Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  “Maybe. But I’ll tell you who else didn’t like him, Jack. Your favorite person on earth, Dr. Kenneth Crockett.”

  All the sticks he could find were damp. The leaves were sodden. Kerosene or no kerosene, it was going to be a hell of a job to get a fire lit. He made a pile of the best material he could find and dosed it anyway.

  “I don’t think Dr. Kenneth Crockett is my favorite person on earth,” he said carefully, “especially not lately. He seems to be metamorphosing into a self-absorbed jerk. And maybe I’m not surprised that he doesn’t like Mr. Demarkian.”

  “Dr. Elkinson was surprised. He told her he thought Mr. Demarkian was a spy. I heard him.”

  “What do you think he meant, a spy?”

  “I don’t have to think anything,” Chessey said. “It’s like I told you. I heard them. Dr. Crockett said he thought Father Tibor was asked to get Mr. Demarkian up here, by the police. He said—”

  “Chessey, that’s ridiculous. The police couldn’t possibly know someone was going to try to kill Miss Veer. If they had, they would have stopped it.”

  “Maybe. But I can see what Dr. Crockett meant, Jack. I mean, the man knows so much about everything. He doesn’t even have to ask you things and he should have to. About yourself, I mean.”

  “He’s a friend of Father Tibor’s. Tibor probably talks to him.”

  “Dr. Crockett told Dr. Elkinson she’d better be sure she didn’t have anything lying around her life she didn’t want found.”

  “Do you think it was Dr. Elkinson who tried to kill Miss Veer?”

  “Jack, for God’s sake—”

  “Maybe they were in it together. Crockett and Elkinson. They’re in everything else together.”

  “I hate it when you get this way. I really hate it.”

  “Look,” Jack said, “Gregor Demarkian investigates murders. That’s what he does with his life. If you’d read the handout for his lecture, you’d know that’s what he has done with his life. Ken Crockett is just getting all academic liberal intellectual paranoid about it, that’s all. Unless he and Dr. Elkinson were the ones who tried to kill Miss Veer.”

  “Jack.”

  “Well, somebody tried to kill her, didn’t they? How’s that cape coming along? When I saw that rip I wanted to kill myself. Forty dollars down the drain.”

  Chessey had actually stopped sewing several minutes ago, but Jack had had no way of knowing whether she’d stopped because she was finished or because she’d become too involved in their conversation to concentrate on stitches. Now she held the cape up for his inspection, solid and seemingly undamaged, a wall of black against the graying sky of evening.

  “It won’t look as good in full daylight,” she said, “but you’ve only got to wear it in the daylight for tomorrow and I figured the point was really the bonfire tomorrow night. Isn’t it?”

  “Definitely.”

  “It’ll do, then.” She folded it, folded it again, and put it down on her lap, a fat black square. “Jack?” she said. “I was thinking. It’s so quiet-up here, and dark. And we’re alone. And this morning was, I don’t know, off somehow. So I was thinking…”

  She let her voice trail into nothingness, a lilting diminuendo that was like music. It struck him that three days ago he would have felt faint to hear that music, and now he felt nothing at all, or almost nothing, just careful, as if the ground were made of broken glass and he was being forced to walk across it on bare feet. He got a wooden match out of his box, lit it, and tossed it onto his pile of sticks and leaves. It caught, sputtered, and caught again. The air smelled full of kerosene.

  “No,” he said. “Chessey, not right now, all right? I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  He wasn’t looking at her, but he heard the music change, and he knew what the change meant.

  She was crying.

  3

  IT WAS FIVE O’CLOCK, and over at Constitution House, Dr. Alice Elkinson had locked herself in her apartment. She had not only turned the switch at the center of the doorknob, but thrown the bolt at the top of the door. Then she had gone to every window in her living room and bedroom and drawn the curtains shut. In the kitchen, she only had shades, and they hardly seemed like enough. Even with all three of them pulled tight, she could see the light streaming in from the porch, making a puddle of dirty yellow in the middle of her kitchen table.

  There were people in this world, and especially on this campus, who thought Dr. Alice Elkinson had had an easy life—and mostly the impression was true. She had always been pretty and she had always been smart and she had come from a family with enough money to let her do what she wanted but not so much that it might have made her crazy. Her abilities had always matched her ambitions. The men she had loved had always loved her back.

