Entombed

20

"You gonna tell McKinney you just came from viewing Dr. Ichiko?"

"Of course I am," I said.

"And you're going to tell him about the Raven Society phone call, too?"

"Not until I know what the society is." By morning, Mike would be able to check the reverse telephone directory and get a name and address for the number that had been displayed in the lighted dial of the cell phone.

We had just reached the Nineteenth Precinct squad room, shortly after nine-thirty Tuesday evening. When Mike had called Scotty Taren earlier to tell him about the scene at the gorge, the cold case detective had a new development to report, too.

Pat McKinney had been contacted late in the day by a man who claimed to have information about the skeleton in the West Third Street basement. He had directed Scotty to set up a meeting with the man, himself, and Scotty at 9P.M. in the Nineteenth Precinct station house.

Mike knocked on the frosted glass pane of the captain's office. Through it, I could see the outline of McKinney's figure, standing in front of the desk. He walked to the door and opened it, stepping out into the squad room to greet Mike.

"Hey, Chapman. Scotty tells me you've been to the river to-" McKinney said, stopping short when he spotted me over Mike's shoulder. "I suppose you had to stick your nose in the middle of this, too? Maybe if you concentrated your energy on the Silk Stocking Rapist you could solve that one, Alex."

A man was seated inside the room with his back to me. I was more curious about the pair of legs sticking out from a chair behind the door-a woman's legs, crossed at the knees, displaying thick ankles planted in cheap black pumps.

Mike saw them, too, and recognized them. McKinney's long-time lover, Ellen Gunsher, was also a prosecutor, but her fear of the courtroom and her lack of any creative investigative ability had landed her a succession of administrative jobs that were nestled under McKinney's protective eye.

"Are those the stumps-I mean stems-of my favorite yellow rose?" Mike asked, pushing back the door and exposing a bit more of Ellen, who played her big-city helplessness against her homespun Texas roots.

She waved at Mike and offered a wan smile.

"Are we interrupting anything personal, Pat?" I asked.

"Ellen and I were working on turning an informant down at the office when I got this call. That's why she's here."

"Who's the suit? Is that the guy who called with information?"

Pat reached for the doorknob to close it behind him to answer me.

"Just a minute, pal. Don't be leaving any witness on something I'm involved in alone in a room with Ellen," Mike said, motioning her out of the room while the dark-haired man in the chair turned his head to examine the four of us. "C'mon, Tex."

Mike closed the door, leaving the man inside.

Pat was trying to get between Mike and the door. "Last I knew this was Scotty Taren's investigation, not yours. The skeleton's a Cold Case Squad matter, and Ichiko goes with that."

"Yeah, well, Lieutenant Peterson changed the rules. He wants all hands on deck-I just got off the phone with him-until we know if any of these things are connected. You heard Ms. Cooper. Who's the suit?"

Scotty Taren spoke while McKinney glared at Mike, and Ellen stood frozen like a deer caught in the headlights. "His name is Gino Guidi. Fifty-six years old. He's an investment banker with an operation called Providence Partners."

"Stop right there. I know why four of us are here, but I think it's time for Ellen to hit the road," Mike said. "She's got no business with me, and either she packs it in or I make a call to the chief of d's and we go to the mat on this."

McKinney usually bullied detectives into getting his way, but Mike wouldn't brook it. An assistant who had never handled homicides would not be cutting her teeth on one of his investigations.

Ellen raised a hand at Pat to stop whatever feeble protest he was about to make and put on her coat. As she said good night and walked to the staircase, Mike sang out after her: "Oh, I've got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle."

McKinney was close to a boiling point.

"You want me to continue?" Scotty asked Mike.

McKinney slapped his hand against the wall. "I'm the senior man here. We'll do this the way I say."

"Look, Pat. I think Mike and I have more information than you do at this point," I said. "You can run the show. Just grow up and realize that we're all in it for the same result. I'll take the backseat but you're not doing this without us. Go on, Scotty."

Taren shook his head. "You guys ready? Guidi's married with four kids. Lives in Kings Point. The reason he called is that he was treated by Dr. Ichiko a long time ago. He was in that same rehab group as Emily Upshaw-SABA. He was an alcoholic who moved into other drugs. He was in business school at the time. Guidi thinks he knows the name of the skeleton-well, the girl whose bones you found."

