Entombed

by Linda Fairstein

  "What does Guidi know about Monty? Anything else?"

  "That he was in a graduate program-something to do with literature. Guidi thinks he was a poet or a writer."

  "And the police-did Guidi ever tell the police about Aurora back then, when she disappeared?" I asked.

  "No. He says he was too whacked out on drugs. She vanished and most of the kids figured she just either left town or she got caught up in some drug sweep and went to prison for a while."

  Fifteen minutes later, while Mike worked the phones to set up meetings for the next day, McKinney was summoned into the room by Roy Kirby. Whatever agreement they reached, Scotty, Mike, and I were not privy to it. McKinney came out to ask Taren to set them up in the interrogation room with the two-way glass, so that Taren could watch the rest of the conversation without being seen by Guidi. McKinney's excuse for excluding Mike and me was that Guidi was uncomfortable with so many investigators surrounding him.

  After McKinney went inside with the witness, Taren waved both of us into the darkened cubicle so we could observe the interchange alongside him.

  Gino Guidi had started to explain what he knew about Aurora Tait and the man known as Monty.

  "The program we were in-SABA-was set up on the twelve-step model of Alcoholics Anonymous. You know what that is?" Guidi asked.

  "I've got a pretty good idea. Why don't you be specific," McKinney said.

  "The first thing is just to admit that you're powerless over alcohol and can no longer control your life. The second step is to acknowledge your belief in a higher power that can help restore your sanity. Next you agree to turn your life over to God-whatever your understanding of him is-and then to make a soul-searching inventory of yourself," Guidi said, still smoking as he talked.

  "We got to the fifth step and that's where Monty started to choke."

  "What do you mean?" McKinney asked.

  "I think the way it goes is that you have to admit to yourself, and to God, and to another human being the exact nature of your wrongs. Most of us had hurt the people we loved, stolen money to buy drugs, hocked the family jewels-that kind of thing," he said, crushing his cigarette in an ashtray on the bare table in front of him and shaking his head.

  "And Monty?"

  "I was sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park, waiting for a meeting to begin. I didn't even know the guy except for an hour a week in a church basement, listening to him talk about getting kicked out of boarding school and being an orphan and that kind of shit. Next thing I know, he's telling me he'd been having weird dreams."

  "Dreams?" McKinney asked.

  "Yeah, nightmares. Said he had visions that he had killed someone."

  "Did he tell you who?"

  "Not by name. I mean, I didn't know it was Aurora Tait. He told me he kept waking up in the middle of the night, thinking he had murdered a girl. Some chick, he told me, who had betrayed him. He said he'd had a summer job doing construction work-this was where he got especially weird-and that he'd used materials from his work to bury her behind a wall."

  "And what did you do about it?"

  "Do about it?" Guidi asked, looking puzzled.

  "Who'd you tell?"

  "I just assumed he was back on the blow, Mr. McKinney. Dreams and visions and blackouts were nothing unusual to any of us. I just chalked it up to the fact that he was using crack again, hallucinating and being paranoid. I knew firsthand what that was like."

  "Do you know whether he-this, this Monty-told anyone else?"

  "No idea."

  "Can you give me the names-the nicknames, that is-of the other people who were in the SABA group with you?" McKinney asked.

  Guidi looked over at Roy Kirby before he answered. "No. No, I can't."

  "Or won't."

  "I said I can't. Twenty years is a long time."

  Mike whispered to me and Scotty, "Why's McKinney going soft on him? Give me ten minutes in the room with Gino and I bet we'd have names and social security numbers. He's too smart not to know."

  Scotty agreed. "Yeah, but he's got too much on the line. I guess Pat'll shake a little more out of him in front of the grand jury."

  McKinney stood up and shook Gino Guidi's hand. "Well, I'll get in touch with Roy if we need anything else from you. A deal's a deal."

  "What's the frigging deal?" Mike asked.

  I walked to the door and waited for McKinney to step out of the interrogation room. "What did I miss? What do you mean by 'deal'?"

