The Gravedigger's Ball (3 page)

The detective was willing to bet that nothing happened at Fairgrounds without the manager’s knowledge. That was why Coletti, when questioning him, repeatedly made him go over their procedures for digging graves.

“Please tell me again how a grave could be left open like this,” Coletti said for the third time.

The manager sighed in frustration. “As I told you before, there would normally be heavy metal poles holding the Astroturf in place over an open grave, and the area would be blocked off so no one could access it.”

“So what happened here?”

“Apparently someone moved the poles!” the manager snapped.

Coletti looked at him with a raised eyebrow. Then the manager took a deep breath and spoke more calmly.

“Look,” he said in a conciliatory tone, “I’m as bothered about this as anyone, but you have to know I had no idea there was an untended open grave on the grounds. We tend to take that type of thing very seriously.”

Coletti could see, from the troubled expression on his face, that the manager was genuinely concerned about what had happened. But that didn’t mean he was off the hook.

“What about her?” Coletti said, nodding toward Lenore. “Are you sure you’ve never seen her here before?”

“I’m certain,” the manager said, sneaking a look at her while nervously adjusting his glasses. “Mrs. Wilkinson visited for the first time today. Clarissa was so excited that she sent out an e-mail about it. I can show you if you’d like.”

“Sure, I’ll take a look at the e-mail,” Coletti said as the manager fumbled with his BlackBerry. “But I’m more interested in knowing what was so special about having Mrs. Wilkinson here.”

“She was going to help us with the Gravedigger’s Ball.”

Coletti nodded slowly. “I’ve seen the banners. What is the ball, exactly?”

“It’s an annual event that raises funds to help maintain the cemetery,” the manager said as he continued searching his BlackBerry for Clarissa’s e-mail. “This year it’s taking place at Tookesbury Mansion, less than a mile from here in the park.”

“Is the ball some kind of tradition or is it something new?”

The manager stopped scrolling through his e-mails and looked at Coletti, his beady eyes deadly serious. “It’s a tradition that began with a gravedigger who worked here during the Civil War,” he said. “Ironically, the incident that started the ball was pretty close to what happened today.”

“What do you mean?”

“The gravedigger’s job was burying Union soldiers’ remains, so you can imagine there was always work for him to do. Well, one day, when there were literally dozens of bodies lined up and waiting for burial, the gravedigger didn’t show up for work. People were annoyed, but nobody thought much of it at the time. Rumor had it that he was a bit of a drunk. He’d disappeared on binges before. This time was different, though. He wasn’t in any of the taverns or flophouses he usually frequented, and he never showed up at home that night. Eventually, they gathered a search party to check the cemetery. Shortly after that, they found him crumpled in a freshly dug grave. His neck was broken. There were those who said he fell in because he was drunk, but most people didn’t believe that. Most people thought he’d been murdered.

“The evening after they discovered him, a few neighbors got together to raise money for his widow to give him a proper burial, but the night they were supposed to bury him, his body disappeared. No one ever saw him again, and legend has it he was never really dead at all.”

Coletti thought of the man he’d seen in the cemetery, dressed in clothes from a time gone by. “What did this gravedigger look like?” he asked.

“There weren’t any pictures of him, unfortunately, but they say he was short, red-faced, and scruffy. The kind of man you might find on skid row. Why do you ask?”

“The man I saw here earlier … I was just wondering if the gravedigger…” Coletti was about to go on, but he thought better of it. “Never mind.”

The manager laughed. It was a squeaky, high-pitched sound. “Of course, none of us believes the legend of the gravedigger, if that’s what you’re thinking. There aren’t any ghosts at the ball. It’s usually just a fancy dinner with a hundred or so history buffs who like national historic landmarks. This year, with the economy being what it is, the ball’s a little more important. If it flops, we’re going to have to make some hard choices.”

The manager went back to scrolling though the e-mails on his BlackBerry. “Here’s the message from Mrs. Bailey,” he said, handing the device to Coletti.

The detective read it and was about to hand the BlackBerry back when he noticed Mrs. Bailey’s signature line.

“What’s this acronym by her name—DOI?”

