One Coffee With

by Margaret Maron

  Anne Harald was not unhygienic, but the litter she could strew was phenomenal. She was the type who pulled furniture into the middle of the room in order to vacuum the corners, then forgot to push things back. Or she would take down curtains to clean the windows and leave them piled on a chair for a week.

  Tramegra had tactfully left a large wastebasket just inside the door, and Sigrid came close to filling it, knowing that if her mother had valued any of the papers, she would have filed them promptly. Sigrid was just clipping the last skirt onto a hanger in Anne’s closet when Tramegra paused in the open doorway.

  “Excellent, my dear! Simply excellent. Come along now. You’ve earned your dessert.”

  Even though he was still comparatively young, he had fallen into an avuncular manner with her, which eased her usual stiffness. She didn’t feel she was being “drawn out” because Tramegra seemed perfectly content to do the talking for both of them if necessary.

  “I didn’t take time to bake today, but there’s an adequate bakery in the next block, and these petits fours seemed passable. I made them give me a sample before I’d buy. You should always insist on a taste,” he said, pouring coffee from a silver pot into china cups, both of which Sigrid had forgotten Anne even owned, so seldom did her mother use anything except a percolator and mugs imprinted with black and red P & W Railroad logos.

  “If a bakery’s proud of its product and cares for your patronage, they’re always willing to give you a sample. I did a filler once on how to pick bakeries and delicatessens. I shall have to give you a copy of it.”

  It was becoming clearer that Roman Tramegra was a journalistic magpie who scraped together a living of sorts on the fringes of authorship and publishing, carefully gathering up a bauble here, a gewgaw there, which he polished into small salable tidbits: household hints, buying tips, brief how-to articles, explications of humorous bits of nonessential information and a multiplicity of filler items for magazines. Most of his markets were small magazines or trade journals, which paid just enough to keep him going; occasionally an article would score with the higher-paying “slicks,” and then everything was jam tarts and honey.

  “I once wrote two thousand words on how to call a cat in twenty different languages, “he said in his dignified rumble, his hooded eyes drolly solemn as he elaborated. “You know—Here, Kitty-kitty, in Japanese, Swedish, Choctaw and so forth. Holiday bought it first for a most generous sum, then CatTalk took a second version, and finally Reader’s Digest. My dear child, it paid the rent for two years!”

  He reworked legends on flag lore and major holiday customs, and explained why chimney sweeps wear top hats, or why the fifth borough of New York is called the Bronx instead of Bronx. A hundred different subjects.

  “How do you think of so many?” asked Sigrid with an amused smile.

  “If something catches my eye, makes me stop for a second thought, I jot it down immediately. Whenever I see someone doing something unfamiliar, I ask a million questions. Mostly, yes, mostly people are flattered that someone’s interested. And really if a man likes his job, there’s simply no way he can be boring when he talks about it. Think of the librarian for a symphony orchestra: finding a complete set of scores for all his orchestra members. I mean, you just don’t run off a photocopy of the violinist’s score and hand it to the oboe player. And the commissary manager of a large zoo: where does he buy mice for the snakes and owls, and live grasshoppers for birds that turn up their fussy little beaks at dead ones?

  “Or the curator of an art museum. How does he go about authenticating a dubious painting? Incidentally did you know that Picasso was quite unreliable about that? His early works are often forged, but I’ve heard there’ve been cases where he capriciously disavowed things he had actually and truly created. Don’t think that won’t give a museum director white hair!

  “Oh, no, my dear, the problem has never been thinking up subjects, but selecting. There’s the difficulty. Everything is grist for my mills. I grind fast,” he said with sonorous resonance, “but exceedingly short, unfortunately.”

  The mangled metaphor made Sigrid laugh, and Tramegra looked pleased, “What a lovely laugh you have, my dear,” he said; and before she could become self-conscious about it, he was off on another round of anecdotes.

  Sigrid pushed her cup across the newly polished coffee table for a refill and sat listening with one denim leg drawn up, her strong chin supported on her knee.

