One Coffee With

by Margaret Maron

  The door at the end of the car opened, and an emaciated drunk weaved through. Swaying with the motion of the train, he steadied himself on the pole beside Harley, and a fetid smell of cheap wine and urine settled around them. The drunk wore a dingy overcoat three sizes too large, baggy green pants and brand-new black-and-white sneakers. His gray crew cut was a month late for the barber’s chair, and he did not appear to have a shirt or teeth.

  “Gimme a dollar,” he told Harley.

  The boy slid down to the end of the empty bench.

  The drunk followed, stumbling from one overhead strap to another till he dangled in front of Harley again. “Gimme a dollar,” he repeated.

  Harley Harris stared straight ahead, ignoring him.

  “How ’bout a quarter, then?” asked the drunk.

  “Leave me alone!” Harley said shrilly.

  The drunk lost his handhold and half lurched, half fell the length of the car, fetching up by a pair of well-dressed matrons who appeared to be coming home from an afternoon of shopping followed by dinner out. One carried a dress box from Lane Bryant, the other a smaller Saks box. Both regarded the unshaven, ill-smelling derelict with distinct disapproval.

  “Gimme a dollar,” Harley heard him say.

  “Go to hell,” advised the first matron.

  The second followed with an explicit but anatomically impossible suggestion. Shocked, the drunk retreated to a corner seat, muttering to himself.

  Harley looked at his watch. Almost ten. He’d had nothing to eat since a hot dog and bagel at Grand Central his third or fourth time through. When had that been? Two o’clock? Three? And there was his old man expecting him at three to help lay out the summer display windows for the Susie-Lynne stores. He’d probably be standing on his head by now.

  Every time he thought about what he’d done, Harley Harris felt queasy. Nauman had it coming to him, he told himself; but the anger that had fueled him earlier had dissipated, and now he was wondering if maybe he’d acted too hastily. Too drastically. If only he’d waited and made Nauman talk to him, artist to artist.

  That’s what his old man was always saying: “Harley, you don’t think what you’re doing till you’ve done it.”

  The train slowed down, stopped, and the two matrons got off.

  “They weren’t no ladies,” the drunk confided to the car at large, but Harley Harris was twisting to look for signs.

  Kingston. Good, he was on the New Lots train after all. Home was only five minutes away, and dinner would have been saved for him. Suddenly he felt like a small boy again. Mom would cry and smear her glasses; the old man would storm and rage, but Harley was too tired to care anymore.

  I’ll tell pop, he thought. Pop’ll figure out what I should do.

  All his life pop had told him what to do. Postgraduate work had been his first rebellion; and now his heart sank even lower, knowing what his stern father would probably make him do.

  CHAPTER 8

  Madigan’s was another relic of New York’s bygone days, a sort of unofficial memorial to a lustier, roughneck age. Located in a seamy section near the docks south of Fourteenth Street, the tavern had outlasted wars, depressions, recessions, Prohibition and several attempts at urban renewal. Its original customers had been sailors, draymen and Irish stevedores working on the piers; and for the first eighty years of its existence only one female had ever been served there: Madame Ernestine Schumann-Heink.

  The famous opera star had just disembarked from the ship that had returned her to America for another season at the Metropolitan when the horse drawing her carriage went lame practically on Madigan’s threshold. It was late fall with a chill rain falling. His chivalry appealed to, Francis Madigan (son of “Daddy” Madigan, the founder) had reluctantly offered his tavern as a waiting room for her party while another horse was being fetched.

  There were dark looks upon her entrance; two or three old-timers standing at the long mahogany bar had muttered into their ale about “petticoat patronage” and with ostentatious rudeness had given her their backs. But the great contralto was then at the height of her powers and had accurately sized up her “house”—child’s play to a woman who would still be able to sing in Das Rheingold when she was sixty-four.

