One Coffee With (6 page)

“Who is Mike Szabo?” asked Sigrid, knowing this must be their first mention of the man as a possible suspect since his name did not appear in Tillie’s notes.

Several started to answer, but Oscar Nauman’s deep voice carried. “He’s a Hungarian refugee employed by Buildings and Grounds and the son of Janos Karoly’s only sister.”

It was clear the name meant nothing to Sigrid. “Janos Karoly was an abstract artist who came to prominence here in the fifties, Lieutenant,” explained Jake Saxer, the hint of a sneer in his voice, implying he thought her an ignorant philistine. “He died in the early sixties and left all his paintings to Riley Quinn. His reputation is still growing, and the paintings become more valuable every year. Mike Szabo thinks they should have gone to him—he was still in Hungary at the time, hadn’t corresponded with Karoly or anything in his whole life, but he still thought Professor Quinn somehow cheated him out of an inheritance.”

“Did he?” asked Sigrid.

“Of course not!
It was all perfectly legal.”

“Yeah?
Then why wouldn’t Riley let Mike see Karoly’s notebooks?” asked Leyden.

“Why should he?”

“The question is, why shouldn’t he?” gibed the neo-realist. “Riley could read Karoly’s French, but I’ll bet you two wooden nickels and a pug dog he was afraid of what those Hungarian passages had in them. We’ve all heard about how he covered those up whenever he let anyone look at the notebooks.”

Saxer shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t read Hungarian.”

“Neither did anyone else in Riley’s pocket,” taunted Leyden. “That’s why he was afraid to let Mike see them.”

“That illiterate peasant!
Do you think he cares about his uncle’s genius? All he wants with the paintings is the money.”

“And what the hell did Quinn want?” chimed in Lemuel Vance. “The way he kept pushing up Karoly’s reputation with those articles in The Loaded Brush and Arts Today. You think that didn’t jack up the price every time he put one of the paintings on the market?”

Jake Saxer bit off a sharp retort as all three men suddenly remembered why Sigrid was following their exchange so intently. They subsided with sheepish faces.

“Thank you, gentlemen,” she said dryly and turned to Sandy again. “To recapitulate: this Mike Szabo, who seems to have had a grudge against Professor Quinn, carried in the tray for you and was alone with it for a few minutes?”

“Well, yes,” said Sandy, “but really he barely had time to set it down and pick up the broken chair before he was back out again.”

“And am I correct in assuming that you always left two cups, with sugar clearly marked, in a tray on that bookcase every morning?”

“Just Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Professor Nauman isn’t here on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Professor Quinn has—had—third period free then, so I’d just take it on in to him at his desk those two days.”

“But the two cups would be there by ten-forty the other three days?”

Sandy nodded.
“By ten-forty-five, anyhow.
I got back a little early today.”

“Wait a minute!” cried Vance, springing up from his chair and rushing over to the bookcase. “There were two cups sitting here, both exactly alike, right? So how could anyone be sure which one Riley would take?”

“Congratulations for finally seeing the obvious,” Leyden said sourly. “Better hire yourself an official taster till they catch him, Oscar.”

“Is that a suggestion or a warning?” asked the white-haired chairman with a half smile.

“What about it, Miss Keppler?” asked Sigrid. “Was there a pattern as to who took which cup?”

The girl seemed genuinely puzzled. “I’m not sure. Professor Quinn lectured just down the hall while Professor Nauman’s class is on the next floor, so most times Professor Quinn had first choice; but I’ve never noticed which cup he usually took.”

“No? Still, I think we must assume someone did,”
said
Sigrid, “unless it didn’t make any difference to the murderer.
A rather unlikely proposition.”

As the implications of her statement sank in, Piers Leyden shook his dark head. “Much as it pains me, I have to say Harley Harris is probably the only one dumb enough to poison a cup of coffee without caring whether Riley or Oscar drank it.”

