Entombed

18

"Trust me. It's not from having my nose in a book."

"But how'd you know those lines?" Mike asked again. Mercer had returned to his office to go over the casework with another of the task force members. I was riding uptown with Mike to try to find Aaron Kittredge.

"Remember that I told you that Poe was a student at the University of Virginia for a year? He lived on the Lawn, which is still the most magnificent part of the campus, with pavilion homes where professors lived and taught class, and student rooms around a common green, all that Jefferson himself designed. Well, legend has it that he etched those very words into his own window before he left the school, and the original pane of glass with that inscription has been on display in the Rotunda there for as long as I can remember."

"So maybe the killer was a schoolmate of yours."

"There were a few sharks in my class but nobody that lethal. I think whoever he is, he's made a life study of Edgar Allan Poe," I said.

Kittredge's address placed us in front of a small tenement building off West End Avenue in the high Nineties. There was a doorbell with his name on it, but no one answered when Mike rang. It was six-thirty, and the chilled darkness caused us to retreat to the parked car and wait to see whether we'd get lucky.

Within the hour, a stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair turned the corner and walked up the stoop of the building.

"Kittredge!" Mike yelled as he swung open the car door.

The man looked in our direction and squinted, trying to make out whether he knew the person calling his name.

"Chapman. Mike Chapman. On the job."

"Fuck the job," Kittredge called out just as quickly, as he stuck his key in the vestibule lock and started inside.

Mike sprinted from the car to the steps and pushed in behind him. "I just need to talk to you about someone you know-an old friend."

"Haven't got any of those. Why don't you get lost?"

I was a few feet behind Mike as he tried to talk his way in.

"She thinks you're a friend. She needs your help," Mike said, pausing before he spoke her name. "Emily Upshaw."

Kittredge stopped and pointed at me. "Who's that?"

"Alexandra Cooper. Manhattan DA's office."

"I'm out of that game. What's with Emily? Back in her cups again?"

"Look, can you give us twenty minutes? I'm freezing my balls off out here."

Kittredge unlocked the door and let us trail him up to his apartment on the second floor. He switched on the light and threw his leather jacket on a chair. The charcoal gray walls were hung with paintings of nude women-or rather of one nude woman painted over and over again from different angles.

"They're mine, if that's what you're wondering. I paint. I work out at the gym two hours a day and I don't bother anybody. Next question."

"Why so hostile, pal?" Mike asked.

The workout time was obvious. Kittredge's five-foot-eight frame was solid and well muscled. His black T-shirt seemed molded to his overdeveloped chest, and tattoos covered his forearms up to the point where the sleeves of his shirt cut off. The wrinkles on his face made him look a decade older than what I guessed was the fifty hard years he had lived.

"You get my address from the department?"

"Yeah."

"Without the back story?"

"With nothing. I figure you're getting a pension check, so you couldn't have done anything to make yourself a pariah."

"I got a good lawyer. That's how come they reinstated my pension. Try living six years without one and sweating out a lawsuit."

Mike sat down on the sofa and I sat beside him. Kittredge stood in the archway between the kitchen and the living area. He took a protein drink from the refrigerator and chugged it from the cardboard container while he waited for Mike to talk.

"Why'd they-?"

"None of your business. What's the problem with Emily?"

"Don't you read the papers?"

"Only the days they got good news."

"Then you might have missed her obituary yesterday."

Kittredge took another slug of his protein. "You here to collect money for the flowers?"

"Emily Upshaw was murdered."

"And you're the hotshot who's gonna solve the crime? You must have some track record, Chapman, you're wasting time hunting me down. I haven't seen that dame in eighteen, twenty years. Can't even imagine how you hooked me up with her."

"She must have liked your brushstrokes. Court papers say she was living here when her shoplifting case was dismissed."

"I bought that sofa you're sitting on so Emily would have a safe place to sleep."

"Bring your work home with you?" Mike asked.

"It was here or a Bowery flophouse. The poor kid had nowhere to go. Her family didn't want to hear about her, the college wouldn't let her live in the dorms after she got busted, and the guy she'd been living with threw her out on-"

There was the sound of a key turning in the lock and Kittredge walked to the door as it opened. A brunette in her fifties with a well-toned body and a skintight ski outfit entered. She was the model for the paintings and looked as cold and hard in person as she did on every wall surface.

"Anything wrong?" she asked, looking from Kittredge over to Mike and back again.

Mike stood up and extended his hand. "Hi, I'm Mike Chap-"

"The Duke and Duchess of Windsor will be leaving shortly. Wait in the bedroom," Kittredge said, jerking his head in the direction of the other door.

The woman took another look at the two of us and patted his arm as she crossed in front of him to leave the room.

"It's the boyfriend we're interested in," Mike said, although I knew he was now every bit as interested in the disaffected Kittredge as he was in Emily's old beau. "What can you tell me about him?"

"Nothing. Never met the guy."

"Well, how'd you get pulled into the case?"

"I wasn't. Had nothing to do with the larceny she got locked up for. I worked in the Sixth Squad at the time," Kittredge said.

The theft was uptown, we knew from the police report, but Emily had been living in Greenwich Village, in the Sixth Precinct.

"She came to the station house with-well, with a pretty bizarre tale-and I happened to be the schmuck catching cases that day. You know what it's like, don't you, Chapman?"

"What was her story?"