  Still, nobody’s life on this earth is an Eden. There had been periods and incidents in Dr. Alice Elkinson’s that she would not like to repeat. What stuck out most in her mind now was her one experience of violence before the attack on Miss Maryanne Veer. She had been a third-year doctoral student at Berkeley and still possessed by that adolescent certainty of her own invulnerability, still walking through a world in which bad things happened only to other people. It had been late on a Tuesday night, after eleven o’clock. She was doing what she always did at eleven o’clock on weekday nights, walking home from the library. Usually, she walked only on well-lit streets or streets lull of people who never went to bed. On this Tuesday night, she had been too tired for that and had taken a shortcut instead. She had been just behind Sproul Hall when the boy had grabbed her, his arm reaching out of a darkness she could not penetrate, his long fingernails digging into the skin of her wrist and drawing blood. She had jerked away from him, screamed at the top of her lungs, and started running. She had gone all the way home that way, screaming and screaming, until the screaming began to feel like one of those Marine Corps war cries that were supposed to help soldiers charge into battle. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had followed her. Nobody had asked her what was wrong. Berkeley had been like that then.

  Later, what she remembered was sitting in her apartment and wondering if the incident had happened at all. It had been so bizarre, she hadn’t been able to keep hold of it. It had not, however, been as bizarre as this.

  After she’d locked all the doors and closed all the windows, she had sat down in the best chair in her living room and made herself be still. Now she stood up and made herself walk back the way she had come, back to the kitchen and the back porch door. She had left the back porch door unlocked and slightly open—which said something. Maybe it said she hadn’t been able to delude herself into thinking she didn’t believe it.

  She took a deep breath, opened the porch door wide, and stepped out onto the balcony. There was nothing back here but trees, no other part of the campus to look out on. What sounds she heard were coming from all the way on the other side of the building, where the students were holding another of their pre-Halloween parties on the quad. If the entire faculty of Independence College had been ax-murdered in their beds this afternoon, the students would still be holding a pre-Halloween party on the quad.

  The problem with the porch was with those buckets of lye Dr. Steele had left with her.

  They were missing.

  Three

  1

  BY THE TIME THE bells in Declaration Tower rang six o’clock, Gregor Demarkian needed a rest—not a nap, not a mental and physical vacation, but the real rest of being outside the pressurized circle of social restraint. He was not tired. It had been years since he had been part of a real emergency, instead of being called in afterward to lend support and clean up. Even in the three murder investigations he had involved himself in since leaving the Bureau, he had served as a kind of consultant. It amazed him that his body still responded so well to the need to overcompensate for its preferred and natural lethargy. He was adrenalated. His mind was working too fast. Every muscle in his body was twitching and jiggling, as if they had been carbonated. He knew all t
he rules of official murder investigations, especially the iron one about how, after forty-eight hours, the odds against catching the killer grew more and more remote by the second. In his experience, it was a rule that did more harm than good. It made people rush and occupy themselves with busywork. It was the catalyst for dozens of unnecessary interviews and hundreds of extravagantly examined blind alleys. He did much better when he gave himself the time and distance to calm down, untangle his emotions, and face the problem like a rational man.

  The problem, at the moment, was finding the time and distance. They were in Tibor’s apartment—he and Bennis and Tibor himself—and the topic on the agenda was dinner. Under the circumstances, it was not a topic Bennis and Tibor were approaching with a great deal of common sense. Bennis was agitated and distraught. She had seen at least one of her sisters die by violence. She didn’t take well to outbreaks of murderousness in her fellow man. Of course, Gregor admitted, nobody did, not even veteran agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. With Bennis, though, the reaction was particularly acute, a kind of psychological nuclear implosion. It made Gregor wonder why Bennis was always so eager to become part of his problems—and so obsessed with filling up her spare time in the reading of murder mysteries.

