Authors: Margaret Maron
“And if Nauman had come back first?” Sigrid asked.
“I guess he’d have found a way to knock the tray over ‘accidentally’ and just wait for another time,” said Tillie.
“You sound as if you have a particular ‘he’ in mind.”
“Yep.
Harley Harris. He was next to the bookcase with plenty of time to doctor the cups while the girl had her back to him. She’d already told him no one could talk to him that morning. So why’d he keep hanging around if it wasn’t to make sure Quinn got the right cup?”
“But I thought it was the chairman Harris was angry with, not Quinn. Even though Quinn was the first to tell him he wasn’t going to get a degree, Oscar Nauman would seem to be the one with enough authority to keep Harris from getting that M.F.A., and Nauman, after all, was the one who broke their appointment.”
Tillie looked confused, but he stuck to his guns.
“Well, maybe he’d poisoned the back cup, meaning it for Nauman, and then since he was in Quinn’s way, Quinn reached around him and got that one instead of the front cup. And then maybe Harris was so rattled that he let Quinn shut the door in his face before he could knock the cup out of Quinn’s hand.
“Sure!” he said, gaining confidence in his revised theory. “And then when Nauman wouldn’t give him the time of day, either, that’s when he shouted—” here Tillie thumbed through his notebook till he came to a verbatim account of Harley Harris’s remarks “‘—
You
just wait then! You’ll be sorry! And I hope you roast in hell!’ Doesn’t that sound like a threat?”
Sigrid was dubious, but before she could voice an alternate opinion, her office door opened, and Lieutenant Duckett stuck his head in.
“Hey, Harald, you handling that Vanderlyn College poisoning?”
Somebody here to see you about it.”
Without waiting for her assent, he held the door wide to admit a worried middle-aged man.
Sigrid recognized Duckett’s intentional rudeness with an inward sigh, knowing that sooner or later she was going to be forced into a confrontation with him. Duckett was a competent detective and senior to her. He didn’t have to feel threatened by her mere presence in the department. If only he could see how pointless these petty little harassments were.
Except for a slight flintiness in her gray eyes, however, Sigrid allowed none of her emotions to show. She rose from behind her battered, regulation desk and invited the man to be seated in the chair Detective Tildon dragged forward.
He hesitated in the doorway, a stocky, forceful businessman of medium height, who was obviously used to taking the bull by the horns and was now momentarily buffaloed at finding the bull was a heifer instead. He quickly regained his composure, but there was still a touch of exasperated impatience as he faced Sigrid.
“Coming to my house.
Getting my wife all upset. Wanting to know where’s my boy, and I gotta get in touch as soon as he comes home; and then I take him down to the local precinct station, and they say we should come all the way here!
“I’m not saying what he did wasn’t wrong, but to send cops! We never had cops before. And then to expect me to come all the way over here, and it’s nearly midnight, and nobody but gangsters on the subway that late; so I figure what the hell’s so bad about what he’s done that can’t wait till morning and—”
“You must be Mr. Harris,” said Sigrid, interrupting the man’s Niagara of words.
“Right.
Al Harris. And this is my boy—”
He looked around and realized that he was unaccompanied. With a muttered expletive and a heavenward roll of his eyes he reached around the door frame and hauled in a thin youth whose weak mouth was a pale copy of the older man’s more determined one.
“This is my boy, Harley,” said Mr. Harris. “He’ll tell you all about what he did yesterday.”
“H
e did what
?” growled Oscar Nauman into the mouthpiece of his telephone.
The door to his inner office was open, and in the outer office Lemuel Vance stood by the mail rack separating wheat from chaff, which is to say, sorting his personal mail from Administration’s form letters.
Admin was proud of its ecological efforts in
using recycled
paper; but here in the Art Department artistic theory held to a cynical belief that recycled paper should be kept recycling. The department’s historians were only slightly more conscientious than the artists about reading Admin’s circulars, so an enormous wastebasket stood next to the mail rack.
“Oh, God!
Not the chancellor, too?” roared Nauman.
Vance raised his eyebrows at Sandy Keppler, who had stopped typing and was now frankly eavesdropping. Around the Art Department it was blithely assumed that those who wished to speak privately would close the door.
“Who’s on the line?” Vance pantomimed to Sandy.
“Dean of faculties,” she mouthed back.
Two girls appeared on the other side of the mail rack. They had entered from the hall door around the corner near Professor Simpson’s desk. Sandy knew most of the art majors by sight if not by name, and she didn’t recognize this duo in tight jeans, sloppy shirts and tangled hair. Moreover, she didn’t like the way they gazed around the office so avidly.
“May I help you?” she asked crisply.
“They said Art Department office,” drawled one of the girls. “Is this where it happened? Where the guy died?”
Piers Leyden had followed them in, and the comment brought a glint of anger to his dark eyes.
“Sorry, my dears,” he said caustically, “but the guided tours don’t start till next week. Tickets may be purchased in the bursar’s office. Be sure to tell all your friends.”
Cupping an elbow in each strong hand, he quickmarched them back to the hall and shoved them out none too gently. A knot of students clustered near the elevator watched curiously.
“The barbarians are within our gates,” murmured Professor Simpson from his book-filled corner as Leyden reentered the office and closed the door.
“It’s been like this all morning,” Sandy said hotly. “They’re ghouls!” She wore a pink-and-bluechecked blouse and well-cut denim slacks that had been prefaded to a soft blue. Her long golden hair was loosely tied back with a matching blue scarf, but her face was pale and distressed this morning. “They keep coming in and staring as if they expect to see someone else dead.”
“Chin up, kid,” said Leyden, patting her shoulder; but the more pragmatic Vance retrieved two sheets of paper from the wastebasket, and on the blank side he lettered in black charcoal:
ART DEPT. BUSINESS ONLY—NO RUBBERNECKERS.
