Quoth the Raven(99)

Gregor looked out at Ken Crockett and noticed that, although Crockett was as white as he had been since he first came to the hall, he had now begun to relax. The stiffness of his shoulders had begun to melt. Gregor looked away.

“According to some people,” he continued, “Dr. Crockett might even have a secret he was afraid Dr. Steele might expose—but I didn’t like that secret. I hadn’t been able to verify it. I still haven’t been able to. And it was the kind of thing that could possibly be—worked out. If it was true at all. No, what began to dawn on me was what people said when they hadn’t been asked directly about who would be the next Head of the Program if not for Donegal Steele. The official version was one thing. The collective gut instinct was another. And here, I saw, I had a person with a much better motive, a person in a much better—or worse—position, a person far more easily ruined by Dr. Donegal Steele. This was also a person who worked on her car and did it well. This was also a person who had been seen heading in the direction of the parking lot in the hour or so before Miss Maryanne Veer was attacked. This was Dr. Alice Emerson Elkinson.”

Dr. Elkinson was sitting in the seat one in from the aisle, blocked off from escape by Dr. Crockett sitting beside her. Dr. Crockett, Gregor noticed, had gone into a kind of waking paralysis. All his muscles that had begun to relax only a few moments before had stiffened into mock rigor. Dr. Elkinson was far more poised. She glanced to her right, to her left, at her hands and up. Then she said, “Are you accusing me of something, Mr. Demarkian? Of a murder that never even happened?”

Her voice was strong and soprano-clear, but Gregor ignored it. He reached under the lectern for the can of Belleville Lemon and Lime soda and brought it up. Then he nodded to Freddie Murchison, waiting in the wings.

“Let me show you,” he said, “how Miss Maryanne Veer was poisoned with lye, when there wasn’t any other food on her plate but tea.”

There was an ice pick under the lectern, too, just as he had asked. He picked it up, turned the can on its side, and punched a hole in the seam. A hiss came up he thought he was probably the only one to hear. He widened the hole a little, shook some of the soda out onto the floor—he had to do it over and over again to get enough out; even with a reasonably wide hole the physics of the process was difficult—and then reached for the small bag of lye and poured some in to fill up the space left by the missing liquid.

“Miss Veer didn’t have a can of this on her tray,” he said, “but you did, Dr. Elkinson. Now we have to wait a little while here, to let the lye fizz and pop its way to reasonable peace. It’ll never calm down completely, but it doesn’t have to. This is a carbonated soda. It’s supposed to fizz. Mr. Murchison?”

Freddie Murchison came forward, took the can, and picked up the soldering gun.

“Mr. Murchison is going to make a solder plug,” he said. “To anyone not looking for a trick, the can, when he is finished with it, will look to all intents and purposes normal, and as if it has never been opened. So will a can of Belleville’s local brand of beer, which is what people on this campus use when they commit an alcoholic atrocity called popping. That was what Dr. Steele was on his way to do when he ran into Jack Carroll on the twenty-eighth. When someone pops beers, the beer goes down his throat in force and at a tremendous pace. That would have gotten quite a bit of lye into Donegal Steele before he’d have had a chance to react. As for Miss Maryanne Veer, I think what you intended to do was to hand her that doctored can of soda either sometime at lunch or sometime after it. You knew it was what she liked. Everybody did. You fell into a little luck. She was so upset, she didn’t pick up her usual lunch. You stood there beside her right next to the cash register, opened the doctored soda, and handed it to her. When you both got past the cash register and she took a drink, as she started to drop it and the tray and everything else, you took it back.”

“Why?” Alice Elkinson burst out. “For God’s sake, why? Just to end up Head of Program in a small college in Pennsylvania? Whatever for?”

“Just to end up not professionally dead,” Gregor said gently. “What Donegal Steele was threatening to do to you was what he had already done to Chessey Flint—to make you look like a tramp, to make you look ridiculous. He kept coming to your apartment. That’s why the lye was there in the first place, when Dr. Branch found it. Dr. Steele was going to bring it out to the Climbing Cabin, but he stopped by your place first and he left it there, to give himself an excuse to come back. My guess is that he gave you the same kind of ultimatum he gave Chessey, one you had no intention of buckling under—but if you didn’t, the consequences would have been much worse than anything Chessey could have imagined. After all, Chessey’s only concern was Jack Carroll, and Jack believed her. Yours was the entire academic community, because you knew that one thing mattered if you were going to have the career you’d spent so much time working for and yet be a woman. You could not afford to be made to look like what he would make you look like. It would have destroyed any claim you had to be a serious scholar, a serious intellect, a woman on the way up and not just another fool sleeping her way into the good graces of her Chairman.”