The law school was on Fourth Street, the southern border of the square, and a very short ride from my office. I got out of the cab in front of the main building, careful to step around the icy patches of sidewalk left over from the weekend storm.
A security guard stopped me at the front door and asked where I was going. "The reception has already started, miss. It's in the new building, not here."
"But I thought-"
"Eighty-five West Third Street."
My dismay was obvious. I had rushed Nan off the phone and never asked the exact address. Now I didn't feature going back out into the cold.
"Just around the corner, miss," the guard said. "Not very far. The block between Sullivan and Thompson Streets."
It felt like it was twenty degrees or below outside. I put my head down and fought the wind as I made my way down the narrow street, so typical of Greenwich Village. I followed several men with litigation bags up the steps of the small brick building in the middle of the block, moving against the flow of other partygoers on their way out.
"Your coat, madam?" A young man standing beside a metal rack checked my things and I continued inside until I saw my friends from the office.
"I recommend the red," Catherine Dashfer said, holding up her glass. "Enough of the wine and you won't feel quite the urge to punch out Scalia when they discuss his opinions."
"Sorry it took me so long. I went to the law school first. What's this?" I looked around at the bare walls of this shell of a building, which looked more like a tenement than a major academic facility.
"They're tearing this dump down and putting up an enormous new structure in its place," Nan said. "Check it out downstairs."
"Check what out?"
"The dean's got a construction crew in the basement, using crowbars to break down pieces of the wall."
"Seven o'clock at night? With that kind of overtime, no wonder the tuition here is so high."
"It's all part of the show for this evening's alumni dedication ceremony for the new school building."
The bartender handed me a glass of red wine. "Am I supposed to say that sounds like a riveting evening? Worth skipping the lecture to see?"
"Not exactly. But this brownstone is more than two hundred years old. The excavation has turned up all sorts of artifacts from colonial days. Teacups, silverware, pewter bowls. You'd love it."
"Why now? Why tonight?"
"Give the big donors a show. How often do you get to see a bit of New York City history uncovered before your very eyes? C'mon."
"I've seen enough. It's claustrophobic down there," Marisa Bourgis said to Sarah Brenner, the deputy of my unit, who was nodding in agreement.
"I'm game," I said, and followed Nan and Catherine to the staircase that led down to the basement.
Two dozen men in a variety of pin-striped and chalk-striped suits mingled with a handful of lady lawyers, while three other guys in hard hats chipped away at discolored old bricks. A table in the corner held the assorted debris recovered from behind the eastern portion of the wall that had been revealed in the hours before I arrived. I sipped at my wine and examined a wooden implement- some kind of primitive kitchen tool, I assumed-while Nan stopped to speak with one of her former professors.
"What would you guess this is?" Catherine asked me, holding up a twisted piece of black metal. "A pair of spectacles or-"
The crowded space reverberated with the shrill screech of a woman who looked as though she had been one of the earliest female graduates of the distinguished law school. She was on the far side of the room and several of the men rushed to help her to a chair.
"Poor old dame probably got nailed by the backswing of a crowbar," Catherine said. "Every ambulance chaser in the house will be looking for a piece of the action."
We walked toward the site of the commotion. A couple of welldressed visitors had moved to the staircase to hold off onlookers from above, while others clustered in front of the fractured bricks, staring into a dark hole and murmuring their surprise. One man moved aside and I stepped into his place.
Perfectly smooth ivory-colored bones framed the empty orbital sockets that met my horrified stare. I was face-to-face with a human skull, buried behind the ancient wall.
4
Mike Chapman stood in front of the skeletal head that had been exposed in the basement of the Third Street building. "The Thin Man, eh, Coop? What homicide dick wouldn't give his left leg to come face-to-face with the Thin Man?"
The professor assigned by the law school dean to wait out the arrival of the police didn't seem to appreciate Mike's humor and had no reason to know that every unidentified corpse he encountered was given a nickname, some way for him to personalize the task at hand.
"Whaddaya expect me to do here?" Mike said, turning to Nan and me. "It's not even my jurisdiction."
"You think I'd call those guys at Manhattan South after the way they treated me on that last case?" I said.
"I'm not talking geography." Mike was the very best detective assigned to Manhattan North Homicide, the elite squad responsible for all unnatural deaths from the farthest tip of the island down to Fifty-ninth Street, and we had worked scores of investigations together. "I'm talking centuries. I got people tripping over me and my partner to get to the morgue-they're shooting and stabbing each other, sticking up bodegas for nickels and dimes, throwing babies out windows like there were trampolines on the sidewalk, filling hypodermics with poison and poppin' 'em in their veins. Current events are overwhelming me and you broads call me down here 'cause some old colonial codger got buried in the basement two hundred years ago?"
The construction workers had started to pull the bricks away to about chest level. The figure seemed frozen in place, raised arms bent and fingers outstretched, as though they had been pressing against the wall that had entombed them.
But the workmen stopped at that point-at our urging-as the bones began to shift and several ribs dropped away to the floor of the dark hole in which the fully articulated skeleton stood.