  "The reason Kirby offered to let Guidi talk to me just now is that I agreed not to subpoena him, because of the privileged communication."

  "Privilege?" I asked. "Are you talking about Dr. Ichiko? Doctor-patient?"

  "No, no, no. The clerical privilege."

  "I must be confused," Mike said. "Where's the priest? Who's got a collar here?"

  "Kirby's worked on a case. He just let me read it. Westchester County. He made law in the Second Circuit, getting them to treat Alcoholics Anonymous as a religious entity. There's a clericcongregant privilege that protects communications made even during unconventional forms of religious expression," McKinney said, talking down to Mike with his newfound legal knowledge that Roy Kirby had imparted. "Like disclosing one's 'fearless moral inventory' to God and your fellow A.A. members."

  Mike was muttering under his breath and making the sign of the cross. "Monty didn't confess to a priest, Pat. He was talking to another goddamn junkie on a park bench."

  McKinney called out to Kirby, "Miss Cooper doesn't trust your interpretation of the law, Roy. Want to show her that copy of the opinion in the Cox matter?"

  "I'm going to say this very quietly, Pat, because now that Roy Kirby has made a fool out of you once tonight, I don't need him to do it again. Just like Monty, Mr. Cox-Kirby's client in that Westchester case-didn't make his confession to murder for the purpose of getting spiritual guidance."

  McKinney screwed up his nose. "So? I don't follow you, Alex."

  "So the decision was reversed by the United States Court of Appeals a year later. It helps, Pat, if you read the slip opinions every now and then."

  McKinney reddened and bit his lip.

  "You've just let Gino Guidi off the hook and now we'll never truly find out how much he knows about Monty and any other people who might be able to identify him." I was steaming. "You let Guidi bargain to stay out of the grand jury when he might also have the names of disgruntled group members or former patients who didn't want Dr. Ichiko to go public tonight. Way to go, McKinney. Way to go."

  22

  Mercer, Mike, and I were sitting in my living room eating takeout from Shun Lee Palace at midnight. I had kicked off my boots, still damp from my trek through the snow-covered ground at the gorge, and was curled up on the sofa working the crispy sea bass with my chopsticks.

  Mike poured us a second round of drinks as we tried to figure out the next day's plan of attack.

  "The computer guys promised me answers from Emily Upshaw's hard drive," Mercer said. "I'd like to revisit Teddy Kroon to confront him about his DNA on the mouse, if they've figured out what files he tried to get into."

  Mike eschewed chopsticks in favor of dipping his spring rolls into the duck sauce and popping them into his mouth. "I located Noah Tormey, the professor who bailed Emily out."

  "I looked in the phone book this afternoon and couldn't find him."

  "That's why I've got a gold shield, kid, and you've got a desk job. I guess he got flopped. I had somebody back in the office Google him while we were at the precinct. He's teaching now at Bronx Community College."

  "Where's that?" I asked.

  "And she thought I'd never be so useful, Mercer. Isn't that right? Coop's own little outer-boroughs guy. Your second Bronx geography lesson in one day. Till 1973, NYU used to have a campus in the Bronx. It was called the Heights-all male, very prestigious-much more so in those days than the one in the Village. They sold it to the City University in the Bronx, once all of NYU's focus shifted to its Washington Square fac
ility."

  "You want to drop in on Professor Tormey in the morning? I'm with you."

  "Yeah. Scotty's going to attend at the Ichiko autopsy. Will you be in the office or you want me to pick you up here at nine?" Mike asked, trying to keep the honeyed baby spareribs from dripping onto my rug.

  "Here is good. How about the Raven Society?"

  "No listing under that name in the Manhattan directory. And no individual's name associated with the number we have came up in the Coles directory. Just an address in the East Fifties that's linked to the phone listing. We can rendezvous with Mercer and check it out tomorrow afternoon. You didn't mention it to McKinney, did you?"

  "Not once he screwed up the chance to get Gino Guidi to cooperate," I said. "It just slipped my mind."

