by Jane Haddam
The girl behind the counter might not have been a girl. She was skinny and dyed blond and chewing gum. She might have been fifteen or forty. She couldn’t have been anything in between. Evie was giving her the benefit of the doubt.
“Hey,” the girl said through her gum. “Tell me somethin’. You got a boy back there in that car?”
“Yes,” Evie said.
“Thought so. Teenage?”
“I think he’s twenty-two.”
The girl shrugged. “Same difference. I can always tell. Girls come in here with orders like that one, I know they got a boy in the car. Teenage.”
“Right,” Evie said. She folded the sacks into her arms like grocery bags. They were as heavy as grocery bags. They smelled like grease.
Outside, she looked across the parking lot at Jack’s Volkswagen wreck and sighed. She had left Jack and Chess sitting up in the front seats, and now there was no sign of them. The only thing to be said for it was that the parking lot at McDonald’s had to be a safer place to disappear than the last place they’d done it, which was stopped for a red light out on the commercial section of Route 92. She marched over to the car, tried to look through the driver’s side window—it was steamed up; she’d never believed they did that when she read about it in books—and grabbed the door handle. She yanked the door open and found them as she expected to find them, doing what came naturally.
“Except that, before last night, Evie would never have thought that this was what came naturally to Chessey Flint.
Evie threw the McDonald’s bags on top of them both and said, “Oh, crap. Why don’t the two of you just screw right here in the car and I’ll go hide in the trunk?”
Four
1
WHEN GREGOR DEMARKIAN LEFT Freddie Murchison on the quad, he first went directly to Constitution House, springing along happily in what he later decided was a state of utter delusion. He hadn’t paid much attention to Constitution House before, or to any of the other buildings he had been in, except to make mental notes of the routes he had to take to get where he wanted to go. What he found out about Constitution House when he finally decided to pay attention to it was disheartening. It had both a cellar and an attic, both locked, and probably both vast. He had no idea what the arrangements with the keys were. Both places might be being used for resident storage, with keys passed out to everyone who lived in the house. Both could have been off-limits and as hard to get into as the Pentagon subbasement. Or one or the other. Or either or both. Or—. It didn’t take him long to decide that he was engaged in an exercise in futility. In spite of the exploits of Bennis Hannaford’s favorite private detectives, in the real world the police were necessary for more than comic relief or political counterexample. They were necessary to search large areas, for instance. If Constitution House was as big as it seemed to Gregor after his prowl through the ground floor, it was going to take a dozen men to go over the attic and the basement with any degree of attention in anything less than a millennium.
Actually, the ground floor hadn’t made Gregor feel much better and neither had the staircases. He had no idea when Constitution House had been built, but he thought it must have been a hundred years ago or more. Much more. Modern architects didn’t go in for all these nooks and crannies, all these hidey-holes and sliding panels. The place was like some Victorian lady’s dream of a haunted mansion, except that it was built in the Federalist style. Gregor imagined little cells of fevered adolescent patriots, cut off from the fighting of the Revolutionary War, wallowing in paranoia and secret passwords, burying themselves away against imagined harm in the walls of their own college buildings. It was a nonsensical image—from everything Gregor had heard, the American people in 1776 had been extraordinarily commonsensical—but it brought home the point with force. Under no circumstances was he going to be able to search any part of Constitution House without the help of David Markham and his men.
It was after that that Gregor had gone to Liberty Hall, haphazardly in search of Father Tibor Kasparian, and run into Alice Elkinson instead. What he had got out of that conversation was a vague feeling that he was overlooking the obvious, but he didn’t know why. From the beginning, he had felt he was overlooking the obvious, stumbling over large boulders in the dark, skinning himself on sharp protrusions he should have been able to see. The necessity of the murder of Donegal Steele was only part of it. Now it was half past one and he was wandering through the crowd on the quad again, going back to Constitution House. He knew by analysis that he had been wandering for some time—it had been half past twelve when he left Alice Elkinson in her office; it was now an hour later; he must have been wandering—and he felt like a pinball played by an expert on a machine that refused to go tilt. The only hope he could see lay in questioning the one person he had yet to question and the one person most likely to give him accurate answers. Father Tibor.
