Entombed

by Linda Fairstein

  "The police believe they have a homicide on their hands and yet you refuse to talk to them, Doctor. Am I right?" The reporter gave up and turned back to the camera. "That was Dr. Wo-Jin Ichiko, who may hold the clues to the mysterious discovery of a woman's skeleton that we told you about last week. It seems that the good doctor is willing to spill the beans… but only for a price."

  Brenda Whitney had left her office-Battaglia's public relations bureau-unlocked so that Mike, Mercer, and I could watch the breaking story on the evening news. I had beeped Mike at five-thirty, when Battaglia ejected the press corps, and he gave us the strange development about the doctor.

  "Ichiko's just trying to cash in on his fifteen minutes of fame. He's got a bullshit practice treating derelicts, drunks, and druggies and he finally smells a score," Mike said, talking over the reporter.

  "Who'd he call first?" Mercer asked.

  "The good doctor started at the Post after he read their story. They leaped at the chance to get an exclusive with him. The police department only found out because the editors checked with headquarters to make sure the guy wasn't a quack. Meanwhile, Ichiko liked the press reaction so much he began to call the networks to drum up a little bidding competition for his story."

  "I thought the media can't pay sources for news. I thought they had some kind of ethical guidelines," I said.

  "You use 'ethics' in the same sentence as 'the media'? I figured you had more brains than that, Coop. The news producer got Dr. Ichiko a twofer. Flipped him over to that reality show- Crime Factor-the one where ex-cons tell about their worst offenses and how they beat the system. They're willing to pay him twenty-five thousand dollars for what he knows about the girl's disappearance, and then the evening news show uses outtakes from that. We get leftovers."

  "Déjà vu?" I asked Mike.

  "All over again."

  We had handled a high-profile homicide several years back in which a young woman had been strangled. Friends of the defendant had made a videotape of him while he was partying during the trial. He was high on cocaine at the time and playing with a doll, laughing into the camera as he broke its neck. Rather than talk to police about what the perp had been saying off-camera about the murder, or even telling us about the existence of the tape, the enterprising teen filmmaker sold it to a tabloid television show for use after the trial was over.

  "Does Scotty know?" I asked, referring to the Cold Case Squad detective who was assigned to the matter.

  "He heard about it on the radio and dashed over to the doc's office. Couldn't get past the receptionist."

  "Tell Scotty to be here first thing in the morning," I said. "We'll open a grand jury investigation and give him a subpoena. The doctor doesn't want to talk to the police, then let him tell the jurors his story. He clams up, we hit him with contempt."

  Mike made some calls from Brenda's desk while Mercer and I watched the rest of the news. One of Emily Upshaw's sisters had flown in to accompany her body back home to Michigan for burial. She was due at the morgue shortly and had agreed to talk to us at eight o'clock tonight, after her meeting with the medical examiner.

  At twenty-five after seven, Mike clicked the buttons to change the channel on the small TV set Brenda kept on top of an old green filing cabinet.

  Trebek was announcing the topic of the final answer: "Benjamin Franklin's Firsts."

  "Twenty bucks," I said.

  "I'm only good on Founding Fathers who were warriors, not statesmen."

  "Cough it up, Mike. Mercer?"

  He removed a bill from his wallet and put it on the desktop. "You're taking food right out of my baby's mouth, Alex. Lightning rods, bifocals, lending libraries. I just know the easy things he invented that you learn in grade school."

  The big board slid back. Trebek read it to us. "Franklin's printing press published this novel, first ever in America, in 1744."

  Mike crumpled a wad of paper and threw it at the screen. "A setup if I've ever seen one. Literature in the guise of history, to borrow one of your regular gripes. Nobody was writing novels then. They all should have been plotting the revolution or fighting against the French and Indians."

  "Show me the money."

  "Payday's next Friday. You guessing, Mercer?"

  He pointed at the screen. Two of the contestants had left blank spaces where the question should have been. "I'm no further along than they are."

