There were so many messages of concern about Mike on my answering machine that it had run out of space. I played them all back and settled in to return some of the calls.
The last conversation was with Joan Stafford, who adored Mike and spent some portion of each of our daily phone calls inquiring about him. I didn't repeat everything that had happened during the last few days, but I confided in her about the engagement band that Mike had heaved into the ocean.
"Did you know he had bought Val a ring?"
"Not until he put it in my hand. I-uh, I hadn't really thought he was that close to a proposal. He seemed like the last guy in the world to make that kind of commitment."
"Yeah, it would have changed everything between the two of you. The way you work together, the way he protects you, the joking-"
"That's just ridiculous. His marriage was bound to have happened sooner or later. It wouldn't have made the least bit of difference on the job. Look at the way Mercer and Vickee have got it together. We're still-"
"It's me you're talking to, sweetie. Didn't the sight of that ring make you just a little bit jealous?"
"Jealous? Are you crazy, Joan? My heart just breaks for Mike, seeing him like this." I tried to sort through my emotions and reassure myself that one of my very closest girlfriends hadn't seen something more clearly than I had.
"He's going to need you to get him through this."
"Right now he's pushing everyone away. I don't even know how to begin to help him."
"Trust me, Alex. When he's ready for a shoulder to lean on, it's going to be yours."
I called P. J. Bernstein's deli to get the last delivery at nine o'clock, and ate half a turkey sandwich before abandoning it in favor of a comforting bath.
I ran the water steaming hot and filled it with a fresh-scented bubble bath. I poured myself a scotch, then stopped in the den to look at my bookshelves. There was an old volume of Poe-not the stories, just the collected poems-and I pulled it down to take with me as I soaked and sulked.
My mood was maudlin. I couldn't blame Mike for shutting me out, yet it was difficult to be kept at arm's length when he was so very alone. He would have to go through much of his grieving by himself, and I understood that completely.
I turned up the jets on the whirlpool and started flipping the pages. So many of the poems were written to dead and dying women-various names, all meant to be Poe's Virginia-and so many had as their theme the loss of a loved one. I started to read them aloud, one by one, matching the somber cadences to my mood.
I finally came to "The Raven." It had been years since I had read the poem in its entirety. The editor of the anthology had written an introduction, proclaiming that this work had made an impression that had probably never been surpassed by any single piece of American poetry. More than one hundred and fifty years had gone by since its publication. Reflecting on it, I viewed that a stunning fact.
I loved the poem-everything about it. The tale of the young man, devastated by his lover's death, visited on a bleak winter night by the stately ebony bird. The fact that the bird could talk (Poe eventually described in an essay his plan to use a creature that was nonreasoning but capable of speech). The pulsating rhythm of the stanzas building as the narrator recognizes the torture of his fate, realizing that he will not find peace in forgetting his beloved. And of course, the haunting refrain of the raven's taunting reminder- "Nevermore."
At the end of the poem there was a note, reminding the casual reader that Poe considered his bird "the emblem of mournful and never-ending remembrance."
I thought of all the deaths that had occurred in this last week- unnatural and unnecessary, each of them-and closed the book.
I dried off and got into bed, reading myself to sleep.
We had no idea what kind of schedule Aaron Kittredge kept, so Mercer had offered to pick me up at six-thirty on Sunday morning. We drove to the block where he lived, on West End Avenue, and parked at a hydrant in front of the stoop, waking ourselves up slowly with coffee from the corner bodega.
For almost an hour we talked about Mike and Valerie. Mercer had left him at his own apartment last night, and one of his sisters was waiting there. She had arranged to take him out to see his mother and spend the rest of the weekend with his family.
At seven-thirty sharp, I saw Kittredge come out of the building and trot down the steps. Both of us got out of the car and I called his name.
He turned his head toward me but kept walking away, swinging his gym bag. I went after him, trying to keep up with his pace.