"Who is she?" Mike asked.

Scotty looked at his notes. "Aurora Tait."

"He's got the initials right," I said, referring to the ring that we'd found inside her brick coffin. "Why'd he come forward today?"

"That's what he was telling us when you two interrupted," Pat said.

"He seems pretty freaked out about Dr. Ichiko going on television to name his former patient. He's willing to give us information if we can stop Ichiko," Scotty said.

"Apparently someone else shared that sentiment. Shall we continue?" Mike opened the door and introduced the two of us, apologizing to Guidi for the commotion and reconfiguring the chairs so that we could all fit in the small office.

Pat McKinney took the captain's seat and picked up his questioning. I was against the back wall, listening to the conversation and looking over Gino Guidi.

The banker was dressed in a well-tailored charcoal gray suit- Brioni, if I had to guess. His shirt was a white-on-white herring-bone, with his initials on the barrel cuff. The subtle circular weave on his necktie was perfectly matched to the lavender pocket square, and his fingernails had been recently buffed to a high sheen. His black hair looked like a good dye job, and the only sign of a bump in the road of Gino Guidi's life was a raw scar that ran from the middle of his right cheek down below his shirt collar.

"You were going to give us some background, Mr. Guidi," Pat said.

"I trust this is still confidential?" Guidi said, gesturing at Mike and me.

"My colleagues understand that. You were telling us about Ms. Tait. About why you think she's the woman who was found last week."

"Aurora was what people used to call a free spirit. I was at the B-school when I first met her," he said, resuming his story.

"Was she an NYU student, too?" Pat asked.

"No. She lived in the Village, so she was always hanging around Washington Square. I think a lot of people assumed she was a student, which gave her entrée to all the kids, but in fact she was just a hanger-on."

"How did you meet her?"

"At a party. Nothing memorable about the event except Aurora."

"What about her?"

"She was the sexiest woman I'd ever seen, I think. Tall and willowy, moved like a cat, had lots of dark hair that kind of framed her face and made her smile seem even more electric. And mean," Guidi said, smiling. "She had a really mean streak."

"How'd she show that?"

"She had a pretty vicious tongue, Mr. McKinney. I guess she'd heard every pickup line in the book so her comebacks were designed to cut through all the crap, separate the men from the boys. She kept me on a tight wire for the first couple of weeks, threatening to destroy anything in my life I cared about."

"Did you date her?" Pat asked. I knew that Mike was as ready to hijack the questioning and let Guidi tell his story as I was, but Pat plugged ahead.

"Aurora didn't date. She conquered. Took me home with her that night and-"

"Where did she live? On Third Street?"

Let him finish his goddamn sentences, I thought to myself.

"No. No, not where the bones were found. I don't know anything about that place. We went to a pad on Bleecker Street. I thought it was where she lived, but it turned out to be just a place she flopped for the night. Anyway, Aurora showed me some tricks," Guidi said, looking over his shoulder at me, as though to make sure he wasn't offending me. "Some experiences that were new to me. And then, of course, there were the drugs."

"What drugs?"

"Aurora introduced me to crack, Mr. McKinney. I was a big drinker at the time. Both my parents were alcoholics, so whatever genetic predisposition there was kind of doubled up in me. But I was in denial, like most alcoholics. I thought everyone in college drank like I did. Then I had my first job on Wall Street and got into the two-martini lunches of the eighties, to get me through the afternoon until I could start drinking in earnest. Went on to business school, where I mixed my liquor with the occasional line of coke."

"Why crack?"

Guidi leaned in and lighted a cigarette, throwing the match into a half-empty coffee cup. "Because Aurora Tait lit the pipe and put it in my mouth while she was lying naked next to me in bed. It seemed like a fine idea at the time."

"And then?"

"I guess you haven't talked with many crack addicts, have you, Mr. McKinney?"

McKinney had spent too much time doing administrative work behind his closed office door to know, from witnesses, the things the rest of the line assistants and cops heard firsthand every single day.

"I don't understand, Mr. Guidi."

"The first time I smoked crack I thought I had found nirvana. I wanted to do it again, that night, and every night thereafter. I felt a sense of freedom I'd never known before-no pressure, no anxiety- completely sensual and pleasurable. And like every truly addictive personality, I began by assuming that I could control my reaction to the drug. Denial worked just as well for crack cocaine as it did for alcohol."

