Entombed (35 page)

"This guy is well
dressed and carefully groomed. If you trust Annika, he may even have
been educated in England, like so many families from the territories of
the former British Empire," I said. "That one little word she picked up
had me thinking this guy didn't learn English in America. It fits so
well with a connection to the UN."

"That could be why his
DNA isn't in any data bank in the States."

"I'm figuring it can't
be an ambassador or high-ranking diplomat himself, just 'cause the age
we're going for is too young for that," I said. "But suppose his father
is posted here. The son gets a job as an investment banker-an office on
Park that fits with the subway stop on East Fifty-first Street and with
hanging out at the bar at Primola with a handful of yuppies, yapping on
their cell phones the night Giuliano made him."

Mercer picked up the
thread. "Maybe someone on the father's staff got wise to the fact that
the kid's got a problem. Maybe even tags his comings and goings to the
nights of the attacks, back four years ago when the newspaper coverage
was saturating the city. Shows Papa the sketch that was plastered all
over the East Side and that convinces the father to send him back to
the mother country."

"The rapes stop
happening for a few years. The father doesn't have any reason to know
the pathology of a rapist. Figures his son has outgrown the problem and
decides it's time to ease his way back into town," I said.

"That's a lot of data
to read into a few MetroCard entries, but it makes as much sense as
every other shadow we've been chasing. I'll get on it tomorrow."

It was after 7
P.M
. when the guys dropped me at my
apartment. We had talked Mike into taking time off, spending a few days
with Val's brother when he came into town to close up her apartment at
the end of the week. I had never seen him look as lost as he did when
the car pulled away from my building, and I wonderd when I would hear
from him again.

There were so many
messages of concern about Mike on my answering machine that it had run
out of space. I played them all back and settled in to return some of
the calls.

The last conversation
was with Joan Stafford, who adored Mike and spent some portion of each
of our daily phone calls inquiring about him. I didn't repeat
everything that had happened during the last few days, but I confided
in her about the engagement band that Mike had heaved into the ocean.

"Did you know he had
bought Val a ring?"

"Not until he put it
in my hand. I-uh, I hadn't really thought he was that close to a
proposal. He seemed like the last guy in the world to make that kind of
commitment."

"Yeah, it would have
changed everything between the two of you. The way you work together,
the way he protects you, the joking-"

"That's just
ridiculous. His marriage was bound to have happened sooner or later. It
wouldn't have made the least bit of difference on the job. Look at the
way Mercer and Vickee have got it together. We're still-"

"It's me you're
talking to, sweetie. Didn't the sight of that ring make you just a
little bit jealous?"

"Jealous? Are you
crazy, Joan? My heart just breaks for Mike, seeing him like this." I
tried to sort through my emotions and reassure myself that one of my
very closest girlfriends hadn't seen something more clearly than I had.

"He's going to need
you to get him through this."

"Right now he's
pushing everyone away. I don't even know how to begin to help him."

"Trust me, Alex. When
he's ready for a shoulder to lean on, it's going to be yours."

I called P. J.
Bernstein's deli to get the last delivery at nine o'clock, and ate half
a turkey sandwich before abandoning it in favor of a comforting bath.

I ran the water
steaming hot and filled it with a fresh-scented bubble bath. I poured
myself a scotch, then stopped in the den to look at my bookshelves.
There was an old volume of Poe-not the stories, just the collected
poems-and I pulled it down to take with me as I soaked and sulked.

My mood was maudlin. I
couldn't blame Mike for shutting me out, yet it was difficult to be
kept at arm's length when he was so very alone. He would have to go
through much of his grieving by himself, and I understood that
completely.

I turned up the jets
on the whirlpool and started flipping the pages. So many of the poems
were written to dead and dying women-various names, all meant to be
Poe's Virginia-and so many had as their theme the loss of a loved one.
I started to read them aloud, one by one, matching the somber cadences
to my mood.

