One Coffee With Page 3

  “Puke on the dean! Let him wait! Or is Nauman afraid to see me? Afraid I’ll raise a stink?” His voice rose in a whine. “Listen, Sandy, they’re wrecking me. If I don’t get that degree, I can’t teach; and if I don’t teach, when’ll I have time to paint?”

  Sandy gave an inaudible groan. If Harley Harris were lazy or less dedicated, she thought, echoing departmental sentiment, he could have been deflected from the Master of Fine Arts program long ago; but what could be done with an energetic grind whose mawkish, ill-proportioned, beetle-busy landscapes weren’t even good kitsch?

  It was Piers Leyden, with his perverted sense of humor and disdain for degrees, who had conned the department into letting Harris into the program; who had insisted Harris had the makings of a primitive artist—another Rousseau or Bombois. Unfortunately Harley Harris wasn’t even another Grandma Moses.

  The joke had stopped being funny. A graduate, after all, reflects the quality of the institution awarding the degree, and the other faculty members were determined that Harley Harris was not going to reflect on them. He had been informed that he would not be receiving an M.F.A. degree next month.

  “If I can’t teach, I’ll have to take a job with my old man,” Harley complained.

  “Oh, stop whining!” said Sandy, stuffing pigeonholes angrily. “You’re lucky to have your father to fall back on.”

  The senior Mr. Harris owned a thriving window-dressing business in Brooklyn. He had loved the way Harley could write SPRING FASHION SALE in bluebirds and daisies when the lad was only sixteen, and he didn’t think six years of college had improved his son’s technique. Most of Vanderlyn’s Art Department agreed with him.

  “You don’t have the foggiest idea of how tight the job market is right now,” she added impatiently. “Do you know how many people in this country can’t find a job? Not just the job they want, any job! And if you think an M.F.A.’s a sure ticket to college teaching, forget it! Look at David—for the last three months we’ve papered the whole country with his curriculum vitae, and he still hasn’t found an opening!”

  The murmur of changing classes signaled the end of the third lecture period. Ten-fifty. Sandy turned and saw Harley Harris now leaning over the bookcase to glare at a jewel-toned abstract on the wall above.

  “Nauman says my work’s fuzzy and tasteless—what the hell does he call this muck?”

  Since examples of Oscar Nauman’s “muck” hung in major museums all over the world, Sandy overlooked his peevish insult.

  Suddenly the door of the inner office opened, and a thin blond man emerged. “Phone calls,” he announced blandly, and Sandy wondered how much he had heard of her outburst. Jake Saxer was by no means one of her favorites.

  Everything about him was just a little too crisp and hard-edged. Even his straw-colored beard was precisely clipped to a Vandyke point. Andrea Ross called him a Plexiglas construction straight out of minimal art, and he did have the brittle two-dimensional intensity of a man who expects to make it before forty. At twenty-seven Saxer already had his Ph.D. and an assistant professorship. Upon his arrival at Vanderlyn College two years ago, he’d analyzed his opportunities like a hard-nosed curator assessing the authenticity of a dubious Etruscan warrior and then deliberately ingratiated himself with Professor Quinn. Quinn had just begun another definitive book on postwar trends in modern art, and Saxer was knowledgeable about sources, references and illustrations. He had made himself so indispensable that Quinn had used his authority as deputy chairman to cut Saxer’s teaching load to one survey course this semester—ostensibly so that Saxer could sort and catalog the department’s chaotic slide library but in reality to give him more free time for Quinn’s research chores.

  The office continued to fill up as people drifted in from classes to check their mail or just shoot the breeze. Piers Leyden and Andrea Ross were followed by Vance, who came in sipping his hot chocolate. Graduate students and lecturers, holding coffee and cigarettes, elbowed for space at the corner table, gossiping about the morning fiasco in hoots of laughter, which moderated slightly when Riley Quinn returned from his ten-o’clock lecture, “Conceptual Divergence in Modern Art.”

