“This is my boy, Harley,” said Mr. Harris. “He’ll tell you all about what he did yesterday.”
“He did what?” growled Oscar Nauman into the mouthpiece of his telephone.
The door to his inner office was open, and in the outer office Lemuel Vance stood by the mail rack separating wheat from chaff, which is to say, sorting his personal mail from Administration’s form letters.
Admin was proud of its ecological efforts in using recycled paper; but here in the Art Department artistic theory held to a cynical belief that recycled paper should be kept recycling. The department’s historians were only slightly more conscientious than the artists about reading Admin’s circulars, so an enormous wastebasket stood next to the mail rack.
“Oh, God! Not the chancellor, too?” roared Nauman.
Vance raised his eyebrows at Sandy Keppler, who had stopped typing and was now frankly eavesdropping. Around the Art Department it was blithely assumed that those who wished to speak privately would close the door.
“Who’s on the line?” Vance pantomimed to Sandy.
“Dean of faculties,” she mouthed back.
Two girls appeared on the other side of the mail rack. They had entered from the hall door around the corner near Professor Simpson’s desk. Sandy knew most of the art majors by sight if not by name, and she didn’t recognize this duo in tight jeans, sloppy shirts and tangled hair. Moreover, she didn’t like the way they gazed around the office so avidly.
“May I help you?” she asked crisply.
“They said Art Department office,” drawled one of the girls. “Is this where it happened? Where the guy died?”
Piers Leyden had followed them in, and the comment brought a glint of anger to his dark eyes.
“Sorry, my dears,” he said caustically, “but the guided tours don’t start till next week. Tickets may be purchased in the bursar’s office. Be sure to tell all your friends.”
Cupping an elbow in each strong hand, he quickmarched them back to the hall and shoved them out none too gently. A knot of students clustered near the elevator watched curiously.
“The barbarians are within our gates,” murmured Professor Simpson from his book-filled corner as Leyden reentered the office and closed the door.
“It’s been like this all morning,” Sandy said hotly. “They’re ghouls!” She wore a pink-and-bluechecked blouse and well-cut denim slacks that had been prefaded to a soft blue. Her long golden hair was loosely tied back with a matching blue scarf, but her face was pale and distressed this morning. “They keep coming in and staring as if they expect to see someone else dead.”
“Chin up, kid,” said Leyden, patting her shoulder; but the more pragmatic Vance retrieved two sheets of paper from the wastebasket, and on the blank side he lettered in black charcoal: ART DEPT. BUSINESS ONLY—NO RUBBERNECKERS. Sandy provided thumbtacks, and he fastened a sign on each of the hall doors. Since those doors were always propped open during the day, closing them created an air of siege—an Us-against-Them feeling.
They had almost forgotten Nauman when from the inner office came another roar.
“Damn his pimpled soul to purple hell! Can’t they see he’s crazy? Never mind trying to explain. I’ll do it myself!”
They heard the phone crash down; drawers banged open and shut while Nauman rummaged for something; then he erupted into the outer office. “Where the hell’s a City University directory?” he asked Sandy impatiently.
“Would you like me to get someone on the line for you?” she asked placatingly.
He nodded. “The chancellor.”
“Something wrong?” Leyden inquired.
“Those damn copying machines! Invented by fools for the use of cretins!” Nauman’s white hair was standing in angry tufts, and he’d bitten the stem of his favorite pipe hard enough to crack it. “If he’d had to copy that letter by hand, he might have come to his senses by the fifth copy. Damn copiers! One for every dean, board member and trustee in the whole bloody city.”
He glared at Leyden. “If you ever try to sneak another goddamned primitive into the graduate program—” he swore.
“I have the chancellor’s office on the line,” said Sandy.
Nauman glared at Piers Leyden again, then slammed his office door shut. Sandy waited a moment till he’d picked up his phone, then hung up her receiver.
“I take it Harley Harris has surfaced?” asked Leyden.