  Mike tossed each of us a fortune cookie and I tore open the plastic wrapper to break it in half and read mine. "'Happiness returns when black cloud departs,'" I said aloud.

  "I hope the weather pattern doesn't stall over Manhattan. She's always more cheery when she's getting some. What's yours?"

  Mike ripped his open while Mercer answered, "'Avoid temptation. Tastiest dishes in your own kitchen.'" He smiled as he stood and carried his dishes to the sink. "I'm afraid the kitchen will be closed by the time I get home tonight."

  Mike tossed the little slip of paper onto his empty plate. "'Bad news travels faster than lightning.'"

  "I thought I paid Patrick extra for good fortunes," I said, referring to our favorite maître d' at Shun Lee. "These are as gloomy as this week's forecast. I'll pick up the rest of the mess. Why don't you guys get going?"

  The alarm went off at seven and was followed immediately after by the ringing telephone. "You up?"

  "Thinking about it, anyway." It was Joan Stafford, one of my best girlfriends, calling from Washington. "It's too cold and gray to get out of bed."

  "What are you doing next weekend?"

  "Saturday? I'm right in the middle of a very complex investigation. I can't-"

  "No, not this one. The one after?"

  "I don't know how this thing is going to break, Joanie. I think I'm grounded for the foreseeable future."

  "We'll come to you. I've got a guy I want you to meet."

  I groaned and threw back the covers. Joan had kept her apartment in New York despite her engagement to a Washington foreign affairs columnist. "I'm through with reporters. And none of your foreign diplomats. I don't even want to talk to any man who has a valid passport. I'm thinking local talent only."

  "He is local. You have to do me a favor, Alex. Just this once. It's one evening, one night of your life-it's not like I'm asking you to marry him. Pick a restaurant and we'll just have a quiet dinner for four."

  "Maybe in a couple of weeks, when this settles down," I said, in an obvious effort to stall her well-intentioned matchmaking. "What are you two doing for Valentine's Day?"

  "We'll be in the city. I took a table for the museum benefit."

  "Count me in. Chapman's betting me I can't get a date."

  "That'll work fine. I'll see if I can put this together for the fourteenth."

  "Who is he, Joanie?" I could lose him at a group event. The benefit would actually be an easier setting than an intimate dinner for four.

  "No names. You're not going to check him out with anyone. He's a writer. He came to one of my readings last month and Jim and I have had him for dinner three times. He'd be perfect for you. Completely available, no professional competition, very dishy."

  "Well, it's a great big 'if' until the cases are solved. But in case Chapman asks you, tell him I jumped at the offer."

  I showered, dressed warmly, and caught up on the news until the doorman buzzed to announce that Mike was waiting for me in the driveway. We sipped coffee on our way up the Major Deegan Expressway until we exited at West 183rd Street. The old NYU uptown campus had been purchased, Mike told me, in the late 1890s, and the great architect Stanford White had been commissioned to build a Beaux Arts complex on a grand scale.

  We drove through the makeshift guard station where a young woman handling security directed us to the administration building. From blocks away I could see the monumental dome of the Gould Memorial Library with its distinctive green copper patina, clearly a copy of the Roman Pantheon.

  As we pulled up in front of the entrance, another guard directed us to a parking area on the far side of the steps. Mike decided not to put the police parking plaque on the dashboard, as there was no need yet to declare our presence on the small campus.

  Students milled inside the lobby of the old great hall. No one was dawdling on the cold, windswept grounds between the buildings that towered over University Park and the highway below. Somehow, the massive interior columns of verdigris Connemara marble, the Tiffany stained-glass windows, and the fourteen-karat gold-leaf coffered dome that once had graced this scholarly outpost seemed terribly inconsistent with the poorly funded community college population the institution now serviced.

  The faculty listings and campus map were tacked to a board inside a display case with a cracked glass door. Noah Tormey was listed as a member of the English department, with an office on the third floor of the old library.

  "How are you going to start this off?" I asked as we climbed the dark staircase.

  "Just follow my lead. It's a work in progress."

