Wicked Deeds

“Yes, she will let everyone know exactly what she thinks, including everyone in the media. The problem is that she’s going to demand answers before people may have them. The ME is no one’s fool, and certainly in no way a yes-man. He will not give his report until he has every single test in. So...”

“I guess any ME has to be careful. I mean, a writer isn’t exactly a Michael Jackson, Heath Ledger or Prince, but...”

“Bite your tongue!”

“I’m serious—who recognizes writers? Stephen King, maybe. And okay, James Patterson—he does a lot of his own commercials, too. But—”

“People knew Franklin Verne. He was very popular—he gave to so many charities. He and his wife had no children, just one another—and all their good deeds,” Griffin said.

“But you’re saying it’s going to be a while before the ME will even say if it was a murder or an accidental death?”

“He will test for every poison out there, for every possibility,” Griffin said.

“So, what do you think?” Vickie asked.

“What do I think?” he repeated.

“That was, yes, indeed, the question,” she said.

He glanced over at her again as they drove. Vickie was serious and thoughtful. He gritted his teeth, reminding himself that she’d already been through two heinous cases. She’d never panicked; she behaved rationally.

She was about to go through the academy. It was a smart thing for her to do, the right choice; since they were staying together, she was going to get involved in his cases. He was glad she’d been accepted into the program.

And still...the worrying—the wishing he could keep her from all danger—did not go away.

“I think,” Griffin said, “that we’re way too early in this investigation to have any idea as to what is really going on. For one thing, I’m disturbed by the fact that no one can explain how Franklin Verne got into the restaurant—much less down to the wine cellar.”

“And the way he died... Well, I think they’ll find out that it was drugs or alcohol poisoning. So similar to Poe—though there are many theories on exactly what happened with Edgar Allan Poe, too,” Vickie said. “Some people believe he was just taken by pollsters—it was an election time, and in the 1800s, voter fraud certainly existed. One theory is that Poe was kidnapped by ruffians so that he could vote and then vote again—and that could be why he was dressed in clothing he hadn’t owned.”

“That sounds like a possibility,” Griffin said.

“Ah! But some people believe it was a murder plot by the brothers of the woman—Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton—whom he was about to marry. History is still undecided about whether they were or weren’t officially engaged when he died. She denied it sometimes, and sometimes said that it was true. I guess it was an understanding. She had been his first love, and his last, certainly. But she would lose the inheritance from her first husband if she married again.”

“Motive!” Griffin said.

“Yes. A thickened plot,” Vickie agreed. “Then again, some think he just got into a bar brawl, changed clothing for some more whiskey money—and died in his delirium because he was an alcoholic and, therefore, finally drank himself to death.”

“And that sounds possible, too.”

Vickie looked unhappy again. “Poor Monica. People will assume that Franklin Verne fell off the wagon, got started on a binge and managed to sneak down to the restaurant’s wine cellar.”

“Maybe we’ll get a lucky break. There are cameras at the front door.”

“They won’t see Franklin Verne on those cameras. I’m assuming the cops are checking them now, right?”

“Yep.”

“They won’t find him.”

“You’re so sure.”

“I am absolutely certain,” Vickie said. She hesitated, drawing in a breath and holding it. “I believe that he was murdered.”

There was something about her voice that made Griffin look over at her quickly. She was definitely deeply disturbed by something that went beyond their current speculation.

“What is it?” he asked her softly.

She glanced back over at him, thoughtful, yet appeared hesitant.

They’d originally met under horrible circumstances; Vickie had been just seventeen, he in his early twenties, and she’d been attacked by a serial killer.

They’d met again when a new serial killer was terrorizing Boston, and since then, they’d worked together to rescue a friend and save the lives of many people, including—in the end—Vickie’s own life.

They knew each other deeply; knew they saw and felt what most others did not.

And, still, sometimes Vickie seemed timid, as though afraid that when she spoke aloud what she had to say would sound ridiculous.

“Vickie!” he persisted. “It’s me!”

“Okay!” she said, and smiled. She took a breath. “Remember this morning? You asked me if I was having a nightmare.”

“Yes.” Griffin didn’t press.

