Entombed (22 page)

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."