Quoth the Raven(73)

“True. And if Miss Veer had been coshed, as you put it, I’d be with you. But lye, while Chessey was sitting right there looking at her, after she’d already seen its effects on Donegal Steele. Not Chessey Flint. Chessey Flint is one of those girls who will always have somebody else to do their heavy work for them.”

“You mean Jack Carroll,” Markham said.

“That I do. It fits with Steele’s body being in Constitution House, too. Jack Carroll and Ken Crockett were fast friends. Carroll would have been in Constitution House plenty of times. I’d guess the situation with Chessey was heating up, too. I can see Carroll marching up to Steele’s apartment and insisting on having it out. I can’t see Chessey doing that.”

Markham cocked his head. “What about the other two? Ken and Alice. Jesus Christ. I sound like I’m talking in movie titles.”

Gregor smiled slightly. He thought Markham was going to be accusing him of worse than movie titles in a minute. “For Alice Elkinson,” he said slowly, “I’d guess rape.”

“What?”

“It fits, too,” Gregor said blandly. “Katherine Branch told us Steele was bothering Alice Elkinson. Jack Carroll told me about Steele’s attitude to women and sex, which, quite frankly, sounded to me like the excuses of half the rapists I’ve ever come in contact with. The other half think all the women on earth are asking for it, specifically from them. Then you’ve got that business Katherine Branch told us about the lye. If Steele brought lye to Alice Elkinson’s apartment, then Alice Elkinson had easy access to lye, and Steele had private access to Alice Elkinson.”

Markham sighed. “All right,” he said, “let’s hear it for Ken Crockett. And if you’re going to say he was protecting Alice Elkinson—”

“I wasn’t.” Gregor looked down at the tray in front of him. He had gone back up for coffee more than once since he had begun to explain his theory to David Markham, but now the cups spread out across the pale blue plastic were all empty again, and he thought he might have drunk too much. He didn’t usually have problems with caffeine, but he was feeling twitchy.

“You know,” he said, “to my mind, Ken Crockett is the most interesting of the three. I’ve been told he’s local.”

“Very local,” Markham said. “I was the one who told you. His family is about the biggest thing in Belleville.”

“Am I right in assuming that until the arrival of Donegal Steele, he had every reason to assume he’d be the next Head of the Interdisciplinary Program in the American Idea?”

“You’d have to ask some of the academia nuts about that,” Markham said. “I’d say in town, though, we wouldn’t have been surprised. But, Mr. Demarkian, you can’t possibly be suggesting that Ken Crockett would kill one person with lye and maim another just to end up Head of the Program. Especially not now. If Steele had been named Head of that Program, or anything else, I’d have heard.”

“No, Steele hadn’t been named Head of the Program. But I was talking to Bennis Hannaford yesterday, and this came up, as a side issue to something else. And she pointed out, rightly I think, that there wasn’t much of any other reason for Steele to be here. His ideas on education weren’t popular, but they were famous. He could probably have his pick of campuses with one or two exceptions. And they paid him a lot of money to get him to come here. Why else would they do that if they weren’t expecting to put him in the Head’s seat?”

“Maybe none,” Markham admitted, “but still—”

“But still, it’s a weak motive,” Gregor agreed. “That’s why I’m so interested in the local connection. What might not have mattered so much to someone from out of town might have mattered a great deal to Ken Crockett. What might have been a major career embarrassment and a reason for taking off for parts unknown to someone else, might have been the worst-case scenario to someone who had his whole life and his whole reputation built around this town.”

Markham leaned back, closed his eyes, and let out a long, low raspberry. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “You’re a very plausible man, do you know that, Mr. Demarkian? You’re the most plausible man I’ve ever met. You do realize this is still all pie-in-the-sky, don’t you?”

“No,” Gregor said.

“Well, it is.”

Markham stood up. The shirt he was wearing was made out of some kind of cheap synthetic fabric, shiny and stiff, and it caught on the crest of his beer gut. Standing there like that, he looked more local yokel than ever, and more phony. Gregor wanted to tell him to sit down and behave like a human being.