The Poet (11 page)

But sometime during the cold Chicago winter something apparently changed. On March 13-which would have been the thirteenth birthday celebrated by the Smathers boy. Mr. Brooks sat in his favorite chair in the den where he liked to write poems as a distraction from his job as a homicide detective. He’d taken at least two tablets of Percocet he had left over from treatment of a back injury the year before. He wrote a single line in his poetry notebook. Then he put the barrel of his .38 Special into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He was found by his wife when she came home from work.

The death of Mr. Brooks left family and friends bereaved and full of questions. What could they have done? What were the signs they had missed? Cantor shook his head wistfully when asked during an interview if there were answers for these troubling questions.

“The mind is a funny, unpredictable and sometimes terrible thing,” the soft-spoken psychologist said in his office. “I thought that John had come very far with me. But, obviously, we did not come far enough.” Mr. Brooks and whatever it was that haunted him remain an enigma. Even his last message is a puzzle. The line he wrote on the pad offered little in the way of insight into what caused him to turn his gun on himself.

“Through the pale door,” were his last written words. The line was not original. Mr. Brooks borrowed it from Edgar Allan Poe. In his poem “The Haunted Palace,” which originally appeared in one of Poe’s best-known stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe wrote:

While like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door A hideous throng rush out forever And laugh-but smile no more.

The meaning of those words to Mr. Brooks is unclear but they certainly carry the melancholy incumbent in his final act.

Meantime, the murder of Bobby Smathers remains an open case. In the homicide unit where Mr. Brooks worked and his colleagues still pursue the case, the detectives now say they are seeking justice for two victims.

“Far as I’m concerned, this is a double murder,” said Lawrence Washington, a detective who grew up with Brooks and was partnered with him in the homicide unit. “Whoever did the boy also did Jumpin’ John. You can’t convince me any different.”

I straightened up and glanced around the newsroom. No one was looking at me. I looked back down at the printout and read the end of the story again. I was stunned, almost to the same degree as the night Wexler and St. Louis had come for me. I could hear my heart beating, my guts being taken in a cold and crushing grip. I couldn’t read anything else but the name of the story. Usher. I had read it in high school and again in college. I knew the story. And I knew the character of the title. Roderick Usher. I opened my notebook and looked at the few notes I had jotted down after leaving Wexler the day before. The name was there. Sean had written it in the chronological record. It was his last entry.

RUSHER

After dialing the editorial library I asked for Laurie Prine.

“Laurie, it’s-“

“Jack. Yes, I know.”

“Look, I need an emergency search. I mean, I think it’s a search. I’m not sure how to get-“

“What is it, Jack?”

“Edgar Allan Poe. Do we have anything on him?”

“Sure. I’m sure we have lots of biographical abstracts. I could-“

“I mean do we have any of his short stories or works? I’m looking for ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ And sorry to interrupt.”

“That’s okay. Um, I don’t know what we would have right here as far as his written works go. Like I said, it’s mostly biographical. I can take a look. But, I mean, any bookstore around here is going to sell his stuff if we don’t have it.”

“Okay, thanks. I’ll just go over to the Tattered Cover.”

I was about to put the phone down when she said my name.

“Yes?”

“I just thought of something. Like if you want to quote a line or something, we have lots of quotations on CD-ROM. I could just plug it in real quick.”

“Okay. Do it.”

She put the phone down for an eternity. I reread the end of the Times story again. What I was thinking seemed like a long shot but the coincidences in the way my brother and Brooks had died and in the names of Roderick Usher and RUSHER could not be ignored.

“Okay, Jack,” Laurie said after picking back up. “I just checked our indexes. We have no books containing Poe’s works in whole. I’ve got the poetry disk in, so let’s give it a whirl. What do you want?”

“There is a poem called ‘The Haunted Palace’ that is part of the story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’ Can you get that?”

She didn’t answer. I heard her typing on the computer.

“Okay, yeah, there are selected quotes from the story and the poem. Three screens.”

“Okay, is there a line that goes ‘Out of space, out of time’?”

“Out of space. Out of time.”

“Right. I don’t know the punctuation.”

“Doesn’t matter.” She was typing.

“Uh, no. It’s not in-“

“Damn!”

I don’t know why I made such an outburst. It immediately bothered me.

“But, Jack, it is a line from another poem.”

“What? By Poe?”

“Yes. It’s in a poem called ‘Dream-Land.’ You want me to read it? The whole stanza’s here.”

“Read it.”

“Okay, I’m not that great at reading poetry but here goes. ‘By a route obscure and lonely, / Haunted by ill angels only, / Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, / On a black throne reigns upright, / I have reached these lands but newly, / From an ultimate dim Thule- / From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, / Out of SPACE-out of TIME.’ That’s it. But there is an editor’s note. It says an Eidolon means a phantom.”

I didn’t say anything. I was frozen still.

“Jack?”

“Read it again. Slower, this time.”

I wrote the stanza in my notebook. I could have just asked her to print it out and then gone and picked it up but I didn’t want to move. I wanted, for the short moment, to be totally alone with this. I had to be.

“Jack, what is it?” she asked when she was done reading. “You seem so anxious about this.”

“I don’t know yet. I’ve gotta go.”

I hung up.

In an instant I began to feel overly warm, claustrophobic. As large as the newsroom was, I felt like the walls were closing in. My heart pounded. A vision of my brother in the car flashed through my mind.

Glenn was on the phone when I walked into his office and sat down in front of him. He pointed to the door and nodded like he wanted me to wait outside until he was done. I didn’t move. He pointed again and I shook my head.