“I was. Kind of. I was dreaming about Edgar Allan Poe. I was here—in Baltimore. But it was way back in time—on the day that he was found in delirium before he was taken to the hospital for the few days before he died. Poe was talking to me. He warned me not to assume that it was like what had happened to him.”

“This was before I heard from Jackson?” he asked her.

She nodded gravely. “Yes, Griffin. Before. I mean, I thought I was dreaming about Poe because we were in Baltimore, because we had enjoyed that great dinner and the Black Bird and our waiter had kind of inundated us with Poe. But...”

Griffin sat quietly.

The “gift” or “curse” that united Krewe members—that had sent Adam Harrison on his quest for his special teams—manifested in different ways. For most of them, it was simply seeing and speaking with the dead.

But because of what Griffin had seen and encountered over the years, there was little that he denied as possible.

Oh, he doubted most people! He was a horrible skeptic. He’d learned to be, since the world was far more filled with fake seers, psychics, mystics and mediums than most people would ever imagine.

But there were also those who truly had a sixth sense—and it did, sometimes, manifest itself in the world of dreams and nightmares. This wasn’t the first time Vickie had communicated with the dead in visions while sleeping.

“So, under these circumstances, your nightmare meant something. We’ll assume that you had the dream for a reason—and that it wasn’t an Edgar Allan Poe overdose at the restaurant. Did you see in this nightmare that the cameras at the front would get nothing?”

Vickie shook her head. “No, I just saw Poe himself in the nightmare. Maybe Poe was witnessing it, or... I don’t know. But I believe that Franklin Verne was murdered, and that his murderer is too smart to be caught on film. There’s also a delivery entrance. There’s a driveway that goes down to the basement at the back, remember? Receiving for the kitchen is next to the wine cellar, right through one of the little doors.”

“Yes,” Griffin told her. “I walked the whole thing. So, tell me—how did he get in through the receiving door?”

“With a friend. Or a so-called friend.”

“A friend? So you’re thinking accidental—or depraved indifference?”

“No,” Vickie said again, emphatic. “I think that Franklin trusted this person—and shouldn’t have. I don’t think that he set out to drink. I believe he loved his wife as passionately as she loved him. She had no problem with him being a wild Hemingwayesque writer—she didn’t care until his excesses started to kill him. Only then did she put her foot down. And I believe he knew that everything she did was because she loved him.”

“Wow. You did just meet her, right?” he asked, smiling—but with a sardonic tone.

“Oh, ye of little faith!” she said. “I am good at reading people.”

He laughed. “I have faith. I buy what you’re saying, too. I never heard anything other than that those two—Franklin and Monica—had a beautiful marriage.”

Griffin shifted his attention for a moment to navigating the one-way streets throughout downtown around the University of Maryland campus.

“And, we can’t forget the Poe mania around here—and Poe’s stories!” Vickie said. “There’s ‘The Cask of Amontillado’!”

“Ah-ha!” he said. “The cask of Amontillado. Wine? A cask of wine. Saw lots of bottles down in the cellar, but no casks. Something I didn’t notice?”

Vickie nodded gravely. “I’m not talking about wine—it was a short story by Poe, circa 1846. The narrator of the story is a man named Montresor. He’s very angry with and jealous of an acquaintance, Fortunato. Fortunato has insulted him gravely, you see. The story is haunting and gothic and creepy—Montresor is dressed for the carnival season in black, and Fortunato is in all the colors of the jester. Anyway, to make a long story short—”

“Too late,” Griffin assured her, which earned him a glower.

“Montresor tricks Fortunato with wine, promising him a most unique sherry—and saying that if he’s too busy, he can get one of Fortunato’s competitors to come try it. Fortunato is too vain to allow someone else to try the wine. Montresor never explains what the insult was that he’s so angry about—he’s just on a vendetta and he explains how he’s become judge and jury. In the end, he walls poor Fortunato up in a crypt—and we learn he remains there, undisturbed, for fifty years. Pretty harsh.”

“He gets away with it?” Griffin asked.

“You never read the story?”

“Um—no.”

