One Coffee With (13 page)

“Leyden was no doubt full of suggestions,
“ Sigrid
said. She had taken the neo-realist’s measure.

“Dozens,” Nauman agreed. “For openers he advised Szabo to take the first five thousand and cash in the plane ticket. Then he got Szabo a job raking leaves and shifting furniture with Buildings and Grounds. Szabo hired a lawyer, but Karoly’s will was too explicit—“everything to Riley Quinn’ in black and white.”

“Couldn’t the lawyer make anything out of that
‘juste et humain’
phrase?”

“Too nebulous.”

Sigrid set down her coffee mug and said reflectively, “Szabo must have been a constant embarrassment to Professor Quinn. If it were Leyden who’d been poisoned, I know who my chief suspect would be.”

“Don’t be too sure,” Nauman said lightly. “Leyden’s addicted to practical jokes, and Riley wasn’t his only victim.”

Returning to her original point, Sigrid said, “You say Szabo was too emotional to poison Quinn, but what if it were something unplanned, a spur-of-themoment yielding to temptation when he found himself alone with Quinn’s coffee?”

“When was he alone with it? There were still three other cups on that tray then—mine, Sandy’s and Vance’s. And potassium dichromate’s not something you walk around with in your pocket, is it?”

“The grounds people must have duplicates of all the keys, and he’d certainly have access to them,” Sigrid pointed out reasonably, “but I suppose he couldn’t have known the coffee routine any better than Harley Harris did.”

“No, it couldn’t have been Harris, either,” said Nauman.

Was there regret in his tone?
wondered
Sigrid.

“Nor Sandy.”

“Why not?” she asked coldly.
“Are pretty little blond secretaries automatically exempt?”

A flicker of amusement touched Nauman’s lips as he noted her acerbic tone. “No motive. She and young Wade are getting married sometime this summer; going off to Idaho in September. She liked Simpson better than Riley, but I can’t see her killing Riley so his job could be a going-away present for Bert Simpson. If he even wants it. He’s turned the deputy chairmanship down once before, you know.”

Something niggled in the corner of his mind.

“What is it?” she asked alertly.

Nauman shook his head. “It’s gone now.”

“Something to do with Simpson or Sandy Keppler?
Or what about David Wade? Could Quinn have hurt him in any way?
Maybe written a nasty letter of recommendation?”

Again Nauman shook his head but less decisively. “No, Riley actually wrote a very flattering letter. Or rather, he told Sandy what to say and then signed it. Riley did run the art history side of the department, and theoretically David Wade was answerable to him; but in practice they had almost nothing to do with each other. As long as the young lecturers taught their classes competently, Riley left them alone. And Simpson, not Riley, was Wade’s dissertation advisor, so there’d be no conflict in that area.”

Again something niggled just below the surface of his consciousness, but this time Nauman ignored it and signaled for their bill.

“It’s so idiotic and pointless,” he said with returning anger. “Sandy, Vance and Harris gain absolutely nothing with Riley dead. Saxer may get his name on the book as coauthor; Leyden will get a better mention in the book; Andrea Ross’ll be promoted; and Bert Simpson will probably be the new deputy chairman. Is any of that worth killing for?”

“Earlier today a boy knifed a doctor for enough drugs to feed his habit for two days,” said Sigrid dryly. “Was that worth killing for?”

“A doped-up hophead’s different!” On his feet now, Nauman towered over her. He slapped a bill down on the table to cover their check. “These are my colleagues. They had no real reason to want Riley dead.”

“You’re convinced there’s no strong motive for Quinn’s death?” Sigrid asked with answering heat.
“Fine!
Makes no difference to me.
My job doesn’t change. Only, if you believe that, then you’ve got to believe there’s an even stronger motive for your death. That poison was deliberately set there for one of you. Personally if it were me, I’d hope the poisoner had already got the one he wanted!”

Nauman glared at her, then turned and stalked from the tavern.

The gold-toothed waiter hurried over and helped Sigrid into her jacket with rough courtesy.
“Bue
na
s
n
oches, se
ñ
ora, y muchas gracias,”
he beamed as she added another bill to Nauman’s for a tip,
then
crossed the sawdust floor at a serene pace. There was dead silence as she passed the bar. Most of the men had been unaware of her presence until then. She saw no reason to hurry. This was not a well frequented section of town at night; Nauman would be waiting on the sidewalk.

Instead she stepped outside just in time to see a cab pull away from the curb. The rearview window framed a halo of silver hair. Clinically Sigrid noted a small prick of regret that their evening had ended like this.

How odd!

C
HAPTER
9

Working late in his office
, Captain McKinnon saw Sigrid pass his open door and called out to her.

She entered reluctantly, stopping just inside the door and pretending not to see his gesture toward a chair.

Captain McKinnon was built like a grizzled, overgrown teddy bear: rumpled looking and easygoing until faced with incompetence. That’s when his staff realized that the muscles on that large frame hadn’t softened with
paperwork,
and that those sleepy brown eyes had noted every lapse up to and including the one they were being chewed out for right then.

In the past year Sigrid had often caught the captain looking at her with a puzzled expression as if he expected something more from her, and it made her uneasy. Could he possibly have worked with her father? They would have been about the same age. Probably not, though; for whenever she met any people who’d known her parents—blond, laughing Leif and dark, beautiful Anne—that person sooner or later commented on how different the daughter was from the parents.

Sigrid had built up no special myths about her father in her mind, but her mother never talked of his police work, and Sigrid would have liked to know what kind of officer he’d been—how competent, how dedicated, how involved. The old-timers on the force who actually remembered Leif Harald were few, and they seldom connected her name to his. In any event, she was too reserved to approach them and ask for their memories.