  For Tibor, the problem was different, more general, pervasive instead of specific. Most of the violence he had seen in his life—and there had been a lot of it—had been both officially sanctioned and rigorously theologized. He had told Gregor once that the most frightening hour of his life had come one afternoon when he was ten and sitting in his fifth-form Political class. His teacher, a pock-faced woman brought in from the outside the way priests were brought in from the outside to teach religion in some American Catholic schools, had delivered a lecture on “the fundamental lie of Christianity,” and that lie had been this: that Christianity demonized violence, illegitimated revolution, and celebrated the weakness of the weak. Change is a garden, she had told them, and that garden could only be properly watered by blood.

  Now Tibor sat in his armchair, white and small, and watched Bennis pace back and forth across the living room. Gregor felt sorry for him. He looked so old and defeated, even though he was actually younger than Gregor himself. It had only taken one undeniable intrusion of the reality of the outside world to knock him back into a frame of mind he probably thought he had forgotten.

  Bennis had come to rest in the middle of the room, with her foot on one of the picnic baskets the boys—Freddie and Max?—had delivered while they were out. She reached into the pocket of her shirt, took out her cigarettes, and lit up.

  “The thing is,” she said, waving her wand of smoke in the air, “the one thing I am not going to do tonight is go back to that place to eat. Assuming it’s even open. If that David Markham person has any sense, he’ll have sealed it up.”

  “If he has, he isn’t going to leave it sealed for long,” Gregor said. “He intends to eat breakfast there tomorrow.”

  Bennis took a deep drag, tilted her head back, and blew smoke at the ceiling. “Marvelous,” she said. “I love macho. I just love it. However, being a girl, I do not have to display it, which is fortunate. I want to go out to dinner.”

  “Bennis,” Tibor said tentatively, “there is so much food here. All these picnic baskets. There is so much food, I should distribute it to the poor. I will never eat it.”

  “Well, Tibor, distribute it to the poor if you want, but don’t distribute it to me tonight. Honey cakes. Doritos nacho-flavored tortilla chips. For God’s sake.”

  “I like Doritos nacho-flavored tortilla chips,” Tibor said. “You open the bag, you put it in your lap, you go on reading. Then in a little while you have finished the bag and you are full, and you have not been distracted.”

  There was a column of ash an inch long on the end of Bennis’s cigarette. She tapped it into the saucer Tibor had left on top of the picnic basket for her to use as an ashtray and said, “Tibor, over there on the couch I have a pocket-book. In that pocketbook I have a wallet. In that wallet I have an American Express Gold Card on which I have charged not one single thing this month. I say we get the van, take the Gold Card, and go find the kind of place where a glorified lounge singer interprets Joni Mitchell music all night and you can drop three hundred dollars on a bottle of wine.”

  “Bennis, please, you are at the edge of what is called Appalachia. There is no such place here.”

  “Oh, yes, there is. Trust me. With this college sitting here and the tuition at eighteen thousand dollars a year—I saw it in the catalog I was looking through when we were waiting for you to get ready to go to lunch—trust me, there is. Just get me the phone book. I’ll find it.”

  “Bennis, I do not have a phone book.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  And, Gregor thought, she was undoubtedly right. In this mess of books and periodicals, pens and pencils and notepaper scribbled over in six languages, there would be a phone book, and probably an entire Encyclopaedia Britannica as well. He had been standing near Tibor’s chair. Now he moved away and went to the window, to look out on the quad. It got dark so early in Pennsylvania, once the switch from daylight savings time had been made. The only light below him came from the globe lamps spaced out along the quad’s sidewalks and the “ghost wands” that so many of the students carried. The ghost wands glowed greenly phosphorescent in the puddles of darkness where the light from the lamps didn’t reach, seeming to move on their own.

  “What’s going on down there?” he asked. “What is it exactly everybody thinks they’re doing?”

  Bennis had found the phone book and was looking through it, sitting cross-legged on the floor and running her index finger across the large square restaurant ads that crammed the yellow pages. Tibor was sitting shriveled up in his chair, looking more defeated than ever. Gregor’s question seemed to give him heart, and he stood up to join his friend at the window.

  “You should have read the material I sent you,” he said. “It is the thirtieth of October. They are having a Halloween advent.”

  “Advent?”

  “It is not meant as sacrilege, Krekor. It is just students having fun. They have a little later a kind of street fair without a street. Students who juggle. Students who mime. Students who do magic tricks. Then they will have a voice vote and give one of the performers a prize, for talent.”

