The DeadHouse

13

"What was the deadhouse?"

"Just Lola's name for Blackwells Island, I guess. It was a nineteenth-century expression that meant a place for dead bodies."

"Did she refer to it that way?"

"I know you had met her, Alex. She had this tremendous flair for the dramatic. Used it to great advantage in the classroom whenever things got dull. We were all brainstorming about the dig one night-I think we were downstairs in my own dining room- going through a pretty good case of red wine-and that's when I heard Lola use the expression for the first time."

"Was it an actual place on the island?"

"Not on any map that I've ever come across. Imagine the scene, as Lola used to say. There you were, raging with fever and blistering with pustulant sores, as epidemics swept through communities in the crowded city dwellings. Smallpox was spread both by direct contact and by airborne virus, as you probably know. Public-health workers separated out the ill and infected-rich and poor alike-to isolate them from the able-bodied."

The image of a plague-ridden city was chilling.

"Then, Lola would describe the bedlam on the piers in the East River as the afflicted were loaded onto boats to bring them over to the hospital. Most of them knew that for the diseased, it was a sentence of death. Some tried to escape from the officials at the docks. From time to time, one or two dared to jump in the water and brave the fierce currents of the East River rather than be ferried to hell. The once tranquil farmland had become a zone for the dead and dying. Boats went out loaded with contagious patients. As these untouchables neared the shore, their first sight was the stacks of wooden coffins piled by the edge to be loaded on for the ride home. Chances were good that if your destination was Blackwells Island, as Lola said, you were going to the deadhouse."

We were silent until Mike spoke.

"So she had the fourth piece of the project? Government, political science."

"Exactly."

"Any particular interests, like some of you others?"

"Lola had a special preoccupation, I'd say, with the prison and the madhouse. Disease and the hospital conditions revolted her, she said. But a lot of famous people passed in and out of both the asylum and the penitentiary, and she loved to learn their stories. I've never seen anyone do research about these places the way she did. Lola read all the books, she devoured letters and diaries of the time that were original source material, she even found some old survivors who had lived or worked on the island in the 1920s and thirties."

"Do you know who they were?"

"No, but surely someone in the department must have catalogued names. I'm too busy belowground to talk to people. We left that to Lola. As long as this place was mentioned, she didn't care whether it was the notebook of a nurse or the autobiography of Mae West-"

"I saw her do that bit in her classroom once. I thought that West was locked up in Manhattan, in the Tombs."

"One night there. Then a ten-day sentence to the workhouse on the island. Mae had it pretty cushy, for a prisoner. The warden agreed that the inmate underwear was too rough for her delicate skin and let her wear her own silk teddies and white stockings. He even took her out for horse rides in the evening.

"Lola knew all their stories. Boss Tweed, Dutch Schultz, lots of corrupt New Yorkers wound up there."

"Damn, I'd love to hear some of those tales," Mike said.

"Talk to Professor Lockhart in the history department. Or even to Paolo Recantati. The historians were tracking that kind of thing. I've got my own tales of woe from the asylum."

"What kind of guy is Recantati?" I asked.

"He was new to King's this semester. Quiet, very aloof. He was a history scholar, too, so Lola tried to engage him in our cabal, get his support for continued funding. Our goal was not only to complete the dig, but to try to get the money needed to restore these unique buildings. She brought Recantati in on a few of our meetings to hear what we were up to. I've talked with him about it several times, and he seemed quite interested."

"Were you and Lola the only two women running the show?"

Nan paused for a moment. "Yes, we were."

"Any sense of Lola's personal life? Was she involved with any of these other professors?"

"I'd probably be the last one to know. The students always seemed to be more interested in that kind of information than I was."

I showed Nan a photograph of Charlotte Voight, a copy of the one on Lola's board, which Sylvia Foote had given to me earlier in the day. "Did you know this girl, one of Lola's students? Ever see her on the island?"

Nan studied the picture and handed it back. "No help to you there. I supervised the Barnard and Columbia kids. If she went to King's College, then any one of the group we've talked about would have been working with her."

"It's puzzling why Dakota would have cared about the kid enough to hang her picture in the office. Along with Franklin Roosevelt-"

"The Roosevelt piece I can answer," Nan interjected. "FDR was one of Lola's heroes, for whom Blackwells was renamed in 1973."

"Charles Dickens?"

"No idea."

"Nellie Bly?"

"She's one of my inmates. Your office helped, Alex."

"We did?"

"Assistant District Attorney Henry D. Macdona, 1887. Nellie Bly was a young reporter, working for The World, Joseph Pulitzer's scandal-loving newspaper. Some editor had a brainstorm to expose the hideous condition of the patients in Blackwells insane asylum, and Nellie Bly volunteered for the job. Undercover, you'd call it. She actually went to the district attorney for advice, and for the promise that they would begin a grand jury investigation if she found abuses.

