Entombed (36 page)

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."

"You thought wrong.
Two of them used to work there a few years back. These kids all had
addresses in Queens. None of them had anything to do with that
neighborhood the night this went down." Kittredge fired the words at me.

"Were they armed?" I
asked.

"They had knives. All
of them had knives," he said, pushing up his jacket and shirtsleeve in
search of a scar to display. "Then one of them got my gun."

Mercer pressed on.
"But it was one of the kids who got shot, wasn't it?"

"I carried a second
pistol on my ankle. An old habit, Detective, from working narcotics.
They didn't find that one."

I wasn't a fan of the
nuts on the force who thought one gun wasn't enough to do the job.

"Was the boy shot in
the back?" Mercer asked, having the good sense to leave out the
question of the distance for the moment.

Kittredge walked to
the sink, his back to us, and turned on the faucet, running water and
rinsing his mug. "Who told you so? That crackpot Zeldin? He's the one
that didn't want me in there to begin with. He probably set the whole
thing up."

I glanced at Mercer.
Kittredge spotted me and called me on it. "You think I'm making this
up, huh?"

"No. No, I don't. I
can't imagine a reason someone would invite you there, but then not let
you in."

He walked toward me
and pointed a finger in my face. "Before you go thinking I'm some kind
of psycho, spend a little more time checking out that group of
screwballs."

"I assume you've
already done that, Mr. Kittredge. That's why we're here."

"I knew what the rumor
was. Zeldin probably thought I was there to investigate him and his
cronies. The Raven Society or whatever they called themselves."

"What-?"

"After I got jammed up
I didn't give a damn. I didn't care about police work-real or
fictional. I started taking art classes for therapy. Anger management,"
Kittredge said, waving his arm around at the various incarnations of
his favorite nude. He was wild-eyed now that we had stirred up these
unpleasant memories.

"But what was the
rumor about Zeldin? I don't know what you mean."

"Not just him. His
whole little secret society. For somebody who thinks she's pretty
smart, you don't really know much about this, do you?"

"I'll take all the
help you can give me."

"A very select
membership, with very special rules. There are people who believe, Ms.
Cooper, that if you want to be admitted to the Raven Society, you have
to have killed someone," Kittredge said, walking to the door of his
apartment and opening it, to signal the end of our meeting. "You have
to have taken a page out of Edgar Allan Poe."

36

"Ready to give up on
this?" Mercer asked. "I know you'd rather be curled up at home with the
crossword puzzle."

"Time to pull out that
list of names again and see what kind of birds these ravens really are
before we keep ruffling their feathers. C'mon, we've got places to go
and people to see."

We were back in the
car by nine and Lieutenant Peterson was beeping Mercer. He returned the
call and gave me the news.

"Loo can't raise
anyone over at the UN on a Sunday. Thinks we ought to drop in and start
the ball rolling. You got his attention with this diplomatic mission
connection to a suspect."

The Sunday-morning
ride back through Central Park and over to the FDR Drive was quick. The
February chill was powerful as we drove south along the East River. We
passed under the Roosevelt Island tram cables, and I avoided glancing
off to my left at the elegant remains of the old Blackwell Hospital
site that sat on the island's southern tip-the scene of a case we had
worked several years back.

Mercer turned off the
highway at Forty-eighth Street and squared the block to come around in
front of the vast complex that fronted on First Avenue. After the
Second World War, when every large American city was competing to host
the headquarters of a new international organization to replace the
League of Nations, the deal was clinched for New York by John D.
Rockefeller, Jr.'s gift of $8.5 million which allowed the purchase of
seventeen prime acres of real estate in midtown Manhattan's Turtle Bay.

The United Nations
opened for business in 1950 with the completion of the now familiar
tall and sleek Secretariat Building-our destination this
morning-followed later by the General Assembly and conference buildings.

As Mercer shut off the
engine and stuck his laminated parking plaque in the car's windshield,
we were both conscious of the fact that the UN, technically, was not
within the jurisdiction of the United States. It had its own police
force and post office, and operated with a unique set of rules and
regulations.

Forty minutes later,
passing through layer upon layer of internal security, we presented
ourselves to the second assistant to the chief of protocol for the
United States mission, the duty officer in charge on a quiet Sunday
morning.

Ralph Barcher wanted
to know more about our inquiry. Mercer told him only that we were at
the preliminary stage of an investigation that was confidential, but
might involve an employee or relative of someone assigned to the world
peace organization. Barcher balked at the idea of releasing any
information to us without permission from the protocol chief himself.

"Why don't you phone
him?" I asked. "I'll be happy to explain what we need."