  Tramegra refilled both cups, then padded from the room to get a magazine article he’d written the month before that he thought would interest her. He even walked like a cat, Sigrid thought idly, watching him go. He moved lightly for one his size, each footstep placed precisely and neatly, one in front of the other.

  When he returned, he had circled back to a previous point. “Speaking of Picasso forgers, did you know there are artists who forge their own work? He dumped the contents of a large manila envelope on the couch beside him. “I’ve been gathering material about it.”

  “That sounds like a contradiction in terms,” said Sigrid. “I know artists often paint several versions of the same subject, but that’s not forgery, is it?”

  “Not if they’re all connected, no. But suppose an artist in the first flush of youth is entranced with painting blue cubes. For four years, let us say, he does nothing but blue cubes—singly, in tiers or jumbled on top of each other. Then he gets bored; moves on to mauve and puce gardenias. Now further suppose, if you will, that the public has liked his blue cubes but loathes these mauve and puce gardenias. Beastly colors, and anyhow, the critics don’t think his draftsmanship’s as good with flowers as it had been with cubes. Nevertheless, our artist stubbornly perseveres and for twenty years paints gardenias, tiger lilies and tulips, all in mauve and puce. Sooner or later he has to realize that they simply aren’t bringing in much capital. In the meantime, seeing that there will be no more pictures of blue cubes, the price has simply skyrocketed. Our artist, starving in his miserable garret, begins to think how jolly it would be if he still had a few of those old canvases around. So one fine day he sneaks around to the local paint store, buys a couple of tubes of ultramarine, and a few weeks later after the paint’s had time to dry, he announces to the world the discovery of several forgotten canvases from his blue-cube period. There he is, you see—a forger of his own work.”

  “But it’s still the same artist doing the same sort of picture,” Sigrid protested.

  “You know that and I know that and so does the artist,” Tramegra agreed cheerfully, “but critics cry foul every time. They say it’s not the same, and anyhow—”

  He had taken a swallow from the coffee cup and now broke off to stare at it distastefully. Then his brow cleared. “How silly of me! I’ve taken your cup by mistake. How on earth can you drink it without sugar?”

  He brought her another cup and pointedly pushed it over to her side of the coffee table. The swallow had been so bitter that he added another spoonful of sugar to his already sweetened cup. As he stirred the dark liquid and rattled on—he had switched subjects again and was now onto Tibetan tea flavored with rancid yak butter—Sigrid felt a faint flicker of conjecture. A flicker that steadily brightened into radiant certainty.

  Gratified by the expression on her thin face, Roman Tramegra expanded on Montezuma’s addiction to cocoa. A fascinating subject, he decided. Perhaps he should write an article on it.

  CHAPTER 18

  As Sigrid crossed the squadroom the next morning, she was appalled to hear laughter spilling from her small office and to see a large group of men clustered around the open doorway. With a jolt she remembered the interview. Useless to envisage all the outfits she might have chosen from the Carolina side of her closet. Today’s navy suit might be a twin of yesterday’s gray one—just as shapeless and selected with just as little thought.

  She was annoyed at having to waste goad time on such a frivolous thing as this interview. How the hell could she phrase words about her “conflicts” as a woman in a
traditional male preserve when her mind was running happily on completing a case against Riley Quinn’s murderer?

  Lower-ranking detectives stepped aside and melted back to their desks upon becoming aware of her presence, and Sigrid’s head was high as she took possession of her office.

  “I’m glad to see you’ve been taken care of, Miss Fielden,” she said pleasantly, noting the ministrations of her fellow officers.

  They had brought the young woman coffee, doughnuts and the morning papers; and now they were offering themselves as substitute subjects to interview.

  “Ms. Fielden,” said the editor a little breathily, “but do call me Iris.”

  From her past experience Sigrid was quite prepared for a glamorous editor; but most of the interviewers she had met had achieved some balance between the feminine and the businesslike. Ms. Fielden, however, kept her businesslike qualities—whatever they might be—well concealed.