"So Bly checked into a women's boardinghouse, claiming to be a Cuban immigrant called Nellie Moreno. Within days of her arrival, feigning insanity and babbling in an incomprehensible tongue, she was escorted to the police station and then to court. First stop was Bellevue, where doctors ruled out the delirium of belladonna, the deadly nightshade poisoning of so many nineteenth-century mysteries, and actually declared her to be insane. On to Blackwells."

"Committed to the asylum?"

"Spent ten days there, documenting everything from the filthy ferry that brought her over, to the vicious prison attendants from the penitentiary who choked and beat their patients, to the baths that consisted of buckets of ice water being thrown on her head, to the descriptions of the perfectly sane women who were just sent away because they couldn't be understood. 'Inside the Madhouse' made a pretty compelling story in the World, and then your office exposed the whole operation."

"Did that close the asylum down as a result?"

"Certainly helped make it happen. All the mental patients were moved away from the island at the turn of the last century. My building became the first incarnation of Metropolitan Hospital."

"The one that's now on the Upper East Side?"

"Exactly right."

Mike had checked off Bly's name from his list in the steno pad. "About Lola, would you know why someone would call her a treasure seeker or gold digger?"

"That's what we all are on this project, of course." Nan smiled. "Each of us is looking for a different kind of mother lode. For me, the treasure is as simple as a stone ax or a porcelain teacup, coal boxes or ox yokes. One of my interns actually found a handful of pearls last fall."

"Pearls?"

"In those days, men were able to discipline insubordinate wives by committing them to the asylum for a spell."

Chapman winked at me, nodding his head in approval.

"Some of the well-to-do women sewed jewels in the hems of their skirts when they were sent to Blackwells, hoping to buy favors from their keepers. Or perhaps their escape. I've got one volunteer on the project, Efrem Zavislan, who dreams of stumbling across Captain Kidd's buried gold. No one's ever found the million-dollar lode the pirate was bringing back from Madagascar to New York, before his capture. Talk to Efrem, he spent lots of time with Lola. She sure wasn't interested in my kind of booty.

"My view of it is that if all those prisoners were digging for years, and they didn't come up with any treasure, then there's none here to be found."

"What were the prisoners digging?"

"Every inch of the place. The island's bedrock is gneiss. Ford-ham gneiss. And there's lots of granite, too. From the time the penitentiary opened in 1835, until it was shut down a hundred years later, the healthier prisoners were forced to do hard labor. All of the stone for these many buildings on the island was quarried from its own land. No rock had to be brought in.

"The granite was used to build a seawall around the entire circumference. And the gneiss is what they mined to create the exteriors of the notorious Blackwells institutions. If there were treasure to be found, some miscreant would have dug it up long before now." "This gives us a great head start, Nan. We're hoping to meet with some of the faculty members tomorrow. At least we'll have an idea about what has had all of you so absorbed."

Nan walked us down to the front door, retrieved my coat and gloves, and waved us off into the cold night air.

We made the short drive down Second Avenue and Mike stuck his laminated police department parking permit on top of his dashboard as he left the car illegally positioned in front of a bus stop near the corner of Sixty-fourth Street. "C'mon, Coop. There's not a brownie in town who'd brave this weather to stick a ticket on my wreck."

We weaved our way across the late-hour Christmas shopping traffic that was blocking the intersection and pressed through the crowd around the bar at Primola, hoping that Giuliano had not given away my eight-thirty reservation.

"Buona sera, Signorina Cooper. Your table will be ready in a minute. Have a drink on me, please. Fenton," he called over to the bartender, "a Dewar's on the rocks and a Ketel One, subito."

People were five-deep waiting to be seated at my favorite restaurant. Most had drinks in one hand and shopping bags in the other, adding to the volume of the pack. It was too noisy to talk murder in their midst, so we relaxed with our cocktails till the maitre d', Adolfo, led us to a corner table in the front of the room.

I didn't hear the chirping sound of my cell phone ringing until I had lowered myself into the chair and hung my bag over the armrest.

"Alex, can you hear me? It's Bob Thaler." The chief serologist usually started his day in the lab at 6 A.M. That he was still working at 9 P.M. meant that he had pulled out all the stops to do the testing on the Lola Dakota case. "Am I catching you at a bad time?"

"Never. Any results?" The DNA testing that had routinely taken six months to yield information when I first submitted samples to the FBI ten years ago now came back to us from the medical examiner's office in less than seventy-two hours.

"Dr. Braun and I worked on your evidence all through the weekend. I've got some preliminary answers you might want to get going with. All I'll need from you are some suspect controls, when you come up with them."

"That's Chapman's end of the deal. He's working on it."

"Dakota's vaginal swab was negative for the presence of semen. But we did find some seminal fluid on the sheets the cops sent in for testing. From a sofa bed, is what the voucher says. I worked that up and got a profile from it for you.

"The wad of gum Chapman pulled from the wastebasket in the deceased's office? Dr. Braun handled that piece. He also got a DNA sample from it. Just thought you'd like to know as soon as we confirmed them that it's a match. Whoever was sleeping in Dakota's bed is the same guy who paid a visit to her office. Does that help you?"