Free The Gravedigger's Ball by Solomon Jones Page A

had nothing to do with anyone’s death, including Clarissa’s,” Ellison said nervously.
    “Maybe not, but you’ve got a pattern of defrauding old women, and Clarissa would’ve been your biggest victim. You couldn’t afford to fight her in divorce court, so the next best thing would’ve been to kill her. As her husband, you would get everything. So you see, Mr. Bailey, you’re the perfect suspect, and the way I see it, you’ve got two options. You can go get a lawyer and try to delay the inevitable, or you can talk before I track down the rest of the old ladies you scammed and see who else ended up dead.”
    Ellison stared at Coletti for a moment. Then he gulped the rest of his martini and looked down into the empty glass. He seemed to be fighting a battle with himself, and from the expression on his face, he was losing. When finally he spoke, it was with a quiet humility that hadn’t been there before.
    “I’ve never killed anybody or arranged to have anyone killed, including Clarissa. I was here sleeping all morning, just like I do most days. I’m sure if you check with Clarissa’s friends, they’ll verify that I’m the laziest man they’ve ever seen. They kept telling her to just grant me the divorce and move on, but Clarissa was much too kind for that. That’s why I cared for her so much.”
    “If you cared for her why did you file for divorce?”
    Ellison got up, walked over to the bar, and made himself a third martini. “You’ve already told me what you think of me, Detective, and, sadly, you’re right. I’m a failed writer who takes money from old women and leaves them worse off than when I found them. I’m not proud of that, but I accept it. That’s why I couldn’t stay with Clarissa. She deserved much better than me.”
    “Why?” Coletti asked skeptically. “What made her any different from the others?”
    “Trite as it might sound, she was a good person,” Ellison said, as he walked toward an oil painting of Clarissa that hung on the far wall. “She funded nurseries for crack babies, shelters for alcoholics, and a million other little causes for people nobody else cared about. She loved humanity, Detective … almost as much as she loved history and the arts.”
    Coletti joined him in front of the portrait. “If she was such a saint, why would someone kill her?”
    “I’m afraid I don’t know much about why people kill,” Ellison said. “I create things. I’m not into death.”
    “But your wife was into death,” Coletti said. “She was heavily involved in fund-raising for a historic cemetery called Fairgrounds.”
    Ellison walked slowly to his seat and sat down. He looked concerned. “Is that where it happened—at the cemetery?”
    “Yes. Does that mean something?”
    Ellison sighed and shook his head. “As I told you, my wife loved history and the arts—writing, especially. She was involved with Fairgrounds Cemetery because she believed it was connected to one of her favorite nineteenth-century writers.”
    “You mean Edgar Allan Poe?”
    Ellison looked surprised. “How’d you know that?”
    “We found a line from ‘The Raven’ near your wife’s body when she died.” Coletti pulled out his notepad and read it. “ Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing…”
    Ellison’s face turned ashen, and Coletti stopped reading.
    “Are you all right, Mr. Bailey?”
    Ellison started mumbling. “I told her to let it go, but she wouldn’t listen.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    He looked at Coletti, unsure how much he wanted to reveal. “Our divorce was about more than just money, Detective. It was also about Clarissa’s insistence on dabbling in things I thought were dangerous. Things she thought were revealed in that poem.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Certain scholars believe Edgar Allan Poe was a seer who stood between life and death and saw something that regular people couldn’t see—some sort of secret that would