“Ah,” Gregor said. Actually, he had noticed. He might not have been talking to as many people as he should have been talking to, but he had been talking to Tibor. Tibor always knew more than he thought he did. He had also been talking to Jack Carroll and Chessey Flint.
“The impression I got,” he told Markham, “is that the only thing out of the ordinary in Maryanne Veer’s life yesterday was her—concern—over the disappearance of a man named Dr. Donegal Steele.”
“The Great Doctor Donegal Steele?” David Markham hooted. “Well, Mr. Demarkian, if someone had gone after Dr. Donegal Steele with lye, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Hell, I’d go after him with lye myself if I wasn’t a law-abiding type. The man is a complete turd.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“I don’t believe Maryanne was worried about him not being around, either. She hated the bastard’s guts. Everybody hated the bastard’s guts.”
“That may be,” Gregor said, “but according to Jack Carroll, Miss Veer was bound and determined to call the police, probably meaning you, as soon as she got back from lunch yesterday to report the man missing. Apparently, he hasn’t been around for a couple of days.”
“Hasn’t he?” Markham shrugged. “He was always blithering about how all this Halloween stuff was ‘infantile’ and anti-intellectual.’ That’s Steele’s kick, intellectual standards. They’re the only kind of standards he’s got, far as I can see. He’d been here about two weeks, he walked into the IGA down in Belleville, walked right up to Ed Leaver’s sixteen-year-old daughter and gave her an ass rub. Girl he’d never laid eyes on in his life, no joke. I had to stop Ed from breaking the asshole’s arm and I was sorry to have to do it. But if you think somebody killed Steele and tried to bump off Maryanne Veer because she’d figured it out—”
“No,” Gregor said. “I don’t like explanations like that. When they come up in mystery stories, they drive me crazy. Besides, I saw Miss Veer for a few moments before she fell over. From the reading I took, if that woman thought Donegal Steele had been murdered, she would have said he’d been murdered. And if she thought she knew who killed him, she would have said that, too.”
“Exactly.”
“I keep trying to think of some reason why someone would want to stop her from calling you and filing a missing persons report,” Gregor said. “If the man is missing because he has been murdered, it can’t be the fact that he was murdered, or even the fact that he was missing, that would account for what happened to Miss Veer. It wouldn’t make sense. This isn’t some tramp we’re talking about. This is a senior professor with a national reputation and a book on the best-seller lists. If he stays missing long enough, somebody’s going to file a missing persons report sometime. If he’s buried out in the back garden, somebody’s going to end up digging that up sometime, too.”
“I think I like the Tylenol-poisoning theory better than this,” Markham said. “Are you really going to drink that third cup of coffee?”
“I may drink two more than that. I’ve got something I want to show you.”
Gregor reached into his pocket and rummaged around carefully for the small square of paper he had folded into an envelope to contain the solder cylinder Jack Carroll had made for him last night. This, after all, was what he had been most excited about on his way to the dining hall. He probably should have brought it up first thing, even though he knew Markham was not as impressed by the original cylinder as he was himself. It was Gregor Demarkian’s opinion that a complete oddity found at a crime scene had to be important one way or another. It at least had to be explained. Now that he knew just how hard one of these things was to make, he was determined to find out what it had been made for. He threw the folded paper envelope, secured with a piece of electrical tape, down on the table in front of him and opened his mouth to make one of those pronouncements he secretly prided himself on as being “oracular.”
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.”