Quoth the Raven (23 page)

Still, walking up to the dining hall from Constitution House at five minutes to seven on Halloween morning, Gregor had fully expected to find the cafeteria closed. He thought he’d be meeting David Markham surrounded by empty tables and a nonfunctioning kitchen. It only made sense. Instead, he came into the dining hall foyer to find the wide double doors to the cafeteria line open and stuffed with bleary-eyed students balancing more in the way of books than of food on their trays. The kitchen was, indeed, nonfunctioning—there was a neat little hand-lettered sign near the stacks of trays and pockets of tableware that said, “
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE, BUT THE CAFETERIA WILL BE UNABLE TO OFFER HOT FOOD UNTIL 4 NOVEMBER
”—but otherwise business was proceeding as usual. The Halloween decorations had not only been left up, but increased. A jack-o’-lantern cut out of a pumpkin so large it looked like it had grown in a dump for nuclear waste was sitting on the top of the plastic display cover where the hot food should have been, glowing evilly with the interior light of a dozen votive candles.

Gregor passed by the little individual boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes and Count Chocula cereal—he hoped the Count Chocula was a special just for Halloween—and by the little sealed containers of milk and orange juice until he came to the coffee. Then he took three coffee cups, filled them, and pushed the tray along to the cash register. From there, he could see David Markham, sitting alone at one of those tables by the window, surrounded by papers. It was remarkable about those tables near the windows. No matter how crammed the dining room got, there was always at least one of them left open. It was as if the students had mentally consigned a certain number of the best places to eat to the faculty, and neither common sense nor self-esteem could talk them into violating them.

The girl at the cash register was tense—understandably, Gregor thought—so he gave her his best reassuring smile as he stuffed his change into his pants pocket. Then he picked up his tray and, not looking at it, headed for David Markham. Linda Melajian back on Cavanaugh Street had taught him that about not looking at coffee while you were carrying it. For some reason—Linda had talked a great deal about natural balance and the inner ear—it helped you not to spill.

“This is something of a surprise,” Gregor said, as he put his tray down in one of the few spaces left by Markham’s paper blizzard, “I expected to find the place shut and in possession of the authorities.”

The sheriff looked at the glowing tip of his cigar and said, “It would be wonderful if we could do things like that, but we can’t. Not here. This is the only place on campus to eat. We had enough trouble keeping it shut last night.”

“You
did
keep it shut last night?”

“Oh, yes, until about nine o’clock. That was about how long it took for us to get done what we had to get done. You should have heard the screams from the President’s office, though. The nearest town to this is fifteen miles away and the nearest mall, meaning the nearest Burger King, is forty. Most of the kids don’t have cars. Whoosh.”

“What did they do about dinner last night?”

Markham grinned. “Some Dean or other got hold of a pickup truck and went fifty miles to the nearest serious pizza joint. By serious he meant run by actual Italians. Anyway, the pizzas showed up in the dorms around five o’clock and everybody had a party. Like they needed to have another one.”

“I’m surprised I missed all that,” Gregor said. “I was here.”

“You were outside,” David Markham said. “I saw you.” He began to pick up the papers he’d been working on, stacking them in ragged-edged piles without really looking at them. At Gregor’s quizzical look, he shrugged. “My notes. What do I need notes for? I could recite you chapter and verse what we’ve got so far.”

“What have you got so far?” Gregor asked him.

“Not damned much. You know what we were doing here until nine o’clock last night? Taking the food out. All of it. Also looking for available cleaning materials that contain lye—sodium…”

“Sodium hydroxide,” Gregor said. “Did you find anything?”

Markham sighed. “No. The last word on the food’s going to have to come from the lab, of course, and that’s going to take a couple of days. The lab’s up in the county seat. But we did what you sort of suggested yesterday. We opened all the sandwiches. We checked all the pies and cakes for tampering. We did stuff I couldn’t believe. Nothing.”

“What about the cleaning materials?”

