GREGOR DEMARKIAN HAD NOT had an effortless, smoothly crescendoing career. He had faced his share of disbelief on the part of superiors and resistance on the part of local law enforcement officials. He knew that with the way he worked, that sort of thing was sometimes inevitable. It was all well and good for magazines and true crime books and novels to praise what they called “intuition,” and what Gregor knew to be merely a rigorously adhered to commitment to inductive reasoning. It was something else again for people to swallow that reasoning, no matter how meticulously it was explained to them. Even so, he had never been laughed at before, and it rankled. It did more than rankle. It made him feel ready to explode.
Sitting on the other side of the table, David Markham looked ready to explode himself, possibly from an excess of disbelief. Gregor had never thought of disbelief as gaseous before, but apparently it was. Markham looked filled full of it, puffed out at the cheeks and chest and belly. Every once in a while, giggles would escape through his mouth like little bubbles. Sometimes the sheriff held hard to the table, as if he were preventing himself from taking off, like a punctured balloon.
“Look,” Markham said, after Gregor had explained the whole thing for about the fifteenth time. It was nine thirty by now, and the cafeteria was filling up. Most of the faculty seemed to have decided there were more interesting places to eat in Belleville, but most of the students obviously had nowhere else to go. Gregor watched them walking past with trays underfilled by tightly sealed packages of cereal and even more tightly sealed cartons of milk and orange juice, poking at everything as if they could tell by touch if it were poisoned. “Look,” Markham said yet again. “What you’re telling me here is that this boogeyman, the Great Doctor Donegal Steele, is dead.”
“That’s right. Or close enough as to make no difference. After almost three days, there’d be no way to save him if he fell across this table right now.”
“But why?” Markham demanded. “Just because he’s missing? For God’s sake, Demarkian, the man is a nut.”
“I don’t care what kind of a nut he may have been,” Gregor said. “It’s the only thing that makes any sense. Or even could make any sense, unless Miss Veer was poisoned by a random psychopath, and we’ve—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Markham said, “we’ve decided that wasn’t it. Nothing from her tray found anywhere on the floor except the tea and it couldn’t have been the tea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But—”
“But nothing. Markham, think, will you please? Yesterday Miss Maryanne Veer had a perfectly ordinary day except for one thing, and that was that she decided she had to call the police and report Donegal Steele missing. The only reason anyone could possibly have wanted to hurt her was to stop her from doing that.”
“You know, we’ve been through all of this a little while ago. Never mind the simple fact that it would be insane to try to murder somebody with lye just to keep them from making a phone call—”
“Remember me?” Gregor said. “I was the one who told you yesterday that I didn’t think the point was to murder Maryanne Veer.”
“Well, for God’s sake, if whoever it was didn’t want to murder her, all he had to do was cosh her, right? Why go through this complicated and very nasty rigmarole with lye?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said, “but I do have a theory—”
“Oh. Another theory.”
“Will you please stop that? I think there’s some kind of time limit. It’s not that our murderer wants to stop any search for Donegal Steele permanently. It couldn’t be done. It’s that he, or she, wants to stop it for a certain period of time—”
“What period of time?”
“I don’t know. But something is going to happen. Something our murderer can’t make happen by himself—”
“Or herself.”
“Right. The trick was to take our minds off Donegal Steele until the time came. And what happened to Maryanne Veer was perfect.”
“Except that it wasn’t,” Markham pointed out. “Here you are, talking about the death of Donegal Steele and wanting me to pull men off a major investigation to go look for him, when I haven’t got that many men to begin with—and when you still haven’t given me one good reason—”
Gregor held up a finger. “I’ll give you several. One, Donegal Steele has been missing since sometime on the evening of the twenty-eighth. He missed both his classes and his office hours on the twenty-ninth, without notifying anybody of his intent to be absent, which, according to what we’ve been hearing, was not like him. The last person to see him as far as we know was Jack Carroll, who told me Steele was on his way to pop beers. That’s—”
“I know what popping beers is, Demarkian. I’ve done enough of it in my time. That’s a reason to assume the man’s been hung over someplace or involved in a traffic accident.”
“Have you had any reports of a traffic accident?”
“Demarkian—”
“Two”—Gregor held another finger up—“there is no other reason for anyone to have attacked Miss Veer in the way and at the time she was attacked.” Markham started to protest. Gregor held up another finger. “Three, half the people on this campus hated the man with a passion. Four, Steele’s just the type to get himself murdered—and don’t snort, Markham, there are types—from all reports, he’s abrasive, arrogant, aggressive, and psychologically ugly. Five, that bird has been circling over Constitution House, acting entirely out of character since Steele disappeared.”
