Privy to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  “Got it. So I get to sift through that lovely dirt with my hands, looking for something dirty that’s about an inch long?”

  “Right. Hey, you volunteered.”

  “I’m the smallest one around—you wouldn’t fit.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  The foreman returned with a relatively narrow ladder, which he slid into the pit. “I’m going to insist you wear a hard hat, or I’ll have state and federal authorities crawling all over me. And here’s a flashlight, and a pair of work gloves, and some protective goggles.” He handed her the items. “We think we cleared out anything big. If you find something small, you can put it in your pocket. If it’s too big for that, we’ll have to work something out.”

  “Fair enough. I’m going in.” Marty turned around and backed down the ladder. I heard a few muttered curses, and then she called out, “Pull the ladder up now.” Logan did.

  I could hear Marty scrabbling around the detritus at the bottom of the pit, and tried not hard to think about the fact that it had once been a privy. A long time ago. At least a century, right? And she’d volunteered, even knowing its history. How bad could it be?

  “Put the ladder back,” she called out, after what must have been fifteen minutes. The foreman complied quickly, and Marty clambered out.

  “Well?” I said.

  She nodded, the turned to the foreman. “Thanks for your help, Joe. I got what I needed.”

  The poor guy stood there for a few seconds, obviously waiting for an explanation, but Marty didn’t volunteer anything else, so in the end he pulled out the ladder, picked it up, and left. We waited until we could no longer hear his footsteps.

  “Okay, what’ve you got?”

  “Some nice china shards, and what I think is an old pipe—couldn’t be sure.” Marty grinned wickedly. “And these.”

  She reached into her pocket, then pulled her hand out and opened it to reveal three brass cartridges, tarnished and covered with soil—and I recognized them immediately. “Damn! These cartridges are .45 ACPs. They were invented in 1905. The timing fits.”

  “What?” Marty said. “Wait? Why do you know this?”

  “Long story. The point is, we’ve just narrowed down what weapon we’re looking for.”

  “Hang on,” Marty said, “we’ve just shown there was a weapon, probably when the box went into the pit. Unless some idiot came down here and felt like chucking bullets into a hole in the ground. At least they’re whole shells, not just the casings, so they weren’t fired here?”

  “Right again. Ergo, they must fit the missing weapon.”

  Marty said. “Why are you assuming the gun was in the box when it was tossed? How do you know that the gun wasn’t removed first, and then the box was dumped?”

  “Like, how do you prove something wasn’t there?” I retorted. “I can’t, but think about it: Why would anyone kill Carnell over a bunch of old cartridges? There had to be a gun. Carnell would have seen it in the pit and known he could sell it, so he hid it in a pocket or under his belt and didn’t tell anyone. But somebody else saw him pocketing something—maybe one of his construction buddies—and followed him when he left.”

  “Maybe.” Marty didn’t look convinced. “So what is it we’re supposed to do with this piece of information?” she demanded.

  After my first burst of deductive reasoning, I had run out of steam. We still had no more than some chemical traces and some wild hypotheses—and no gun. Nothing worthy of taking to the police yet. “I . . . really don’t know. I need to think. You need to shower and change clothes.” When I looked at my watch, I was shocked to see that the workday was barely half-over. “Late lunch? Early supper?”

  “I smell that bad? No, don’t tell me. I’ll go home and clean up. You gonna tell Hrivnak? Or James?”

  “Marty, please.” I held up one hand to stop her. “I need to get my head around this first. Don’t worry, I won’t do anything without consulting you. Let’s go upstairs.”

  We took the elevator up to the first floor, where Marty in her present condition evoked a couple of stares, which she ignored. She headed straight out the front door, and I went back to my office, where I sat and stared into space, trying to think.

  Henry had said the broken box with the brass fittings that we’d pulled out of the pit in the basement dated to the eighteenth century and probably came from the same furniture maker as the famous Terwilliger furniture. I trusted his opinion.

  Henry also said he had found traces of gunshot residue—a kind that hadn’t existed until 1884—and gun oil on the bits of wood we’d given him. I was less sure of that fact, since the box had been sitting in a hole in the floor for over a century. But he was the test-machine wizard, and I’d have to accept what he and his machines told us.

  And now Marty and I had found cartridges from an appropriate era in the same hole. And I was guessing that there was a weapon, that it also been in the pit, along with the cartridges, and that Carnell had pocketed it. Should I tell the police that they should test Carnell’s clothing for firearms residue? Would their equipment even be able to detect such small traces, and how quickly could they do it?

  Had someone seen Carnell take the weapon out of the building, then taken it from him and made sure he was dead so he couldn’t tell anyone about it?

  Where did the Terwilliger family fit in all this?

  If I tried to explain this to the police, what would they think? But if I didn’t tell them and the gun showed up in a crime now, I’d be liable for something, wouldn’t I? Would it be concealing evidence if the concealing took place before the crime?

  And why had the hypothetical gun hypothetically ended up in the pit at all?

