A single twitch. "Certainly, if that would help."
"Guidi. Gino Guidi."
Tormey shook his head.
"Ichiko. Dr. Wo-Jin Ichiko."
The corner of Tormey's mouth danced with tension. "Familiar, that one."
"How is that? You know him?"
"Wasn't that the man whose body was found in the river last night? I heard that on the news this morning, before I left home."
"Did you know him? That's what I asked," Mike said.
"No, no, I don't."
"Were you teaching yesterday, Professor?"
"Actually not. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I spent all of yesterday afternoon at my home."
"With anyone?"
"Afraid not. My wife was a lot less tolerant than the head of the department at NYU. She left after the first time I was caught up in a relationship with a student."
"How about the name Emily Upshaw?"
The twitching was off the charts. "I saw that story on the news, too. Such a tragic case, that one. Yes, yes, I knew Emily."
"Intimately?"
"No, Mr. Chapman. Emily was a student of mine-I'd say, Lord, it must have been almost twenty-five years ago. She was very smart, but a girl with more problems than anyone that age should have had to handle. No, no-nothing went on between us. We weren't even close."
Mike sat forward in his chair and stared into Tormey's face. "How many times in your life have you gone to court and posted bail for someone?"
"What do you mean?"
"Emily Upshaw's arraignment. It's all over the court papers that you bailed her out."
Tormey sat up, tapping his fingers on his desktop while he regrouped his thoughts before speaking again. "I'd actually forgotten about that."
"Like I forgot Mariano Rivera blowing the save against the Diamondbacks in the last game of the 2001 World Series. I don't think so. Your lip is moving like it's a 7.0 on the Richter scale."
"There are some things I can't control, Detective. You don't have to mock-"
"Yeah, but you can sure as hell control what you want to tell me, can't you? Think about it for a minute or two. Ever been to court any other time?"
Tormey shook his head.
"It usually makes an impression. You the guy she was stealing the shirts for?"
"Of course not."
"But Emily Upshaw was allowed to make one phone call and you're the jerk she decided to lean on. Why?"
He spoke softly. "I think she trusted me. She'd been working as my research assistant. She'd been spending a lot of time in my office. I'd been trying to convince her that she had some real potential as a writer, if she could get herself cleaned up and get off the drugs."
"Nothing physical between you?"
"I was happily married then, Mr. Chapman. I was thirty years old with a wife and two babies. I hadn't started looking for trouble yet."
"Tell me about the research Emily was doing for you," I asked. "What were you working on?"
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Not very titillating, Miss Cooper."
"We heard you talking about him today, from the hallway."
"Well, I've written three books about him and God knows how many articles for academic journals," Tormey said, checking his watch. "Will we go much longer, Detective?"
"Why, you got other plans?"
"There's actually a little ceremony I have to perform outside at eleven o'clock."
"A ceremony? We're here to talk about murder."
Tormey looked to me for help. "I'm not planning to abscond, Miss Cooper. I'll be back up here in half an hour," he said, picking up the three long-stemmed roses as though they explained something. "Or perhaps you'd like to come along. I've just got to put these next to Poe's bust. The students are expecting me."
The professor must have seen me look at Mike when he mentioned the great poet's name. It had figured too prominently in this case to be a coincidence. First Aurora Tait's place of entombment, and then Emily Upshaw's preoccupation with premature burial.
"What bust? What's this about?" I asked.
"February second," he said. "The anniversary of the funeral of Poe's wife, Virginia. There's an old tradition in Baltimore, where the Poes are buried, that some mysterious stranger places roses on his grave every year on his birthday. That fell on January nineteenth, during the winter break, so I couldn't observe that event this time. But this particular memorial fits the school schedule, so we'll have a little ceremony out at the statue today."
"What statue are you talking about?" I asked again.
"The Hall of Fame."
"Button up, Coop. Let's take a walk."
Professor Tormey looked relieved for the first time since we started talking. "You know it, Mr. Chapman?"