"Mr. Kittredge, I've got to see you."
"Another day. I'm late."
"I need twenty minutes."
"I told you what I know. Yesterday's news. Lay off me."
Joggers and dog walkers were interested in the scene. I dodged between them.
I called out a single word: "Ratiocination."
Kittredge stopped and turned around. "Now there's a word I haven't heard in a very long time. Who's your sidekick this time?" he asked. "You trade in the wise-mouth for the strong, silent type?"
"Mercer Wallace, Special Victims."
"Let's take this conversation off the street," he said, removing his keys out of his pocket and leading us back to his apartment.
He let us inside and motioned us to sit in the living room, while he opened the bedroom door and whispered something-probably explaining our presence-to the girlfriend.
Kittredge didn't know what to make of us. "So what's this? The book club of the Manhattan DA's office? Or are you reading fiction now to try to find out how to solve cases?"
He poured himself a cup of coffee but didn't offer any to us.
"Can we start with Emily Upshaw again?" I asked.
"Suit yourself."
"The story she told you when you first met her, about the boyfriend who claimed to have killed a girl?"
"Yeah?"
"The day I was here with Mike Chapman, Edgar Allan Poe's name didn't come up in that conversation. What I want to know is whether Emily ever mentioned that she thought the murder she was telling you about had anything to do with Poe."
He shook his head. "You know what kind of reception she got from the desk sergeant when she walked in the station house and started talking about a woman holed up alive behind a wall of bricks? Nobody thought she was wrapped too tight. The last thing I think she woulda done is make literary allusions to try to impress a bunch of harebag cops."
"But you," I asked, "when she spent time with you, didn't she mention it?"
"Emily introduced me to Poe. That was much later on, though, when she was hanging out here, trying to get her act together."
"And was it in the context of this murder her boyfriend had told her about?"
"I guess it was. You know the short stories?"
"Some of them," I said.
"I'd never known any of them. Emily had an anthology. She made me read a few tales-'The Cask of Amontillado,' 'The Black Cat.'"
"Both of those are about people who were bricked up alive. Didn't that make you take her more seriously?"
"Me? Hey, Ms. Cooper," he said, refilling his mug. "I may have been the only guy in town who gave her the time of day. Quite frankly, between the booze and the blow she ingested, and the fact that there was no missing victim and no crime scene, even though I tried to help her at first, I began to think she was just lifting the crap she was telling me right out of the fiction she liked to read."
"But you must have gotten enough into Poe's work to become interested in ratiocination, didn't you?"
"What makes you think so?"
"Your visit to the New York Botanical Gardens, Mr. Kittredge," I said. "Your meeting-or your aborted visit-with a man called Zeldin."
Kittredge put the coffee down in the sink and bent his head before turning back to me.
"I guess the department spit up the old story to you. Is that fool still around?"
"You want to tell us why you wanted to see Zeldin?" Mercer asked. "Did it hav
e anything to do with Emily Upshaw?"
"She'd been out of the picture for a decade when that shooting happened," Kittredge said, thinking for a minute before he spoke. "I guess you're right, in a sense. Emily had nothing to do with it directly, but she left that book of short stories here. I picked it up about ten years later, when someone told me it was Poe who wrote the first detective stories in literature."
"Emily hadn't talked about those?" I asked.
"Nah. She was interested in the bizarre and macabre. It was 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' that got me hooked."
"On what, the techniques of Monsieur Dupin?" I asked, referring to Poe's amateur sleuth.
"I liked a character that used his brain to solve crimes."
"But he ridiculed the Parisian police, didn't he?"
"He thought like a detective. It fascinated me. You know the others?"
"Poe's other detective stories? Only that there are three that feature Auguste Dupin," I said.
"Yeah. 'The Purloined Letter' and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget,'" Kittredge said. "What most people don't know is that Marie Roget was based on a real case-on a murder that occurred in New York. You knew that?"
