Quoth the Raven (17 page)

“Gregor Demarkian? What am I supposed to think of him? A typical authoritarian male with delusions of genital superiority.”

“Well, Katherine, that’s all well and good, but delusions or not, Demarkian happens to have a certain reputation.”

“A reputation for what?”

“A reputation for catching murderers.”

“You mean like Nero Wolfe?” Katherine laughed. “Oh, for God’s sake, Vivi, lighten up. The man’s a fascist. He was in the CIA.”

“FBI.”

“Same difference.”

“I don’t think they think so,” Vivi said, “and don’t give me a lecture on false consciousness. I couldn’t stand it. Katherine, I just went into an office ordinarily protected by a woman someone just tried to murder and stole a file. Under the circumstances, even a raging feminist might start to think that the reason someone tried to kill that woman was to get that file.”

“That file?”

“Or some other file sitting in that office, yes. Katherine, that Gregor Demarkian person thinks like a policeman, even if he isn’t one officially anymore. And he’s no hick like David Markham.”

“So?”

“So,” Vivi said, taking a deep breath, “what we have to do now is wait till the coast is clear and put the file back.”

The coffee in Katherine’s cup had a smoky film on top, as if it had been injected with dust. Katherine picked up her spoon and stirred it. Sometimes she found it hard to take, just how much she disliked Vivi Wollman. Sometimes she found it hard to take Vivi, period.

Still, Vivi was waiting for an answer, and Katherine supposed she owed her one. In Katherine’s experience, you always ended up owing women something, usually something you didn’t have to give.

“Well,” she said, still staring into her coffee cup, “here’s what I think. I don’t think we have to put that file back. I think
you
have to put that file back. And I think you ought to do it soon, Vivi, because if you don’t the whole world is going to begin wondering about that guilty look on your face.”

J
ACK CARROLL HAD GROWN
up in places that had inspired him only with the determination to get out and go somewhere else, but in spite of the conventional demonology of those places—and there was a demonology; when he had first come to college and encountered it Jack had been shocked—he had never seen anyone killed until he saw Miss Maryanne Veer fall to the Independence College dining room floor. Of course, Miss Maryanne Veer had not been killed, not yet. They had taken her out to County Receiving and were doing their best for her. Jack’s private opinion was that their best was not going to be good enough. That raw skin, that strangled gurgling scream she had tried to heave up from deep inside her chest—there had been such pain and finality about it that it had frozen him where he stood, with his hand on Chessey’s back and his mind on their private tryst of the morning. Part of him had been watching, unbelieving, unable to move. Part of him had been thinking about sex. There had been something so obscene about the juxtaposition that he had been on the verge of being violently ill. He was still oh the verge, now, almost three hours later. It didn’t matter at all that he had not been thinking about sex the way he usually thought about sex. He had not been having fantasies about what might happen someday when he and Chessey both went totally out of control. He was no longer sure that Chessey was capable of going totally out of control, or that he was, either. What had been bothering him was the idea that their separate commitments to self-control were coming from opposite directions, working at cross-purposes. In the beginning, Chessey had held back out of principle and he out of fear of losing her. Lately their positions had seemed to be reversed, although Jack didn’t think that what Chessey was most afraid of was his own walking out. He wondered what she was afraid of. He had been wondering if her fear was something he ought to do something about, when Miss Maryanne Veer hit the floor.

Now they were sitting halfway up Hillman’s Rock, at that point in the climb where they would have had to bring the ropes and the pitons out. It was after four thirty and the world around them was getting dark, and cold. After Miss Maryanne Veer had been taken away there had been formalities to go through, and the formalities had gone on forever. Or seemed to. Jack was just beginning to think it was time to light a fire. Chessey was sitting on a small outcrop of rock, carefully sewing a small black patch of cloth onto the edge of his bat cape, where it had torn. He was lying propped up on one shoulder in a bed of leaves. Chessey had on heavy hiking boots and khaki pants and a reindeer-patterned sweater. She looked impossibly sweet and impossibly childish.