Gregor let himself into Constitution House, looked with something like despair at its multitude of closed doors leading to a multitude of closed rooms, and went down the short hall in the corner to the west staircase. Besides the door that led to the hall that led to the foyer, the west staircase—like all the other staircases—had a door to the outside. If one of Gregor’s suspects had had a dying Donegal Steele squirreled away in the upper reaches of Constitution House, it would have been no problem at all to get the finally dead body out and onto the grounds without being seen. Professors weren’t students. They had work to do and classes to teach. Do your dirty work late enough at night, and you could be fairly sure that anyone who might have seen you would be safely tucked in bed. Going up the winding stair, Gregor automatically checked for traces of blood—but he had done that before. There was nothing he could see without the aid of a mobile crime unit. That was true even though he knew there must be something somewhere. If Donegal Steele had been dying in Constitution House since late on the twenty-eighth, he was no longer dying—or dead—there now. Anyone who was keeping an eye on Lenore could have figured that out. Lenore had been circling Constitution House since Gregor got to Independence College and, according to Tibor, well before. Today, the bird had lost all interest in the place.
Gregor stopped on the landing that led to Tibor’s floor, pressed his face against the staircase window there, and checked. Lenore was out over the campus, circling so widely she looked like she was taking off for outer space. Gregor turned around, pushed his way through the fire door, and headed for Tibor’s apartment. For once on this godforsaken day, he was in luck. He hadn’t got halfway down the hall to Tibor’s door before he heard the low, rich, explosive staccato burst of Bennis Hannaford’s laughter.
2
“THE PROBLEM WITH YOU,” Bennis was telling Tibor as Gregor let himself in the door, “is that the men you pick for me are always so gay.”
“Gay?” Tibor said. “Dr. Crockett? Dr. Crockett is not gay. Dr. Crockett is in love with Dr. Elkinson.”
“I don’t care what he does for a front, Tibor, the man is gay as a green goose. Trust me. I can tell.”
Gregor shut the door behind him, walking into the living room, and looked down at the scene: Tibor stiff and proper in one of the wing chairs, with books on his lap; Bennis on the floor next to an open picnic basket, eating her way through some kind of pastry that dripped. There were streaks of honey running down her chin, and every once in a while she swiped at them with a finger and licked the finger clean. When she saw Gregor, she grinned happily and took another bite.
“Tibor’s arranging my love life for me again,” she said, through a mouthful of honey. “He means well, but he’s just so bad at it.”
It was Gregor Demarkian’s opinion that Bennis was so bad at arranging her own love life, almost nothing could be worse. So far in their relationship, he had suffered through an avant-garde artist in a black leather jacket and a spiked nose ring, a science fiction writer who believed that computers could be taught to procreate, a Philadelphia lawyer who spoke in what Gregor could only assume to be code, a
nd two rock stars. The rock stars had almost given poor old George Tekemanian a heart attack. All these people had had only one thing in common. They were all extraordinarily beautiful men.
Gregor cleared a place for himself on the love seat, pushing a pile of Mickey Spillane novels to the floor. Tibor watched him do it without protest. Tibor spent a lot of his time pushing piles of books to the floor.
“Perhaps,” Tibor said, “this is the answer to what happened to Miss Maryanne Veer. You say Dr. Crockett is gay and—and using a cover. Yes. So, Miss Veer finds out, and threatens to tell, and Dr. Crockett, worried about his career, decides to—”
Gregor choked. “This is the 1990s, Tibor. And this is a college campus. No one would care.”
“According to Bennis, Dr. Crockett would care.”
“Actually,” Bennis said, “he might even have reason to care. It’s like that Katherine Branch person.”
“We ran into Dr. Branch in the quad, Krekor.”
