The Poet (21 page)

I nodded and realized it was the way we should have done it all along. For the next fifteen minutes he operated the copier while I took the protocols from the files and replaced them after they were copied. It was a slow machine, not made for heavy use.

When we were done he turned off the machine and told me to wait in the office.

“I forgot about the cleaners. It might be better if I just take these back to storage, then come get you.”

“Okay.”

I started looking through the copied protocols while he was gone but was too nervous to concentrate on them. I felt like running out the door with the copies and getting away before anything could go wrong. I looked around his office to try to pass the time. I picked up the photo of Warren’s family. A pretty, petite wife and two kids, a boy and a girl. Both of preschool age in the photo. The door opened while the frame was still in my hand. It was Warren and I felt embarrassed. He paid no notice.

“Okay, we’re ready.”

And like two spies we snuck out under cover of darkness.

Warren was silent almost all the way back to the hotel. I think it was because his involvement was over and he knew it. I was the reporter. He was the source. It was my story. I felt his jealousy and desire. For the story. For the job. For what he’d once been and had.

“Why’d you really quit, man?” I asked.

This time he dropped the bullshit.

“My wife, family. I was never home. One crisis after another, you know. I had to cover them all. Finally, I had to make a choice. Some days I think I made the right one. Some days I don’t. This is one of those that I don’t. This is a hell of a story, Jack.”

Now I was silent for a while. Warren drove into the hotel’s main entrance and headed around the circle to the doors. He pointed through the windshield to the right side of the hotel.

“See down there? That’s where Reagan got it. I was there. Fuckin’ five feet from Hinckley while we were waiting. He even asked me what time it was. Almost no other reporters were out there. Back then, most of them didn’t bother staking his exits. But they did after that.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah, that was a highlight.”

I looked over at him and nodded seriously and then we both laughed. We both knew the secret. Only in a reporter’s world would it be a highlight. We both knew that probably the only thing better than witnessing a presidential assassination attempt as a reporter was witnessing a successful assassination. Just as long as you didn’t catch a bullet in the crossfire.

He pulled over at the door and I got out and leaned my head back into the car.

“You’re showing your true identity there, pal.”

He smiled.

“Maybe.”

16

Each of the thirteen files was thin, containing the five-page protocol questionnaire supplied by the FBI and the foundation, and usually just a few more pages of ancillary notes or testimonials to the pressures of the job from colleagues of the deceased.

Most of the stories were the same. Job stress, alcohol, marital difficulty, depression. A basic formula for the police blues. But depression was the key ingredient. In almost all of the files depression of one sort or another was reported as attacking the victim from inside the job. However, only a handful mentioned that the victims were troubled by any specific case, unsolved or otherwise, that they had been assigned to investigate.

I did a quick read-through of the conclusion segment of each of the protocols and quickly eliminated several of the cases from my investigation because of varying factors ranging from the suicides being witnessed by others to their taking place under circumstances precluding a setup.

The remaining eight cases were going to be more difficult to whittle down because each, at least in the summary remarks, seemed to fit. In each of these cases there was some mention of specific cases burdening the victim. The burden of an unsolved case and the quotes from Poe were really all I had as far as a pattern went. So I stayed with it and made it the standard by which I judged whether these eight remaining cases could be part of a series of false suicides.

Following this as my own protocol led to the dropping of two more cases when I found references to the suicide notes. In each, the victim wrote to a specific person, a mother in one, a wife in the other, and asked for forgiveness and understanding. The notes contained nothing resembling a line of poetry or, actually, any kind of literature. I dropped them and then I had six.

Reading one of the remaining files I came across the victim’s suicide note-one line, like those left by my brother and Brooks-in an addendum containing the investigator’s report. Reading the words sent a chilling, electric surge through me. For I knew them.

I am haunted by ill angels I quickly opened my notebook to the page where I had written the stanza from “Dream-Land” that Laurie Prine had read to me from the CD-ROM.

By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reins 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

I had it cold. My brother and Morris Kotite, an Albuquerque detective who supposedly killed himself with a shot to the chest and another to the temple, left suicide notes that quoted the same stanza of poetry. It was a lock.

But these feelings of vindication and excitement quickly gave way to a deep, growing rage. I was angry at what had happened to my brother and to these other men. I was angry at the living cops for not seeing this sooner and my mind flashed to what Wexler had said when I had convinced him of my brother’s murder. A fucking reporter, he had said. Now I knew his anger. But most of all, I realized, my anger was for the one who had done this and for how little I knew about him. In his own words, the killer was an Eidolon. I was chasing a phantom.

It took me an hour to get through the remaining five cases. I took notes on three of them and dropped the other two. One was rejected when I noticed the death occurred on the same day John Brooks was killed in Chicago. It seemed unlikely, given the planning each of the killings must have involved, that two could be carried out on one day.

The other case was rejected because the victim’s suicide had been attributed, among other things, to his despair over a heinous kidnap-murder of a young girl on Long Island, New York. It initially appeared, though the victim had left no note, that the suicide would generally fit my pattern and require further scrutiny, but I learned when I read the report to the end that this detective had actually cleared the kidnap-murder with the arrest of a suspect. This was outside the pattern and, of course, didn’t fit with the theory that Larry Washington had floated in Chicago and that I subscribed to, that the same person was killing both the first victim and the homicide cop.