"I called Hal Sherman at the Crime Scene Unit while Alex was looking for you," Nan said to Mike. Every prosecutor had a favorite detective and we each hoped to get one of them to respond as quickly as possible this time. "I think I can still hear him laughing."
"You picked the right night, bright eyes. CSU's got a pile of body parts sticking out of a snow mound that was plowed off a street in TriBeCa last weekend and a domestic with five down, the perp still out looking for his wife's goombah. You bet Sherman's laughing at you. This antique bag of bones is not going to be a priority for him or anybody else in the department until the spring thaw. It'll probably take the docs that long to figure out what they've got and how long it's been here."
Professor Walter Davis stepped away from the skeleton. "What do you propose to do about this, Mr. Chapman?"
"I've got a call into the medical examiner's office. They'll send a death investigator over to figure out how to dismantle this character properly and give him a place to lay down for a while. Long time to be on your feet."
"Who's coming?" I asked.
Mike shrugged. "I asked for Dorfman. Andy Dorfman."
The office had only one forensic anthropologist. The overwhelming number of old bones that people came across in an urban setting belonged to animals that had once roamed the place more freely, and sometimes to humans who had died of natural causes. Every now and then, the remains could be linked to a homicidal death.
"That's why you stopped the digging?"
"You got it. Andy doesn't like anybody touching his bones until he's eyeballed the setup for himself. I'm just waiting to see if he's available so I can help him get started."
Dorfman was a perfectionist, a brilliant detail man who at thirty-eight had been a leader in this specialty long before recent television shows and popular media made his work seem chic. We had recently consulted him to determine the identity of a body that had been reduced to charred pieces of bone and left in the furnace of an aband
oned building in Harlem. The ex-lover who killed his pregnant girlfriend was convicted on the basis of the forensic work, and as a result of Dorfman's success, the chief medical examiner hired him away from his academic position at a Texas university.
"Look, Mr. Chapman. Can we just lock up the basement and get about our business? Surely this… this"-Professor Davis waved his hand at the silent skeleton-"this can wait until tomorrow."
"You got somebody's briefs you got to get into? We can handle this without you."
Davis fidgeted and kept looking to the staircase. It was not unusual for people to be uncomfortable in the presence of death, but these remains looked more like an exhibit in a museum or medical school display case than those of someone who had recently shuffled off his mortal coil.
"The dean asked me to wait with you. Of course I'll stay."
"How old's this tenement?" Mike asked.
Nan had gone upstairs to refresh our glasses of wine and bring one for Mike. The dean had swept everyone else out of the building, including the bartenders, who had abandoned their station but left their cargo behind.
"It was built more than two hundred years ago," Davis said. "That's what all the community fuss was about when the law school trustees bought the place. Neighborhood people wanting to declare it a historic landmark, even though it wasn't architecturally significant. I handled the lawsuit for the university."
Mike lifted his glass to the Thin Man. "Cheers, buddy. We'll have you out of that wall in no time."
"Can these scientists actually tell, Detective, how long this body has been here?"
"It's a little bit of modern forensics and a lot of circumstantial evidence. Me, I like when you find one of these guys clutching an old newspaper with the date on it. The 1805 town crier, with the latest reports on Napoléon's victory over the Austrians at Austerlitz. Short of that, I turn it all over to the medical examiner," Mike said.
"Strange way for someone to go to his eternal rest, isn't it?" I asked. "Standing up inside a brick coffin."
"And naked. Unless his drawers fell down to his kneecaps and I just can't see them in there, he's stark naked. Somebody could have had the decency to spring for a black suit, don't you think?" Mike said, turning back to the professor. "Were there people living here when the university bought the building?"
Davis nodded. "Yes, it was completely occupied until a couple of years ago. This basement was the original kitchen of the house, which explains some of the pottery and cooking tools that have been dug up. Then in the 1940s it was a restaurant called Bertololloti's, refitted for apartments in the sixties. In fact, it's generally been students and faculty who've lived in here going back decades. The way the campus has grown, it's conveniently in the middle of things."
"I know a few guys who are gonna hate you for this, Coop. Some poor slob over at the cold case squad will be digging through occupancy records and census data till his pension vests, trying to figure out whether any tenants disappeared or people were reported missing over the past few centuries."
Professor Davis had seated himself on the edge of the table in the far corner, where the recently dug artifacts were displayed. "You don't hear a heartbeat, do you?"
Mike smiled at him. "I didn't see you drinking, Mr. Davis. These bones have been picked clean."
"The floorboards, Detective. I'm not talking about the chest cavity."
Mike looked at me quizzically but I was just as puzzled as he.
"No telltale heart, Mr. Chapman? I'll give your colleagues a head start. This building was once the home of Edgar Allan Poe. This grim little structure was known to the neighbors as Poe House."
5
Mike Chapman ushered Andy Dorfman down the narrow staircase shortly after 9P.M. "The last place that Poe lived in Manhattan, that's what the professor was telling us. Eighteen forty-five, right?"
"Eighteen forty-five, forty-six. It was called Amity Street then. Number Eighty-five Amity Street. Greenwich Village," Davis said.
