Quoth the Raven(85)

Gregor was counting to ten. He always ended up counting to ten when Bennis had information to give him. It was practically mandatory.

“Back up,” he demanded. “If you say you saw her there then, I believe you. Why do you think she was in the cafeteria first?”

“Because of this,” Bennis waved her can of soda in the air. “That was what she was doing. Opening a can of Belleville Lemon and Lime soda. She must have just gotten it, too. It was cold, sweating like crazy.”

Bennis was waving the can in the air like a flag. Gregor stopped her hand and took the can out of it. He’d never been so startled in his life.

“Belleville Lemon and Lime,” he said slowly. “This is a local brand.”

“Yes, of course it is. It’s been pointed out to you more than once.”

“It’s in a tin can,” Gregor said.

Yes, Gregor, its in a tin can. Bennis was looking at him as if he were crazy.

“Not an aluminum can,” he insisted.

“It’s some ecological thing,” Bennis said. “You can read about it on the side if you want to. It was in that greener-than-green language that makes me want to nuke the whales, so I never got past the friends of the earth business. All the products of the Belleville Natural Soft Drink Company and the Belleville Organic Beer and Wine Company are—”

“Beer,” Gregor said, throwing up his hands. “Oh, my God.”

“He is having a stroke,” Tibor burst out in agitation. “Bennis, we must get him to a doctor, he is going red in the face—”

“Tin cans have seams,” Gregor said, and then saw they had no idea what he was talking about. But he did. Oh, Lord, yes he did. He got up off the love seat.

“Tin cans have seams,” he said, as calmly as he could. “Aluminum cans do not have seams. Also, they’re soft. I know how it was done.”

“How what was done?”

“How Miss Veer was poisoned with lye even though there was nothing on her tray but tea and the lye couldn’t have been in the tea. Hell, I know more than that. I know who poisoned her. I even know where the body is hidden.”

“What body?” Bennis asked wildly. “Tibor, I don’t think the man is having a stroke, I think he’s already had it. Gregor, have you any idea how nuts you sound?”

Gregor had a fair idea just how nuts he did sound, but that didn’t seem to be important at the moment, and there were things he had to do. It was a relief to realize that for once he wasn’t worried about stopping another murder, about getting to the site of a fresh execution and getting there in time. He didn’t think there was going to be another murder. He did think there was a fair chance, if he didn’t get to the people he had to get to and convince them to do what needed to be done, of the evidence just vanishing into thin air.

He was on his feet, pushing his arms into the sleeve of his coat. They were still sitting where he had left them, gaping at him.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to find David Markham. We’ve got work to do.”





Five


1


THE CALL CAME IN at five o’clock, while Dr. Alice Elkinson was still sitting at the desk in her office, pretending to correct papers under the light of a flex-stemmed reading lamp. The papers were spread out across the gouged and battered oak surface in neat little paper-clipped piles. The stem of the lamp had been pulled all the way over and pointed down, as if it were an examination light in a mad doctor movie of the 1940s. Alice was wasting her time either staring out the window at Minuteman Field or looking up to the wall beside her, where her degrees hung in thin-edged dark wood frames, protected by glass that had been recently polished. Usually when she worked she pinned her hair up, or tied it back with a scarf. Now it was hanging down over her shoulders like a curtain of blond threads. Every once in a while she picked up her red marking pencil, turned it over in her hands, and put it down again.

It got dark early here in October, but not this early. Through the window, Alice could see figures moving back and forth through a half-grey light that looked like ash. She could hear them, too: laughing, giggling, faking sounds of menace and surprise. It was all so different from Berkeley—or even from Swarthmore, where she had started. It was all so different from what she had imagined it to be. For some reason, thinking through to the rest of her life when she was still an adolescent, she had imagined herself in tweed skirts and cashmere sweaters and pearls, under Gothic arches. It hadn’t occurred to her that she would have to read through papers with titles like “The Effects of Capitalist Structural Paranoia on the Work of Benjamin Franklin.”