The manager looked at it. “It means she was a member of the Daughters of Independence. It’s one of the groups that maintain mansions and other landmarks in Fairmount Park.”

“Do you know who the other members are?”

“There were only three, maybe four. Unfortunately I don’t have their names.”

“That’s okay, I’ll find them.” Coletti fished a card from his pocket and handed it to the manager. “If you can forward me that e-mail from Mrs. Bailey, that’d be a big help.”

“No problem,” the manager said, twitching his nose.

Coletti walked toward the spot where the body had been found, but as he watched the crime scene cops work in and around the grave, taking pictures and dusting for prints, it was clear that they hadn’t found much beyond the dirt in Mrs. Bailey’s mouth. Coletti had more than that. He had Lenore Wilkinson, and he didn’t plan to let her go just yet.

He found her exactly where he’d left her, standing near the crime scene tape and waiting for the body to be lifted out of the grave. When he came alongside her, Coletti could see the grief on her face morphing into a sort of numbness. He knew that she was shocked by what had happened, but shock didn’t exclude her as a suspect.

“Come on,” Coletti said as he guided her away. “You don’t have to stand here. You can wait in the car.”

“I want to get out of here,” she mumbled.

“I’m sure you do. But I’m going to have to ask you a few questions first.”

“Then ask them.”

“It might take a while,” Coletti said smoothly. “I think we’d probably do better down at headquarters.”

There was an uncomfortable pause. “Does that mean you think I was involved in this?”

“Sometimes people can be involved in things and not even know it.”

They stopped at the car and she turned to him as the numbness in her eyes gave way to fire. “I think I’d know if I were involved in a murder, Detective Coletti.”

“I know you would. That’s why you’re coming back to headquarters. We’re going to find out exactly what you know.”

“Oh really?” she said with muted anger. “Well, here’s what I know. I know I don’t have to talk to you if I don’t want to. I know I can call my husband and have a lawyer down here in five minutes, and I know that I didn’t have anything to do with what happened here. But I’ll answer whatever questions you have, because I know one more thing.” She stared at him in the same way she’d done at her sister’s grave. “I know you don’t trust me.”

“I don’t trust anybody,” Coletti said as he opened the door to his unmarked black Mercury and gestured toward the backseat.

Lenore searched his face carefully. “I know you don’t. That’s why you’ve been alone all these years.”

She got into the car and looked up at him with a calm that was almost frightening. She’d spoken her piece, and it was neither opinion nor assumption. It was simply the truth.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Coletti said, sounding more certain than he felt. “But before this is all over, we’re gonna find out all about you. I promise you that.”

“Good,” Lenore said defiantly. “When you figure out who I am let me know, because that’s what I came here to find out.”

Coletti was about to press her, but before he could say anything more, a familiar voice spoke up from behind him.

“Am I interrupting something?” asked Detective Charlie Mann, his dreadlocks draping over his hoodie as he craned his neck to get a better look at the woman in the car.

There was silence as Coletti and Lenore stared at each other. “No, you’re not interrupting anything,” Coletti finally answered. “But I do need to talk to you in private.”

Coletti closed the car door, turned around, and took his young partner by the arm. Then he walked him across the cemetery to the spot where workers from the medical examiner’s office were about to remove the body.

“What’s wrong with you?” Mann asked as he examined Coletti’s sweaty face. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Coletti looked back toward the car, where Lenore sat watching them intently. “Maybe I have.”

Mann glanced at the woman as she sat in the car and made a call on her cell. “You mean
her
?”

Coletti nodded. “Her name’s Lenore Wilkinson. She’s Mary Smithson’s sister.”

“Yeah, right,” Mann said with a chuckle.

When Coletti didn’t respond in kind, Mann’s laughter faded. He glanced at the car, and when he saw Lenore’s eyes staring back at him, his expression changed.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

Coletti nodded.

“Have you had a chance to talk to her?”

“Not as much as she’s talked to me,” Coletti said. Then he paused. “She, uh, seems to know things about me. I don’t know if it’s some kind of parlor trick or if she talked to her sister more than she let on, but it’s strange. It makes me wonder what kind of things she knew about Mrs. Bailey. Or what Mrs. Bailey knew about her.”