Dorfman was as excited by the find as I was. The literature major in me thought it extraordinary to be in these haunting surroundings that Poe had actually inhabited. The literary provenance seemed to matter not at all to the forensic anthropologist. He made straight for the skeleton and spent several minutes just staring at it, his two technicians over his shoulder, before he set his large metal case on the floor and opened it to remove some of his tools and a camera.
Mike leaned in to talk to Andy. "What can I do to be useful? Imagine you've got the greatest American writer of his time, the man who created the first fictional detective-damn, I bet Coop can recite his poetry, can't you?-and all the while he's living next door to a corpse."
Andy waved him off. "Back off, Mike. Let me get some shots before we open this up. Any bets that Poe himself was the perp?"
I thought of all the stories I had read from adolescence on by the master who created the genre that had become modern crime writing, including everything from mystery and detection to horror.
"That's like suggesting someone in my own family's a murderer," Nan said. "Don't break my heart."
"You have to admit," I said, as Andy's flash went off repeatedly and his assistant loaded film into a second camera, "he was fascinated with premature burial and entombing people in odd ways."
"These bones are gonna talk to Andy. They're gonna tell him everything," Mike said. "Seven hundred homicides a year citywide. How many are like this-skeletal remains?"
"Only one for the last twelve months," Andy answered.
"No wonder you're so frisky. You might earn your keep, starting out the new year with something to dig your teeth into."
Pathologists worked with soft tissue-flesh, brains, organs. Anthroplogists worked with bone, and rarely in New York City did Andy get the chance to do only that.
"Here's what we're going to do. The three of us will try to take another section of brickwork down. You got gloves, Mike? I may need you to hold on to your friend here as we remove the support in front of him. Then we'll see whether there's anything inside with him, on the ground, to give us a sense of date."
Mike pulled a pair of rubber gloves out of his rear pants pocket and started to put them on, while Andy's assistant tossed some to Nan and to me.
"So, where's his fingers?" Mike asked, stepping toward the wall.
"The phalanges probably dropped off. Small bones do that," Andy said, shining his flashlight over the side of the brick column and looking down. "The spinal ligament's still in place. That's what connects the bones to each other, so it keeps the body and head together-for the moment. But your friend's never going to come out of here in one piece. This will be a long night."
Andy and his team were suited for work in white lab coats and boots, and they laid out a sheet on the floor in front of the skeleton's vertical coffin. Professor Davis watched us from his remote corner of the room.
With construction tools that they had brought with them, Andy's assistants began to chip carefully away at the layer of bricks. The first four came out easily, and still the upper torso remained in place.
"Mind if I try something?" Mike said, lifting one of the stones and carrying it over to the table. He compared it with several others that had been mounted there and labeled as objects from the original foundation. "Looks like it could be as old as the ones removed from another part of the wall earlier today."
"This building has been restored and rehabilitated so many times over the years that it's entirely possible there were piles of the old materials just stored down here in the basement, maybe used and reused," Professor Davis said.
Andy was bagging a couple of the bricks, and into another envelope he was scraping the substance that had bonded each of them to the others. "Whatever this cementlike compound is might give us a clue about age."
He laid the bags carefully on the floor, to be tagged and numbered, just as each piece of stone had come down from the wall.
I picked one up and ran my gloved finger over the surface, sm
oothing out the plastic so I could examine the stone. It was the color of a burnt sienna Crayola, faded from its once red glaze. It was pocked and pitted on the exterior surface, smooth on the sides where it had been resting against one of its mates. The taupecolored sealant was clumped on the top and bottom, some substance that had fixed it in place for all the years it had been here.
"You and Alex mind holding hands with him for a minute?" Andy asked. "Gently, Mike. Not like he's a suspect in a homicide."
We stood on either side of the Thin Man, an arm under each elbow, as Andy directed us while he worked below us to free the last foot of space to ease the rest of the removal. I had handled bones before at the morgue, and I had seen my share of human skeletons on late-night visits to the medical school at the University of Virginia when I was engaged to a student there. This was eerily different and discomforting, as I wondered what brought our unfortunate soul to such a macabre resting place, naturally or unnaturally.
"You see anything down there?" Mike asked.
"Nothing from this angle, but it's too dark to tell." He picked up his camera and took more photographs, including close-ups from head to legs. "Okay, guys, let's go."
The technicians who were assisting Andy moved in next to him. They replaced Mike and me, one of them taking hold of the arms and the other of the skull, while Andy secured the lower torso. Together they moved the skeleton slowly and painstakingly out of the brick niche and swiveled it onto the sheet, laying it out flat. Leg bones fell away and clattered to the bottom of the brick shaft, and Andy returned to reach in to retrieve them. One by one, he kneeled and laid them out to complete his human jigsaw puzzle, gently and deliberately.
"First thing we're going to do, Mike, is give your pal a new name," Andy said, leaning back on his heels.
"Because?"
"Because I think he's a she."
"Ah-hah! Once some more of the bricks came down I was beginning to wonder. But then I've been told you need a magnifying glass to see my private parts, too."
Entombed Page 3