“I don’t know,” Chessey was saying, “I think it must have been an accident. No matter what that man Mr. Demarkian said. Nobody would actually go out and try to kill a person like that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it was so horrible. It makes me sick to think of it even now. Can you imagine doing something like that and then standing around to watch? If someone did it on purpose, they had to have been there to see Miss Veer fall. I was sitting at the table right next to the cash register when it happened. I didn’t see anybody leave.”

“Maybe whoever did it left a long time before that. Maybe it was somebody who worked in the cafeteria, on the breakfast shift or on setup maybe, and they put the lye into a peanut butter sandwich and then walked away home.”

“Not caring who might pick it up or who might eat it? Children eat in that cafeteria sometimes, Jack, when they’ve got faculty for parents and their parents bring them.”

“I know.”

“I don’t know what’s happening to you,” Chessey said. “Lately you’ve gotten so—cynical.”

Jack didn’t know what was happening to him lately, either. He just knew it was time to start a fire. There was a wind blowing down from the north that was going straight through the sleeves of his flannel shirt and the sleeves of his thermal T-shirt and the skin of his arms. The down vest he was wearing was no help at all. He sat up and reached for his daypack, where he had matches and kerosene and everything else he needed. There were people in the Climbing Club who insisted on rubbing two sticks together and praying to the Great Spirit for fire and rain, but he wasn’t one of them. That sort of thing exasperated him to the point of madness.

“You know what?” he said. “I think someday I’d like to be like Mr. Demarkian. I’d like to be that kind of man.”

“Fat and old.”

“Something tells me we’re all going to end up fat and old whether we want to or not. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean sure of myself like that, knowing where I’m going. Where I want to be.”

“I didn’t like Mr. Demarkian,” Chessey said. “He made me feel, I don’t know, creepy.”

“Why?”

“The way he looked at me, I guess. Like he could see right through me and listen to what I was thinking. Like he thought I was stupid or vain or shallow or something.”

“You’re projecting. You’re getting your period and going through one of your insecurity phases.”

“Maybe. But I’ll tell you who else didn’t like him, Jack. Your favorite person on earth, Dr. Kenneth Crockett.”

All the sticks he could find were damp. The leaves were sodden. Kerosene or no kerosene, it was going to be a hell of a job to get a fire lit. He made a pile of the best material he could find and dosed it anyway.

“I don’t think Dr. Kenneth Crockett is my favorite person on earth,” he said carefully, “especially not lately. He seems to be metamorphosing into a self-absorbed jerk. And maybe I’m not surprised that he doesn’t like Mr. Demarkian.”

“Dr. Elkinson was surprised. He told her he thought Mr. Demarkian was a spy. I heard him.”

“What do you think he meant, a spy?”

“I don’t have to think anything,” Chessey said. “It’s like I told you. I heard them. Dr. Crockett said he thought Father Tibor was asked to get Mr. Demarkian up here, by the police. He said—”

“Chessey, that’s ridiculous. The police couldn’t possibly know someone was going to try to kill Miss Veer. If they had, they would have stopped it.”

“Maybe. But I can see what Dr. Crockett meant, Jack. I mean, the man knows so much about everything. He doesn’t even have to ask you things and he should have to. About yourself, I mean.”

“He’s a friend of Father Tibor’s. Tibor probably talks to him.”

“Dr. Crockett told Dr. Elkinson she’d better be sure she didn’t have anything lying around her life she didn’t want found.”

“Do you think it was Dr. Elkinson who tried to kill Miss Veer?”

“Jack, for God’s sake—”

“Maybe they were in it together. Crockett and Elkinson. They’re in everything else together.”

“I hate it when you get this way. I really hate it.”

“Look,” Jack said, “Gregor Demarkian investigates murders. That’s what he does with his life. If you’d read the handout for his lecture, you’d know that’s what he
has
done with his life. Ken Crockett is just getting all academic liberal intellectual paranoid about it, that’s all. Unless he and Dr. Elkinson were the ones who tried to kill Miss Veer.”

“Jack.”

“Well, somebody tried to kill her, didn’t they? How’s that cape coming along? When I saw that rip I wanted to kill myself. Forty dollars down the drain.”