Sandy provided thumbtacks, and he fastened a sign on each of the hall doors. Since those doors were always propped open during the day, closing them created an air of siege—an Us-against-Them feeling.
They had almost forgotten Nauman when from the inner office
came
another roar.
“Damn his pimpled soul to purple hell! Can’t they see he’s crazy? Never mind trying to explain. I’ll do it myself!”
They heard the phone crash down; drawers banged open and shut while Nauman rummaged for something; then he erupted into the outer office. “Where the hell’s a City University directory?” he asked Sandy impatiently.
“Would you like me to get someone on the line for you?” she asked placatingly.
He nodded.
“The chancellor.”
“Something wrong?”
Leyden inquired.
“Those damn copying machines!
Invented by fools for the use of cretins!”
Nauman’s white hair was standing in angry tufts, and he’d bitten the stem of his favorite pipe hard enough to crack it. “If he’d had to copy that letter by hand, he might have come to his senses by the fifth copy. Damn copiers!
One for every dean, board member and trustee in the whole bloody city.”
He glared at Leyden. “If you ever try to sneak another goddamned primitive into the graduate program—” he swore.
“I have the chancellor’s office on the line,” said Sandy.
Nauman glared at Piers Leyden again,
then
slammed his office door shut. Sandy waited a moment till he’d picked up his phone,
then
hung up her receiver.
“I take it Harley Harris has surfaced?” asked Leyden.
“I don’t know about Harley in the flesh,” said Sandy, “but evidently he wrote a letter yesterday accusing the department and especially Professor Nauman of all kinds of improper things, beginning with something like ‘the frivolous granting and withholding of graduate degrees.’ He must have gone over to the library and run off a couple of dozen, which he hand delivered all over the city. Practically every dean on campus has already called. And as you just heard, even the chancellor and the board of trustees must have got copies.”
She looked at Vance disapprovingly. The burly printmaker was choking with silent laughter. “I really don’t think Professor Nauman considers it funny, Lem.”
“He will!” Vance promised gleefully, and a smile spread over Piers Leyden’s face, too, as they topped each other in imagining what the frustrated Harley Harris might have written.
They knew that Nauman felt the department’s greatest strength lay in avoiding Administration’s notice. As long as Art didn’t make annoying demands of the paper pushers and didn’t actively embarrass the image polishers, Nauman expected them to leave Art alone and let him get on with the business of imparting knowledge to students as he and his colleagues saw fit.
Quinn’s death was bad enough; but Harley Harris’s barrage of letters could draw the fire of every nit-picking bureaucrat at Vanderlyn College and could open up an internal investigation that would last longer than any police department’s.
C
HAPTER
15
S
igrid and Tillie
had listened to Harley Harris’s shamefaced account of his copied letters in astonishment. When he’d finished, Tillie broke the news of Riley Quinn’s death, something neither seemed to have been aware of before. Mr. Harris was instantly and indignantly on his guard when he realized that they were interested in his young son not because of his letters full of wild accusations but because they suspected him of murder.
“Okay, so he sent those dumb letters,” he told Sigrid. “Dumb!
Dumb! DUMB!”
he reminded Harley, who flinched beneath his father’s verbal blows. “But,” he said, swinging back to Sigrid, “just because he’s dumb doesn’t mean he’s stupid.”
“He uttered a threat in the presence of witnesses,
”
Sigrid said mildly.
“But I didn’t mean it!” wailed Harley.
“Shut up!” said his father. “Don’t say another word. I’m calling our lawyer.”
“If you wish,” Sigrid said, pushing the telephone toward him, “but really at this point we’re only interested in getting a descriptive statement from your son.
The same sort of statement that everyone else who was there yesterday has given us quite freely.
Of course, you know best for Harley, and if you feel you want a lawyer present, that’s certainly your right.”
Again she gestured toward the telephone, and this seemed to mollify the elder Harris. “Tell the lieutenant what she wants to know,” he directed the boy.
Point by point Sigrid and Tillie took him through a recital of the previous morning’s events.
No, he hadn’t touched the cups, and he couldn’t tell you what Nauman or Quinn or any of that
bunch
drank while they were wasting time up there. He was always too busy working down in his studio—“I’m a painter, not a coffee guzzler”—to hang out with those loudmouthed bull tossers. He wouldn’t even have been up there yesterday, except that he’d had an appointment with Nauman. An appointment
they
had broken, he might add.
Afraid to face him with the real reasons why he wasn’t getting an M.F.A. degree.
If his work wasn’t any good, they should have warned him back in December. Oh, yes, Professor Leyden was his advisor, and yes, he’d told Harley the rest of the department didn’t like primitives—not that he really was, you understand, but—
“Keep to the point,” growled his father.
Okay. Yeah, he remembered seeing the tray on the bookcase. Two white foam cups from the cafeteria with writing on the lids. No, nobody’d touched them while he was in the office until Quinn came in. “At least, I don’t think anybody did,” he qualified nervously. His father snorted derisively. “Okay!
Nobody!”
he cried.
Tillie brought out the tray and handed Harley the two snap-on lids. “Could you arrange these lids the way the cups were sitting yesterday morning?”
The boy gnawed his thin lips apprehensively. “They were just there, side by side. I don’t remember anything special about whether one was in front or anything like that.”
“Christ!” said Mr. Harris. “Call yourself an artist, and you don’t notice details? I can tell you every shoe in Foot Fair’s windows for the last three years.”
“I’m not a window designer,” whined Harley.
“Oh, yes, you are!” his father said meaningfully.
Pressed hard, Harley admitted remembering that Quinn had reached behind him to take a cup before closeting himself in the inner office.