“Listen, I’ve got something happening here,” he said into the phone. “Can I call you back? Great. Yeah.”

He hung up.

“What’s-“

“I need to go to Chicago,” I said. “Today. And then probably to Washington, then maybe Quantico, Virginia. To the FBI.”

Glenn didn’t buy it.

“Out of space? Out of time? I mean, come on, Jack, that has got to be a thought that goes through the minds of many people who contemplate or actually do commit suicide. The fact that it’s mentioned in a poem written by some morbid guy a hundred and fifty years ago who also wrote another poem this other dead cop quoted, it’s not the stuff conspiracies are made of.”

“What about Rusher and Roderick Usher? You think that’s a coincidence, too? So now we have a triple coincidence and you say it’s not worth checking out.”

“I didn’t say it’s not worth checking out.” His voice rose a notch to a level signaling indignation. “Of course, you check it out. Get on the phones, check it out. But I’m not sending you off on a national tour on the basis of what you’ve got now.”

He swiveled in his chair so he could check his computer for pending messages. There were none. He turned to face me again.

“What’s the motive?”

“What?”

“Who’d want to kill your brother and this guy in Chicago? It doesn’t make-How come the cops missed this?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you spent the day with them and the case, where’s the hole in the suicide? How could someone have done this and just walked away? How come you came away yesterday convinced that it was suicide? I got your message, you said you were convinced. How come the cops are convinced?”

“I don’t have any answers for that yet. That’s why I want to go to Chicago and then to the bureau.”

“Look, Jack, you’ve got a cushy beat here. I can’t tell you how many times reporters have come in here saying they wanted it. You-“

“Who?”

“What?”

“Who wants my beat?”

“Never mind. It’s not what we’re talking about. The point is, you’ve got it good here and you get to go anywhere in the state you want to go. But for this kind of travel, I’ve got to be able to justify it with Neff and Neighbors. I also have a newsroom full of reporters who would like to travel every once in a while on a story. I would like them to travel. It helps keep them motivated. But we’re in an economic downturn here and I can’t okay every trip that gets proposed.”

I hated these sermons and I wondered if Neff and Neighbors, the managing editor and editor of the paper, even cared whom he sent where as long as they got good stories. This was a good story. Glenn was full of shit and he knew it.

“Okay, I’ll just take vacation time and do it myself.”

“You used everything you had after the funeral. Besides you’re not going to run around the country saying you’re a Rocky Mountain News reporter if you’re not on an assignment for the Rocky Mountain News.”

“What about unpaid leave? You said yesterday that if I wanted more time you’d work something out.”

“I meant time to grieve, not go running across the country. Anyway, you know the rules on unpaid leave. I can’t protect your position. You take a leave and you might not have the beat when you come back.”

I wanted to quit right there but I wasn’t brave enough and I knew I needed the paper. I needed the institution of the media as my access card to cops, researchers, everybody involved. Without my press card, I’d be just some suicide’s brother who could be pushed aside.

“I need more than what you’ve got now to justify this, Jack,” Glenn said. “We can’t afford an expensive fishing expedition, we need facts. If you had more, I could maybe see going to Chicago. But this foundation and the FBI you could definitely do by phone. If you can’t, then maybe I can get somebody from the Washington news bureau to go over there.

“It’s my brother, my fucking story. You’re not giving it to anybody.”

He raised his hands in a calming manner. He knew his suggestion was way out of bounds.

“Then work the phones and come back to me with something.”

“Look, don’t you see what you’re saying? You’re saying don’t go without the proof. But I need to go to get the proof.”

Back at my desk, I opened up a new computer file and began typing in everything I knew about the deaths of Theresa Lofton and my brother. I put down every detail I could remember from the files. The phone rang but I didn’t answer it. I only typed. I knew I needed to start with a base of information. Then I would use it to knock apart the case against my brother. Glenn had finally cut a deal with me. If I got the cops to reopen my brother’s case, I’d go to Chicago. He said we’d still have to talk about D.C., but I knew that if I got to Chicago I would get to Washington.

As I typed, the picture of my brother kept coming back to me. Now that sterile, lifeless photo bothered me. For I had believed the impossible. I had let him down and now felt a keener sense of guilt. It was my brother in that car, my twin. It was me.

9

I ended up with four pages of notes which I then synthesized after an hour of study and thought to six lines of shorthand questions I had to find the answers to. I had found that if I looked at the facts of the case from the opposite perspective, believing Sean had been murdered and had not taken his own life, I saw something the cops had possibly missed. Their mistake had been their predisposition to believe and therefore accept that Sean had killed himself. They knew Sean and knew he was burdened by the Theresa Lofton case. Or maybe it was something every cop could believe about every other cop. Maybe they’d all seen too many corpses and the only surprise was that most didn’t kill themselves. But when I sifted through the facts with a disbeliever’s eye, I saw what they did not see.

I studied the list I had written on a page in my notebook.

Pena: his hands? after-how long?

Wexler/Scalari: the car? heater? lock?

Riley: gloves?

I realized I could handle Riley by phone. I dialed and was about to hang up after six rings when she picked up.

“Riley? It’s Jack. You okay? This a bad time?”

“When’s a good time?”

It sounded like she had been drinking.

“You want me to come out, Riley? I’m coming out.”

“No, don’t, Jack. I’m okay. Just, you know, one of those blue days. I keep thinking about him, you know?”

“Yes. I think about him, too.”

“Then how come you hadn’t been around for so long before he went and … I’m sorry, I shouldn’t bring things up …”