Entombed (18 page)

Mercer and I both
laughed. "Nothing's silly, Annika," he said.

One more possible
feature for the task force to factor into the investigation. All of the
other women had been asked about the perp's speech and none had
described it as accented. Unlike many attackers who talk to their
victims all through the assault, the Silk Stocking Rapist had not been
a man of many words.

We said our good-byes
and Mercer took Annika and her attendant down to help them into the
ambulette that had transported them from the hospital. He returned
minutes later.

"Back to the drawing
board." He tossed the case folder onto my desk and had an
uncharacteristically discouraged frown on his face.

"I'm not exactly
convinced that we're looking for an Oxfordeducated rapist on the basis
of one syllable," I said.

"Yeah, but we've still
got to reanalyze the language in every case and reinterview each victim
about every single word the guy said. Annika's too smart to ignore. The
list of things to do seems to get longer every day rather than shorter."

"That's because you
two just aren't as efficient as I am," Mike said, walking into the room
and waving his right hand with a flourish. "Emily Upshaw. Grand larceny
in the third degree."

"Nice work," I said,
clapping my hands in appreciation.

"Bloomingdale's. Men's
department. Designer clothes and accessories," Mike said, as he began
to quote from the old complaint report. "'Undersigned did observe
above-named defendant conceal three long-sleeved men's shirts, an
alligator belt'-there's your felony price tag-'and six pairs of socks
in a shopping bag and attempt to leave the store without paying for
said items.'"

"Who's the guy? Was he
locked up, too?"

"Don't jump ahead,
Coop. Seems the cowardly weasel waited outside the store and sent Emily
in to do the lifting."

"Well, did the cop
see-?"

"Not a cop. Square
badge made the collar," Mike said, referring to a store security guard.
"There's nothing to suggest a codefendant was picked up."

"Was there any bail
set at the arraignment?" I asked.

"Five hundred bucks,"
he said, flipping a few sheets of paper. "What did Emily's sister say
about a professor helping her out? The guy who posted bail was named
Noah Tormey. Says he taught English at NYU."

"He put the money up
either because he truly wanted to help her or-"

"Or because he was the
unapprehended beneficiary of the shirts and belt."

"Isn't there a
detective's name anywhere in the file?" I asked, thinking of Emily's
sister's other comments, as I opened the telephone book to see if there
was a listing in Manhattan for Tormey.

"Yeah. You'll like
this. Emily Upshaw had a change of address on the date the case was
dismissed. She had moved out of her apartment on Washington Square and
was living on West End Avenue. With a detective named Aaron Kittredge."

"What? She moved in
with a detective?"

"Don't make it sound
like drinking poison, Coop. Could be good for you."

Noah Tormey wasn't in
the book. I replaced it on the shelf and logged on to the Internet.
"Kittredge still on the job?"

"Nope. Retired five
years ago. Pension bureau still sends his checks to the Upper West Side
address. We got places to go and people to see, kid. Saddle up."

Laura walked in and
handed Mike a fax. "Andy Dorfman called from the medical examiner's
office. Wanted you to look at this when you came in."

"It's the initial
report of his exam of some of the things taken out of the basement in
the room with the skeleton. No surprises. First of all, the
pathologists agree there's nothing to work with but bones, which don't
reveal any gross trauma that could have caused death. Buried
alive-entombed in that basement-still seems the most likely way they're
going to rule on this one," Mike said. "The bricks are a couple of
hundred years old. But the sealant is a cement compound that didn't
exist until the last fifty years."

"Those chips Andy
pointed out to you, were they really fingernails?"

"Yes, ma'am. And this
confirms the nails picked up some of the cement scrapings," he read to
me in a quiet voice. "That broad wanted
out.
"

He skimmed the rest of
the paragraphs. "What's 'vermeil'?"

"Silver, with a gilt
finish on top."

"That's all Andy can
tell us about the ring. But he's also picked up something that was
scratched into one of the panes of glass on the basement door."

"What door?" I asked.
I had been so absorbed once I saw the skeleton in her coffin I hadn't
even noticed much else.

"In the corner of the
basement there was a small door with two little windows that looked out
onto the yard. Somebody etched this into one of them." Mike smiled as
he read from Dorfman's report.

"O Thou timid one,
do not let thy

Form slumber within
these unhallowed walls,

For herein lies-"

I interrupted him to
finish the stanza.
"…The ghost of an awful crime."

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."