Entombed

37

Mike Chapman would have been pushing me out of the way if he were with us, telling Teddy Kroon to stop whining. Mercer and I took the more compassionate approach, hoping to gain his trust and elicit more candid responses than we had in our first meeting.

"Amelia. Amelia Brandon," Kroon said, repeating the girl's name over and over again as he rocked back and forth on his living room sofa. "I opened the door and I swear it was like seeing Emily's ghost. Amelia. It was Emily's little girl."

"You just let her walk away?" Mercer asked.

I was sitting next to Kroon and patting him on the back to help calm him.

"What else could I do? She came in and talked for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. I, I think she had figured out that I might be her father," Kroon said, forcing a smile. "I guess I convinced her that wasn't possible."

"But why didn't you give her some coffee-find some way to stall and keep her here-and go inside to call the precinct?"

Kroon looked at Mercer quizzically. "Detective Wallace, this whole thing came at me as such a surprise, I'm sure I didn't do a lot of things you would have thought of."

Mercer had the opportunity he wanted. Kroon was caught in a lie. The draft of the letter from Emily Upshaw to her sister was one of the files that had been opened on the computer the night of Emily's murder. Amelia and her appearance could not have been much of a surprise at all.

Mercer pushed the coffee table out of the way and lowered himself onto an ottoman that he pulled up directly in front of Kroon.

"Now one of the things we'd like to do this morning, Teddy, is to establish some ground rules," he said, his huge frame boxing the smaller man into place beside me. "You haven't been entirely honest with us about-"

"Yes, I have. Yes, I have from the very beginning. It's my finger-prints; didn't I tell you they'd be everywhere in Emily's apartment? I, I knew that was going to be a problem from the first time the police started questioning me. Is that what you mean?" Kroon looked over at me to be the good cop in this conversation, but I stared back at him without offering any comfort.

I remembered that Mike had been even more suspicious of Kroon when he got the confirmation from the autopsy that no sexual assault had been completed on Emily. The killer's sexual orientation was of little moment if the whole scene had been staged for the purpose of misleading the investigators.

"You gotta do better than that, Teddy. You gotta convince us you weren't the one waiting in the apartment for Emily when she came home from the theater the night she was killed."

Kroon was practically doubled over. "But I told you the name of the bar I was in. People saw me there. Lots of people."

"In a crowded bar where you were a regular. No one can swear to the time you arrived or when you ordered your second drink or whether you went out and came back during the course of the evening."

"I'd never have hurt Emily. She was the dearest friend I've ever had," he said, resting his head in his hands.

Mercer tapped a long, thick finger against the top of Kroon's knee. "Look at me when I'm talking to you," he said, his deep voice the only sound in the room.

Kroon slowly lifted his head to meet Mercer's eyes.

"Don't mess with me, Teddy. There's a little chip inside the hard drive that recorded the exact minute someone went into a bunch of files from Emily Upshaw's computer," Mercer said, rubbing his fingers together in front of Kroon's face. "And there were enough skin cells on the computer mouse to tell us that person was you. So it suggests that you were either there with your friend at the time she was attacked with-correct me if I have this wrong- yourcarving knife, or that you interrupted your mourning after her death long enough to log on to her machine. Neither one of those is a pretty picture."

Kroon's head snapped back and he leaned it against the rear edge of the sofa, gazing up at the ceiling.

Mercer was getting to him. "Start with the crap you gave us about leaving messages on her answering machine. There were none."

"Maybe I dialed the wrong number. I'm telling you that I called Emily several times."

"Try harder. You knew she was very upset. You lied about that, too. She told you she was frantic when she called you at the store in the afternoon."

"Like I said, she only left a message with one of my sales-"

"Teddy, her phone records show she was talking with someone at your shop for almost five minutes."

It wasn't warm enough in Kroon's apartment for any of us to be sweating, but small, watery beads were forming on his forehead.

He pulled himself upright and snarled at Mercer, "Emily Upshaw was scared to death when she called me that afternoon. She had a premonition that she was going to be murdered."

Mercer and I hadn't expected that answer.

"All right, Detective? Would you have believed her if she told you that? Would you have taken her any more seriously than I did?"

"It depends what she was talking about."

"Someone was trying to find Emily. Someone she didn't want to hear from ever again."

I thought I knew where he was going. "Amelia Brandon. Her daughter?"

Kroon was silent.

"Look, Teddy, we know the letter that Emily wrote to her sister about Amelia is one of the documents you opened the night of the murder. That's why I don't believe you were all that surprised when Amelia showed up at your door this morning. There's got to be a different reason you turned the child away."

