Mike looked at me and whispered, "Is the dude on target?"

"Bull's-eye."

I looked back into the room and could see that the speaker had lost the better part of his audience, if he'd ever held their attention.

"Coleridge uses the word 'fancy' to describe the mode of memory. A poet needs fancy, of course, but it's just his storehouse of images, as memory is for all of us. Now, imagination-well, that's the higher power, the creative form. It's inherent in the words and possessed in the mind of great poets, adding pleasure to-"

The end-of-period bell rang and all but two young women, hanging on to the speaker's every word, clapped their notebooks shut and emptied into the hallway.

The professor, a bespectacled man in his mid-fifties, with a sizable paunch and dull brown hair in need of shaping, walked out explaining Coleridge's primary and secondary imaginative degrees to his young disciples.

"Excuse me, sir, but are you Professor Tormey?" Mike asked.

The man nodded.

"Could you give us a few minutes to chat? Maybe in your office?"

He cocked his head, no doubt trying to figure, unsuccessfully, who we were. Police were probably the farthest thing from his mind. "From administration?"

Mike waited until the young women crammed their notebooks into their backpacks and lumbered off. "NYPD."

Tormey frowned and led us into his small office. He turned on the light, closed the door behind him, and offered us two seats. Walking around his desk, he picked up the three yellow roses that were on his blotter and moved them to the side, putting his lecture notes squarely in front of him. "What's this about?"

Mike told him our names. "We're handling a missing persons case." Anything worked better in eliciting information from people than telling them they might be involved in a murder investigation. Or two.

"A student?" he said, the right side of his mouth pulling back in a twitch.

"An NYU student, actually."

"Well, I haven't had anything to do with NYU in more than a decade."

"Tait. Aurora Tait. Does that name mean anything to you?"

"No. No, it doesn't." The twitch was either a preexisting condition or something with an immediate onset caused by Mike's questions.

"She disappeared from the Washington Square area more than twenty years ago."

"What has that got to do with me?" He looked back and forth between us.

"Maybe you can tell us why you chose to leave NYU for Bronx Community College?" Mike asked.

Tormey twitched and laughed at the same time. "I suppose even a rookie cop would be smart enough to know it wasn't entirely my choice. I crossed boundaries, Mr. Chapman. I believe that's what the dean called it."

"With a student?"

"With-with a couple of students," Tormey said, playing with the edge of his papers.

"It happened more than once, which was more than the school was willing to tolerate."

"Were you tenured?" I asked.

"Painfully close, Miss Cooper. I went from a position teaching some of the most eager, brilliant students you can imagine to- well, I've got a few dreamers here who are motivated to get themselves out of the Bronx, but for most of them, English is a second language, and a very foreign one at that."

"You still teach English literature?"

"English and American. Lucky for me I like the sound of my own voice. I try to teach them, that's all I can do."

"You had a full class today."

"First week of the new term. Attendance is required for at least six classes. I think some of them have hit bottom already."

"But why BCC, after you had to leave NYU?" I asked.

"I couldn't get myself looked at by another institution of that quality here in the city, and my entire family is around this area now. I didn't want to leave. I assumed I'd do my penance for a while and work my way back into a better academic environment," Tormey said, looking somewhat embarrassed. "I just haven't been able to do that."

"You want to try some name associations, Professor?" Mike asked.

A single twitch. "Certainly, if that would help."

"Guidi. Gino Guidi."

Tormey shook his head.

"Ichiko. Dr. Wo-Jin Ichiko."

The corner of Tormey's mouth danced with tension. "Familiar, that one."

"How is that? You know him?"

"Wasn't that the man whose body was found in the river last night? I heard that on the news this morning, before I left home."

"Did you know him? That's what I asked," Mike said.

"No, no, I don't."

"Were you teaching yesterday, Professor?"

"Actually not. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I spent all of yesterday afternoon at my home."

"With anyone?"

"Afraid not. My wife was a lot less tolerant than the head of the department at NYU. She left after the first time I was caught up in a relationship with a student."

"How about the name Emily Upshaw?"

The twitching was off the charts. "I saw that story on the news, too. Such a tragic case, that one. Yes, yes, I knew Emily."

"Intimately?"

"No, Mr. Chapman. Emily was a student of mine-I'd say, Lord, it must have been almost twenty-five years ago. She was very smart, but a girl with more problems than anyone that age should have had to handle. No, no-nothing went on between us. We weren't even close."

Mike sat forward in his chair and stared into Tormey's face. "How many times in your life have you gone to court and posted bail for someone?"

"What do you mean?"

"Emily Upshaw's arraignment. It's all over the court papers that you bailed her out."

Tormey sat up, tapping his fingers on his desktop while he regrouped his thoughts before speaking again. "I'd actually forgotten about that."

"Like I forgot Mariano Rivera blowing the save against the Diamondbacks in the last game of the 2001 World Series. I don't think so. Your lip is moving like it's a 7.0 on the Richter scale."

"There are some things I can't control, Detective. You don't have to mock-"

"Yeah, but you can sure as hell control what you want to tell me, can't you? Think about it for a minute or two. Ever been to court any other time?"

Tormey shook his head.

"It usually makes an impression. You the guy she was stealing the shirts for?"

"Of course not."

"But Emily Upshaw was allowed to make one phone call and you're the jerk she decided to lean on. Why?"

He spoke softly. "I think she trusted me. She'd been working as my research assistant. She'd been spending a lot of time in my office. I'd been trying to convince her that she had some real potential as a writer, if she could get herself cleaned up and get off the drugs."

"Nothing physical between you?"

"I was happily married then, Mr. Chapman. I was thirty years old with a wife and two babies. I hadn't started looking for trouble yet."

"Tell me about the research Emily was doing for you," I asked. "What were you working on?"

"Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Not very titillating, Miss Cooper."

"We heard you talking about him today, from the hallway."

"Well, I've written three books about him and God knows how many articles for academic journals," Tormey said, checking his watch. "Will we go much longer, Detective?"

"Why, you got other plans?"

"There's actually a little ceremony I have to perform outside at eleven o'clock."

"A ceremony? We're here to talk about murder."

Tormey looked to me for help. "I'm not planning to abscond, Miss Cooper. I'll be back up here in half an hour," he said, picking up the three long-stemmed roses as though they explained something. "Or perhaps you'd like to come along. I've just got to put these next to Poe's bust. The students are expecting me."

The professor must have seen me look at Mike when he mentioned the great poet's name. It had figured too prominently in this case to be a coincidence. First Aurora Tait's place of entombment, and then Emily Upshaw's preoccupation with premature burial.