Quoth the Raven(81)

Actually, the ground floor hadn’t made Gregor feel much better and neither had the staircases. He had no idea when Constitution House had been built, but he thought it must have been a hundred years ago or more. Much more. Modern architects didn’t go in for all these nooks and crannies, all these hidey-holes and sliding panels. The place was like some Victorian lady’s dream of a haunted mansion, except that it was built in the Federalist style. Gregor imagined little cells of fevered adolescent patriots, cut off from the fighting of the Revolutionary War, wallowing in paranoia and secret passwords, burying themselves away against imagined harm in the walls of their own college buildings. It was a nonsensical image—from everything Gregor had heard, the American people in 1776 had been extraordinarily commonsensical—but it brought home the point with force. Under no circumstances was he going to be able to search any part of Constitution House without the help of David Markham and his men.

It was after that that Gregor had gone to Liberty Hall, haphazardly in search of Father Tibor Kasparian, and run into Alice Elkinson instead. What he had got out of that conversation was a vague feeling that he was overlooking the obvious, but he didn’t know why. From the beginning, he had felt he was overlooking the obvious, stumbling over large boulders in the dark, skinning himself on sharp protrusions he should have been able to see. The necessity of the murder of Donegal Steele was only part of it. Now it was half past one and he was wandering through the crowd on the quad again, going back to Constitution House. He knew by analysis that he had been wandering for some time—it had been half past twelve when he left Alice Elkinson in her office; it was now an hour later; he must have been wandering—and he felt like a pinball played by an expert on a machine that refused to go tilt. The only hope he could see lay in questioning the one person he had yet to question and the one person most likely to give him accurate answers. Father Tibor.

Gregor let himself into Constitution House, looked with something like despair at its multitude of closed doors leading to a multitude of closed rooms, and went down the short hall in the corner to the west staircase. Besides the door that led to the hall that led to the foyer, the west staircase—like all the other staircases—had a door to the outside. If one of Gregor’s suspects had had a dying Donegal Steele squirreled away in the upper reaches of Constitution House, it would have been no problem at all to get the finally dead body out and onto the grounds without being seen. Professors weren’t students. They had work to do and classes to teach. Do your dirty work late enough at night, and you could be fairly sure that anyone who might have seen you would be safely tucked in bed. Going up the winding stair, Gregor automatically checked for traces of blood—but he had done that before. There was nothing he could see without the aid of a mobile crime unit. That was true even though he knew there must be something somewhere. If Donegal Steele had been dying in Constitution House since late on the twenty-eighth, he was no longer dying—or dead—there now. Anyone who was keeping an eye on Lenore could have figured that out. Lenore had been circling Constitution House since Gregor got to Independence College and, according to Tibor, well before. Today, the bird had lost all interest in the place.

Gregor stopped on the landing that led to Tibor’s floor, pressed his face against the staircase window there, and checked. Lenore was out over the campus, circling so widely she looked like she was taking off for outer space. Gregor turned around, pushed his way through the fire door, and headed for Tibor’s apartment. For once on this godforsaken day, he was in luck. He hadn’t got halfway down the hall to Tibor’s door before he heard the low, rich, explosive staccato burst of Bennis Hannaford’s laughter.





2


“THE PROBLEM WITH YOU,” Bennis was telling Tibor as Gregor let himself in the door, “is that the men you pick for me are always so gay.”

“Gay?” Tibor said. “Dr. Crockett? Dr. Crockett is not gay. Dr. Crockett is in love with Dr. Elkinson.”

“I don’t care what he does for a front, Tibor, the man is gay as a green goose. Trust me. I can tell.”

Gregor shut the door behind him, walking into the living room, and looked down at the scene: Tibor stiff and proper in one of the wing chairs, with books on his lap; Bennis on the floor next to an open picnic basket, eating her way through some kind of pastry that dripped. There were streaks of honey running down her chin, and every once in a while she swiped at them with a finger and licked the finger clean. When she saw Gregor, she grinned happily and took another bite.