Authors: Jane Haddam
G
REGOR HAD HEARD ENOUGH
about hushed silences in his day, and read enough about them, so that he shouldn’t have been surprised to be presented with one. The hall had gone dead quiet and paralytically still. The only person in the place who was even fidgeting was Tibor, standing right behind him. A man in the center of the front row had gone as white as chalk. Gregor assumed he was the dean. He felt sorry for the man even, as he turned away to ignore him.
At the last minute, his eyes swept the room, searching for his suspects, but if he had been looking for some special reaction, he would have been disappointed. They were all still in their seats and impassive. They might have been numb. He moved closer to the lectern and leaned out over the crowd.
“Yesterday afternoon,” he said, “we were presented here with a very interesting problem, in feet an impossible problem. Not only had a woman, Miss Maryanne Veer, with very few personal ties to the college and only limited professional ones, been fed enough lye to put her in the hospital for several weeks and possibly to cripple her for life, but she had been fed it in full view of the lunch crowd in a packed dining hall, while she was standing up, while she was holding a cafeteria tray on which was nothing but a cup of strong tea. Now I don’t know what you people out there know about lye, so I will tell you something about it. The technical name for it is sodium hydroxide, and it always fizzes when it comes in contact with water. Our first thought—mine, and later that of the police—was that what we were looking at was a Tylenol-poisoning type of attack. At first glance, it looked as if we had someone, a cafeteria worker or a student or a faculty member, intent on causing havoc to whoever might get in his line of fire. Given that assumption, first I, and later David Markham and his men, began to look for what the lye might have been in. It could not have been in Miss Veer’s tea, because if it had been the tea would have been fizzing, and it was highly unlikely that she would have drunk it. Even if she hadn’t expected to be poisoned, she would have, as any of us would have, been suspicious about what she was being fed. Her natural reaction would have been to dump out that cup of tea and pour herself a new one. So we went looking, at that point, for what else she might have had and what else she might have eaten—someone suggested to me over the course of this investigation a peanut butter sandwich. That would have been good. But there was no peanut butter sandwich. In fact, there was nothing of any kind. Everyone we asked told us the same thing: Miss Maryanne Veer had come through that cafeteria line with a cup of tea and only a cup of tea on her tray. We searched the floor for food that might have gone unnoticed and been dropped when Miss Veer fell. Nothing. We searched the tables. Nothing. We searched the cafeteria line. Nothing. We were finally forced to admit to ourselves what seemed so unlikely to be true: that someone had attacked Miss Veer in particular for some personal reason, and then taken away, or disposed of, whatever food the lye had been in.
“Now we had two new problems, equally disturbing. In the first place, although the lab reports haven’t come in yet, it was clear that whatever Miss Veer had eaten that contained lye was unlikely to have been large and only theoretically likely to have been solid food at all. Immediately after she fell, I and a number of people in the crowd applied the antidote for her condition, namely milk forced into her mouth and down her throat. I saw no residues of solid food in her teeth or gums. Then there was the larger problem: Who would want to hurt Miss Maryanne Veer and why? I say hurt and not kill, because there is something you must understand about lye. People do die from being poisoned by it, but I have never yet heard of a murderer who managed to bring such a thing off deliberately. It is almost impossible for someone to swallow enough lye to kill them immediately. Lye burns—actually, it dissolves human flesh on contact. People have been known to die by swallowing small amounts of lye, thinking they’ve cured the problem with milk or some other agent, and three or four days or a week later being presented with a perforated stomach lining that has finally given out in its attempts to counteract the alkali. With a dose of the strength administered to Miss Veer, however, and with that dose administered in full view of a hundred or so people, the attacker would have had to realize that it would have been very unlikely for Miss Veer to die. So we had someone here who did not care if Miss Veer lived or not. That could not have been the point.
“But what was the point? The more we looked into Miss Veer’s life, the less likely it was that there was one, at least of the kind we are used to in murder investigations. Miss Veer lived with a woman friend of many years standing, who was not on campus at the time. She did her work in her department without causing any obvious rancor among the faculty and students she worked with. We heard no underground rumbles of unfairness or dislike. In fact, the only person on campus who seemed to have any antipathy to Miss Veer at all was a man I had never met but heard much about, Dr. Donegal Steele.
“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.”
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
.”