The two detectives stood there for a moment before Coletti took his notepad from his pocket and handed it to Mann. “We found a piece of paper near the body. I copied down what it said. Does it ring any bells for you?”

Mann looked at the notepad. Then he took out his iPhone. “Deep into that darkness peering…” he said as he typed the words into a Google search. A second later, the results popped up. “It’s a line from ‘The Raven,’ by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“I gotta get me one o’ those phones,” Coletti said.

“I
bought
you one two months ago. Where is it?”

“I’ve got it somewhere,” Coletti said, sounding like a school kid telling a lie. “Besides, my old phone still works and I can send texts and get e-mail on it, so … anyway, what does the line from the poem mean?”

Mann stared at Coletti for a few seconds. “I can’t believe you lost that phone,” he said, shaking his head. Then he looked at the phone’s screen, and a look of recognition swept over his face. “What did you say Mary’s sister’s name was?”

“Lenore.”

When Coletti said it, the storm clouds darkened, sucking the very sound from the air. Just as he’d heard almost nothing but his own breathing when he was searching among the cemetery’s crypts for the killer, Coletti could only hear a few sounds now. One of them was Mann’s voice, reading the next line of Poe’s masterpiece.

“
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, and the only word there spoken
—”

Mann’s voice was drowned out by the roll of thunder and the patter of the rain against granite headstones.

The two of them walked quickly to Coletti’s car, where Lenore was waiting. When they got in, an alert tone came over the radio.

“Cars stand by,” the dispatcher said. “Nine two one two, what’s your location?”

Five seconds of static followed.

“Car 9212, report.”

Again, there was static, and with it, an almost palpable sense of dread. Coletti and Mann looked at each other, then at Lenore. A moment later, the radio crackled again.

“This is 9210,” a cop said gravely. “I got 9212 near Reservoir Drive. The car’s running, but he ain’t in it.”

*   *   *

The dispatcher called for an assist—the highest priority in the department. It meant that a cop was in trouble, and this assist was much like any other. Once the call went out, chaos reigned.

The radio was clogged with the voices of cops falling over each other to respond. The streets were filled with police cars flying recklessly through the park. The air was thick with the electric pulse of cops who were out for blood.

They blocked Kelly Drive and brought civilian traffic to a standstill. As they did so, they tried to do the impossible—fight against the unspoken yet prevailing feeling that time had already run out.

As rain poured from dark clouds that made the morning feel like night, the police used everything at their disposal to search for their comrade. There were K-9 units and SWAT teams, uniformed and plainclothes, and when word of the cop’s disappearance hit his former district—the ninth—a steady stream of police sped to the area from downtown.

Lieutenant Sandy Jackson was among them. With cinnamon-brown skin and a beauty that belied her toughness, Sandy commanded officers in the sixth district. She’d served most of her career in the ninth, however, and the cop who’d disappeared was one of the few who’d helped her along as a rookie.

As she whipped her car around Kelly Drive and past the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Sandy glanced out the window at a golden statue of an armor-clad Joan of Arc and thought of her own days on the battlefield.

She remembered how she’d fought to get promotions. She remembered how she’d battled sexism in the department. Most of all, she remembered that the officer who was now missing was one of the few male cops who’d helped her as she struggled for equal treatment.

When her crass colleagues would leave pornography out at roll call to harass Sandy and the other female cop on the squad, it was Smitty who stepped up to make them stop.

He never won any popularity contests because of it, and he never tried to do so. He simply did his job, and most of the time, he did it well. That was what led to his proudest moment—the arrest of two college boys who’d run a major meth operation out of their Center City apartment. On appeal, it all came crashing down when their parents hired the city’s top defense attorney to get their convictions overturned.

When the smoke cleared, Smitty was portrayed as the bad guy, and by the time the media finished with him, the commissioner had no choice but to get him out of the limelight. Sandy watched sadly as he was transferred from the ninth district to the park, but she consoled herself with the belief that the new assignment took him out of harm’s way. Her belief was wrong.