There were quick murmurs of agreement. Someone repeated Harris’s threats; another described his anger and frustration at not receiving his master’s degree.

“No!”

Oscar Nauman had listened without comments as his eager
colleagues
heaped blame on the unfortunate Harris, and now he cut across their accusations, silencing them. “Rotten taste,” he said firmly, “but all the time, and anyhow no one liked him.”

Obviously he thought his statement made the graduate student’s innocence crystal clear. Sigrid looked blank and Lemuel Vance grinned.

“Don’t mind him, Lieutenant Harald; Oscar tends to leave out whole paragraphs when he’s being logical.”

Patiently Nauman elucidated. “Harris is an ant.
Constant toil.
A drudge.
He doesn’t socialize. Never comes up for coffee breaks. He’s dull witted but just bright enough to know when he’s the butt; so he stays downstairs painting all the time.
Can’t have been up here for coffee more than once or twice in the last year.”

Sigrid saw his logic, “So you think he wouldn’t have known Miss Keppler’s routine with the coffee cups?”

“Precisely,” said Nauman. “And the same reservation applies to Mike Szabo.”

Sigrid glanced around the circle of attentive faces, but no one seemed inclined to dispute Nauman’s observations. She nodded, made a brief notation on her note pad, then gathered up all the papers and neatly aligned their edges. “It will probably be necessary to speak to you again, but that’ll be all for now, I think,” she said, rising from Sandy’s desk and motioning to Detective Tildon, who had reappeared in the doorway during Nauman’s statement.

“Class dismissed!” said Leyden, but no one smiled.

The professors drifted away from the office, and Sandy Keppler reclaimed her desk as Sigrid and Tillie conferred with the remaining lab technician, who was awaiting permission to leave. The others had finished with the inner office and already departed.

A young man in wire-rimmed glasses, chinos and a rumpled shirt had talked his way past the officer at the end of the hall and now stepped around the mail rack. Sigrid saw the blond secretary’s face soften at the sight of him.

“David!”

“Hey, you okay?” he asked anxiously.

Her desk was between them, and they didn’t actually touch, but Sigrid suddenly felt that she and Tillie and Yanitelli were interlopers. Intimacy always embarrassed her.

She cleared her throat and said, “One thing more, Miss Keppler. Could you give us a list of everyone else in the room before Professor Quinn actually went into his office, and put a check by the name of any you remember seeing near the bookcase?”

The girl seemed to pull herself away from another world to focus on Sigrid’s request; then she quickly typed the names of teaching fellows, lecturers and graduate students while David Wade lounged against the corner of her desk, watchful and protective.

Sigrid turned back to the remaining lab man. “That’ll be all for now, Yanitelli, thanks. On your way out tell that officer at the elevator to check out Buildings and Grounds and see if he can locate a Mike Szabo.”

Yanitelli gave a half salute and gratefully departed.

“Did you turn up anything downstairs?” Sigrid asked Tillie beneath the clack of Sandy’s typewriter.

“Yes, indeed,” said Detective Tildon happily. “I think I’ve found our poison.”

C
HAPTER
5

Back in his office
around the corner Lemuel Vance sat at his desk with his catalogs opened to the coveted printing presses. With Quinn dead, who would inherit the position of deputy chairman? Simpson?
Probably.
He was the most senior.
A pedant, old Bert Simpson, always pottering after obscure details of Roman sculpture, compiling cross-references on the details of toga draping as if it mattered a tinker’s damn which shoulder of a statue was left uncovered.
But at least he had a proper respect for studio artists, something that pompous, parasitical Riley Quinn’d never had. He never lost sight of the fact that there wouldn’t be any classical art if there hadn’t been a lot of classical artists first. And he cared about the students, was always there to give them extra help. Too bad so few kids specialized in his area. Yes, Simpson could be led to see that a new press was more important than an enlarged slide library.

In the next office but one, Piers Leyden was calm in his newly acquired power as a less poised Jake Saxer followed him in and closed the door.

