“It’s possible, isn’t it?” James said. “It’s entirely possible.”
“How?” Gregor said.
“What do you mean, how?”
“How did she kill him?” Gregor insisted. “You know the particulars of Michael Feyre’s death, I presume. From what I understand, they were common knowledge. How did Marta Coelho kill Michael Feyre?”
“She knocked him out with something, strung him up while he was unconscious, and then staged the rest.”
“Very good. Not plausible,” Gregor said, “but very good.
Unfortunately, that particular scenario won’t fit the autopsy report. But never mind. I can think of a scenario that would. Tell me how she managed to get into Hayes House without being seen on a night when most students and both houseparents were at home.”
“How am I supposed to know?” James said. “That’s not my job. It’s your job. Maybe she was seen. Maybe nobody has mentioned it.”
“There was a death and an autopsy and a police investigation,” Gregor said. “If somebody had seen her on the third floor of Hayes House, where she had no business being either as a resident—which she wasn’t, she’s a resident of Barrett—or as a visitor, somebody would have mentioned it. It would have been in the autopsy report, or Mark would have said something, or one of the other people I talked to would have said something. If the descriptions I’ve heard of that House on that night are in any way accurate, she could not have been on that floor at any time between dinner and when Mark found the body without having been noticed, and she was not noticed.”
James turned away. “So maybe Michael did commit suicide,” he said sullenly. “Maybe she was poisoning Mark because he knew something about her sleeping with Michael.”
“Maybe,” Gregor said.
“You should see the way she’s been behaving,” James said. “Going on and on. Making accusations where anybody could hear them. Making accusations in front of half the student body in the library last night, from what I’ve heard. What could possibly be the point of that except to deflect suspicion from herself?”
“I don’t know,” Gregor said. “Some people like to gossip. What could possibly be the point of this display you’ve put on for me today except to deflect suspicion from yourself?”
James Hallwood froze. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said. “I don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”
He really was an elegant man, Gregor thought. He could play the part of an Oxford don or a Nobel Prize winner in amovie aimed at the sort of people who thought of Indiana Jones as brainwashing. Gregor gathered up the papers—he would keep those; he wasn’t an idiot—and stood himself.
“It has been suggested to me,” he said carefully, “that you bought drugs from Michael Feyre.”
James snorted. “Suggested by Marta, I suppose. That’s what she’s been going around saying. And not only about me.”
“I didn’t hear it from Marta Coelho.”
“Then you heard it from somebody who heard it from Marta Coelho,” James said. “I don’t buy drugs, Mr. Demarkian. And if I did, I wouldn’t buy them from a student. I’m not a fool.”
“Maybe not, but the idea that you do buy drugs is current on this campus, and I have to wonder, if you don’t buy them at all, why that’s so. I also have to wonder about the possibility that Michael Feyre knew you bought them and threatened to expose you for it. He was a blackmailer.”
“He was a blackmailer for sex,” James said, “and he blackmailed women.”
“Maybe he blackmailed men for money.”
“He had more money than all the faculty combined. He had more money than the school’s endowment, most likely. He didn’t need money.”
“Psychopaths need things in ways much different than normal people do. He may not have needed money in the usual sense, but he might have needed to extort it.”
“If he did, he didn’t extort it from me.”
James was glaring. Gregor didn’t blame him. He’d come into this interview convinced he could make Gregor move in the direction he wanted him to go, and Gregor wasn’t going there. James turned away and stared out the living room windows onto an expanse that ended in a large clapboard building Gregor thought might be the Student Center.
“If you’ve come here to trap me into saying something that you can use to arrest me, I won’t have any part in it,” James said. “You might as well pack up and go.”