  She had curls, long eyelashes, and many rings on her pink-tipped fingers; and she so completely filled a pink ruffled shirt that the distracted Duckett seemed unable to tear himself away from Sigrid’s office. That Ms. notwithstanding, Iris Fielden looked about as militant a feminist as the average Las Vegas chorine, and her manner matched her appearance.

  And true to Sigrid’s foreboding, the lady gushed.

  Still, as Captain McKinnon had pointed out the day before, this was not her first interview. Efficiently she removed Duckett and the rest from her office, closed the door, then faced Fielden’s tape recorder calmly. Whenever the questions strayed from the professional to the personal, she couched her answers in vague generalities that would apply to almost any working woman and firmly steered the conversation back to the job itself. In the end the young editor was so inundated with facts, figures and stacks of police-department publicity pamphlets that she numbly asked, “What was the name of that sergeant who works in— Burglary, was it?”

  “Missing Persons,” Sigrid answered guilelessly.

  “Sergeant Louella Dickerson. Mrs. Dickerson.” Without the slightest twinge of conscience Sigrid offered Dickerson up on a sacrificial platter, even tucking in a candied apple to enhance the dish: “I’ve heard that her husband’s extremely proud of her, but that he worries about her all the time.”

  It was sufficient. Appreciatively Ms. Iris Fielden jotted down directions and telephone numbers, then departed, making her way across the squad room to the accompaniment of even more appreciative whistles.

  Even Detective Tildon, entering the office as she left, looked bemused until he felt Sigrid’s sardonic stare. He flushed, his cherubic face embarrassed. Despite twelve years on the force Tillie still believed that a happily married man shouldn’t be looking.

  “I wonder if Marian would like a blouse like that?” he said, then flushed again.

  Sigrid had met Tillie’s wife once: a pleasant-faced birdlike redhead whose chest was even flatter than her own. She rather doubted that Marian Tildon would do justice to a pink ruffled blouse and repressively reminded Tillie of the tasks at hand.

  Without going into the details about Roman Tramegra and the previous evening, Sigrid outlined her new theory of how Riley Quinn’s killer had made certain he and not Nauman would get the poisoned cup.

  Tillie nodded enthusiastically when she’d finished. “That sure takes care of the how,” he said, “but why?”

  Together they sorted through all the statements they’d been given during the past two days and looked for stronger motives. Everything was too nebulous. It meant another morning of digging.

  “Just the same, I wonder why Harley Harris didn’t say something,” Tillie said.

  Sigrid reached for the telephone. “Did we ever ask him?”

  It was shortly after 10:00 a.m. when they met again to compare notes at the unmarked cruiser parked behind Van Hoeen Hall.

  “Why don’t we walk down to the river?” asked Tillie, who responded more directly than Sigrid to spring’s quickening transformation. “It’s another gorgeous day.”

  Sigrid looked around and for the first time realized that it was a gorgeous day. Once again spring seemed to have arrived while her back was turned. She stepped from the car and followed Tillie down a long brick path, which led to the promenade overlooking the East River.

  Short-sleeved students lay on the grass in sheltered nooks close to the buildings, rushing the sunbathing season as they studied or flirted or just enjoyed being outdoors without heavy winter clothes. Overhead a few small puffs of white cloud had drifted into the April blue sky; forsythia arched golden branches over a nearby water fountain, and a double row of yellow buttercups marched primly along each side of the path. Most of the benches along the path were occupied, but a breeze blowing in across the water kept the river walk itself almost deserted. The ropes of wisteria twined about the overarching trellis let welcome sunshine through now; later in the summer the walkway would be a dark tunnel shaded by thick leaves and sweet with the heavy scent of purple blossoms. As they paced its sunlit length, there was a medieval feel to the promenade, which reminded Sigrid of the reconstructed Cloisters up at Fort Tryon Park.

  She leaned against a brick column, one trousered leg propped upon a low stone bench, listening to Tillie’s report with only half an ear while she stared moodily across the blue gray river at the ugly piers lining the Brooklyn shore.

