Twelve Angry Librarians

THIRTY-FOUR

Kanesha didn’t laugh. Didn’t even blink, in fact.

I wasn’t sure how to interpret that lack of response. I found it unnerving, but I couldn’t let it rattle me or I wouldn’t remain coherent enough to explain my theory.

“Okay, well.” I cleared my throat. “Gavin didn’t intend to die, of course. He wanted to kill two people but make it look like they died accidentally while he himself was the actual target. He’d set it up so that his victims accidentally got the water bottles that were poisoned instead of him.”

If Kanesha’s eyes hadn’t been open I’d have thought she’d gone to sleep on me. Then she drank more coffee.

“I think he probably prepared the two bottles—and I’m guessing that there were only two—with poison back home in Alabama. Maybe the investigators there found evidence of that in his home, but I guess you’re not going to tell me that right now.”

Kanesha shook her head. “Go on.”

“So Gavin brings the poisoned bottles to Athena with him. He told Lisa Krause, the chair of the local arrangements committee for the conference, that he had to have a certain kind of bottled water in his suite. He demanded it as a keynote speaker. Lisa got the water bottles for him. They were his cover, so to speak, for the doctored ones.” I paused for a sip of coffee.

“Next, all he had to do was get the right people to his suite, and he did that by having a party. One that he basically stuck the conference with the bill for, incidentally, but that’s another issue. He knew he could force people to come, all people he’d worked with before, ones who knew what he was capable of if he was crossed. He needed a number of people there so that it wouldn’t look like, later on, he had singled anyone out.

“Now, this devotion to one brand of bottled water wasn’t a new thing, and I reckon that most of his guests knew that little idiosyncrasy of his. He was counting on that, in fact, because it was an important part of his plan. He would be able to say, after his intended victims died from the water he’d doctored, that the killer brought the bottles to the party and managed somehow to put them with the others, the ones that weren’t doctored. Gavin would have been relieved at his lucky escape and wasn’t it terrible, blah blah blah. And the whole time, he’d be congratulating himself on how smart he was and what idiots the rest of us were. He always thought he was the smartest person in the room. Hubris, because he outsmarted himself in the end.”

“Why was he determined to kill two people in this scenario of yours?” Kanesha asked, her tone bland. “Maxine Muller apparently was one of them, but who was the other?”

“Harlan Crais,” I said. “Do you remember what you told me about Gavin’s attempts to find another job? How two places scheduled phone interviews with him and then canceled at the last minute? According to what Maxine Muller told you, he knew who blackballed him. He was sure it was Harlan Crais.”

“Why was he so sure?” Kanesha asked.

“Because he’d done the same thing to Crais, and more than once, I suspect.” I told her what I’d heard from Marisue and Randi and about the conversation between Crais and Bob Coben that I’d overheard. “I think Gavin, out of sheer spite, kept him from at least two good jobs. Crais must have taken some satisfaction in returning the favor.

“Now, back to the party. Last night, in talking with Cathleen Matera and Nancy Dunlap, both of whom had been at Gavin’s party, I learned that Gavin had behaved in uncharacteristic fashion. They told me that he’d held these little gatherings before, and when the party was over, he’d made sure to keep any leftovers for himself. He never offered any of them to his guests. At the last party, though, he suddenly became generous, insisting that people help themselves. He even offered bottles of his precious water to them. Cathleen Matera took one, and she drank it and lived, so it was obviously fine. Nancy Dunlap turned it down, but both Harlan Crais and Maxine Muller left with a bottle apiece.”

“After you found that out, that was when you texted me about Crais last night, correct?” Kanesha said.

“Yes, I wasn’t quite sure what to do. Up until then I was sure he was the murderer, and I didn’t want to give anything away by talking to him about bottled water. If he were innocent, however, and still had that bottle unopened, then he might be in danger if the killer had poisoned more than two.”

“So you passed the buck to me.”

I nodded. “Under the circumstances, I figured it was the only thing I could do.”

