Entombed (21 page)

"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."

21

The four of us stepped
out so Kirby and his client could confer.

"Does he know that Dr.
Ichiko is dead?" Mike asked.

"He didn't seem to
when he walked in the door," McKinney said. "Unless he came in here to
set up the perfect alibi for himself. 'Me? I was cooperating with the
police when Ichiko went over the falls. Just ask them.'"

"Yeah, well, nice job,
Pat. You did everything except get what we really need-the name of the
guy who killed Aurora. The person who hated her enough to brick her up
behind a wall, still breathing. Solve Scotty's case for him."

"Take your best shot,
Mike. Guidi told me before you two showed up, right off the bat, that
he didn't know anything definite. All he can do is guess. Everyone in
the rehab group was students or had once been enrolled in the
university. They were each told to use nicknames so no one could make
any official connection between them and the school."

"You got a nickname?"

McKinney looked at his
pad. "Monty. He told me the guy who might have wanted Aurora dead used
the name Monty."

That fit with the
nickname Emily Upshaw's friend, Teddy Kroon, had told us. Mike and I
knew that, but McKinney wasn't familiar with the details of the Upshaw
investigation, so the name Monty didn't seem to have any significance
to him. Mike looked at me and winked.

"What does Guidi know
about Monty? Anything else?"

"That he was in a
graduate program-something to do with literature. Guidi thinks he was a
poet or a writer."

"And the police-did
Guidi ever tell the police about Aurora back then, when she
disappeared?" I asked.

"No. He says he was
too whacked out on drugs. She vanished and most of the kids figured she
just either left town or she got caught up in some drug sweep and went
to prison for a while."

Fifteen minutes later,
while Mike worked the phones to set up meetings for the next day,
McKinney was summoned into the room by Roy Kirby. Whatever agreement
they reached, Scotty, Mike, and I were not privy to it. McKinney came
out to ask Taren to set them up in the interrogation room with the
two-way glass, so that Taren could watch the rest of the conversation
without being seen by Guidi. McKinney's excuse for excluding Mike and
me was that Guidi was uncomfortable with so many investigators
surrounding him.

After McKinney went
inside with the witness, Taren waved both of us into the darkened
cubicle so we could observe the interchange alongside him.

Gino Guidi had started
to explain what he knew about Aurora Tait and the man known as Monty.

"The program we were
in-SABA-was set up on the twelve-step model of Alcoholics Anonymous.
You know what that is?" Guidi asked.

"I've got a pretty
good idea. Why don't you be specific," McKinney said.

"The first thing is
just to admit that you're powerless over alcohol and can no longer
control your life. The second step is to acknowledge your belief in a
higher power that can help restore your sanity. Next you agree to turn
your life over to God-whatever your understanding of him is-and then to
make a soul-searching inventory of yourself," Guidi said, still smoking
as he talked.

"We got to the fifth
step and that's where Monty started to choke."

"What do you mean?"
McKinney asked.

"I think the way it
goes is that you have to admit to yourself, and to God, and to another
human being the exact nature of your wrongs. Most of us had hurt the
people we loved, stolen money to buy drugs, hocked the family
jewels-that kind of thing," he said, crushing his cigarette in an
ashtray on the bare table in front of him and shaking his head.

"And Monty?"

"I was sitting on a
bench in Washington Square Park, waiting for a meeting to begin. I
didn't even know the guy except for an hour a week in a church
basement, listening to him talk about getting kicked out of boarding
school and being an orphan and that kind of shit. Next thing I know,
he's telling me he'd been having weird dreams."

"Dreams?" McKinney
asked.

"Yeah, nightmares.
Said he had visions that he had killed someone."

"Did he tell you who?"

"Not by name. I mean,
I didn't know it was Aurora Tait. He told me he kept waking up in the
middle of the night, thinking he had murdered a girl. Some chick, he
told me, who had betrayed him. He said he'd had a summer job doing
construction work-this was where he got especially weird-and that he'd
used materials from his work to bury her behind a wall."

"And what did you do
about it?"

"Do about it?" Guidi
asked, looking puzzled.

"Who'd you tell?"

"I just assumed he was
back on the blow, Mr. McKinney. Dreams and visions and blackouts were
nothing unusual to any of us. I just chalked it up to the fact that he
was using crack again, hallucinating and being paranoid. I knew
firsthand what that was like."

"Do you know whether
he-this, this Monty-told anyone else?"

"No idea."

"Can you give me the
names-the nicknames, that is-of the other people who were in the SABA
group with you?" McKinney asked.

Guidi looked over at
Roy Kirby before he answered. "No. No, I can't."

"Or won't."

"I said I can't.
Twenty years is a long time."

Mike whispered to me
and Scotty, "Why's McKinney going soft on him? Give me ten minutes in
the room with Gino and I bet we'd have names and social security
numbers. He's too smart not to know."

Scotty agreed. "Yeah,
but he's got too much on the line. I guess Pat'll shake a little more
out of him in front of the grand jury."

McKinney stood up and
shook Gino Guidi's hand. "Well, I'll get in touch with Roy if we need
anything else from you. A deal's a deal."

"What's the frigging
deal?" Mike asked.

I walked to the door
and waited for McKinney to step out of the interrogation room. "What
did I miss? What do you mean by 'deal'?"

"The reason Kirby
offered to let Guidi talk to me just now is that I agreed not to
subpoena him, because of the privileged communication."

"Privilege?" I asked.
"Are you talking about Dr. Ichiko? Doctor-patient?"

"No, no, no. The
clerical privilege."

"I must be confused,"
Mike said. "Where's the priest? Who's got a collar here?"

"Kirby's worked on a
case. He just let me read it. Westchester County. He made law in the
Second Circuit, getting them to treat Alcoholics Anonymous as a
religious entity. There's a clericcongregant privilege that protects
communications made even during unconventional forms of religious
expression," McKinney said, talking down to Mike with his newfound
legal knowledge that Roy Kirby had imparted. "Like disclosing one's
'fearless moral inventory' to God and your fellow A.A. members."

Mike was muttering
under his breath and making the sign of the cross. "Monty didn't
confess to a priest, Pat. He was talking to another goddamn junkie on a
park bench."

McKinney called out to
Kirby, "Miss Cooper doesn't trust your interpretation of the law, Roy.
Want to show her that copy of the opinion in the Cox matter?"

"I'm going to say this
very quietly, Pat, because now that Roy Kirby has made a fool out of
you once tonight, I don't need him to do it again. Just like Monty, Mr.
Cox-Kirby's client in that Westchester case-didn't make his confession
to murder for the purpose of getting spiritual guidance."

McKinney screwed up
his nose. "So? I don't follow you, Alex."

"So the decision was
reversed by the United States Court of Appeals a year later. It helps,
Pat, if you read the slip opinions every now and then."

McKinney reddened and
bit his lip.

"You've just let Gino
Guidi off the hook and now we'll never truly find out how much he knows
about Monty and any other people who might be able to identify him." I
was steaming. "You let Guidi bargain to stay out of the grand jury when
he might also have the names of disgruntled group members or former
patients who didn't want Dr. Ichiko to go public tonight. Way to go,
McKinney. Way to go."