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 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 insure 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 that 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 oft he 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. "It'll work out. Trust me. Idaho might be fun. And it sure beats starving. Have you told Nauman you're leaving yet?"
"There's no rush," she hedged. "He knows about us, but I don't want to hand in my resignation downstairs until we're sure you can't find something here. There're lots of applications for my job, too, you know. Oh, David, do we have to leave? We could live on my salary without much scrimping-just till you finish your degree and-"
"No way!" David said stubbornly. "I'm not having you slaving to support me-even if we are going to be married."
He took away the severity of his half-serious admonition by bending to kiss her lips gently.
As he turned to go, Sandy asked, "How was the exhibition?"
"I skipped it. Spent the morning at the library instead."
"Downtown?"
"No, here. There were some references I had to recheck. See you at six?"
The girl nodded, trying to push down a small stab of fear. In the next moment David had rounded the corner, and she heard him stop and speak to Professor Simpson before he was hailed by a younger voice and moved out of range down the hall.
A few minutes later the door to the inner office opened, and Oscar Nauman's high-domed head appeared. "I thought David was still here."
"He just left. Want me to try to catch him?"
"No," he said, "it can wait. Has he landed anything yet?"
"Well, there's a college out in Idaho that needs an art teacher."
" Idaho?"
"Yeah, me, too," Sandy smiled wistfully. She picked up her steno pad and a sheaf of papers. "There are a few things you have to tell me about today. And these letters need a signature."
Nauman groaned. "I was on my way to see Doris Quinn."
"These won't take long," the girl said firmly.
"Sometimes you're too damned efficient," the artist grumbled, but he followed her docilely back into his office.
At his desk at the front of the nursery around the corner Professor Albert Simpson shook his head in private disagreement. He could remember a long string of indifferent civil-servant-type secretaries over the years: a few had been much too fastidious over matters of detail and protocol; the rest inexcusably lazy. Sandy Keppler was the first to combine competence with tolerance.
A sudden thought struck him: if Sandy left, and he were promoted to Quinn's position, he would have to help train a new secretary. Oh, dear! So inconvenient and time-wasting. There had to be some way to keep young Wade on the staff. Silly rules that said a lecturer's contract couldn't be renewed unless he were offered tenure!
As usual Professor Simpson had taken advantage of the acoustics, which channeled all conversation in the outer office right to his desk. He was a shameless eavesdropper once voices penetrated his thoughts, and he had followed the young romance with more than sentimental interest. Those two would be wasted in Idaho. Especially David. The boy had the makings of a brilliant classical scholar. Look at how he'd organized those long-neglected notes on Praxiteles, drawing parallels to Apollonius of Athens, which he, Simpson, had never noticed before.
He'd even toyed with the idea of taking David with him to Pompeü and Herculaneum on his next sabbatical. Let the boy see Western civilization's loftiest expressions of artistic creativity on their native soil. Well, maybe he still would. What else did he have to spend his salary on? Sandy, too. Indeed, why not? David would hardly want to leave his bride behind, and besides, she was an accurate typist; her skills would be useful when he and David started rewriting the book.
Professor Simpson leaned back in his chair and contemplated his dream of the finished book-a vindication of the strength and beauty of works that had stood the test of centuries, a noble creation worth the lifetime he'd lavished on it; quite unlike the here-today-gone-tomorrow ephemera Riley Quinn had wasted so much of the department's money and energies on.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum, he reminded himself. And come to think of it, Lucretius, too, had said something about not speaking ill of the dead, hadn't he?
The elderly classicist's knobbed and veined hands wandered among the piles of books before him as he began a vague search for that Lucretius reference. Very pertinent, as he recalled…
Lieutenant Harald and Detective Tildon emerged on the floor below to find it apparently deserted. Tillie had promised to show his superior the probable poison, but he was incapable of ignoring any details that might later prove important. Gravely Sigrid took an interest in what he had to show her along the route that led to their goal.
"These first rooms are small studios for student painters," Detective Tildon explained, referring to his notes as he trotted along beside Sigrid's tall figure.
"Harley Harris uses one of them. There're three here and four more scattered around campus. The photography lab's in an annex of the library, and somebody said something about a ceramics workshop over at the gym. In what used to be the basketball team's dressing room?"
He looked at his notes doubtfully; his previous academic experience had been limited to night courses at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But Sigrid nodded, remembering a college roommate who'd complained about taking a drawing class in the basement of the biology building. It had reeked of formaldehyde, and so did her roommate after every session of that class. Art departments seemed to follow a pattern. Redheaded stepchildren, all.