  She began with the few Celtic lullabies at her disposal and, when those were exhausted, switched to the sweetest German songs in her repertoire. The language barrier evaporated—sentimentality has never needed translation—and soon the most hardbitten stevedores were weeping into their glasses. (Empty glasses, one might add, since no one had wanted to break the spell to order.) For over an hour the majestic Schumann-Heink held them in the palm of her queenly hand until at last she expressed fatigue and impatience at the nonarrival of a fresh horse; whereupon a dozen strong men hitched themselves to her carriage and pulled it though the rain all the way to her hotel on Seventh Avenue.

  “Shure and she was a foine lady,” said the pragmatic Francis Madigan, tallying up the evening’s lost revenues, “but women do be taking a man’s mind off his drinking.”

  Succeeding owners, even those not of Irish descent, had echoed his sentiments, and Madigan’s was one of the last male bastions to fall beneath the feminist assault. Not that women came there very often once their point was made. Madigan’s was neither quaint, picturesque nor cozy. In point of fact, it was quite hopelessly shabby, for there had been few concessions to modernity. Women were, by law, tolerated; but they were not encouraged with any plastic niceties.

  No wine, beer or liquor was served. Dark stout and porter foamed down the sides of chunky glass mugs, and food arrived on chipped brown earthenware, while the wide oak tables and benches were so dingy with age and indifferent cleaning that the sawdust on the floor looked fresh by comparison. The air was thick with stale malt fumes and greasy smoke, and Sigrid Harald peered through it dubiously.

  “I can see at least a dozen violations of the health code from right here. God knows what the kitchen must look like.”

  “A policewoman shouldn’t quibble about minor dangers,” said Nauman. “I thought you wanted the best steak in town.”

  “Not if it comes with a side order of ptomaine,” she said tartly.

  Their waiter had a poor grasp of English, but he flashed a gold-toothed smile, eager to please. “You no worry about that, senora. We no have it—just plain lettuce for the ensalada.”

  Sigrid laughed, and a certain familiar curve of her lips pricked the artist’s memory.

  “Harald,” he said reflectively when the waiter had taken their order and gone.” Are you by any chance related to a photojournalist, Anne Harald?”

  “My mother,” Sigrid said, and her lips tightened defensively as she waited for the inevitable, disparaging comparison. Anne Harald was known for her vivacious beauty, and casual acquaintances found it difficult to think of this tall, plain young woman as her daughter.

  Instead Nauman said only, “She took some pictures of my work for a Life article years ago. Good camera work.”

  “Were you in that series?” Sigrid asked, surprised. Then she realized her gaucherie. “I’m sorry. Of course, you would have been. That was the whole point of the piece, wasn’t it? Profiles of leading American artists. I was away at school when my mother was working on it, so I’m afraid I don’t remember any of the details.”

  “You might want to look it up since Riley Quinn wrote the accompanying text. Your mother writes most of her own stuff now, doesn’t she? Haven’t seen her in years, but wasn’t she nominated for a Pulitzer not too long ago?”

  Sigrid nodded. “For a story on how Vietnamese refugees are assimilating into this culture. She keeps an apartment here, but she doesn’t use it much. She’s all over the world these days, taking pictures about issues with more social significance.”

  “Meaning that art has none?” Nauman asked, amused.

  “Well, does it?”

  “Very little,” he admitted wryly. “But not for any reasons you might give.”

  “Probably n
ot. Of course, I don’t know very much about art, but—”

  “Oh, Lord! You’re not going to say it?” he groaned.

  “—but I know what I like,” she finished firmly.

  “She said it!” Nauman mourned to the waiter, who’d just arrived with their steaks.

  The waiter beamed uncomprehendingly and deftly distributed their dinner dishes. As promised, the salad had no romaine lettuce, just wilted iceberg under an indifferent bottled dressing; but the baked potatoes had crisp jackets and had been split open to receive huge dollops of butter, while the man-sized steaks still sizzled, and small streams of deep red juices trickled from several fork pricks.