“Strange woman,” Bennis shrugged. “Anyway, the thing is, there’s a position open here for Head of the Program all these people teach in, right?”
“Right,” Gregor said. Cautiously.
“Well, it’s one thing to grant tenure to someone who’s a little ridiculous, like Katherine Branch. I mean, why not? If they’re politically correct about being ridiculous, it even makes the administration look good. So tolerant, you know the gig.” Bennis had finished her pastry. She reached for another one. “With an important administrative post, though—and that’s what Head of this Program or Chairman or whatever is, from what I can tell, it’s the most important Program on campus—anyway, for that sort of thing, you want dignity. I hate to apprise you of this, Gregor, but 1990s or not, homosexuality has yet to acquire the odor of sanctity most college administrations are looking for in their officially visible members. Neither has being a witch. Neither has being a sex bomb.”
“Sex bomb?”
“It is silliness, Krekor. It is Bennis’s personal theory of what makes a professional image.”
“Well, Alice Elkinson is a very ambitious woman. You don’t put out all those publications everybody’s talking about if you’re not. Under those circumstances, if I’d had a randy old goat chasing me all over campus right before a promotion decision, I would be furious.”
Tibor sighed. “We have been all over campus today, Krekor. We have been talking with students. Bennis has been flirting. I have been serving as bodyguard. If it is necessary to a professional image not to be perceived as a sex bomb, I think it is a good thing Bennis did not become a scholar.”
“I would have choked on the dust.” Bennis had finished the second pastry. She licked her fingers and stood up. “I’m going to go find myself something to drink,” she said, “you people want anything?”
Gregor and Tibor both shook their heads, and she wandered off The alcove kitchen was neither hidden nor very far away. They could both see her opening the refrigerator door, leaning down to get a good look at what was inside (it was really only half a refrigerator), rummaging through the contents. Gregor couldn’t imagine anyone looking less like a sex bomb than Bennis did on an ordinary day: the knee socks, the baggy jeans, the turtleneck, the oversize flannel shirt, the hair either falling or rising cloudlike into the air around her face or pinned precariously to the top of her head. And yet, he knew what Tibor was getting at. There was just something about Bennis Hannaford.
Gregor looked up to find Father Tibor staring at him in concern, and shrugged slightly, feeling embarrassed. He had come up the west staircase determined to lay his theory on the line and proceed from there, but now he didn’t want to do it that way. He had been made a little gun-shy by David Markham’s laughter. He and Father Tibor had discussed the little solder cylinder thoroughly last night, after Tibor and Bennis had come home from the restaurant. Gregor pulled the copy Jack Carroll had made for him out of his pocket and put it down on one of the books on the coffee table. Tibor raised eloquent eyebrows. Gregor shrugged. Bennis had taken to sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the refrigerator and swearing under her breath.
“So,” Tibor said, with an air of being responsible for getting the conversation going, “you are still worried about that.”
“Tibor, you remember yesterday when we first arrived here, when we were up in the parking lot? You were being tickled that the professors, and I think I quote, ‘all fix their own cars.’ ”
Tibor nodded. “Yes, yes,” he said. “It’s very democratic, Krekor, except that I am not one of them. Of course, I do not have a car.”
“What about the rest of the professors in the Program? Do they?”
“As far as I know they do, Krekor, yes.”
“Do they all fix them by themselves?”
Tibor considered the question gravely, as if he’d been asked to give an account of the reasons for the Greek Schism. “Dr. Steele,” he said, casting a surreptitious glance at the wall he shared with the college’s least-liked professor, “does nothing for himself or by himself that he considers menial. Dr. Steele even has a woman who comes in to clean his bathroom. It is very unusual. Also, Krekor, it is one of the reasons he always gives for why he thinks Miss Flint will—will—”
“Leave Jack Carroll and end up in his bed in time?”
“Or has ended up in his bed already, Krekor, yes. He says she will prefer a scholar over a grease monkey. But Mr. Carroll, Krekor, is—”
“I know,” Gregor said. “He’s hardly your everyday grease monkey. What about the rest of them? Alice Elkinson? Ken Crockett? Katherine Branch? Even Chessey Flint.”
