The Gravedigger's Ball

by Solomon Jones

  “Hold down the fort while I’m gone,” she said. Then she put on a pair of Chanel sunglasses and walked out the front door wearing a hint of perfume and a self-assured grin.

  A few officers did double takes as they passed her in the parking lot. She didn’t respond—not outwardly, at least—but on the inside, she was thinking what every beautiful woman knows instinctively. If her man wouldn’t give her what she needed, there were plenty of others who were more than willing to fill the void.

  Sandy got into her black Dodge Charger and checked her hair and makeup in the mirror. Then she rumbled out of the parking lot with her mind switching back into cop mode. She thought about the man who’d killed so easily in the cemetery that morning and then killed her friend in the woods. She thought of the task the commissioner had given her—to learn how the raven was connected to the killer—but she didn’t know where to start. In cases like that, Sandy always went back to the beginning, and this was no exception.

  She swung her car around and headed back to Seventh Street, slowing as she rode past the Poe house, and parking there to look once more at the place where Clarissa and the black-haired man played out their obsessions with “The Raven.”

  She sat there and imagined what it must be like to return to the same place again and again, looking for something that simply wasn’t there. Then she smiled and remembered how many times she’d asked Charlie to open up, to let her in, to let go of the past, to move forward. Sandy knew exactly what it was like to return to the same thing again and again. She’d been doing it for the past two months.

  She got out of the car and looked at the house, then she looked at the streets, and before she knew it, she found herself walking, trying to put into order the thoughts that were swirling in her mind.

  Clarissa had come to the house on multiple occasions, looking to find something that the ranger couldn’t give her. The black-haired man had done the same. The ranger said they both believed that Poe had hidden something at Fairgrounds Cemetery. Why, then, would they keep coming back to the house? Why wouldn’t they just go to the place where the knowledge was supposed to be hidden? It didn’t make sense to Sandy.

  As she walked north on Seventh Street, she passed by the public housing she’d seen earlier. It was getting cool out, so there were only four men outside to whistle and yell at her. When she gave them a perfunctory hello and kept walking, one of them hurled an insult. Sandy ignored him and continued on her way.

  She walked by a building that had been converted to condos during the housing boom and was now up for sale. As she continued walking north, she saw signs that the neighborhood was teetering between success and failure. There were townhouses for young couples and a new apartment building for seniors, alleys for drug addicts and vacant lots for dealers.

  When she crossed Girard Avenue and walked past the corner where Xanax and Vicodin and Valium were sold to refugees from nearby outpatient drug rehabs, everyone on the corner went silent. They knew she looked good. They knew she wasn’t from the neighborhood, and they knew she was a cop, because only a cop would be bold enough to walk there alone.

  Sandy had everyone’s attention now, though no one would say it aloud. No one that is, except for the old man wearing a dirty, rumpled ski jacket with several layers of clothing underneath. He was a bum, but you couldn’t tell him that.

  “You shouldn’t be out here by yourself,” he said, coming alongside her with a friendly grin. “This ain’t no place for a lady.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll be fine,” Sandy said, noting that the drug dealers across the street were rapidly closing up shop as she approached.

  “I know you will,” he said reassuringly. “But my mom taught me to never let a lady walk alone if I could help it. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just tag along to make sure nothin’ happens to you.”

  She looked at the old man with a smile of genuine gratitude. “You’re a rare breed,” she said. “An actual gentleman. I thought they were extinct.”

  “We still around,” he said. “We might disappear for a while, but we always come back.”

  Sandy thought about what he’d said as she looked at the brick houses that stood between trash-strewn, weed-filled lots. Everyone on the block pretended to continue what they were doing as she and the old man passed by, but they were all watching her, waiting for the backup they assumed was on the way.

  Sandy smiled at a few of the children. Then she saw an old woman amble out to the street and drop breadcrumbs on the asphalt. A group of pigeons swooped in. The old lady watched along with Sandy and her escort as the birds pecked away at their treat. A car came flying past and the birds scattered. A second later, they came back to finish what they’d started.