“Fine,” Markham said, “now you want me to take into account the psychological functioning of a bird.”
“Ravens are carnivores, Markham. And they’ll spot carrion.”
“If Donegal Steele had been dead and stashed for over two days in Constitution House, somebody would have noticed the stink by now.”
“I didn’t say he’d been dead for two days. You know how hard it is to kill somebody with lye. It’s practically impossible to get them to ingest enough under any circumstances. Lye burns.”
“You think somebody spiked his food with lye—”
“Beer,” Gregor corrected. “Beer would be a good thing to spike with lye, especially if the victim was going to drink it from a can, because it fizzes anyway.”
“Except that when you pop beers, you start with an unopened can. Then you punch a hole in the bottom, hold the can over your mouth, and pull the tab. How’s the lye supposed to have gotten into the can?”
“I don’t know.”
“There are a lot of things you don’t know,” Markham said.
Gregor sighed. “I realize that. I realize a lot of things. I know this is going to be impossible to prove until we find not only a body, but the way the lye was delivered. I know it’s going to be impossible to prosecute even after we find all of that unless we come up with a motive that fits in with the rest of this. I can think of three possible people with motive, opportunity, and the interior disposition to kill Steele and maim Miss Maryanne Veer. The problem is—”
On the other side of the table, Markham’s eyes were widening. Amusement seemed to be passing over entirely into shock. “Three people,” he said. “You’ve got suspects for this crazy idea of yours?”
“Of course I do. Jack Carroll. Ken Crockett. Alice Elkinson.”
“Why those three? Why not Katherine Branch? She’s the one who was just here trying to implicate a man you think is dead, which seems to me a very good ploy for somebody who’s just—”
“Katherine Branch couldn’t have Both poisoned Maryanne Veer and picked up the evidence afterward. She wasn’t in the dining room when Miss Veer fell. Later, after she did get to the dining room, she spent all her time lying on the floor in a corner all the way on the other side from where Miss Veer’s tray fell, dressed up as a witch.”
Markham pounded his fist against the table, scattering his papers again. “All right then, what about Chessey Flint? She was right where she’d have to be. According to what you say Jack Carroll told you, Steele’s been telling lies on her for two months.”
“True. And if Miss Veer had been coshed, as you put it, I’d be with you. But lye, while Chessey was sitting right there looking at her, after she’d already seen its effects on Donegal Steele. Not Chessey Flint. Chessey Flint is one of those girls who will always have somebody else to do their heavy work for them.”
“You mean Jack Carroll,” Markham said.
“That I do. It fits with Steele’s body being in Constitution House, too. Jack Carroll and Ken Crockett were fast friends. Carroll would have been in Constitution House plenty of times. I’d guess the situation with Chessey was heating up, too. I can see Carroll marching up to Steele’s apartment and insisting on having it out. I can’t see Chessey doing that.”
Markham cocked his head. “What about the other two? Ken and Alice. Jesus Christ. I sound like I’m talking in movie titles.”
Gregor smiled slightly. He thought Markham was going to be accusing him of worse than movie titles in a minute. “For Alice Elkinson,” he said slowly, “I’d guess rape.”
“What?”
“It fits, too,” Gregor said blandly. “Katherine Branch told us Steele was bothering Alice Elkinson. Jack Carroll told me about Steele’s attitude to women and sex, which, quite frankly, sounded to me like the excuses of half the rapists I’ve ever come in contact with. The other half think all the women on earth are asking for it, specifically from them. Then you’ve got that business Katherine Branch told us about the lye. If Steele brought lye to Alice Elkinson’s apartment, then Alice Elkinson had easy access to lye, and Steele had private access to Alice Elkinson.”
Markham sighed. “All right,” he said, “let’s hear it for Ken Crockett. And if you’re going to say he was protecting Alice Elkinson—”
“I wasn’t.” Gregor looked down at the tray in front of him. He had gone back up for coffee more than once since he had begun to explain his theory to David Markham, but now the cups spread out across the pale blue plastic were all empty again, and he thought he might have drunk too much. He didn’t usually have problems with caffeine, but he was feeling twitchy.
“You know,” he said, “to my mind, Ken Crockett is the most interesting of the three. I’ve been told he’s local.”
“Very local,” Markham said. “I was the one who told you. His family is about the biggest thing in Belleville.”
“Am I right in assuming that until the arrival of Donegal Steele, he had every reason to assume he’d be the next Head of the Interdisciplinary Program in the American Idea?”