"Fear, Miss Cooper. Plain and simple fear. Can you understand that?" He pushed himself up from the sofa and walked away from the two of us.

"Of course I can accept that." Better than you'll ever imagine. "But it would help if you told us who you're afraid of."

He balanced himself against the windowsill as he shouted at me, "How the hell am I supposed to know if you people can't figure it out?"

"So what did you do?" Mercer asked. "Send the kid back out on the street as a test balloon? See what kind of trouble she attracts? I want to find that girl, Teddy, before we have another tragedy on our hands."

Kroon exhaled. "Emily had been sick since she got that phone call from Amelia, maybe a week or ten days before she was killed. She'd promised her sister never to have any contact with the child."

"We know that. Sally Brandon talked to us when she was here. But Amelia's got to be out of college by now-she was bound to find out sooner or later."

"Some sort of legal papers had been arranged for the Brandons when Emily gave up the baby, but apparently no one ever destroyed the original birth certificate on file at the hospital. Amelia hadn't gone looking for trouble. She simply wanted to come here to meet Emily, to find out why her mother had abandoned her. She wanted to know who her father is."

"Wasn't his name on the birth certificate, too?" I asked.

"No. That just said 'unknown' in the space for the father's name."

"Do you know who he is?"

Kroon nodded his head up and down. "Emily told me that same week. The NYU professor whom she slept with the time she came to the city for her college interview. Noah Tormey is his name."

"Did Emily actually speak to Amelia?"

"Only once. You see, the child didn't have a phone number for Emily. Her home phone is-was-unlisted. So Amelia rummaged through her mother's papers but the only things she came up with were some occasional clippings of articles with Emily's byline that Sally must have saved. The girl began to call the editorial departments of the magazines, and once she did that, Emily got calls from her former colleagues, telling her that someone named Amelia Brandon was trying to reach her."

"So Emily phoned her?" Mercer asked.

"Absolutely not. She'd made a promise to her sister that she wasn't going to break. But she was tormented by the fact that Amelia was determined to track her down. There was no way to put the cat back in the bag. I guess one of the other writers on the magazine staff finally gave the child Emily's phone number."

"Take us to Saturday afternoon before the murder," Mercer said, "when Emily called you with her-what did you say- premonition?"

Kroon wiped his brow. "I was at work, like I told you. The store was busy and I'm afraid I didn't take her as seriously as-well-as it turned out I should have."

"You couldn't have known what would happen to her," I said.

"Emily had been at home all morning, sleeping late, I'm sure. She went out for the papers and some groceries, and when she got back there had been a series of calls. Three, I think she said. All of them hang-ups."

I looked at Mercer, who had studied the outgoing and incoming activity on Emily Upshaw's phone records. He nodded his head and mouthed the words "pay phone."

"Emily couldn't imagine who had called, but she was concerned that it had something to do with Amelia's attempts to find her. Every time we had met during the week, she'd been soliciting my help with what to do about telling her sister."

"And your advice?"

He shrugged. "Be honest with her. There was nothing to hide anymore."

"The hang-up caller, did he or she phone back?"

"Yes. That's what prompted Emily's panicked call to me. It was that doctor-you know, the one with the Asian name who was found dead last week."

"Dr. Ichiko?" I asked.

"Exactly."

"Did Emily know him?"

"No," he said. "She told me that she'd never met him."

Mercer walked over to Kroon. "But you just told us her phone is unlisted."

He sniffled and answered, "Emily's name was in the file the doctor had kept on Monty, when Ichiko had treated him back in his college days. Apparently, Monty had talked about her in session, as the woman he lived with, the person he confided in when he had the flashbacks that he had killed someone. The doctor had an NYU alumni directory. Emily's number is printed in that."

"What did he want?"

"First he spooked her by just expressing relief that she was alive-that she hadn't been murdered long ago. Ichiko asked whether she had seen the newspapers, the headlines about the skeleton in the building basement. Emily had just come home with the papers-the Times and the tabloids. He told her to look at the Post follow-up story, that he was convinced he knew whose bones had been discovered. And certain that the killer was Emily's old boyfriend, the one she called Monty."

"What did Emily do?" I asked.

"Ichiko wanted her to tell him where Monty was, what had become of him. She swore she didn't know, that she hadn't seen him in over twenty years. He pressed Emily hard-he really scared the daylights out of her."

"How?"

"He told her that once the skeleton was identified, Emily wouldn't be safe in New York. That she had to help him figure out what had become of Monty or they'd both wind up dead. Dr. Ichiko wasn't wrong, was he?"