"As soon as Yanitelli tested for fingerprints and got all the chemical samples he wanted here, we went across to the library annex and checked out the photography lab," said Tillie. "There were only a couple of boxes marked Poison, and Yanitelli doesn't think any of them fit the bill. He says that developing chemicals used to come separately and a few were pretty strong-I forget their names. Anyhow,t he only developers and fixatives that we found were prepared compounds. Yanitelli took samples, but he said it'd take a lot of stuff to kill, diluted like that-more than you could dissolve in one cup of coffee anyhow."
(What Yanitelli, who had little respect for the academic mind, had actually said was: "It'd take a damned absentminded egghead not to notice there was a hell of a lot more powder than coffee in a cup that little." But Tillie saw no point in repeating that opinion to Lieutenant Harald. It was still not definitely established that she had a sense of humor.)
They moved along the deserted hallway.
"This next is a lecture room for art historians," said Tillie.
Sigrid paused to read a schedule tacked to the door. Professors Saxer, Simpson and Ross were listed as using the room this semester; in fact, it was where Andrea Ross had been due to lecture at eleven that morning.
"And here, right across the hall," Tillie said meaningfully, "is the printmaking workshop."
The door was unlocked, and they stepped into a big boxy studio that smelled of ink and a vaguely metallic acrid odor. The opposite wall was all tall windows facing north, and the space beneath was lined with open shelves that held an assortment of copper, zinc and aluminum plates, lithography stones and drying prints. Makeshift clotheslines strung across a corner had more prints clipped to them. There were mismatched worktables and stools, and a large hand-operated, antiquated-looking press stood in the center of the room. To Sigrid's untrained eyes it looked like something Ben Franklin might have been right at home with. No wonder Vance complained. A smaller iron-press was bolted to one end of a heavy workbench, and a second workbench held two electric hot plates.
Tillie had collared a student earlier for a crash course in the mechanics of printmaking and was eager to share his new knowledge.
"As I understand it, you start with one of those flat zinc or copper plates. If you're going to engrave it, you just gouge out your picture with a steel needle-it's called a burin-and then put ink on it and runi t through the printing press. But for an etching, you heat some varnish on the hot plate, coat your plate, and when it cools, you draw your picture by scratching away the varnish. Etching's supposed to be easier than engraving because varnish is softer to get through than the metal. Then you stick it in an acid bath back there."
Along the rear wall were three deep stone sinks connected by stained and pitted counters, which held large shallow plastic trays.
"You mix the chemicals in those trays, stick your plate in, and the acid will eat out the lines you drew without touching the part that still has varnish on it. When you've got the line as deep as you want, you rinse it off, heat the plate again until the varnish is melted, and you can wipe every bit of it off. Then you ink the plate and print it just like you did with the engraving."
"Very concise," said Sigrid and the detective beamed. "Is that the chemical closet over there?"
"Right, ma'am. You can go in. Yanitelli checked for prints and took a sample of everything he thought Quinn could have been poisoned with."
The chemical closet was actually a small supply room lined with shelves that held neat stacks of paper sorted by size and thickness, and cartons and tins of powdered varnish, talc and inks of various colors. Sigrid's eye was drawn to a collection of containers ominously decorated by skulls and crossbones.
"I made a complete inventory," said Detective Tildon, thumping his clipboard.
"And which do you favor?"
"I guess any of them would do it," Tillie said judiciously. "The nitric acid or the sulfuric; but my money's on the end one, the potassium dichromate. That lid was put back crooked, and Yanitelli wasn't the one who spilled some on the shelf. That was already there. And another thing: it was the only one that didn't have any fingerprints at all. That's always significant to me. Remember that cup we found polished clean in that model's kitchen cabinet?"
"No," smiled Sigrid. "That was just before I came, but I remember Captain McKinnon telling me about it. That cup changed a tentative suicide verdict to murder, didn't it?"
"Well, it just stood to reason," said Tillie modestly. "Just like now. One squeaky-clean jar on a shelf full of dusty ones? Uh-uh. Anyhow, the kid I was talking to said their normal procedure was to take all the jars over to the mixing trays and measure the stuff out there, so nothing should have been spilled in here, right?"
The suspect jar seemed to hold orange salt. Underneath the label Potassium Dichromate was the ubiquitous skull-and-crossbones. Some sophomoric wit had inked a red Marcel Duchamp mustache on the skeletal head and closed one eye socket in a raffish wink.
"I'd like to speak to Professor Vance again," Sigrid said thoughtfully. "See if he's still around, would you, Tillie?"