“You’d have to ask some of the academia nuts about that,” Markham said. “I’d say in town, though, we wouldn’t have been surprised. But, Mr. Demarkian, you can’t possibly be suggesting that Ken Crockett would kill one person with lye and maim another just to end up Head of the Program. Especially not now. If Steele had been named Head of that Program, or anything else, I’d have heard.”
“No, Steele hadn’t been named Head of the Program. But I was talking to Bennis Hannaford yesterday, and this came up, as a side issue to something else. And she pointed out, rightly I think, that there wasn’t much of any other reason for Steele to be here. His ideas on education weren’t popular, but they were famous. He could probably have his pick of campuses with one or two exceptions. And they paid him a lot of money to get him to come here. Why else would they do that if they weren’t expecting to put him in the Head’s seat?”
“Maybe none,” Markham admitted, “but still—”
“But still, it’s a weak motive,” Gregor agreed. “That’s why I’m so interested in the local connection. What might not have mattered so much to someone from out of town might have mattered a great deal to Ken Crockett. What might have been a major career embarrassment and a reason for taking off for parts unknown to someone else, might have been the worst-case scenario to someone who had his whole life and his whole reputation built around this town.”
Markham leaned back, closed his eyes, and let out a long, low raspberry. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “You’re a very plausible man, do you know that, Mr. Demarkian? You’re the most plausible man I’ve ever met. You do realize this is still all pie-in-the-sky, don’t you?”
“No,” Gregor said.
“Well, it is.”
Markham stood up. The shirt he was wearing was made out of some kind of cheap synthetic fabric, shiny and stiff, and it caught on the crest of his beer gut. Standing there like that, he looked more local yokel than ever, and more phony. Gregor wanted to tell him to sit down and behave like a human being.
Since Gregor didn’t say anything, Markham got his hat off the table, jammed it onto his head, and began gathering his papers into one final pile. Gregor doubted he would ever look at them again, or, if he did, that he would ever find anything he wanted in them. Markham stuffed the papers into the inside pocket of his jacket—they didn’t exactly fit—and stretched.
“If you’re not going to be sensible and come along with me,” the sheriff said, “I’m going to go by myself. You’re sure you want to spend your time hacking around on this wild-goose chase of yours?”
“It’s not a wild-goose chase,” Gregor said.
Markham tipped his hat, spun around, and marched away toward the cafeteria’s doors.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, GREGOR Demarkian headed for the cafeteria doors himself. He should have left immediately after Markham, and he knew it, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to. Maybe it was that his head was still caught up in motives, and especially Ken Crockett’s motive. He kept feeling there was something missing in the picture he had gotten of the man, and it irked him. Maybe it was just that so many students stopped beside his table once he was alone, mostly to ask about the lecture he’d be giving that night and to probe into his credentials. It surprised him a little, how rigid these young people were about background and training. It was as if they didn’t believe anyone could know anything about everything if they hadn’t learned it in school.
It was after ten when he finally got up and got moving. The cafeteria was in the middle of its switch from breakfast to lunch. Students dressed in white coats like medical students were bringing large trays of sandwiches into the main cafeteria room from the back and laying them out where the Swedish meatballs and roast beef au jus had been the day before. The sandwiches were hermetically sealed in plastic and looked terrible. Gregor thought the cheese ones looked made out of cellulose and possibly more lethal than lye. As he was passing down the line, he heard one of the working students refer to the sandwiches labeled “meatball” as “mystery meat,” and he didn’t blame her.
He walked through the foyer, out the doors, down the front steps, and came to rest at the edge of the quad. It was a late Thursday morning and presumably a time when the campus was occupied with lectures and seminars, but he didn’t think any of that was actually getting done. The quad was jammed with students and pounding with music. The crowd extended, unbroken like a sea, all the way past the Minuteman statue and out the other side, presumably into Minuteman Field. Gregor couldn’t see that far because his vision was blocked by both buildings and people. No matter how tall he was—and he was tall—there always seemed to be someone taller in his line of sight. He walked down to the path and pushed his way gently through clutches of giggling boys and girls. They had never seemed physically bigger to him. They had also never seemed so childish.
He was winding his way in and out of people, in and out of groups so firmly packed they would have been harder to break up than a hydrogen atom, when he felt a tug on his sleeve and turned to see an immensely tall boy in a Dracula suit leaning over him. The makeup the boy was wearing was too realistic to be comfortable. The fangs that grew out from under his upper lip and down across his mouth and chin seemed to be tipped with real blood. Gregor wanted to tell him to get the hell out of here until he’d washed his face. Then the boy leaned forward, smiled a little, and said, “Mr. Demarkian?” in a voice so tentative, it could have come from a six year old, and Gregor found himself sighing once again.