“I don’t know about Harley in the flesh,” said Sandy, “but evidently he wrote a letter yesterday accusing the department and especially Professor Nauman of all kinds of improper things, beginning with something like ‘the frivolous granting and withholding of graduate degrees.’ He must have gone over to the library and run off a couple of dozen, which he hand delivered all over the city. Practically every dean on campus has already called. And as you just heard, even the chancellor and the board of trustees must have got copies.”
She looked at Vance disapprovingly. The burly printmaker was choking with silent laughter. “I really don’t think Professor Nauman considers it funny, Lem.”
“He will!” Vance promised gleefully, and a smile spread over Piers Leyden’s face, too, as they topped each other in imagining what the frustrated Harley Harris might have written.
They knew that Nauman felt the department’s greatest strength lay in avoiding Administration’s notice. As long as Art didn’t make annoying demands of the paper pushers and didn’t actively embarrass the image polishers, Nauman expected them to leave Art alone and let him get on with the business of imparting knowledge to students as he and his colleagues saw fit.
Quinn’s death was bad enough; but Harley Harris’s barrage of letters could draw the fire of every nit-picking bureaucrat at Vanderlyn College and could open up an internal investigation that would last longer than any police department’s.
CHAPTER 15
Sigrid and Tillie had listened to Harley Harris’s shamefaced account of his copied letters in astonishment. When he’d finished, Tillie broke the news of Riley Quinn’s death, something neither seemed to have been aware of before. Mr. Harris was instantly and indignantly on his guard when he realized that they were interested in his young son not because of his letters full of wild accusations but because they suspected him of murder.
“Okay, so he sent those dumb letters,” he told Sigrid. “Dumb! Dumb! DUMB!” he reminded Harley, who flinched beneath his father’s verbal blows. “But,” he said, swinging back to Sigrid, “just because he’s dumb doesn’t mean he’s stupid.”
“He uttered a threat in the presence of witnesses,” Sigrid said mildly.
“But I didn’t mean it!” wailed Harley.
“Shut up!” said his father. “Don’t say another word. I’m calling our lawyer.”
“If you wish,” Sigrid said, pushing the telephone toward him, “but really at this point we’re only interested in getting a descriptive statement from your son. The same sort of statement that everyone else who was there yesterday has given us quite freely. Of course, you know best for Harley, and if you feel you want a lawyer present, that’s certainly your right.”
Again she gestured toward the telephone, and this seemed to mollify the elder Harris. “Tell the lieutenant what she wants to know,” he directed the boy.
Point by point Sigrid and Tillie took him through a recital of the previous morning’s events.
No, he hadn’t touched the cups, and he couldn’t tell you what Nauman or Quinn or any of that bunch drank while they were wasting time up there. He was always too busy working down in his studio—“I’m a painter, not a coffee guzzler”—to hang out with those loudmouthed bull tossers. He wouldn’t even have been up there yesterday, except that he’d had an appointment with Nauman. An appointment they had broken, he might add. Afraid to face him with the real reasons why he wasn’t getting an M.F.A. degree. If his work wasn’t any good, they should have warned him back in December. Oh, yes, Professor Leyden was his advisor, and yes, he’d told Harley th
e rest of the department didn’t like primitives—not that he really was, you understand, but—
“Keep to the point,” growled his father.
Okay. Yeah, he remembered seeing the tray on the bookcase. Two white foam cups from the cafeteria with writing on the lids. No, nobody’d touched them while he was in the office until Quinn came in. “At least, I don’t think anybody did,” he qualified nervously. His father snorted derisively. “Okay! Nobody!” he cried.
Tillie brought out the tray and handed Harley the two snap-on lids. “Could you arrange these lids the way the cups were sitting yesterday morning?”
The boy gnawed his thin lips apprehensively. “They were just there, side by side. I don’t remember anything special about whether one was in front or anything like that.”
“Christ!” said Mr. Harris. “Call yourself an artist, and you don’t notice details? I can tell you every shoe in Foot Fair’s windows for the last three years.”
“I’m not a window designer,” whined Harley.
“Oh, yes, you are!” his father said meaningfully.
Pressed hard, Harley admitted remembering that Quinn had reached behind him to take a cup before closeting himself in the inner office.
