One Coffee With

by Margaret Maron

  As a child, she had been dutifully marched around the city’s great museums, shifting from one leg to the other as her mother lectured on the aesthetic quality of one interminable picture after another. Only the portraits had held her attention, and she particularly liked the drawings and illuminated manuscripts at the Morgan Library. Still lifes and landscapes, if not too fulsome, had also been acceptable. But whenever Anne tried to interest her in nonrepresentational art, she had resisted fiercely. Once when confronted with some paintings by Jackson Pollock, she had rebelled, declared the whole room to be filled with “scribblescrabble baby pictures” and had so dug in her heels that Anne gave up. Even a required college survey course in art appreciation had not altered her original evaluation. She still felt that abstract art was an elaborate put-on, and this plain black square before her seemed to prove it. She dismissed it with a shrug and looked around.

  The rest of the upper hall was in darkness except for a sliver of light beneath the first door. Sigrid tapped softly and at her slight pressure the door slid open upon an injudicious blend of Parisian bordello and American “sweet sixteen.”

  Sigrid’s first stunned impression of Doris Quinn’s bedroom was of its overpowering fluffiness. Bouffant white silk shades capped each delicate crystal lamp, and at all the windows heavily ruffled curtains crisscrossed beneath red velvet drapes and swags, An overstuffed chaise longue was upholstered in some sort of white fur heaped with plush velvet cushions, while the dressing table was swathed in frilly white organza. Sigrid’s feet sank alarmingly into the soft, red carpet, and her eyes were assaulted by coy bouquets of red-and-green roses spangled across a white wallpaper.

  The bed, an extravaganza in beknobbed and curlicued brass, had a curved tester and dust ruffles of lace-edged organza. The puffed silk coverlet repeated the wallpaper’s overblown roses, and it, too, was edged in white lace, as were the pillows.

  In the midst of this froth of white lace Sigrid recognized Piers Leyden’s muscular form as he struggled with a woman’s inert body.

  “Ah, the hell with it!” she heard him mutter. Then he heaved himself upright and staggered over to collapse on the chaise longue.

  “Professor Leyden?” she asked hesitantly.

  He smiled up at her without really focusing, turned over and buried his curly black head in the velvet cushions. “All classes are canceled,” he announced and promptly passed out.

  From the direction of the bed rose a muffled snore. Sigrid tiptoed over, nearly tripping on the thick rug. It was like walking on marshmallows.

  Doris Quinn was visible only from the waist down. A black elastic girdle smoothly encased her softly rounded bottom, and the shapely legs, which dangled over the edge of the bed, still wore sheer black stockings. Her head, arms and upper torso were entangled in a lacy black slip. Frustrated in his effort to remove it, Leyden had abandoned in midstream the whole idea of putting Doris Quinn to bed.

  If she spent the entire night with her head and arms so constricted by that slip, Sigrid reflected, Mrs. Quinn was going to wake up awfully stiff and sore—that is, assuming she didn’t suffocate during the night. Deftly she extricated the rest of Doris from the slip and was rewarded by another snore and an overpowering aroma of liquor, mingled with expensive perfume.

  With the slip removed from her head, Doris Quinn was unveiled as a well-tended forty, who probably waged a daily battle with calories, but whose slight plumpness had doubtless helped keep her soft white skin so smooth and unwrinkled. Her tousled tresses were unnaturally blond but too expertly managed to show anything so crass as dark roots. Altogether a small and cuddly, pampered, indulged and thoroughly sexual woman. The kind that always made Sigrid feel gawky even though scornful of so much feminine artifice.

  Irritably she turned down the covers and rolled Doris Quinn under, tucked her in, then firmly closed the rosebud mouth. She glanced over at Piers Leyden, comatose on the furry chaise, shrugged and switched off all but one of the ruffled lamps before tiptoeing to the door. A final and distinctly unfeminine snore goaded her into banging the door shut behind her.

  On the landing she paused again to glare at that offensive black painting. What on earth had impelled Quinn (and after seeing his wife’s taste in bedroom furnishings, she was sure it was Quinn) to give wall space to something so meaningless? And not just wall space. He must have paid an electrician quite a bit to custom wire that concealed spotlight high in the ceiling.