  “Pigeons somethin’ else,” the old man said as he continued to walk with her. “They just survive off whatever’s there. They don’t care where it comes from or who put it there. They’re survivors, and they’ll still be here a long time after we gone.”

  Sandy looked at the man and then at the birds. “Does that lady drop those breadcrumbs here every day?”

  “Like clockwork,” the old man said. “And I swear those same four or five pigeons wait for it. They know where the treasure is, and they come back every day to get it.”

  Sandy immediately thought of what the captain back at homicide had said about the raven. He was smart, and just like the pigeons, he knew where his treasure was supposed to be. It stood to reason that he would keep coming back to find it. When that thought crystallized in Sandy’s mind, she knew exactly where she should look.

  CHAPTER 8

  As he drove to the University of Pennsylvania to meet with Professor Workman, Coletti’s mind was filled with Lenore. He tried not to allow those thoughts to consume him, but he was fighting a losing battle.

  He thought of the things she’d told him about himself, and of her resolve in the face of danger, and of the zeal with which Clarissa believed in her. Even if nothing else happened, Lenore had already proven that there was something special about her. Coletti hoped that the next few hours would reveal what that something was.

  Of course, Coletti knew old-fashioned police work got more results than hope did. When his efforts to contact Lenore’s father continued to fail, he had arranged to interview Workman.

  On his way to meet the professor, Coletti realized that he hadn’t eaten all morning. This was one of the small ways in which police work got tough. He turned onto Walnut Street while reaching into his glove compartment for a half-eaten piece of beef jerky. Peeling off the plastic, he bit down hard, bending the tough, dry meat until it broke off in his teeth and filled his mouth with the taste of salt and old gravy.

  Coletti knew he should eat better. His cholesterol had been in the two hundreds for years. Still, he’d managed to avoid the doctor’s repeated attempts to medicate him by promising to diet and exercise. At fifty-eight, he’d figured it out: having a doctor was no different from being in a relationship. You lied to keep things intact, because lies were easier to stomach than the truth.

  Coletti had chosen to believe the lies with Mary Smithson. He’d ignored the fact that she shouldn’t have wanted him, couldn’t have wanted him, even in his wildest dreams. He told himself that she was different from the women he’d managed to drive away with his caustic style and refusal to commit. But that was all in the past now. At least, that was what he told everyone else. Deep down, he knew that it would be years before the scars would heal, if in fact they ever healed at all.

  Still stuck on Walnut Street, Coletti took a look at the heavy downtown traffic in front of him and flipped on his lights to try to move it into a single lane. It didn’t work. Armored cars, UPS trucks, and FedEx vehicles were parked in the inner lanes, delivering money and inventory to the banks and high-end stores near Rittenhouse Square. Slow-moving buses clogged the outer lane.

  Coletti figured the traffic would clear up when the street widened from two lanes to three, but while he was waiting, he turned on both the car r
adio and the police radio. It had taken him years to learn to listen to both at once, but it was particularly easy today, since the topic was the same no matter which station he chose.

  KYW Newsradio ran an endless series of recaps and updates from the morning’s events, with periodic reports from the scenes where the bodies had been found. A so-called expert spoke about the possibility that the killings were part of a satanic ritual, while another surmised that the killings weren’t connected at all. Meanwhile, police radio featured snippets of conversation centering on the search for the suspect.

  Officers in the park and at the cemetery remained on their posts, sealing off the nearby roads from all vehicle and foot traffic. Officers outside the park were busy making car and pedestrian stops, trying desperately to find someone who matched the description.

  Commanders worked with school district and transit police to cordon off every school within a five-mile radius. Homes and businesses were searched. Informants were questioned. But while Coletti knew that everything they were doing was necessary, he was sure that most of it was in vain.

