One Coffee With

by Margaret Maron

  A young man in wire-rimmed glasses, chinos and a rumpled shirt had talked his way past the officer at the end of the hall and now stepped around the mail rack. Sigrid saw the blond secretary’s face soften at the sight of him.

  “David!”

  “Hey, you okay?” he asked anxiously.

  Her desk was between them, and they didn’t actually touch, but Sigrid suddenly felt that she and Tillie and Yanitelli were interlopers. Intimacy always embarrassed her.

  She cleared her throat and said, “One thing more, Miss Keppler. Could you give us a list of everyone else in the room before Professor Quinn actually went into his office, and put a check by the name of any you remember seeing near the bookcase?”

  The girl seemed to pull herself away from another world to focus on Sigrid’s request; then she quickly typed the names of teaching fellows, lecturers and graduate students while David Wade lounged against the corner of her desk, watchful and protective.

  Sigrid turned back to the remaining lab man. “That’ll be all for now, Yanitelli, thanks. On your way out tell that officer at the elevator to check out Buildings and Grounds and see if he can locate a Mike Szabo.”

  Yanitelli gave a half salute and gratefully departed.

  “Did you turn up anything downstairs?” Sigrid asked Tillie beneath the clack of Sandy’s typewriter.

  “Yes, indeed,” said Detective Tildon happily. “I think I’ve found our poison.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Back in his office around the corner Lemuel Vance sat at his desk with his catalogs opened to the coveted printing presses. With Quinn dead, who would inherit the position of deputy chairman? Simpson? Probably. He was the most senior. A pedant, old Bert Simpson, always pottering after obscure details of Roman sculpture, compiling cross-references on the details of toga draping as if it mattered a tinker’s damn which shoulder of a statue was left uncovered. But at least he had a proper respect for studio artists, something that pompous, parasitical Riley Quinn’d never had. He never lost sight of the fact that there wouldn’t be any classical art if there hadn’t been a lot of classical artists first. And he cared about the students, was always there to give them extra help. Too bad so few kids specialized in his area. Yes, Simpson could be led to see that a new press was more important than an enlarged slide library.

  In the next office but one, Piers Leyden was calm in his newly acquired power as a less poised Jake Saxer followed him in and closed the door.

  Saxer pulled out a briar pipe he’d recently affected and tried to seem casual as he went through the business of filling and lighting it; but his pale eyes, nervous and darting, kept flicking back to the older man apprehensively.

  Around the department Piers Leyden was known as a lazy, cynical slob. He was a good-looking sensualist who ate too much, drank too much and spent too much time in too many different beds. At forty the effects hadn’t quite begun to show; but hangovers were starting to take a little longer to go away in the mornings, his belt felt a bit tight all the time, and he knew he should be spending more hours in front of his easel. Tachs, his gallery owner, had been somewhat caustic about those last two nudes; he had implied that Leyden was coasting, that maybe Riley Quinn had a point.

  Leyden knew why Jake Saxer had followed him, and he didn’t intend to make it any easier for the sneaky, whey-faced opportunist.

  A small cloud of blue sulfur drifted over to him as Saxer struggled through several kitchen matches trying to get the pipe going. At last he managed two or three jerky puffs. Unfortunately he’d chosen an oversweet blend that smelled more like apple pie than masculine tobacco; still the steady ribbon of smoke seemed to give Saxer confidence.

  “A terrible thing, Riley’s death,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?” Leyden agreed blandly. “Poor Doris will no doubt be heartbroken. I wonder if anyone’s thought to tell her yet?”

  Saxer grasped at the opening offered by Doris Quinn’s name. “You and Riley may have had your differences, Leyden, but I didn’t agree with him on everything.” He paused significantly, exuding a casual air as he puffed on the pipe. “I know how much Doris respects your judgment—”

  He paused again, and Leyden kept his face carefully blank. Inside he was chortling. When he’d first climbed into Doris Quinn’s bed, it was to sting Riley; but that smug bastard acted as if their affair only confirmed Quinn’s original low opinion of the artist’s taste. And now that lusty little wench was going to ensure his place in history. What marvelous irony!