The final three that held my interest-in addition to the Kotite case-included Garland Petry, a Dallas detective who put one shot into his chest and then another into his face. He left a note that read, “Sadly, I know I am shorn of my strength.” Of course, I hadn’t known Petry. But I had never heard a cop use the word “shorn” before. The line he had supposedly written had a literary feel to it. I just didn’t think it would have come from the hand and mind of a suicidal cop.

The second of the cases was also a one-liner. Clifford Beltran, a detective with the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department in Florida, had supposedly killed himself three years earlier-it was the oldest of the cases-leaving behind a note that said simply, “Lord help my poor soul.” Again, it was a conglomeration of words that sounded odd to me in the mouth of a cop, any cop. It was just a hunch but I included Beltran on my list.

Lastly, the third case was included on my list even though there was no mention of a note in the suicide of John P. McCafferty, homicide detective with the Baltimore police. I put McCafferty on the list because his death eerily resembled the death of John Brooks. McCafferty had supposedly fired one shot into the floor of his apartment before firing the second and fatal shot into his throat. I remembered Lawrence Washington’s belief that this was a way of getting gunshot residue on the victim’s hands.

Four names. I studied them and the rest of the notes I had taken for a while and then pulled the book on Poe I had bought in Boulder out of my flight bag.

It was a thick book with everything that Poe had supposedly ever written. I checked the contents page and noted there were seventy-six pages containing his poetry. I realized that my long night was going to get longer. I ordered an eight-cup pot of coffee from room service and asked them to bring some aspirin as well for the headache I felt sure I would get from the caffeine binge. I then started reading.

I’m not one who has ever been afraid of aloneness or the dark. I’ve lived by myself for ten years, I’ve even camped alone in the national parks and I’ve walked through deserted, burned-out buildings to get a story. I’ve sat in dark cars on darker streets waiting to confront candidates and mobsters, or to meet timid sources. While the mobsters certainly put fear in me, the fact that I was out there by myself in the dark never did. But I have to say that Poe’s words put a chill in me that night. Maybe it was being alone in a hotel room in a city I didn’t know. Maybe it was being surrounded by the documents of death and murder, or that I felt the presence of my dead brother somehow near. And maybe also it was just the knowledge of how some of the words I was reading were now being used. Whatever it was, I put a scare on myself that didn’t lift as I read, even when I turned the television on to provide the comforting hum of background noise.

Propped against the pillows on the bed, I read with the lights on either side of me turned on and bright. But, still, I bolted upright when a sudden sharp sound of laughter shot down the hallway outside my room. I had just settled back into the comfort of the shell my body had formed in the pillows and was reading a poem titled “An Enigma” when the phone rang and jolted me again with its double ring so foreign to the sound of my phone at home. It was half past midnight and I assumed it was Greg Glenn in Denver, two hours behind.

But as I reached for the phone I knew I was wrong. I hadn’t told Glenn where I had checked in.

The caller was Michael Warren.

“Just wanted to check in-I figured you’d be up-and see what you came up with.”

Again I felt uneasy about his self-involvement, his many questions. It was unlike any other source that had ever provided me with information on the sly. But I couldn’t just get rid of him, given the risk he had taken.

“I’m still going through it all,” I said. “Sitting here reading the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. I’m scaring myself shitless.”

He laughed politely.

“But does any of it look good-as far as the suicides go?”

Just then I realized something.

“Hey, where are you calling from?”

“Home. Why?”

“Didn’t you say you live up in Maryland?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Then this is a toll call, right? It will be a record on your bill that you called me here, man. Didn’t you think about that?”

I couldn’t believe his carelessness, especially in light of his own warnings about the FBI and Agent Walling.

“Oh shit, I … I don’t really think I care. Nobody’s going to pull my records. It’s not like I passed on defense secrets, for crying out loud.”

“I don’t know. You know ‘em better than me.”

“So never mind that, what have you got?”

“I told you I’m still looking. I’ve got a couple names that might be good. A few names.”

“Well, then, good. I’m glad it was worth the risk.”

I nodded but realized he couldn’t see me do this.

“Yeah, well, like I said before, thanks. I gotta get back to it now. I’m fading and want to get it done.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it. Maybe tomorrow, when you get a chance, give me a call to let me know what’s going on.”

“I don’t know if that will be a good idea, Michael. I think we better lay low.”

“Well, whatever you think. I guess I’ll be reading all about it, eventually, anyway. You have a deadline yet?”

“Nope. Haven’t even talked about it.”

“Nice editor. Anyway, go back to it. Happy hunting.”

Soon I was back in the embrace of the words of the poet. Dead a hundred and fifty years but reaching from the grave to grip me. Poe was a master of mood and pace. The mood was gloom and the pace often frenetic. I found myself identifying the words and phrases with my own life. “I dwelt alone / In a world of moan,” Poe wrote. “And my soul was a stagnant tide.” Cutting words that seemed, at least at that moment, to fit me.

I read on and soon felt myself gripped by an empathic hold of the poet’s own melancholy when I read the stanzas of “The Lake.”

But when the Night had thrown her pall Upon that spot, as upon all, And the mystic wind went by Murmuring in melody Then-ah then I would awake To the terror of the lone lake Poe had captured my own dread and fitful memory. My nightmare. He had reached across a century and a half to me and put a cold finger on my chest.

Death was in that poisonous wave, And in its gulf a fitting grave I finished reading the last poem at three o’clock in the morning. I had found only one more correlation between the poetry and the suicide notes. The line attributed in the reports to Dallas detective Garland Petry-“Sadly, I know I am shorn of my strength”-was taken from a poem entitled “For Annie.”