  Adjacent to Tormey's empty room-number 326-was a small lecture hall. An instructor's voice carried into the corridor and I motioned to Mike to stop and listen. The schedule posted on the wall next to the door had the week's classes listed, and this was one of Professor Tormey's. I could see some of his thirty or so students slumped in their chairs, while a handful were furiously taking notes as the lecturer spoke.

  "Coleridge's Biographia Literaria is the greatest single book of literary criticism ever written. It suggests to you all the things you must consider to discuss a poem, it clears out whatever gets in the way of your understanding of reading poetry. It was written, of course, because he believed the work of his dear friend William Wordsworth was the greatest poetic achievement of his time."

  Mike looked at me and whispered, "Is the dude on target?"

  "Bull's-eye."

  I looked back into the room and could see that the speaker had lost the better part of his audience, if he'd ever held their attention.

  "Coleridge uses the word 'fancy' to describe the mode of memory. A poet needs fancy, of course, but it's just his storehouse of images, as memory is for all of us. Now, imagination-well, that's the higher power, the creative form. It's inherent in the words and possessed in the mind of great poets, adding pleasure to-"

  The end-of-period bell rang and all but two young women, hanging on to the speaker's every word, clapped their notebooks shut and emptied into the hallway.

  The professor, a bespectacled man in his mid-fifties, with a sizable paunch and dull brown hair in need of shaping, walked out explaining Coleridge's primary and secondary imaginative degrees to his young disciples.

  "Excuse me, sir, but are you Professor Tormey?" Mike asked.

  The man nodded.

  "Could you give us a few minutes to chat? Maybe in your office?"

  He cocked his head, no doubt trying to figure, unsuccessfully, who we were. Police were probably the farthest thing from his mind. "From administration?"

  Mike waited until the young women crammed their notebooks into their backpacks and lumbered off. "NYPD."

  Tormey frowned and led us into his small office. He turned on the light, closed the door behind him, and offered us two seats. Walking around his desk, he picked up the three yellow roses that were on his blotter and moved them to the side, putting his lecture notes squarely in front of him. "What's this about?"

  Mike told him our names. "We're handling a missing persons case." Anything worked better in eliciting information from people than telling them they might be involved in a murder investigation. Or two.

  "A student?" he said, the right side of his mouth pulling bac
k in a twitch.

  "An NYU student, actually."

  "Well, I haven't had anything to do with NYU in more than a decade."

  "Tait. Aurora Tait. Does that name mean anything to you?"

  "No. No, it doesn't." The twitch was either a preexisting condition or something with an immediate onset caused by Mike's questions.

  "She disappeared from the Washington Square area more than twenty years ago."

  "What has that got to do with me?" He looked back and forth between us.

  "Maybe you can tell us why you chose to leave NYU for Bronx Community College?" Mike asked.

  Tormey twitched and laughed at the same time. "I suppose even a rookie cop would be smart enough to know it wasn't entirely my choice. I crossed boundaries, Mr. Chapman. I believe that's what the dean called it."

  "With a student?"

  "With-with a couple of students," Tormey said, playing with the edge of his papers.

  "It happened more than once, which was more than the school was willing to tolerate."

  "Were you tenured?" I asked.

  "Painfully close, Miss Cooper. I went from a position teaching some of the most eager, brilliant students you can imagine to- well, I've got a few dreamers here who are motivated to get themselves out of the Bronx, but for most of them, English is a second language, and a very foreign one at that."

  "You still teach English literature?"

  "English and American. Lucky for me I like the sound of my own voice. I try to teach them, that's all I can do."

  "You had a full class today."

  "First week of the new term. Attendance is required for at least six classes. I think some of them have hit bottom already."

  "But why BCC, after you had to leave NYU?" I asked.

  "I couldn't get myself looked at by another institution of that quality here in the city, and my entire family is around this area now. I didn't want to leave. I assumed I'd do my penance for a while and work my way back into a better academic environment," Tormey said, looking somewhat embarrassed. "I just haven't been able to do that."

  "You want to try some name associations, Professor?" Mike asked.