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security directed us to the administration building. From blocks away I could
see the monumental dome of the Gould Memorial Library with its distinctive
green copper patina, clearly a copy of the Roman Pantheon.
As we pulled up in front of the entrance, another guard directed us to a
parking area on the far side of the steps. Mike decided not to put the police
parking plaque on the dashboard, as there was no need yet to declare our
presence on the small campus.
Students milled inside the lobby of the old great hall. No one was dawdling
on the cold, windswept grounds between the buildings that towered over
University Park and the highway below. Somehow, the massive interior columns
of verdigris Connemara marble, the Tiffany stained-glass windows, and the
fourteen-karat gold-leaf coffered dome that once had graced this scholarly
outpost seemed terribly inconsistent with the poorly funded community college
population the institution now serviced.
The faculty listings and campus map were tacked to a board inside a display
case with a cracked glass door. Noah Tormey was listed as a member of the
English department, with an office on the third floor of the old library.
"How are you going to start this off?" I asked as we climbed the dark
staircase.
"Just follow my lead. It's a work in progress."
Adjacent to Tormey's empty room-number 326-was a small lecture hall. An
instructor's voice carried into the corridor and I motioned to Mike to stop
and listen. The schedule posted on the wall next to the door had the week's
classes listed, and this was one of Professor Tormey's. I could see some of
his thirty or so students slumped in their chairs, while a handful were
furiously taking notes as the lecturer spoke.
"Coleridge'sBiographia Literariais the greatest single book of literary
criticism ever written. It suggests to you all the things you must consider to
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discuss a poem, it clears out whatever gets in the way of your understanding
of reading poetry. It was written, of course, because he believed the work of
his dear friend William Wordsworth was the greatest poetic achievement of his
time."
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."
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"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
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