  Sigrid suddenly remembered that she hadn’t eaten since early morning, and when Nauman insisted that she try an anchovy, she was too hungry to resist. With that first taste of a steak grilled to absolute perfection she instantly forgave the greasy table and smoky air, the food-specked menus and crazed earthenware dishes. And the salty anchovies were such a delicious complement to red meat that she might even have forgiven Nauman’s condescension had he not tactlessly brought it up again.

  “Very well, Lieutenant, what kind of art do you like?”

  “Pictures of people.”

  “Norman Rockwell?” he jeered.

  “No.” She speared another anchovy.

  Nauman studied her intently, feeling slightly annoyed. Taken separately, the features of the young woman across the table were excellent: strong facial bones, clear skin, extraordinary gray eyes, dark hair that tried to escape from its braided knot, and a wide mouth shaped for generous laughter. Yet collectively her features might as well have added up to total gracelessness for all the use she put them to.

  Despite his fame Oscar Nauman was not an arrogant man; still without realizing it, he had become spoiled. He was used to having women make an effort to amuse him. As his reputation had grown in the past thirty years, so had the number of women who sought him out. He was cynical enough to know why many came—the would-be artists, the bored faculty wives, the semi-intellectual sophisticates, all drawn like moths to the flame” of his public recognition—but he had attracted women before he became well known, and an innocent pride in his own masculinity made him think he knew why the ones he chose had stayed.

  Nor had his relations with every female been purely physical. Among his closest friends were many women whose minds he respected, who could hold their own in fierce intellectual debate. But even with these, there had been an initial period in which they had probed and tested each other, an exchanged awareness of sexuality. Sublimated, yes, but quite definitely there.

  With Sigrid Harald he felt none of these subtle nuances, and it piqued him. She seemed as sexless as a young boy. For a brief moment he wondered if he were getting too old; then his subconscious pride discarded that hypothesis and flicked onto other reasons. Could she be frigid? A lesbian? Or had she been too early or too bitterly rejected? Was her prickly facade merely a thick shell covering a romantic nature? He rather favored that last theory and thought it might be interesting to prove.

  “Renaissance portraits, right?” (In his experience most closet romantics loved the Renaissance.) “Botticelli, Raphael, Michelangelo?”

  “Some of them,” she admitted. “But my favorites—do you know those pen-and-ink heads by Durer? And Holbein? And especially those drawings by Lucas Cranach?”

  “The Goths?” Nauman was astounded. His memory conjured up those north-European masters of the late Middle Ages. The sober and pure linear quality of their work. He had thought to furnish this odd young woman’s mind with romanticism, gorgeous costumes and rich colors; but she had outreached him stripped away all nonessentials and retreated to the uncluttered simplicity and elegance of late Gothic line and form.

  “I told you I don’t know much about art,” Sigrid said tightly as he broke into delighted laughter.

  “I’m not laughing at you but at myself. For jumping to unwarranted conclusions.” If she could respond to the austere directness of these drawings . . . . There seemed to be more to this unusual policewoman than he’d suspected.

  He put on his most charming air and tried to draw her out but his laughter had offended. She ate neatly but swiftly with the air of one who’d had to leave more than one meal unfinished.

  Nettled, Nauman concentrated on his own steak.

  “I might have known you wouldn’t like anything created in this century,” he said crossly.

  “Actually you’re wrong.” The steak had been surprisingly good, the ale refreshing, and now that Nauman had quit trying to be charming, Sigrid felt more at ease. “I saw a small black and brown painting at the Quinn house just tonight. On the top landing. Do you know it?”

  “Are you putting me on?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Why? Isn’t it any good, either?” Enlightenment dawned in her gray eyes. “Oh. Is it yours?”

  He nodded. “I did that thirty years ago, but it was damn good. You’ve just made it impossible for me to attack your taste.”

  “Excellent. Perhaps now we can quit pretending this is a social occasion and get down to work.”

  She pushed aside the dishes and opened her ubiquitous notebook. “You must have known Professor Quinn as well as anyone. Who’d want him dead? Leyden?”

  “Because of that tableau you saw with Doris Quinn?”

