Entombed

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 facility."

"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 back 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.

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 were 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.