“The one nearest you?” asked Tillie.
“I guess.” Quinn had been on his high horse, he told them; and Nauman was just as rude, acting like he had nothing to do with getting him canned out of the graduate program.
“Jeez! Two years just down the drain, and what I’m going to do now—”
“You’ll come into the business with your brother and me as you should’ve done six years ago,” said Mr. Harris.
“But my art—”
“You can paint at night if you want. Or on Sundays. Look at Churchill. Look at Ike. Both of ’em decent painters, but did it stop ’em from winning the war or from running their countries and earning a good living?”
“They were hacks.”
“And you’re Michelangelo?”
It was evidently an old battle, and Sigrid stepped into it long enough to extract Harley’s promise that he’d let them know if he remembered anything else.
When the Harrises, père et fils, departed, they were separated by more than a foot of open air; yet Sigrid was left with the distinct impression that Mr. Harris was pulling his son along by the ear.
Tillie rubbed his round chin and admitted that Harley Harris was probably out of it. “That makes it one down and seven to go.”
“Seven? Oh, yes, Mike Szabo,” Sigrid said dubiously. She had shared with Tillie the background information on Szabo that Nauman had furnished the night before. “He probably had access to the poison closet, but I really don’t see how he could have known which of those four cups was for Quinn.”
“Still . . .” said Tillie, who hated to leave even the smallest pebble unturned.
Sigrid agreed that it probably wouldn’t hurt for him to chase Mike Szabo down and get his statement on the record. “For all we know someone else could have been standing by the bookcase when he brought the tray in and left it.”
“If that’s the case, I bet I can tell you who it was.”
“Who? David Wade?”
Tillie looked deflated that she’d thought of that angle, too, but he pressed on. “That Keppler girl looks like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, but I bet she’d lie for Wade without blinking those baby blue eyes.”
“When you’ve finished with Szabo, you might stop by Vanderlyn and ask Keppler where David Wade was yesterday morning; see what her reaction is. And while you’re at it,” Sigrid added, “better see the dean of —” She had to search through her notes to find the right title; Tillie nodded thoughtfully as she explained what she wanted to know.
For the next couple of hours Sigrid worked steadily at the accumulation of reports on her desk. Gradually the pile dwindled, disappeared; all except for a media query, which she carried to Captain McKinnon.
“Do I have to keep doing these interviews?” she asked sourly, remembering Andrea Ross’s gibe about being the Police Department’s showcase model.
McKinnon looked at the innocuously worded request. It was from a women’s magazine, one slanted toward a readership of women who, if they held jobs, worked more to supplement the family’s income than to carve out careers of their own. He tossed it back to her.
“What’s wrong, Harald? You ashamed to talk about police work?”
“Of course not! If that’s what they’d ask me about,” Sigrid said tightly, “but they won’t. They’ll ask about my personal life—you know, does-my-husband-mind-my-being-a-policewoman sort of thing—and they’ll probably think it a waste of time when they find out I haven’t got a husband. Anyway, aren’t there enough women police officers around that we’re not a novelty any longer?”
“Apparently not,” McKinnon said heartlessly. “I don’t see the problem, Harald. You’ve conducted enough interviews to know how to steer one.”
He held up his hand to forestall further protest. “Look upon it as building up Brownie points for the department. Public relations. The commissioner appreciates good public relations.”
Sigrid marched back to her small office grimly and telephoned the magazine. Upon being connected with the junior editor who’d requested the interview, she summoned a cordial tone to her voice and expressed her willingness to talk. “Unfortunately my only free time is tomorrow morning at eight A.M.
Silence from the editor, then timidly, “What about lunch, Lieutenant? On us, of course.”
“Sorry,” Sigrid said. “I have a previous engagement.”
“Well, we’re not in that big a hurry. What about day after tomorrow. We could meet—”
“I’m afraid I’m booked rather solid,” Sigrid said firmly. “Perhaps you’d have better luck with someone in a different department. Now Sergeant Louella Dickerson over in Missing Persons . . .”