  “They did seem . . . intimate.”

  Nauman smiled at the chasteness of the term. “If Piers Leyden wanted Riley Quinn dead, it wouldn’t be because of Doris. She was just extra protection.”

  “Against what?”

  “Against what Quinn was likely to say about Leyden in his latest book.” Nauman toyed with his mug, creating patterns of wet, interlocking circles on the wooden tabletop as he chose his words carefully.

  “Riley was a bastard,” he said slowly, “but he knew a hell of a lot about art trends since the war, and he didn’t hesitate to make value judgments. If he said your work had merit, you’d stop having trouble getting a gallery to show it. If he said it was good, you’d start selling occasionally. And if he called it of lasting value, you’d sell things regularly, and people would come around to your studio begging you to accept their commissions.

  “There’s been so much crap floating around these past few years—pop, op, slop—that collectors with more money than confidence in their own taste depend on someone like Riley. It’s similar to what Bernard Berenson did for Renaissance art. It’s all very well to buy a trendy piece of art because it amuses you; but if a Riley Quinn approves, then it becomes a good investment, too.”

  “Like having someone tell you Picasso’s going to be Picasso before he actually becomes Picasso, and the prices go up,” Sigrid said thoughtfully. “And Quinn didn’t consider Professor Leyden a Picasso?”

  “You do have a talent for understatement,” Nauman smiled. “Leyden’s a good draftsman, and he knows more about anatomy and the way muscles work than most doctors, but he doesn’t have much taste.

  “Ordinarily that wouldn’t matter,” he added cynically. “His things are probably better than many of Riley’s pets, but Quinn and Leyden have always clashed—one of those natural antipathies—and Quinn was planning to put him down for all time in his new book. I suppose Leyden thought that bedding Doris would take the edge off Quinn’s attack, make everyone think Riley Quinn was letting personalities influence his judgment. Which he was, of course, but not because of Doris.”

  “How will Quinn’s death affect the book?”

  Nauman’s eyes narrowed, and his speech became telegraphic as his mind zipped through possibilities. “Final draft . . . on the other hand . . . intestate . . . and Saxer’s hungry enough, God knows.”

  He sipped his ale moodily, and Sigrid struggled to catch up with him. Final draft—well, that was clear enough: the book was finished but not yet at the publishers. If Quinn hadn’t left a will, that would make Doris Quinn his literary executor, too.

  “So if there are things Piers Leyden wants
changed, Mrs. Quinn can force Jake Saxer to rewrite those parts now?”

  “That’s what I said!” Nauman snapped.

  Sigrid’s eyebrows lifted. She saw this reaction frequently when decent people involved in an investigation suddenly realized that a person they knew had committed murder, and that they were being asked to help hunt that person down—to trap him, knowing that the guilty one might be a friend or colleague. With that initial awareness came anger, a reluctance to betray anyone and a shrinking away in distaste.

  His reaction made Nauman seem human and vulnerable; and for the first time since meeting him, Sigrid was conscious of the man’s age. He had such a forceful personality that she hadn’t noticed it before. His white hair was not just the famous Nauman trademark; the lines in his face did not denote character only. They were milestones from days and months of living that added up to years. With an unexpected feeling of regret she realized that he was old—that his first recognized masterpiece must have been painted years before she’d even been born.

  There were brown age marks on the backs of his hands. But even as she saw them she noted the vigorous body, saw that the fingers that steadied his pipe were sensate and strong; and when he laid his pipe aside and impatiently raked his thick white hair with those fingers, it seemed absurd to think of him as anything but ageless, no matter what the calendars said.

  “So you think one of us poisoned Riley Quinn?” he asked, referring to the group detained earlier that day. “One of those six?”

  “Eight if you count Harley Harris and Mike Szabo. I’m still not sure how Quinn’s death would benefit Szabo, but from what Professor Ross and Miss Keppler say, he did have opportunity.”

  “Mike has a hot temper,” Nauman objected. “Poisoning would be too deliberate for him.”