Entombed

by Linda Fairstein

  "I'll tell you what, Yolanda. The two of you can go down to Ryan's office and wait while he sends this MetroCard over to the transit office to be decoded and gets the information about your subway ride last week. I'm going to hang on to your weapon," I said, holding up the box cutter, "and we'll just toss your marijuana."

  Wanda smacked her sister on the back of her head. "What you doing with-"

  "Don't hit her again. Don't ever let me hear you laid a hand on her," I said. "And, Yolanda, if you decide there's anything about your story you want to change before you meet the judge, you tell Ryan as soon as you get down to his office."

  "If I do, do I have to come back and see you again?" she asked, clearly anxious to avoid that possibility.

  "Not if the information Ryan gets from the Transit Authority helps jog your memory."

  "You mean, if I tell him everything I can just go home?"

  "If it's the truth, yes."

  Yolanda followed Wanda out the door before I could pick up the file and return it to Stewart. "I didn't know you could get all that information from MetroCards."

  "That's what you're here to learn," Ryan said, winking at me. "Laquon and Yolanda-can't you just feel the love, Alex? I never saw you do the pocketbook trick before."

  "Teenage girls carry half their lives in those things. The older women get, the more you can find in the handbag. Pills, condoms, diaries, weapons, love letters. I've broken more cases with a peek in the purse than everything I learned in law school. I'd guess that little Yolanda's probably half a hooker already."

  "That's what Laquon claims."

  "Well, if the subway records are more consistent with his story and you can't break her, bring her back up and we'll beep a few of her conquests. See what they can tell us about her."

  Each MetroCard is encoded with a unique ten-digit serial number, which generates a fare-card history report with every use. It would tell me the time Yolanda went through the turnstile in one-tenth-of-an-hour intervals, what train station or bus she used, and even what her remaining balance was. I wouldn't have to be the sole judge of her credibility-the transit records would prove she had lied.

  I walked Ryan and Stewart to the door and picked up my messages from Laura. "These are the only calls?"

  "And you just missed an update from Mike. Scotty Taren's still waiting it out on Sixth Avenue. But they think Dr. Ichiko pulled a fast one, to avoid the police and save his best stuff for his television debut. He didn't show up for work today."

  17

  Mercer arrived in my office with Annika Jelt at one, to prepare for the afternoon grand jury. An attendant from the hospital accompanied the young student, who was brought to me in a wheelchair because of her still-fragile physical condition.

  He sat beside her and held her hand as she went over all the details of her attack. Her English was excellent as she spoke softly but with determination. Annika described how her assailant had appeared quite suddenly, out of nowhere. Like the others before her, she had no idea whether she had been followed for any distance to the stoop of her building.

  It took me the better part of an hour to get from Annika every nuance of the aborted assault, and then another fifteen minutes-once the afternoon grand jurors reconvened-to present her testimony to them. It was clear now that it was only the resistance she mounted at the top of the staircase-unwilling to give her assailant the opportunity to get her alone behind her closed apartment door-that led to the frenzied stabbing.

  Mercer wheeled her back to my office to get her coat and turn her over to the attendant from the hospital.

  "It's so wonderful to see how much stronger you are, how much you've improved, in just this short time. I know you've got a long way to go, Annika, but you've made a great start. Do you know when you're leaving for Sweden?" I asked.

  "As soon as the doctors tell me it's safe for me to fly. The pressurized cabins are not good for my lungs yet, and the flight is so long. But you'll call me there if you catch the man, no?"

  "The City of New York will buy you the ticket back here to testify and I'll be your personal escort," Mercer said.

  "The posters-may I ask you a question about them?" Annika said. "One of the nurses showed me a poster."

  Neighborhood groups had reproduced the composite sketch and circulated it to stores and businesses on the Upper East Side, urging them to hang it in their windows and behind their counters, in case the rapist made an appearance.

  "What about it?"