While she waited for his return, Sigrid walked down the hall to examine the last two classrooms on that floor. They were duplicates of the print workshop in size and north lighting, but the first reeked of turpentine and oil paints and held an undergrowth of various sized easels. Canvases in different stages of completion showed a nude girl poised on a stool, one leg outstretched. The neophyte artists were evidently troubled by that leg, for several showed signs of paint build-up there. Charcoal sketches of other nudes, both male and female, were thumbtacked to the molding all around the studio, and the card on the door confirmed that this was indeed Professor Leyden's life class.
The last studio-Prof. Oscar Nauman, Color and Basic Design, read the card on the door-was different again. Despite the bursts of color blocks and circles tacked to the molding, there was a feeling of order, calm and discipline that had been lacking in the first two studios. Drawing tables stood in neat rows, their precision marred only by their tops being tilted at different angles. Twenty-three of the tables were completely bare; the twenty-fourth was littered with a drift of two-inch paper squares in every conceivable shade of red.
A young girl whose hands and face carried smudges of the same red looked up as Sigrid entered the room and gave her an electric smile. "I did it!" she said, dazed triumph in her voice. "I really did it!"
"Did what?"
"Went from dark red to light pink in nine equal steps. See?"
On the table in front of the girl was a white sheet of paper on which were aligned nine of the little squares of red tones. The gradations shaded from almost black to light pink and reminded Sigrid of a paint store's sample card.
"Is that so very difficult?" asked Sigrid.
"Difficult!" the girl hooted. "Boy, it's plain you never took Oscar Nauman's color class! What time is it? Five? God! No wonder I'm feeling so empty-I've been down here working on this thing since eleven this morning. It's really a hairy problem," she explained. "See, the assignment was to go from dark to light, any color, in nine equal steps."
Sigrid looked puzzled, so the girl tried again. "Look, I started with this dark red square, right? So dark it's almost black. Then I put down another square that's a little more of a clear red, right?"
Sigrid nodded.
"Now let's say I next tried one of these that's even lighter from further down at the pink end. I'm still going from dark to light, but the differences between this second and third shade is greater than that between the first and second. See? It's got to step down exactly equal."
Again Sigrid nodded. "But it still doesn't sound very difficult."
"Want to try? Be my guest," said the girl, pushing all the extra little squares toward Sigrid. "I must have mixed a hundred and fifty different shades."
Intrigued, Sigrid began lining them up as the girl pasted her own final combination of the white paper.
"There," she said after a few moments.
The girl examined Sigrid's maiden effort and shook her head kindly, "Not bad for a first time, but the change is too great between your third and fourth, and you've only used seven shades. Nine's the magic number, no more, no less. Seven's easy and twelve's a snap. Nine's the bastard."
While the girl cleaned her brushes and put away her tools, Sigrid idly shifted the squares. "I had no idea you could spend a whole semester on just color," she mused.
"A semester? You could study it for years," the girl assured her, "and still not learn half the stuff Professor Nauman knows about it. Which is weird if you think about it. I mean, look in the school catalog.
Everybody else has a string of letters after their names-M.F.A.'s Ph.D.'s Nauman has nothing. I heard he didn't even finish high school."
"But he's a good teacher?"
"The best if you're serious about learning rock-bottom, basic fundamentals. Some of the staff, their stuff's based on sneaky little tricks of technique, see? So they're stingy about what they'll share when they're teaching. Afraid you'll steal it. But Nauman's generous. He'll give you everything he has because his work's built on solid truth. If you could imitate it, you wouldn't want to because you'd know enough to have your own perception of truth, see?"
"Professor Nauman must be very popular," Sigrid said, recognizing an enthusiast.
"Nope! No way. Lots of people hate his guts," said the girl cheerfully. "Students and staff. He gets impatient with stupidity and laziness, and there's lots of both floating around. They're afraid of him. The man's brilliant, see? And sometimes he forgets the rest of us aren't and says what's on his mind without even realizing that he's cutting everybody to splinters. Hey, you through playing with those?" she finished, ready to sweep the superfluous squares of red tones into a wastebasket.
"You're going to throw them away? After all the time you spent making them?"
"Sure! I've got the nine I need. Hey, do you want them? Take them," she said magnanimously. "They'll drive you crazy, but it really is a good exercise for training your color sense."
"Thank you," Sigrid said formally. She collected solitaire games, and this one seemed more engrossing than many.
The girl unearthed a manila envelope, which she filled with the color squares and gave to Sigrid before carefully carrying away her completed project. "I'm going to leave it on Nauman's desk," she said proudly. "He didn't think any of us could do it in less than three days. See you!"