"I went to Fordham," Mike said, standing and opening the door for the three of us.
"Then you're acquainted with the neighborhood?"
"Used to be. Hall of Fame for Great Americans, right?"
Tormey led us to a rear stairwell and down, out the side door and along a walkway behind the library and the Hall of Philosophy. Fifty or sixty students lined the path, oblivious to the cold as they stood with cameras and coffee cups, calling out to Tormey as we passed by.
"Today, of course, there are halls of fame for athletes and singers, cowboys and country music stars. But this was the very first one in the country."
"Built when?" I asked.
"Nineteen oh one. I guess you knew that-ironically, I must add-this campus was once NYU. There was the downtown campus that's still thriving today, and this one was the uptown part of the school. The man who was then president of the college had this fabulous colonnade built just to conceal the unsightly foundation of these great buildings up on the heights. You remember The Wizard of Oz, don't you?"
"Sure," I said.
Tormey was alive now, warm and engaging. "Well, in the movie, when Dorothy dissolves the Wicked Witch of the East, don't you remember the Munchkins singing to her? 'You'll be a bust, be a bust, be a bust in the Hall of Fame'? This is the very place they were singing about. It really used to be famous all over the country."
I looked around as we walked toward the entrance, paved with red bricks rather than the yellow ones of Oz. We were high on a promontory over the expressway below, the bare trees covering the steep slope beneath us. I had assumed a "hall" would be the interior of a dusty old building, but this was an outdoor vista with sweeping views to the Harlem River, less than a mile away.
"What's here now?" I asked.
"Ninety-eight bronze busts, commissioned by prominent sculptors and artists. The project was abandoned in the 1970s, but it used to be quite grand in the first half of the last century."
"What's your interest in Poe?" Mike asked, as we both tried to keep pace with Tormey, who moved with greater speed than I expected of a man of his girth.
"A genius, Mr. Chapman. Possibly the greatest American writer ever to have lived. And despite the fact that he borrowed a bit too liberally from my man Coleridge, the kids here get him in a way they don't get the Brits and the Romantic poets."
I nodded at his enthusiasm for the macabre storyteller.
"They love the bizarre, the ghastly, the obsession with mortality," Tormey said. "The dean wanted me to find some way to put this wonderful landmark to work-the Hall of Fame, that is-so here you have it. I've created these little ceremonies, if you will, for many of the grand old gentlemen who still sit vigil here in the Bronx. Anything I do with Poe is especially popular with the students, as you can see. His death obsessions are so classically timeless."
Tormey pointed up at the words carved into the stone arch over the entrance, directly behind one of the original campus buildings on the quadrangle. "'Mighty Men Which Were of Old-Men of Renown.'" He held the elaborately filigreed iron gate open for me and I entered, staring off between the columns at the sharp precipice to the highway below.
This alfresco hall was, in fact, a series of more than ten connected serpentine paths. They wer
e open and airy, high on this lofty point, twisting and winding with busts on both sides of the walk-way and bronze plaques beneath them identifying the subjects, who were separated from one another by tall white columns supporting an arched ceiling.
Names familiar to every schoolchild were mixed with those of long-forgotten heroes. Walter Reed, Robert Fulton, and Eli Whitney peopled the first long crescent, with several hundred feet of turf dedicated to their great accomplishments. Beside and between them were others whose deeds were little known today. I squinted at the chiseled descriptions of Matthew Fontaine Maury, pathfinder of the seas, and James Buchanan Eads, who built the first submarine before the Civil War.
The walk curved, abutting the solid wall of the building on its interior side. The second series of busts arched ahead of us. Tormey moved briskly, pointing his small bouquet of roses at figures along the way. The Wright Brothers stood opposite Thomas Edison and beside a mathematical physicist named Josiah Willard Gibbs. "George Washington," Tormey said. "He's the only one ever elected unanimously to rest here."
"An hour or two," Mike said, stopping to read the descriptions on some of the plaques, "and I'd be set with Jeopardy! questions for the next couple of years."