“Oh, no, Lieutenant. We’re all so intrigued with the idea of a woman chasing down murderers, almost a female Kojak. Eight o’clock? I’ll certainly be there.”
She sounds like a gusher, Sigrid thought pessimistically. She glanced at her watch. Ten-forty and she was due in court at eleven.
It was an appearance connected with a case completed two months before. Routine, but timeconsuming. Despite the district attorney’s previous promise, she wasn’t called to testify until after lunch. She wasn’t on the stand very long. The defense lawyer had come up against her before, so he didn’t try the court’s patience by attempting to confuse her in cross-examination. The last time he’d tried that, her cool dignity and unruffled professionalism had convinced a teetering jury of his client’s guilt.
She was free a little after two and decided against going back to the office just then. Somehow facing another round of reports seemed unbearably dreary, though she would have denied any touch of spring fever.
Last night’s rain had scoured sky, air and pavements, and in the afternoon sunlight the sky looked bluer than usual, buildings seemed more sharply edged, and Central Park’s spring foliage shone greener. These things Sigrid barely noticed as she drove uptown. A short while later she parked by a fire hydrant almost in front of Riley Quinn’s brownstone and flipped down her sun visor to reveal a discreet notice that she was on official police business. As she stepped from her car, what her practical mind did appreciate about last night’s rain was that it had washed the sidewalks so clean that one didn’t have to watch where one was putting every step—a true boon considering the city’s canine population.
She crossed the street, lightly dodging a chauffeured limousine. There was a spray of white carnations tied with black satin ribbons on the gleaming oak door, a homely old-fashioned symbol that Sigrid hadn’t expected of Riley Quinn’s wife.
The woman who answered the doorbell was short and stout with iron gray hair, which ballooned improbably around a plain face made even plainer by tear-blotched skin and swollen red eyes. Hers was the first sign of real grief for Quinn’s death that Sig
rid had seen.
The woman seemed to assume that Sigrid had called to offer condolences. “I’m Millie Minton,” she said, taking Sigrid’s hand in hers and pressing it sadly as she drew Sigrid across the threshold, “Riley’s sister. It’s so good of you to come.”
As tactfully as possible Sigrid retrieved her hand and identified herself.
“Police!” Mrs. Minton’s eyes widened, then flooded with fresh tears. “Oh, poor Riley! How could anyone have killed him? It’s just so dreadful. What a horrible way to die!”
“I’m sorry to intrude,” Sigrid said uncomfortably, “but if I might speak to Mrs. Quinn?”
“Yes, of course, Lieutenant.” She blew her nose again with a sodden handkerchief and smoothed her black dress down over well-corseted hips as she turned.
Beyond the grieving woman the living room was crowded with earlier callers who had lapsed into discreet conversation. It needed only the tinkle of ice against glass to be mistaken for a well-bred cocktail gathering, though none of last night’s bottles and glasses were visible this afternoon. Yet there was soft laughter from one group, which quickly hushed when Mrs. Minton led Sigrid past the open archway. Sigrid found herself scanning the gathering for a tall white-haired figure and was annoyed with herself when she realized what she was doing.
Across the room Jake Saxer flushed and turned away as the full force of her scowl fell on him. Sigrid had been unaware of him until his movement of withdrawal, and her eyes narrowed. Why was he afraid to meet her gaze, she wondered, unconscious of her formidable frown.
Mrs. Minton opened the door to Quinn’s study at the end of the wide entrance hall. “I’ll tell Doris you’re here,” she said.
Left alone, Sigrid circled the leather-bound study with interest. Riley Quinn’s domain was more or less what she would have expected—pretentiously academic, almost a stage set, yet showing signs of serious work in that rear wall of counters and files. Some still partially open file drawers struck a jarring note in the otherwise precisely ordered room. Had Quinn removed a folder hurriedly on his way to Vanderlyn yesterday morning? And what had he used that crowbar for? Surely it was an odd tool to find standing in the corner of a scholar’s study? Visions of monumentally stuck drawers were put aside for the time being, however, as the door opened and Doris Quinn entered.
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