Entombed

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, smoothing 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."

"The hips on this one give her away."

"Why's that?"

"See where this flares out over here?" Andy said, pointing his finger to the large bones coming out of the lower vertebrae. "Nature's way of accommodating childbirth. The sciatic notch spreads as a young woman matures, and the pelvis gets wider to be able to hold a fetus. Look at the forehead, too."

"What?"

"Vertical. Straight up and down. Men's foreheads tend to slope more, form a brow ridge above the eye sockets, while women's generally are like this." He turned to one of the techs. "Want to pass the big torch?"

"What are you looking for?" Mike asked.

"You want to know who this is, right? We've got a start on gender. We need to figure out her age, race, height-anything that will direct the scope of your investigation."

"How about when she went missing behind the wall?"

"That's what I'm about to dig for." Andy turned on the light and moved it slowly over the surface of the crude wooden floor behind the remaining few inches of bricks.

He lifted out some tiny sepia-colored chips, pieces of bone that seemed to have absorbed color from the brown earth on which they had rested. He turned them over and examined them, placing them next to the digitless hands. "Fingers, probably. Toes are down there, too. Camera, please."

The tech passed the equipment back to Andy, who took the shots himself. When he finished that task, he bent down close to the wall and reached in again, sifting through some of the remains and scooping a small sampling into a glassine envelope, which he studied before passing it on to Mike.

"See those little fragments?" Andy asked. "Like small caramelized bits?"

"Yeah."

"Good chance they're her fingernails, broken off when the bones dropped to the ground years ago. Submit them to the lab along with one of the older bricks. Betcha fifty bucks you'll find some of that sealant stuck to them."

Mike looked up at Andy. "You're telling me this lady was clawing at a brick wall to try to get out from behind it?"

Andy nodded.

"So this isn't just a coffin, right? You're saying she was probably still breathing when she went in here, just from what you think is underneath her nail bed?"

Buried alive. I shuddered at the terrifying thought of such a ghoulish demise, at the hopelessness of her delicate fingernails scraping against the stones that had been cemented in place. Nan and I exchanged glances.

Mike was pumping Andy for his techniques, unfamiliar as we both were with skeletal remains.

"Last year's case in midtown, some hard hats found the bones in a concrete slab when they were digging a storage room for an Eighth Avenue pizza shop," Andy said. "The girl still had the hair on her head and some ligature around her wrists. Hey, can you get a shot of this?"

One of the techs moved closer and focused his camera on an object on the ground.

"What do you see in there?" Mike asked.

"Looks like a sock. Like a man's sock. I was hoping it would be something of hers."

Clothing would be a big help in the identification process, Andy explained. If it had great age or distinctive markings, it might lead the detectives to a specific period in time. Modern pieces with logos, labels, and trademarks could pinpoint a year and guide them directly to the place of purchase.

"Big enough to be a restraint?"

"I'll let you see it in a few minutes. Maybe a gag, stuffed in the mouth, but nothing long enough to tie her up, I don't think," Andy said, as he painstakingly covered every crevice of the small space with his light.

Mike was readying a brown paper bag. "That'd be good. Get some saliva off it for DNA evaluation."

"Don't be too excited about that until we know how long she was in here. There are some holes in the back wall of the building. Professor, you still here?" Andy called over his shoulder.

"Yes."

"What abuts this basement on the outside?"

"A small yard, actually."

"That's why she's picked clean, Mike. May not mean she's been here two hundred years."

"Maggots?"

"More likely mice have gotten in and out. Field mice, squirrels, some kind of vermin could have squeezed through these crevices. Picked the flesh clean, but the ligaments would have been left just like they are. Kind of dried out, almost mummified."

"How'd you date the bones you found uptown?"

"One shiny dime," Andy said. "A 1966 ten-cent piece in the cement coffin. We knew that wasn't necessarily the year she was killed, but it couldn't have been any earlier than that."

He lifted the dark sock with a pair of tweezers and passed it out to be bagged.

"Any pocket change?" Mike asked.

"Nope. But there's something cylindrical standing on its edge." He reached in again and removed what appeared to be a small ring. An assistant sealed and labeled the package before passing it to me.

The gold-toned band was now tarnished and caked on its surface with some sort of debris. At its widest place, I could make out an engraving in cursive black lines. "Could be initials. Maybe an A and a T. "

There was no date, no hallmark. It looked like an inexpensive ring that a young woman would wear.

"Come in close on this, will you?" Andy said, lying prone and making room on the basement floor for Mike as he passed the flashlight to him. "There's some writing."

"Where?"

"It looks like a piece of canvas that got caught in the cement on one of the bricks over to the left. See it?"

Mike focused the beam into the recessed brickwork and read aloud: "'Cappozelli's Rat Poison. Manufactured in'-first three letters are all I can get-probably going to be Detroit. I'm making out the d-e-t. "

"Does it show a date?"

"Patience is a virtue, blondie." Mike had his nose pressed against the bottom edge of the wall. "It's got one of those drawings of a skull and crossbones. 'Keep out of reach of children.' Looks like Poe is exonerated. The poison was packaged in 1978."