One Coffee With (21 page)

“So we’re left with two down and six to go?” asked Sigrid. “Or is it seven?” She sensed a suppressed satisfaction behind the detective’s cherubic face and was willing to let him work his way around to its source in his own methodical way.

“Just six.
I met David Wade in the cafeteria and casually asked him if he’d been up in the Art Department yesterday during all the excitement.

“And?”

“At the library all morning.
I checked. He was in the reserve stacks. No mistake. There’s only one entrance into that area, and it’s gimmicked with some sort of magnetic alarm that goes off if anyone tries to sneak a book out. There’s a desk where you have to sign in and out, and the librarian showed me the time sheets: in at 9:40; out at 12:15.”

“What about the dean of faculties?”

Now they’d come to it.

“Your hunch was right,” Tillie beamed. “Nauman’s meeting with the dean wasn’t about anything crucial, and his secretary says she made that clear when she called at such short notice yesterday morning. She seemed surprised to hear that Nauman had a previously scheduled appointment for that same time and wondered why the Keppler girl didn’t suggest another date for Nauman to see the dean.”

He looked at Sigrid expectantly, but she wasn’t quite prepared to share his surmises. Her curiosity about the odd lapse in the competent young secretary’s efficiency had been a shot in the dark, and after all, what did it prove? She tipped her chair back until it rested on its two rear legs and wedged her knee onto the edge of her desk.

“What did Keppler accomplish by doublescheduling Nauman?” she mused aloud.

“It wouldn’t have kept him from being there when Quinn drank his coffee,” said Tillie. “Classes were over at ten-fifty; his appointment with the dean was at eleven-fifteen. Anyhow, he still could have seen Harris at eleven if he’d wanted to. The dean’s office is just three floors down.”

Sigrid thought about that and agreed. “Fifteen minutes should have been long enough to make it clear he wasn’t going to reverse the committee’s decision. The only thing canceling Harley Harris accomplished was to make him angry all over again.”

Tillie resorted to his notes again, leafing through them as if they held the answer concealed in his neat script. At times like this he was humbly aware of his lack of imagination. The book made no mention of intuition, but he knew two and two didn’t always make four even when it looked as though they should.

“1 guess I’m being rather stupid about this case,” Sigrid said, letting her chair hit the floor on all four legs. “After all, life’s not a convoluted doublecrostic. Why shouldn’t the simplest explanation be the right one?”

“She had plenty of opportunity,” Tillie encouraged. He cited
CHAPTER
and verse, but Sigrid waved it aside impatiently.

“We could build an airtight case against Sandy Keppler if all we needed was opportunity. Give me a motive, Tillie! Why would she do it? There’s no logical reason. Nauman says that as soon as she and Wade are married, they’ll probably leave New York. No, we need someone with a more solid motive.
Someone like Jake Saxer.
He and Quinn had a loud fight the night before last.
Sounds very much as if Quinn were kicking him off their book project.”
She repeated Doris Quinn’s account, and Tillie perked up.

“What if he had the door cracked when Szabo brought in the tray? Then when Keppler took the hot chocolate into Vance—” He brought out his sketch of the Art Department floor plan and pointed to the partition separating Vance’s office from Nauman’s. “I don’t know how thick that wall is, but he might have been able to hear them talking. From the inner office to the bookcase and back is only thirty seconds, and that includes doctoring the coffee and putting the lid back on and wiping it. I timed it. Forty-five seconds for the others.”

He was looking at his watch as he spoke, watching the sweep of the second hand. Suddenly he focused on the time itself and bounded to his feet. “I promised Chuck I’d leave on time today,” he exclaimed, his round face guilt-stricken. “He’s trying out for shortstop in Little League, and I’m supposed to help him with his fielding.”

Sigrid inclined her head and paraphrased an old Henry Morgan weather report, “April showers followed by small boys with baseball bats?”

“You’d better believe it! And out-of-shape dads with sore pitching arms,” Tillie grinned as he rushed from the room.

