Tendrils of a pungent aroma wreathed themselves around Piers Leyden’s nostrils and brought him back to consciousness. Groaning, he sat up on the furry chaise longue. His neck was unbearably stiff, and a dull red pain, beginning at the back of his head, pulsated up through his temples with each small movement he made.
The aroma defined itself: cinnamon. Hot cinnamon buns lavishly smeared with thick sugar frosting, drenched in butter and studded with disgusting raisins and—merde—was that the smell of bacon mingling with the spice?
His stomach recoiled at the idea of bacon, too.
Thick slabs of Canadian bacon browning in the kitchen below. Sizzling in grease. Greasy strips of meat that would be laid on a greasy plate next to a couple of greasy eggs fried sunny-side up and oozing yellow, viscous—
Leyden pushed off from the chaise longue and lurched for Doris Quinn’s red-and-gold bathroom.
When he emerged, whitish green, shaken and weak, he found Doris waiting for him with sympathy, tomato juice and the news that Riley’s sister was on her way down from upstate.
“So you’ll just have to pull yourself together and leave soon, poor sweetie,” she crooned, stroking his neck with cool fingers while he forced himself to drink the juice. Her eyes were clear and unbloodshot, her milky-white skin translucent. In fact, Leyden thought resentfully, her whole body radiated as much dewy freshness as a field of goddamned daisies.
He built himself a backrest of ruffled pillows on her bed and gingerly eased himself down.
“It isn’t fair,” he grumbled. “You drank twice as much of that Scotch as I did. Why aren’t you hung over, too?”
Her vitality always amazed him. It was one of life’s ironies that she landed in a Manhattan brownstone instead of a Nebraska cornfield.
No, cornfield’s the wrong image, he decided, watching as she brushed her golden curls into a sunny aureole. She was too decorative and expensive for any farmyard.
He was suddenly reminded of a little rococo church in southern Germany a few years ago. After a glut of Italian Renaissance cathedrals with their ponderous dark marbles and richly somber stainedglass windows, that German church had burst upon his senses like an explosion of light. Clear crystalline windows on three levels had flooded the interior with sunlight, and everything seemed gold and white: a frothy exuberance of gilt-tipped white marble columns; gold-leafed statues, a bright celestial blue ceiling decorated in gaily colored frescoes; and everywhere sunlight glinting and dancing on sparkling white walls and silver gilt trim.
Such rococo frivolity would have been too much like whipped cream and pineapples for a steady intellectual diet; but for dessert or for dalliance. . . .
There must have been some hair of the dog in that tomato juice, Leyden thought, reaching out to gather in her gold-and-whiteness; but she eluded him easily. Half giggling, half shocked, she pushed away his hands and continued dressing.
“Sweetie! You know we can’t. Not with poor Riley. . . .”
“What about last night?” he demanded.
“I was in shock last night. All those people. Besides, we only got pickled.”
“That’s for sure! You were being the brave little widow, comforting everyone with flagons. No apples, though.”
Doris looked blank. She was better acquainted with the spirit of the Song of Solomon than with its actual contents. She shrugged it off. “Anyhow, we didn’t—I mean—well, wasn’t Oscar here?”
“Yeah, he was the last to leave. He helped me carry you up here. But then it seems like there was some female who—uh-oh!”
“What?” asked Doris, who’d decided that a simple off-white sheath trimmed in Irish lace looked chaste enough for her new status. She glanced at him in the mirror and, alarmed by his expression, turned to face him. “What is it, sweetie?”
“Did I tell you that the police officer investigating Riley’s death is a woman?”
Doris’s leaf green eyes widened. “She was here—in this room—last night?” Horrified, she reconstructed the room’s appearance when she awoke that morning, and then she let out a sigh of relief.
“It’s okay; sweetie. You were on my polar-bear lounge, and you had all your clothes on.”
“But you didn’t,” Leyden reminded her dryly, “and she could hardly have taken me for your chambermaid.” He shrugged. “Oh, what the hell? She’s bound to hear about us anyhow.”
“Will she think you had anything to do with Riley’s getting poisoned?” A thought struck Doris and she frowned. “You didn’t, did you, Piersie?”