  "I'm sorry to say you're wrong, Josh," Trebek told the dog obedience school owner from Wichita.

  "You must be one lousy poker player, Coop. You got that shit-eating-I-majored-in-literature-at-Wellesley grin on your face," Mike said, walking to the door. "Subtlety will never be your strong suit. So, what was-?"

  " Pamela.By Samuel Richardson. Published in England in 1740 and reprinted by Franklin. It was subtitled Virtue Rewarded, 'cause it's about a young woman who eludes the lecherous advances of the man she works for," I said, folding and pocketing Mercer's money.

  "C'mon. Add the twenty to my tab and let's go find out more about Emily Upshaw. If you spent a little less time with your nose in your books and a little more effort practicing your social skills, you might be able to hold on to a guy once he makes it into your bedroom and under the sheets."

  "Is that where you think I lose my men?"

  "Gotta be, blondie. You're doing something wrong there."

  Mercer put his arm around me as Mike walked ahead of us down the dark hallway.

  "I guess what I really need is an expert like you to teach me, Mike. Hands-on. How come it never occurred to me before now? You up for a lesson tonight?"

  Mike stopped in his tracks. He turned around to face us and began to comb his fingers through the lock of dark hair that framed his forehead. The overhead lights were dim but I could swear he was blushing.

  "Mercer, did you hear what I think I just heard?"

  "Yeah, and it sounds as though my lawyer is calling your bluff."

  "Just like you, Coop. You wait until I get a girl of my own. Then she leaves town and in a heartbeat you try to throw temptation in my path. It won't work this time."

  "Why are you doing that stroking thing with your hair? Am I making you nervous?"

  He put his hands in his pants pocket and started walking to the elevator. "The way I figure it is I've got the best of both worlds. There isn't anyone in either of our jobs who doesn't think we've slept together already-which may be great for my reputation or really bad, depending on what they think of you. But it means I don't actually have to risk finding out whether you really do have a set of razor-sharp teeth in the lining of your-"

  "You're a dog, Chapman," Mercer said.

  "Unhand that woman, Mercer. Here she is, propositioning me-and you're trying to hold her back."

  "As far as I'm concerned, you either come home with me tonight or you stop yapping about my sex life."

  "I told you I'm just worried about Valentine's Day. You're gonna be cold and lonely."

  "I'm booked. You can relax."

  "Who? What unwitting sucker stepped into the batter's box this time?"

  The elevator doors opened and we got on. "Tell him nothing, Alex," Mercer said.

  Mike teased me all the way down to the lobby and out to his car. By the time we reached the morgue, I had gotten him off the subject and back to the sobering topic of Emily Upshaw's death.

  Dr. Chet Kirschner, the chief medical examiner, left instructions for us to use his office for our meeting with Emily's sister. The attendant admitted us, and we found the woman sitting alone, her head bowed with eyes closed and her fingers twisting an already crumpled handkerchief.

  We introduced ourselves and explained our roles in the investigation. Sally Brandon appeared to be close to fifty, taller and slimmer than her younger sister. She had just viewed the body and was trying to compose herself as she spoke to us.

  Mike and Mercer answered most of the questions Brandon asked about her sister's murder. Mercer took the lead; his firm but compassionate manner, practiced with g
reat frequency in the Special Victims Unit, was usually comforting to victims and survivors. Mike's preference for working homicides was in no small measure based on his aversion to the emotional hand-holding that always slowed down an investigation that he was eager to solve.

  When the two of them ran out of answers for Sally Brandon, they started to ask her about Emily.

  "She was the youngest, Mr. Wallace. I'm seven years older, and our other sister was right in between. We were a close family growing up, but when I went off to college at eighteen, Emily was only eleven."

  "What was your relationship like, as adults?"

  Sally fumbled with the handkerchief. "We didn't have one, I'm afraid. I married right after college and had children of my own. She moved to New York, and that's when Emily really began to make my parents' lives miserable."

  "In what way?"

  She sighed before answering. "I'm still so resentful of all the trouble she caused back then. It sounds pretty rough, I guess, now that she's dead."

