"No, no, no," she scolded, although clearly pleased by his pleasure. "We are very naughty to make light at such a time. Lieutenant Harald is not amused and she is right. And now, mes ami's, I must fly. Already I am late for a meeting at my Montespan. Lieutenant Harald, Lieutenant Knight-please, whatever you wish, do not hesitate to ask. I have told my staff they are to give you all the assistance you need. And Molly, too, will-ah, but no! Molly must go straight home and go to bed and not get up till all those horrid circles are gone from below her pretty eyes."
With a word to her accountant, another to the adjuster, and a dazzling smile for Lieutenant Knight, Lucienne Ronay swept from the room, off to the smallest of her three Manhattan hotels where she intended to learn precisely why the Montespan had received two letters of complaint in the past month. Heads would roll.
As the victim in the last nine months of similar interrogations, Molly Baldwin did not envy her Montespan colleagues; and, her employer's words to the contrary, she knew she was expected to remain at the Maintenon this afternoon for as long as Lieutenant Harald needed her. No matter that her nerve ends were screaming for release or that her body felt as if she were moving through deep water. Instead, she must force herself to smile pleasantly at the two investigators, to wait expectantly until they had finished poking and prying.
"We'll check with Lowry and Albee, see what they've come up with so far," Sigrid told Lieutenant Knight, "and then I want to have a talk with this Ted Flythe of Graphic Games. If Ms. Baldwin can give us his address…?"
"Certainly," Molly replied, "but you don't need his address. He's just across the landing. In the Bontemps Room. Didn't someone tell you? They decided not to cancel the tournament."
10
IT surprised the hell out of me, too. Lieutenant," Ted Flythe admitted frankly. He sat on an imitation eighteenth-century settee upholstered in mauve silk and gazed at the nearly four hundred people engrossed in their cards and hunched over their cribbage boards. According to a small plaque near the gold-and-white enameled double doors, The Bontemps Room was named for one of Madame de Maintenon's godparents. It was slightly smaller but just as ornate as the damaged d'Aubigné Room. The walls were covered with murals meant to depict the court of Louis XIV at play; elaborately bewigged and silk-suited courtiers sported beneath the trees with equally bewigged and lavishly dressed ladies. The ceiling far overhead simulated a celestial blue sky enhanced by puffy white clouds and interspersed with golden sunbursts from which depended brass and crystal chandeliers.
It was a room meant for formal music, for dancers in tuxedos and jewel-toned taffetas, for the discreet clink of champagne glasses and witty repartee. It was not quite the setting for these cribbage players casually dressed in corduroy or plaid wool slacks and autumn-colored sweaters, who kept the ventilating system busy dispersing clouds of cigarette smoke, and who broke the room's pastel serenity with smothered laughter and occasional raucous cries of 'fifteen four and there ain't no more!'
"I held a meeting with the players this morning, told them I was authorized to refund all the entrance fees, but they wanted to go ahead with the tournament," said Mr. Flythe. "Not everybody. Not those who were hurt of course; a good number were too frightened to stay, but look at this!"
He gestured toward the tables. "Over three hundred and fifty people! Hell of a note, isn't it? You'd think they'd be afraid their board might be next."
The mauve silk couch and several matching side chairs formed a separate sitting area near the front of the large room. With the table and extra chairs Detectives Albee and Lowry had rounded up, it made a suitable place to winnow out and question witnesses.
They had just begun on Mr. Flythe when Sigrid entered with Lieutenant Knight and Molly Baldwin. Handing Flythe over to her, they had plunged back into the crowd, using newly revised seating charts to locate promising witnesses of last night's events.
"I suppose some of the contestants came a long distance," suggested Sigrid. "Perhaps had hotel or plane reservations they couldn't change easily?"
"Partly that," the tournament director conceded, "but I think it's mainly that they like the excitement. Most of the players are from the metropolitan area. They can go home by bus or subway. It's not as if they have to stay; but damned if they didn't want to, even though I made it clear that we'd have to reduce the prize money in proportion to how many pulled out.
"We've had to cut back on how many games they'll play, too. Instead of best out of seven, it's now three out of five to advance. That should finish us up in time."
While Mr. Flythe spoke of the procedural changes made in order to bring the tournament to a close on schedule tomorrow evening, Sigrid studied him unobtrusively, remembering Nauman's account of John Sutton's puzzled glances back at the man he'd met on Wednesday.
There was more than a suggestion of a traveling salesman on the lookout for a likely farmer's daughter about Mr. Flythe, a slight arrogance in his lazy way of assessing every woman as if she wore no clothes. In his late thirties or early forties, Sigrid judged. No gray in his dark hair or beard but his hairline was receding a bit at the temples and there was a slight puffiness beneath his sleepy brown eyes. Bedroom eyes, her Grandmother Lattimore would have called them. If his chin line had begun to blur, that was hidden by the short beard which was clipped into a modified Vandyke point.
His clothes fit well, too: there was no tightness in the collar of his crisp blue-striped shirt, no straining at the waist of his custom-tailored navy blazer or gray wool pants.
If Alan Knight embodied the ail-American lustiness of sunny haystacks and bosky dells, Ted Flythe was the comme ci comme ça of a sensual blues piano in a cocktail lounge on a rainy night; and his vibrations were just as strong as Knight's.
And he knew it, too, Sigrid suspected, noting how Molly Baldwin had instinctively chosen the empty space on the settee and how she sat closer than was required, just as the female members of the Graphic Games crew seemed compelled to consult their superior more often than one would have thought necessary.
"Perhaps we should finish this interview somewhere quieter," Sigrid suggested, when a blazered girl approached for a third time since they began talking.
"Sorry, Lieutenant. This is her first tournament, too." he beckoned the girl nearer. "Look Marcie, I can't answer your questions right now, but I tell youw hat: you have any problems, you ask Barbara over there. She's an old pro at this, okay?"
"Okay," the girl pouted.
Sigrid was interested in Flythe's unexpected revelation. "Your first tournament, Mr. Flythe? You haven't been with Graphic Games long?"
"Only since the end of the summer," he admitted, watching Marcie's sulky retreat.
"And before that?"
"You name it, I've probably done it," he answered easily. "From waiting tables in high school to selling refrigerators to Eskimos."
"And in any of your varied jobs had you ever met John Sutton before?"
"Who?"
"One of the men who died in last night's explosion," Sigrid said sharply, wondering why no one connected with the hotel seemed willing to admit having met Sutton. "You saw him, you even spoke with him in the d'Aubigné Room on Wednesday morning."
Ted Flythe stroked his beard into a sharp point; the lids of his sleepy eyesd rooped lower. "I didn't realize it was the same man," he said. "No, if I ever met him before, I don't remember. Why?"
"No reason, really," she said. "Someone in the group thought that Professor Sutton seemed to have recognized you from a previous meeting."