"What do you mean?" I asked.

"If the lawsuit had not been lost, if the building had not been demolished, well-you'd never have come upon that skeleton. It would have been interred behind the brick wall forever, as its killer intended."

"And what do you know about the bones? About those intentions?"

"Nothing more than what I've read in the newspaper and discussed with some of the society's members. We're interested, obviously," Zeldin said, gesturing at Mike with his glass.

"Poe only lived there for one year. What's your interest in that particular place?"

"Yes, Mr. Chapman, just a year. But do you know what he wrote in that house on Third Street?"

We each shook our heads.

"The most exquisite meditation on passion and revenge ever created. A tale called 'The Cask of Amontillado.'"

"Of course," I said. It was one of the most famous of Poe's tales, and I had studied it in a literature course at college. "The narrator entombs someone who has betrayed him behind a brick wall. Buries him alive, laughing while the man screams to be freed. Why is it he did that to his victim?"

Now my mind flashed to images of the young Aurora Tait, left to die inside the very same place where that story was created.

Zeldin's Latin was perfect. "The family motto, Miss Cooper. Nemo me impune lacessit. 'No one insults me with impunity.'"

"Maybe we're on the same page," Mike said. "Is there anyone associated with the society whose name or nickname is Monty? Maybe going back twenty or thirty years?"

"Why do you ask?"

"One of the victims involved may have had a boyfriend named Monty."

"I would guess he was pulling her leg, Detective. It would be a wonderful joke for the killer to take that name, for either of two reasons. There's amontillado itself."

"Sherry?" I asked.

"Exactly. A blend of pale, dry sherry from the Montilla region of Spain. It was casks of this wonderful rare drink that the storyteller invited his prey down into the catacombs to sample. He wanted to get his victim intoxicated enough to pass out, but then have him come around in time to see that the last bricks were about to seal him in forever."

I could imagine Aurora Tait, being lured into the basement on Third Street by someone she had betrayed, with the promise of some pure smack or a stash of high-grade cocaine.

"And then there's the name of the killer himself," Zeldin said. "Don't you remember, Ms. Cooper? Montresor. Poe called him Montresor."

"Monty," Mike whispered. "All the time I'm looking for a guy called Monty, like that was really his given name. If he was Emily's boyfriend, and if he did kill Aurora Tait, he was probably just playing with people's heads, counting on the fact that the junkies in his little self-help group wouldn't have a clue about the stories of Edgar Allan Poe."

"I'm just commenting on the irony of finding the poor woman in that particular location," Zeldin said, backing off a bit, "and here you people are trying to connect it with someone named Monty."

"I got to catch up on my reading," Mike said. "Meantime, if you come across any tales by Poe where someone is killed going over a gorge and pummeled to death in a vortex, be sure and let me know. Once might be a coincidence, twice could be a plan."

"Sounds more Sherlockian than Poe, doesn't it? Professor Moriarity and the great Holmes, struggling with each other at the Reichenbach Falls," Zeldin said. "But then you'll want to move my crutches out of the corner, take down that slim lavender volume of Poeiana on the end of the third shelf and read a bit of it, Mr. Chapman. The story you're looking for is in that collection."

I had never read "A Descent into the Maelstrom," but a scan of the ten pages in one of Zeldin's leather-bound first editions revealed a scene eerily similar to Dr. Ichiko's last minutes on earth. It seemed characteristically Poe to describe "how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner," and then have the narrator watch his own brother disappear into the vast funnel and gyrations of the whirling water below.

At exactly 6P.M., a housekeeper in a gray uniform knocked on the library door. She announced to Zeldin that his physical therapist had arrived and was awaiting him in the exercise room. He looked at us and asked what we wanted him to do.

"Most people I know start their drinking after they work out," Mike said, with his usual skepticism.

"I've got a degenerative nerve condition, Detective. It actually relaxes me to sip on some wine before we go do the therapy."

"May we continue this conversation tomorrow?" I asked.

"Of course, Ms. Cooper. In the meantime I shall inquire about the release of the list of society members' names. And you three should brush up on your Poe."

"Here, at nine o'clock?"

"Actually, I had planned to spend the day at my office tomorrow," he said, as the attendant wheeled him to the door of the spacious room. "You'll find that quite interesting, in light of the death of Dr. Ichiko."

"Why's that?" Mike asked.

"For years until I retired I was the head librarian in the rare books department at the Botanical Gardens," Zeldin said.

Mike was on his way to the door to put the brakes on the wheelchair. "You were at the gardens and yet you didn't know anything about Ichiko's death until you read it in the newspaper?"

"Mr. Chapman, I was in the Mertz Library at an acquisitions meeting all afternoon. By the time my driver came to take me home at four o'clock in the afternoon, according to the published accounts, the poor man's body hadn't even been discovered. The first I knew of it was the morning papers. Julia, please-let's show these people out and get on with my session."

"And this morning," I asked, thinking of our near-miss at the Hall of Fame, "were you in the Bronx again today?"

"Alone here with my books all day. Julia will be only too happy to confirm that."

The housekeeper nodded as she held the door open for us.

"Nine o'clock?" I repeated.

"At the library, inside the Mosholu Parkway gate and turn left."

Once again we were out on a stoop in the cold. "I'm hungry," Mike said, "and everything aches. My tailbone, my pride, my stomach. I need a good steak."

We split up in two cars and met a few blocks away, on Forty-sixth Street, to have dinner at Patroon. This mecca for power business diners and elegant parties had long been a favorite. The waiting area was packed and the hostess was alarmed that we had no reservation.

"Hey, Mike, c'mon upstairs for a drink." The owner, Ken Aretsky, was waving to us from the staircase. We squeezed in through the crowd and walked one flight up to the lounge, past the stunning collection of elegant black-and-white photographs of Manhattan from the forties and fifties.

No matter how packed with tycoons and traders the restaurant was, Ken always made us feel welcome. Within minutes, we each had a drink and a quiet corner in which to catch up on our thoughts.

"Salut," Mike said, clicking our glasses together. "To a peaceful end of a busy day."

"Now how are we going to figure out how to put all these pieces together?" I asked.

"You're the literature major. What do you know about Poe? There's too strong a connection here among Aurora Tait, Emily Upshaw, and Dr. Ichiko to ignore it."

"I know the obvious-a lot of the poetry, some of the stories. I know he was born in Boston, and that his father's family was from Baltimore-which is where he died and was buried. There's a Poe museum in Richmond, where he was raised, before he went to school in Charlottesville."

"Did you ever know about the New York City connection?" Mercer asked.

Mike answered, "There's the place he once lived on West Eighty-fourth Street that Zeldin mentioned. I handled a burglary on the block. Back in the 1840s it was all a farm belonging to the Brennan family, like he said. I think it's even called Poe Alley."