"And you, what did Emily want from you?" Mercer asked.

"Money. Money to get out of town. And advice about where to go."

"What did you tell her?"

"That she couldn't run because she didn't know where in the world this man Monty had gone."

"Hadn't she thought of that before?" I asked.

"Often," Kroon said. "She often wondered what had become of him. How do you support yourself if you're a poet, Detective Wallace? Nobody can make a living that way today."

"The pages you opened from Emily's computer, Teddy, what was that about?" Mercer asked.

He bowed his head. "That was such a stupid thing to do."

Heartless, I wanted to add.

"What was so important to you that you opened computer files before you even called nine-one-one?"

Kroon walked to his desk drawer and returned to the sofa, sitting next to me and handing me a thin manila folder. "You can look. I mean, when I found her body, I assumed she'd been killed by the Silk Stocking Rapist. That it was just a rotten piece of bad timing and bad luck. I-I guess I just wanted to be a hero."

"It never occurred to you that the killer was Monty?"

"Call it denial, Detective. I had read about the rapist back in the neighborhood, stabbing a woman. I-I guess I didn't think things were moving so fast, since the doctor had only called Emily that very day. I didn't think Monty was anywhere around yet, so I thought I could find information about Monty that I could turn over to Dr. Ichiko, that would help the police solve the old case."

I opened the file that Kroon had printed out the night of Emily's murder and shuffled through the papers to see whether anything struck me as relevant or useful to our investigation. I hadn't had the chance yet to study the police forensics report on the computer.

Teddy may have claimed a close friendship with Emily, but for some unfathomable reason he had purloined some very personal writings. There were pages of meditations on the emotional upheaval she had undergone because of Amelia's contact, and intimate recollections that the dead woman had written about her parents and sisters.

Then came a lengthy manuscript, titled "Poetic Injustice," which listed both Emily Upshaw and Noah Tormey as its authors. It appeared to be the academic treatise on Poe's flirtation with plagiarism that she had researched and written for the young professor- the one that had scotched his ambitions at the Raven Society.

Next came a paragraph of single-spaced prose. I lifted the page from my lap to read it.

Kroon saw what it was. "See? I thought I could give this to Dr. Ichiko, to show that Monty-whoever he was-had confessed to Emily."

I read the lines:

I determined to wall it up in the cellar, as the monks of the Middle Ages are recorded to have walled up their victims. For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and… I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole thing up as before so that no eye could detect anything suspicious… by means of a crowbar I easily dislodged the bricks and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it up in that position, while with a little trouble I re-laid the whole structure as it originally stood.

"Stick to gourmet cooking, Teddy. That's vintage Poe. 'The Black Cat.' Another burial behind brick walls," I said.

He looked crestfallen, as though he had actually found a clue of significance.

The last pages included the draft letter that Emily was working on to send her sister Sally, telling her about Amelia's discovery.

"Is this your handwriting?" I asked, pointing to the edits and corrections that had been made in pen along the margins.

Kroon said yes without looking up.

"Why did you write Noah Tormey's name at the top of the page?"

"I wanted to be sure I'd remember it. I'd heard his name from Emily for the first time, just a few days earlier."

"But why?" I asked. "What were you going to do with this letter, with this information?"

"Well, nothing. I-uh-I just felt I knew the truth and ought to keep a record of it, for Amelia's sake."

"And then you brushed her off at the door when she arrived this morning?" Mercer asked.

I read the page again while Mercer questioned Kroon. The changes he had made to the draft made no sense to me. It was no longer intended to be a letter to Sally Brandon.

"Where did you send the girl?"

"Nowhere in particular. I couldn't deal with her is all."

"Did you give her Tormey's name?" Mercer asked. "Was that your plan?"

"No, not yet. I didn't think she was ready for that. I didn't know what to do with her. She wanted information about Emily's life, about who would be able to help her. I-I told her about the detective who had befriended her mother-"

Mercer was steaming. "Kittredge? Did you give her Kittredge's name?"

"Yes."

"What else? Did you talk about Monty?"

"Only that I don't know who he could be. I wasn't suggesting she try to find out."

"But she's desperate for information about her birth parents. For all we know you've sent her out in harm's way. Now how the hell do you help us find her again?" Mercer asked. "At least if you'd given her Tormey's name, maybe he'd have taken her in and we'd know she's safe."

Now the written words made more sense, came clearer on the page when Kroon answered Mercer's questions.

"Of course you didn't want her to get to Noah Tormey quite yet," I said, looking up at Kroon. "You were hoping to extort a little money from him in order to let his secret go to the grave with Emily."