Finally I said, 'What are you doing here this time of year? I understand it's between sessions.'
He muttered, 'My Qualifyings are coming up next month. I'm studying. Qualifying examinations. If I pass,
I can go on for my Ph.D., see?'
I said, 'I suppose you stopped at the desk when you came in here.' He mumbled.
I said, 'What?'
He said in a low voice that was hardly an improvement, 'I didn't. I don't think I stopped at the desk.'
'You don't think?'
'I didn't.'
I said, 'Isn't that strange? I understand you're good friends of both Susan and Louella-Marie. Don't you say hello?'
'I was worried. I had this test in my mind. I had to study.
'So you couldn't even take time out for a hello.' I looked at Susan to see how this was going over. She seemed paler, but that might have been my imagination.
I said, 'Isn't it true that you were practically engaged to one of them?'
He looked up with uneasy indignation. 'No! I can't get engaged before I get my degree. Who told you I was engaged?'
'I said practically engaged.'
'No! I had a few dates, maybe. So what! What's a date or two?'
I said smoothly, 'Come on, Pete, which one was your girl?'
'I tell you it wasn't like that.'
He was washing his hands of the whole matter so hard, he seemed buried and smothered in an invisible lather.
'How about it?' I asked suddenly, addressing Susan. 'Did he stop at your desk?'
'He waved as he passed,' she said.
'Did you, Pete?'
'I don't remember,' he said sullenly. 'Maybe I did. So what?'
'Nothing,' I said. Inside me, I wished Susan joy of her bargain. If she had killed for the sake of this specimen, she had done it for nothing. To me it seemed a certainty that henceforward he would ignore her even if she fell off a two-story building and hit him on the head.
Susan must have realized that too. From the look she was giving Peter van Norden, I marked him down as a second candidate for cyanide-assuming she went free-and it certainly seemed as though she would.
I nodded to Hathaway to take him away. Hathaway rose to do that and said, 'Say, you ever use those books?' and he pointed to the shelves where the sixty-odd volumes of the organic chemistry encyclopedia stretched from floor to ceiling.
The boy looked over his shoulder and said in honest astonishment. 'Sure. I've got to. Lord, is something wrong with looking up compounds in Beilst-'
'It's all right,' I assured him. 'Come on, Ed.'
Ed Hathaway scowled at me and led the boy out. He hates letting go of an exploded theory.
It was about six and I didn't see that anything more could be done. As it stood, it was Susan's word against no word. If she had been a hood with a record, we could have sweated out the truth in any of several effective, if tedious, ways. In this case, such a procedure was inadvisable.
I turned to the professor to say so, but he was staring at Hathaway's cards. At one of them, anyway, which he was holding in his hand. You know, people always talk about other people's hands shaking with excitement, but it's something you don't often see. Rodney's hand was shaking, though, shaking like the clapper of an old-fashioned alarm clock.
He cleared his throat. 'Let me ask her something. Let me...'
I stared at him, then pushed my chair back. 'Go ahead,' I said. At this point, there was nothing to lose.
He looked at the girl, putting the card down on the desk, blank side up.
He said shakily, 'Miss Morey?' He seemed to be deliberately avoiding the familiarity of her first name.
She stared at him. For a moment she had seemed nervous, but that passed and she was calm again. 'Yes, Professor?'
The professor said, 'Miss Morey, you smiled when the furrier told you his business here. Why was that?'
'I told you, Professor Rodney,' she said, 'I was being pleasant.'
'Perhaps there was something peculiar about what he said? Something amusing?'
'I was just trying to be pleasant,' she insisted.
'Perhaps you found his name amusing, Miss Morey?'
'Not particularly,' she said indifferently.
'Well, no one has mentioned his name here. I didn't know it till I happened to look at this card.' Then suddenly, tensely, he cried, 'What was his name, Miss Morey?'