The Gravedigger's Ball

by Solomon Jones

  “Who was the detective and what was he doing there, Commissioner?” asked a radio reporter.

  “We can’t comment on either of those questions right now, as the answers might compromise the investigation. But we can say that shortly after the detective heard the gunshot, he spotted a man in the area where the victim’s body was found. The detective gave chase, and when the suspect eluded him, the detective put out a description. We believe the man he described, a white male with black hair and a mustache who was dressed in black and white clothing, may have been involved in the victim’s death.”

  “So is this male you described the same man who’s been identified informally as the Gravedigger?” the reporter pressed. “And are you treating the death in the graveyard as a homicide?”

  Lynch glared at him for a long moment. “We won’t be commenting on the name, and we’ll have no comment on the manner of death until we see the coroner’s report, but I will say this.” Lynch locked eyes with several reporters before continuing in an angrier tone. “After that description was broadcast, Officer Frank Smith responded, and he did so with the same sense of urgency that he would if someone had found one of you dead in that cemetery. Whatever folks in the media had to say about Frank Smith in the past, I know one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt. He went into those woods because he had enough respect for his badge to do his job. And just like all the other officers who’ve been killed in the last year fighting crime in this city, Frank Smith did that job well.”

  Lynch paused, his jaw working furiously as he ground his teeth in an effort to calm himself.

  “I’ve already seen a picture of his body online, and I haven’t even had the chance to meet with his family,” Lynch said with a stony stare. “That’s wrong. It’s disrespectful, and I think some of you agree with me, so if you’re covering this story, do all of us a favor. Give Officer Smith the same respect he gave to that victim and this job, because the bottom line is, he lost his life in an effort to protect yours and mine.”

  There was a slight pause. Then a reporter from the Inquirer spoke up. “Does that mean you’re placing some kind of gag order on the media, Commissioner Lynch?”

  “It means there won’t be any more pictures of this officer’s body posted on the Internet for his wife and children to see,” Lynch said with smoldering eyes. “Not one more.”

  The reporters looked around at each other, unsure if they’d just heard a request or an order. Lynch didn’t care what they thought. He had one more message to deliver, and the media were going to deliver it for him, whether they liked it or not.

  “And to the person who fled the scene this morning, you know who you are, you know what you’ve done, but you need to know this: we don’t let our officers die in vain in Philadelphia, and we don’t take our justice lightly.”

  “So you’re promising retribution?” yelled a reporter from CNN.

  Lynch turned his withering stare on him, and both the reporter and the rest of the crowd grew quiet. “I’m promising that wherever this man is, we’ll find him. No matter how far he runs, we’ll get him. No matter how good he thinks he is, we’re better. So if he’s out there listening, he should know that he better not stop, he better not sleep, he better not blink, because if he does, we’ll be there waiting. I promise you that.”

  Lynch walked away from the microphones to the sound of shouted questions, and when the raven flew away, the man Lynch was looking for snapped shut his laptop and took a sharp knife to his mustache. After he’d shaved it, he changed the clothes he’d worn for the killings, and smiled at the name they’d given him.

  The Gravedigger. He liked the sound of that name. It fit what he was about to do.

  * * *

  Ellison Bailey awakened to the sound of the brass knocker pounding the oak door of the Society Hill brownstone he shared with his wife. The sound always startled Ellison, especially when he was sleeping, and this afternoon, he was sleeping more soundly than usual.

  For what seemed like days, he’d repeatedly heard the knocker along with the sound of ringing bells in his dreams. His mind had incorporated the sounds into a story of bombs and air-raid sirens. This was the first time since he lay down that morning that he realized the knocking was real.

  Slowly, he opened his eyes and looked toward the ten-foot ceiling, blinking as a shaft of sunlight knifed between the drapes in his study. He raised his hand to block the light and squinted at the leather-bound volumes of Frost, Thoreau, Dickens, and Poe that lined the bookcases on the other side of the room.

