"No, thanks. We were wondering about Sunday morning."
"What about it?"
"Did you know the kid that was killed? Pernell Johnson?"
"Not by name. I'd seen him ground all weekend though."
"Talk to him much?"
Flythe shook his head. "No need to. Miss Baldwin and the room steward-What's his name? George? They kept that side of the tournament running smoothly. I'll say that for the Maintenon. Graphic Games got its money's worth. Lucienne Ronay runs a class operation. Those fancy ballrooms."
"We heard you liked the bedroom, too," said Eberstadt, with a slow winkt hat was a visual nudge.
Flythe gave an airy man-of-the-world wave of his hand. "No point letting opportunity knock and not get up to answer," he grinned.
"The last time anyone seems to have seen Johnson alive was about the middle of the break on Sunday morning," said Lo wry. "About 10:41. Did you run into him after the break began?"
"Nope, can't say that I did." Flythe drained his glass and looked at Eberstadt's. "Ready for another suds?"
"No, thanks. Let me get this straight, now. When you left the tournament, you went out the back exit, right?"
"Right. There's an elevator behind the one in the lobby and I took it up to my room. Had to change my shirt because of one of those ditsy kids. I didn't even know she was there. I turned around right after the break started and she had one of those goddamned permanent markers in her hand-getting ready to make someone a new name tag she said-and put a black line three inches long right across the front of a new forty-five-dollar shirt. And don't think that didn't go on the expense account I turned in yesterday."
"Did the girl go up with you?" asked Eberstadt, with an insinuating smile. "Help you find a fresh shirt or something?"
"Naw. I didn't have time for a long hunt." He laughed.
"So in fact," said Lowry, "you were away from the Bontemps Room from, shall we say, 10:25 to 10:55? With no one to confirm your movements?"
"Hey, wait a minute! What the hell are you playing at?"
"Oh, we're not playing, Mr. Flythe. Pernell Johnson was killed sometime between 10:41 and eleven o'clock A.M. and you can't seem to prove where you were."
"Jesus H. Christ!" groaned Flythe. "I'll show you the goddamn shirt!"
Lowry followed him to the bedroom, his hand inconspicuously close to the gun under his jacket. But Flythe rummaged through a basket of dirty laundry and came up with a crumpled shirt. It did indeed have a long black ink stain across the front.
"You think I'd lie about a dumb thing like this?"
"I don't know," said Eberstadt from the doorway, where he stood with the framed diploma in his big hands. "You lied about a dumb thing like a college, why not murder?"
"What the bloody hell-?"
"Knock it off, Flythe," said Lo wry impatiently. "Alfred Theodore Flythe
– the real Alfred Theodore Flythe
– graduated in 1907. If you look closely, you can see where you changed the zero to a six. You never went to Carlyle. Why did you lie about it?"
Ted Flythe sank down on his unmade bed and put a pillow over his head. They heard a steady string of muffled heartfelt curses, and they waited till he started repeating himself.
"Who's Alfred Theodore Flythe?" asked Eberstadt.
Flythe sat up. "Me. And my grandfather. I was named for him. Look, you gotta understand: every job you go into today, doesn't matter how sharp you are, how much chutzpah you've got, the first thing they want to know is, have you got yourc ollege degree? You think it takes a college education to handle a bloody cribbage tournament? So I tell 'em I graduated from this little college that went bankrupt in the seventies, show 'em the old sheepskin, and I'm in. They're never going to look it up. They don't really care. They're just checking off boxes on their questionaire."
The went back into the living room. Eberstadt accepted another beer and they turned Flythe inside out, but got nothing further out of him. He insisted that he'd never seen John Sutton before that first chance encounter last Wednesday and that the only place he'd gone during the Sunday morning break was straight upstairs to his room for a fresh shirt and back down again.
It was only seven o'clock when they gave up. Lowry borrowed Flythe's phone and rang Elaine Albee's apartment again.
Still no answer.
29
VASSILY IVANOVICH had been on his way out of his apartment near the UN when Elaine Albee and Alan Knight caught him. The big Russian invited them back inside for a glass of rosé.
"No more vodka or slivovitz," he apologized. "Now I am having to watch my blood pressure."
He explained he was on his way to the hospital. "Molly Baldwin and me, we have long talk yesterday and she explains to me so much foolishness for her job. She cries very hard when I tell her it is foolishness. All is understood now and last night they let me see T. J. This morning I go, and tonight I go. Next week I go home."
"To Russia?"
"Da. To Russia. My delegation here is finished."
He did not take offense when they questioned him again about his movements
Sunday morning. It was almost as if he did not realize he could be seriously considered for the murders. Asked why he was late getting back to the tournament after the break, he said he'd made a phone call to a member of his trade delegation and had been put on hold for longer than he'd anticipated.
It was not something they could easily check, but Elaine remembered another possibility, the theft of the cribbage board, and asked, "Did you work on Thursday, Mr. Ivanovich? Between noon and three, say?"
"Thursday? Da. We meet with export group from Georgia. We have same state. In our south, too," he beamed at them. "They want to sell us new fish they make there. Crawdudes."
"I think you mean crawdads," said Alan Knight with a perfectly straight face.
"We meet at ten, have lunch at one, make first agreements at four."
"And that's something I can check out," said Knight as he and Elaine left Ivanovich's apartment in Tudor City, that enclave of pseudo-French-Gothic buildings on the East River across from the UN.
They strolled north along a tree-lined street that was so quiet they might have been in one of the outer boroughs of the city. Lights glowed softly behind the leaded glass windows around them and midtown bustle seemed far away. As they paused on the bridge above Forty-second Street to watch the early evening traffic pass below them, the night breeze off the river was cool with a lurking undertone of coming winter.
Alan bent his fair head to Elaine's and his drawl was as warm as a summer night in Georgia. "I know a little place down in Chelsea where they make a shrimp tempura that's almost as good as chicken-fried shrimp back home. Do you like Japanese food?"
"Ye-ess," she said slowly. "But what?"
She looked at her watch. "I half-promised Jim Lowry-"
"If it's not a whole promise by five, it doesn't count."
"Is that the way it works down South?" she dimpled.
"Oh, we're much more formal in the South. Half-past three's the cutoff point for half-promises."
"Tell the kids I like the pictures," Tillie said, looking at the crayoned drawings taped to the wall beside his bed.
"You sound better tonight," said Marian's warm voice in his ear.
He positioned the phone more comfortably on the pillow beside his head. "I am. I ought to be. Sleeping through your visit this afternoon. You should have waked me."
The three older kids got on the phone then and talked a few minutes-Chuck about football, Shelly about a drawing she would make of Chuck in his uniform, and Carl about Halloween, still two weeks away. At three, this would be his first real trick-or-treat experience and he was both fearful and excited about the scary costumes and all the candy he could eat.