“Maybe,” David Markham said, “but you’re making an assumption. You’re assuming that whoever fed her that stuff knew what there was to know about lye.”
“You think the people at this college wouldn’t?”
“I think some of them would and some of them wouldn’t.” Markham nodded across the room. The body was gone, but the small space where it had lain was still empty. It was as if the people who had witnessed Miss Maryanne Veer’s pain were afraid to step into the circle, afraid of a hex. Even Bennis was sitting on one of the tables near the window, smoking a cigarette and looking anywhere but at the place where she had so recently been. Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint were farther away, back all the way to the wall, in deep conversation. Gregor thought Chessey was crying.
“Ken Crockett,” Markham said, “is local, too, from the richest family in the county. I used to be impressed by the Crocketts before I went out to California and saw what rich was really like. Never mind. Rich or not, Ken would know all about lye. He’d have picked it up somewhere. But the rest of these people?” Markham shrugged. “The rest of these people are like Ken’s lady friend, nice little intellectuals from nice little upper-middle-class suburbs, people who have spent all their lives in hermetically sealed, overzoned, planned communities among their own kind.”
“The cafeteria workers wouldn’t be like that, would they?” Gregor asked. “And they’re the most likely suspects, in a case like this.”
“No,” Markham agreed, “they wouldn’t be like that. But I don’t agree they’re the most likely suspects. They’d have had the best opportunity, but I know most of them. None of them is nuts, as far as I can tell. And none of them had any reason to hurt Maryanne Veer.”
“What about Tibor’s friend, that boy, Jack Carroll? I don’t know anything about his history, but the impression I got is that he’s from anything but an upper-middle-class family.”
“That’s true. He’s on scholarship. He works down at the Sunoco to make his pocket money.”
“So?” Gregor said.
Markham sighed. “So I think I’m going to go over there and look for a sandwich or a cheese Danish or something, and if I don’t find it I’m going to treat this as an attempted murder. You going to be around for a couple of days?”
“I’m supposed to give my speech tomorrow, late. I’ll be around until the morning of the first.”
“Good. Why don’t you meet me tomorrow morning, around seven, right here? I think I’m going to want to pick your brain.”
“I’d be glad to.”
“Glad isn’t the word I’d use in connection with any of this,” Markham said.
He had stuffed his notebook into the back pocket of his pants while he had been talking to them. Now he took it out, squinted at it, and sighed again. Then he headed across the room toward the open space where the body had been, parting the crowd in front of him as easily as God had parted the Red Sea.
Gregor waited until he had gotten all the way to the other side of the room and gone down on his knees to look under the table Bennis was sitting on. Then he grabbed Tibor by the arm and said,
“Come on. There’s something I want to see.”
2
WHAT GREGOR WANTED TO see was the floor under the tray-rest just inside the line from the cash register. Talking to Markham, it had hit him all of a sudden that that was where something was likely to be. He couldn’t have said what. It wasn’t that clear. Like a lot of successful detectives—in police departments across the country, in the FBI, maybe in the CIA (although he doubted it; he’d never had much respect for the professionalism of the CIA)—most of what he knew was buried in his deep memory. It consisted of a collection of rank trivialities that added up to more than the trivial, but if he’d tried to keep either the collection or its sum in the forefront of his consciousness, he wouldn’t have had any attention to spare for anything else. Like most men, he wanted to have attention to spare for everything else: for Tibor and Bennis and Donna, for good dinners and enjoyably bad movies; for his memories of his wife. He certainly didn’t want to turn into the kind of neurotic law enforcement officer, retired or otherwise, who used the vagaries of his profession as the background music to his life.
The cafeteria line was entirely clear of people. The medical personnel had left campus with Miss Maryanne Veer on her stretcher. David Markham’s police deputies were spread out through the students and faculty and food workers who had been at lunch when the poisoning happened. The girl who had been at the cash register and the students who had been tending to the Swedish meatballs and the lime Jell-O had withdrawn into a group of their own in a far corner. They were being comforted by an older woman who was probably the college dietician and their boss. Dr. Katherine Branch and her friends were doing their best to fade into the woodwork, near the place where they had laid themselves out on the floor. Their clothes were spattered with pieces of pumpkin pulp and smudges of face paint.