  Peeling himself off the couch, Clarissa Bailey’s husband smacked his lips and rubbed the sleep from his eyes. Then he sat there with his head in his hands, trying to wake up.

  The knocking came again, more insistently this time, and Ellison cursed under his breath before crossing the room and turning on his laptop to make it look as if he’d been working on his never-ending novel.

  “I’m coming!” he yelled as he walked down the winding staircase and through the cavernous rooms and hallways that led to the front door of the four-story, thirty-room home.

  The knocking became more persistent. It was annoying, just like Clarissa. The sound reminded him of why he wanted to be rid of her. By the time he arrived at the door, he was downright angry, and it showed when he snatched open the door and yelled in his clipped British accent, “What is it!”

  He was greeted by an outstretched hand holding a badge. “Detective Coletti, Philadelphia Police. Are you Ellison Bailey?”

  Ellison nodded, looking at the detective and the officer who stood at the bottom of the steps, near a parked police car with another cop in the driver’s seat.

  “We’ve been trying to reach you all morning, Mr. Bailey. It’s about your wife.”

  “What about her? Is she all right?”

  Coletti paused to look at Ellison Bailey, whose sprayed-on tan and dyed brown hair starkly contrasted the two-day growth of gray stubble that lined his wrinkled face. Dressed in driving loafers, jeans, and a slept-in designer shirt, Ellison appeared to be fighting a losing battle against age.

  As they stood there looking at each other, several of the Baileys’ neighbors peeked out their windows and doors.

  “Maybe I should come in, Mr. Bailey,” Coletti said, nodding toward the patrol officer. “It might be a little more private.”

  “Oh, of course,” Ellison said, standing aside. “We can talk in the den.”

  Coletti told the officers to stay outside. Then Ellison led Coletti through a labyrinth of halls and rooms that were lined with prominently displayed sculpture and paintings. They passed through the living room, with luxurious furnishings and Fabergé eggs strategically placed beneath banks of recessed lighting. They passed through the drawing room, with rich oils by impressionist masters encased in ornate frames. The dining room was equipped with a marble table whose velvet and silk runner was a deep royal purple. The den was appointed with plush wingback chairs, earth-toned African carvings, a giant flat-screen television, and most importantly to Ellison, a bar.

  “Please sit down,” Ellison said as he mixed himself a martini and took a sip. “Can I get you anything?”

  Coletti had neither the time nor the inclination to socialize, so he got to the point quickly. “Your wife’s dead, Mr. Bailey.”

  Ellison stopped in mid-sip. There was no grief, no shock, and no joy. There was only acceptance of the grim news. A moment later he gulped down the martini and mixed himself another.

  “How did it happen?” he asked as he popped an olive into the glass and fell into a chair directly across from Coletti.

  “Someone pushed her into a grave and stuffed her mouth with dirt. We think she choked to death.”

  “Really?” Ellison asked, sounding surprised, but not grieved. “That’s dreadful.”

  Coletti knew what it was to lose a woman he loved, and what he saw from Ellison Bailey didn’t compare to the grief he felt each time he thought of Mary. The question came out of his mouth before he cou
ld stop it. “You didn’t care about her at all, did you?”

  Ellison took another sip of his martini. “We were in the midst of a divorce, Detective. At least, I was. She wanted to fight to keep the marriage intact so she wouldn’t have to pay.”

  “So you stood to gain financially from the divorce?” Coletti asked.

  Ellison looked at him. “I suspect you already know the answer to that, so let’s cut to the chase, shall we? My wife was rich and I’m her sole surviving relative. In your eyes, that makes me a suspect, right?”

  Coletti smiled in spite of himself. He appreciated Ellison’s bluntness, if not his attitude. “There are a lot of things other than the money that make you a suspect, Mr. Bailey, including the fact that you were trying to divorce your wife.”

  “Lots of people have marital problems, Detective. There’s nothing unique about that.”