  He regarded Jake Saxer as a spider might regard a particularly tasty summer midge and gave the blond historian a wicked smile. “Why, yes, I think Doris would listen to me . . . under the right circumstances, of course.”

  Andrea Ross noted the closed door on her way through to the slide room. Losing Quinn’s patronage would put Jake Saxer right back among hoi polloi, she thought, mechanically refiling the slides of Chartres Cathedral that she’d pulled earlier that day. If Simpson became deputy chairman, he’d be promoted to full professor, opening up another associate professorship; and this time, Andrea vowed to herself, viciously slamming shut the last file drawer, she wouldn’t sit quietly by while it was handed to a less qualified man!

  “Idaho?” Sandy keppler was incredulous. “There’s no such place!”

  David Wade grinned at her ruefully through his wire-rimmed glasses. “Yes, Virginia, there is an America west of the Hudson River. Contrary to popular belief, there’s a whole continent beyond Staten Island. I even have the letter to prove it.”

  There was still a boyish air about the thin, very young man perched on the front of her desk, but underneath his relaxed banter one could discern a scholarly maturity. He flourished a postmarked envelope in front of Sandy’s disbelieving blue eyes.

  “But Idaho?” She tasted the name again. “All I can remember from fourth-grade geography lessons is potatoes.” She looked at him with city horror. “You’re not getting any back-to-the-land ideas, are you?”

  “Idiot child! Can you see either of us on a farm? Don’t worry, it won’t be for long. As soon as I finish my doctorate, we’ll make it back to New York.”

  Sandy continued to look doubtful, unconsciously twisting a long strand of her blond hair. It was a mannerism left over from childhood that David found utterly entrancing.

  “I don’t know, David. How can you finish your thesis out there without New York’s libraries and museums? Once you’re out—do you know how many applications this department gets every month? And it’s not just here at Vanderlyn. Every academic opening in this city must have at least five hundred Ph.D.’s lined up for it. Oh, damn! If only your contract could be renewed!”

  He leaned over and ruffled her hair tenderly.

  “It’ll work out. Trust me. Idaho might be fun. And it sure beats starving. Have you told Nauman you’re leaving yet?”

  “There’s no rush,” she hedged. “He knows about us, but I don’t want to hand in my resignation downstairs until we’re sure you can’t find something here. There’re lots of applications for my job, too, you know. Oh, David, do we have to leave? We could live on my salary without much scrimping—just till you finish your degree and—”

  “No way!” David said stubbornly. “I’m not having you slaving to support me—even if we are going to be married.”

  He took away the severity of his half-serious admonition by bending to kiss her lips gently.

  As he turned to go, Sandy asked, “How was the exhibition?”

  “I skipped it. Spent the morning at the library instead.”

  “Downtown?”

  “No, here. There were some references I had to recheck. See you at six?”

  The girl nodded, trying to push down a small stab of fear. In the next moment David had rounded the corner, and she heard him stop and speak to Professor Simpson before he was hailed by a younger voice and moved out of range down the hall.

  A few minutes later the door to the inner office opened, and Oscar Nauman’s high-domed head
appeared. “I thought David was still here.”

  “He just left. Want me to try to catch him?”

  “No,” he said, “it can wait. Has he landed anything yet?”

  “Well, there’s a college out in Idaho that needs an art teacher.”

  “Idaho?”

  “Yeah, me, too,” Sandy smiled wistfully. She picked up her steno pad and a sheaf of papers. “There are a few things you have to tell me about today. And these letters need a signature.”

  Nauman groaned. “I was on my way to see Doris Quinn.”

  “These won’t take long,” the girl said firmly. “Sometimes you’re too damned efficient,” the artist grumbled, but he followed her docilely back into his office.

  At his desk at the front of the nursery around the corner Professor Albert Simpson shook his head in private disagreement. He could remember a long string of indifferent civil-servant-type secretaries over the years: a few had been much too fastidious over matters of detail and protocol; the rest inexcusably lazy. Sandy Keppler was the first to combine competence with tolerance.

