment of small bottles and tubes.

'I always thought you had to use a lot and I hated all that thick goop. It's the first time anybody's ever explained the theory to me,' she confessed almost shyly. 'Ida says there are books in the library.'

He was touched by her delight in her new look yet he couldn't help laughing. 'Trust you to approach the frivolity of makeup in a rational, systematic way.'

'I don't have six sisters,' she replied with some of her usual tartness.

Ahead of them out in the bay, the shape of a trim little fishing boat emerged from the foggy gray of sky and water.

The Margie Q was heading in.

* * *

Val Sutton had remembered Victor Earle as short and getting thin ont op. Seventeen years later, Earle was completely bald. Even his eyebrows were scanty. All the hair on his head seemed to have repositioned itself around his mouth. His top lip supported a thick brown handlebar moustache that swirled out with exuberant panache on either side of his mouth. He had very pale blue eyes and a disconcerting stare.

After identifying themselves, they had led him to a table in the Lobster Pot Cafe and he had followed without protest, still wearing his rubber waders. His yellow slicker hung across the back of his chair. He gazed straight into the eyes of his questioners and long minutes seemed to pass before he blinked. The last time Sigrid had seen that sort of unblinking gaze was in the eyes of a man who had killed and then sodomized the bodies of three small boys.

There seemed to be a momentary pause between the end of each question and the beginning of his response, almost like the two-second delay when a question is bounced off a satellite to someone being televised halfway around the world. Earle answered them willingly enough, but thats pacy stare and the hesitation before his response made Sigrid suspect he might be on drugs.

Earle expressed neither surprise nor resentment at being sought out by the police and only minimal curiosity that they should be interested in Red Snow.

'Hell of a way to die,' he told them, his fingers tapping the rubber waders. 'Messing around with C-4.'

'Is that what it was?'

'That's what Fred said. I never messed with that stuff. M-4's and Uzis, even hand grenades, okay, but-'

'Fred? Fred Hamilton? When did he tell you that?'

Victor Earle turned his pale-eyed stare upon Sigrid. 'In France. One of those resorts on the Mediterranean.'

'Where is Hamilton now? Still in Europe?'

Earle continued to gaze at her. 'Yeah, he's still there.'

His moustache twitched up and down and it took a moment to realize that he was laughing. There was no sound and no change in the expression in his eyes, just that jerk of brown handlebars andt he flash of teeth beneath.

'He loaded his needle with the wrong stuff one night and woke up dead the next morning.' [

'When?'

'Seventy-one. April, I think it was.'

'What about the girl that was with him?'

'Brooks Ann?' He shrugged. 'Who knows? She split. She was walking the streets for rent money and one night she didn't come back. Probably went home with one of the Johns.'

'Did you ever hear of any others getting out alive from that burning lodge?' asked Sigrid,

'Nah.'

As the interview continued, they learned that Victor Earle did not watch television or read the papers, so he claimed to know nothing about the Maintenon bombing or John Sutton's death. In fact, he seemed not to know who Sutton was.

'McClellan? Nah. I was never at McClellan.'

Alan Knight showed him the group photo taken of the McClellan SDS group and asked him whom he recognized. Hep icked out Fred Hamilton, a couple of the women, and Tris Yorke, but not Sutton. Even when they pointed to him, Earle shook his head.

Then they spread out the photographs taken at the hotel over the past weekend. Knight had remembered to bring along Sigrid's magnifying glass for studying the tiny faces in the background.

Absentmindedly rubbing his bald head, Earle moved the glass methodically across the pictures. A surprising number of cardplayers and hotel workers were to be seen in the background and the two officers pointed to those of main interest: Haines Froelick, Vassily Ivanovich, Molly Baldwin, and, of course Ted Flythe. He admitted knowing none of them.

'Who are those geeks?' he asked, pointing to a view of the Bontemps Room Sunday afternoon.

The photographer had taken it in an attempt to get Flythe's profile without her target noticing, so Flythe was well to the right of the picture. On the left, Madame Ronay seemed to be instructing the remaining busboys and Mr. George,t he head steward. Every face was in sharp detail.

Sigrid explained who they were.

Earle's pale blue eyes gazed vacantly into her face. 'This George guy. He works for her?'

'They all do. It's her hotel,' Knight said impatiently. 'Do you recognize them? Have you seen this George before?'

Another pause.

'Nah.

***

Before they started the rainy drive back to town, Sigrid telephoned headquarters and left a message for Eberstadt or Peters to start checking Mr. George's background.