  I was getting tired of my own thoughts. I hadn’t heard from Marty, who lived a short walk away—maybe she was taking a very long bath. And thinking along the same lines I was, about where her grandfather and her father fit in this puzzle, that now included an old or antique firearm. I stood up, stretched, and meandered out to Eric’s desk.

  “I collected those board files you asked about, Nell,” Eric said.

  Great—if I wanted to read them in time to talk about them tomorrow morning, I’d have to take them home. James would love that. “Thank you, Eric—that was fast. Nothing from Latoya?”

  Eric shook his head.

  “Shelby?”

  “I saw her for about a minute earlier, but she said she was still working on what you asked.”

  There was not a whole lot more I could do before the end of the day. We’d all be hearing the new information cold at the meeting in the morning—assuming there was anything to hear. “Okay, let me take the management files home with me and go over them and see if I learn anything. Do they include budgets, Eric?”

  “They do. Don’t worry—it’s not too big a stack, not from those early days.”

  That was good news and bad news. “Let’s hope we find something.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I caught a ride home with James, which was a good thing since I was hauling the batch of files with me. They weren’t particularly heavy, but they were irreplaceable—and they might contain evidence crucial to solving a murder. A very slim chance, I knew, but it was nice to have an armed FBI agent protecting them. Even if he didn’t know it.

  We had a pleasant dinner, and then I announced, “I have some Society stuff I need to review this evening. I thought I’d spread out on the dining room table.” We usually ate in the kitchen anyway. The table and its four chairs were the only pieces of furniture in the dining room; luckily there was an overhead chandelier, emerging from an opulent cast-plaster medallion, to provide light, even if it was a challenge to replace the bulbs so far above.

  “Okay,” James said amiably. “I think there’s a game on. I’ll wash up, if you’ve got work to do.”

  I wasn’t about to turn down that offer, so I grabbed up
my files and retreated to the dining room. I set them down, pulled up a chair, and started sorting the files into piles. I had to suppress a sneeze—it was pretty clear that no one had looked at these for a long time, and they were dusty.

  As Eric had said, there really wasn’t very much. Administration circa 1900 had been a bit casual—a bunch of old—and male—friends getting together now and then because they loved history and/or their families had been part of making that history so they felt some kind of social responsibility. And if meeting schedules had been haphazard then, the notes and reports taken from them had been even more so. This was going to take some digging.

  However, as I read, I found myself becoming more and more interested. A lot of this was information I had known in broad terms; I’d used a lot of this background when I was raising money for the Society. As I quickly discovered, the period I was interested in was particularly busy in some rather intriguing ways. I started to make rough notes of my own.

  Anyone familiar with the history of Philadelphia—or any other old city, for that matter—knows that city centers and neighborhoods shift over time (often surprisingly rapidly, in hindsight). It looked as though the decision to build a new City Hall for Philadelphia, on a square in the middle of the city, had been a precipitating factor in shifting the focus away from the waterfront.

  It was while construction was under way on that building that the Society had purchased the mansion that had stood on Locust Street. As Lissa had told me, the Society had been renting space before that, but as the collections grew, particularly toward at the end of the nineteenth century, so did the conviction that a dedicated permanent space was the best choice. I noted that as of 1899 there were nearly 1,600 members of the Society, and an endowment that sounded sizable but was mostly restricted to collections acquisitions and maintenance—the reality was, member contributions weren’t enough to pay for even basic operating costs. And at that point there were only a handful of paid employees—the head librarian, an assistant librarian, a cataloger added in 1891, and a woman who specialized in manuscript repair. There wasn’t even a general secretary until 1907.

  Still, the flood of collections donations demanded action, so in 1901 the Society announced a renovation plan, with an estimated cost of two hundred thousand dollars—but only twenty-two individuals contributed money to that campaign. However, by a great stroke of luck, the president of the Society became governor of the Commonwealth right about then, and—surprise—the Society received a nice state grant for fifty thousand dollars, which made it possible to begin construction. That construction was finished in a year. Fast work! I wondered if the money had been paid up front, or if the disbursement was contingent on completion.

  Now we were getting to the interesting stuff. After that first success, the Society decided to go even bigger, helped along by another state grant of a hundred thousand dollars—nothing like having friends in high places!—and that was the renovation that required the demolition of all but the foundations of the old mansion. So that had taken place between 1905, when the first phase was officially dedicated, and 1907, when the second phase was completed. Again, a very quick turnaround, considering that it was far more than a mere remodeling. But not everything went smoothly, because the formal opening didn’t take place until 1910. Had they spent those three years sorting out and installing the burgeoning collections? I sympathized, since I was dealing with the same issues.

  I made a few more notes, mostly because I was intrigued: the grand staircase followed the outline of the original mansion staircase; the reading room off the lobby had been the only space open to the public; and the nice space under the stairs, where we were meeting in the morning, had once been the librarian’s office, since he was supposed to emerge from his lair and greet visitors in the lobby. Nice office! The third floor had held only the offices for the cataloger and for manuscript repair, and the fourth floor had been entirely empty, waiting for future collections. I wondered briefly how long it had taken to fill that, because it was certainly stuffed to the rafters now.