  All signs of the deputy chairman’s earlier loss of control had vanished. Once again he was a supercilious, dapper executive with a tanned face, crisp gray hair and shrewd brown eyes. Quinn always seemed to have just emerged from an expensive barbershop, his nails freshly manicured and trailing a faint scent of after-shave lotion; and in a department not noted for sartorial elegance his perfectly pressed fawn-colored suit, dark brown shirt and paisley tie set him apart. Not a speck of city dust dulled the gleaming surface of his shoes, and his pigskin slide case was custom-made and unbattered.

  Harley Harris rose from a chair beside the bookcase. “Professor Quinn—”

  “Not now,” Quinn said brusquely. “Sandy, get me Dean Ellis.” He reached around Harris and picked up one of the two Styrofoam cups on the bookcase.

  “Now just a minute!” Harris squeaked. “I have a right—”

  Quinn ignored him and, seeing Sandy signal that the dean was on the line, went into his office and closed the door in Harley Harris’s face. Harris turned angrily and almost collided with Professor Simpson, who was balancing his coffee on two thick reference tomes.

  “Excuse me,” murmured the old man and, nudging the boy aside, returned the books to the shelves below. Beyond Simpson’s bent back Harris spotted Oscar Nauman just making his way through the crowded office, and his truculence wavered.

  White-haired, six-foot-two and possessed of deep blue eyes that seemed to look past externals to the heart of any matter, the chairman towered over his colleagues mentally as well as physically. He tended to forget appointments and responsibilities, and left most departmental routine to Quinn and Sandy. When aroused in intellectual debate, his speech often became tangled and elliptical because his mind outran his tongue; but in his writings and especially in his paintings his brilliance shone forth unhindered. The only criticism ever leveled at Oscar Nauman’s work was that it was too starkly cerebral.

  Now he took the last cup from the tray on the bookcase, discarded the snap-on lid, swallowed deeply and grimaced, “God, Vance! This tastes like one of your acid baths!”

  All this time Harley Harris, who barely came up to Nauman’s chest, had been dancing for attention, and the artist looked down at him in mystified bewilderment as a Great Dane might gaze at a yipping Chihuahua. Frustrated, Harris shrilled, “You just wait then! You’ll be sorry! And I hope you roast in hell!”

  Nauman watched him flounce away through the nursery exit and, honestly puzzled, appealed to Sandy. “Is he upset about something?”

  Malicious laughter rippled through the big room as Sandy reminded him of Harley’s failure. “Professor Quinn told him yesterday that he wouldn’t qualify for an M.F.A., but I think he was hoping you’d override the committee’s decision. He was supposed to have a meeting with you today but it had to be postponed.”

  Nauman frowned, uncomfortably aware that he’d been unintentionally rude to the boy. He could be, and often was, merciless in his treatment of those with intellectual pretensions, but picking on someone of Harley Harris’s mental size was not quite sporting.

  Around him the conversation had reached a raucous pitch. Among the younger staff members at the corner table, battle was joined over whether or not there was a shred of individuality in the whole second generation of abstract expressionists. Both sides had fervent, articulate defenders who shouted to be heard.

  A bearded latecomer pushed his way into the group, snarling good-naturedly at a friend who’d maneuvered him into dating his girl friend’s cousin. “You promised me a Venus,” he grumbled. “She was a Venus, all right. The Willendorf Venus!”

  Which led to fertility symbols, Paleolithic cave paintings, Stonehenge, Toltec technology and present-day earthworks and “—so his uncle’s in the business, and he can borrow a bulldozer whenever—”

  “I’ll be damned if I’l
l buy it. What kind of art is it if you’ve got to go up five miles in a frigging helicopter to see the whole thing?”

  “Ah, you’re a reactionary—”

  “—combines soft sculpture with collage and gets—”

  “—so I told him where he could put holography, and she said—”

  Nauman shook his head over so much simultaneous vociferous enthusiasm, but on the whole he approved. Some of his best paintings had been generated by freewheeling debate. He took a final gulp of the really unpalatable coffee and set the empty cup on the file cabinet between two of Sandy’s potted geraniums while he pulled out an elaborately carved meerschaum pipe. As he lit it, he was cornered by Lemuel Vance, who began buttressing his demand for a new printing press for the graphics workshop with data from three different catalogs. He almost had to shout to be heard over the surrounding din.

