One Coffee With

by Margaret Maron

  Quite poised now, she preceded Nauman into his office.

  Sandy’s blue eyes were wide and worried as the door closed, and she twisted a strand of long blond hair anxiously while Detective Tildon spread his notes and diagrams on the corner table and invited Vance, Leyden and Andrea Ross to join him in yet another reconstruction of Wednesday morning’s events.

  The cleaning crew had been quite efficient in removing all traces of Riley Quinn’s sickness and death from the office he had shared with Oscar Nauman. Only a whiff of carbolic lingered, and even that was quickly being dissipated by a mild spring breeze, which drifted through the tall open windows and which seemed to bring with it a vaguely herbal scent. It made Nauman think of formal summer gardens with clipped boxwood hedges and patterned walks.

  He stood by the windowsill, awkwardly trying to hold his broken pipe stem with one hand while he taped it with the other. He kept his eyes on the pipe as if by avoiding her eyes he could avoid questions of poison and murderers; but when he groped for the scissors in a jar on his desk, the bowl of the pipe slipped through his fingers.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” Sigrid snapped irritably, annoyed by what seemed like cavalier treatment of her in his continued attention to mending a pipe. She laid her notebook down and bent to pick up the pipe, and as she straightened, she caught the lost look on his face, and her tone gentled. “You hold it and I’ll tape,” she said.

  Blue eyes met her gray ones, and part of his mind noted dispassionately that the vague scent of lemon balm emanated from her soft dark hair and not from the spring breezes that ruffled the collar of her blouse. She concentrated on winding the tape neatly. Only half a head shorter than he. There was something infinitely touching in the line of her slender neck, in her finely modeled head as she bent to the task.

  He felt as if he were standing on a high precipice, removed, and watching the scene through the wrong end of a telescope.

  The temporary mend was complete, the tape cut, yet he was still reacting with only the top, detached surface of consciousness. Time seemed stretched out. He drew her to him, and unlike yesterday she came without resistance. Their lips met, then he was holding her tightly, aware of the passion within himself, sensing—he thought—an answering feeling within her.

  And nothing happened.

  “Dammit! I don’t want your pity!” he snarled, releasing her angrily.

  “Then don’t kiss me like you’re drowning, and I’m the last lifeboat on the lake!” she blazed back at him.

  They glared at each other until Sigrid dropped her eyes. She took her notebook from his desk and walked slowly over to the window where she stood gazing out for a long moment, her back to the room and to him.

  On the brick walks far below, students crossed back and forth, girls and boys in short sleeves and bright colors beneath the blue spring sky. Sometimes in groups, more often in pairs, they lounged around the central fountain, lay on the grass with open books or walked hand in hand from one building to another. And Sigrid Harald, who had never been in love, found herself thinking about the love of a girl for a boy, of a parent for a child, of a man for a woman or of scholars for their studies. So many kinds of love, and one had grown so overpowering that Riley Quinn had been killed because that love could be more fulfilled with him out of the way.

  Sigrid took a deep breath and turned to face the tall man behind her.

  “You can’t push it away,” she said quietly. “He was murdered, you know. We can’t just ignore it.”

  The bleak look had returned to Nauman’s face. “You know who it is.”

  It was a statement, not a question, but Sigrid nodded. “I think so. Proving it will be another matter without a confession. There are a few more facts 1 need to know. Tell me about tenure. How is it awarded here?”

  Nauman answered that question and the ones that followed factually and tried not to let himself see where they were leading.

  CHAPTER 19

  Schedules seemed to be meaningless today, thought Sandy. All morning she had been aware of the police presence in the department—Lieutenant Harald and Detective Tildon asking questions, probing, adding data to the case they were building. Professor Nauman had looked at her oddly once or twice after his short conference with the policewoman but had revealed nothing of their talk.

  It was after eleven before she could go downstairs for coffee. Quinn’s classes were canceled, of course; but his students, excited by the recent sensational events, had shown up anyhow and now milled about the halls, embellishing every conjecture and rumor that reached their avid ears.