Leyden winced at that pet name. “Don’t be stupid. It’s her job to suspect everybody. Anyhow, I’m not the only one who hated Riley’s guts.”
“You’re the only one who could’ve taken me away from him, though,” Doris declared dramatically and threw herself upon him.
Leyden realized that she was suddenly seeing herself in a flattering new light: a woman worth killing for. Oh, dear Lord!
Now he was the one to push away entangling hands. “Didn’t you say Riley’s sister was on her way?”
“And she’s such a dreary, dish watery sort of person,” Doris sighed. “Always complaining about her children.” She untwined herself reluctantly. I guess you’d better go, sweetie. Uncle Duncan’s coming over, too. He’s going to handle all the funeral arrangements. Poor Riley!”
Uncle Duncan was J. Duncan Sylvester, owner and publisher of The Loaded Brush, probably the country’s most widely read and certainly its most influential art journal. He was a shrewd businessman and a thoroughly doting bachelor uncle. There were some who said that Quinn’s entree to the pages of The Loaded Brush had been Sylvester’s wedding present to Doris. Her dowry, said the cattier. At any rate, subsequent acceptance by that prestigious magazine had been the final entrenchment of Riley Quinn’s reputation.
And that reminded Leyden: “I told Jake Saxer I’d pick up the files on the book so he can keep working on it without disturbing you.”
Doris had been examining her exquisite pink nails, wondering if she should change the enamel to a deeper red, or if peach would be more appropriate? Now she looked at Leyden with puzzlement. “But I thought after that fight he and Riley had that Jake didn’t want to have anything more to do with the book.”
“Fight? When?”
“Why, night before last. I could hardly hear my television for all the yelling going on down in Riley’s study. Jake shouted something about taking Riley to court, and Riley said that if that was the way Jake felt about it, he could go to hell before he got an inch of credit. And then Jake yelled that they’d just see who went to hell first and slammed out of the house. So I thought maybe I’d ask Uncle Duncan if he knows somebody who could finish it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t do that,” Leyden said silkily. “I’m sure that fight meant nothing. Bringing in somebody new would take longer. Anyhow, Jake’s familiar with all the material and knows Riley’s style. He’ll have the book finished and the royalties in your pocket before you know it.”
It took several passionate kisses to distract Doris and remove any lingering hesitations; but when Leyden left the brownstone that morning shortly before eight, he left with the manuscript of Riley Quinn’s last book under his arm.
Jake Saxer finished trimming his Vandyke beard and examined the results petulantly. He still wasn’t convinced it did as much for his appearance as he’d hoped when he grew it. Maybe because he was too fair haired? Dark men always looked better in beards for some reason. More saturnine and incisive.
His hand hesitated over a razor, but in the end he decided against removal. After things settled down perhaps, not now. The beard was a disappointment, yet he felt safer behind it. Less chance for an expression to betray him.
He had chosen a carefully casual rust brown suit to wear today, which struck a note midway between Riley Quinn’s sartorial elegance and David Wade’s graduate sloppiness. After combing his hair, he gave it an artful mussing with his fingers, then nodded in satisfaction. He looked intellectual and reliable bu
t still hip. Of the arts but not too arty.
Only his eyes betrayed a shifting fear and indecision. Had the police heard about his fight with Quinn? Should he bring it up himself? Wouldn’t that make it look as if he attached no importance to it, and that it hadn’t been a serious thing? On the other hand, if Quinn hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, and if Doris Quinn hadn’t overheard them, maybe nobody ever had to hear about it. What the police didn’t know certainly couldn’t hurt him.
Riley Quinn! That double-dyed bastard! After all the work he’d done! The insults he’d swallowed from other faculty members. As if he could be fobbed off with an associate professorship when he’d been promised! And damned if Quinn hadn’t threatened during their fight to renege on his backing with the college’s promotions committee.
Remembered rage held him rigid until he reminded himself that rage was unnecessary now. Riley Quinn was dead. The book would be half his now and carry his name, too, after all; and unless Oscar Nauman suddenly became involved in departmental politics and actively opposed him, his promotion would go on through automatically.