  But even as she frowned at the picture, she became aware of hidden depths beneath its smooth surface. The longer she stared, the more there was to see. Instead of being one shade of matte black, the painting was actually a harmonious blend of transparent blacks and browns; and each subtle tonal difference assumed a different geometric form, the shapes seeming to float in a dark void, shifting and realigning to form a rich angular pattern.

  She looked away, and the canvas resumed its blank surface. She concentrated, and again veiled complexities revealed themselves. Sigrid was obscurely pleased by its elusive beauty and came downstairs in a much better humor than when she’d gone up.

  Her crossness returned, though, when she stepped out into the cool spring evening and found Oscar Nauman lounging against her car, a cold pipe clenched between his teeth.

  “I thought you’d gone.”

  “How the hell could I go?” His crossness matched hers. “One of your damned cohorts towed my car away again.”

  “And there are no taxis?” she inquired sweetly.

  “Be my guest,” he offered, sourly gesturing toward the busy avenue.

  Feeling vastly superior, Sigrid walked the few steps to the corner, stepped to the curb edge beneath a streetlight and signaled an oncoming cab. It ignored her. As did the next two. The following four were either occupied or displayed off-duty signs.

  Annoyed, she took out the brass whistle she carried in her shoulder bag and blew several sharp blasts. The only response this elicited was from an excited little Scottish terrier out for an evening stroll along the avenue, which jerked the leash free from its master’s hand and bounded down the sidewalk to dance around Sigrid’s feet and jump up at her knees.

  “Oh, dear! Oh, I’m so sorry!” apologized the owner, a plump little man in a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows, who bustled up to collect the bouncing animal. “Heel, Mischief! Heel, I say! It’s the whistle, you see,” he told Sigrid in a clipped English accent. “She blows it—sit, Miss! My daughter, I mean. It’s her signal—sit you naughty dog—when it’s time for a romp. For the dog I mean. Come along, Mischief. No, that’s not Sally. That’s a strange lady.”

  The man moved away, still admonishing his dog; and Nauman, his sense of humor restored, broke into rich deep laughter. “That’s a strange lady, that is,” he repeated in a burlesqued cockney accent.

  Wryly Sigrid pocketed the whistle. She walked back down to her car, unlocked it and said, “Get in, and I’ll give you a lift downtown. I need to talk to you anyhow.”

  “Only on condition that we stop for dinner first. I haven’t had mine yet, and you probably wouldn’t be so bitchy if you’ d had yours.” He climbed in beside her, and she was aware of a clean smell of turpentine and mellow tobacco. A not unpleasant combination.

  “I’m not a health-food, wheat-germ addict,” she warned nastily, turning the ignition key.

  “Neither am I,” he answered serenely. “I had in mind a thick and bloody steak.”

  CHAPTER 7

  As twilight fell the spring evening was infused with a pervasive moistness somewhat between a heavy dew and a thin fog. It haloed streetlights and gave the air a soft texture that would make country-reared, transplanted city dwellers remember seedtime and spring rains. Restless with vague yearnings for new-turned earth, they would drift home from work tomorrow instead of rushing along in their usual blind fashion. Their eyes would see what they had previously ignored: flats of petunias, marigolds, candy tuft and salvia displayed for sale in front of a dozen different stores. And many a New
Yorker, suddenly and unaccountably homesick for the green fields of Kentucky, Ohio or Minnesota, would stop and buy as many tender seedlings as his bit of earth—be it only a single narrow window box—could accommodate. “You can take the boy out of the country . . .” they would tell each other sheepishly as they exchanged advice on potting soils and tomato varieties.

  There was no gateway into Central Park opposite the street Quinn’s brownstone stood on, only tall iron railings. Behind the railings, in the deepest shadows where the illumination of one mist-blurred streetlight barely met the next, stood a man. He was concealed from casual notice by the thickly overgrown bushes, which pushed tender twigs through the rails in front of him. From his camouflaged position he had a clear view across the wide avenue and down the side street to the third house from the corner—Quinn’s house—from which a trickle of people had been coming and going since he arrived late that afternoon.