Chessey had actually stopped sewing several minutes ago, but Jack had had no way of knowing whether she’d stopped because she was finished or because she’d become too involved in their conversation to concentrate on stitches. Now she held the cape up for his inspection, solid and seemingly undamaged, a wall of black against the graying sky of evening.

“It won’t look as good in full daylight,” she said, “but you’ve only got to wear it in the daylight for tomorrow and I figured the point was really the bonfire tomorrow night. Isn’t it?”

“Definitely.”

“It’ll do, then.” She folded it, folded it again, and put it down on her lap, a fat black square. “Jack?” she said. “I was thinking. It’s so quiet-up here, and dark. And we’re alone. And this morning was, I don’t know, off somehow. So I was thinking…”

She let her voice trail into nothingness, a lilting diminuendo that was like music. It struck him that three days ago he would have felt faint to hear that music, and now he felt nothing at all, or almost nothing, just careful, as if the ground were made of broken glass and he was being forced to walk across it on bare feet. He got a wooden match out of his box, lit it, and tossed it onto his pile of sticks and leaves. It caught, sputtered, and caught again. The air smelled full of kerosene.

“No,” he said. “Chessey, not right now, all right? I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

He wasn’t looking at her, but he heard the music change, and he knew what the change meant.

She was crying.

I
T WAS FIVE O’CLOCK,
and over at Constitution House, Dr. Alice Elkinson had locked herself in her apartment. She had not only turned the switch at the center of the doorknob, but thrown the bolt at the top of the door. Then she had gone to every window in her living room and bedroom and drawn the curtains shut. In the kitchen, she only had shades, and they hardly seemed like enough. Even with all three of them pulled tight, she could see the light streaming in from the porch, making a puddle of dirty yellow in the middle of her kitchen table.

There were people in this world, and especially on this campus, who thought Dr. Alice Elkinson had had an easy life—and mostly the impression was true. She had always been pretty and she had always been smart and she had come from a family with enough money to let her do what she wanted but not so much that it might have made her crazy. Her abilities had always matched her ambitions. The men she had loved had always loved her back.

Still, nobody’s life on this earth is an Eden. There had been periods and incidents in Dr. Alice Elkinson’s that she would not like to repeat. What stuck out most in her mind now was her one experience of violence before the attack on Miss Maryanne Veer. She had been a third-year doctoral student at Berkeley and still possessed by that adolescent certainty of her own invulnerability, still walking through a world in which bad things happened only to other people. It had been late on a Tuesday night, after eleven o’clock. She was doing what she always did at eleven o’clock on weekday nights, walking home from the library. Usually, she walked only on well-lit streets or streets lull of people who never went to bed. On this Tuesday night, she had been too tired for that and had taken a shortcut instead. She had been just behind Sproul Hall when the boy had grabbed her, his arm reaching out of a darkness she could not penetrate, his long fingernails digging into the skin of her wrist and drawing blood. She had jerked away from him, screamed at the top of her lungs, and started running. She had gone all the way home that way, screaming and screaming, until the screaming began to feel like one of those Marine Corps war cries that were supposed to help soldiers charge into battle. Nobody had stopped her. Nobody had followed her. Nobody had asked her what was wrong. Berkeley had been like that then.

Later, what she remembered was sitting in her apartment and wondering if the incident had happened at all. It had been so bizarre, she hadn’t been able to keep hold of it. It had not, however, been as bizarre as this.

After she’d locked all the doors and closed all the windows, she had sat down in the best chair in her living room and made herself be still. Now she stood up and made herself walk back the way she had come, back to the kitchen and the back porch door. She had left the back porch door unlocked and slightly open—which said something. Maybe it said she hadn’t been able to delude herself into thinking she didn’t believe it.

She took a deep breath, opened the porch door wide, and stepped out onto the balcony. There was nothing back here but trees, no other part of the campus to look out on. What sounds she heard were coming from all the way on the other side of the building, where the students were holding another of their pre-Halloween parties on the quad. If the entire faculty of Independence College had been ax-murdered in their beds this afternoon, the students would still be holding a pre-Halloween party on the quad.