Knight had been following her story on his sketched floor plan. "It could have happened like that," he said. "As many exits and elevators and halls as this place has, you could play ring-around-the-rosy all day."
"Madame Ronay spent some time in her office,.too," said Sigrid "is that near yours?"
Molly gave a feminine hoot. "My office is in that warren back of the main desk. La R -I mean, Madame Ronay's is up on thirty, next to the boardroom. On thirty, even the broom closets are bigger than my office."
"So from approximately ten-thirty till eleven-thirty, you were at your desk alone?"
Molly Baldwin nodded her curly brown head.
"Did you see anyone, speak to anyone along the way?"
"Gee, I don't know. You know how it is: you just nod or wave; you don't stop to talk every time. There was the desk clerk, of course, and the bell captain. There're always people coming or going."
"In your office, too?"
"Well, no. Clerical staff don't have to work on Sundays. Just a skeleton crew down in the secretarial pool in case of emergencies. They mostly goof off or read or knit 'cause nothing ever happens on Sunday."
"Now, Ms. Baldwin, you've told us that you did not know Pernell Johnson except by sight and only as a staff member employed here at the hotel. Is that correct?"
As Sigrid's voice became more official, Molly tensed again. "That's right," she said anxiously.
"We've heard that he recently moved here from Miami. That's where you're from, too, isn't it?"
"But I didn't know him," Molly protested. " Miami 's huge. That's like saying I ought to know you because we both live in New York."
"So, in fact, he gave no indication that he'd ever seen you around Miami either?"
Molly Baldwin shook her head.
"Very well, Ms. Baldwin," Sigrid concluded. "If you'll bring me those pairings sheets, I think that'll be all for now."
The girl looked at Alan Knight entreatingly. "Would you tell them about me at the hospital?" she asked. "My name, I mean, and that I'm Commander Dixon's cousin so they won't give me ah ard time about letting me see her?"
"Certainly, Ms. Baldwin," he said formally.
"Oh, thank you," she breathed, and slipped away to fetch the papers.
"Aren't you going to tell her?" Sigrid asked.
"Let her find it out at the hospital," said Knight. "Did I apologize for thinking you were callous about Commander Dixon? And Dixon 's her only relative, for God's sake."
One of the uniformed officers whom Sigrid had instructed earlier came over with a slender young black girl in tow.
"Lieutenant Harald, this is Miss Terri Pratt, the victim's friend."
She was a winsome child, not pretty exactly, but with a sunny intelligent charm that shone through her shock over Johnson's death. They soon learned that she was a part-time employee at the hotel and a full-time student at Hunter College. She hadn't actually dated Johnson yet, "But we were working at it. We'd taken a couple of breaks at the same time. He was a little younger than me, but pretty sharp. Had his act together. I liked that."
They had snatched a few minutes in passing since Friday night, she told them; had even planned to meet for lunch today; but if Pernell had known anything important about the explosion, he'd given her no indication of it.
"And he would have," Terri Pratt assured them. "At least I think he would. He talked about everything else that happened that night."
At the end, Sigrid thanked her and added, "We're very sorry about your loss, Miss Pratt."
The girl shook her head. "We weren't that far yet. Things were just starting between us and there was so much else we needed to do first: school, work. Pernell wanted to start a chain of small resort hotels in Florida. He'd have done it, too. He could've done anything." Her face drooped as she spoke of what would now never be. "He was so-ooh, I don't know. Innocent? And very, very sweet."
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 manner, so that when he asked her why she had joined the police force, instead of replying that it was none of his business, she answered him honestly.
"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.