Linda Fairstein - Entombed

Guidi shrugged and held his hands in the air, palms up. The sun gleamed off the gold on his cuff links. "Maybe New England. Either Andover or Exeter. Could have been St. Paul's. In the boonies, it was. I remember he talked about how he liked being near the woods and the peacefulness of the more remote countryside."

"He was orphaned, you told us. Do you know how or when? Any details about his family that would help us figure out who he is?"

Guidi looked at me. "That's mostly what he talked about in the meetings. Typical junkie's denial, blaming all his problems on everyone else. He never knew his father. I think his mother had a menial job, working as a servant-maybe even the housekeeper- for the scion of an old industrial family. When she died-some blood disease, it was-he was still a kid, taken in by the fat cat who'd been her employer. Richest man in town, that's who sent him off to boarding school and paid for his education."

"This man who adopted him, didn't Monty talk about him at all?"

"That was part of his resentment. He was never adopted."

Neither was Edgar Poe, I remembered. The Allans wouldn't give him their name. I had to wonder whether Monty knew the parallels between his own life and the tormented poet's.

"Was he bitter about it?" I asked.

Guidi checked with Kirby, who must have given him a green light to keep talking.

"Remember when I said that Monty told me he had killed a girl for betraying him?"

Ellen and I both said, "Yes."

"I-uh-I guess after I left the station house last week I began to think more about it. I thought of a few other things I-uh, I guess I asked him at the time. Sorry I didn't press myself a little harder that night." He tried to muster an earnest smile.

"That's all right, Mr. Guidi," Ellen said. "Anything you give us now will be helpful."

I wanted to kick her under the table to keep the pressure on him rather than try to use her short supply of charm to stroke him, but I restrained myself.

"I know I asked what he meant by betrayal, by what this girl had done to him to make him fantasize about killing her," Guidi said, focusing his attention back on me. "You must understand that at the time I heard his story, Ms. Cooper, I assumed it was a fantasy, a product of his dope-induced hallucinations. We all had them."

I looked away from his face and while he continued to talk, gesturing to me with his left hand, I noticed the thin shape of a rifle barrel forged out of gleaming eighteen-karat gold in the fold of his French cuffs.

"He knew I came from a wealthy family. For me, starting over after I screwed myself up meant getting a job in a mail room in a fancy firm, as I think I mentioned. For Monty, it was out on the street doing physical labor, some kind of construction work. Here was this guy who came to every meeting with a book of poetry jammed in his back pocket, quoting everything from the classics to Philip Larkin and James Wright-but meanwhile his hands looked like he'd been sentenced to dig ditches ten years earlier."

"But the girl," I asked, "Aurora-what did she do to him?"

"Monty's benefactor had given him one last chance. He'd flunked out of boarding school, managed to get into college from public school, but then hit the skids with drugs and booze once he got here to the city. When Aurora found out who had been supporting Monty, who had enabled his lifestyle-not knowing all the money was going down the toilet-she got on a bus and went up to his home, wherever that was, and spilled the beans."

"Why?"

"To try to shake down the old man. She'd guessed wrong, was the problem. She thought if she told him the truth about Monty's addiction, she could score enough money-pretending it would go for private rehab and readmission to school-that she could take off and leave Monty in the dust," Guidi said. "With the rest of us."

"The straw that broke the camel's back?" Ellen asked.

"Exactly. The old guy had been threatening to disinherit Monty anyway. Even though he had never adopted the kid, he had pledged the dying mother that he'd secure her son's financial future. As a result of what Aurora told him, he wrote Monty out of his will- not a single cent of inheritance-and before Monty could clean himself up and plead for another chance, the fat cat had a stroke and died a day or two later. Revenge," Guidi said, his voice dropping to a whisper.

"What did you say?" I asked.

"Revenge, Ms. Cooper. That's why Aurora Tait wound up in a brick coffin. I might not have been as creative in disposing of her, but more than a few of us who crossed her path would have been only too happy to have had our revenge. I'm sure that's what Monty had in mind."

He tugged at the tip of his shirtsleeves to align them with each other and rested his clasped hands on the table.

"Do you shoot, Mr. Guidi?" I asked.

"Sorry?"

I pointed to his cuff link. He twisted his wrist to look and remind himself what he was wearing.

"Oh, these? Upper Brookville Hunt Club. It's their logo."

Ellen Gunsher found a new purpose for herself, trying to make her pathetic little firearms unit relevant. "Are you a good shot?"

"Been shooting all my life."

Scotty Taren looked puzzled. "In the Bronx? What are you, a friggin' squirrel bagger?"

"Quail, mostly. Game birds. At the club. But my first kill was back when I was a teenager, Detective, right in Van Cortlandt Park. D'you know it?"

"North Bronx, right next to the high-rent district in Riverdale."

"That's where I grew up-Bailey Avenue," Guidi said. It was still a neighborhood of large fieldstone houses that looked more like suburbia than New York City. "I was fourteen and had just gotten a new puppy for Christmas. We were in the backyard and I was throwing sticks for him to fetch. A coyote came out of the park-"

Little Miss Texas was incredulous. "A coyote?"

"There's eastern coyotes all over the state," Taren said. "Sometimes they slip down here through the woods when they get cold and hungry farther north. Real pain in the ass for Emergency Services to tranquilize them and ship 'em out before they start running in packs and attacking domestic animals-and little kids."

Guidi went on. "I thought it was a German shepherd running into the yard to play so I didn't panic at first. Then I saw that grizzled gray neck and the tail hanging down-you know the way coyotes do?-and he just snatched my puppy, a small brown Lab, and made off into the park. I went after him with one of my father's deer rifles, hanging in the garage, and dropped him before he could do any serious damage to the dog."

Ellen seemed pleased with the story's happy ending. Scotty Taren raised an eyebrow at me and moved his lips. I made out the words "Professor Tormey." Aaron Kittredge was no longer the only marksman on our list. Guidi could just as easily have been the one who shot at us that day at the Hall of Fame, and Kirby didn't know enough to stop him from telling a story of his childhood that set up his marksmanship for us.

There was a knock on the door and Laura opened it. "Excuse me, sorry to interrupt."

"It's fine," I said, getting to my feet with the expectation that she had Mike Chapman on my phone line. "I can step out."

"It's for Ellen," she said, shaking a finger at me. "Mr. McKinney needs to talk to you, dear."

There was a pause while Ellen left the room, and I decided to wait for her before going on with any more questioning.

"It's an odd set of circumstances," I said to Guidi. "Aurora's body found in the basement of the house on Third Street, and now the possibility that someone you knew bricked her up there to pay back a betrayal. Nobody in literature served up revenge better than Poe, and here we have a real-life copycat. On top of that, you're one of the most generous supporters of Poe Cottage. I don't think I've even thanked you for getting us in for a private tour last week."