He looked at his watch
and thought better of placing the call. "You know you can go to our
website and get a listing and mission location for every member state,"
Barcher said, somewhat nervously.

"You can be sure we'll
do that. But it's the home addresses and contacts that I want as well."

"Don't you understand
the security issues we have when it comes to the release of that sort
of personal data, Miss Cooper?"

"We'll be sensitive to
those, of course. We represent the two most important law enforcement
agencies in the city. We're not terrorists. Who's the chief?"

"Waxon. Darren Waxon."

"That must be a recent
promotion. I did some work for him when he was the deputy, just six
months ago," I said. "I can't imagine he won't be willing to help us."

My unit was frequently
called for help in training the staff of foreign missions that came to
this country with a myriad of clashing cultural values. We had stepped
in to prosecute a tribal leader who had brought the horrific practice
of female genital mutilation from his sub-Saharan hut to West 112th
Street, counseled rape survivors attacked by opposition rebel troops in
Eastern European civil wars, intercepted teens brought from Southeast
Asia in juvenile sex slave practices, and handled domestic violence
incidents for women from countries in which they were still treated as
the property of their spouses, even though they were married to
businessmen and not camel herders.

"I'm afraid that since
you won't brief me on what you're going to do with these names,
there'll be nothing Mr. Waxon can help you with either."

"Look, I can't tell
you exactly what case we're working on, but you can see from our
business cards we're both assigned to highly sensitive matters. We
don't intend to embarrass anyone."

Barcher reexamined the
cards we had handed to him.

"I suppose, Miss
Cooper," he said flatly, "that you've given some thought to the concept
of diplomatic immunity."

"You're really jumping
the gun. To tell you the truth, that hadn't crossed my mind yet. I'm
not even close to saying that you're going to hand us a crime suspect
on a silver platter. We'd just like to make sure we don't ignore any
possibilities."

Mercer tried to be
helpful. "Maybe Ms. Cooper didn't make herself clear. We're not looking
at any of your ambassadors here as a target. What we're doing might
eliminate the chance of drawing your people into the investigation."

"What do you know
about immunity, Detective Wallace?"

"Not much."

"It's an ancient
principle of international law, sir. It dates from the early Greeks,
who allowed messengers and envoys to travel freely through neighboring
countries, so they weren't subject to punishment, even when they
carried bad news."

"That was then,"
Mercer said.

It seemed so unnatural
not to have Mike at my side. I smiled just thinking of his typical
comeback. He probably would have told Mr. Barcher that the Greeks had
left us a legacy of some other interesting habits, too.

"Same theory as today.
Representatives of foreign government officials are exempted from the
jurisdiction of local courts and authorities. They're allowed to
operate under the laws of their own countries."

"That extends to their
families, too?" Mercer asked.

Barcher bristled.
"Diplomatic agents as well as their immediate families are immune from
all criminal prosecution."

"Unless their home
government waives that immunity, isn't that right?" I asked.

"Certainly. It's not a
license to commit crimes. If you think you've got evidence to charge
someone, the first step is that the State Department advises the proper
government involved and requests a waiver to take the case to the
proper court."

"How about diplomatic
staff?" I asked, thinking that our perp might even be attached to a
mission for some other purpose.

"Consular employees
have less protection, Miss Cooper. They only get immunity for acts
performed as part of their official duties."

"Well, I suggest you
spend a bit of your spare time today getting together the list I asked
for. I'll have a grand jury subpoena up here first thing tomorrow
morning."

"I don't mean to be an
obstructionist. There must be-well, as we'd say here-a more diplomatic
way to go about this. If you're talking about some egregious criminal
matter, you know we have had charges result in deportation in the past."

"That's a pretty
unsuccessful solution, Mr. Barcher," I said. "When you deport a major
felon, he's never brought to justice in our courts, there's no
punishment for him here at all, and usually he works his way back over
our borders in no time, if New York City is the place he wants to be."

He tried another
route. "You know, one of the things we do here at Protocol is work with
the injured, the aggrieved party to try to secure some kind of
restitution for them."

"Money? For victims of
violent crime?" Mercer asked. "You think that women who've been
sexually assaulted are just looking for money? They want this bastard
off the streets, Mr. Barcher, whoever he is. They want him behind bars.
Now maybe our case will turn out to have nothing at all to do with the
United Nations, but we're expecting your help."

Barcher walked to a
file cabinet and opened the drawer, retrieving two copies of a document
from a large stack. "One hundred ninety-one member states. I can't
provide you with home addresses, but these are where their missions are
located."