  Riley Quinn was to be buried tomorrow afternoon. By all accounts he had been a pompous, arrogant man. An opportunistic thief and so petty as to use his own work of scholarship for revenge; yet scholar enough to save a potentially destructive journal because it chronicled the creation of Janos Karoly’s masterwork. That was a saving grace; but even if Quinn had died without a single virtue, the responsibility of discovering his murderer would still be hers.

  Think of it as a puzzle in logistics, she reminded herself. Or a simple algebraic equation, a solving for x. Try to forget that x equaled a person who might be a hundred times more ethical, more humane, more likable than Riley Quinn. Judgment—thank God—was definitely not her responsibility—only the clear identification of the unknown x. Hold to that.

  Traffic out on the East River was light this morning. Gulls wheeled and swooped above an open garbage scow, and in the middle distance a slowmoving police launch passed an even slower tug. Downriver from them a helicopter lifted from a pad at the water’s edge, shattering the relative quiet and bringing Sigrid back to the present.

  Friday classes in the Art Department were still not back on schedule this morning even though she and Tillie had not interrupted the pace. They had poked around classrooms and offices casually, their questions vague and seemingly unspecific; but between them they had spoken to everyone except Sandy Keppler and Oscar Nauman. David Wade wasn’t expected till after eleven, but Tillie had tracked down the graduate student who shared a desk in the nursery with Wade and had taken that puzzled young woman into an empty classroom for a long talk. His indirect questioning had elicited answers that confirmed Sigrid’s earlier hypothesis.

  “Does it feel right to you now?” asked Tillie, hoping that Sigrid’s intuition would agree with what common sense accepted so completely. He had learned that unraveling the problem was what held the tall, calm-eyed lieutenant’s interest. The more complex, the better. Wearing a suspect down, hearing the actual confession, amassing evidence for an airtight prosecution—all the details so reassuring to his methodical soul—left her depressed; so he was relieved to see her nod.

  “All we need is confirmation from Professor Nauman,” she said, squaring her shoulders decisively as they turned away from the river and headed back to Van Hoeen Hall.

  Although a couple of inches shorter, Tillie matched her easy strides. His heart lightened as they moved toward familiar routine. This was one of the easy ones after all; another open-and-shut case.

  Just that one tricky bit remaining, he reminded himself as they retraced their steps and merged with a throng of brightly clad students surging into Van Hoeen’s side entrance.<
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  In Sandy Keppler’s cheerfully shabby plant-filled office Lemuel Vance was amusing Piers Leyden, Andrea Ross and Sandy herself with a description of an administrative assistant’s appraisal of Sam Jordan’s contribution to the faculty exhibition. The burly printmaker had a mild talent for mimicry, and he minced across the room as if on high-heeled shoes and looked down his nose at the wastebasket which his supercilious frown transformed into Jordan’s polished-steel sculpture.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” he asked in an outraged falsetto, “that this represents my world?”

  Instantly he became the supercool Sam Jordan:

  “Hey, mama, you trying to tell me it don’t?”

  Their laughter died as Lieutenant Sigrid Harald, accompanied by Detective Tildon, entered the office. Her slate-cool eyes seemed to catalog and dismiss, although her tone was pleasant enough as she asked, “Is Professor Nauman in now?”

  “He’s on the telephone, “Sandy said nervously. At that moment his door banged open, and Nauman appeared, apparently in fine humor. The sight of the tall policewoman brought him up short.

  “More questions, Lieutenant?” he asked blandly.

  “If you can spare the time, Professor.” She had meant to sound professional, but her voice had gone husky, and she felt a warm flush rising to her cheeks. She knew Tillie was staring at her curiously; fortunately Nauman’s attention was on the pipe stem he’d finished biting in two.

  “Fire away,” he told Sigrid, then immediately asked Sandy, “Do we have any adhesive tape?”

  Sigrid remained silent as the girl located a small roll in her desk drawer and handed it to him.

  “In private, if you don’t mind, Professor Nauman.” Her voice was cool and under control again. “You needn’t leave,” she told the teachers who were edging from the office. “I’m sure Detective Tilden has a few more details to discuss with you.”