Quoth the Raven

by Jane Haddam

  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.

  2

  THE 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.”

  Katherine Branch made a face. “Oh, Alice,” she said. “Alice will be cooperative. Alice makes a goddamned career out of cooperating in her own oppression.”

  “Mizz Elkinson is a very gracious lady,” David Markham said fatuously.

  Katherine Branch corrected him. “Dr. Elkinson,” she said. “Believe it or not—and I find it very hard to believe, under the circumstances—Alice has the best degree on this campus with the exception of that shit Donegal Steele. Who, by the way, is who I think did in Miss Maryanne Veer. Not that he had anything to worry about from her, even if he thought he did. She wasn’t going to go out kicking. Not Miss “if-you-can’t-behave-like-a-lady,-you-shouldn’t-be-out-in-good-company’ Veer. I think he just got so damned tired of having his papers copied by someone he couldn’t feel up, he offed her.”

  “Nobody’s offed her yet,” Gregor said. “The last I heard, she was in the hospital and doing quite well, considering.”

  “Doing very well, considering,” David Markham said. His drawl was nearly gone, but Katherine Branch didn’t notice that either.

  She took a long sip of her coffee. “I just hope this wakes her up,” she said. “I just hate it when women worship men. Alice, Miss Veer. It’s so damned stupid. We’re supposed to be smarter than that.”

  “How can you think Miss Veer was—attacked—by Donegal Steele?” Gregor asked her. “I thought Dr. Steele was away from campus for some reason.”

  “Well, he hasn’t been around, if that’s what you mean,” Katherine said. “It’s been a blessing to all of us, let me tell you. But he’s the one with the lye, isn’t he?”

  “What?” David Markham sat straight up in his chair. “What do you mean, he’s the one with the lye?”

  Katherine Branch was practically purring—and Gregor finally twigged something himself. Of course, she wasn’t so naive as to believe that David Markham could arrest her for not talking to him. That was beyond the silly. She was here because she had something to say, and this was it.

  Sea changes, Gregor decided a minute later, were a matter of psychological aura. The way they happened could almost make him believe in the paranormal. Markham was too shocked to go on with his local yokel pose with any consistency. Looking at him was like looking at one of the reflections in a fun house mirror. Every time he moved, his image changed. But Katherine Branch was the real shock. Her defensiveness had vanished. So had her air of petty complaint, that strange body-language suggestion that she was about to attack from a position of weakness. There wasn’t a damned thing weak about her now. All she needed to turn herself into the Spirit of the Age was Helen Reddy music playing in the background.

  She leaned across the table, pushed her face straight into David Markham’s, and said, “Lye. Donegal Steele is really big in the Climbing Club, really big on ruggedness, really big on a lot of macho bullshit. And don’t wince every time I say ‘shit,’ Markham. It’s a good old Anglo-Saxon word.”

  “It’s not very ladylike,” Markham said, but the twang was faint and the words were automatic.

  “I am not ladylike,” Katherine Branch told him.

  “What does all this have to do with Dr. Donegal Steele having lye?” Gregor demanded.

  Katherine Branch pulled away from Markham and turned to him. “Macho bullshit,” she repeated. “Steele is always going on and on about how the college boys need to toughen up and be men and God only knows what. You’d think it all went out with the Neanderthals. In the old days the Climbing Club cabin up on Hillman’s Rock used to have outhouses instead of plumbing. The outhouses are still there, but nobody’s used them in years. Steele wants to open them up again.”

  “You mean Chessey Flint was right yesterday?” Gregor asked. “She did see buckets of lye up at that cabin?”

  Katherine Branch shrugged. “How the hell do I know? I know that’s not where they were four days ago, though, if they were Steele’s buckets of lye.”

  “Where were Steele’s buckets of lye?” That was Markham, in a croak.

  Katherine Branch stood up and shoved the tray away from her, across the table, into Markham’s stacks of papers. Maybe she had done it on purpose. The stacks shuddered and some of the pa
pers fell. She didn’t seem to notice.

  “The buckets,” she said, smiling fully now, completely enjoying herself, “were at least until last Saturday on Alice Elkinson’s back porch. I saw them there. Dear Alice just can’t say no to a man, even if it’s a man she hates. She just has to be a perfect little lady.”

  “Dr. Branch—” Gregor started.

  Katherine Branch gave her tray one more shove. “Here,” she said. “If you two big strong powerful men absolutely insist, I suppose I’m going to have to let you take that up for me.”

  She started to turn away, changed her mind, turned back and gave the tray one last vicious shove. It had all the force of muscles made hard by regular exercise and training in self-defense. The stacks of papers shuddered, slid and fell—first into David Markham’s lap, and then off that onto the floor. Katherine stalked out.

  “Damn,” David Markham said. “Here we go again. Academia nuts.”

  “She’s not nuts,” Gregor told him. “She’s been rehearsing. That was guerrilla theater we just witnessed.”

  Markham was on the floor, gathering up papers. He stuck his head up over the table, threw some rescued sheets onto the surface, and sighed. “Dr. Elkinson. Dr. Steele. God knows who. Why didn’t she tell us any of this yesterday?”

  “She didn’t want to.”

  “Well, we’re going to have to go find them now. All of them. Including the Great Doctor Donegal Steele. Lord God Almighty.”

  Gregor took the papers Markham had been throwing onto the table and started piling them neatly in stacks. Because Markham hadn’t bothered to sort them before, he didn’t bother to sort them now. He was staring out the great windows at his side into the quad, and through the quad at the faint suggestion of the rise of King George’s Scaffold.

  He had just had a funny idea, one of the funniest ideas of his life—and yet it was so perfect, he couldn’t see how it could fail to be true. Of course, he couldn’t see how he was going to go about proving it, either, and that was a problem, but proving it was always a problem. It was what all real police work came down to. Gregor had to trust in the possibility that if he didn’t worry about that part of it, if he just followed his funny idea to its conclusion and made sure it worked out as well in practice as it did in theory, the proving would take care of itself.

  David Markham’s head appeared over the top of the table again. The lines looked too deeply edged on his face. The worry looked too deeply buried in his eyes.

  “We’ve got to get moving,” he muttered as he threw more papers in the general direction of Gregor’s tray.

  “Stop,” Gregor told him. “Before we get moving, there are some things I want to tell you. About what I saw and did last night.”

  From the look of exasperation on David Markham’s face, Gregor was certain the man was going to take the gun out of his holster and shoot him.

  Two

  1

  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 protes
t. 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—”