For the thousandth time Sigrid wished she’d inherited her father’s happy congeniality or her mother’s knack of immediate friendliness. She knew how stiff and cold she must still seem to her colleagues, but to be otherwise was impossible. Although she was no longer a tongue-tied child, a considerable shyness continued to numb her in social situations.

Here in the department some of the men still resented her promotion over them; some felt threatened; some ignored her completely. Yet even with the two or three like Detective Tildon, who respected her competence and accepted her presence among them, there was no easy give-and-take of camaraderie and laughter.

None of which bothered Sigrid Harald.
Or so she thought.

Nevertheless, Captain McKinnon did make her uneasy, and she couldn’t quite analyze the reason why. He was scrupulously fair and treated
her the
same as his other officers—piled on work and distributed praise and criticism with absolute impartiality. Yet always there was that vague air of expectation.
Because she was female?

Efficiently she summarized for her superior the completion of the investigation into that doctor’s knifing and outlined the situation at Vanderlyn College.

“Cohen’s preliminary findings were on my desk just now. ‘Respiratory paralysis and shock as a result of ingestion of potassium dichromate.’ That’s one of the chemicals from the print workshop, and anybody in the department could have got hold of it without being noticed.”

“No A.P.B. out for that kid, what’s his name?” McKinnon asked mildly.

“Harris, sir; Harley Harris.
I didn’t think it justified yet. I sent a man over to his home, and he reported that the parents seem cooperative. If Harris shows, they’ll probably make him get in touch.”

“What about that Hungarian janitor?”

“The same.
Physically he could have done it. We think he had access to the closet key, and he was alone with the victim’s coffee cup.” She gave a brief description of how Szabo had carried the tray for Sandy Keppler.

“The girl couldn’t have exposed that tray to more potential poisoners if she’d sent it around Times Square,” McKinnon said sourly. “Better have that Szabo in for a thorough questioning just the same.”

“His landlady said he hadn’t been home since this morning; I thought I’d try again later.”

Her voice was cool and her gray eyes stony. Leif’s eyes, wondered McKinnon. Leif Harald’s eyes had been piercingly blue to match a blond Viking’s build. His daughter had his slender height, and yes, the shape of the eyes was his; but the color, as well as her dark hair, came from Anne.

McKinnon still remembered how he’d felt a year ago upon her assignment to his department. To open her folder and read Mrs. Leif Harald under the next-of-kin heading had been an unexpected shock. When one of Anne’s photo essays had been nominated for a Pulitzer a while back, he’d assumed that Harald was just a professional name by now, that she surely must have remarried. He should have known better.

He looked across his cluttered desk at the reserved young woman who stood just inside his doorway without nervousness, without fidgeting, until he would be done with this interview and dismiss her. If she remembered him even slightly she’d given no hint of it.

And after all, she’d been very young—a thin solemn-eyed little girl who’d clung to her mother’s hand, bewildered by the ceremony; while he, McKinnon, had been only another blue uniform with bright brass buttons, one of a dozen honor guards at her father’s funeral. Anne had refused to let him be more than that.

They had been such unlikely partners—McKinnon, stolid, deliberate and motivated by logic; Leif Harald, mercurial and intuitive. The combination had worked, though, and had carried over into their off-duty social life until that day in a dark hallway of a third-rate hotel, where a killer had gone to earth behind one of those thin doors. When it was over, the killer was dead, and the dark bearlike man had walked out unmarked; but his partner, the golden Viking, was carried out on a stretcher, the blood already drying and turning black around those bullet holes in his body.

“Murderer!”
Anne had screamed. Had she filled the girl with hate over the years? Was that what kept those gray eyes so steady and noncommittal whenever they met his?

McKinnon wrenched himself away from that night and put the years behind him with a sigh. Better to keep it all official, perhaps. Personalities complicated things. If he had to take on a woman officer, Lieutenant Harald seemed one of the best. At least he hadn’t been stuck with a sex bomb who could keep his staff room teetering on the edge of an explosion. The loose, tailored pantsuits, the dark hair skinned back into a knot at the nape of her neck, the minimal makeup—hell! There were times like tonight when she looked closer to forty than thirty. No trouble on that score.

And yet it pained him to see Anne’s daughter looking so finely drawn.

“Not burning the candle at both ends, are you, Harald?” he asked, attempting a jocular note.

“Sir?

“A joke.
What I mean is
,
you’re not working too hard, are you? We’re supposed to be using the pass-along system, remember?”

Sigrid remembered.
Difficult not to with the city going deeper into the red every year.
There had been severe layoffs among personnel, and cutbacks had been ordered everywhere. In an effort to reduce departmental overtime, officers going off duty were encouraged to pass their cases along to the officer on the next shift. The procedure had indeed cut down on overtime, but no one really liked it. “Pass along” meant losing your identification with a case, your pride in a job well done when you cracked it wide open. Sigrid sensed that
McKinnon didn’t like it any more than she did, and others in the bureau complained of feeling like pieceworkers on an assembly line. Overtime dropped, but further compliance was a sometime thing. Unless a situation was really coming unraveled with a need to act quickly, many officers tried to hang onto the cases they’d begun until the next shift.

“This department is officially committed to eighthour shifts, Harald, and it’s nearly ten now.”

“I had no intention of filing overtime,” Sigrid said with the first hint of heat she’d allowed into her voice. “Anyhow, you’re still here, sir.”

“The privilege of rank,” he said loftily.

There! That almost got one of her rare smiles. Inordinately pleased, he dismissed her with a wave. “No more work tonight, Lieutenant. Leave Szabo till tomorrow and that’s an order.”