Kittredge crumpled the empty drink container in his fist. "Poor little Emily was high as a kite. The desk sergeant kicked her upstairs. He wanted one of the women detectives to toss her for drugs 'cause she wasn't making much sense when she talked. Nobody was around but me. The kid said she had information about a murder. She knew a guy who had killed someone."

"True?"

"I gave it a shot. I asked her to start with the perp. Tell me about him. She was too frightened to do much of that. It was a boyfriend of hers, a guy she'd met in some kind of rehab program."

"Monty? Was his name Monty?" Mike asked.

"Nope. He may have had a nickname like that, that he called himself, but it's not how Emily knew him," Kittredge said, frowning and shaking his head. "Hey, I haven't thought about this for two decades. I'm supposed to remember the guy's name?"

"Didn't you meet him? Wasn't Emily living with him?"

"She'd moved out by then. Gone off the wagon and moved into the Y to live. She tried to point him out on the street to me one time, but I never got a clear fix on him. Looked like one more Village idiot to me. Doped-up rich kid trying to live like a hippie. Most of 'em outgrow it. I went back to question the guy, but he was gone. I think they had shared a place on Sullivan Street. Couldn't find a trace of him."

"Was he a student, too?"

"I think he was already out of school. Dropped out or kicked out. His family wouldn't pay the bills, I think she told me. Black sheep syndrome," Kittredge said, smiling at Mike. "Been there myself."

"Who'd he kill?"

Kittredge leaned back against the kitchen table. "She didn't know that either. Another junkie was all she said."

"Where'd it happen?"

"Well, if Emily Upshaw had the answer to that, I might have made a case, don't you think? Look, Chapman, here's this sweet kid strung out on dope who kept telling me that her boyfriend had buried someone alive. I didn't know who, I didn't know where, and I didn't even know whether the boyfriend had been one of her delusions. She had those, too, from time to time."

"Did she tell you why she thought it was true?"

He thought for a minute. "Yeah. One night, a few weeks after Emily had busted out of the program, the guy came home from a session-"

"You mean an AA meeting-Alcoholics Anonymous?"

"Like that. I think it was called SABA-Student Abusers Anonymous. I think he'd been clean and sober a little longer than Emily. He'd started in the group while he was still enrolled at NYU. Anyway, that night he spun out of control and brought home a few bags of coke. They got high together and that's when he broke down."

"How do you mean?"

"He wigged out. According to Emily, he was pretty frantic. He told her that he'd been having flashbacks ever since he'd been sober and dried out. He said that during that evening's session he'd admitted to a couple of the guys that he thought he had murdered someone. It was all visions and dreams, mumbo-jumbo, alcoholic blackouts. But as soon as he-what's the bullshit word they use now-shared? As soon as he 'shared' his story with his self-help group, he began to worry that one of the other guys would give him up. So he went a little berserk, picked up some drugs to get him through the night, and came home crying to lay it all on Emily's lap."

"And she came to the station house?" Mike asked.

"You mean did she come that same night, when she should have?" Kittredge sneered. "Yeah, about four months too late. Not that night, not the next day."

"Why not?" I asked, speaking for the first time.

"Typical broad bullshit. Emily didn't think it was possible. Such a sensitive soul, the guy was. Good family roots, poetic genius, brilliant student, kind to animals. She laid it off to the white powder he shoved up his nostrils."

"She stayed with him?"

"Yeah. Then things got more desperate after the shoplifting. Truth is I never knew whether she was really afraid of him, or he just dumped her and she had nowhere to go."

"How'd she wind up with you?" Mike asked.

"She told her lawyer-Legal Aid, he was-that she had a friend in the police department. He called and told me that if she had a transient address like the Y, the DA's office wouldn't dismiss the case. He just asked me to let her use my crib for a month."

"Did you and she-?"

"None of your fucking business, Chapman."

"But you actually investigated the case?" I asked. "I mean, did you talk to other people in his SABA group?"

Kittredge looked at Mike while he talked to me. "Hard to do. By the time Emily got to me, school was out for the summer. The rehab meetings had been confidential-you know the law, drug treatment stuff is privileged-so the college didn't have any record of who attended."

"All you had was a half-assed confession, fueled by cocaine," Mike said.

"With no body, no crime scene, and not even a suspect I could put my hands on. I kicked it around for a few months," Kittredge said.

Probably, I thought, for as long as Emily was putting out for him.

"Then my boss took me off it. He figured that she was just squealing on a guy who had dumped her and we couldn't go digging up ground all over Manhattan unless we had a report of somebody missing."

"You keep a file on it?" Mike asked.

"There was the usual paperwork I did in the squad, back before we had computers."

"Take any of your case folders with you? Something that might have names on-"

"For what? My memoirs?" Kittredge laughed as he walked to the front door and put his hand on the knob.

"You mind if we come back to you when we have more information?" Mike said, realizing the opportunity for conversation was about to be over.

"Try not to waste my time. Emily wasn't known for her taste in men. She probably picked up one too many barflys with a rough edge. She just couldn't keep off the juice, I guess."

We were back out on the stoop, headed for the car, when Mike's cell phone rang. He opened it to say hello, and I could see the condensation of his breath in the air. It made him look as though he was as fired up inside as I figured him to be.

"Where? Does Scotty Taren know?" Mike asked, getting answers that he liked. "Thanks, Hal. I owe you big-time."

I waited for him to unlock the car and let me inside. He slammed the door and pursed his lips. "That was Hal Sherman. Looks like all the pressure of going public with a patient's history may have been too much for Dr. Ichiko. He killed himself today. They just found his body up in the Bronx."