One Coffee With

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 Pompeu 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.