  “I’ve always wondered what it would take to get perfect attendance,” Leyden told Nauman sourly.

  The elevator was jammed when Sandy returned from the snack bar, and she had to juggle the tray of beverages as she pushed through the hallway. To her surprise she found everyone assembled in the big outer office. Lieutenant Harald had co-opted her desk again.

  “One minute please, Miss Keppler,” said Detective Tildon and took the tray from her unprotesting hands. He carried it across the room and set it on her desk. Everyone watched curiously as he and Lieutenant Harald seemed to give the cup lids special scrutiny.

  “You didn’t stop in at my print shop on the way back upstairs, did you, Sandy?” asked Lemuel Vance in an attempt to lighten the suddenly tense atmosphere.

  “Knock it off!” David Wade said tightly from the corner table, and Sandy’s eyes widened as she saw him for the first time. He shrugged to show he was just as puzzled as she to find himself summoned to this gathering.

  Detective Tildon returned the tray without a word. Yesterday’s fear tightened around Sandy’s heart, and her hand trembled as she gave tea to Andrea Ross and Albert Simpson, hot chocolate to Lemuel Vance and Piers Leyden, and coffee with sugar to Oscar Nauman and Jake Saxer. She took her own black coffee to an empty chair next to Professor Simpson. Her hands shook so that when she removed the lid the old classicist kindly handed her his immaculate handkerchief to blot up the spill from her blue plaid slacks.

  “Shouldn’t young Harris also be here?” Simpson asked, refolding his handkerchief.

  “Or is Leyden’s primitive still hiding in the jungle?” sneered Vance.

  Jake Saxer laughed nervously, then smoothed his yellow beard in embarrassment.

  “We’ve spoken to him, and he had nothing of value to add to this inquiry,” Sigrid said calmly in her schoolmarm manner. “For the record I’d like to hear your opinions on whether it would have made a difference if Professor Nauman had taken the cup with potassium dichromate instead of Professor Quinn.

  “It might to Oscar,” suggested Leyden. Nauman shrugged; everyone else looked blank.

  “I think she means cui bono?” said Simpson. “Who profits by his death?”

  “Correct,” said Sigrid. “Well, let’s start with what happens now that Quinn’s dead. You, Professor Simpson, will become deputy chairman, which means promotion and a larger salary?”

  “If the majority of the department approve. I am senior historian.”

  “Do you need the extra money, Professor?”

  “I have no family and my wants are few, Lieutenant, but you may examine my bank records if you feel it necessary.”

  “A full professor gets a bigger pension,” Vance observed from his chair near the bookcase.

  “So he does,” Simpson agreed equably. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Of course, there are other rewards,” said Sigrid, turning to Jake Saxer. “How much is it worth to be listed as coauthor of an authoritative book rather than an insignificant contributor acknowledged briefly in the preface?”

  The historian’s pale face flushed. “I earned it! I’ve done 90 percent of the work for that book. He promised me coauthorship before we ever began work!”

  “Did you get it in writing?” asked Andrea Ross. “Riley Quinn wouldn’t have shared authorship of a grocery list.”

  “Frigid bitch! You’re just jealous because he passed you
over.”

  “Surely you could invent a more crushing line, Jake,” Professor Ross smiled icily. With her crisp curls and feminine clothes she looked like a porcelain doll; but beneath her artful makeup her face was pale. “You may have done 90 percent, but that’s just the donkeywork. Much as I despised Quinn, I have to admit he was a brilliant historian. His ten percent will bring it all together, make the book a success. Maybe you can stick your name on his work, but none of his brilliance will rub off on you. My advice is to enjoy it while it lasts. Just don’t try to write another book all by yourself, Jake, or Lieutenant Harald might have to arrest you for indecent mental exposure!”

  Saxer sprang to his feet and for a moment actually seemed about to slap her; but Nauman grabbed his wrist with an unexpectedly strong grip and straightarmed him back into his chair with an ease that belied the force he had used.

  “Andrea’s right, so just sit down and stop being tiresome,” he said. “Continue, Lieutenant.”