  In the midst of all the loud hilarity and noisy arguments Sandy noticed a girl hesitating by the mail rack. At Sandy’s gesture the girl, a student aide for Dean Ellis’s office, edged her way over. Clearly such bedlam never occurred in the hushed sanctuaries below.

  “The dean wants to know if Professor Quinn’s all right,” she whispered.

  “All right?” repeated Sandy in a puzzled tone. The decibel level began dropping as others became aware of this new diversion and paused to eavesdrop.

  The girl nodded. “Dean Ellis was speaking with Professor Quinn on the telephone when he suddenly started—I mean, the dean said it sounded like Professor Quinn was—” Embarrassed, she groped for a diplomatic term. “Like he was, well, you know, upchucking.”

  Sandy half rose. Nauman was closer to the door, but before he could move it was wrenched open and Riley Quinn staggered across the threshold. He clutched a wastebasket to his soiled shirtfront, and an acrid stench reached their nostrils as he heaved into it spasmodically. His eyes were glassy, his skin green white beneath its deep tan.

  “Help me!” he gasped hoarsely, retching at every word. “Oh my God, I’m dying!”

  The ambulance responded in record time, but Quinn had passed into a deep coma before it arrived. Death occurred shortly after twelve noon.

  CHAPTER 4

  Sigrid Harald was not a particularly fervent proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment. She waved no banners, marched in no demonstrations, signed no petitions for the advancement of women. She was aware of how much she owed to the feminist movement, but she also knew the worth of her own brains and stamina, and she had expected to reach her present position on the police force before she was thirty-five; ERA just speeded up the timetable. For that she was grateful; and when promotion to lieutenant and an opening in the Detective Bureau were offered so much earlier than she’d hoped and planned, she had accepted it for what it could be, not for what it was.

  ‘‘I’m not here to be the department’s token female officer,” she had told Captain McKinnon equably. “If you won’t give me a share of the case loads just like any other officer—the paperwork and the street work—then you’d better get another female.”

  McKinnon had glared at her. Men he knew how to handle, men could be wilted by a blast of his anger, but women? He had never commanded women on a regular basis and this one wasn’t easily intimidated. Those cool gray eyes refused to waver.

  “You’ll take what’s assigned, and you’ll work by the rules,” he’d said. “My rules. The commissioner wished you on me, but I’m still running things here. I’ll expect the same obedience and respect I get from all my officers, or by damn I will get another female!”

  She had nodded. She was a tall, slender woman. Slender almost to the point of skinny; only not skinny in the dried-up sense, thought McKinnon, but fined down like a greyhound or a ballet dancer. Hair as dark as her mother’s had been; tall like her father with his fair Nordic skin. A self-contained person totally unlike Anne or Leif. Not at all pretty, yet there was something about those level gray eyes, something that had made McKinnon hope she would work out here.

  Nearly a year had gone by since then; and when the call came in from a local precinct station about a possible poisoning at Vanderlyn College, McKinnon checked the work sheets and was glad to see that Lieutenant Harald’s was the lightest case load at the moment. The young woman had shown herself capable of handling violence, but (although he would have denied it) Mac always breathed easier when he could legitimately give Anne Harald’s daughter what he privately tagged the “amateur” murders: the single eruption of violence between friends or relatives that usually left a remorseful killer confessing at the scene of his crime. A homicide at a college—especially a poisoning—how dangerous could it be?

  Lieutenant Harald was unaware that Captain McKinnon had once known her parents, and she would have been indignant had she heard his reasoning. When the new assignment was relayed to her she was cleaning up the loose ends of a routine case, a dope-pushing doctor who had been knifed when he refused credit to a young hophead desperate for a quick fix. The dreary incident had occurred during office hours in front of the doctor’s receptionist and two patients, and the kid had been picked up a half hour later, so any reasonably competent prosecutor should be able to get a conviction. Always nice when the current assignment was wrapped up as the new one began; unfortunately it didn’t happen often enough.