“What? How did you manage to neglect Poe growing up? You’re from Boston. Okay, so Poe hated Boston, but he was actually born there.”

“Hey! I know some of Poe’s work,” Griffin protested. “Everyone knows ‘The Raven.’ I absolutely loved Vincent Price. And Peter Lorre and—”

“You’re talking movies, not the written word!”

Griffin laughed. “Yeah, well? Without Poe, we wouldn’t have had the movies. A few years back—I don’t know how many—there was a movie with John Cusack playing Poe. In that version he died to keep his love from being murdered.”

“That’s not how he died! That was a movie.”

“Ah-ha! But you see, no one knows how he did die—that’s the point, isn’t it?”

“Yes, but the movie had him engaged to a pretty young thing. In reality, he was about to be married—as I was telling you—to Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, she with the brothers who might have been murderers, and with whom he’d been in love when he went to college. Her father hadn’t approved and he’d destroyed all of Poe’s letters to her, and so young love had been thwarted. Anyway, years later, her husband was dead and Poe’s wife, Virginia Clemm, was dead, and Poe and the woman he’d loved in his youth met up again. Poor man, he was just forty when he died. But Sarah Elmira was no sweet young innocent—she was about his age, a mother, all grown up.”

“Killjoy,” Griffin told her, and Vickie laughed softly.

“I don’t mean to be. I love a John Cusack movie, too. I think I would have found a different way to explore what had really happened. I mean, he was found delirious in clothing that wasn’t his! How did that happen? He’d joined the temperance society before he left Richmond, but of course, no matter how you look at it, the man was an alcoholic—though it seemed that he was a binge drinker rather than a habitual drunk. I can’t help but think sometimes that he might have had a much better life if he’d lived in our day and age. So much information disappeared right along with him regarding the days he was missing! His death was as much a mystery then as it is today.”

“‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary...’”

Very determined, Griffin went ahead to repeat a good section of the famous poem. What he couldn’t remember, he thought he faked with a tremendous amount of panache. Vickie was grinning as he gave her his dramatic interpretation, so he was pretty sure that she knew when he was doing his ad-libbing.

“Well, you know the title, you know it’s a poem and you know it’s by Edgar Allan Poe,” she said, amused. “I’m totally impressed.”

“Wait and see how I wow people!” he told her.

He pulled into public parking near Westminster Hall and Burying Ground. “Poe’s grave, at your command, my love.”

She looked at him and smiled. “So you’re going to wow the dead people with your Poe-etic license?” she asked him.

“Sometimes,” he reminded her, “dead people are far more important than the living.”

“Sometimes,” she repeated.

The old Presbyterian church itself—long since deconsecrated and now known as Westminster Hall—offered tours on certain days of the week with reservations, and special tours when prearranged. The catacombs and the inside of the structure were only available through those special times and reservations. But the burial ground surrounding the old church was open to the public, and historical markers identified many of the notable dead.

“Poe was buried in the back at first,” Vickie said, walking quickly ahead of Griffin.

She wasn’t heading toward the back, though, but rather toward the place where Poe had been moved when admirers of his work had finally gotten together to manage the creation of a fine monument to him.

“In an unmarked grave!” she said. “He had a cousin—Neilson Poe—in the city of Baltimore. Neilson was finally contacted after Poe was found and brought to the hospital. But the thing is, Poe never came back to his senses. He was delirious from the time he was found to the time he died.”

There were other visitors to the burial ground, some wandering around to view other notable graves, some hovering by the monument to Edgar Allan Poe.

“Miss, excuse me—is he really here? Or is this just the monument? You seem to know a great deal.”

An attractive woman of about forty or forty-five had stopped in front of Vickie; she’d apparently heard her speaking.

Vickie flushed. “I don’t know that much. I just always loved his work. I do know that he was exhumed and moved here—with other members of his family, Virginia Clemm, his wife, and Maria Clemm, her mother. You can see their names if you walk around the monument.”

The woman thanked her.

Others were gathering. Some came with curiosity—and some with absolute reverence, bowing their heads, speaking softly and then just standing there, as if by gathering at his grave they could breathe in some of his brilliance.