“I see. Well, continue. Tell me why Fong wanted to kill Maxine Muller, and then you can explain how Fong ended up with a poisoned bottle himself.” Kanesha drained her mug and set it on the table.

“More coffee? No?” I asked. “All right. Maxine knew too much about Gavin’s sideline in extorting money out of people, I think. He couldn’t trust her not to turn on him after he’d committed murder. Once Harlan Crais was dead, Maxine might be frightened enough to talk, because she knew Gavin well enough to figure out what he’d done. I’m guessing at that, but I think it’s probably the reason.”

Diesel had remained remarkably quiet during all this, but he chose now to demand attention. I felt that large paw on my thigh, and when I looked down at him, he meowed loudly. I patted his head, hoping that would quiet him, but it didn’t. He meowed again, and I recognized the tone. He wanted food.

“I’m sorry,” I told Kanesha. “He’s hungry, and he’ll keep this up till he’s been fed. It won’t take a minute.”

“Sure,” Kanesha said. “Think I’ll help myself to a little more coffee after all while you do that.”

I followed Diesel to the utility room and added more dry food to his not-empty bowl. I gave him fresh water and opened a can of wet food. “Starvation averted,” I said. He was too busy eating to pay any attention to my smart comment. I went back to join Kanesha at the table.

“Where was I?” I thought for a moment. “Oh, yes, how did Gavin end up with the bottle instead of Crais? The problem with Gavin was that he was never that subtle. He was always so sure he could outsmart anyone that he continually underestimated a person’s intelligence. I think Crais is a sharp guy, and he became suspicious over Gavin’s sudden burst of generosity at the party. I think he probably examined that water bottle closely when he got back to his room, instead of just sticking it in his bag and leaving it there. He found evidence of tampering and then decided to effect a switch somehow with Gavin. Let Gavin have the bottle and see what happened. I don’t know whether he suspected Gavin was trying to kill him, or maybe only make him sick.

“The luncheon on Friday was the best time for Crais to switch the bottles. He was introducing Gavin for the keynote speech, and he would be sitting at the table with him. All he had to do was act clumsy, knock over a few things, and then wait for Gavin to leave the table. He figured Gavin would have at least one bottle of water with him. After Gavin left the table, Crais got clumsy again and knocked that bottle off the table. He switched bottles when he bent down to pick up the one on the floor.”

“How do you know about this? I thought you told me you sat at the back of the room by the doors. You couldn’t see it, surely.”

“I did sit at the back, and I couldn’t see Gavin’s table clearly from there.” I reminded her about the two retired librarians, Ada Lou and Virginia, whose last names I didn’t know. “I overheard them last night discussing Crais and his clumsiness. They were sitting at a nearby table and saw it all.” I paused. “Well, I don’t think they saw him actually switch bottles, but they saw him knock a bottle off the table. I’m sure if you talk to them, they’ll tell you all about it. It might take a while, but they’ll talk.”

I glimpsed a brief smile before Kanesha raised her mug to her lips. She had already talked to Virginia and Ada Lou. They were eccentric enough to make even Kanesha smile.

“After the switch, all Crais had to do was wait. Gavin would open that bottle and drink, never suspecting that it was the bottle he’d poisoned and given to Crais. He went up to the podium without it, started talking, then realized he’d left the bottle at the table. He gestured at Lisa to hand it to him. He opened it, drank, and then of course realized he was going to die. Lisa was watching him, and she told me she thought he looked shocked in the split second or two before the cyanide hit him and he collapsed behind the podium.”

“Where did he get the cyanide?” Kanesha asked.

I shrugged. “That I don’t know. He might have gotten it through Bob Coben. Coben had access to chemicals at the lab. I told you he’s working on a master’s degree in chemistry. Gavin could have blackmailed Bob to get it for him, or he could have ordered it himself online from overseas. Stewart told me it was obtainable that way.”

“Have you figured out how the cyanide was put into the bottles?”

“I think so. Make a hole in the bottom of the bottle where it’s far less likely to be seen, insert the cyanide, and then stop up the hole with some kind of superglue.”