  "Tell us about it."

  "Betsy and I-she's the middle sister-were a tough pair for Emily to follow. Our parents were very serious, churchgoing Presbyterians, and we were the two daughters who never caused them to lose a minute's sleep. Emily was a rebel from the moment she hit adolescence. She hung out with a fast crowd of older kids and started drinking by the time she was in middle school."

  "Drugs, too?" Mercer asked.

  "Nobody knew at the time. Just because no one in the family imagined anything like that. I was away at college and don't even know what symptoms Emily was presenting to them. Mother was in complete denial, and my father thought that the power of prayer would solve all his concerns. Nobody talked about it."

  "Did she stay in school?"

  "That was the only thing that grounded her. Emily loved school, enjoyed everything that had to do with books. She'd always been able to escape through her writing." Sally Brandon stopping wrapping her handkerchief around her finger and looked up at me. "Don't ask me how she did it, but she managed to get high grades and test well, even when she was in the middle of a binge."

  "Was she ever in treatment back home?"

  She shook her head. "That wasn't a concept my parents understood. It would have meant admitting that Emily had a problem."

  "They ignored everything?"

  "Not everything, Mr. Wallace. It was hard to look the other way when she was six months pregnant."

  "When was that, Mrs. Brandon?"

  "During Emily's senior year of high school. Not that it should have come as a great surprise to any of us, but it certainly shocked my parents. They couldn't-" She stopped to compose herself before going on. "In their little town of eighteen hundred people, it was unacceptable at the time. So they sent her to live with me."

  "And she had her baby?"

  Sally Brandon nodded and the tears started again. "A little girl. Yes."

  "What became of the baby? Did she give her up for adoption?"

  "No, Miss Cooper. I agreed to raise the child as my own. I had two boys at the time. I took her into my family on one condition: that Emily never have anything to do with her daughter or with me again. Ever."

  That seemed like an awfully harsh resolution to the situation. "She agreed to that?"

  "It seemed to suit her just fine," Brandon said, sitting bolt upright and looking me in the eye. "A month before she delivered, we left Emily at home babysitting our two boys while we went to a neighbor's house for dinner. She was into her second bottle of wine, asleep on the sofa, when her cigarette dropped out of her hand and set fire to the slipcovers. She and my sons escaped unhurt, by the grace of God, but if I ever saw her again it would be too soon for me."

  "I understand," Mercer said, refilling her water glass from the sink behind her.

  "So she graduated from high school and got a scholarship to go to New York University, pleased to leave me with her baby. Emily resented all of us with our happy little families and thought the big city would be the place to live her life unencumbered by the conventions of small-town mores."

  "And her deal with you? Did she keep it?"

  "Quite faithfully. Her baby was conceived in a haze of bourbon and marijuana during a one-night stand. My husband figures it happened the weekend she went to New York for the first time, to interview for admission to the college. I mean, that date fits with the birth nine months later. For Emily, a baby was just a great inconvenience and another element to include in her great American novel. She simply didn't care about motherhood. No one in the family meant anything to her. Everything was material for a book."

  "So you don't know very much about her life after she left you?"

  "Only indirectly. My mother and I talked about Emily a lot. For Mother, the estrangement of her little girl was the greatest tragedy of her life, of course. My middle sister and I were the only two people she could cry to about it. By the time she was able to acknowledge that Emily needed serious intervention to deal with alcohol and drugs, Emily was already away at NYU and rejecting everything about our parents' lifestyle. For my part, the conversations were just a way for me to make sure that she wasn't coming back."

  "And she didn't?"

  "She tried only once. But that was more than twenty years ago, and my husband made it clear she wasn't welcome. We never heard from her again."

  "Her daughter? She never contacted-"

  "My daughter, Miss Cooper. Amelia is my daughter, can you understand that?"

  "What exactly can you tell us about Emily?" Mike asked. "Do you know what she's been working on lately?"

  "Writing, I assume." It was obviously just a guess.