  Based on what Ellison had told him, Coletti had a hunch that Clarissa Bailey’s murder was connected to something much bigger than money. If indeed it was related to a set of beliefs, it could prove to be particularly dangerous. Coletti had seen people killed in the name of beliefs before.

  The traffic thinned out when he reached Twenty-second Street, and as Coletti sped around the cars that had blocked his path, he wondered if Workman could shed light on Clarissa’s beliefs. More importantly, he wondered if Workman could identify others who shared them.

  Coletti turned off Walnut Street on University Avenue and parked near the small walkway where the Kelly Writers House was located. The Tudor-style cottage was a work and social center for Penn’s writing community. When Coletti knocked on the door, a deep voice called out from the parlor.

  “Come in,” Workman said, walking into the living room to greet the detective.

  Coletti reached out to shake Workman’s hand, noting that the professor was a man of average height, with the rumpled look of an intellectual and the kind eyes of a grandfather. He was balding and wrinkled, but his movements were spry.

  “I was so sorry to hear about Clarissa,” the professor said, shaking his head sadly. “She was a dear friend.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Coletti said, noting that the professor’s grief appeared to be sincere.

  Workman locked the front door and drew the blinds before leading Coletti to a seat in the parlor. “Tell me how I can help.”

  “Well, I spoke with Mr. Bailey—”

  “And you didn’t lock him up?” the professor said, his face still pleasant but his tone deadly serious.

  “I take it you’re one of the friends he mentioned—the ones who didn’t like him.”

  “You don’t have to be Clarissa’s friend to dislike Ellison. Not even her worst enemy would wish him on her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s a lazy fraud who never had her best interests at heart,” the professor spat. “We tried to tell her not to marry him, but Clarissa wouldn’t listen. She saw something in him that the rest of us didn’t.”

  “Who do you mean when you say ‘the rest of us’?”

  “I mean her friends. The people who cared about her, like Violet Grant and Lily Thompkins—the other two women in the Daughters of Independence.”

  Coletti thought for a moment. “The manager at the cemetery mentioned that she was a member of that organization. They deal with historic preservation, right?”

  “I don’t know how much of an organization it is at this point,” the professor said with a wan smile. “There’s only Violet and Lily now, but yes, historic preservation is part of what they do. They maintain the Tookesbury Mansion in Fairmount Park, and they’ve become more involved at Fairgrounds Cemetery. They were trying to create stronger links between some of the city’s most important historical locations. That’s why the Gravedigger’s Ball was going to take place at Tookesbury this year. But now, with Clarissa gone…”

  The professor didn’t need to finish. Both he and Coletti knew that the mansion, located in Fairmount Park, near the sites of both murders, might not be the best location anymore.

  “You said historic preservation was only part of their mission,” Coletti said. “What else do they do?”

  “They believe,” the professor said with a grin. “They believe in Philadelphia, its history, and the people who made it. People like Edgar Allan Poe, who lived here for six of the most productive years of his writing career.”

  “Clarissa’s husband said those beliefs came from you.”

  The professor chuckled. “Yes, they did, and Ellison hated that. He shuddered to think that another man might be influencing Clarissa, but I never sought to recruit Clarissa or the others. I shared my theories, and they thought they were interesting. When Clarissa talked to Ellison about it, he told her she was stupid to believe me. Of course, Ellison doesn’t understand how Poe changed the way we see ourselves and our fears. He doesn’t understand what Poe saw.”

  Coletti smiled. “You seem to know a lot about the conversations Clarissa had with her husband. Did she talk to you often about her marriage?”

  Workman raised his hands in a “stop” gesture. “I know where you’re going, and I assure you I was merely a listening ear for Clarissa—nothing more. Our friendship was platonic. She didn’t want anything from me, and I didn’t want anything from her.”

  Coletti took note of Workman’s defensive posture. The professor quickly tried to conceal his discomfort, but it was too late. Coletti had found a weak spot.

