Privy to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  I wondered if he was surly or just naturally brusque. “Did you know Scruggs well? Outside of work, maybe?”

  He shrugged. “Carnell? Worked with him now and then. Can’t say we were friends—didn’t hang out after work or anything like that. I’m sorry he got killed.”

  “What was he like?”

  The man scrunched up his face as if it was hard to picture a man he’d seen only two days earlier. “Quiet, like. Kept to himself. Showed up on time, worked hard, left.”

  “So you didn’t all get a drink on the way home?”

  “Nah, nothing like that. He was kind of a loner. Look, I gotta get back downstairs.” He shifted from foot to foot.

  “Go ahead. Thanks for helping me with this.”

  “No problem.” He turned to leave, and I motioned to Eric to see him out. That left me sitting in my office staring at a pair of dirty boxes making dents in my nice carpet.

  What now? Call Hrivnak and tell her she should look at the contents? She’d laugh at me. Dig into it myself? But I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for, and I was afraid if there was anything fragile in there, I might do more harm than good. I stalked around the boxes like I was circling my prey, and that’s when Eric returned.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked, looking bewildered.

  “I’m not sure. This is the stuff that came out of the hole in the basement. I’m wondering if maybe the man who died outside the building might have found something in the pit and taken it away with him, and that’s what got him killed. But now I’m afraid to look.”

  Eric still looked confused. “Sorry, but you’re going to have to back up a few steps. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I mean, I know about that poor man, but why would he find anything in the building here?”

  I realized that I hadn’t told him about the conversation I’d had with Hrivnak. I didn’t recall her saying that I couldn’t talk to people about what we’d discussed. Did that mean I could ask my colleagues to help? I didn’t feel I had to explain to all the staff, but Shelby would want to know because she was a friend and as development director she had access to a lot of the older records for the Society, and Lissa had already heard my suspicions and was looking into the history of privies. Marty marched to her own drummer and would no doubt show up and know more than I did, but I could talk to her later. I made my decision. “Eric, could you call Shelby and Lissa, if she’s in the building, and ask them to join me here?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He hurried to his desk.

  I hoped I was doing the right thing. This wouldn’t count as interfering with a police investigation, would it? If we found anything that might have a bearing on the man’s death, of course I’d tell the police ASAP. But other than that, all we were doing was going through a heap of old trash from the basement. Did that make it a de facto part of the Society’s collections? I briefly considered adding Latoya to the group, to represent the collections side of things, but rejected it on the grounds that trash, no matter how historic, was definitely not her kind of thing. If we found anything that needed analysis or identification, I could bring her in then, I reasoned.

  “They’re both on their way, Nell,” Eric reported a minute later.

  “Great. Look, I want you to come in, too—saves me repeating everything. You can hear the phones from here anyway.”

  Shelby had only to walk down a short hall, so she arrived promptly; Lissa appeared a minute later. “Haven’t seen much of you this week, lady,” Shelby said to me.

  “I know—sorry. But in case you haven’t noticed, we’ve had a few small crises.” Like a body on the street, and multiple visits from Detective Hrivnak. I knew I could count on Shelby to understand—we’d puzzled through a couple of earlier “crises” together.

  “I hear you. I assume you need our help? What’s up?” Shelby asked. “And what’s that all about?” she added, pointing to the boxes in the middle of the floor.

  “Ooh, is that what they pulled from the privy?” Lissa said, looking eager.

  Shelby turned to her and made a face. “Privy? Is that what it sounds like?”

  “Sure is. Don’t worry, it’s clean,” Lissa told her.

  “Okay, gang, listen up,” I said. “Detective Hrivnak told me this morning that Carnell Scruggs, the man who died, apparently left here after work and went to a bar a couple of blocks away on Chestnut Street, where he showed the bartender something small and made of brass that he pulled out of his pocket. It may be a stretch, but I’m guessing that it was something he found here. The construction foreman Joe Logan tells me that Mr. Scruggs was working on the basement cleanout before he died, specifically in the pit—he was the one they sent down to clean it out. These boxes here contain whatever stuff they found down there. I asked the crew to save it, in the interest of preserving our history.” Smart move, in hindsight, although not for the reasons I had expected.

  “Is that all of it?” Lissa said, sounding disappointed.

  “That’s what I was told.”

  “And we care about this why?” Shelby asked, still looking confused.

  “While the late Mr. Scruggs was showing this object he found to the bartender, someone else started talking to him about it, and they left together. I’m wondering if the second guy had reason to think that object meant something important. Whatever it was, Carnell Scruggs didn’t have it on him when he died, so either he lost it on his way home, which could have taken him down Thirteenth Street outside, gave or sold it to this mysterious stranger, or that the stranger took it from him. That’s why I want to know what’s in that box of stuff. If we find something similar and it’s nothing important, we can go back to business as usual. If there is something, we turn it over to the police as a clue. Everyone okay with that?”

  Shelby gave me a searching look. “What’re you thinking? You’re guessing that this has something to do with why the man ended up dead?”

  Well, yes, but that was a can of worms I didn’t want to open. I chose my words carefully. “The police are treating this publicly as a tragic accident, but since Detective Hrivnak is on the case, they must think there’s more to it. They have no evidence to suggest anything else. However, the object that Carnell Scruggs had in his pocket is a wild card here, so if it came from the Society, I want to know what it is.”

  Nods all around. “What’re we looking for?” Eric asked.

