Tillie nodded. "Good prints of Quinn's right index, middle and ring fingers. Nothing else, even though the kid at the snack bar put the lids on, and Keppler touched them when she wrote across them. Looks like Quinn's was wiped clean before he picked it up."
"Nauman's, too?"
"No prints but his," Tillie confirmed from the lab report.
"Now why would the poisoner take the time to wipe both cups?" she wondered aloud.
It seemed logical to Tillie. "Because he touched ' em both. Quinn's when he poured in the poison, and Nauman's when he moved it back."
"Moved it back?"
"That must have been how he got Quinn to take the right cup," Tillie said earnestly. "I've been thinking about how he could have done that."
He brought out the tray Sandy Keppler had used to fetch the beverages and arranged the two lids on it side by side, with Quinn's on the right. "Now, this way there's only a fifty-fifty chance that Quinn'd take the right cup, and our killer wants better odds than that: so he sets Quinn's cup on the right at the very front of the tray, and he puts Nauman's at the very back on the left."
"I'll bet if you offered any right-handed person-and Quinn was, I checked-a tray set like that, he'd take the front right cup ninety-nine per cent of the time. And everybody said Quinn usually got back tot he office before Nauman did, so he'd have first choice."
"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's 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.R.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 note-book 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."
"He 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 quickly marched 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 re-entered the office and closed the door.
"It's been like this all morning," Sandy said hotly. "They're ghouls!" She wore a pink-and-blue-checked 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."