“Yes?”
Clare gave out another wintry smile. “The rumor going around the bars was that Kevin Debrett had switched that prescription deliberately.”
“That,” Bennis said, “would have been murder.”
“Not intentional murder,” Clare Markey stressed. “Nobody said he was trying to kill the woman. They said he’d switched that prescription and then thought somebody would catch it—the pharmacist, probably. And he couldn’t have known she’d die even if she took the pills. Chances were they’d simply make her feel awful and then—”
“No.” Gregor Demarkian stood up. The chair was hurting him, but that wasn’t it. He had begun to think this thing through, and he couldn’t sit still any more. “It won’t work,” he told them. “It would have been a perfectly ridiculous plan. He would have known she was homeless. He couldn’t have counted on her going to a pharmacy where they would catch the mistake. And if she didn’t and she did, as you said, ‘start to feel awful,’ then what? Wouldn’t she have gone back to Caroline Bell’s clinic?”
“Probably,” Clare Markey said.
“What would they have done there? Reported the mistake? I don’t think so. They’d have taken the pills away and given her a new refill prescription and buried the whole thing. They would have had to. That wouldn’t have done him any good at all.”
“I wasn’t saying he actually did it,” Clare said. “I was just trying to tell you what the gossip was at the time.”
“The only thing that would have done him any good,” Gregor insisted, “is if he had set out to kill her deliberately. Very deliberately.”
“Well, so what about that?” Victoria Harte shrugged. “I wouldn’t have put it past him. It’s just the kind of thing he would do.”
Gregor turned to Clare Markey. “What about you? Would you say that was just the kind of thing he would do?”
“If you mean, would I have found an accusation of murder in that case believable, then I’d have to say, yes, I would. He—worried about murder, you know. The first time he came to my room today, what he wanted to talk about was—you.”
Gregor nodded. He’d file that and think about it later. He turned to Janet Harte Fox. “What about you?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Rawls?”
“Everybody is capable of murder, Mr. Demarkian. We’re all just violent animals until we’ve merged with the Great Unconscious and freed ourselves of capitalist distortions—”
“I don’t want to know about everybody, Miss Rawls. I want to know about Dr. Kevin Debrett. In particular. If you heard that story about him, heard that he’d deliberately murdered that woman, would you believe it?”
Patchen Rawls screwed her face into a grimace. “Yes. especially about Kevin Debrett.”
“What about you, Mr. Chester?”
“I’d think it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Dan Chester said. “Kevin was ambitious. Kevin was even ruthless sometimes. He was not a psychopath.”
“Senator Fox?”
Senator Fox seemed to be hesitating. To be precise, Gregor thought, he seemed to be hovering, a not-quite-corporeal shift of shapes mysteriously bounded by the arms of his chair. Gregor found himself thinking that it was true, all those things other people had told him. Face-to-face, he made no impression at all, especially when surrounded by strong personalities like Dan Chester and Victoria Harte.
He walked over to the senator’s chair. “Senator?” he said.
Senator Fox started. “Oh. I’m sorry. I was just thinking. Thinking about Kevin.”
“And?”
“Well, Dan’s right, you know. Kevin wasn’t a—what do you call it? A psycho. He wasn’t. He wouldn’t have murdered anybody.”
Gregor frowned. The answer sounded straightforward enough. It just didn’t feel straightforward enough. “Are you saying that if you heard that story, you wouldn’t have found it creditable?”
“Kevin would never have killed anybody because of greed. He wasn’t like that. Kevin was always trying to help people.”
“Oooh, yes,” Victoria trilled. “Kevin was always trying to, help people. I personally know a couple of people he helped a lot.”
“Mother,” Janet Fox said.
“Kevin Debrett was a saint.” The senator’s voice slid up the scale, getting tight, getting half-crazy. “He was a saint. He was the most compassionate man in the history of the world. He understood me.”