  “So, as Clarissa’s friend,” Coletti said, “can you tell me what it was about your theories on Poe that came between Clarissa and her husband? I mean, I’m no expert, but from what I’ve read, Poe was a drunk who spent most of his life broke.”

  The professor’s eyes flashed angrily, just as Coletti knew they would. People spoke most truthfully when they were angry, and Workman was no exception.

  “If you knew anything at all about Poe, you’d know that he was much more than a drunk,” the professor said indignantly. “He was a seer, and he drank because the things he saw were beyond human comprehension. They were horrible, frightening things, and whenever he saw them, he drank himself into a stupor so he wouldn’t have to see them anymore.”

  “How do you know what he saw?” Coletti asked skeptically. “He died a hundred years before you were born.”

  The professor looked at Coletti with a smug expression. “I’ve spent my life poring over every word Poe ever wrote. I’ve written a thousand-page dissertation on his life and career, and what I’m telling you is that Poe lived with visions that horrified him. That’s why he loved poetry so much. In poems he could forget the pictures in his mind and paint a world where everyone could see the frost on a wave as it came in from the sea, or the dew on a flower in the morning. Unfortunately, Poe realized that the world didn’t want beauty. The world wanted horror, so Poe unlocked the unspeakable things he’d seen in his mind, and he shared them with a world that was all too happy to receive them.”

  “So you’re saying Poe was crazy?”

  “I’m saying he was troubled,” Workman said. “And it’s no wonder. His father left when he was too young to remember. His mother died when he was two. He was taken in by family friends, but when he grew up to be a gambler and a drunk, he fell out of favor with his stepfather, dropped out of college, and got himself kicked out of West Point. He drank and wrote and failed repeatedly, and when he was twenty-seven, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin and moved in with the girl and her mother. So you’re right, Detective. He was a drunk who spent most of his adult life broke, but Edgar Allan Poe was nothing less than a genius.”

  “What does any of that have to do with Mrs. Bailey being killed?”

  The professor regarded the detective with a knowing smile. “Poe wrote about murder quite a bit. It was
the subject he knew best. And when his detractors said he’d copied the German authors of his time by writing gothic tales of beauty and murder, Poe said, ‘Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul, and I have reduced it to its likely source.’” Workman stopped smiling and looked Coletti in the eye. “The source of Poe’s terror was his mind. It was there that he saw things that frightened him. He wrote about those things in graphic detail. And that has everything to do with what happened to Mrs. Bailey.”

  “What are you saying, Professor?”

  “I’m saying that Clarissa was chasing one of Poe’s visions—visions he shared in every horror story he ever wrote. ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ was a vision. ‘The Black Cat’ was a vision. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ was a vision. But the vision that made him most famous was the one he saw at Fairgrounds Cemetery, where some believe he worked as a part-time gravedigger when things got lean with his writing. The vision he saw at Fairgrounds was immortalized in ‘The Raven,’ and that’s the vision Clarissa was trying to find.”

  The professor got up and grabbed a leather-bound volume off a bookshelf near the couch, sat down next to Coletti, and opened the book to a well-worn page.

  “Look here,” the professor said, pointing to the book. “When he speaks of a chamber door, it’s a metaphor for the death chamber. And here, where he talks of peering into darkness, he’s speaking of looking into the future. And here, where the raven continually repeats the word ‘nevermore,’ Poe’s saying he’ll never see that vision again.”

  “And what exactly was this vision?” Coletti asked.

  “It was a vision about unlocking the power of the human mind,” Workman said excitedly. “That’s why the raven sat on a bust of the goddess of wisdom. You see, Poe understood, even before science proved him right, that we only use a fraction of our brains. He knew that the human mind, when fully unleashed, could heal sickness, move mountains, even defeat death. Fortunately, Poe knew one more thing. He knew that he couldn’t allow that knowledge to fall into the wrong hands, so he hid it somewhere in Fairgrounds Cemetery for another seer to find. Poe told us that seer’s name right here in ‘The Raven,’ when he spoke of his lost love, Lenore.”