Everything was set. All he had to do now was recast that CHAPTER that had Leyden lumped—rather wittily, too, because say what you will, Riley Quinn had possessed a devastating way with words—with other artists who’d earned Quinn’s displeasure or scorn. He could slip Leyden over three CHAPTERs and add a couple of paragraphs about him somewhere between Andy Warhol and Chuck Close. That should satisfy Piers Leyden.
CHAPTER 14
When Sigrid Harald arrived at headquarters shortly before eight, she found Detective Tildon in her small office with more coffee and the morning papers. The News had devoted a full page to Riley Quinn’s death, complete with photographs and sensational insinuations about the possible motives behind the poisoning.
The Times account was brief, factual and referred its readers to the obituary section where, freed of strict news guidelines, it became gossipy and intimate. In proper order were listed Quinn’s degrees, books he’d written and his major pronouncements therein (“Art is not artful for the sake of Art”) and the half-dozen artists whose reputations he had personally furthered.
A graceful paragraph commended him for the safe haven he’d provided Janos Karoly after the Hungarian uprising and with unintentional irony went on to say, “Dr. Quinn was the acknowledged authority on Karoly and also the most extensive collector of his works.”
In detailing Quinn’s career, the article managed, unfortunately, to make his debut in The Loaded Brush and his marriage to J. Duncan Sylvester’s niece seem as if one were contingent upon the other instead of the happy coincidence Quinn had always insisted on; but it compensated for that by dignifying his running battle with the Friedinger Museum. Quinn’s more vituperous remarks had been edited until his attack on that collection sounded objective and Olympian and not at all like the gutter fight it had really been.
Characteristically Detective Tildon had compiled the names of those artists Quinn had—in print and at scurrilous lengths—sneered at the Friedinger for acquiring; unhappily, none were known to have been near Vanderlyn College yesterday morning.
Sigrid accepted his list of improbable poisoners gravely and added it to the pile of data they were amassing on this case. “I don’t suppose the lab came up with any prints on Quinn’s cup?”
Tillie’s cherubic face was glum. “Just smudges. That foam doesn’t take prints so good. 1 did notice something with the lids, though,” he said, brightening.
He poked through the box that held most of the physical evidence gathered at the college the day before, which the lab had now finished processing, and fished out two round white plastic lids. Each had an identifying tag, and Tillie checked with his master list to be certain he had the correct ones.
Sigrid cradled her own coffee mug in slender fingers and leaned back in her chair, prepared to be instructed.
“This is the lid from Nauman’s cup,” the detective said. “See how the Keppler girl marked it?”
Sigrid duly noted the C/W/SUG on Nauman’s cup. “And this is the one from Quinn’s.”
Her eyes narrowed as she examined the second lid: C/W/SUG. Identical except that the W on the lid from the poisoned cup seemed to be capitalized, while Nauman’s was lowercase. Coincidence or significant difference? A way of distinguishing the cups?
“What about the other lids?” she asked, searching through Tillie’s voluminous notes. “Didn’t one of the others have coffee with sugar? Here it is: Professor Albert Simpson. Did you happen to bring along his lid for comparison?”
Tillie was embarrassed. “I didn’t think about it,” he confessed. “We just took the contents of the wastebaskets in the main office.”
He looked so stricken over the lapse that Sigrid said kindly, “Don’t worry about it, Tillie. You could hardly bring in the whole Art Department. If we’re over there later, just check out how she does it ordinarily. See if there’s any pattern.”
She studied the lids closely and noticed that the letters were slightly smudged on both. The thin plastic was almost mirror smooth. “These should have taken prints readily,” she mused.
Tillie nodded. “Good prints of Quinn’s right index, middle and ring fingers. Nothing else, even though the kid at the snack bar put the lids on, and Keppler touched them when she wrote across them. Looks like Quinn’s was wiped clean before he picked it up.”
“Nauman’s, too?”
“No prints but his,” Tillie confirmed from the lab report.
“Now why would the poisoner take the time to wipe both cups?” she wondered aloud.
