Entombed (29 page)

"We're fortunate that
Phelps lives here."

"Here, in the snuff
mill?" Mike asked.

"No, no," the
groundskeeper said. "Did you see the carriage houses we passed before
we reached this building? I live in one of those."

I had noticed three
buildings, smaller than the mill but in the same old style with wooden
gables over the door and windows.

"Obviously, people can
only come here to the mill on the days the gardens are open," Zeldin
said, "because the entire perimeter of the park is gated, of course.
But that's most of the year, except for major holidays. And yes,
members are free to come and go from these rooms as they please."

He rolled into the
first alcove and beckoned us to follow. Once inside the office, Zeldin
steadied himself on the edge of the desk and hoisted his body out of
the wheelchair. For the several minutes it took him to open a file
cabinet and remove the papers we had asked for, he balanced against the
desktop.

I watched Mercer and
Mike staring at him, knowing they were trying to determine the strength
of his legs and the extent of his movement to figure whether he was
capable of playing a role in any of the recent crimes. But Zeldin
lowered himself back into the chair before any of us could gauge his
mobility.

"Here's what you've
asked for, Detective. The list of our members," he said. "You may have
that copy, and I trust you'll treat them kindly."

Mike put the papers on
the desk and I leaned in next to him to read with him. The pages were
divided by cities, and I quickly scanned the out-of-towners for
familiar surnames, finding none. Baltimore, Boston, Philadelphia,
Richmond-most of them lived in places where Poe had also spent time.
The rest of the members lived in New York City. Other than Zeldin, I
was disappointed to see that there was not a name I recognized.

Mike turned to the
last paper, which was headed with the initials
PNG.
We both
stared at one
of the names that jumped out at us. "Help me here," Mike said to
Zeldin. "Who are these guys?"

"
PNG
? Personae non grata,
Mr. Chapman. Not everyone in the group knows the institutional history
as well as I do, Detective. There are some people who might try to
reapply to the society after old-timers like myself are no longer
alive. This is to make sure certain people never enter our fold."

Mike pulled out the
desk chair and sat down. "I'd like to start right here, if you don't
mind. Why is Noah Tormey on this list?"

29

"I suppose I first met
Noah Tormey about twenty-five years ago," Zeldin said. "Maybe longer.
Quite an intelligent young man, fancied himself a scholar although I'm
not sure I'd be that generous. He had just graduated from New York
University and was an instructor in the English department. He came to
me to borrow some books-they were out-of-print volumes-to do some
research for a dissertation."

"Came to you here, at
the Botanical Gardens?"

"Heavens, no. I was
just a lowly librarian then. Well-known in literary circles for my
collection of Poe-his works, as well as biography and criticism. He
came to my home, where you were yesterday."

Not bad digs for a
"lowly librarian," as Zeldin described himself, is what I was thinking.
Perhaps he sensed that and decided to explain.

"My mother had owned
that apartment, Ms. Cooper. I inherited it upon her death. She had been
collecting rare books most of her life, including Poe. It's thanks to
her family fortune-sewing thread, simple cotton sewing thread that my
great-grandfather manufactured-that I've been able to indulge myself in
my two passions, horticulture and literature."

"So you and Tormey
struck up a friendship?" Mike asked.

"He was an interesting
fellow. I wouldn't say we became close, but he'd call when he needed
something and if it was a volume I owned, I was happy to loan it to
him."

"Did the two of you
talk? Socially, I mean."

"Our conversation was
always about the nineteenth century, Detective. Not women, not current
events, not our personal lives, if that's what you mean."

"And the Raven
Society?"

"I suppose that came
up. In fact I'm sure it did. Tormey eventually got around to asking me
about joining, I'm quite sure of it."

"Were you already a
member?" Mike asked.

"Yes, I was admitted
rather early. I had come along at the moment the group was trying to
expand a bit, and my scholarship in the field was well documented. I
think I was in my mid-twenties when I was accepted."

"Secret handshake?
Flap your elbows like a bird? Swear you'll never watch
The Maltese
Falcon
or read Rex Stout
again?"