  He had watched Sigrid Harald’s attempt to whistle down a cab for Professor Nauman; and when they had finally driven away, he was fairly certain no one remained in the house except Riley Quinn’s widow. Nevertheless, he patiently waited another half hour to be sure, then made his way through the dew-wet bushes to the nearest park exit half a block away and from there to Quinn’s front door. At last, abandoning all signs of his previous stealth, he marched boldly up the broad stone steps.

  Distracted by finding Nauman still there when she emerged earlier, Sigrid had not noticed that the latch was off, so the knob turned smoothly under the intruder’s gloved hand, and he didn’t need the crowbar he carried concealed in his jacket sleeve.

  He slipped inside and closed the door even more quietly than he’d opened it. No one challenged his entry. No sound reached him at all, in fact, apart from the muted traffic noises from outside. He felt he could handle Mrs. Quinn, but it was simpler if the point didn’t arise.

  Lamps had been left lighted throughout the house. The intruder glanced disdainfully at the paintings that had looked like cartoons to Sigrid, scrutinized their signatures, then passed down the entry hall into a spacious living room stale with the odors of cigarette butts and a spilled bottle of Scotch. Someone had made a stab at tidying up, had gathered dirty ashtrays and emptied cocktail glasses onto a large wood tray that had been left on an open liquor cabinet. There were still ice cubes in the silver ice bucket and open bottles of every persuasion stood about.

  Everywhere he turned, there were more drawings and paintings. He circled the room like a nearsighted museum visitor, then toured the dining room, the butler’s pantry and, briefly, the kitchen. No sign of what he’d come for. He moved back into the living room and considered the stairs. Perhaps up there? But Mrs. Quinn was up there, too.

  He hesitated, undecided, then noticed an inconspicuous door, paneled like the rest of the entry hall, just beneath the stairs. He opened it, groped in darkness, and lights came on inside Riley Quinn’s study.

  The room was windowless, about fourteen feet square and had probably started life as a storage area. Whatever its origin, it now looked like something ordered from an office-furniture catalog: “one middle-class study, college-professor type.” A leather-topped desk stood before the rear wall. Nearby were a leather swivel desk chair and matching leather armchairs, a globe stand, a large dictionary on its own little table and several brass lamps. The door wall held framed diplomas and various certificates of honor interspersed with small engravings. The two side walls were lined with glass-fronted mahogany bookcases filled with books.

  For all his posing, Quinn had been a diligent worker. On his desk were an electric typewriter and several folders with the nearly completed manuscript of his latest book. Behind the desk, on the fourth wall, was a section devoted to slide-sized wooden files, each drawer labeled by dates, artists or movements. Beside them was a built-in viewing counter of frosted glass, which could be lit from beneath whenever Quinn wanted to arrange the slide sequence of a lecture.

  A bank of letter-size file cabinets three drawers tall formed a continuation of the counter. Again they were of the same dark wood, and on the front of each drawer was a brass-rimmed card holder with detailed labels of content. It was to these that the intruder was drawn after his careful examination of the bookcases yielded nothing tangible.

  He found the section of the alphabet that interested him, set his crowbar in a corner and tugged at a drawer pull. It opened with a harsh squeak, and the man froze, listening for alarms.

  From upstairs came only a muffled duet of snores.

  Sandy Keppler’s apartment building was near Tompkins Square, and had been built around the turn of the century in a more expansive age when every household comprised several children and at least one live-in servant girl. Back then a single floor barely sufficed for a proper apartment. Now each room was a separate efficiency and considered spacious by modern standards.

  Much of the original molding and all of the oak flooring, admittedly a bit scarred by now, remained. Sandy kept hers waxed to a glossy sheen and bare except for a few inexpensive scatter rugs. She had painted all the walls herself and had even installed the folding shutters that closed off a tiny kitchenette. Bright cushions were heaped on a blue couch that opened into a double bed, and since this had once been a front parlor, the room boasted a charming bay window whose curve was just big enough to hold a small table, two chairs and several hanging baskets of begonias, all in full bloom.