  Their eyes locked, then Sigrid referred to her notes again. “Professor Leyden, I understand that Quinn had planned a thorough hatchet job on you. I believe he called your work the ‘pap of Polaroid pop.’”

  “Riley was incapable of appreciating neorealism,” Leyden said airily, “and he didn’t like my friendship with his wife. We were the best of enemies. You know, I’ll probably even miss him.”

  “So what he planned to write didn’t bother you?”

  “Don’t be naive, Lieutenant—of course it did! The gallery-trotting, picture-buying public is smart enough to read but dumb enough to be influenced by self-proclaimed savants; so I’m very lucky that Doris Quinn is going to accidentally burn some of his notes to that particular CHAPTER.”

  There was a wicked gleam in Leyden’s dark eyes, and Nauman shook his head at the artist’s audacity. “So now you’ll get to dictate your own version and Doris’ll get the pleasure of your company until the book’s safely published.”

  Except for Detective Tildon everyone in the room knew Doris Quinn, and an undercurrent of ribald laughter swirled through the office.

  “Just don’t burn yourself out,” Vance cautioned.

  Sigrid looked at Andrea Ross. “With Quinn dead and Professor Simpson promoted, there’s another associate professorship available now?”

  Andrea Ross carefully tapped her cigarette ash into her empty cup and nodded.

  “And you’ve admitted bitterness at being passed over the first time?”

  Again the woman nodded, and Vance said, “Better remember that, Oscar.”

  Sigrid rounded on him sharply. “You keep acting as if this were all a big joke, Professor Vance. You were in and out of this office all morning, and you were here just before Professor Quinn picked up his cup and took it inside with him.”

  “And where’s my motive?” taunted the stocky printmaker. “I wasn’t in his book, I’m not sleeping with his wife, and he didn’t cut me out of a promotion!”

  “But if the poison had been meant for Professor Nauman?” she asked softly. “It’s my understanding that if the chairman’s an artist, the deputy must be a historian and vice versa. If Professor Nauman had taken that cup, Riley Quinn would have become chairman. So who’s the artist who would get promoted to full professorship and be made deputy chairman?”

  “Now just a minute,” cried Vance. “No offense, Oscar, but if I’d meant to kill you, you’d be dead now—not Riley. Besides,” he said to Sigrid, “I’m no shoo-in. There’re at least ten members of this department who hate my guts, and who would enjoy voting against me.”

  He said this proudly, and Sigrid noted wryly that he seemed to rate his standing as an artist by the number and caliber of his enemies.

  “If the poison was for Oscar, that lets Saxer and me both out,” said Leyden thoughtfully.

  Professor Simpson cleared his throat. “Also me, I presume?”

  “And you, Professor Ross?” asked Sigrid.

  “If you think promotion’s a strong enough motive for murder, then I’m still in. Either way an associate professor gets promoted to full, and I’m next in line for the associate.”

  The medievalist leaned back in her chair and lit another of the cigarettes she’d been chain-smoking all morning. Her brittleness had become even more apparent as the net tightened.

  “We’re like the Mad Hatter’s tea party, aren’t we, Lieutenant? ‘Move down! Move down!’ Only there’s an extra chair left over at this party and I’m not the only one who benefits either way, am I?”

  Piers Leyden had been puzzled by David Wade’s presence and now he beamed appreciatively. “Why, Andrea, how very perceptive of you!” And he too turned to stare at the young lecturer.

  David returned their stares in bewilderment. “I don’t understand. What’s it all got to do with me?”

  “Nothing!” cried Sandy, crumpling her empty cup in agitated hands. “He wasn’t even here. He was in the library.”

  “That’s true,” Sigrid said. “We even have a student aide and a librarian from the reserve stacks who’ll swear to it. But you were here, Miss Keppler.”

  “Sandy?” said Wade incredulously. “You’ve got to be spaced out. She’s the last person in the whole department! Didn’t you know? We’re getting married this summer. Probably move to Idaho.”

  “Why?”

  “Because my contract’s expired and—oh.”