“Yes,” he said, “I’m Gregor Demarkian. If you want to know what my talk is going to be about, you’re going to have to come to it.”
The boy looked confused. “Your talk,” he said. “I’m coming to your talk. We all are.”
“I hope you don’t mean the whole college,” Gregor told him. “From what I’ve seen so far, there isn’t anyplace the whole college would fit.”
“I mean all of us—us,” the boy said, and shrugged. He obviously thought us—us ought to explain it all, which it didn’t. He turned away and looked off into the crowd for a moment and then turned back, an hiatus he seemed to need just to get the subject changed. “Listen,” he said. “I’m Freddie? Freddie Murchison?”
“Yes?” Gregor said.
“I’m a friend of Jack Carroll’s. We haven’t met, but I brought some things up to Father Tibor’s room for you yesterday afternoon. Me and Max. Picnic baskets.”
“Oh,” Gregor said. That didn’t sound very gracious. He added, “Thank you.”
“You don’t have to say thank you,” Freddie told him. “It’s like Jack says, I’m six five. I’ve got responsibilities. No. The thing is, I was wondering, have you seen Jack?”
“Do you mean Mr. Carroll?”
“Mr.—yeah, I guess I do.”
“Do you mean today?”
“Of course today.” Now the boy looked worse than confused. He was not, Gregor thought, a very smart boy. He wasn’t a very mature one, either. Gregor began to feel a little guilty. He was preoccupied, but that wasn’t any reason for putting this boy through what one of his nieces called The Grown-Up Rag. This particular niece of his had just turned seventeen.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m afraid my mind is on something else. You’re looking for Jack Carroll? Why? Is he missing?”
“Yeah,” Freddie said, “he’s missing. I’ve been looking for him all day. And you know what’s weird? Chessey’s missing, too.”
“Chessey Flint?”
“Right.” Freddie obviously thought that everybody, even the President of the United States, must know who “Chessey” was and that she was the girlfriend of Jack Carroll. It was information in the atmosphere, like the fact that the Pope was Polish and Ozzie Osbourne was being persecuted by the middle-class mothers of America. He turned around and stared into the crowd for a moment, as if he expected one or the other of the reigning deities of Independence College to materialize in front of his eyes. Then he turned back again.
“The thing is,” he said, “it’s really important for me to find Jack. It’s really important for all of us. Nothing is getting done.”
“Is there a lot to get done?”
“Oh, yeah,” Freddie said. “The bonfire’s tonight. Do you know about the bonfire?”
“Of course I do.”
“Yeah, I guess everybody knows about it. Jack’s president of students. He’s supposed to be running things. And he’s not here.”
“I could see where that would be a problem.”
“It’s not like we don’t know what to do,” Freddie said. “I mean, Jack’s a good organizer, if you get the picture. We’ve got it all set up. But he’s supposed to be here.”
“Have you tried—”
“I’ve tried everything,” Freddie said. “I went to his room. I went to Chessey’s room. I couldn’t even find Evie Westerman. Hell, Mr. Demarkian, I went all the way up to that Climbing Club cabin and all I got was zip.”
“Zip,” Gregor repeated dubiously. And then he began to smile.
And smile.
And smile.
Jack Carroll.
Chessey Flint.
Evie Westerman.
All missing.
Oh, Lord. There was only one explanation for his having missed this one, and that was that he had to be getting old.
He thought of that figure up on King George’s Scaffold in the early hours of the morning, capering around in its bat suit, and nearly laughed out loud.
Then he saw Freddie Murchison staring at him in alarm—the boy had to think he was crazy—and made himself calm down. He clasped Freddie on the back in just the hearty way he had hated adults for when he was in college and said, “Don’t worry about it. I’m sure Jack will be back in time for the bonfire. He struck me as a very responsible young man.”
“Well, yes,” Freddie said, “that’s the point, isn’t it? I mean, Jack never misses out, not on anything, so what I want to know is, where the Hell has he gotten to? I mean,
Mr. Demarkian, with the stuff that’s been happening around here, I think—”
“Don’t think,” Gregor said. “Go play. Mr. Carroll will be back.”
“Mr. Demarkian—”
Gregor didn’t hear the rest of it. He didn’t want to hear the rest of it. He was bopping along the path, working his way back to Constitution House, in the best mood he’d been in since he first stepped onto this campus the day before. It was remarkable how much easier it was to make his way through the crowd once he was in a good and hopeful mood.
As for the rest of it, in his private—and soon to be not so private—opinion, David Markham was a goddamned fool.