"And Aurora was with you throughout all this?"

Guidi exhaled and laughed at the same time. "No. She was just the siren, luring me onto the rocks."

"Excuse me, what siren?"

McKinney was so literal, so rigid, he was undoubtedly thinking of the sound box of a police cruiser, not the legendary women of Greek mythology whose singing was the downfall of unwary sailors.

"She was a stone-cold junkie who supported her habit by selling drugs. She'd found the perfect niche, Mr. McKinney. She set herself up in the middle of Greenwich Village, cruising the campus and the bars and the parties to find guys like me-rich boys with generous allowances to spend on books and dates and work clothes. Only, me? I never made it to the bookstore. She had me hooked within two weeks of meeting her. Left me with an expensive habit and moved right on to the next guy."

"What happened to you?"

"I had a very sobering wake-up call about a year and a half later. I ran into the sharp end of a jackknife at four in the morning on Avenue C, desperate to find some crack. I was admitted to Bellevue Hospital and regained consciousness three days later. While I was convalescing, the shrink on intake was Dr. Wo-Jin Ichiko. He worked with me while I was in withdrawal and detoxing. Then he introduced me to SABA, the rehab program at the university."

Guidi paused and dropped his cigarette butt in the cup. "The prick probably saved my life. But today, I'll be honest with you, I was ready to kill him."

"Because?"

"Because I've spent two decades of my life trying to put the pieces back together. I've got a very understanding wife, who met me fifteen years ago. I flunked out of business school while all this drug involvement was going on, so I had to claw my way in by starting from scratch. I worked in the mail room at Credit Suisse until I could make enough money to get back into school. But my kids have no idea that for almost three years I lived like a derelict and came close to throwing every advantage I'd been given to the wind. And I bet they'd understand and accept it a whole helluva lot better than my partners and most of my clients."

"When's the last time you saw Dr. Ichiko?" McKinney asked.

"Eighteen, twenty years ago."

"And you haven't spoken to him either?"

Guidi tapped another cigarette out of his pack and lit up. "Yeah, I did. Last night. I called his house."

"You had his home number?"

"No. I called the office and got his service. I told them I was a patient with an emergency and they patched me through."

"Did you have a conversation with him?"

"When I stopped cursing at him, I guess you'd call it that."

"What did you say?"

"I called him every name in the book. I thought there was some kind of privilege between doctors and their patients. I didn't know why the hell he was going to go on television and give out the name of someone he treated years ago. I don't need this kind of shit, this kind of publicity, coming out now-not for my family, not for my clients."

"Why were you so concerned about Aurora Tait?" McKinney asked.

"I never said I was," Guidi replied. "But if a medical doctor could be paid by a television show to make Aurora's name public, what was to stop him from identifying the rest of us?"

"Well, she's dead, so the question of privilege-"

Guidi leaned forward and interrupted McKinney. "You're damn right she's dead and it doesn't make a bit of difference in her sorry case. Nobody even missed her when she drifted out of our lives, so it's nice to know she can finally be laid to rest. But the last thing I need to see on some tabloid television show is a feature about my own wasted youth and drug addiction."

"The girl was buried alive, Mr. Guidi. Somebody had to hate her awful bad to wish that kind of ending."

Gino Guidi covered his eyes with his hand and leaned his head back. He actually seemed shocked. "I saw the news story. I just figured she ran into the wrong junkie, made the same mistakes I did," he said, now rubbing a finger along the length of his scar. "That's chilling."

"Did you threaten Dr. Ichiko?" McKinney had to change direction to show his authority.

Guidi tossed his head and took a draw on his cigarette. "I get it. He taped me. Yeah, I threatened him. So what? I told him I'd nail him, one way or another. I told him I'd sue his Oriental ass from here to Hong Kong."

Mike spoke for the first time. "Rugs are Oriental, Mr. Guidi. People are Asian. PC enough for you, Coop?"

Guidi snapped his head around to look at Mike. "I told him he was dead meat if he messed with me."

A sharp rap on the glass pane startled me. Without waiting for an invitation, someone pushed open the door and walked in.

"Cut it out, McKinney." The speaker was Roy Kirby, from the white-shoe law firm in which he was a name partner. "Give me some place to talk to my client. Gino, don't say another word."