  “Well, that seems harmless enough.”

  “Yes, Krekor, it is harmless enough. It only bothers me that they do it now, with Miss Veer in the hospital and possibly dying. I cannot make it feel right to me.”

  “You ought to try,” Gregor told him. “You were the one who said she didn’t know much of anybody on campus but the people in your Program. There are hundreds of students down there. Most of them wouldn’t have been in the dining room this afternoon and most of them probably would never have met her.”

  “Yes, Krekor, I know. But I will tell you who else will be down there. Jack Carroll and his friend Chessey Flint. And they were in the dining room and they have met her.”

  “What makes you so sure they’ll be there?”

  “They will have to be there, Krekor. Jack Carroll is the president of the students. Chessey Flint goes always where Jack Carroll goes.”

  “Mmm,” Gregor said.

  “Found it,” Bennis said. “Le Petit Chignon. My God, what a name. I don’t even think it’s grammatical. Anyway, ‘Fine Continental Cuisine,’ which is always a tip-off. ‘Jackets and ties required,’ which is also a tip-off. And listen to this, ‘live entertainment for discriminating tastes, Wednesday and Thursday nights.’ She’ll have a piano, a microphone turned up too loud, and an octave and a half in voice range. When she tries to do ‘Chelsea Morning,’ her voice will crack.”

  “Wonderful,” Gregor said. “Don’t you ever like to go to nice restaurants? There probably are a few around here.”

  “I was brought up on nice restaurants. I want kitsch.”

  “Bennis,” Tibor said, “I do not have a tie, or
a jacket, either. I have only my cassocks and what I wear under them.”

  “They won’t object to clerical dress, Father. They never do. It’s Gregor I’m worried about. Do you have anything unspotted, unwrinkled, and unshredded you can wear around your neck?”

  “I don’t have to. I’m not going.”

  “Why not?” Bennis said.

  “Because I’m not hungry, I’m not in the mood for your driving, and I need a little time to walk around, get some air, and think.”

  “Do you really?” Bennis said.

  “Krekor,” Tibor said, “I don’t think I want to—”

  “Oh, yes, you do.” Bennis jumped up, looked around the room, found Tibor’s coat and grabbed it. Gregor had expected her to drop the whole dinner project as soon as she found he had something else he wanted to do. She was like that about his investigations. She hated the idea of being left out of any part of them, even though she knew being left out was inevitable at least some of the time. Tonight, apparently, she was no more in the mood for him than he was for Le Petit Chignon.

  “We’ll call and make a reservation because they’ll expect it,” she said, “but they won’t be full and there won’t be any problem. Then I’ll go put on my dress and make up my face and put on my pearls. I don’t suppose you know how to drive a car?”

  “No,” Tibor said.

  “Well, I’ll just have to be the designated driver. Maybe they’ll sell me a bottle of wine to bring home. Places will sometimes if you offer them enough money and you don’t look like a drunk or a cop.”

  “Try not to get arrested,” Gregor said. “Try to do that.”

  “I always try to do that, Gregor. Go off walking or whatever it is you want to do. Assuming you know what you want to do. Which I doubt. I’m going to have a little fun.”

  2

  ACTUALLY, GREGOR THOUGHT, WALKING out of Constitution House into the quad, he knew exactly what he wanted to do. The snag came in getting to do it the way he wanted to do it. For that, he needed a guide. In this carnival of costumes and extremities, he wasn’t sure where he would find one. He paused at the bottom of the Constitution House steps and looked around. The real action was taking place far away from him, at the place where the sidewalks came together to make a circular frame of concrete for the statue of the Minuteman. At his edge of the quad, the crowd was sparse. He saw a girl dressed up as Carmen Miranda, with enough wax fruit on her head to provide a legion of baby van Goghs with the material for still-lifes. He saw three boys dressed up as bikers from Hell, huddled together, passing around a little grass. The grass made Gregor feel a little irritated, but not much more. He had made it a point to stay as far out of the Great Drug War as he could get, but he was not naive. Outside the grammar schools, practically everyone, especially college administrations, had given up the fight against grass.