  A sudden thought struck him: if Sandy left, and he were promoted to Quinn’s position, he would have to help train a new secretary. Oh, dear! So inconvenient and time-wasting. There had to be some way to keep young Wade on the staff. Silly rules that said a lecturer’s contract couldn’t be renewed unless he were offered tenure!

  As usual Professor Simpson had taken advantage of the acoustics, which channeled all conversation in the outer office right to his desk. He was a shameless eavesdropper once voices penetrated his thoughts, and he had followed the young romance with more than sentimental interest. Those two would be wasted in Idaho. Especially David. The boy had the makings of a brilliant classical scholar. Look at how he’d organized those long-neglected notes on Praxiteles, drawing parallels to Apollonius of Athens, which he, Simpson, had never noticed before.

  He’d even toyed with the idea of taking David with him to Pompeii and Herculaneum on his next sabbatical. Let the boy see Western civilization’s loftiest expressions of artistic creativity on their native soil. Well, maybe he still would. What else did he have to spend his salary on? Sandy, too. Indeed, why not? David would hardly want to leave his bride behind, and besides, she was an accurate typist; her skills would be useful when he and David started rewriting the book.

  Professor Simpson leaned back in his chair and contemplated his dream of the finished book—a vindication of the strength and beauty of works that had stood the test of centuries, a noble creation worth the lifetime he’d lavished on it; quite unlike the here-today-gone-tomorrow ephemera Riley Quinn had wasted so much of the department’s money and energies on.

  De mortuis nil nisi bonum, he reminded himself. And come to think of it, Lucretius, too, had said something about not speaking ill of the dead, hadn’t he?

  The elderly classicist’s knobbed and veined hands wandered among the piles of books before him as he began a vague search for that Lucretius reference. Very pertinent, as he recalled. . . .

  Lieutenant Harald and Detective Tildon emerged on the floor below to find it apparently deserted. Tillie had promised to show his superior the probable poison, but he was incapable of ignoring any details that might later prove important. Gravely Sigrid took an interest in what he had to show her along the route that led to their goal.

  “These first rooms are small studios for student painters,” Detective Tildon explained, referring to his notes as he trotted along beside Sigrid’s tall figure. “Harley Harris uses one of them. There’re three here and four more scattered around campus. A lot of the classes seem to be held in odd places. The photography lab’s in an annex of the library, and somebody said something about a ceramics workshop over at the gym. In what used to be the basketball team’s dressing room?”

  He looked at his notes doubtfully; his previous academic experience had been limited to night courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But Sigrid nodded, remembering a college roommate who’d complained about taking a drawing class in the basement of the biology building. It had reeked of formaldehyde, and so did her roommate after every session of that class. Art departments seemed to follow a pattern. Redheaded stepchildren, all.

  “As soon as Yanitelli tested for fingerprints and got all the chemical samples he wanted here, we went across to the library annex and checked out the photography lab,” said Tillie. “There were only a couple of boxes marked Poison, and Yanitelli doesn’t think any of them fit the bill. He says that developing chemicals used to come separately and a few were pretty strong—I forget their names. Anyhow, the only developers and fixatives that we found were prepared compounds. Yanitelli took samples, but he said it’d take a lot of the stuff to kill, diluted like that—more than you could dissolve in one cup of coffee anyhow.”

  (What Yanitelli, who had little respect for the academic mind, had actually said was: “It’d take a damned absentminded egghead not to notice there was a hell of a lot more powder than coffee in a cup that little.” But Tillie saw no point in repeating that opinion to Lieutenant Harald. It was still not definitely established that she had a sense of humor.)

  They moved along the deserted hallway.

  “This next is a lecture room for art historians,” said Tillie.

  Sigrid paused to read a schedule tacked to the door. Professors Saxer, Simpson and Ross were listed as using the room this semester; in fact, it was where Andrea Ross had been due to lecture at eleven that morning.