"I had no idea. I mean, if I remember correctly, he makes a reference to coincidences between his story and an actual murder here, but I assumed that was just a fictional device to hook the reader."
"It made me curious, so I looked it up. There was no cold case unit at the time, and it was before I'd started painting. I just thought it would be interesting to take a stab at the original case, since it had never been solved."
"But it must have happened over a hundred-"
"Eighteen forty-one. So what? People are still trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was, aren't they? Who killed Cleopatra? Was Alexander the Great murdered?"
"Who was the victim?" I asked.
"Mary Rogers," he said, smiling. "Poe just added a French accent and moved her to Paris."
"And she was a shopgirl, too?"
"She worked in a tobacconist's store, selling cigars, down on Broadway near Thomas Street," Kittredge said. "Right up the street from where police headquarters and your office stand today."
"And are the facts similar?"
"Pretty close. The beautiful Miss Rogers failed to return home one evening. There was no such thing as a missing persons bureau, so her family put an ad in the New York Sun, asking for information about her disappearance. A few days later-bingo."
"They found her?"
"Raped, beaten, strangled to death with a piece of lace from her petticoat. Somebody came upon her body in the Hudson River, on the other side, right near Hoboken."
"How'd she get there?" I asked.
"Mary probably took the ferry over with a suitor. There was a kind of lovers' lane then, called the Elysian Fields."
How ironic that the place in Greek mythology where those blessed by the gods went after death-the eternal ideal of happiness-became the murder scene for a beautiful young woman, forever memorialized in Poe's story.
I thought of the solution that Poe had worked in his brilliant tale of deduction. "Was it a sailor who killed Mary Rogers?"
"Some thought that," Kittredge said. "There was a rock tied around her waist to weigh her down, and it was made with a sailor's knot. But nobody was ever caught."
"You have any theories?" I asked.
"Did you know there were people who speculated that Edgar Allan Poe was the killer?"
I was shocked. "You must be joking."
"He had enemies, Ms. Cooper. Lots of enemies."
"Yes, but-"
"This was a new form of fiction-the detective story-so some journalists misunderstood it. Thought it displayed an unnatural obsession with the crime. Poe himself was known by many to be an odd young man-personally antagonistic, frequently drunk and depressed, with a chronically sick wife who couldn't have offered him much social companionship. He was known to take long, rambling walks in the woods, ferry rides across the river. The story he wrote had the most incredible detail about the murderer and his methods-things that had never been printed in the newspapers."
"That's hardly enough to link him to killing someone."
"And the bottle of laudanum found near Mary's parasol and scarf? Poe was well-known for his flirtation with opium, in all its forms."
"Not all that unusual at the time."
"Yeah, Ms. Cooper. But put those coincidences together with the fact that he knew Mary Rogers, that maybe she trusted him enough to go-"
"Wait," I said. "Poe actually knew the dead girl?"
"James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving-and yeah, Edgar Allan Poe-they were all her customers at the little cigar shop. If I were investigating this case today, I'd have to say Eddie is someone I'd want to talk to. A person of interest."
"So at some point you made a phone call to Zeldin. Was it about Mary Rogers?"
"Yeah. I'd been online doing research, and also up at the public library on Forty-second Street. Half of the articles I read mentioned this Zeldin character. Makes himself out to be the world's leading expert on Poe. I called him and asked if I could talk to him."
"And he invited you there, to the Bronx?"
"Yeah, to the snuff mill," Kittredge said, turning his attention to Mercer. "You ever smell a setup, Detective? Ever walk into a trap?"
"That's what you think happened?"
Kittredge had been hostile when Mike and I first encountered him, but had warmed considerably when talking about Poe. Now he took on the appearance of a paranoid personality, his eyes flashing between us to see if we credited what he was saying. He fidgeted with everything on the countertop, playing with a pack of cigarettes and twisting a napkin till it shredded in his hands.
