The Headmaster's Wife(156)

If he ever married, Mark thought, he would marry somebody not beautiful but kind.





Chapter Seven



1


It had come to the part in every case that Gregor hated most: the part where there was nothing left to do but wait. Waiting left him with much too much time to think, and his thinking went off on tangents: Bennis, Mark, terrorism, Windsor, the fact that he had once again solved, not the case he had been hired to solve, but a different and connected one that nobody would ever be prosecuted for. It seemed to him to be a deep truth about himself that he could never look any problem directly in the face. He was carrying a Windsor municipal check for one dollar in his pocket, handed to him on the assumption that he would aid Brian Sheehy and his force in the investigation into the death of Edith Braxner. So far all he’d done that was directly connected to Edith Braxner was to let the forensics people know they were looking for something portable Edith might have eaten or drunk while she was in the library. Little or nothing had come out of that so far. Edith had been carrying a box of Vanilla Myntz in her bag, but there was no sign that any of them had been tainted, and Gregor didn’t see how they could have been. Myntz were hard little things. There was a possibility that you could take one and paint it with liquid cyanide, but Gregor’s hunch was that that would have taken much too much time and been too finicky an attention to detail than this murderer wasable to provide. If Edith was in the habit of sucking on Myntz throughout the day, there was no way the murderer could be sure she wouldn’t pop the tainted one into her mouth then and there, voiding the advantage that would come if she died of the poison elsewhere, with the murderer not in evidence. If she wasn’t in the habit, it might be days before she ate the tainted mint, or she might give it to somebody else. In either case she would have gone on being the threat she always was.

“We can only speculate about why it was suddenly necessary to kill her when it hadn’t been before,” Gregor told Brian Sheehy as they walked back up the hill toward the quad. The police tape was still up and would be now for at least a day. Brian Sheehy wasn’t going to take the chance that there was something else lying around that might connect the murderer to the crime. “I can’t see that she could have known anything new about what was going on. Nothing’s happened here in the days since Michael Feyre died. Everything’s been on hold. Maybe she just realized the importance of something she had considered trivial before. Or maybe not. Maybe she was harping on some detail that she thought was unimportant, but that was instead very important, and our murderer didn’t want her around talking when at any moment the things she said could make people think about all the wrong things.”

“It would be good if we had all that nailed down for the prosecutor,” Brian said. “He doesn’t like fuzzy thinking much. Juries hate it.”

“Juries are supposed to,” Gregor said. “But this isn’t as fuzzy as it seems. Edith stuck her nose into everybody else’s accounts. She scolded people for handing in sloppy ones. That means she was at least looking at them. From the way people talk, she was looking at all of them. Wouldn’t you say that?”

“We’ll get Danny to ask the women in the financial office.”

“Maybe she had friends there,” Gregor said, “or maybe those things are left lying around where anybody could look at them, but nobody but Edith did. She’s dead, though, because of the fact that she did And because of the fact that she complained to people about them, therefore letting them know that she did. Somehow I doubt that she realized what was actually going on. If she had, I think she would have gone either to Peter Makepeace or to the police.”

“How do you know that she didn’t go to Peter Makepeace?” Brian said.

“Because he hasn’t said anything yet to cover his ass on the issue,” Gregor said. “I don’t mean I’d expect him to get all giggly and be unable to stop talking about it, but I think he would have said something, something out of the way and in passing, that would at least have lessened the chances that we’d take Edith’s habit of snooping all that seriously. And he didn’t. He never said a thing. Whether he was protecting himself or the institution, if Edith had come to him with a story about how the accounts were being tampered with, he’d have said something to try to distance himself from it and to exonerate the school.”

“He could have done it himself then,” Brian said. “That’s an idea I like. Arrest the headmaster of Windsor Academy for bank fraud, grand theft, and murder.”