Griffin noticed that a boy standing near the monument suddenly jerked—as if he’d been startled or touched by someone unseen.

He looked around the monument, but saw nothing but other visitors who had come to pay their respects to Baltimore’s famous poet.

Griffin walked around the monument himself, then stopped short.

A man stood there, with dark hair and a sad face. He seemed to be dressed oddly for the day and the time.

The man saw Griffin. He lifted his hand in a salute, staring at Griffin gravely.

Griffin had never been the Poe reader that Vickie was. Of course, he’d never been any kind of a historian, either—able to rattle off names and dates with such amazing conversational ease.

But even he recognized the figure.

For a moment, he thought that the man was an actor, out to entertain Baltimore visitors at the burial ground.

Then the man disappeared, as if he’d faded into the stone itself.

And Griffin could only presume that he had just seen the real Edgar Allan Poe.

* * *

The news was out; it was everywhere.

Baltimore had lost another great writer, and how oddly, how eerily! He had died in a wine cellar—at a restaurant called the Black Bird, a restaurant that entirely honored the great writer Edgar Allan Poe.

Boston claimed Poe for its own—and had just added a life-size statue of him with a raven on Boylston Street. But in life, Poe hadn’t much loved the city of his birth. To be fair, he had lived and worked more in Virginia and Maryland. It seemed, however, that just as “Washington slept here” was a common refrain, Poe was also coveted. And it was only right. New York City had quite a claim on the man, too—in the Village, and up in the Bronx, where he had last lived, and where his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, had been waiting for him to come retrieve her.

Right now, Baltimore had renewed their claim on the man—and was musing over what facts were known about his death—and how they compared with the death of Franklin Verne.

Griffin and Vickie had come to the police station to meet up with Carl Morris, having given up the illusion that they were on any kind of a vacation or even off for the weekend.

Maybe they had been on the job from the moment the dream had first plagued her that morning, Vickie thought. And, if not then, they had become completely involved once Jackson had called, or even as soon as Monica Verne had reached out to Adam.

Monica’s resolve and passion couldn’t be ignored. Vickie just wished that she hadn’t brought that passion to the media so quickly.

Monica Verne was offering a hundred-thousand-dollar reward to anyone who could lead her to the true cause of her husband’s death.

“Great, just great!” Griffin muttered. “Now we’ll get calls from every demented soul in the city.”

“Well, maybe someone will come forward with good information,” Vickie told him.

They were standing with Morris and a group of officers in the center of the work floor of the station; one of the officers had brought up the live footage on the large screen that hung from the room’s ceiling, available anytime there was some type of video footage that should be witnessed by all.

Monica must have called the local news station just minutes after Griffin and Vickie had left her home; any self-respecting journalist would have hurried to her with all possible speed.

Phones were always ringing, lighting up, at the police station. It almost appeared as if an alien ship sat above them, there was such a display of sound and light as the show aired.

Morris looked at Vickie, shaking his head sadly. “We can hope, but...for the most part? This kind of thing takes up hours of work, and yields little. But yes, we can hope.”

“Well, Monica is convinced her husband was murdered,” Vickie said.

“And she’s probably right,” Griffin murmured.

“Sorry!” Carl Morris called, his voice deep, rich, loud—and extending to the different officers and detectives in the room. “Answer all calls—do your best to sort the wheat from the chaff.”

“You’re going to love this one, Detective!” an officer called out, holding up one of the police station’s yellow crime-tip forms. “The Martians are here. They learned how to beam people places by watching Star Trek reruns for hours and hours. They killed him because they had to suck out his brain.”

Morris waved a hand in the air. There wasn’t much laughter. There were far more sighs.

Morris motioned to Vickie and Griffin. They followed him into his office.

There was a monitor screen at the side of his desk. Morris picked up a remote control and hit it. “Maybe you can see something I missed. I’ve gone over the digital video or whatever the hell it is from the front-door cameras a zillion times.”

Nothing happened on the screen. Morris swore softly. “Hang on,” he told them. “I have to go find a kid.”

The kid—Officer Benedict, who appeared to be about twenty-five—hurried in after Morris stood at the door and yelled out.