"Cost me my job and almost my pension. Somebody set me up."
"In what way?" I asked.
"I was jumped by a pack of kids outside the gate."
"Yeah?"
"They were waiting there for me. Someone must have told them what kind of car I was driving, what I looked like, and that I had a gun."
"How do you know that?"
"'Cause they were yelling to each other when they knocked me to the ground-one was calling out the orders to find the gun. Those kids had no other reason to be there."
"They worked at the gardens, I thought."
"You thought wrong. Two of them used to work there a few years back. These kids all had addresses in Queens. None of them had anything to do with that neighborhood the night this went down." Kittredge fired the words at me.
"Were they armed?" I asked.
"They had knives. All of them had knives," he said, pushing up his jacket and shirtsleeve in search of a scar to display. "Then one of them got my gun."
Mercer pressed on. "But it was one of the kids who got shot, wasn't it?"
"I carried a second pistol on my ankle. An old habit, Detective, from working narcotics. They didn't find that one."
I wasn't a fan of the nuts on the force who thought one gun wasn't enough to do the job.
"Was the boy shot in the back?" Mercer asked, having the good sense to leave out the question of the distance for the moment.
Kittredge walked to the sink, his back to us, and turned on the faucet, running water and rinsing his mug. "Who told you so? That crackpot Zeldin? He's the one that didn't want me in there to begin with. He probably set the whole thing up."
I glanced at Mercer. Kittredge spotted me and called me on it. "You think I'm making this up, huh?"
"No. No, I don't. I can't imagine a reason someone would invite you there, but then not let you in."
He walked toward me and pointed a finger in my face. "Before you go thinking I'm some kind of psycho, spend a little more time checking out that group of screwballs."
"I assume you've already done that, Mr. Kittredge. That's why we're here."
"I knew what the rumor was. Zeldin probably thought I was there to investigate him and his cronies. The Raven Society or whatever they called themselves
."
"What-?"
"After I got jammed up I didn't give a damn. I didn't care about police work-real or fictional. I started taking art classes for therapy. Anger management," Kittredge said, waving his arm around at the various incarnations of his favorite nude. He was wild-eyed now that we had stirred up these unpleasant memories.
"But what was the rumor about Zeldin? I don't know what you mean."
"Not just him. His whole little secret society. For somebody who thinks she's pretty smart, you don't really know much about this, do you?"
"I'll take all the help you can give me."
"A very select membership, with very special rules. There are people who believe, Ms. Cooper, that if you want to be admitted to the Raven Society, you have to have killed someone," Kittredge said, walking to the door of his apartment and opening it, to signal the end of our meeting. "You have to have taken a page out of Edgar Allan Poe."
36
"Ready to give up on this?" Mercer asked. "I know you'd rather be curled up at home with the crossword puzzle."
"Time to pull out that list of names again and see what kind of birds these ravens really are before we keep ruffling their feathers. C'mon, we've got places to go and people to see."
We were back in the car by nine and Lieutenant Peterson was beeping Mercer. He returned the call and gave me the news.
"Loo can't raise anyone over at the UN on a Sunday. Thinks we ought to drop in and start the ball rolling. You got his attention with this diplomatic mission connection to a suspect."
The Sunday-morning ride back through Central Park and over to the FDR Drive was quick. The February chill was powerful as we drove south along the East River. We passed under the Roosevelt Island tram cables, and I avoided glancing off to my left at the elegant remains of the old Blackwell Hospital site that sat on the island's southern tip-the scene of a case we had worked several years back.
Mercer turned off the highway at Forty-eighth Street and squared the block to come around in front of the vast complex that fronted on First Avenue. After the Second World War, when every large American city was competing to host the headquarters of a new international organization to replace the League of Nations, the deal was clinched for New York by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s gift of $8.5 million which allowed the purchase of seventeen prime acres of real estate in midtown Manhattan's Turtle Bay.
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