Quoth the Raven(98)

“At one point in this investigation, someone suggested to me that it was Dr. Steele who had attacked Miss Veer, even though he had not been seen in the dining room at the time and was a figure unlikely to go unnoticed by faculty or students. I dismissed this suggestion out of hand, considering where it came from, but it got me thinking. Because you see, there is one way to commit murder successfully with lye, although I’d never seen or heard of it done. If you can get enough of the stuff down your victim’s throat and then keep him away from any and all medical attention for at least three days, he will die. It’s a nasty way to kill a man, but it could be done. Starting from there, I realized I had two very interesting pieces of information. In the first place, no one had laid eyes on Dr. Donegal Steele since sometime late on the night of the twenty-eighth of October. In the second place, what Miss Maryanne Veer had been doing on the morning of the day she was attacked was worrying about Dr. Steele’s disappearance, making up her mind to call the police and report him missing—and telling at least one person and possibly more about her decision.

“Now, considering Dr. Donegal Steele as a victim was much more rewarding than considering Miss Maryanne Veer. In the first place, he was from all accounts a personally objectionable man. He made passes at women and refused to take no for an answer. When he got no, he got nasty—not physically violent, but slanderous. He tried for a girl named Chessey Flint and failed. In the wake of that failure, he told everyone he could that he had succeeded, causing Miss Flint a great deal of anguish and putting her boyfriend, Mr. Jack Carroll, into an entirely untenable position.”

Gregor looked up at Jack, who had begun to glower and squirm in his seat. Beside him, Chessey was beginning to look panicked, as if she feared an explosion. Gregor didn’t blame her. He had always found Jack Carroll a very controlled young man, but he was convinced that under that control was enough explosiveness to satisfy anybody.

Gregor looked back at his notes and cleared his throat. “In the second place,” he said, “Dr. Steele was a famous man with a book on the best-seller list and more money than he knew what to do with, hired away from his old university by the administration of this college for what was rumored to be a great deal of money and a solid bank of promises. I haven’t talked to the administration about any of this, but I tend to agree with the people I’ve talked to. It was perfectly rational for the faculty members of the Interdisciplinary Program on the American Idea to assume that Dr. Steele had been promised the Chairmanship. It was hard to think of any other reason why he would agree to come to Belleville, Pennsylvania, no matter how illustrious the Program’s reputation might be. From what I’ve heard of the man, it wasn’t the kind of position he could expect to get on any campus where he’d spent a considerable amount of time. He was too abrasive.

“Now, even after I’d figured this out, I was still left with two problems. Unlike Mr. Markham here behind me, I didn’t count as one of those problems that Dr. Steele’s body had not been found. I didn’t think he was necessarily a body yet. What I did count as problems were the following. First, we did not know how the lye had been administered to Maryanne Veer. Second, that we had to account for this.”

Gregor held up one of the little solder cylinders, he really had no idea which one. He wasn’t sure it mattered.

“We found this,” he said, “on the floor under the cafeteria line after Miss Veer had been taken to the hospital. We found other things, too, but for the moment they don’t matter. The problem with this was that we had no idea what it was or what it was for, and, therefore, we had to explain it. It was the only unnecessary and inexplicable thing found anywhere near the scene of the crime. This cylinder is made out of solder. There are facilities for soldering in the shed at the edge of the parking lot behind King’s Scaffold. Yesterday, I had Mr. Jack Carroll take me up there and reproduce one of these. He not only did it, in the process of doing it he created a mess of solder shards very much like the one he had found in the shed on the morning after the last time he had seen Dr. Steele, and very much like the one we found that night, after Maryanne Veer had been attacked. My assumption was that the cylinder had been made in the shed, but I still didn’t know why, or what for.

“Being brought to that impasse, I concentrated instead on motive. I considered first whose lives could be ruined, or might even be about to be ruined, by Dr. Steele’s presence on this campus. I started with Miss Chessey Flint, whose reputation was certainly in a shambles. I went to Mr. Jack Carroll, who loves Miss Flint and wants desperately to protect her. Then I went to the faculty, and I found a curious thing. Whenever I asked anyone who would be Head of the Program if Donegal Steele were not, I was told Dr. Ken Crockett—a good candidate for this murder and this attack, because he was strong, because he was frequently in a place, the Climbing Club cabin, where I was told lye was kept, and because he was known to work on his car in the shed where the cylinder must have been made.”