  "Anything specific that you know of? Anything that could have created a dangerous situation for her?"

  I figured Mike was thinking of the fact that Teddy Kroon had been searching her computer for some document or file.

  "Both my parents are dead, Mr. Chapman. There is nothing I can tell you about the last two years of Emily's life. That door between us was closed."

  "Let's start at the beginning, then," Mike said, his notepad already open and only the letters NYU and a question mark written on the page. "Do you know whether she finished college?"

  "Yes, she graduated. A year late, I believe, because she was in and out of trouble from the time she got to New York."

  "You mean, problems with abuse?"

  "Well, alcohol, of course," Sally said, leaning back and resting her hands on the top of the table. "But then she was also caught shoplifting in a department store. I-uh, I feel awful talking about all these things, but I'm sure you can find them in the police records anyway. The case was dismissed, from what I understand, because it was her first arrest. But then there was bigger trouble, personally, when she graduated to more sophisticated drugs like cocaine, according to what mother used to tell me at the time."

  "Where'd she get the money for these things?" I asked.

  Sally Brandon pursed her lips. "I know you must think I'm terribly hostile, but you're touching all the right buttons. Mother sent her money. Anything she thought my father wouldn't miss. Every time Dad gave her money to treat herself to some little thing that might have made her own life a bit more pleasant, my mother mailed it to Emily. I didn't know about it for years or I would have put a stop to it earlier."

  "Was your sister ever in any relationships that she talked about?" Mike asked.

  Sally laughed. "I guess I'd have to paint you a better picture of my father. There was no one who could have crossed Emily's path who would have been appropriate to bring into a social conversation at home. It's nothing she would have raised with my parents."

  "So Monty-the name Monty-that doesn't mean anything to you?"

  Sally Brandon thought for a few seconds and shook her head. "Nothing at all. She lived with someone for a few months-it was when she was breaking up with him that she wanted to move back to Michigan, back in with us."

  She paused again. "And then there was that policeman who took an intere
st in Emily, at least for a while. I think Mother actually thought he'd be good for her, but I doubt that it was a serious relationship. I don't believe either of the men was named Monty but I'm not really sure. I'm not even certain they were two different people."

  Confusion seemed to be overwhelming Sally Brandon as she struggled to think about things she had tried to repress for so many years.

  "What policeman?"

  "He had something to do with her arrest. I don't know his name, but he actually phoned to speak with Mother several times. I understood he was attempting to help Emily straighten herself out. He and that literature teacher of hers who convinced her to go into rehab the first time. I think they're the only two men who ever tried to do something good for Emily without taking advantage of her from the time she was a twelve-year-old child."

  Kroon had mentioned a professor who had encouraged Emily to get into rehab.

  "Perhaps my husband will remember the names. You can call and ask him about it. He was the one who spoke to Emily the one time she called us for help. You know, when I said she wanted to come to stay with us for a while?"

  Mike took down the Brandons' home telephone.

  "And I'll look in the apartment for her old manuscripts when I go through her things tomorrow," Sally Brandon said dismissively. "If it wasn't just another of Emily's alcohol deliriums, I'm sure she would have written the mad boyfriend into one of her novels."

  "What do you mean, 'mad boyfriend'?" I asked, reminded again of Kroon's words.

  "Oh, that was just the excuse she used when she tried to worm her way back into our lives, Miss Cooper. But by then I'd talked to a psychiatrist, an expert in substance abuse. I found out how manipulative addicts are, and neither my husband nor I was going to let Emily under our roof, no matter what story she made up to weaken our resolve. The doctor assured us she was just spinning a tale."

  "What did she tell your husband?"

  "That she had to leave New York because her life was in danger," Brandon said, waving the idea off with the back of her hand. "That was Emily. Always exaggerating things, always over-the-top with her storytelling."

  "But was there someone in particular she was afraid of?" I wanted to make clear to Sally Brandon that Emily's murder suggested she might have had some legitimate reason to be terrified at the time she had sent out her SOS.