One Coffee With by Margaret Maron

out,” he said at last.
    “The technical side will be sufficient,” she said coldly and started to pass him.
    She was blocked by a surprisingly strong arm, and his keen blue eyes were amused at her sudden irritation. Sigrid glared back at him, and he dropped his arm to herald her entrance with a sweeping flourish of his tall lean body.
    “Up the stairs and first door to your left,” he called after her. “Don’t say you weren’t warned.”
    Unreasonably annoyed, Sigrid strode up the steps, her back rigid. She was conscious of Nauman’s mocking eyes following her progress. At the top of the landing a concealed spotlight illuminated a small canvas chastely framed by unadorned wooden strips. At first glance it seemed to be nothing but a matte black square; not even a brush stroke disturbed its smooth surface, and its pointlessness fueled her annoyance.
    As a child, she had been dutifully marched around the city’s great museums, shifting from one leg to the other as her mother lectured on the aesthetic quality of one interminable picture after another. Only the portraits had held her attention, and she particularly liked the drawings and illuminated manuscripts at the Morgan Library. Still lifes and landscapes, if not too fulsome, had also been acceptable. But whenever Anne tried to interest her in nonrepresentational art, she had resisted fiercely. Once when confronted with some paintings by Jackson Pollock, she had rebelled, declared the whole room to be filled with “scribblescrabble baby pictures” and had so dug in her heels that Anne gave up. Even a required college survey course in art appreciation had not altered her original evaluation. She still felt that abstract art was an elaborate put-on, and this plain black square before her seemed to prove it. She dismissed it with a shrug and looked around.
    The rest of the upper hall was in darkness except for a sliver of light beneath the first door. Sigrid tapped softly and at her slight pressure the door slid open upon an injudicious blend of Parisian bordello and American “sweet sixteen.”
    Sigrid’s first stunned impression of Doris Quinn’s bedroom was of its overpowering fluffiness. Bouffant white silk shades capped each delicate crystal lamp, and at all the windows heavily ruffled curtains crisscrossed beneath red velvet drapes and swags, An overstuffed chaise longue was upholstered in some sort of white fur heaped with plush velvet cushions, while the dressing table was swathed in frilly white organza. Sigrid’s feet sank alarmingly into the soft, red carpet, and her eyes were assaulted by coy bouquets of red-and-green roses spangled across a white wallpaper.
    The bed, an extravaganza in beknobbed and curlicued brass, had a curved tester and dust ruffles of lace-edged organza. The puffed silk coverlet repeated the wallpaper’s overblown roses, and it, too, was edged in white lace, as were the pillows.
    In the midst of this froth of white lace Sigrid recognized Piers Leyden’s muscular form as he struggled with a woman’s inert body.
    “Ah, the hell with it!” she heard him mutter. Then he heaved himself upright and staggered over to collapse on the chaise longue.
    “Professor Leyden?” she asked hesitantly.
    He smiled up at her without really focusing, turned over and buried his curly black head in the velvet cushions. “All classes are canceled,” he announced and promptly passed out.
    From the direction of the bed rose a muffled snore. Sigrid tiptoed over, nearly tripping on the thick rug. It was like walking on marshmallows.
    Doris Quinn was visible only from the waist down. A black elastic girdle smoothly encased her softly rounded bottom, and the shapely legs, which dangled over the edge of the bed, still wore sheer black stockings. Her head, arms and upper torso were entangled in a lacy black slip. Frustrated in his effort to remove it, Leyden had abandoned in midstream the whole idea of putting Doris Quinn to bed.
    If she spent the