Around another corner and the building behind us-to our east-gave way to a courtyard, where we could see the students waiting for Tormey at the far end of the walkway. Framed against the bare gray branches that faced out over the western view were Abe Lincoln and Henry Clay, stuck for eternity opposite Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster.
The redbrick path wound around another corner, where jurists like John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes presided over the distant view, and then a further stretch of columns positioned with soldier heroes-John Paul Jones, the Marquis de Lafayette-the only non-American I spotted in the lineup-Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses Grant. Mike lingered to study the notations beneath them.
"This is quite a stretch."
"Typical, isn't it?" Tormey said to me. "Writers and artists come at the very end. Even teachers and scholars get their due here first."
We passed educators like Maria Mitchell, James Kent, Horace Mann, and Mary Lyon before turning to the final row of great wordsmiths. James Fenimore Cooper and Harriet Beecher Stowe were the first pair, gazing blankly into each other's eyes across the windy corridor.
"There's your Mr. Poe," Tormey said, pointing to a solemn figure perched several hundred feet above the roadway, situated between Samuel Clemens and William Cullen Bryant.
"Who was the sculptor?" I asked.
"The great Daniel Chester French."
The man best known for the massive monument to Abraham Lincoln on the Mall in Washington, D.C., had also crafted this smaller tribute to the dark poet-a solemn visage capped by thick wavy hair, with the bow of his waistcoat tied beneath his chin.
Noah Tormey lifted his arm over his head, waving to the students with his three roses to get their attention. He checked his watch and I looked at my own. We had caused him to be only a few minutes late for his eleven o'clock ceremony.
With a bit of a flourish, evident to those who were watching him from the courtyard, Tormey bowed to the bust of Poe and laid the flowers at the base of the granite pedestal on which it was mounted. The kids laughed and clapped and camera flashes lightened the gloomy morning sky.
As the professor straightened up and took my arm, the blast of gunshots repeating from a high-powered rifle sounded from directly below us on the wooded slope. The third one ricocheted off the head of Samuel Clemens and slammed into Noah Tormey's shoulder. He fell to the ground and I dropped to my knees beside him.
23
Mike Chapman screamed my name and came running around the last curve.
Tormey was crawling to me on his left elbow, his right arm hanging limp beside him.
Mike's gun was drawn, and with his other hand he flattened Tormey on the cold brick pavement. "Get down, both of you."
I couldn't see where the students had scattered but I could hear them shouting in the background.
Mike positioned himself in front of Poe, face-to-face with the bronze head, rising to his full height and peering around the writer's brow at the steep hill below.
I tried to dislodge myself from beneath Tormey's arm. Blood was seeping through the sleeve of his jacket onto my leg and he was groaning in pain. I tried to sit up.
"Down, dammit," Mike said.
He waited a second until I lowered my head again and let off two shots. Again I heard the sound of the rifle as it returned fire, bullets wildly hitting pillars and pedestals and poets before bouncing onto the floor. Beneath the canopy of the brick ceiling, each volley sounded magnified, like rounds from a cannon.
"You-Tormey-you okay?"
He was lying on his stomach now, his left hand covering the top of his head. Mike ducked and pulled him flush up against the front part of the wall.
"I'm gonna stand up and throw off a shot, Coop. I want you to get on all fours and retrace your steps back to the entrance as fast as you can."
I turned my head to the side as I squatted behind Mike and looked up at him.
"Don't fuck with me, kid. Target practice isn't my strong suit. Move!"
All my attention was on moving forward. I tried to do it as quickly as possible, knowing that Mike was exposed to the shooter while he was trying to cover my back. I doubted there would be enough bullets left in his gun to get us to the iron entrance gate if the assassin was tracking our retreat.
I could hear the sound of sirens coming closer. I was hoping the gunman could hear them, too.
More shots echoed around my head. I couldn't tell how many had actually been fired and how many were simply resounding off the various surfaces. I looked back and saw that Mike was still standing, just a few feet behind me, shielded by the statue of David Farragut.
