Dinner had been a cheerful and slightly rowdy meal, not unusual when people are meeting for the first time and talking over and around each other in layered degrees of familiarity. Oscar and Jill had known each other for years, Sigrid first met all three last spring, and she and Roman had become accidental roommates back
in the summer; yet this was the first time the four had dined together. And, of course, this was Nauman and Tramegra's first meeting with Alan Knight.
Conversation had ranged from insects to Lucienne Ronay, from nouvelle cuisine to art nouveau, from naval maneuvers to marine zoology-whereupon Alan Knight suggested to Roman that he might get a good article out of crawdads.
Nauman's salad fork paused in midair. "What the hell's a crawdad?"
"You don't know what a crawdad is?" grinned Knight, who'd been a bit awed earlier to realize who Nauman was.
"No, I don't know what a crawdad is."
Somehow this clash of cultures so delighted Sigrid that she burst into infectious laughter.
Roman chose that moment to bring on his entrée. "Here we are: veau d'anise avec étables verts," he announced in his mangled French.
"What?" asked Nauman. "No chitlins or harmony grits?"
During dinner they had finished Oscar's bottle of wine, opened a second, and
Sigrid had now brought the remains of a third to.the living room with them.
"Should you be drinking this much with your medication?" Oscar asked when she spread John Sutton's notes next to the tape player on the low table before them and held out her glass.
"Nope," she said happily. "But I haven't taken a pill since morning, so more wine, garçon."
"I've never seen you tipsy before."
"I'm not tipsy." She took a slow sip of the amber wine and reconsidered. "Relaxed, perhaps, but definitely not tipsy."
She turned on the tape player, slipped off her shoes, and leaned back lightly against his shoulder with her feet tucked under her.
Pleasantly surprised by her unaccustomed initiative, Oscar shifted slightly so that she fit more comfortably into the curve of his arm while John Sutton's voice filled the room.
23
MONDAY began brightly enough, although the kitchen radio was predicting rain by the afternoon.
Sigrid was in good spirits as she poured herself a glass of juice. She'd slept well and for the first time since Friday night's incident, her arm barely ached. With her hair tightly braided and pinned into a secure knot at the nape of her neck, she felt more like herself than at any time since the knifing.
Roman had again helped with her hair, but he was a mixed blessing this morning, surprised that she felt as cheerful, and unconvinced that she wasn't hiding a headache or a hangover.
"I did not have too much to drink last night and I did not pass out," she told him firmly. "I barely slept Saturday night and then worked all day yesterday. That's the only reason I fell asleep on the couch."
Roman sniffed.
Sigrid supposed she deserved his skepticism. True, it had been a little disconcerting to wake up sometime in the middle of the night in the living room with the apartment dark and silent and a blanket tucked around her, but she'd been too drowsy to care. She'd simply stumbled sleepily to her room, shed her clothes, and crawled into bed where she promptly zonked out again.
"What time did everyone leave?" she asked Roman.
"Around ten. I wanted to wake you, but Oscar wouldn't let me. He said he had an early meeting this morning and Jill was yawning, too, so he took her home then."
The street gate buzzed and Roman went over to push an electric button that released the latch. "That'll be young Horatio Hornblower. He told me he'd pick you up this morning."
But the figure who opened the gate was neither Alan Knight nor the yeoman driver. This sailor was dark and wiry, the sleeve of his navy-blue jumper had a couple of extra hash marks, and hise yes squinted across the courtyard as if he were staring through the briny spray from a fo'c'sle deck, whatever that was. Sigrid was weak on Navy terminology.
She opened the door.
"Lieutenant Knight sent me, ma'am," he said in as flat a North Jersey accent as Sigrid had ever heard. "He said you'd be expecting him."
"I'll be right out," said Sigrid and hurried down the hall to put on her gun and load the pockets of her jacket with wallet, ID, and other necessities for the day. In passing, she snagged a thin zippered leather folder that held her notes on the bombing and was out the door before Roman could remind her to carry an umbrella.
As she pulled the gate shut, the driver jumped out of the gray station wagon and held the door next to the curb for her to enter. Alan Knight was in the far corner with a suspiciously pasty look on his face.
"You look awful," Sigrid said by way of greeting. "Are you all right?"
"It's going," he answered, popping another digestive mint into his mouth. "I always thought I could eat anything, but for some.reason, I keep tasting licorice this morning."
He looked at her closely. "You don't seem the worse for wear. I thought you'd look like I feel."
"I don't know why everyone seems to assume I had too much wine last night," Sigrid said stiffly.
She would have said more, but their driver swerved abruptly with a sharp blast of his horn at a cab that had encroached on his lane. Monday morning rush hour traffic clearly held no terrors for him.
"Petty Officer Schmitt's my regular driver," said Knight unnecessarily.
The driver's eyes met Sigrid's in the mirror. "Ma'am." *
Sigrid gravely returned his nod.
headquarters, her first order ot business was to call the hospital. Tillie's conditions continued to improve, they told her.
Her office was too small to hold everyone working on the Maintenonb ombing, so at 9:06 they carried their coffee cups and doughnuts into one of the conference rooms.
At 9:07, a fingerprint technician licked powdered sugar from his fingers and said, "I'm afraid I have bad news, Lieutenant. The FBI sent us the prints we requested and Ted Flythe's are nowhere close to Frederick Hamilton's." j
"Dead end," sighed Lowry. Sigrid was dismayed. "You're certain?"
"Yes, ma'am. See for yourself." She studied the photographic enlargements of both sets of prints. Small arrows had been superimposed on distinguishing loops and whorls. Sigrid was no expert in this area, but even she could see that none of the comparison points matched. "That's not all," said the fingerprint technician. "I requested the prints of all known Red Snow members and Flythe's don't match any of them. Sorry, ma'am." It was a bitter disappointment. Sigrid's assumption of a Red Snow link between John Sutton and Ted Flythe had infected them all. Consciously or unconsciously, they'd let similar assumptions affect the diligence withw hich they'd looked at other possible suspects that weekend.
Because Haines Froelick seemed a harmless dilettante. Peters and Eberstadt had only gone through the motions in checking his background; Elaine Albee shared Sigrid's instinctive rejection of Val Sutton as a killer-"Besides, she wasn't anywhere near the Maintenon yesterday," said Albee-and those who'd heard of Molly Baldwin's lies about her relationship to Commander Dixon had marked the girl as an uncomplicated, self-centered airhead, much as Vassily Ivanovich was their idea of a comic Russian.
"There's nothing comic about an ex-demolition expert with a KGB son," said Sigrid, setting her blue mug on the table with a firm thunk. "Let's stop thinking in stereotypes and start at the beginning again. Comments? Suggestions?"