  On her way to Vanderlyn College, Lieutenant Harald stopped by the small hospital where Professor Quinn had died. In a holding area off the emergency room, Cohen, an assistant from the Medical Examiner’s Office, had finished his superficial examination and was waiting for her before removing Quinn’s body for a complete autopsy.

  “Offhand I’d say ingestion of some sort of metallic irritant,” he said, pulling back the sheet and pointing to the corrosive burns on the dead man’s lips. “I’ll know better after I open him up.”

  “How soon?” she asked, trying to match Cohen’s dispassionate mood.

  He shrugged. “There’s a drowning and two suicides ahead of you today, but ladies first, I guess. I’ll put yours at the head of the line. Nice threads,” he added reflectively, gazing at the no longer immaculate fawn suit and the crumpled and befouled paisley tie, which lay across the bottom of the stretcher. “Too bad they got puked on.”

  He dropped the sheet over Riley Quinn’s body again.

  Vanderlyn College employed its own security personnel to police the campus, but when Sigrid Harald was still a uniformed rookie, she had ridden a patrol car in this precinct for a few months before being transferred, so she had a working knowledge of the college layout. Except for the river promenade Vanderlyn’s tree-graced grounds were completely enclosed by a tall ivy-covered brick wall broken in several places by broad wrought-iron archways with gates, that could be locked at night. All legal spaces on both sides of the streets for a three-block radius were jammed with cars, motorcycles and mopeds, and several privately owned parking garages on side streets were guaranteed a turn-away business because of the warning signs posted on every gate onto the campus: Official Vehicles Only—Absolutely No Parking on Campus.

  Sigrid flashed her shield at a beefy-faced uniformed patrol officer lounging in front of the main gate.

  The officer gave her a dour nod and gestured toward a narrow service street to the left, which eventually brought her to the rear of Van Hoeen Hall where several other police vehicles were parked in a delivery zone. By the time she located the Art Department, it was nearly three-thirty. Personnel from precinct and headquarters were, as always, overlapping in the preliminaries, amiably arguing points of precedence; but the lab technicians seemed to have settled in with their usual efficiency.

  Another uniformed officer was posted at the top of the hall by the elevator doors to keep back a crowd of blue-jeaned students who craned their necks and jostled for good sight-seeing positions. Sigrid heard a buzz of curious speculation as she again flashed her shield.

  “What do you call a lady pig?” asked an adenoidal voice, but the gibe was good-natured and was even accompanied by a couple of emb
arrassed shushes. There had been no demonstrations at Vanderlyn in several years.

  She entered the Art Department’s main office by way of the nursery door, and her glance brushed over the group of people seated on a motley collection of ill-matched chairs around a long table in the front corner. The office reminded her of those in old precinct stations throughout the city. There were the same unlovely tile floors, a battered bookcase, a large desk canted across a rear corner and under the high windows a bank of ugly green, black and brown file cabinets, some with sprung drawers that would never again close flush.

  The resemblance to precinct houses ended there, however, for large bright paintings—mostly abstract—covered the cream-colored walls; baskets of Swedish ivy, asparagus ferns, spider plants and the like hung in front of the windows, and pots of geraniums stood on the file cabinets, softening the room’s bureaucratic feel. Someone evidently had a kelly green thumb or amazing luck, thought Sigrid, who never managed to keep a plant alive for more than a month and no longer tried.

  An assemblage of small white nonrepresentational sculptures, none more than eight inches high, stood on the file cabinets in front of the plants. They had all been carved from blocks of plaster of Paris, and each was intricately detailed with a variety of surface textures. One ambitious piece looked like a random pile of barred cages with small cubes inside. Not very aesthetic perhaps but remarkable when one realized that it had been carved from a solid chunk of plaster, Later Sigrid would learn that these sculptures were not the handiwork of art majors but had come out of a workshop course that the Art Department gave to teach predental students dexterity in using small tools in a confined space.

  At the moment, however, most of her attention was focused not on the plaster sculptures atop the file cabinets but on the cherubic-faced man who waited for her in front of them. He carried a folder, and past experience told her it must already hold the rough beginnings of timetables, character sketches, floor plans and anything else that had caught his attention.