  “But it’s unique for a man with no steady source of income to be married to a billionaire.”

  “Yes, aren’t I the lucky one?” Ellison asked sarcastically.

  Coletti’s cell phone buzzed, and he took it out and looked at the message. It was the e-mail Clarissa had sent out announcing Lenore’s visit. The cemetery manager had finally forwarded it, as promised. There were five addresses in the “to” line. Four of them had names attached. One of them didn’t.

  Ellison took another sip of his martini. “Is everything all right, Detective?” he asked. “Do you need to make a call?”

  Coletti’s instincts told him not to share the e-mail with Ellison. He quickly put the phone away. “No, I don’t need to make any calls,” he said. “But I do need to know a little more about your relationship with your wife. How did the two of you meet?”

  “We met five years ago at the Borrowers Ball,” Ellison said. “It’s a black-tie gala to benefit the Free Library of Philadelphia.”

  “And you were on the guest list?”

  “Yes,” Ellison said, taking another sip of his drink. “I once wrote a book on the history of Mayan civilization, and somehow, through serendipity or dumb luck or whatever you want to call it, my book became a Hollywood film. The genius who directed it decided to make the movie without dialogue. It flopped, and after that, no one would touch any of my books with a ten-foot pole. I was forever relegated to being a featured author at literary events, and it didn’t take me long to go broke.”

  “You sound bitter.”

  “On the contrary,” Ellison said. “I’m grateful that the library invited me. I felt like I’d turned the tables on Cinderella, and for once, the prince got to be the one to crash the ball.”

  Coletti smiled at Ellison’s sardonic wit.

  “Clarissa was at my table that night,” Ellison continued. “She took a liking to me. And when I told her I was working on a novel about a nineteenth-century writer who’s involved in a murder, she was actually rather intrigued. A few weeks later, she invited me over to, um … look at her etchings. She showed me hers, I showed her mine, and six months later, we were married.”

  “I see,” Coletti said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you, Mr. Bailey?”

  “I’m eight years Clarissa’s junior. She was fifty-five when we met. I was forty-seven. It was quite the scandal on the society page. Still is.”

  Coletti looked around at the trappings of wealth that surrounded them. “Scandal or not, banging old broads for a living pays well, doesn’t it?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Ellison said sharply.

  Coletti stood up and walked over to the chair where Ellison Bailey was sitting. “You said you wanted to cut to the chase, Mr. Bailey, so let’s do that. Clarissa wasn’t the first older woman to take care of you, was she? There was the woman you lived with in California who sued after you ran through her fortune. Then there’s the woman you lived with in Florida who sued after you drained the bank accounts the two of you shared. But they were lucky, weren’t they? They didn’t end up dead.”

  “I had nothing to do with anyone’s death, including Clarissa’s,” Ellison said nervously.

  “Maybe not, but you’ve got a pattern of defrauding old women, and Clarissa would’ve been your biggest victim. You couldn’t afford to fight her in divorce court, so the next best thing would’ve been to kill her. As her husband, you would get everything. So you see, Mr. Bailey, you’re the perfect suspect, and the way I see it, you’ve got two options. You can go get a lawyer and try to delay the inevitable, or you can talk before I track down the rest of the old ladies you scammed and see who else ended up dead.”

  Ellison stared at Coletti for a moment. Then he gulped the rest of his martini and looked down into the empty glass. He seemed to be fighting a battle with himself, and from the expression on his face, he was losing. When finally he spoke, it was with a quiet humility that hadn’t been there before.

  “I’ve never killed anybody or arranged to have anyone killed, including Clarissa. I was here sleeping all morning, just like I do most days. I’m sure if you check with Clarissa’s friends, they’ll verify that I’m the laziest man they’ve ever seen. They kept telling her to just grant me the divorce and move on, but Clarissa was much too kind for that. That’s why I cared for her so much.”

  “If you cared for her why did you file for divorce?”