  “And here, right across the hall,” Tillie said meaningfully, “is the printmaking workshop”

  The door was unlocked, and they stepped into a big boxy studio that smelled of ink and a vaguely metallic, acrid odor. The opposite wall was all tall windows facing north, and the space beneath was lined with open shelves that held an assortment of copper, zinc and aluminum plates, lithography stones and drying prints. Makeshift clotheslines strung across a comer had more prints clipped to them. There were mismatched worktables and stools, and a large hand-operated, antiquatedlooking press stood in the center of the room. To Sigrid’s untrained eyes it looked like something Ben Franklin might have been right at home with. No wonder Vance complained. A smaller iron press was bolted to one end of a heavy workbench, and a second workbench held two electric hot plates.

  Tillie had collared a student earlier for a crash course in the mechanics of printmaking and was eager to share his new knowledge.

  “As 1 understand it, you start with one of those flat zinc or copper plates. If you’re going to engrave it, you just gouge out your picture with a steel needle—it’s called a burin—and then put ink on it and run it through the printing press. But for an etching, you heat some varnish on the hot plate, coat your plate, and when it cools, you draw your picture by scratching away the varnish. Etching’s supposed to be easier than engraving because varnish is softer to get through than the metal. Then you stick it in an acid bath back there.”

  Along the rear wall were three deep stone sinks connected by stained and pitted counters, which held large shallow plastic trays.

  “You mix the chemicals in those trays, stick your plate in, and the acid will eat out the lines you drew without touching the part that still has varnish on it. When you’ve got the line as deep as you want, you rinse it off, heat the plate again until the varnish is melted, and you can wipe every bit of it off. Then you ink the plate and print it just like you did with the engraving.”

  “Very concise,” said Sigrid and the detective beamed. “Is that the chemical closet over there?”

  “Right, ma’am. You can go in. Yanitelli checked for prints and took a sample of everything he thought Quinn could have been poisoned with.”

  The chemical closet was actually a small supply room lined with shelves that held neat stacks of paper sorted by size and thickness, and cartons and tins of powdered varnish, talc and inks of various colors. Sigrid’s eye was drawn to a collection of containers ominously decorated by skulls and crossbones.

&nb
sp; “I made a complete inventory,” said Detective Tildon, thumping his clipboard.

  “And which do you favor?”

  “I guess any of them would do it,” Tillie said judiciously. “The nitric acid or the sulfuric; but my money’s on the end one, the potassium dichromate. That lid was put back crooked, and Yanitelli wasn’t the one who spilled some on the shelf. That was already there. And another thing: it was the only one that didn’t have any fingerprints at all. That’s always significant to me. Remember that cup we found polished clean in that model’s kitchen cabinet?”

  “No,” smiled Sigrid. “That was just before I came, but I remember Captain McKinnon telling me about it. That cup changed a tentative suicide verdict to murder, didn’t it?”

  “Well, it just stood to reason,” said Tillie modestly. “Just like now. One squeaky-clean jar on a shelf full of dusty ones? Uh-uh. Anyhow, the kid I was talking to said their normal procedure was to take all the jars over to the mixing trays and measure the stuff out there, so nothing should have been spilled in here, right?”

  The suspect jar seemed to hold orange salt. Underneath the label Potassium Dichromate with the ubiquitous skull and crossbones. Some sophomoric wit had inked a red Marcel Duchamp mustache on the skeletal head and closed one eye socket in a raffish wink.

  “I’d like to speak to Professor Vance again,” Sigrid said thoughtfully. “See if he’s still around, would you, Tillie?”

  While she waited for his return, Sigrid walked down the hall to examine the last two classrooms on that floor. They were duplicates of the print workshop in size and north lighting, but the first reeked of turpentine and oil paints and held an undergrowth of various-sized easels. Canvases in different stages of completion showed a nude girl poised on a stool, one leg outstretched. The neophyte artists were evidently troubled by that leg, for several showed signs of paint build-up there. Charcoal sketches of other nudes, both male and female, were thumbtacked to the molding all around the studio, and the card on the door confirmed that this was indeed Professor Leyden’s life class.