A short while later Sigrid stood in the parking lot feeling suddenly edgy and restless. She unlocked her car, drove to the exit and paused indecisively. The sun was still high; it was too early for dinner, and besides, that odd sensation wasn’t hunger even though she couldn’t put a true name to it.
Spring fever?
Absurd! She gave herself a mental shake and drove over to her favorite health spa. Twenty laps of the pool left her pleasantly tired and in a better mood. On the way home she stopped in at a grocery close to her apartment and bought a frozen chicken potpie for dinner later.

When she got home, she changed into jeans and an old shirt and went down the hall to a cubbyhole formally referred to as “bedroom #2” on the rental agent’s diagram, but which in Sigrid’s case had devolved into a storage closet/workroom. The rest of the apartment was almost Spartan in its bare neatness; this room held the small amount of messiness Sigrid allowed in her life. Its latest addition both fascinated and appalled her.

Once a week large open trucks from the Sanitation Department make the rounds through Manhattan. On the night before, citizens wanting to rid themselves of old mattresses, dilapidated sofas, defunct refrigerators or any such furnishings too large for the regular garbage trucks, may stack these items on the sidewalk for early-morning pick up. Other citizens spend that same evening picking through the leavings. One person’s trash truly becomes another’s treasure; and scavenging is considered a respectable pastime.

Sigrid had never indulged in the sport. Her furniture came from a proper store and was all modern, with neutral-colored no-nonsense fabrics and clean, functional lines. When her cousins cooed over Grandmother Lattimore’s Chippendale pie crust tables or her Queen Anne highboy, delicately asserting nebulous claims in case grandmother wished to dispose of anything, Sigrid had always yawned and gone off with a book. Yet two weeks ago, walking home from the Laundromat, she had paused by a motley collection of castoffs near the curb.

Standing slightly apart, as if to separate itself from the rest of the debris, was a perfectly horrible armchair. It was square and massive, and the wood was slathered in thick layers of brown enamel, like peeling alligator skin. The seat and a central back panel were upholstered in cracked brown leather. The wooden back itself rose to a height of five feet, and instead of knobs its two uprights ended in roughly carved lions’ heads. Another pair of snarling long-toothed lions’ heads appeared on the ends of the broad armrests. All four were as large as a domestic cat’s head. Except for simple bevelings and turnings the rest of the wood was unornamented.

Sigrid had stopped short at the sight of it, held by an inexplicable attraction. She was not the sort to talk about character in a piece of furniture, yet something about that hideous chair. . . .

She’d hesitated, measuring its mass against her strength.
Ridiculous.
She’d shrugged and walked on. At the far end of the block she saw a young man and woman dressed in identical Levi’s and shirts. She saw the man point to the collection of things behind her, saw the woman’s interest revealed by a quickened pace. In that instant Sigrid knew they would want the chair and just as instantly knew that she was closer. Without stopping to analyze her decision, she turned back, slung her laundry bag into the chair and began tugging it down the sidewalk. She saw the envious glance the young couple gave her as they passed and felt a small pride of ownership mixed with a large portion of embarrassment. An adolescent from her building overtook her and offered to help drag her booty home; fortunately the elevator was empty so they were able to get it upstairs and into her apartment without enduring curious stares.

The next day a helpful clerk at a nearby hardware store sold Sigrid paint remover, sandpaper and steel wool and gave her enough enthusiastic (and free) advice to make her succumb to the refinishing bug. The mindless activity was perfect for unwinding, yet physical enough to compensate for those days when she’d had to shuffle papers for eight hours. As she scraped and sanded and stripped away the old paint, she was even more delighted by the chair. Especially when judicious applications of the paint remover revealed that the lions’ eyes were inset with clear green glass marbles.

She had no idea what wood the chair was made of, knowing only that it was close-grained and had a mellow tone. Beneath the brittle brown leather she’d found horsehair and cotton padding, which the hardware-store clerk advised her to try to salvage since it was probably the original. In her mind’s eye she pictured the chair waxed to a soft gleam. She hadn’t quite decided on new fabric, but moss-green velvet kept floating into that mental picture.

