The DeadHouse

by Linda Fairstein

  There was something different about the tone of Nan's responses when she talked about Lola. She did not seem quite as open as she had when discussing the history of New York. "Were you here for the funeral?"

  "No. No, I left for London on Friday evening. That was the day she was killed, wasn't it? I didn't learn of her death until one of Howard's phone calls." She fumbled with paper clips in the top drawer of her desk.

  "We've only spoken to one of her sisters and a couple of students. What was she like as a colleague or peer?"

  "Well, her style was a lot flashier than my own. I wouldn't say that we had much in common." Nan was a brilliant scholar, nationally renowned in her field, and as modest as she was good. "But one-on-one, she was perfectly pleasant to work with. She never confided in me, if that's what you mean. I don't think I had seen her in more than a year after she moved to King's College. It was the Blackwells Island project that brought me into contact with her again."

  "How did that get started?" Mike asked. Nan looked at the ceiling and laughed. "Several years of wishful thinking on my part. Hard to remember which of us pushed the idea forward first. Let's see. Winston Shreve helped to organize the plan. He's the head of the anthropology department at King's."

  "Have you known him long?"

  "Fifteen years. Very impressive credentials, which is why they recruited him for the school. Undergrad and graduate degrees are both Ivy League, if I remember correctly. Spent some time at the Sorbonne. Helped with the excavations at Petra. He's wanted to do something on the island for as long as I have. Like me, one of those New Yorkers in our profession who's always wanted to get his hands in some local dirt, but just keeps watching apartments and office towers get planted on top of every square inch of historical soil that we covet.

  "Yes, Winston and I have been talking about digging on the island for as long as I've known him."

  "And the others?"

  "It was a four-department program. Multidisciplinary, as they like to call it these days. Something for everybody. We each seem to have a special place on the island that attracts us for a different reason. Winston and I run the anthropological courses. My favorite site is the northern tip, from the lighthouse to what remains of the Octagon Tower. Skip Lockhart chairs the American history segment. His heart seems to be attached to the people who passed through here, their stories and what became of them. Thomas Grenier is in charge of the biology students."

  That's a name we hadn't heard yet. "Who's Grenier?" Mike asked.

  "King's College. Head of the biology department there. Out of UCLA, if I remember correctly. Haven't seen him around in weeks, but I think it's because he's been on sabbatical this semester. Might not even be in town." Mike was writing the name in his notepad.

  "Why biology?" I asked.

  "The scientific piece is as important as all the digging we're doing. Maybe more so. By the 1870s there were almost a dozen medical facilities here. Every 'incurable' patient from the city was sent to a hospital or clinic on Blackwells. One was for scarlet fever, another for epilepsy, a separate place for cripples, for cholera and typhus sufferers. There were tuberculosis facilities, and a special building for lepers. It even had the first pathology laboratory in the country.

  "Then there came your ruin, Alex. Eighteen fifty-six, to be exact. Smallpox continued to be a societal scourge throughout the nineteenth century."

  "What about Jenner? I thought there was already a smallpox vaccine by that time."

  "Yes, the vaccine was being used in America by then, but the constant influx of poor immigrants who had been infected in their own countries brought the disease here from all over the world. Because it was so wildly contagious, patients in New York City had always been quarantined away from the population. They were generally sent to live in wooden shacks on the banks of the two rivers, until it became even safer to ship them off to the island of undesirables."

  "Blackwells?"

  She nodded. "Renwick designed a stunning home for those latest outcasts. The Smallpox Hospital. You see it lighted up so dramatically at night from Manhattan, with its pointed, arched windows and crenellated roofline. A great gray monument to disease. Small wonder the biologists want to study the place."

  Nan moved to the giant map and ran her finger up the narrow piece of waterway that separated Manhattan from the grim institutions of the old Blackwells Island. "How are you on Greek mythology?" she asked. "The River Styx, Lola used to say this was. Souls crossing over from the realm of the living on their way to hell. To what she called 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 departme
nt. 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 sle
eping in Dakota's bed is the same guy who paid a visit to her office. Does that help you?"

  14

  "Anybody out there blowing bubbles?" I asked, greeting Mike at the office of the Manhattan North Homicide Squad at eight-thirty Tuesday morning. I had walked up the stairs and in the rear door, near the Special Victims Unit, to avoid any members of the King's College faculty who had responded to Sylvia Foote's directive to appear to answer questions.

  "It wasn't bubble gum. It was Wrigley's spearmint. Just keep that in mind if you see any of those jaws masticating." He motioned me to sit at the table that was back-to-back with his own.

  "Won't Iggy need it when she gets in?"

  "Nope. Gone to Miami for Christmas."

  Ignacia Bliss was one of the only women in the squad. They had tried to team her with Mike when she first arrived from the Career Criminal Apprehension Unit, but her humorless nature and plodding investigative technique were not suited to his style. The banner he had hung over her desk more than a year ago was still tacked to the windowsill: ignorance is bliss.

  "Who's here to chat with us?"

  "Only got three. The rest of them seem to have scattered to the north and south poles." Mike's jacket was hanging from the back of his chair. He swung around and put his feet on the top of my desk, reading from his pad. "Skip Lockhart, the project's history professor, is out of town till the end of the week. Grenier's the biologist who's had the semester off. He's due back in the middle of January. May have to hunt those two down.

  "Here with us for bagels and brew are Mr. Recantati, Professor Shreve, and Foote herself."

  "Let's begin with Shreve. Nan puts him back at the beginning of all this. Why don't we see how helpful he is?"

  Mike walked past the lieutenant's empty office and returned with a man I guessed to be in his late forties and dressed, like Mike, in jeans and a crewneck sweater, carrying a cardboard container of coffee that had been set out in the waiting area for our guests from King's College. Before we could be introduced, he reached for my hand. "Good morning. I'm Winston Shreve. You must be Ms. Cooper."