  He looked like a man who’d been kicked in the groin and his eyes were sick as he spoke to Andrea Ross. “That’s what you meant about an extra chair left over.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Sigrid. “Your contract expires in June. They couldn’t extend it without offering you tenure, and until Wednesday there wasn’t a tenured position open. Now there is. After Professors Simpson and Ross are promoted, there’ll be an unfilled position left on the history side. Either way Wade would get tenure, wouldn’t he, Professor Nauman?”

  Nauman nodded stonily. “A chairman teaches only one course. Riley dead or promoted to chairman—either way—someone would have to take up the slack of his other classes. I was going to speak to David this afternoon. Discuss tenure.”

  “And who has David Wade’s career interest most at heart?” asked Sigrid. “Who very loudly read the warnings on that container of potassium dichromate last month? Who could unlock that chemical closet at her leisure or leave the coffee wherever she chose and maneuver things so as to implicate as many people as possible? Who could mark the coffee lids and position the cups on the tray, knowing which Quinn would pick up?”

  “No!” cried Sandy. The white foam cup was now only a formless ball of plastic that slipped from her nerveless fingers as the girl shrank into her chair.

  “Yes!” said Sigrid inexorably.

  There was a stunned silence as Detective Tildon read the litany of her rights aloud, a silence broken only by Sandy Keppler’s soft, terrified denials.

  When they led her away, a scared and angry David Wade insisted on going with her.

  The six people who remained in the large office stared at each other, incredulous and bewildered by the sudden finality of it all.

  “She said academic positions were so scarce now,” murmured Professor Simpson. The whitehaired classicist seemed distressed and uncertain. “She chided the Harris boy for not taking the high rate of unemployment seriously, but even so. . . .”

  “I hope Washington doesn’t hear of her solution,” said Vance, but the quip was an automatic, mechanical response, a numb reaction to the grim reality of Sandy’s arrest.

  “I don’t believe it,” said Nauman, who’d been silent. “Sometimes I do get back first. She wouldn’t have left it to chance.”

  “You said it yourself, Oscar,” Piers Leyden reminded him. “Either way—you dead, or Riley—Wade would still get tenure. That’s the whole point. It wouldn’t make any difference to her as far as making a place for Wade on the staff goes. And maybe the chanciness of it made her feel that it was out of her hands. Up to fate. Kismet.”

  “A
nyhow,” said Jake Saxer, fingering his pointed beard and breathing easily again, “poisoning is traditionally a woman’s method.”

  “Thanks a lot!” snapped Andrea Ross. “You’re saying that if Sandy weren’t guilty, I’d be the only logical alternative?” She stubbed her cigarette and stood up. “I’m going to lunch.”

  Professor Simpson, still upset, began murmuring about finding a lawyer for Sandy; but before anyone could leave, Rudy Turitto, who taught photography and who, to his great regret, had missed Wednesday’s dramatics, burst into the office.

  “Where’s that Lieutenant Harald?” he demanded excitedly.

  When they told him, he dived for the phone book, then quickly dialed a number, forestalling their questions.

  “Hello? Police?” he said as the call went through.

  After identifying himself, he said, “Lieutenant Harald’s on her way there I’ve been told. As soon as she comes in, have her call me—Art Department, Vanderlyn College. It’s very important.”

  “What’s happened, Rudy?” asked Nauman.

  “It’s Harley Harris! He’s downstairs holed up in one of the graduate studios. Says he’s remembered something about Riley’s death. He was here, wasn’t he? Right there by the coffee the whole time before Riley came in? But the little bastard won’t say what it is. Says he won’t tell it to anyone except Lieutenant Harald.”

  “What could he know?” Vance asked scornfully. “Anyhow, they’ve arrested Sandy for it. They figure she killed Riley to make space on the staff for David Wade.”

  “Sandy? But that’s terrible! Are they sure? Little Sandy?” Professor Turitto looked distressed as the others nodded. “Oh, well,” he said, deflated, “in that case, what the Harris kid saw will just pile on more evidence, I guess.”

  He turned to go. “I’ve got a class, Oscar. When the lieutenant calls back, would you give her the message?”