“It occurred to me,” Gregor told Tibor, “that I had no right to assume that when Miss Veer’s tray fell, all its contents scattered in the same general direction. The cup was right next to her left foot. I didn’t see her tray—”
“I did, Krekor. It went toward the table closest to her, toward the windows. When it fell, Chessey Flint picked it up.”
“What did she do with it?”
“Put it on the table in front of her. It was automatic, I think, Krekor. She is a girl who has been brought up to that kind of politeness.”
“Maybe. We’ll get back to that later. The tray went toward the windows. Fine. There’s nothing to say that whatever else was on it also went toward the windows. Miss Veer was standing very close to the cash register. It makes as much sense to think that something might have fallen in that direction.”
“Do you mean you think you were wrong, Krekor? No one has taken the sandwich or whatever it was? It has simply fallen where we have not seen it?”
“If it did, it didn’t fall toward the cash register. I could see all the way under the cash register stand, the tray-rest and the food service tables, all the way back to that wall with the canisters on it, from where I was standing when I was talking to David Markham.”
“Oh.”
They had reached the steel-tube tray-rest and the cash register, the clear plastic-fronted dessert display and the large bucket of crushed ice stuffed with cans of Coke and Dr Pepper and carbonated lemonade. Gregor noticed a few things he hadn’t before: little straw baskets full of Halloween spaced out along the top of the plastic shield of the food display; a wart-faced, grey-skinned witch’s mask hung on the hot-water canister; a mummy rising up out of the ice next to a can of Vernors ginger ale.
“It’s got to be something small,” he told Tibor. “It might even be a piece of food, but I’m not expecting to get that lucky. Pick up anything you find.”
“I am likely to find a lot of things, Krekor. Lost earrings. Money.”
“Leave the money on the edge of the cash register. That’s not what we’re looking for.”
“Krekor.” Tibor hesitated, so-long and in such an uneasy way that Gregor began to become alarmed. Then he brushed at the front of his cassock and straightened up. “Krekor, do you believe what you said to David Markham, that the people who work in the cafeteria are the most likely suspects?”
“Yes and no.”
“What does that mean, Krekor, yes and no?”
“Yes, because they have the best access to the food. You have to take that into consideration, Tibor, whether you like it or not. There’s always the chance that what we’re dealing with here is a lunatic, like the man who put the cyanide in the Tylenol capsules.”
“Did they catch that person and know he was a man, Krekor?”
“I don’t remember. It happened when Elizabeth was sick.”
“Why the no?”
“A lot of reasons,” Gregor said. “In the first place, a lunatic wouldn’t have bothered to get rid of the evidence, especially not at the risk of exposing himself. Why should he bother? The frightening thing about incidents of that kind is that they so seldom leave anything that actually points to anybody in particular. In this situation, it would have been easy to set it up in a way that left him completely in the clear. The victim would be random. Our lunatic wouldn’t be singled out as a man with a motive. It would be easy to throw suspicion on somebody else. He only had to put the lye in the food in a section of the line where he wasn’t working. Why leave the line to pick up what remained of the food, in full view of a hundred or so people, a fair proportion of whom could identify him? If he was par for the course at this sort of thing, he’d be happy to have the rest of us know just what he’d done and how he’d done it. The only thing he’d be trying to protect is the who.”
“What else?” Tibor asked.
“What else should be obvious, Tibor. The Tylenol incident and things like it make the papers and cause a lot of fuss, but the reason for that is that they’re out of the ordinary. Stranger-to-stranger crime is rising, of course, because of the drug problem, but in ninety-nine percent of the cases, in murder and in attack, the victim and the victimizer not only know each other but know each other well. If the food hadn’t disappeared, I would have had to assume a lunatic, on practical grounds. With the food gone, I have to assume something else.”
“You are sure the lye was not put into the tea, Krekor?”
“Positive. There was lye mixed with the tea by the time the tea hit the floor. It was hissing away like a snake at her feet just before she keeled over. She would never have drunk it if she heard it doing that.”