The Poet (1995)

by Michael Connelly

  Reading one of the remaining files I came across the victim's suicide note-one line, like those left by my brother and Brooks-in an addendum containing the investigator's report. Reading the words sent a chilling, electric surge through me. For I knew them.

  I am haunted by ill angels I quickly opened my notebook to the page where I had written the stanza from "Dream-Land" that Laurie Prine had read to me from the CD-ROM.

  By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reins upright, I have reached these lands but newly, From an ultimate dim Thule From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime, Out of SPACE-out of TIME

  I had it cold. My brother and Morris Kotite, an Albuquerque detective who supposedly killed himself with a shot to the chest and another to the temple, left suicide notes that quoted the same stanza of poetry. It was a lock.

  But these feelings of vindication and excitement quickly gave way to a deep, growing rage. I was angry at what had happened to my brother and to these other men. I was angry at the living cops for not seeing this sooner and my mind flashed to what Wexler had said when I had convinced him of my brother's murder. A fucking reporter, he had said. Now I knew his anger. But most of all, I realized, my anger was for the one who had done this and for how little I knew about him. In his own words, the killer was an Eidolon. I was chasing a phantom.

  It took me an hour to get through the remaining five cases. I took notes on three of them and dropped the other two. One was rejected when I noticed the death occurred on the same day John Brooks was killed in Chicago. It seemed unlikely, given the planning each of the killings must have involved, that two could be carried out on one day.

  The other case was rejected because the victim's suicide had been attributed, among other things, to his despair over a heinous kidnap-murder of a young girl on Long Island, New York. It initially appeared, though the victim had left no note, that the suicide would generally fit my pattern and require further scrutiny, but I learned when I read the report to the end that this detective had actually cleared the kidnap-murder with the arrest of a suspect. This was outside the pattern and, of course, didn't fit with the theory that Larry Washington had floated in Chicago and that I subscribed to, that the same person was killing both the first victim and the homicide cop.

  The final three that held my interest-in addition to the Kotite case-included Garland Petry, a Dallas detective who put one shot into his chest and then another into his face. He left a note that read, "Sadly, I know I am shorn of my strength." Of course, I hadn't known Petry. But I had never heard a cop use the word "shorn" before. The line he had supposedly written had a literary feel to it. I just didn't think it would have come from the hand and mind of a suicidal cop.

  The second of the cases was also a one-liner. Clifford Beltran, a detective with the Sarasota County Sheriff's Department in Florida, had supposedly killed himself three years earlier-it was the oldest of the cases-leaving behind a note that said simply, "Lord help my poor soul." Again, it was a conglomeration of words that sounded odd to me in the mouth of a cop, any cop. It was just a hunch but I included Beltran on my list.

  Lastly, the third case was included on my list even though there was no mention of a note in the suicide of John P. McCafferty, homicide detective with the Baltimore police. I put McCafferty on the list because his death eerily resembled the death of John Brooks. McCafferty had supposedly fired one shot into the floor of his apartment before firing the second and fatal shot into his throat. I remembered Lawrence Washington's belief that this was a way of getting gunshot residue on the victim's hands.

  Four names. I studied them and the rest of the notes I had taken for a while and then pulled the book on Poe I had bought in Boulder out of my flight bag.

  It was a thick book with everything that Poe had supposedly ever written. I checked the contents page and noted there were seventy-six pages containing his poetry. I realized that my long night was going to get longer. I ordered an eight-cup pot of coffee from room service and asked them to bring some aspirin as well for the headache I felt sure I would get from the caffeine binge. I then started reading.

  I'm not one who has ever been afraid of aloneness or the dark. I've lived by myself for ten years, I've even camped alone in the national parks and I've walked through deserted, burned-out buildings to get a story. I've sat in dark cars on darker streets waiting to confront candidates and mobsters, or to meet timid sources. While the mobsters certainly put fear in me, the fact that I was out there by myself in the dark never did. But I have to say that Poe's words put a chill in me that night. Maybe it was being alone in a hotel room in a city I didn't know. Maybe it was being surrounded by the documents of death and murder, or that I felt the presence of my dead brother somehow near. And maybe also it was just the knowledge of how some of the words I was reading were now being used. Whatever it was, I put a scare on myself that didn't lift as I read, even when I turned the television on to provide the comforting hum of background noise.

  Propped against the pillows on the bed, I read with the lights on either side of me turned on and bright. But, still, I bolted upright when a sudden sharp sound of laughter shot down the hallway outside my room. I had just settled back into the comfort of the shell my body had formed in the pillows and was reading a poem titled "An Enigma" when the phone rang and jolted me again with its double ring so foreign to the sound of my phone at home. It was half past midnight and I assumed it was Greg Glenn in Denver, two hours behind.

  But as I reached for the phone I knew I was wrong. I hadn't told Glenn where I had checked in.

  The caller was Michael Warren.