  I sat back and ran my fingers through my hair. So, what had I learned? That the window of opportunity to hide the lap desk, intact or otherwise, was very brief, as we had suspected—limited to the years between 1905 and 1907. That there was essentially very little oversight of the collections by official staff. That the public had little access but the members probably could roam at will throughout the building. Next I turned to the board minutes, a pitifully thin pile. Mostly they recorded the date and time of the meeting, members present, and motions taken and approved (there seemed to be little argument among the board members, or if there was, it had been deliberately omitted from the official record). I wondered if the request for state funding had originated from the governor himself, who was probably all too aware of the pressing needs of the Society, or if some board member could claim the glory for proposing the idea. Either way, the money had materialized and been spent in record time. Things were a lot simpler back then.

  Then I looked at the treasurer’s reports, an equally slim pile. Balance sheets and cash flow. I didn’t see anything recording collections contributions, at least not with any monetary value attached (how ungentlemanly that would be!). Maybe Latoya had found those. The balance sheet showed a long list of restricted endowments, as I expected, and the infusion of the state monies. I made a mental note to check with our architect to see if he had been given not only the building plans but also the costs and expenditures of the second construction project, because I didn’t see them in the papers in front of me. Or maybe Shelby had copies of them in her files, since there must have been donor contributions to supplement the government funds. I wondered if the Society’s treasurer—another unpaid position, appointed from among the board members—was a financial professional or merely a willing volunteer. So many of the board members appeared to be lawyers or bankers—and all were male. The classic group of good ole boys, Philadelphia style. I bet if I looked up their addresses in those days, most would have lived somewhere along the Main Line.

  James came up from behind me and set a mug of tea next to me (on a coaster!). “That looks rather dry,” he commented.

  “It’s part of the history of the Society. It’s also part of the quest for That Which We Cannot Talk About.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  I couldn’t resist going on. “It’s interesting objectively because the Society had these wonderful collections, even in 1900, with more coming in, especially as Philadelphians fled to the suburbs and didn’t want to take their tatty old stuff with them, but the place was run with only a few paid employees and a board made up of old buddies. Remember the wine cellar? That went in during one of the renovations early in the twentieth century. Wonder which line item in the budget that was.”

  “What are you looking for?” he asked.

  I debated making a snarky remark, but since he had asked . . . “I’m not sure, really. Anything that seems out of place. Anything referring to the renovation project, particularly the second phase, when the old mansion was torn down. Any financial anomalies. But all the records here are so sketchy that it’s hard to know what went on. And in a way it didn’t matter—the Society survived, even with the pathetic level of oversight back then. Of course, we’re still fighting the same battles now, particularly in terms of housing and caring for the collections, but we’re still here.”

  James was now kneading my shoulders, which was a bit distracting, even as he leaned over to read the exposed documents. “What it sounds like you’re saying is that almost anyone on the board or on this small staff could have done almost anything he wanted, and either no one would have noticed, or the gentlemen would have closed ranks to protect one of their own.”

  What he said made sense. “Exactly. So if John Doe had an affection for, let’s say, a choice portfolio of 1870s erotica and took it home for his own enjoyment, the librarian and his friends would have looked the
other way, and there would have been no paper trail.”

  “You have erotica in the collections?” James feigned horror.

  “Yes, that—or even more valuable items, like silver or portraits. I don’t have to tell you that if something had belonged to a family for generations, the current generation might feel it was theirs by right, even if the item in question had been donated and changed hands years earlier, with plenty of documentation. I’ve seen it many times. ‘Great-grandpa’s letter should be mine,’ says the patron, sticking it in his jacket pocket. And then there’s the question of money.”

  “What about it?” James asked.

  “Well, there was an unusual amount of it coming in and going out between 1900 and 1907, when construction was finished. At least a hundred and fifty thousand from the state government, for a start. If the treasurer was an amateur, he might not have caught any irregularities. So if someone on the board was helping himself to funds . . . how would anyone know?”

  “I don’t suppose you have canceled checks from 1906?” James asked.

  I wasn’t sure if he was kidding—but then, I wasn’t sure we didn’t have those items buried somewhere in our files. “We might. But I’m not exactly sure where they’d be stored. I can ask Eric to look for them in the morning. Or maybe the bank has records, although they’re probably either in digital format now or archived somewhere off-site.”

  “You’ve been using the same bank from the beginning?” James asked, incredulous.

  “Yes. It’s changed names a few times, but the account has never moved. We’ve shuffled the investment accounts from time to time, to optimize return on the endowed funds that aren’t tapped often, but that’s about it.”

  James sat down next to me, a distant look in his eye. I was torn: we had sworn not to talk about this. I wasn’t going to drag him into Society business, particularly when it might include a crime. But on the other hand, he was the one who seemed to be digging himself in here. I kept my mouth shut.