  Ellison got up, walked over to the bar, and made himself a third martini. “You’ve already told me what you think of me, Detective, and, sadly, you’re right. I’m a failed writer who takes money from old women and leaves them worse off than when I found them. I’m not proud of that, but I accept it. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Clarissa. She deserved much better than me.”

  “Why?” Coletti asked skeptically. “What made her any different from the others?”

  “Trite as it might sound, she was a good person,” Ellison said, as he walked toward an oil painting of Clarissa that hung on the far wall. “She funded nurseries for crack babies, shelters for alcoholics, and a million other little causes for people nobody else cared about. She loved humanity, Detective … almost as much as she loved history and the arts.”

  Coletti joined him in front of the portrait. “If she was such a saint, why would someone kill her?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about why people kill,” Ellison said. “I create things. I’m not into death.”

  “But your wife was into death,” Coletti said. “She was heavily involved in fund-raising for a historic cemetery called Fairgrounds.”

  Ellison walked slowly to his seat and sat down. He looked concerned. “Is that where it happened—at the cemetery?”

  “Yes. Does that mean something?”

  Ellison sighed and shook his head. “As I told you, my wife loved history and the arts—writing, especially. She was involved with Fairgrounds Cemetery because she believed it was connected to one of her favorite nineteenth-century writers.”

  “You mean Edgar Allan Poe?”

  Ellison looked surprised. “How’d you know that?”

  “We found a line from ‘The Raven’ near your wife’s body when she died.” Coletti pulled out his notepad and read it. “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing…”

  Ellison’s face turned ashen, and Coletti stopped reading.

  “Are you all right, Mr. Bailey?”

  Ellison started mumbling. “I told her to let it go, but she wouldn’t listen.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He looked at Coletti, unsure how much he wanted to reveal. “Our divorce was about more than just money, Detective. It was also about Clarissa’s insistence on dabbling in things I thought were dangerous. Things she thought were revealed in that poem.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Certain scholars believe Edgar Allan Poe was a seer who stood between life and death and saw something that regular people couldn’t see—some sort of secret that would literally change the course of mankind. Those scholars believe that’s what ‘The Raven’ was really about. And some of t
hose scholars—men like Irving Workman at Penn—believe the place where Poe stood is somewhere at Fairgrounds Cemetery.”

  Coletti remembered that Workman was one of the names on the e-mail Clarissa sent regarding Lenore’s visit. He asked his next question while jotting down Workman’s initials. “Do you know Irving Workman?”

  “I met him once or twice when I was lecturing at Penn, but Clarissa was friends with him,” Ellison said with disdain. “Workman had Clarissa convinced that Poe discovered his gift of sight here in Philadelphia. He even took Clarissa and her friends to the house where Poe lived.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Seventh and Spring Garden.”

  Coletti wrote down the location. “So why did you think it was dangerous for your wife to listen to Workman?”

  “Because he kept telling Clarissa that there was another seer—a woman who could decipher what Poe found at the cemetery. Clarissa was obsessed with that woman, almost to the point where she’d do anything to find her. If a reasonably stable person like my wife could get so lost in Workman’s teachings, I figured there were those who would give their very lives for those beliefs, or worse, take the lives of others.”

  Ellison shook his head sadly. “Turns out I was right.”

  Coletti’s cell phone rang as Ellison stared down into the last few drops of his martini. When the detective took the phone from his pocket and saw the number, he answered immediately.

  “Okay,” he said after listening to the voice on the other end. “We’ll be right down.”

  Ellison looked on as Coletti disconnected the call.

  “That was the medical examiner’s office,” Coletti said solemnly. “They’ve found something on Clarissa’s body.”

  * * *

  With every passing second, Kirsten Douglas realized just how fortunate she was. Unlike Clarissa Bailey and Officer Smith, she’d seen the Gravedigger face-to-face and survived. Kirsten was the only one other than Mike Coletti to do so. It was that distinction more than anything else that landed her a guest spot on CNN.