  "Just wanted to check in-I figured you'd be up-and see what you came up with."

  Again I felt uneasy about his self-involvement, his many questions. It was unlike any other source that had ever provided me with information on the sly. But I couldn't just get rid of him, given the risk he had taken.

  "I'm still going through it all," I said. "Sitting here reading the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. I'm scaring myself shitless."

  He laughed politely.

  "But does any of it look good-as far as the suicides go?"

  Just then I realized something.

  "Hey, where are you calling from?"

  "Home. Why?"

  "Didn't you say you live up in Maryland?"

  "Yeah. Why?"

  "Then this is a toll call, right? It will be a record on your bill that you called me here, man. Didn't you think about that?"

  I couldn't believe his carelessness, especially in light of his own warnings about the FBI and Agent Walling.

  "Oh shit, I . . . I don't really think I care. Nobody's going to pull my records. It's not like I passed on defense secrets, for crying out loud."

  "I don't know. You know 'em better than me."

  "So never mind that, what have you got?"

  "I told you I'm still looking. I've got a couple names that might be good. A few names."

  "Well, then, good. I'm glad it was worth the risk."

  I nodded but realized he couldn't see me do this.

  "Yeah, well, like I said before, thanks. I gotta get back to it now. I'm fading and want to get it done."

  "Then I'll leave you to it. Maybe tomorrow, when you get a chance, give me a call to let me know what's going on."

  "I don't know if that will be a good idea, Michael. I think we better lay low."

  "Well, whatever you think. I guess I'll be reading all about it, eventually, anyway. You have a deadline yet?"

  "Nope. Haven't even talked about it."

  "Nice editor. Anyway, go back to it. Happy hunting."

  Soon I was back in the embrace of the words of the poet. Dead a hundred and fifty years but reaching from the grave to grip me. Poe was a master of mood and pace. The mood was gloom and the pace often frenetic. I found myself identifying the words and phrases with my own life. "I dwelt alone / In a world of moan," Poe wrote. "And my soul was a stagnan
t tide." Cutting words that seemed, at least at that moment, to fit me.

  I read on and soon felt myself gripped by an empathic hold of the poet's own melancholy when I read the stanzas of "The Lake."

  But when the Night had thrown her pall Upon that spot, as upon all, And the mystic wind went by Murmuring in melody Then-ah then I would awake To the terror of the lone lake Poe had captured my own dread and fitful memory. My nightmare. He had reached across a century and a half to me and put a cold finger on my chest.

  Death was in that poisonous wave, And in its gulf a fitting grave I finished reading the last poem at three o'clock in the morning. I had found only one more correlation between the poetry and the suicide notes. The line attributed in the reports to Dallas detective Garland Petry-"Sadly, I know I am shorn of my strength"-was taken from a poem entitled "For Annie."

  But I found no match of the last words attributed to Beltran, the Sarasota detective, with any poem that Edgar Allan Poe had written. I began to wonder if through my fatigue I had simply missed it but knew that I had read too carefully, despite the lateness of the hour. There simply wasn't a match. "Lord help my poor soul." That was the line. I now thought that it had been the last true prayer of a suicidal man. I scratched Beltran from the list, thinking that his words of misery were truly his.

  I studied my notes while fending off sleep and decided that the McCafferty case of Baltimore and the Brooks case of Chicago were too similar to be ignored. I knew then what I would do in the morning. I would go to Baltimore to find out more.

  That night my dream came back. The only recurring nightmare of my entire life. As always, I dreamed I was walking across a vast frozen lake, the ice blue-black beneath my feet. In all directions I was equal distances from nowhere, all horizons were a blinding, burning white. I put my head down and walked. I hesitated when I heard a girl's voice, a call for help. I looked around but she was not there. I turned and headed on. A step. Two. Then the hand came up through the ice and gripped me. It pulled me toward the growing hole. Was it pulling me down or trying to pull its way out? I never knew. In all the times I'd had the dream I never knew.

  All I saw was the hand and slender arm, reaching up from the black water. I knew the hand was death. I woke up.

  The lights and the television were still on. I sat up and looked around, not comprehending at first and then remembering where I was and what I was doing. I waited for the chill to pass and then got up. I flicked the TV off and went to the minibar, broke the seal and opened the door. I selected a small bottle of Amaretto and sipped it without a glass. I checked it off on the little list they give you. Six dollars. I studied the list and the exorbitant prices just to give myself something to do.

  Eventually, I felt the liquor start to warm me. I sat on the bed and checked the clock. It was quarter to five. I needed to go back. I needed sleep. I got under the covers and pulled the book off the bed table. I turned to "The Lake" and read it again. My eyes kept returning to the two lines.

  Death was in that poisonous wave, And in its gulf a fitting grave Eventually, troubled thoughts gave way to exhaustion. I put the book down and collapsed back into my bed's shell. I slept the sleep of the dead after that.