Zeldin wasn't amused.
"I submitted some of the papers I had written and demonstrated, at
meetings with some of the members, that I was intimate with the body of
work. I'm sure my collection of first editions made me an attractive
candidate."

"So what happened to
Noah Tormey? Why'd he get black-balled?"

"There was no question
that he knew Poe's writings as well as most of us. But then he
published a paper in one of the literary reviews. It was brilliantly
researched and quite well written," Zeldin said.

I thought immediately
of Emily Upshaw, who had done some of Tormey's writing for him.

"The problem was," he
went on, "the piece dredged up all the petty old claims, with
impressive documentation."

"The personal foibles
you just described to us?" I asked, wondering why they would matter to
scholars.

"No, no, Miss Cooper.
Poe's plagiarism."

"His what?" Mike
asked. "What did he plagiarize?"

Zeldin sighed. Then he
called out the groundskeeper's name. "Phelps?"

Sinclair Phelps came
back into the little office from the other room. "Yes?"

"Against that wall,
third drawer down, would you mind fetching me a folder labeled
'Tormey'?"

Phelps retrieved the
document and left the room. "We're talking about a young man hoping to
establish himself in academia," Zeldin said, opening the file and
passing an issue of the review to Mike. "Naturally, the immature Poe he
wrote about was struggling to find his voice. You'll see some examples
in this study."

We took a few minutes
and read the first several pages. There were lines that appeared to be
lightly lifted from obscure poets I'd never read. Here was Poe's "Song":

I saw thee on the
bridal day-

When a burning
blush came o'er thee…

And below it a poem by
John Lofland, published a year earlier:

I saw her on the
bridal day

In blushing beauty
blest…

I had just heard
Tormey yesterday, teaching his class
Biographia Literaria
. Now
here in the
paper Zeldin gave me to look at, he was quoting Coleridge and his
classic description of poetry as a kind of composition "which is
opposed to works of science, by proposing for its immediate object
pleasure, not truth."

Next to Coleridge he
interposed the words of Poe, who wrote that "a poem, in my opinion, is
opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object,
pleasure, not truth."

Least welcome to
Zeldin and his cohorts must have been the lines referred to in the
masterwork, "The Raven." Here was Elizabeth Barrett Browning first,
hardly an obscure poet if one was to be borrowing phrases: "With a
murmurous stir uncertain in the air the purple curtain…" And then Poe's
famous line: "And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple
curtain…"

I handed Tormey's
essay back to Zeldin.

"Mr. Tormey took Poe
apart, as the two of you can see. Most of my colleagues didn't treat
that lightly. He was even anxious to show off his own skill at
researching, noting how Edgar had taken commentary for many of his
treatises practically verbatim from secondary sources, sometimes right
out of the encyclopedia-like a schoolchild might do."

"Had Poe ever been
exposed to this kind of claim in his lifetime?" I asked.

"Attacked for his lack
of literary morals? Indeed he was," Zeldin said. "It was another source
of his great despair. When Poe's critics accused him of plagiarism, he
was barred from some of New York's most important literary salons."

"No wonder his
characters so often resort to revenge in his stories," I said. "Poor
Mr. Poe must have dreamed about it often."

"You've got that
right. Of course, he took it out on other writers, Miss Cooper. He
viewed everything as a personal wound. Have you ever read his volumes
of literary criticism?"

"No, I haven't."

"He published quite a
lot of it, and went after many of his contemporaries-quite mercilessly."

"Which ones?" I asked.

"He had absolute
contempt for Longfellow. Hated him as much for the heiress he married
and all the private volumes of work that her wealth enabled him to get
published as for his derivative and mediocre poetry. Then there was
William Cullen Bryant and Washington Irving. I could go on and on."

I thought of the Hall
of Fame. Poe might have used the surrounding busts as a shooting
gallery himself-taking potshots at his rivals-had it existed in his day.

"So what's the big
deal to the Raven Society?" Mike asked. "People had heard this
criticism before."

