Entombed (23 page)

"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.

23

Mike Chapman screamed
my name and came running around the last curve.

Tormey was crawling to
me on his left elbow, his right arm hanging limp beside him.

Mike's gun was drawn,
and with his other hand he flattened Tormey on the cold brick pavement.
"Get down, both of you."

I couldn't see where
the students had scattered but I could hear them shouting in the
background.

Mike positioned
himself in front of Poe, face-to-face with the bronze head, rising to
his full height and peering around the writer's brow at the steep hill
below.

I tried to dislodge
myself from beneath Tormey's arm. Blood was seeping through the sleeve
of his jacket onto my leg and he was groaning in pain. I tried to sit
up.

"Down, dammit," Mike
said.

He waited a second
until I lowered my head again and let off two shots. Again I heard the
sound of the rifle as it returned fire, bullets wildly hitting pillars
and pedestals and poets before bouncing onto the floor. Beneath the
canopy of the brick ceiling, each volley sounded magnified, like rounds
from a cannon.

"You-Tormey-you okay?"

He was lying on his
stomach now, his left hand covering the top of his head. Mike ducked
and pulled him flush up against the front part of the wall.

"I'm gonna stand up
and throw off a shot, Coop. I want you to get on all fours and retrace
your steps back to the entrance as fast as you can."

I turned my head to
the side as I squatted behind Mike and looked up at him.

"Don't fuck with me,
kid. Target practice isn't my strong suit. Move!"

All my attention was
on moving forward. I tried to do it as quickly as possible, knowing
that Mike was exposed to the shooter while he was trying to cover my
back. I doubted there would be enough bullets left in his gun to get us
to the iron entrance gate if the assassin was tracking our retreat.

I could hear the sound
of sirens coming closer. I was hoping the gunman could hear them, too.

More shots echoed
around my head. I couldn't tell how many had actually been fired and
how many were simply resounding off the various surfaces. I looked back
and saw that Mike was still standing, just a few feet behind me,
shielded by the statue of David Farragut.

I was as low to the
ground as I could manage to be and still propel myself forward, passing
Henry Ward Beecher and John James Audubon. I hadn't heard Louis
Agassiz's name since I left Wellesley and didn't stop to make note of
his many accomplishments.

I took another corner
and Mike let go with another round. I glanced back again to make sure
he hadn't been hurt. "Keep going, Coop. You're almost there."

Pushing along the
rough surface of the bricks had worn back the tops of my gloves. My
wrists were raw from rubbing against the ground as I tried to scoot
along.

Now I could hear what
seemed like a small army of footsteps pounding toward us. "Stay back.
Someone's shooting at us," I yelled, as I saw a guard dressed in the
uniform of the campus police coming toward me. I pointed at Mike. "He's
a cop!"

Mike was too engaged
to pull out his gold badge. The danger was off to the side and below
him, not in the form of bewildered and unarmed security guards.

He took one look at
the startled officers, called out to them to watch me, and vaulted over
the two-foot-high balcony that bordered the hilltop. In that split
second given me to decide what to do, I knew that if I made the mistake
of calling out his name, it would cause him to look back and think I
needed help.