The Gravedigger's Ball (8 page)

Ellison stopped in mid-sip. There was no grief, no shock, and no joy. There was only acceptance of the grim news. A moment later he gulped down the martini and mixed himself another.

“How did it happen?” he asked as he popped an olive into the glass and fell into a chair directly across from Coletti.

“Someone pushed her into a grave and stuffed her mouth with dirt. We think she choked to death.”

“Really?” Ellison asked, sounding surprised, but not grieved. “That’s dreadful.”

Coletti knew what it was to lose a woman he loved, and what he saw from Ellison Bailey didn’t compare to the grief he felt each time he thought of Mary. The question came out of his mouth before he could stop it. “You didn’t care about her at all, did you?”

Ellison took another sip of his martini. “We were in the midst of a divorce, Detective. At least, I was. She wanted to fight to keep the marriage intact so she wouldn’t have to pay.”

“So you stood to gain financially from the divorce?” Coletti asked.

Ellison looked at him. “I suspect you already know the answer to that, so let’s cut to the chase, shall we? My wife was rich and I’m her sole surviving relative. In your eyes, that makes me a suspect, right?”

Coletti smiled in spite of himself. He appreciated Ellison’s bluntness, if not his attitude. “There are a lot of things other than the money that make you a suspect, Mr. Bailey, including the fact that you were trying to divorce your wife.”

“Lots of people have marital problems, Detective. There’s nothing unique about that.”

“But it’s unique for a man with no steady source of income to be married to a billionaire.”

“Yes, aren’t I the lucky one?” Ellison asked sarcastically.

Coletti’s cell phone buzzed, and he took it out and looked at the message. It was the e-mail Clarissa had sent out announcing Lenore’s visit. The cemetery manager had finally forwarded it, as promised. There were five addresses in the “to” line. Four of them had names attached. One of them didn’t.

Ellison took another sip of his martini. “Is everything all right, Detective?” he asked. “Do you need to make a call?”

Coletti’s instincts told him not to share the e-mail with Ellison. He quickly put the phone away. “No, I don’t need to make any calls,” he said. “But I do need to know a little more about your relationship with your wife. How did the two of you meet?”

“We met five years ago at the Borrowers Ball,” Ellison said. “It’s a black-tie gala to benefit the Free Library of Philadelphia.”

“And you were on the guest list?”

“Yes,” Ellison said, taking another sip of his drink. “I once wrote a book on the history of Mayan civilization, and somehow, through serendipity or dumb luck or whatever you want to call it, my book became a Hollywood film. The genius who directed it decided to make the movie without dialogue. It flopped, and after that, no one would touch any of my books with a ten-foot pole. I was forever relegated to being a featured author at literary events, and it didn’t take me long to go broke.”

“You sound bitter.”

“On the contrary,” Ellison said. “I’m grateful that the library invited me. I felt like I’d turned the tables on Cinderella, and for once, the prince got to be the one to crash the ball.”

Coletti smiled at Ellison’s sardonic wit.

“Clarissa was at my table that night,” Ellison continued. “She took a liking to me. And when I told her I was working on a novel about a nineteenth-century writer who’s involved in a murder, she was actually rather intrigued. A few weeks later, she invited me over to, um … look at her etchings. She showed me hers, I showed her mine, and six months later, we were married.”

“I see,” Coletti said. “If you don’t mind my asking, how old are you, Mr. Bailey?”

“I’m eight years Clarissa’s junior. She was fifty-five when we met. I was forty-seven. It was quite the scandal on the society page. Still is.”

Coletti looked around at the trappings of wealth that surrounded them. “Scandal or not, banging old broads for a living pays well, doesn’t it?”

“I beg your pardon?” Ellison said sharply.

Coletti stood up and walked over to the chair where Ellison Bailey was sitting. “You said you wanted to cut to the chase, Mr. Bailey, so let’s do that. Clarissa wasn’t the first older woman to take care of you, was she? There was the woman you lived with in California who sued after you ran through her fortune. Then there’s the woman you lived with in Florida who sued after you drained the bank accounts the two of you shared. But they were lucky, weren’t they? They didn’t end up dead.”