  "The poster has one of the drawings on it from the group Detective Wallace showed to me, the one I identified last week. It looks just like him-exactly like the man who did this to me. But what it says on the writing below the picture, well…"

  "You don't have to be hesitant," I said. "If you noticed something different, you can tell us." Some people were more accurate at estimating height or weight. Some could remember the feel of facial hair rubbing against them that others hadn't even observed, or notice the smallest of scars or blemishes on the skin of a perpetrator.

  "The drawing the detective showed me didn't have any writing on it. But the poster does."

  Mercer and I both nodded.

  "You know where it says the guy is African-American?" Annika asked.

  Mercer seated himself on a chair opposite his witness and let her talk directly to him. "Yeah, you told me he was a black man."

  "Of course, yes. But, maybe this is because I'm foreign, because English is a second language for me and I hear it differently."

  I didn't know where she was going with this.

  "The other women," she asked, "were any of them foreign-born?"

  Mercer thought for a moment. "No."

  "Well, I don't think the man is American. That's the word that troubles me. Black, yes. African-American, no."

  "What then? Caribbean?"

  "I can't say that. I haven't had much experience with people from the islands. It wasn't all-how you say?-singsong, like a few of the Jamaicans in my class at school. Not like that at all."

  "Can you give me an example?" Mercer said. "He didn't speak very many words to you."

  "No, no. It's-well, maybe it's not important then," Annika said, rolling the wheels of her chair backward and averting Mercer's glance, as though she feared wasting his time.

  "It's all in the details," he repeated to her, gripping the arm of the chair. "What is it you remember? Every bit of it is important."

  "Perhaps it's silly. It's just a single word that I noticed."

  "Which word?"

  She looked at Mercer. "Ass. When he tried to get me to open the door, he told me to get my ass inside."

  "Go on."

  Annika was doing what we had watched hundreds of other victims do. She was putting herself back in the moment, watching a slow-motion replay of the attack in her mind's eye, and fighting the emotions that bubbled to the surface as she did.

  "I can hear him say that, just before I braced myself against the wall with my leg," she said, reminding me of the footprint on her door. "It's what I believed at the time. I thought he was from England, or that he went to school there."

  "Why?" Mercer asked.

  "A lot of my friends in Sweden, they learned their English in boarding school or college. My accent is from speaking it in class, as a second language. But the British pronunciation is different from you Americans'."

  Annika smiled for the first time since I had seen her greet Mercer from her hospital bed. "My boyfriend? He spent a summer at Oxford. He says the word 'ass' exactly the same way. It's silly, no? I didn't think at the time, but whenever that night comes back to me, I realized that's what was so jarring, when I heard the man speak that word."

  Mercer and I both laughed. "Nothing's silly, Annika," he said.

  One more possible feature for the task force to factor into the investigation. All of the other women had been asked about the perp's speech and none had described it as accented. Unlike many attackers who talk to their victims all through the assault, the S
ilk Stocking Rapist had not been a man of many words.

  We said our good-byes and Mercer took Annika and her attendant down to help them into the ambulette that had transported them from the hospital. He returned minutes later.

  "Back to the drawing board." He tossed the case folder onto my desk and had an uncharacteristically discouraged frown on his face.

  "I'm not exactly convinced that we're looking for an Oxfordeducated rapist on the basis of one syllable," I said.

  "Yeah, but we've still got to reanalyze the language in every case and reinterview each victim about every single word the guy said. Annika's too smart to ignore. The list of things to do seems to get longer every day rather than shorter."

  "That's because you two just aren't as efficient as I am," Mike said, walking into the room and waving his right hand with a flourish. "Emily Upshaw. Grand larceny in the third degree."

  "Nice work," I said, clapping my hands in appreciation.

  "Bloomingdale's. Men's department. Designer clothes and accessories," Mike said, as he began to quote from the old complaint report. "'Undersigned did observe above-named defendant conceal three long-sleeved men's shirts, an alligator belt'-there's your felony price tag-'and six pairs of socks in a shopping bag and attempt to leave the store without paying for said items.'"