With a friendly wave of her hand the girl was gone, still unaware that murder had occurred overhead while she wrestled with color.
Sigrid followed more slowly. If a student's casual assessment meant anything, it would be a mistake to ignore the possibility that the poisoned coffee might have been meant for Nauman instead of Riley Quinn.
Jealousy and resentment could be potent corrosives.
"Oh, there you are. Lieutenant," said Detective Tildon from the doorway of the print workshop. With him was the uniformed officer who'd been sent to collect Mike Szabo. An earnest young rookie, he looked somewhat abashed at having to report failure.
"Sorry, ma'am," he said, "but they told me Szabo took off as soon as he heard about the murder. Not a word to anybody-just up and went, though he was supposed to work till seven tonight. I did get his home address for Detective Tildon."
Tillie touched his clipboard in affirmation that Szabo's address was officially noted.
Sigrid inclined her head. "Very good, Officer. Thank you."
"You still want someone posted upstairs?" he asked.
"No, it's no longer necessary," Sigrid replied. The rookie nodded and left.
"Is this going to take very long?" Lemuel Vance complained as Sigrid and Tillie joined him inside the studio. "I've got a class meeting here at six, and I haven't day."
"Only for the day people in the department," he said bitterly. "Administration's decreed that since the Continuing Ed. students had no contact with Quinn, canceling classes out of respect for his memory would be, quote, meaningless, unquote. They're ignoring the fact that everyone who teaches at night was Quinn's colleague."
In light of his earlier calm over Quinn's death Sigrid interpreted his present mood as resentment at not getting a night off, and she directed his attention to the supply closet where the chemicals were housed.
"If the stuff that killed Riley really did come from here, maybe we'd better cancel my etching class anyhow. Admin, couldn't object if you told them you don't want things disturbed," Vance said hopefully, looking around the small room.
"That won't be necessary," Sigrid said coldly, crushing his plans for an early getaway. "Everything's been photographed and examined for fingerprints. Tell me,
Lemuel Vance's eyes followed hers to the red-mustachioed jar. "It's for etching aluminum plates. Mostly we use copper or zinc, but I like the kids to know how to do it all. Or at least be familiar with the techniques. Funny," he said slowly, "I just ordered a fresh batch last month. The first in-hell, must be nearly five years."
"Oh?"
"Yeah. Like I said, we don't use much aluminum. As you can tell, that jar's an old one. I just dumped the new stuff in on top. But it was delivered to the office upstairs. I remember Sandy reading off all the warnings out loud. Jesus! Now I remember Riley saying it sounded like something the cafeteria could use to jazz up the soup!"
"Who else was there?" Sigrid asked sharply.
Vance shrugged. "I don't know. The usual crowd, I suppose."
"Ross, Saxer, Leyden?"
Vance nodded.
"Harris, Simpson… or Szabo?"
"No. Szabo comes up to talk to Leyden once in a while, but that's usually in Leyden's office, not out with the rest of us in Sandy 's office." Vance's brow furrowed in deeper concentration. "I don't remember Bert Simpson. Harris? No-Oscar was right about him not coming up much. Who else? David Wade definitely wasn't because he always sits on the corner of Sandy 's desk, and that's where Jake Saxer was leaning to read off the antidote. Not that you're interested in Wade, I guess, but he's usually up there every break. Young love in bloom, you know.
"Oscar was there, too. He told me to be sure and warn the kids again about how dangerous these chemicals can be. As if I don't read them the riot act every time they touch the knob of this closet door!"
Remembering his facetious remarks earlier about "an eye here, a hand there," Sigrid was bemused by his indignation.
"One final thing, Professor Vance. Hypothetically speaking, how unusual would it look if a teacher or student or any unauthorized person entered this closet?"
"Hypothetically, not unusual at all if they had the keys," Vance answered with a resurgence of his former cheerfulness. "Especially during the morning hours. The hall door's never locked, and this room is usually empty up until noon every day."
"But wouldn't a student think it strange to see a historian, for instance, entering your workshop when you're not here?"
Vance laughed outright. "Are you kidding? Ninety-five per cent of our students wouldn't think an elephant in chartreuse tights was strange unless it squirted them in the teeth and whistled three bars of 'Yankee Doodle.' You're talking about kids with eyes that see not, neither do they hear. Or if they do, they won't admit it. They'll print a plate with fuzzy lines and swear it looks as crisp as a photo to them. You think you've got 'em to the point where they'll start to observe, and the next thing you know…"
But Sigrid, recognizing an ancient grievance, signaled to Tillie and quietly withdrew.