Linda Fairstein - Entombed

"But you," I asked, "when she spent time with you, didn't she mention it?"

"Emily introduced me to Poe. That was much later on, though, when she was hanging out here, trying to get her act together."

"And was it in the context of this murder her boyfriend had told her about?"

"I guess it was. You know the short stories?"

"Some of them," I said.

"I'd never known any of them. Emily had an anthology. She made me read a few tales-'The Cask of Amontillado,' 'The Black Cat.'"

"Both of those are about people who were bricked up alive. Didn't that make you take her more seriously?"

"Me? Hey, Ms. Cooper," he said, refilling his mug. "I may have been the only guy in town who gave her the time of day. Quite frankly, between the booze and the blow she ingested, and the fact that there was no missing victim and no crime scene, even though I tried to help her at first, I began to think she was just lifting the crap she was telling me right out of the fiction she liked to read."

"But you must have gotten enough into Poe's work to become interested in ratiocination, didn't you?"

"What makes you think so?"

"Your visit to the New York Botanical Gardens, Mr. Kittredge," I said. "Your meeting-or your aborted visit-with a man called Zeldin."

Kittredge put the coffee down in the sink and bent his head before turning back to me.

"I guess the department spit up the old story to you. Is that fool still around?"

"You want to tell us why you wanted to see Zeldin?" Mercer asked. "Did it have anything to do with Emily Upshaw?"

"She'd been out of the picture for a decade when that shooting happened," Kittredge said, thinking for a minute before he spoke. "I guess you're right, in a sense. Emily had nothing to do with it directly, but she left that book of short stories here. I picked it up about ten years later, when someone told me it was Poe who wrote the first detective stories in literature."

"Emily hadn't talked about those?" I asked.

"Nah. She was interested in the bizarre and macabre. It was 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' that got me hooked."

"On what, the techniques of Monsieur Dupin?" I asked, referring to Poe's amateur sleuth.

"I liked a character that used his brain to solve crimes."

"But he ridiculed the Parisian police, didn't he?"

"He thought like a detective. It fascinated me. You know the others?"

"Poe's other detective stories? Only that there are three that feature Auguste Dupin," I said.

"Yeah. 'The Purloined Letter' and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget,'" Kittredge said. "What most people don't know is that Marie Roget was based on a real case-on a murder that occurred in New York. You knew that?"

"I had no idea. I mean, if I remember correctly, he makes a reference to coincidences between his story and an actual murder here, but I assumed that was just a fictional device to hook the reader."

"It made me curious, so I looked it up. There was no cold case unit at the time, and it was before I'd started painting. I just thought it would be interesting to take a stab at the original case, since it had never been solved."

"But it must have happened over a hundred-"

"Eighteen forty-one. So what? People are still trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was, aren't they? Who killed Cleopatra? Was Alexander the Great murdered?"

"Who was the victim?" I asked.

"Mary Rogers," he said, smiling. "Poe just added a French accent and moved her to Paris."

"And she was a shopgirl, too?"

"She worked in a tobacconist's store, selling cigars, down on Broadway near Thomas Street," Kittredge said. "Right up the street from where police headquarters and your office stand today."

"And are the facts similar?"

"Pretty close. The beautiful Miss Rogers failed to return home one evening. There was no such thing as a missing persons bureau, so her family put an ad in the New York Sun, asking for information about her disappearance. A few days later-bingo."

"They found her?"

"Raped, beaten, strangled to death with a piece of lace from her petticoat. Somebody came upon her body in the Hudson River, on the other side, right near Hoboken."

"How'd she get there?" I asked.

"Mary probably took the ferry over with a suitor. There was a kind of lovers' lane then, called the Elysian Fields."

How ironic that the place in Greek mythology where those blessed by the gods went after death-the eternal ideal of happiness-became the murder scene for a beautiful young woman, forever memorialized in Poe's story.

I thought of the solution that Poe had worked in his brilliant tale of deduction. "Was it a sailor who killed Mary Rogers?"

"Some thought that," Kittredge said. "There was a rock tied around her waist to weigh her down, and it was made with a sailor's knot. But nobody was ever caught."

"You have any theories?" I asked.

"Did you know there were people who speculated that Edgar Allan Poe was the killer?"

I was shocked. "You must be joking."

"He had enemies, Ms. Cooper. Lots of enemies."

"Yes, but-"

"This was a new form of fiction-the detective story-so some journalists misunderstood it. Thought it displayed an unnatural obsession with the crime. Poe himself was known by many to be an odd young man-personally antagonistic, frequently drunk and depressed, with a chronically sick wife who couldn't have offered him much social companionship. He was known to take long, rambling walks in the woods, ferry rides across the river. The story he wrote had the most incredible detail about the murderer and his methods-things that had never been printed in the newspapers."

"That's hardly enough to link him to killing someone."

"And the bottle of laudanum found near Mary's parasol and scarf? Poe was well-known for his flirtation with opium, in all its forms."

"Not all that unusual at the time."

"Yeah, Ms. Cooper. But put those coincidences together with the fact that he knew Mary Rogers, that maybe she trusted him enough to go-"

"Wait," I said. "Poe actually knew the dead girl?"

"James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving-and yeah, Edgar Allan Poe-they were all her customers at the little cigar shop. If I were investigating this case today, I'd have to say Eddie is someone I'd want to talk to. A person of interest."

"So at some point you made a phone call to Zeldin. Was it about Mary Rogers?"

"Yeah. I'd been online doing research, and also up at the public library on Forty-second Street. Half of the articles I read mentioned this Zeldin character. Makes himself out to be the world's leading expert on Poe. I called him and asked if I could talk to him."

"And he invited you there, to the Bronx?"

"Yeah, to the snuff mill," Kittredge said, turning his attention to Mercer. "You ever smell a setup, Detective? Ever walk into a trap?"

"That's what you think happened?"

Kittredge had been hostile when Mike and I first encountered him, but had warmed considerably when talking about Poe. Now he took on the appearance of a paranoid personality, his eyes flashing between us to see if we credited what he was saying. He fidgeted with everything on the countertop, playing with a pack of cigarettes and twisting a napkin till it shredded in his hands.

"Cost me my job and almost my pension. Somebody set me up."

"In what way?" I asked.

"I was jumped by a pack of kids outside the gate."

"Yeah?"

"They were waiting there for me. Someone must have told them what kind of car I was driving, what I looked like, and that I had a gun."

"How do you know that?"

"'Cause they were yelling to each other when they knocked me to the ground-one was calling out the orders to find the gun. Those kids had no other reason to be there."

"They worked at the gardens, I thought."