  "Who's the guy? Was he locked up, too?"

  "Don't jump ahead, Coop. Seems the cowardly weasel waited outside the store and sent Emily in to do the lifting."

  "Well, did the cop see-?"

  "Not a cop. Square badge made the collar," Mike said, referring to a store security guard. "There's nothing to suggest a codefendant was picked up."

  "Was there any bail set at the arraignment?" I asked.

  "Five hundred bucks," he said, flipping a few sheets of paper. "What did Emily's sister say about a professor helping her out? The guy who posted bail was named Noah Tormey. Says he taught English at NYU."

  "He put the money up either because he truly wanted to help her or-"

  "Or because he was the unapprehended beneficiary of the shirts and belt."

  "Isn't there a detective's name anywhere in the file?" I asked, thinking of Emily's sister's other comments, as I opened the telephone book to see if there was a listing in Manhattan for Tormey.

  "Yeah. You'll like this. Emily Upshaw had a change of address on the date the case was dismissed. She had moved out of her apartment on Washington Square and was living on West End Avenue. With a detective named Aaron Kittredge."

  "What? She moved in with a detective?"

  "Don't make it sound like drinking poison, Coop. Could be good for you."

  Noah Tormey wasn't in the book. I replaced it on the shelf and logged on to the Internet. "Kittredge still on the job?"

  "Nope. Retired five years ago. Pension bureau still sends his checks to the Upper West Side address. We got places to go and people to see, kid. Saddle up."

  Laura walked in and handed Mike a fax. "Andy Dorfman called from the medical examiner's office. Wanted you to look at this when you came in."

  "It's the initial report of his exam of some of the things taken out of the basement in the room with the skeleton. No surprises. First of all, the pathologists agree there's nothing to work with but bones, which don't reveal any gross trauma that could have caused death. Buried alive-entombed in that basement-still seems the most likely way they're going to rule on this one," Mike said. "The bricks are a couple of hundred years old. But the sealant is a cement compound that didn't exist until the last fifty years."

  "Those chips Andy pointed out to you, were they really fingernails?"

  "Yes, ma'am. And this confirms the nails picked up some of the cement scrapings," he read to me in a quiet voice. "That broad wanted out. "

  He skimmed the rest of the paragraphs. "What's 'vermeil'?"

  "Silver, with a gilt finish on top."

  "That's all Andy can tell us about the ring. But he's also picked up something that was scratched into one of the panes of glass on the basement door."

  "What door?" I asked. I had been so absorbed once I saw the skeleton in her coffin I hadn't even noticed much else.

  "In the corner of the basement there was a small door with two little windows that looked out onto the yard. Somebody etched this into one of them." Mike smiled as he read from Dorfman's report.

  "O Thou timid one, do not let thy

  Form slumber within these unhallowed walls,

  For herein lies-"

  I interrupted him to finish the stanza. "…The ghost of an awful crime."

  18

  "Trust me. It's not from having my nose in a book."

  "But how'd you know those lines?" Mike asked again. Mercer had returned to his office to go over the casework with another of the task force members. I was riding uptown with Mike to try to find Aaron Kittredge.

  "Remember that I told you that Poe was a student at the University of Virginia for a year? He lived on the Lawn, which is still the most magnificent part of the campus, with pavilion homes where professors lived and taught class, and student rooms around a common green, all that Jefferson himself designed. Well, legend has it that he etched those very words into his own window before he left the school, and the original pane of glass with that inscription has been on display in the Rotunda there for as long as I can remember."

  "So maybe the killer was a schoolmate of yours."

  "There were a few sharks in my class but nobody that lethal. I think whoever he is, he's made a life study of Edgar Allan Poe," I said.