It seemed logical to Tillie. “Because he touched ’em both. Quinn’s when he poured in the poison, and Nauman’s when he moved it back.”
“Moved it back?”
“That must have been how he got Quinn to take the right cup,” Tillie said earnestly. “I’ve been thinking about how he could have done that.”
He brought out the tray Sandy Keppler had used to fetch the beverages and arranged the two lids on it side by side, with Quinn’s on the right. “Now, this way there’s only a fifty-fifty chance that Quinn’d take the right cup, and our killer wants better odds than that; so he sets Quinn’s cup on the right at the very front of the tray, and he puts Nauman’s at the very back and on the left.
“I’ll bet if you offered any right-handed person—and Quinn was, I checked—a tray set like that, he’d take the front right cup ninety-nine percent of the time. And everybody said Quinn usually got back to the office before Nauman did, so he’d have first choice.”
“And if Nauman had come back first?” Sigrid asked.
“I guess he’d have found a way to knock the tray over ‘accidentally’ and just wait for another time,” said Tillie.
“You sound as if you have a particular ‘he’ in mind.”
“Yep. Harley Harris. He was next to the bookcase with plenty of time to doctor the cups while the girl had her back to him. She’d already told him no one could talk to him that morning. So why’d he keep hanging around if it wasn’t to make sure Quinn got the right cup?”
“But I thought it was the chairman Harris was angry with, not Quinn. Even though Quinn was the first to tell him he wasn’t going to get a degree, Oscar Nauman would seem to be the one with enough authority to keep Harris from getting that M.F.A., and Nauman, after all, was the one who broke their appointment.”
Tillie looked confused, but he stuck to his guns.
“Well, maybe he’d poisoned the back cup, meaning it for Nauman, and then since he was in Quinn’s way, Quinn reached around him and got that one instead of the front cup. And then maybe Harris was so rattled that he let Quinn shut the door in his face before he could knock the cup out of Quinn’s hand.
“Sure!” he said, gaining confidence in his revised theory. “And then when Nauman wouldn’t give him the time of day, either, that’s when he shouted—” here Tillie thumbed through his notebook till he came to a verbatim account of Harley Harris’s r
emarks “‘—You just wait then! You’ll be sorry! And I hope you roast in hell!’ Doesn’t that sound like a threat?”
Sigrid was dubious, but before she could voice an alternate opinion, her office door opened, and Lieutenant Duckett stuck his head in.
“Hey, Harald, you handling that Vanderlyn College poisoning?” Somebody here to see you about it.” Without waiting for her assent, he held the door wide to admit a worried middle-aged man.
Sigrid recognized Duckett’s intentional rudeness with an inward sigh, knowing that sooner or later she was going to be forced into a confrontation with him. Duckett was a competent detective and senior to her. He didn’t have to feel threatened by her mere presence in the department. If only he could see how pointless these petty little harassments were.
Except for a slight flintiness in her gray eyes, however, Sigrid allowed none of her emotions to show. She rose from behind her battered, regulation desk and invited the man to be seated in the chair Detective Tildon dragged forward.
He hesitated in the doorway, a stocky, forceful businessman of medium height, who was obviously used to taking the bull by the horns and was now momentarily buffaloed at finding the bull was a heifer instead. He quickly regained his composure, but there was still a touch of exasperated impatience as he faced Sigrid.
“Coming to my house. Getting my wife all upset. Wanting to know where’s my boy, and I gotta get in touch as soon as he comes home; and then I take him down to the local precinct station, and they say we should come all the way here!
“I’m not saying what he did wasn’t wrong, but to send cops! We never had cops before. And then to expect me to come all the way over here, and it’s nearly midnight, and nobody but gangsters on the subway that late; so I figure what the hell’s so bad about what he’s done that can’t wait till morning and—”
“You must be Mr. Harris,” said Sigrid, interrupting the man’s Niagara of words.
“Right. Al Harris. And this is my boy—”
He looked around and realized that he was unaccompanied. With a muttered expletive and a heavenward roll of his eyes he reached around the door frame and hauled in a thin youth whose weak mouth was a pale copy of the older man’s more determined one.
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