How ironic that the place in Greek mythology where those blessed by the gods went after death-the eternal ideal of happiness-became the murder scene for a beautiful young woman, forever memorialized in Poe's story.

I thought of the solution that Poe had worked in his brilliant tale of deduction. "Was it a sailor who killed Mary Rogers?"

"Some thought that," Kittredge said. "There was a rock tied around her waist to weigh her down, and it was made with a sailor's knot. But nobody was ever caught."

"You have any theories?" I asked.

"Did you know there were people who speculated that Edgar Allan Poe was the killer?"

I was shocked. "You must be joking."

"He had enemies, Ms. Cooper. Lots of enemies."

"Yes, but-"

"This was a new form of fiction-the detective story-so some journalists misunderstood it. Thought it displayed an unnatural obsession with the crime. Poe himself was known by many to be an odd young man-personally antagonistic, frequently drunk and depressed, with a chronically sick wife who couldn't have offered him much social companionship. He was known to take long, rambling walks in the woods, ferry rides across the river. The story he wrote had the most incredible detail about the murderer and his methods-things that had never been printed in the newspapers."

"That's hardly enough to link him to killing someone."

"And the bottle of laudanum found near Mary's parasol and scarf? Poe was well-known for his flirtation with opium, in all its forms."

"Not all that unusual at the time."

"Yeah, Ms. Cooper. But put those coincidences together with the fact that he knew Mary Rogers, that maybe she trusted him enough to go-"

"Wait," I said. "Poe actually knew the dead girl?"

"James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving-and yeah, Edgar Allan Poe-they were all her customers at the little cigar shop. If I were investigating this case today, I'd have to say Eddie is someone I'd want to talk to. A person of interest."

"So at some point you made a phone call to Zeldin. Was it about Mary Rogers?"

"Yeah. I'd been online doing research, and also up at the public library on Forty-second Street. Half of the articles I read mentioned this Zeldin character. Makes himself out to be the world's leading expert on Poe. I called him and asked if I could talk to him."

"And he invited you there, to the Bronx?"

"Yeah, to the snuff mill," Kittredge said, turning his attention to Mercer. "You ever smell a setup, Detective? Ever walk into a trap?"

"That's what you think happened?"

Kittredge had been hostile when Mike and I first encountered him, but had warmed considerably when talking about Poe. Now he took on the appearance of a paranoid personality, his eyes flashing between us to see if we credited what he was saying. He fidgeted with everything on the countertop, playing with a pack of cigarettes and twisting a napkin till it shredded in his hands.

"Cost me my job and almost my pension. Somebody set me up."

"In what way?" I asked.

"I was jumped by a pack of kids outside the gate."

"Yeah?"

"They were waiting there for me. Someone must have told them what kind of car I was driving, what I looked like, and that I had a gun."

"How do you know that?"

"'Cause they were yelling to each other when they knocked me to the ground-one was calling out the orders to find the gun. Those kids had no other reason to be there."

"They worked at the gardens, I thought."

"You thought wrong. Two of them used to work there a few years back. These kids all had addresses in Queens. None of them had anything to do with that neighborhood the night this went down." Kittredge fired the words at me.

"Were they armed?" I asked.

"They had knives. All of them had knives," he said, pushing up his jacket and shirtsleeve in search of a scar to display. "Then one of them got my gun."

Mercer pressed on. "But it was one of the kids who got shot, wasn't it?"

"I carried a second pistol on my ankle. An old habit, Detective, from working narcotics. They didn't find that one."

I wasn't a fan of the nuts on the force who thought one gun wasn't enough to do the job.

"Was the boy shot in the back?" Mercer asked, having the good sense to leave out the question of the distance for the moment.

Kittredge walked to the sink, his back to us, and turned on the faucet, running water and rinsing his mug. "Who told you so? That crackpot Zeldin? He's the one that didn't want me in there to begin with. He probably set the whole thing up."

I glanced at Mercer. Kittredge spotted me and called me on it. "You think I'm making this up, huh?"

"No. No, I don't. I can't imagine a reason someone would invite you there, but then not let you in."

He walked toward me and pointed a finger in my face. "Before you go thinking I'm some kind of psycho, spend a little more time checking out that group of screwballs."

"I assume you've already done that, Mr. Kittredge. That's why we're here."

"I knew what the rumor was. Zeldin probably thought I was there to investigate him and his cronies. The Raven Society or whatever they called themselves."

"What-?"

"After I got jammed up I didn't give a damn. I didn't care about police work-real or fictional. I started taking art classes for therapy. Anger management," Kittredge said, waving his arm around at the various incarnations of his favorite nude. He was wild-eyed now that we had stirred up these unpleasant memories.

"But what was the rumor about Zeldin? I don't know what you mean."

"Not just him. His whole little secret society. For somebody who thinks she's pretty smart, you don't really know much about this, do you?"

"I'll take all the help you can give me."

"A very select membership, with very special rules. There are people who believe, Ms. Cooper, that if you want to be admitted to the Raven Society, you have to have killed someone," Kittredge said, walking to the door of his apartment and opening it, to signal the end of our meeting. "You have to have taken a page out of Edgar Allan Poe."

"Ready to give up on this?" Mercer asked. "I know you'd rather be curled up at home with the crossword puzzle."

"Time to pull out that list of names again and see what kind of birds these ravens really are before we keep ruffling their feathers. C'mon, we've got places to go and people to see."

We were back in the car by nine and Lieutenant Peterson was beeping Mercer. He returned the call and gave me the news.

"Loo can't raise anyone over at the UN on a Sunday. Thinks we ought to drop in and start the ball rolling. You got his attention with this diplomatic mission connection to a suspect."

The Sunday-morning ride back through Central Park and over to the FDR Drive was quick. The February chill was powerful as we drove south along the East River. We passed under the Roosevelt Island tram cables, and I avoided glancing off to my left at the elegant remains of the old Blackwell Hospital site that sat on the island's southern tip-the scene of a case we had worked several years back.

Mercer turned off the highway at Forty-eighth Street and squared the block to come around in front of the vast complex that fronted on First Avenue. After the Second World War, when every large American city was competing to host the headquarters of a new international organization to replace the League of Nations, the deal was clinched for New York by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'s gift of $8.5 million which allowed the purchase of seventeen prime acres of real estate in midtown Manhattan's Turtle Bay.

The United Nations opened for business in 1950 with the completion of the now familiar tall and sleek Secretariat Building-our destination this morning-followed later by the General Assembly and conference buildings.