Saxer pulled out a briar pipe he’d recently affected and tried to seem casual as he went through the business of filling and lighting it; but his pale eyes, nervous and darting, kept flicking back to the older man apprehensively.

Around the department Piers Leyden was known as a lazy, cynical slob. He was a good-looking sensualist who ate too much, drank too much and spent too much time in too many different beds. At forty the effects hadn’t quite begun to show; but hangovers were starting to take a little longer to go away in the mornings, his belt felt a bit tight all the
time,
and he knew he should be spending more hours in front of his easel. Tachs, his gallery owner, had been somewhat caustic about those last two nudes; he had implied that Leyden was coasting, that maybe Riley Quinn had a point.

Leyden knew why Jake Saxer had followed him, and he didn’t intend to make it any easier for the sneaky, whey-faced opportunist.

A small cloud of blue sulfur drifted over to him as Saxer struggled through several kitchen matches trying to get the pipe going. At last he managed two or three jerky puffs. Unfortunately he’d chosen an oversweet blend that smelled more like apple pie than masculine tobacco; still the steady ribbon of smoke seemed to give Saxer confidence.

“A terrible thing, Riley’s death,” he said.

“Isn’t it?” Leyden agreed blandly. “Poor Doris will no doubt be heartbroken. I wonder if anyone’s thought to tell her
yet?
”

Saxer grasped at the opening offered by Doris Quinn’s name. “You and Riley may have had your differences, Leyden, but I didn’t agree with him on everything.” He paused significantly, exuding a casual air as he puffed on the pipe. “I know how much Doris respects your judgment—”

He paused again, and Leyden kept his face carefully blank. Inside he was chortling. When he’d first climbed into Doris Quinn’s bed, it was to sting Riley; but that smug bastard acted as if their affair only confirmed Quinn’s original low opinion of the artist’s taste. And now that lusty little wench was going to ensure his place in history. What marvelous irony!

He regarded Jake Saxer as a spider might regard a particularly tasty summer midge and gave the blond historian a wicked smile. “Why, yes, I think Doris would listen to me . . . under the right circumstances, of course.”

Andrea Ross noted the closed door on her way through to the slide room. Losing Quinn’s patronage would put Jake Saxer right back among hoi polloi, she thought, mechanically refiling the slides of Chartres Cathedral that she’d pulled earlier that day. If Simpson became deputy chairman, he’d be promoted to full professor, opening up another associate professorship; and this time, Andrea vowed to herself, viciously slamming shut the last file drawer, she wouldn’t sit quietly by while it was handed to a less qualified man!

“Idaho?” Sandy keppler was incredulous. “There’s no such place!”

David Wade grinned at her ruefully through his wire-rimmed glasses. “Yes, Virginia, there is an America west of the Hudson River. Contrary to popular belief, there’s a whole continent beyond Staten Island. I even have the letter to prove it.”

There was still a boyish air about the thin, very young man perched on the front of her desk, but underneath his relaxed banter one could discern a scholarly maturity. He flourished a postmarked envelope in front of Sandy’s disbelieving blue eyes.

“But Idaho?”
She tasted the name again. “All I can remember from fourth-grade geography lessons is potatoes.” She looked at him with city horror. “You’re not getting any back-to-the-land ideas, are you?”

“Idiot child!
Can you see either of us on a farm? Don’t worry, it won’t be for long. As soon as I finish my doctorate, we’ll make it back to New York.”

Sandy continued to look doubtful, unconsciously twisting a long strand of her blond hair. It was a mannerism left over from childhood that David found utterly entrancing.

“I don’t know, David. How can you finish your thesis out there without New York’s libraries and museums? Once you’re out—do you know how many applications this department gets every month? And it’s not just here at Vanderlyn. Every academic opening in this city must have at least five hundred Ph.D.’s lined up for it. Oh, damn! If only your contract could be renewed!”

He leaned over and ruffled her hair tenderly.