I loved the poem-everything about it. The tale of the young man, devastated by his lover's death, visited on a bleak winter night by the stately ebony bird. The fact that the bird could talk (Poe eventually described in an essay his plan to use a creature that was nonreasoning but capable of speech). The pulsating rhythm of the stanzas building as the narrator recognizes the torture of his fate, realizing that he will not find peace in forgetting his beloved. And of course, the haunting refrain of the raven's taunting reminder- "Nevermore."

At the end of the poem there was a note, reminding the casual reader that Poe considered his bird "the emblem of mournful and never-ending remembrance."

I thought of all the deaths that had occurred in this last week- unnatural and unnecessary, each of them-and closed the book.

I dried off and got into bed, reading myself to sleep.

We had no idea what kind of schedule Aaron Kittredge kept, so Mercer had offered to pick me up at six-thirty on Sunday morning. We drove to the block where he lived, on West End Avenue, and parked at a hydrant in front of the stoop, waking ourselves up slowly with coffee from the corner bodega.

For almost an hour we talked about Mike and Valerie. Mercer had left him at his own apartment last night, and one of his sisters was waiting there. She had arranged to take him out to see his mother and spend the rest of the weekend with his family.

At seven-thirty sharp, I saw Kittredge come out of the building and trot down the steps. Both of us got out of the car and I called his name.

He turned his head toward me but kept walking away, swinging his gym bag. I went after him, trying to keep up with his pace.

"Mr. Kittredge, I've got to see you."

"Another day. I'm late."

"I need twenty minutes."

"I told you what I know. Yesterday's news. Lay off me."

Joggers and dog walkers were interested in the scene. I dodged between them.

I called out a single word: "Ratiocination."

Kittredge stopped and turned around. "Now there's a word I haven't heard in a very long time. Who's your sidekick this time?" he asked. "You trade in the wise-mouth for the strong, silent type?"

"Mercer Wallace, Special Victims."

"Let's take this conversation off the street," he said, removing his keys out of his pocket and leading us back to his apartment.

He let us inside and motioned us to sit in the living room, while he opened the bedroom door and whispered something-probably explaining our presence-to the girlfriend.

Kittredge didn't know what to make of us. "So what's this? The book club of the Manhattan DA's office? Or are you reading fiction now to try to find out how to solve cases?"

He poured himself a cup of coffee but didn't offer any to us.

"Can we start with Emily Upshaw again?" I asked.

"Suit yourself."

"The story she told you when you first met her, about the boyfriend who claimed to have killed a girl?"

"Yeah?"

"The day I was here with Mike Chapman, Edgar Allan Poe's name didn't come up in that conversation. What I want to know is whether Emily ever mentioned that she thought the murder she was telling you about had anything to do with Poe."

He shook his head. "You know what kind of reception she got from the desk sergeant when she walked in the station house and started talking about a woman holed up alive behind a wall of bricks? Nobody thought she was wrapped too tight. The last thing I think she woulda done is make literary allusions to try to impress a bunch of harebag cops."

"But you," I asked, "when she spent time with you, didn't she mention it?"

"Emily introduced me to Poe. That was much later on, though, when she was hanging out here, trying to get her act together."

"And was it in the context of this murder her boyfriend had told her about?"

"I guess it was. You know the short stories?"

"Some of them," I said.

"I'd never known any of them. Emily had an anthology. She made me read a few tales-'The Cask of Amontillado,' 'The Black Cat.'"

"Both of those are about people who were bricked up alive. Didn't that make you take her more seriously?"

"Me? Hey, Ms. Cooper," he said, refilling his mug. "I may have been the only guy in town who gave her the time of day. Quite frankly, between the booze and the blow she ingested, and the fact that there was no missing victim and no crime scene, even though I tried to help her at first, I began to think she was just lifting the crap she was telling me right out of the fiction she liked to read."

"But you must have gotten enough into Poe's work to become interested in ratiocination, didn't you?"

"What makes you think so?"

"Your visit to the New York Botanical Gardens, Mr. Kittredge," I said. "Your meeting-or your aborted visit-with a man called Zeldin."

Kittredge put the coffee down in the sink and bent his head before turning back to me.

"I guess the department spit up the old story to you. Is that fool still around?"

"You want to tell us why you wanted to see Zeldin?" Mercer asked. "Did it have anything to do with Emily Upshaw?"

"She'd been out of the picture for a decade when that shooting happened," Kittredge said, thinking for a minute before he spoke. "I guess you're right, in a sense. Emily had nothing to do with it directly, but she left that book of short stories here. I picked it up about ten years later, when someone told me it was Poe who wrote the first detective stories in literature."

"Emily hadn't talked about those?" I asked.

"Nah. She was interested in the bizarre and macabre. It was 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' that got me hooked."

"On what, the techniques of Monsieur Dupin?" I asked, referring to Poe's amateur sleuth.

"I liked a character that used his brain to solve crimes."

"But he ridiculed the Parisian police, didn't he?"

"He thought like a detective. It fascinated me. You know the others?"

"Poe's other detective stories? Only that there are three that feature Auguste Dupin," I said.

"Yeah. 'The Purloined Letter' and 'The Mystery of Marie Roget,'" Kittredge said. "What most people don't know is that Marie Roget was based on a real case-on a murder that occurred in New York. You knew that?"

"I had no idea. I mean, if I remember correctly, he makes a reference to coincidences between his story and an actual murder here, but I assumed that was just a fictional device to hook the reader."

"It made me curious, so I looked it up. There was no cold case unit at the time, and it was before I'd started painting. I just thought it would be interesting to take a stab at the original case, since it had never been solved."

"But it must have happened over a hundred-"

"Eighteen forty-one. So what? People are still trying to figure out who Jack the Ripper was, aren't they? Who killed Cleopatra? Was Alexander the Great murdered?"

"Who was the victim?" I asked.

"Mary Rogers," he said, smiling. "Poe just added a French accent and moved her to Paris."

"And she was a shopgirl, too?"

"She worked in a tobacconist's store, selling cigars, down on Broadway near Thomas Street," Kittredge said. "Right up the street from where police headquarters and your office stand today."

"And are the facts similar?"

"Pretty close. The beautiful Miss Rogers failed to return home one evening. There was no such thing as a missing persons bureau, so her family put an ad in the New York Sun, asking for information about her disappearance. A few days later-bingo."

"They found her?"

"Raped, beaten, strangled to death with a piece of lace from her petticoat. Somebody came upon her body in the Hudson River, on the other side, right near Hoboken."

"How'd she get there?" I asked.

"Mary probably took the ferry over with a suitor. There was a kind of lovers' lane then, called the Elysian Fields."