Markham threw up his hands. “That was worse. Turns out, this campus is something called a central inventory ordering system. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“It’s this deal where everything the college needs is ordered by one department at one time, to take advantage of bulk rate discounts. The cleaning materials are ordered from there and then sent to Janitorial, and Janitorial keeps them. They had a little problem here a few years ago with a student who tried to unclog a drain by nuclear explosion or something. Anyway, he mixed a couple of different drain cleaners, poured them down the sink and blew up the plumbing. He caused a lot of expensive damage and he could have gotten himself and a lot of other people killed. You mix that stuff, you release fumes that are absolutely lethal. Point is, since then Janitorial doesn’t let the buildings have their own stuff. Something goes wrong, no matter how small, you have to call a college plumber.”

“I take it nobody called a college plumber yesterday,” Gregor said.

“You take it right. There was no lye, and no product containing lye, anywhere on these premises when Maryanne Veer keeled over. At least, not officially.”

Gregor had finished his first cup of coffee. He reached for his second and thought this over.

“You know,” he said, “this is actually a good sign. It means the lye was brought here deliberately. It makes it unlikely to the point of ridiculousness that what we’re dealing with is a Tylenol-poisoning type nut. Unless you found whatever the lye was in when Maryanne Veer ate it, I’d say someone came here yesterday to put Maryanne Veer in particular out of commission in a hurry. And went to a great deal of trouble to do it.”

“We didn’t find anything that came off that tray except the tea,” Markham said. Then he scratched his nose and looked speculatively up at the ceiling. “But you know, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve been working with this now for quite a few hours. And like I said, I’ve known Maryanne Veer all my life. You may not have noticed, you haven’t been talking to as many people as I have, but we’re a little stuck on motive.”

“Ah,” Gregor said. Actually, he had noticed. He might not have been talking to as many people as he should have been talking to, but he had been talking to Tibor. Tibor always knew more than he thought he did. He had also been talking to Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint.

“The impression I got,” he told Markham, “is that the only thing out of the ordinary in Maryanne Veer’s life yesterday was her—concern—over the disappearance of a man named Dr. Donegal Steele.”

“The Great Doctor Donegal Steele?” David Markham hooted. “Well, Mr. Demarkian, if someone had gone after Dr. Donegal Steele with lye, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Hell, I’d go after him with lye myself if I wasn’t a law-abiding type. The man is a complete turd.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I don’t believe Maryanne was worried about him not being around, either. She hated the bastard’s guts. Everybody hated the bastard’s guts.”

“That may be,” Gregor said, “but according to Jack Carroll, Miss Veer was bound and determined to call the police, probably meaning you, as soon as she got back from lunch yesterday to report the man missing. Apparently, he hasn’t been around for a couple of days.”

“Hasn’t he?” Markham shrugged. “He was always blithering about how all this Halloween stuff was ‘infantile’ and anti-intellectual.’ That’s Steele’s kick, intellectual standards. They’re the only kind of standards he’s got, far as I can see. He’d been here about two weeks, he walked into the IGA down in Belleville, walked right up to Ed Leaver’s sixteen-year-old daughter and gave her an ass rub. Girl he’d never laid eyes on in his life, no joke. I had to stop Ed from breaking the asshole’s arm and I was sorry to have to do it. But if you think somebody killed Steele and tried to bump off Maryanne Veer because she’d figured it out—”

“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t like explanations like that. When they come up in mystery stories, they drive me crazy. Besides, I saw Miss Veer for a few moments before she fell over. From the reading I took, if that woman thought Donegal Steele had been murdered, she would have said he’d been murdered. And if she thought she knew who killed him, she would have said that, too.”

“Exactly.”

“I keep trying to think of some reason why someone would want to stop her from calling you and filing a missing persons report,” Gregor said. “If the man is missing because he has been murdered, it can’t be the fact that he was murdered, or even the fact that he was missing, that would account for what happened to Miss Veer. It wouldn’t make sense. This isn’t some tramp we’re talking about. This is a senior professor with a national reputation and a book on the best-seller lists. If he stays missing long enough, somebody’s going to file a missing persons report sometime. If he’s buried out in the back garden, somebody’s going to end up digging that up sometime, too.”

“I think I like the Tylenol-poisoning theory better than this,” Markham said. “Are you really going to drink that third cup of coffee?”

