Entombed

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 abandoned 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."