I finally came to "The
Raven." It had been years since I had read the poem in its entirety.
The editor of the anthology had written an introduction, proclaiming
that this work had made an impression that had probably never been
surpassed by any single piece of American poetry. More than one hundred
and fifty years had gone by since its publication. Reflecting on it, I
viewed that a stunning fact.

I loved the
poem-everything about it. The tale of the young man, devastated by his
lover's death, visited on a bleak winter night by the stately ebony
bird. The fact that the bird could talk (Poe eventually described in an
essay his plan to use a creature that was nonreasoning but capable of
speech). The pulsating rhythm of the stanzas building as the narrator
recognizes the torture of his fate, realizing that he will not find
peace in forgetting his beloved. And of course, the haunting refrain of
the raven's taunting reminder- "Nevermore."

At the end of the poem
there was a note, reminding the casual reader that Poe considered his
bird "the emblem of mournful and never-ending remembrance."

I thought of all the
deaths that had occurred in this last week- unnatural and unnecessary,
each of them-and closed the book.

I dried off and got
into bed, reading myself to sleep.

We had no idea what
kind of schedule Aaron Kittredge kept, so Mercer had offered to pick me
up at six-thirty on Sunday morning. We drove to the block where he
lived, on West End Avenue, and parked at a hydrant in front of the
stoop, waking ourselves up slowly with coffee from the corner bodega.

For almost an hour we
talked about Mike and Valerie. Mercer had left him at his own apartment
last night, and one of his sisters was waiting there. She had arranged
to take him out to see his mother and spend the rest of the weekend
with his family.

At seven-thirty sharp,
I saw Kittredge come out of the building and trot down the steps. Both
of us got out of the car and I called his name.

He turned his head
toward me but kept walking away, swinging his gym bag. I went after
him, trying to keep up with his pace.

"Mr. Kittredge, I've
got to see you."

"Another day. I'm
late."

"I need twenty
minutes."

"I told you what I
know. Yesterday's news. Lay off me."

Joggers and dog
walkers were interested in the scene. I dodged between them.

I called out a single
word: "Ratiocination."

Kittredge stopped and
turned around. "Now there's a word I haven't heard in a very long time.
Who's your sidekick this time?" he asked. "You trade in the wise-mouth
for the strong, silent type?"

"Mercer Wallace,
Special Victims."

"Let's take this
conversation off the street," he said, removing his keys out of his
pocket and leading us back to his apartment.

He let us inside and
motioned us to sit in the living room, while he opened the bedroom door
and whispered something-probably explaining our presence-to the
girlfriend.

Kittredge didn't know
what to make of us. "So what's this? The book club of the Manhattan
DA's office? Or are you reading fiction now to try to find out how to
solve cases?"

He poured himself a
cup of coffee but didn't offer any to us.

"Can we start with
Emily Upshaw again?" I asked.

"Suit yourself."

"The story she told
you when you first met her, about the boyfriend who claimed to have
killed a girl?"

"Yeah?"

"The day I was here
with Mike Chapman, Edgar Allan Poe's name didn't come up in that
conversation. What I want to know is whether Emily ever mentioned that
she thought the murder she was telling you about had anything to do
with Poe."

He shook his head.
"You know what kind of reception she got from the desk sergeant when
she walked in the station house and started talking about a woman holed
up alive behind a wall of bricks? Nobody thought she was wrapped too
tight. The last thing I think she woulda done is make literary
allusions to try to impress a bunch of harebag cops."

"But you," I asked,
"when she spent time with you, didn't she mention it?"

"Emily introduced me
to Poe. That was much later on, though, when she was hanging out here,
trying to get her act together."

"And was it in the
context of this murder her boyfriend had told her about?"

"I guess it was. You
know the short stories?"

"Some of them," I said.

"I'd never known any
of them. Emily had an anthology. She made me read a few tales-'The Cask
of Amontillado,' 'The Black Cat.'"

"Both of those are
about people who were bricked up alive. Didn't that make you take her
more seriously?"