“I had nothing to do with anyone’s death, including Clarissa’s,” Ellison said nervously.

“Maybe not, but you’ve got a pattern of defrauding old women, and Clarissa would’ve been your biggest victim. You couldn’t afford to fight her in divorce court, so the next best thing would’ve been to kill her. As her husband, you would get everything. So you see, Mr. Bailey, you’re the perfect suspect, and the way I see it, you’ve got two options. You can go get a lawyer and try to delay the inevitable, or you can talk before I track down the rest of the old ladies you scammed and see who else ended up dead.”

Ellison stared at Coletti for a moment. Then he gulped the rest of his martini and looked down into the empty glass. He seemed to be fighting a battle with himself, and from the expression on his face, he was losing. When finally he spoke, it was with a quiet humility that hadn’t been there before.

“I’ve never killed anybody or arranged to have anyone killed, including Clarissa. I was here sleeping all morning, just like I do most days. I’m sure if you check with Clarissa’s friends, they’ll verify that I’m the laziest man they’ve ever seen. They kept telling her to just grant me the divorce and move on, but Clarissa was much too kind for that. That’s why I cared for her so much.”

“If you cared for her why did you file for divorce?”

Ellison got up, walked over to the bar, and made himself a third martini. “You’ve already told me what you think of me, Detective, and, sadly, you’re right. I’m a failed writer who takes money from old women and leaves them worse off than when I found them. I’m not proud of that, but I accept it. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Clarissa. She deserved much better than me.”

“Why?” Coletti asked skeptically. “What made her any different from the others?”

“Trite as it might sound, she was a good person,” Ellison said, as he walked toward an oil painting of Clarissa that hung on the far wall. “She funded nurseries for crack babies, shelters for alcoholics, and a million other little causes for people nobody else cared about. She loved humanity, Detective … almost as much as she loved history and the arts.”

Coletti joined him in front of the portrait. “If she was such a saint, why would someone kill her?”

“I’m afraid I don’t know much about why people kill,” Ellison said. “I create things. I’m not into death.”

“But your wife was into death,” Coletti said. “She was heavily involved in fund-raising for a historic cemetery called Fairgrounds.”

Ellison walked slowly to his seat and sat down. He looked concerned. “Is that where it happened—at the cemetery?”

“Yes. Does that mean something?”

Ellison sighed and shook his head. “As I told you, my wife loved history and the arts—writing, especially. She was involved with Fairgrounds Cemetery because she believed it was connected to one of her favorite nineteenth-century writers.”

“You mean Edgar Allan Poe?”

Ellison looked surprised. “How’d you know that?”

“We found a line from ‘The Raven’ near your wife’s body when she died.” Coletti pulled out his notepad and read it. “
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing…”

Ellison’s face turned ashen, and Coletti stopped reading.

“Are you all right, Mr. Bailey?”

Ellison started mumbling. “I told her to let it go, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked at Coletti, unsure how much he wanted to reveal. “Our divorce was about more than just money, Detective. It was also about Clarissa’s insistence on dabbling in things I thought were dangerous. Things she thought were revealed in that poem.”

“What do you mean?”

“Certain scholars believe Edgar Allan Poe was a seer who stood between life and death and saw something that regular people couldn’t see—some sort of secret that would literally change the course of mankind. Those scholars believe that’s what ‘The Raven’ was really about. And some of those scholars—men like Irving Workman at Penn—believe the place where Poe stood is somewhere at Fairgrounds Cemetery.”

Coletti remembered that Workman was one of the names on the e-mail Clarissa sent regarding Lenore’s visit. He asked his next question while jotting down Workman’s initials. “Do you know Irving Workman?”

“I met him once or twice when I was lecturing at Penn, but Clarissa was friends with him,” Ellison said with disdain. “Workman had Clarissa convinced that Poe discovered his gift of sight here in Philadelphia. He even took Clarissa and her friends to the house where Poe lived.”

“And where’s that?”

“Seventh and Spring Garden.”

Coletti wrote down the location. “So why did you think it was dangerous for your wife to listen to Workman?”