“I may drink two more than that. I’ve got something I want to show you.”

Gregor reached into his pocket and rummaged around carefully for the small square of paper he had folded into an envelope to contain the solder cylinder Jack Carroll had made for him last night. This, after all, was what he had been most excited about on his way to the dining hall. He probably should have brought it up first thing, even though he knew Markham was not as impressed by the original cylinder as he was himself. It was Gregor Demarkian’s opinion that a complete oddity found at a crime scene had to be important one way or another. It at least had to be explained. Now that he knew just how hard one of these things was to make, he was determined to find out what it had been made for. He threw the folded paper envelope, secured with a piece of electrical tape, down on the table in front of him and opened his mouth to make one of those pronouncements he secretly prided himself on as being “oracular.”

He never got the chance. Just as he looked up, David Markham stood. It was like watching one of those sea changes Bennis went through when she decided to be “sophisticated.” Sitting down, Markham had been the Markham that Gregor had come to know, intelligent, traveled, down-to-earth, and a little cynical. Standing up, he was transformed into the worst kind of local yokel, complete with glazed eyes, bad posture, and insincere grin.

“Well, well,” he said. “This is really a pleasure. The little lady has showed up early.”

Gregor winced.

The twang was back.

T
HE LITTLE LADY THIS
morning was Dr. Katherine Branch, looking considerably more normal this morning than she had on the only other occasion on which Gregor had seen her. Gone was the black and white greasepaint. Gone were the leotards and tights—if that, in fact, was what they had been. To Gregor, Dr. Katherine Branch was recognizable mostly from her hair, which had been blazing red yesterday afternoon and was blazing red now. The rest of her was barely recognizable as female. That, Gregor thought, was surprising. He’d had a good look at Katherine Branch yesterday, and she was most definitely female. In his experience, women with bodies that good—and bodies that good took work, especially in women over thirty; nobody got handed one free by the grace of genetics alone—didn’t hide their light under bushels. Or, in this case, sweaters. That was what Dr. Katherine Branch was wearing, sweaters, in the plural, over a pair of baggy pants. She had a turtleneck. She also had something that looked like a cross between a tent and a tunic. The effect was not entirely unattractive, but it was totally asexual.

David Markham was holding out a chair in his best gallant local yokel manner. Katherine Branch ignored it, walked around to the chair next to Gregor and slammed her tray on the table. There wasn’t much on it—orange juice in a little waxed cardboard carton, coffee, and an apple that had been sealed in plastic wrap—but it hit its target with a bang as loud as any sound a jackhammer could have made. She pulled a chair out from under the table, banged it into the floor, and sat down in it.

“If you two white male fascists think you’re going to intimidate me,” she said, “you better get rid of that idea right now.”

“Ahhh,” David Markham said.

Gregor took another sip of coffee. The interesting thing about that little speech was what hadn’t been in it: any real passion or conviction. Gregor wondered briefly what exactly was going on inside Katherine Branch. The signals were mixed.

David Markham had retreated to his own chair and his own coffee. Now he plastered a shit-eating grin across his face and said to Gregor, “I figgered, instead of us runnin’ all over the place gettin’ statements from ever’body in sight, I’d see if they weren’t willin’ to do us the courtesy of comin’ to us.”

“I’m not doing you a courtesy of any kind,” Katherine Branch said. “If you couldn’t throw me in jail, I wouldn’t be here.”

Markham’s twang had been so thick, Gregor was sure Katherine Branch would twig it. She didn’t. She accepted it as perfectly normal. Gregor wondered if she really believed that David Markham could throw her in jail for refusing to talk to him. She was an educated woman. She couldn’t be that naive.

She opened her orange juice, looked deeply inside it—to see if it were fizzing?—and drank. Then she turned to Gregor.

“I don’t have to talk to you at all,” she said. “You aren’t anybody. Unless you pull out a card and prove you’re still with the FBI, you can’t ask me any questions at all.”

“I can always ask,” Gregor said pleasantly. “You don’t have to answer.”

“Damn right I don’t.”

“Of course, I’ve only got one question,” Gregor told her. “And I could get the answer from a dozen places. Dr. Elkinson, for example.”