  It was a cheerful, homey room, her toehold on New York, and Sandy hated the idea of leaving it. Idaho, for God’s sake! It would be worse than that upstate small town she’d escaped from two years ago.

  Although she would insist it didn’t affect her, Sandy came from a long line of nest builders. One may shake from one’s feet the dust of a small town one considers provincial and stultifying; shaking off heredity is another thing altogether. Sandy’s father had worried about all the dangers—physical and moral—faced by a young girl alone in the big city; but her mother had come down, taken a good look at the apartment and relaxed, knowing her daughter’s values were unchanged.

  A totally liberated woman, thought Mrs. Keppler, does not collect casserole recipes, buy furniture with an eye toward how it’ll fit into a larger apartment “someday,” nor after only a year on her own begin every other sentence with “David says. . . .”

  Mrs. Keppler was quite confident that she’d dance at her daughter’s wedding yet.

  As she cleared the last dishes from the table and blew out the candles, Sandy glanced over at David, who was correcting a batch of themes from one of Professor Simpson’s classes. He lounged on her blue couch, his glasses riding precariously down on the end of his nose, one foot propped on an old brass and wood trunk she’d bought at a thrift shop, and which served as both coffee table and linen closet.

  He looked very domestic, and while washing up their few dishes, Sandy briefly considered mentioning that tonight’s spaghetti dinner had cost less than fifty cents a serving. Not that it would change his mind. No more than would the argument that he should go ahead and move in with her since he spent more time here than in his own apartment and could be saving that two hundred and fifty in rent. Maintaining certain appearances was part of David’s old-fashioned code of morality, though he was modern enough in other ways, she reminded herself with a satisfied grin.

  The object of her thoughts suddenly exploded in outraged sensibilities.

  “Listen to this!” he commanded, pushing his glasses back up where they belonged. “‘The ancient Romans were really hip to all kinds of modern jazz. Like their houses had central heat, hot and cold running water, and you could flush the johns, and since they dug being clean so much, they had great big public bathrooms where everybody grooved together a couple of times a day.’”

  “Well, didn’t they?” Sandy teased. She put the last plate in the drainer, dried her hands and came in to join him on the blue couch.

  “Technically, yes. At least the wealthiest classes had all that; but this jive-talking illiterat
e makes it sound as if everyone had oil furnaces in the basement and electric water heaters on every floor. And the Romans didn’t bathe every day just because they ‘dug being clean so much’!”

  He scrawled a bitter comment across the top of the unfortunate theme and added a grade: C for facts; F-minus for composition. “And how the hell he ever passed English 1.1 is beyond me,” he muttered. From the lofty height of his twenty-four years came fretful predictions for the imminent demise of education.

  Sandy knelt beside him and gently smoothed his hair as he picked up another paper and began to read.

  “Sensuous old Romans,” she murmured. “All that bathing just for the fun of it.”

  Her fingers moved down to the nape of his neck and hesitated provocatively. David Wade’s breathing quickened, but he kept his eyes firmly fixed on the papers before him.

  She leaned away then and casually twisted her long golden hair into an enchanting topknot. “As long as you’re working, I think I’ll go take a shower myself.”

  Her tone was innocent, but her dimples beguiled as she loosened the top button of her blouse. David abandoned his papers and pulled her down to him.

  She laughed, pretended to pull away; yet all her struggles only seemed to twist her into more kissable positions. Somehow in the next few minutes his glasses became entangled in her hair, but neither noticed.

  “Want me to soap your back?” he murmured, nibbling a dainty pink ear.

  “What about those themes? What’ll you tell Professor Simpson tomorrow?”

  “The truth,” he grinned, feeling a joyous virility rising within. “‘The woman tempted me, and the fruit I did eat thereof’—or however that quotation goes!”

  As the subway roared away from Franklin Avenue, Harley Harris roused himself enough to wonder which Seventh Avenue express he was on. The evening rush hour was long past, and he nearly had the car to himself, but he’d been riding and changing trains so aimlessly these last few hours that he’d lost track. Flatbush or New Lots, which was it? The interior sign by the door was broken. Jammed permanently at Pelham Bay. No help there.