"Me? Hey, Ms. Cooper,"
he said, refilling his mug. "I may have been the only guy in town who
gave her the time of day. Quite frankly, between the booze and the blow
she ingested, and the fact that there was no missing victim and no
crime scene, even though I tried to help her at first, I began to think
she was just lifting the crap she was telling me right out of the
fiction she liked to read."

"But you must have
gotten enough into Poe's work to become interested in ratiocination,
didn't you?"

"What makes you think
so?"

"Your visit to the New
York Botanical Gardens, Mr. Kittredge," I said. "Your meeting-or your
aborted visit-with a man called Zeldin."

Kittredge put the
coffee down in the sink and bent his head before turning back to me.

"I guess the
department spit up the old story to you. Is that fool still around?"

"You want to tell us
why you wanted to see Zeldin?" Mercer asked. "Did it have anything to
do with Emily Upshaw?"

"She'd been out of the
picture for a decade when that shooting happened," Kittredge said,
thinking for a minute before he spoke. "I guess you're right, in a
sense. Emily had nothing to do with it directly, but she left that book
of short stories here. I picked it up about ten years later, when
someone told me it was Poe who wrote the first detective stories in
literature."

"Emily hadn't talked
about those?" I asked.

"Nah. She was
interested in the bizarre and macabre. It was 'The Murders in the Rue
Morgue' that got me hooked."

"On what, the
techniques of Monsieur Dupin?" I asked, referring to Poe's amateur
sleuth.

"I liked a character
that used his brain to solve crimes."

"But he ridiculed the
Parisian police, didn't he?"

"He thought like a
detective. It fascinated me. You know the others?"

"Poe's other detective
stories? Only that there are three that feature Auguste Dupin," I said.

"Yeah. 'The Purloined
Letter' and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget,'" Kittredge said. "What most
people don't know is that Marie Roget was based on a real case-on a
murder that occurred in New York. You knew that?"

"I had no idea. I
mean, if I remember correctly, he makes a reference to coincidences
between his story and an actual murder here, but I assumed that was
just a fictional device to hook the reader."

"It made me curious,
so I looked it up. There was no cold case unit at the time, and it was
before I'd started painting. I just thought it would be interesting to
take a stab at the original case, since it had never been solved."

"But it must have
happened over a hundred-"

"Eighteen forty-one.
So what? People are still trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was,
aren't they? Who killed Cleopatra? Was Alexander the Great murdered?"

"Who was the victim?"
I asked.

"Mary Rogers," he
said, smiling. "Poe just added a French accent and moved her to Paris."

"And she was a
shopgirl, too?"

"She worked in a
tobacconist's store, selling cigars, down on Broadway near Thomas
Street," Kittredge said. "Right up the street from where police
headquarters and your office stand today."

"And are the facts
similar?"

"Pretty close. The
beautiful Miss Rogers failed to return home one evening. There was no
such thing as a missing persons bureau, so her family put an ad in the
New York
Sun,
asking for
information about her disappearance. A few days later-bingo."

"They found her?"

"Raped, beaten,
strangled to death with a piece of lace from her petticoat. Somebody
came upon her body in the Hudson River, on the other side, right near
Hoboken."

"How'd she get there?"
I asked.

"Mary probably took
the ferry over with a suitor. There was a kind of lovers' lane then,
called the Elysian Fields."

How ironic that the
place in Greek mythology where those blessed by the gods went after
death-the eternal ideal of happiness-became the murder scene for a
beautiful young woman, forever memorialized in Poe's story.

I thought of the
solution that Poe had worked in his brilliant tale of deduction. "Was
it a sailor who killed Mary Rogers?"

"Some thought that,"
Kittredge said. "There was a rock tied around her waist to weigh her
down, and it was made with a sailor's knot. But nobody was ever caught."

"You have any
theories?" I asked.

"Did you know there
were people who speculated that Edgar Allan Poe was the killer?"