Murder in the Queen's Armes Read Online Free PDF Page A

morosely to Gideon.
    "I’m looking for Dr. Marcus. Can you tell me where to find him?"
    "And you are…?"
    "Gideon Oliver. An old friend."
    The man sighed lugubriously and stood up. "I’ll see if he’s available." He climbed gravely from the far side of the pit, a small, soft man with little feet who seemed out of place on a field expedition, and made his way fussily around the backfill piles toward a prefabricated building of corrugated metal.
    Barry had returned and was looking at Gideon with frank but somewhat puzzled awe on his open countenance. "Gee," he said, "are you
the
Gideon Oliver?"
    Gideon was asked this from time to time, sometimes by a person familiar with his publications on Pleistocene hominid taxonomy, but a great deal more often by someone who’d read a lurid account of his consulting work with the police or FBI. He had never hit on a satisfactory response.
    "Well," he said, smiling modestly, "I’m
a
Gideon Oliver."
    Understandably, this seemed to confuse Barry, so Gideon added, "I teach anthro at Northern Cal."
    The serious, friendly face cleared somewhat. "Gee, sir, I’ve sure heard of you."
    From a slight vacancy in the smile, it was clear that the young man knew Gideon was
someone,
but didn’t quite know whom.
    The rewards of fame, he thought. "Thanks, Barry, how about introducing me to your friends?"
    The other two were absorbed, or pretending to be absorbed, in their scraping, but Barry called to them enthusiastically. "Hey, guys, this is Professor Oliver from Northern Cal." Then, indicating the woman, he said, "This is Sandra Mazur."
    From her knees she looked up, and Gideon saw a thin, pale face, long-nosed and elegant in an edgy, horsey way, with sharp, delicate cheekbones over which the skin was tightly stretched.
    "Hi, there, Prof," she said brightly. With one hand she took a cigarette from the corner of her mouth. With the other she gave him a sober mock salute, tipping her trowel to her forehead. It seemed to Gideon there was something false in the casual, easy greeting, something that didn’t go with the shadows under her eyes or the tense, almost haggard set of her thin lips. The trowel at her forehead tossed back a few pale, wispy strands that had straggled from under a woolen headband.
    "Good morning," he said. "Looks like you have something there." He indicated a small black object before her, lumpy and shapeless, and still only partly coaxed from the earth.
    "Yes, I think it’s a leather belt buckle. What do you think?"
    "Could be, or maybe a wristguard—you know, for an archer."
    "Yes!"
she cried. Again Gideon had the feeling she was overdoing it. "These holes could be where the thongs went, couldn’t they?" She bent over it again, crouching to blow away the crumbs of dirt as she loosened them. Her teeth were sunk in her lower lip—to show her concentration?— and when the wisp of fine hair fell over her eyes again, she ignored it.
    "And this," Barry said, "is Leon Hillyer."
    The third person in the trench was already rising and wiping his hands on his jeans. There was something slightly familiar about the good-looking, self-assured face with its well-trimmed golden beard, the compact body, and the concise, almost prissy movements, but Gideon couldn’t remember where he’d seen him before.
    "The skeleton detective," Leon said—a little dryly, Gideon thought, but the intelligent face wore a cordial enough smile and the cleaned hand was extended.
    "Right," said Barry, and then, with pleasure as it clicked, "
Right,
the skeleton detective! Damn!"
    Gideon shook Leon’s hand. "We’ve met, haven’t we?"
    "Not exactly," Leon said. "I delivered a Grabow Award paper at last year’s Triple-A meeting in Detroit. You probably saw me."
    Gideon remembered. The Grabow Awards were three one-thousand-dollar prizes given by the American Anthropological Association for the best student papers of the year, and Leon’s had dealt with the inferring of broad cultural values from ceramic