"Our members come to
praise Caesar, not to bury him, if you will. We gather to celebrate the
genius and originality of Poe, which is far outweighed by a few
youthful indiscretions. We're very collegial and quite admiring of the
master. We didn't need Mr. Tormey to put a spotlight on these things
again. I don't know that anyone was ready to kill the young professor
for that sort-"

Zeldin stopped himself
with that thought. "Sorry, I shouldn't use language like that around
the three of you. You might take me seriously. They just didn't want
Tormey in their mix. He knew the poetry, but he didn't love the poet
quite as unequivocally as the rest of us do."

"Talk about holding a
grudge," Mike said. "You guys are tough. You hear anything lately from
Mr. Tormey?"

The morning papers had
lowballed yesterday's shooting at the Hall of Fame. It took place in
the Bronx, after all, and to crime reporters, that might as well have
been Siberia. An outer-borough triple homicide might earn a paragraph
in the
Times
and space within the
first ten pages of the tabloids. But there was no reason Zeldin would
have heard about this assault.

"Nothing. Nothing at
all."

"So the people on this
last page-the ones you've blackballed- are they all here for reasons
like this?" Mercer asked.

"More or less,
Detective. Some aren't really committed to serious scholarship, some
can't afford the dues. Why? What did you think?"

Mercer hesitated.

"Ah, were they
dangerous? Is that what you mean? You're thinking that whoever killed
the woman in Greenwich Village might be one of us?" Zeldin said. "Not
very likely. The closest we've ever come to an actual crime was-Phelps,
are you there? When was that shooting?"

The groundskeeper
reappeared and leaned on the doorframe. "Outside the main gate? It must
be almost ten years now."

"What did it have to
do with the society?" Mike asked.

"There was a detective
with whom I'd spoken on the phone several times. I don't recall his
name. He was quite interested in meeting with me."

"About the Raven
Society?"

"Oh, no. I doubt he
knew of its existence. Ratiocination it was. He was quite intrigued
with ratiocination."

"What?" Mike asked.

"The process of
deductive reasoning. Old hat to you and Mr. Wallace, perhaps, but when
Poe wrote his first tale of ratiocination- 'The Murders in the Rue
Morgue'-the word 'detective' had not yet been used in the English
language. The first professional police department in the world had
only been set up in London twelve years earlier."

"What did this cop
want?"

"He wanted to talk to
me about Poe's detective stories, he told me. Use the archives for some
research, I assumed. And I thought, in return, that it might be
interesting to have him address the society, with these tales as
background to the work that police detectives do today. After all,
Poe's works are the first time in literature that you see some of these
techniques used-postmortem examinations, ballistics discussions,
locked-room mysteries."

"And there was a
shooting near the gardens, you say?"

"Yes. Really dreadful.
The officer claimed some kids tried to rob him right outside the main
gate, on his way in to meet with me. Turned out one of them was a young
fellow who had done some part-time work here on the grounds. Phelps,
you remember any of the details?"

"Just like you said,
sir. The boy who was killed was a pretty decent kid, according to
everyone who knew him. Shot in the back, from quite a fair distance
away. That's the main thing I remember."

"That's why we screen
everyone who approaches the society so carefully now. The last thing we
need is to attract any attention to ourselves-certainly not any
scandal. I never returned the officer's calls after that. He was a damn
good shot, I'll tell you that."

"Well," Mike said,
standing and reaching for Zeldin's hand, "thanks for your time. We'll
let you know if we need to speak with you again."

"Wouldn't you like me
to arrange for you to see Poe's cottage, as long as you're so close?"
he asked.

"Yes, of course," I
said, at the exact moment Mike answered with a "No thanks."

"We really got some
ground to cover, Coop," Mike said to me. "Another time."

Zeldin wheeled himself
out to the main room. "Phelps will drive you back to your car. You just
let me know when it would be convenient for you to stop by. The cottage
is open five days a week, or if you'd prefer a private tour, I'll just
call Mr. Guidi's office and they'll accommodate you."