“Here, sir!” Benedict said to Morris, glancing at Griffin and Vickie with a grimace. “This, sir, turns it on. Then just hit this arrow, and it will play. The arrow is Play. But the device must be powered on.”

“I got it this time, I got it!” Morris said. “Hey, these things are new. We just got them in a week or so ago. Thanks, Benedict.”

“Yes, sir,” Benedict said.

“Stay, will you? These special agents might want the footage slowed down.”

There was only one real agent there at the moment—Griffin. But he didn’t say anything and Vickie kept quiet as well.

“We have footage from the opening at eleven o’clock all the way through the night,” Benedict explained. “So, it would take hours to watch it all.”

“Go ahead, start at the beginning,” Griffin told him. “I’ll have you speed it up—but please, Detective Morris, Officer Benedict, please let us know if you see someone coming or going that we should know about.”

“Of course,” Morris told them.

They began to watch the footage. They saw Gary Frampton, the owner, opening the door and looking out on the day, then closing it again. His daughter, Alice, arrived. A small cluster of men and women who’d been identified as kitchen staff showed up. Then later, Lacey Shaw, the Poe lover/gift shop manager, and then their waiter from the night before, whose full name was Jon Skye. More staff ambled on in. Then came the customers.

“There! Stop it. Back up a bit!” Morris told Benedict.

The young officer did as he was told. Morris leaned in to the screen, pointing at people as he said, “There. Naturally there is a major Poe literary society here, a national Poe society and others. Among them is one actually called the Blackbird Society, and they’re dedicated to all things Poe. Franklin Verne belonged nominally to a number of societies, and among them was the Blackbird Society. That woman there, Liza Harcourt, is the president. The man at her side is Alistair Malcolm, vice president of the society, and with them is...” He paused, staring at the screen.

“That’s Brent Whaley,” Office Benedict said. “Another writer. He’s probably best known in science fiction circles, but he loves horror and Poe. Oh, and he belongs to several societies, the Poe one here, and also an H. P. Lovecraft one up somewhere in the northeast, probably Rhode Island, where Lovecraft was from and where he’s buried.”

They all looked curiously at Officer Benedict.

“You have great information,” Griffin told him.

Benedict flushed and shrugged. “My parents are kind of armchair members. They pay their dues and they love to read all the different stories and articles that go out. They’re just kind of homebodies.”

“They all went in together,” Morris noted. “I’ve met Liza and Malcolm, just not Brent Whaley.”

“Well, they must be friends. They’re society friends, at least,” Benedict said.

Other diners came and went. Benedict sped up the recording, and people on the screen began to look like little ants.

Liza left the restaurant at about three thirty in the afternoon.

Malcolm left a few minutes later.

Brent Whaley didn’t seem to leave.

“Take it all the way to the next morning,” Griffin asked.

They watched as the evening diners—including Vickie and Griffin themselves—came and went. They watched as the staff left, including their waiter, Jon Skye, gift-store maven Lacey Shaw and finally Alice Frampton with her father, Gary. Then nothing. Just a few late-night stragglers walking past, but the front door didn’t open again, and the time stamp on the video rolled into the next day.

“Did you see Brent Whaley leave?” Griffin asked, looking at the others.

“Let me run the footage back,” Benedict said.

Morris pointed at the screen when a large group was leaving together. “Is that Whaley there? I think it’s the same man—the top of his head appears to be the same. But maybe not.”

“You have to be right,” Benedict said. “Yeah, that has to be him. He’s just surrounded by that big crowd—looks like it was a rehearsal dinner for a wedding. Guess Brent got into the middle of it.”

“Maybe—or maybe not,” Griffin murmured.

“We’ll find out. Because if he was still in the restaurant... I guess we’ll pick up Brent Whaley. If he tells us he walked out in a crowd...we’ll know for sure. But even with the cameras, there are things that can be missed. And there is the delivery door... Oh, we’ll be really nice. We’ll ask for help from him,” Morris said wearily. He shook his head. “Would one writer kill another? Out of jealousy, anger or a perceived insult?”

Griffin looked at Vickie. “I don’t think it involved writers, but... ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’” he said.