  Kittredge's address placed us in front of a small tenement building off West End Avenue in the high Nineties. There was a doorbell with his name on it, but no one answered when Mike rang. It was six-thirty, and the chilled darkness caused us to retreat to the parked car and wait to see whether we'd get lucky.

  Within the hour, a stocky man with salt-and-pepper hair turned the corner and walked up the stoop of the building.

  "Kittredge!" Mike yelled as he swung open the car door.

  The man looked in our direction and squinted, trying to make out whether he knew the person calling his name.

  "Chapman. Mike Chapman. On the job."

  "Fuck the job," Kittredge called out just as quickly, as he stuck his key in the vestibule lock and started inside.

  Mike sprinted from the car to the steps and pushed in behind him. "I just need to talk to you about someone you know-an old friend."

  "Haven't got any of those. Why don't you get lost?"

  I was a few feet behind Mike as he tried to talk his way in.

  "She thinks you're a friend. She needs your help," Mike said, pausing before he spoke her name. "Emily Upshaw."

  Kittredge stopped and pointed at me. "Who's that?"

  "Alexandra Cooper. Manhattan DA's office."

  "I'm out of that game. What's with Emily? Back in her cups again?"

  "Look, can you give us twenty minutes? I'm freezing my balls off out here."

  Kittredge unlocked the door and let us trail him up to his apartment on the second floor. He switched on the light and threw his leather jacket on a chair. The charcoal gray walls were hung with paintings of nude women-or rather of one nude woman painted over and over again from different angles.

  "They're mine, if that's what you're wondering. I paint. I work out at the gym two hours a day and I don't bother anybody. Next question."

  "Why so hostile, pal?" Mike asked.

  The workout time was obvious. Kittredge's five-foot-eight frame was solid and well muscled. His black T-shirt seemed molded to his overdeveloped chest, and tattoos covered his forearms up to the point where the sleeves of his shirt cut off. The wrinkles on his face made him look a decade older than what I guessed was the fifty hard years he had lived.

  "You get my address from the department?"

  "Yeah."

  "Without the back story?"

  "With nothing. I figure you're getting a pension check, so you couldn't have done anything to make yourself a pariah.
"

  "I got a good lawyer. That's how come they reinstated my pension. Try living six years without one and sweating out a lawsuit."

  Mike sat down on the sofa and I sat beside him. Kittredge stood in the archway between the kitchen and the living area. He took a protein drink from the refrigerator and chugged it from the cardboard container while he waited for Mike to talk.

  "Why'd they-?"

  "None of your business. What's the problem with Emily?"

  "Don't you read the papers?"

  "Only the days they got good news."

  "Then you might have missed her obituary yesterday."

  Kittredge took another slug of his protein. "You here to collect money for the flowers?"

  "Emily Upshaw was murdered."

  "And you're the hotshot who's gonna solve the crime? You must have some track record, Chapman, you're wasting time hunting me down. I haven't seen that dame in eighteen, twenty years. Can't even imagine how you hooked me up with her."

  "She must have liked your brushstrokes. Court papers say she was living here when her shoplifting case was dismissed."

  "I bought that sofa you're sitting on so Emily would have a safe place to sleep."

  "Bring your work home with you?" Mike asked.

  "It was here or a Bowery flophouse. The poor kid had nowhere to go. Her family didn't want to hear about her, the college wouldn't let her live in the dorms after she got busted, and the guy she'd been living with threw her out on-"

  There was the sound of a key turning in the lock and Kittredge walked to the door as it opened. A brunette in her fifties with a well-toned body and a skintight ski outfit entered. She was the model for the paintings and looked as cold and hard in person as she did on every wall surface.

  "Anything wrong?" she asked, looking from Kittredge over to Mike and back again.

  Mike stood up and extended his hand. "Hi, I'm Mike Chap-"

  "The Duke and Duchess of Windsor will be leaving shortly. Wait in the bedroom," Kittredge said, jerking his head in the direction of the other door.

  The woman took another look at the two of us and patted his arm as she crossed in front of him to leave the room.