What she would do with the damn thing when she finished it, she hadn’t the least idea. Nor did she want to look that far ahead. For the time being, all she cared about was the pleasure she derived from freeing the wood of its coat of ugly brown paint.

But somehow she couldn’t settle into it this evening. Her earlier restlessness had returned. At last she threw down the sandpaper and went into her bedroom to sit cross-legged in the middle of her bed, an elbow on each leg, her chin supported by her cupped hands. From early childhood this had been her soul-searching position, and she still reverted to it when troubled.

So what was the matter? Was it a residue from last night? Was she in fact jealous of Cousin Hilda after all? Examined psyche answered no. Then did she regret not having a Chuck to keep promises to as did Detective Tildon? It was a relief to face this squarely; an even greater relief after honest examination to know she was not getting broody about children.

So what was left? Work, of course. Duckett’s continued antagonism and that blasted interview first thing in the morning. Better make a special effort in clothes tomorrow in case that editor brought along a camera. As for her case loads, all were well in hand except for Riley Quinn’s death.

If only there were some way to ascertain how the killer had known for sure which cup the deputy chairman would take. That was the key. Unless Keppler did it, in which case knowledge was a simple matter of a capital W on the lid. But if it were Keppler, what was her reason for wanting Quinn dead? Any of the others, even Vance with his resentment of art historians or Simpson with his promotion had more motive than the pretty young secretary. And there was Mike Szabo scheming for Karoly’s paintings and Harris’s anger about his failure.

Opportunity without plausible motive; motives without provable opportunity.
Round and round it went, and yet she couldn’t help feeling that somewhere in the past two days something she’d heard or seen or been told held the answer. She started with Harley Harris and worked her way up to Professor Simpson and then back down to Harris again without spotting it.

If Harris could be believed, there was nothing unusual about the positioning of the cups; but the poison had been in Quinn’s cup and not in Nauman’s. Fantastic suppositions danced through her mind: could Riley Quinn have been a secret sugar addict? Could he have kept extra packets of sugar in his desk drawer to add to his already sweetened coffee, and could the poisoner have doctored the packets, substituting potassium dichromate? But the chemical was orange, dammit! Quinn would have noticed orange sugar.
Unless he were colorblind?

Oh, God, a color-blind art critic! And she was the one who’d preached simplicity to Tillie.

All right, then, what’s simplest?

That the killer had been a regular at the morning coffee breaks.

Agreed.

That he had noticed whether Quinn habitually went for the left or right cup.

Agreed.

That he (not forgetting that “he” could be Ross or Keppler) had been in the office when Quinn picked up the cup so that he could—
à
la Tillie’s first theory—knock over the tray before Nauman arrived if Quinn picked the wrong cup. (And it might be worthwhile to ask if the tray
had
been upset in the recent past.)

So!

She concentrated on those three points. If logic served, Harley Harris and Mike Szabo were again eliminated on the first two points alone, and even without the librarian’s alibi David Wade was eliminated by the third point.
As was Professor Simpson?
By all accounts he hadn’t entered the room until after Quinn had gone through to the inner office. So who did that leave in position to see precisely which cup Quinn took?

She tried to visualize Sandy Keppler’s large office, collating all their statements. When Quinn chose the fatal cup, Sandy had been at her desk, Andrea Ross and Piers Leyden had stood talking by the mail rack, Vance had been waiting by the file cabinets to corner Nauman for a discussion of printing presses, and Saxer
—
Irritably
she tried to place Jake Saxer in the room and failed.

Another point to check on.

Keppler, Ross, Leyden, Vance and Saxer.
Could any of these be eliminated? Tentatively she removed Lemuel Vance’s name. He seemed to have a hot temper, so wouldn’t poison be too calculated? Especially since his strongest grudge against Quinn seemed to be an annual irritation about budget priorities or the usual friction between artist and art critic.