“Because he kept telling Clarissa that there was another seer—a woman who could decipher what Poe found at the cemetery. Clarissa was obsessed with that woman, almost to the point where she’d do anything to find her. If a reasonably stable person like my wife could get so lost in Workman’s teachings, I figured there were those who would give their very lives for those beliefs, or worse, take the lives of others.”

Ellison shook his head sadly. “Turns out I was right.”

Coletti’s cell phone rang as Ellison stared down into the last few drops of his martini. When the detective took the phone from his pocket and saw the number, he answered immediately.

“Okay,” he said after listening to the voice on the other end. “We’ll be right down.”

Ellison looked on as Coletti disconnected the call.

“That was the medical examiner’s office,” Coletti said solemnly. “They’ve found something on Clarissa’s body.”

*   *   *

With every passing second, Kirsten Douglas realized just how fortunate she was. Unlike Clarissa Bailey and Officer Smith, she’d seen the Gravedigger face-to-face and survived. Kirsten was the only one other than Mike Coletti to do so. It was that distinction more than anything else that landed her a guest spot on CNN.

In less than a minute, she’d be on the air, and she was sweating profusely. Sitting in the studio at VideoLink for her first television appearance in twenty years as a crime reporter, with Philadelphia’s skyline superimposed on the greenscreen backdrop, Kirsten was nervous. Not only were the lights intense in the tiny room, but the air-conditioning seemed to be broken. And while the satellite technology was impressive, the squiggly wire attached to her earpiece was tickling her.

In the hours since she’d sneaked past the police barricades and taken the only picture of Officer Frank Smith’s mud-covered body, Kirsten had become a national figure. She’d talked to the police commissioner. She’d generated millions of Internet hits. She’d sparked a fierce debate on media ethics, but she still couldn’t get a call back from Mike Coletti.

As she waited for the interview to begin, a bead of sweat trickled down her face. She reached up and dabbed it dry with a napkin. Fortunately, her face was devoid of makeup except for a bit of lipstick. Studio makeup was apparently reserved for the truly important. Despite her instant fame, Kristen was not yet among them.

“Five seconds.” The director’s voice came through the earpiece as she stared at the square camera in front of her.

She reached up nervously to adjust her hair and took a last look at the notes she’d jotted down in front of her. Then suddenly the host’s voice was in her ear, and she forgot about her talking points and points of emphasis and everything other than the truth.

He recapped what she’d done and who she was, and as Kirsten tried to focus on what he was saying and what she would say in response, she somehow heard the host welcome her to the show.

“Thanks for having me,” Kirsten croaked, clearing her throat and trying to smile while staring into the camera.

The host spoke a few more words about the murders and asked Kirsten for her impressions on the investigation thus far.

Kirsten took a deep breath and tried to remember that the camera was supposed to be the audience. Then she stared straight ahead and talked until the slight tremor in her voice went away.

“Honestly, I don’t have any real thoughts on the investigation at this point, because I can’t get any of my sources in the department to return my calls. But I do want to say before I go any further that my condolences go out to the victims’ families. I think that’s kind of been lost in all this discussion about media ethics and privacy and everything else. I’m a human being and I can’t help feeling for the families, especially since I’m lucky that I made it out of those woods alive.”

The host stared into the camera with a serious expression. “And for our viewers who don’t know, Kirsten, what exactly happened when you went into those woods?”

Kirsten paused to gather herself. Then she said things she’d never expected to come out of her mouth.

“I think going into those woods changed me in ways I still haven’t quite figured out. Initially it was just about getting the story because I felt like we were being stonewalled by the police. And as you know, sticking to traditional approaches means getting our butts kicked by online outlets that have a no-holds-barred approach to reporting, and—”

The voice in her ear interrupted her. “Does that mean you don’t believe you did anything wrong?”

“It means newspapers, including mine, are threatened with being shut down because our news is old before we even go to press. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying it’s reality.”

“So what do you mean when you say you were changed in those woods?”

“I mean, I went back there initially just to get the facts, you know? But sometimes the story goes way beyond just facts. Things aren’t always black and white. Sometimes, they’re gray, and even though my training as a journalist tells me to reject that type of subjective thinking, what I saw in those woods today changed my mindset. In fact, I think it changed everything about me.”