  17

  It was against Gladden's instincts to stay in the city but he couldn't leave just yet. There were things he had to do. The wired-funds transfer would land at the Wells Fargo branch in a few hours and he had to get a replacement camera. That was a priority and that couldn't be done if he was on the road, running to Fresno or someplace. So he had to stay in L.A.

  He looked up at the mirror over the bed and studied his image. He had black hair now. He hadn't shaved since Wednesday and already the whiskers were coming in thick. He reached to the bed table for the glasses and put them on.

  He had dumped the colored contacts in the trash can at the In N Out where he'd eaten dinner the night before. He looked back up at the mirror and smiled at his new image. He was a new man.

  He glanced over at the television. A woman was performing fellatio on one man while another was having sex with her in the position instinctively favored by dogs. The sound was turned down but he knew what the sound would be if it wasn't. The TV had been on all night. The porno movies that came with the price of the room did little in the way of arousing him because the performers were all too old and looked world-weary. They were disgusting. But he kept the TV on. It helped him remember that everyone had unholy desires.

  He looked back to his book and began to read the poem by Poe again. He knew it by heart after so many years and so many readings. But, still, he liked to see the words on the page and hold the book in his hands. He somehow found it comforting.

  In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted Gladden sat up and put the book down when he heard a car pull to a stop outside his room. He walked to the curtains and peeked through at the parking lot. The sun hurt his eyes. The car was just somebody checking in. A man and a woman, they both looked drunk already and it wasn't yet noon.

  Gladden knew it was time to go out. He first needed to get a newspaper to see if there was a story about Evangeline. About himself. Then to the bank. Then to find the camera. Maybe, if there was time, he'd go searching after that.

  He knew that the more he stayed inside, the better his chances were of avoiding detection. But he also felt confident that he had covered his tracks sufficiently. He had changed motels twice since leaving the Hollywood Star Motel. The first room, in Culver City, he used only to dye his hair. He cleaned up, wiped the place down and left. He then drove to the Valley and checked into the dump in which he sat now, the Bon Soir Motel on Ventura Boulevard

  in Studio City. Forty bucks a night, three channels of adult films included.

  He was registered under the name Richard Kidwell. It was the name on his last ID. He'd have to get on the net and trade for a few more. And he realized that would require him to set up a mail drop to receive the IDs and that was another reason to stay in L.A. At least for a while. He added the mail drop to his list of things to do.

  As he pulled on his pants he glanced at the television. A woman with a rubber penis held to her abdomen with straps that went around her pelvis was having sex with another woman. Gladden tied his shoes, turned the TV off and left the room.

  Gladden cringed at the sight of the sun. He strode across the parking lot to the motel office. He wore a white T-shirt with a picture of Pluto on it. The dog was his favorite cartoon animal. In the past, wearing the shirt had helped soothe the fears of the children. It always seemed to work.

  Behind the glass windows of the office sat a frumpy-looking woman with a tattoo on what had been at one time the upper curve of her left breast. Her skin was sagging now and the tattoo was so old and misshapen it was hard to tell it wasn't a bruise. She had on a large blond wig, bright pink lipstick and enough makeup on her cheeks to frost a cupcake or pass for a TV evangelist. She was the one who had checked him in the day before. He put a dollar bill in the pass-through slot and asked for three quarters, two dimes and a nickel. He didn't know how much the papers cost in L.A. In the other cities they had ranged from a quarter to fifty cents.

  "Sorry, babe, I don't have change," she said in a voice that begged for another cigarette.

  "Ah shit," Gladden said angrily. He shook his head. There was no service in this world anymore. "What about in your purse? I don't want to have to walk down the fuckin' street for a paper."

  "Let me check. And watch that mouth. You don't have to get so testy."

  He watched her get up. She wore a short black tube skirt that embarrassingly displayed a network of varicose veins running down the back of her thighs. He realized he had no idea how old she was, a used-up thirty or an over-the-hill forty-five. It seemed that when she bent over to get her purse out of a lower file drawer, she was intentionally giving him the view. She came up with the purse and dug around in it for change. While the large black bag swallow
ed her hand like an animal she looked at him through the glass with appraising eyes.

  "See anything you like?" she asked.

  "No, not really," Gladden replied. "You got the change?" She pulled her hand out of the maw of the bag and looked at the change.

  "You don't have to be so rude. Besides, I only got seventy-one cents."

  "I'll take it."

  He shoved the dollar through.

  "You sure? Six of it is pennies."

  "Yes, I'm sure. There's the money."

  She dropped the change into the slot and he had a difficult time getting it all up because his fingernails were bitten away to nothing.

  "You're in room six, right?" she said, looking at an occupancy list. "Checked in a single. Still by yourself?"

  "What, now is this twenty questions?"

  "Just checking. What are you doin' in there alone, anyhow? I hope you're not jerkin' off on the bedspread."