“Chessey Flint is not a professor, Krekor. I do not think she has a car, but I don’t know. If it needed to be fixed, I think Mr. Carroll would do it for her, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Dr. Branch fusses around in the shed and under the hood and pretends,” Tibor said, “and often in the shed she leaves a mess. Then I think she takes the car into town and has it fixed by a mechanic in secret. Dr. Crockett and Dr. Elkinson fix their own. I have seen them.”
“In the shed?”
“Yes, yes, Krekor, in the shed.”
Gregor drummed his fingers against a pile of books, The Sociopolitical Consequences of Unilateral Peace, Augustine’s City of God, unabridged and in Latin. Then he reached into his pocket and came up with a folded sheet of paper. It was unlined, flimsy, and cheap, and had been torn off the sort of typing paper pad that could be bought in any small-town pharmacy. The surface interior to the folds had been covered with David Markham’s incongruously small, neat, precise handwriting, in ballpoint pen.
“This,” Gregor told Tibor as he flattened the paper on yet another pile of books, wondering all the time how the damned things had migrated to the coffee table. Yesterday, the surface of that table had been clear. “This,” he said again, “is David Markham’s timetable for yesterday morning and early afternoon, up to the point where Miss Veer was poisoned. David Markham likes timetables. He likes lists. He likes notes. He sheds paper wherever he goes.”
“I like timetables, too,” Bennis said, coming back to them. She had a can of something to drink in her hand. “Those are my favorite kinds of mysteries. You know. The ones with the train schedules and things.”
“This is not a mystery with a train schedule in it.” Gregor looked at her drink again, tried to figure out what was wrong with the can, and dismissed the whole subject as irrelevant. “Now,” he said, “let’s flesh this out a little bit. We arrived here yesterday at eleven o’clock—”
“Quarter to,” Bennis said sheepishly.
“Quarter to?”
“I fudged the time a little,” Bennis was defensive. “Gregor, I know how you are about speed—”
“Never mind how I am about speed,” Gregor told her, exasperated. “I’ll give you my last word on speed when we have this done. Let’s just get it straight. We arrived here at quarter to eleven. We walked down from the parking lot. We got to the quad in, what, ten minu
tes?”
“Not so long as that, Krekor,” Tibor said. “Five at the most.”
“Fine. Five. That puts us at ten of. That means we talked to Jack Carroll at no later than five of. Now, according to what he told Markham, right after Jack Carroll talked to us he went straight to—”
“Chessey Flint’s room at Lexington House,” Bennis put in. “We talked to this guy named Max this morning, Gregor. This thing between eleven and twelve with Jack and Chessey is famous on campus. Everybody knows. Jack Carroll’s been missing all day and—”
“I know about Jack Carroll being missing,” Gregor said. “I even have a fair idea of where he is. Never mind. He’ll be back. Now, we got to Constitution House no later than a minute or two after eleven, and we saw Alice Elkinson coming out, looking for Ken Crockett. Then we came up here and talked for a while before going to lunch. In the meantime, again according to what Dr. Elkinson told David Markham, Dr. Elkinson went to her office, checked Dr. Crockett’s office, and then came back here. She says she got back here at about quarter to twelve. At ten to twelve, she says she got a call from Ken Crockett, supposedly from the Climbing Club cabin on Hillman’s Rock. Where exactly is Hillman’s Rock?”
Over there, Tibor said ingenuously, pointing to one of the walls. Then, seeing the look on Gregor’s face, he got up, went to the desk he had shoved into one of the corners, and came back with a piece of paper of his own. This was a far more expensive example of the art of papermaking than Gregor’s, a thick textured thing stained to look like parchment. Tibor flattened it out on the one clear space on the coffee table, and Gregor read the legend that was written across the bottom in sweeping, embossed calligraphic script: A Visitor’s Guide to Independence College.