I was as low to the ground as I could manage to be and still propel myself forward, passing Henry Ward Beecher and John James Audubon. I hadn't heard Louis Agassiz's name since I left Wellesley and didn't stop to make note of his many accomplishments.
I took another corner and Mike let go with another round. I glanced back again to make sure he hadn't been hurt. "Keep going, Coop. You're almost there."
Pushing along the rough surface of the bricks had worn back the tops of my gloves. My wrists were raw from rubbing against the ground as I tried to scoot along.
Now I could hear what seemed like a small army of footsteps pounding toward us. "Stay back. Someone's shooting at us," I yelled, as I saw a guard dressed in the uniform of the campus police coming toward me. I pointed at Mike. "He's a cop!"
Mike was too engaged to pull out his gold badge. The danger was off to the side and below him, not in the form of bewildered and unarmed security guards.
He took one look at the startled officers, called out to them to watch me, and vaulted over the two-foot-high balcony that bordered the hilltop. In that split second given me to decide what to do, I knew that if I made the mistake of calling out his name, it would cause him to look back and think I needed help.
I picked my head up and watched him slide down the embankment, rolling only ten or twelve feet until he crashed into a tree trunk. Everything down there was silent now, with no sign of an attacker.
"The professor's been shot," I said to the officer who reached me first. "He needs an ambulance."
"Who's the…?" one guard asked, while I directed two others down to the far end to tend to Tormey.
I looked over the side of the wall. Mike was sitting with his back against the large tree trunk. The guards glanced back and forth at each other, uncertain about what lay below.
"Can you help him, please? He's a detective-NYPD-Homicide."
"He do the shooting?"
"No, we were fired at," I said. "From somewhere down there."
I had just killed their enthusiasm for climbing down to help Mike. One of the men leaned over and picked up a bullet.
"Looks like a twenty-two-caliber-"
; "Please don't touch anything. We'll have to get the Crime Scene Unit here."
I could hear more sirens. Guards checked on Tormey and assured me that he was conscious and coherent, and that an ambulance had been called. I stood up, and ignoring Mike's gestures for me to stay with the men from security, I swung my legs over the balcony and lowered myself onto the densely wooded hillside.
"Graceful, huh?" Mike asked as I made my way down the slope to him, bracing myself against trees along the way, and helped him to his feet. "How's Tormey?"
"Looks like he's hit in his upper arm, from the way he's just dragging it and the amount of blood soaking through his jacket. They've got a bus on the way. D'you see anything?"
"Somebody knew exactly what he was doing. Had Tormey's arrival timed to the minute, didn't he? And wouldn't have minded shaving some peroxide off the top of your scalp, either. He was comfortable in these woods," Mike said, looking around at the rough terrain.
"Unless he was over there," I said, pointing at the railroad tracks on the far side of the highway. "There's enough scrub to conceal yourself, especially if he was shooting with a scope. Did you fire down because you saw someone?"
Mike started to walk back up to the colonnade. "Nothing. Nada. I just wanted to draw the guy out if he was still around."
"Hey, Chapman. Clara Barton's down the hall, if you need a hand," a uniformed cop called out, clearly delighted to have seen Mike on his ass, then being guided back up the hill by a woman Sherpa.
Mike scrambled over the metal railing behind the entrance gate, while I stretched my arms out overhead so two cops could hoist me up onto the balcony next to a stone-faced Elias Howe.
Medics were loading Noah Tormey into the rear of the ambulance and I followed Mike over to check on him.
One of the EMTs spoke first, shaking his finger at us. "Sorry. You'll have to question him at the hospital. We can't hang out here with a gunshot wound."
Mike boosted me up into the rear of the van. "We're going with you. We need medical attention, too. I'm full of cuts and scrapes." He stepped up and swung the door closed behind him. "We're going to Columbia Presbyterian," he said, flashing his badge.
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