“I see. You’ve got it all worked out pretty neatly.” Kanesha leaned back in her chair and regarded me like a professor who’d been questioning her student.

“Well, how did I do?” I almost added teacher but that wouldn’t have gone over well. Kanesha didn’t appreciate flippancy. “Did I get it right?”

Kanesha didn’t respond right away. The silence between us lengthened, then suddenly she laughed.

You did make a fool of yourself after all. It was too far-fetched to be believable.

I sighed and waited for her to tell me how big an idiot I was for wasting her time.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Kanesha said. “How you manage to figure these things out without all the other information that goes into solving a case.”

“Do you mean I’m right?” I was astonished. I’d prepared myself to be laughed at, and she did laugh, but not for the reason I expected.

Kanesha nodded. “Based on information I have, I’m pretty sure you are. We’ve traced the cyanide to Fong’s house in Alabama. We don’t know yet how or where he got it, but investigators there found where he’d hidden it.” She shook her head. “He was incredibly careless to go off and leave the evidence right there in his house.”

“Sounds like typical Gavin to me,” I said. “Always thinking he was too smart to get caught.”

“I guess you’re right about that,” Kanesha said. “We’ll find out where he got the cyanide eventually, but it will take time. Now, about those little old ladies, Miss Ada Lou and Miss Virginia. They were hard to track down, but they finally showed up in the room we were using at the hotel about six o’clock last night. Seems they realized that what they had seen at the luncheon might have some bearing on the case, and I had an officer watching them from then on. I guess they were talking about it again when you saw them later.”

“Harlan Crais came into the suite where we were having a small gathering,” I said. “I guess that set them off again.”

“They didn’t see the actual bottle switch, but I have confirmation of that from another source.”

“Harlan Crais himself?” I asked.

“When you texted me last night, I’d been trying to track him down for almost an hour. He wasn’t answering his cell phone or responding to messages left on his room voice mail. Thanks to you, though, I was able to question him further last night.”

“So he admitted to switching the bottles?”

“Not right away,” Kanesha said. “He was nervous. Pretty sure he thought he was about to be arrested for murder because he didn’t think I’d believe his story. I finally convinced him to tell me.”

“Was he the one who had blackballed Gavin and kept him from getting interviews?”

“Yes, and he explained why,” Kanesha said. “It never occurred to him that Fong would try to kill him, he said, but he got suspicious at that party when Fong suddenly turned generous. He didn’t actually examine the bottle until the next morning, and that’s when he found the evidence of tampering. You figured that out, too—how Fong got the poison into the bottles.”

“Did you charge Crais with anything?”

“Not yet,” Kanesha said. “That’s going to be up to the district attorney and the grand jury. Frankly, I believe him. He might have suspected there was poison in the bottle, and in that case he should have gone to the police. He didn’t, however, and switched the bottles, and that led to Fong’s death. Based on everything I’ve learned about Fong’s personality, I have little doubt that he was the murderer. Just his bad luck he ended up killing himself.”

“I’m really sorry poor Maxine Muller died,” I said. “After she saw Gavin die right in front of all of us from drinking poisoned water, why on earth did she open that bottle?”

“My guess is that she believed someone else murdered Gavin and didn’t suspect the truth. She wouldn’t have suspected that her water was poisoned until it was too late.”

I shook my head. “I can’t say that I’m all that sorry about Gavin. He was a terrible person, but I am sorry that he killed the one person who actually cared for him.”

Kanesha rose wearily from her chair. “I’m going home now and getting in bed. The last time I saw a bed was a cot in my office, for about two hours yesterday morning.” She yawned.

“You’ve earned your rest.” I escorted her to the door, assisted by Diesel, and watched until she drove off in her car. I shut the door, and Diesel and I headed upstairs. I decided bed was where I wanted to be, at least for a couple more hours. Now that the investigation was done—at least my self-appointed part of it, that is—I had some decisions to make, and I figured postponing them in favor of a little rest wouldn’t hurt.