  “I don’t really know,” I said. “Something that survived being down in that pit for who knows how long—the foreman said everything that they pulled out was from a pre-plastic era, and Lissa can tell us when that hole in the ground would have been closed up. Hrivnak said the bartender described it as a few inches long, metal, maybe brass, flat, and curly.”

  Shelby grinned. “So we’re looking through old trash for something flat and curly. Beats writing begging letters any day.”

  “From 1907 or earlier,” Lissa said. “That’s when construction was finished here, that time around.”

  “Let me get something to cover the floor,” Eric volunteered, “so then you can spread everything out.”

  “Thanks, Eric.” He disappeared down the hall, and I turned to Shelby and Lissa. “Who said working here was dull?”

  “Do you seriously think that this trash has anything to do with the man’s death?” Lissa asked.

  “You know, Nell,” Shelby said, her tone skeptical, “traffic accidents happen all the time in the city.”

  “I know that, Shelby, but I don’t believe it was just a random traffic accident. I swear I’m not looking for trouble. But you all know that it seems to find me.”

  “Does that detective think there’s something suspicious about Mr. Scruggs’s death?” Lissa asked.

  “She hasn’t said so, not in so many words, but I think she has doubts about the accident theory, too. She made sure to tell me that the man fell backward into the street, in front of
that car.”

  “Oh,” Shelby said, quick to grasp the significance of that. “She thinks he was pushed?”

  “Officially this is still an accident. But if we brought her some new information, I think she’d listen. All I’m trying to do now is eliminate one possibility and make sure that the Society is in the clear.”

  “What does Mr. Agent Man think?” Shelby asked.

  “He thinks this is not his problem, and he has faith that I can handle this all by myself. He doesn’t know all the details.”

  Eric returned with an aged drop cloth that was already dirty—perfect. He knelt and spread it out on the floor, then looked at me. “Should I hunt down some gloves?”

  “Ladies?”

  The women both shook their heads.

  I waved a magnanimous hand. “Then dig in. Just try not to break anything—if there’s anything breakable in there. And watch out for splinters and broken glass, please.”

  “What about spiders?” Shelby asked with a wicked grin.

  “Don’t even go there!” We all knelt around the battered boxes, as if worshiping at some obscure shrine. I figured I had first rights, so I reached in and pulled out . . . a broken fountain pen. I laid it carefully on the drop cloth. “Next?”

  We went round and round the group a few times. The boxes emptied, and the pile of detritus on the floor grew. We’d nearly reached the bottom when Lissa stopped and pointed. “There. It’s metal, flat, and curly.”

  We all peered into the depth of the box, and I reached in and pulled out . . . a flat, curly piece of metal. I laid it on a clear patch of the drop cloth and we all stared at it.

  CHAPTER 8

  It was flat. It was curly. It was the right size to fit into a pocket. Eric handed me a tissue without even being asked, and I rubbed the piece gingerly. To my eye it appeared to be brass. And I was going to guess that it dated from a long time before 1907.

  “What is it?” Lissa finally said.

  “It’s got to be from a piece of furniture,” Shelby said. “It’s got two screw holes, to attach it to the wood.”

  Like the bartender said, according to Detective Hrivnak, it looked like a drawer. “I think they call it an escutcheon,” I said tentatively. “It goes behind a handle on a drawer, maybe to protect the wood. Anybody have a guess how old it is?”

  “Eighteenth, early nineteenth century?” Shelby suggested.

  “I’d agree, although I’m no expert,” I told her. “Let’s see if there’s anything that goes with it in the bottom of the box?”

  With renewed energy we started sifting through the remaining bits and pieces and came up with a handle, a single hinge, a few brass screws, and some large splinters of wood. We lined up the wood pieces and the metal bits together on the drop cloth and studied them.

  “Well,” I said intelligently, then stopped because I couldn’t think of anything to add.

  “You got that right, Nell,” Shelby said. “Looks like we’ve got pieces of something made of wood with brass fittings. And that biggest metal thingy is definitely the right size and shape to match the thing that bartender described, so maybe we can guess there was a pair of ’em? And the dead guy pocketed the other one? He must’ve missed this one.”

  “Works for me,” I said. “It would have been easy to miss. It was dark in that hole, and there wasn’t much room to move down there—I bet he just grabbed a handful at a time and passed it up. Not that it looks particularly interesting or important. I wonder why this thing, whatever it was, ended up in the hole.”

  “Looks to me like it was broken a long time ago, but who knows if it was already broken when it was pitched into the hole, or the fall broke it up,” Lissa added.

  I considered that comment. “Let’s assume no one carried it into the privy with him. Unless it’s like one of those television shows where somebody’s traveling with a briefcase chained to his wrist. It doesn’t look like it ever got wet, so maybe it went in after it was no longer a privy?”

  “Hey, could somebody explain this whole privy thing to me? Is that really what it was?” Shelby said plaintively.

  “Lissa, you want to take that?” I said.

  “Sure. Shelby, there’s a long rich history of the archeology of privies in Philadelphia, even some that were known to have been used by Ben Franklin and his peers. A surprising array of stuff fell in or got tossed in over time.”

  “Such as?” Shelby appeared honestly interested.

  “Broken china, glassware, pipes, buttons, coins, dice, even the odd doll or toy. They offer amazing insight into ordinary life at various points in time, before the widespread use of indoor plumbing. For the most part, privies were located outside and behind a residence, but not too far, of course. When one would get . . . um, exhausted—”

  Shelby interrupted her. “You mean, filled up?”

  Lissa nodded. “Yes. Then the homeowner would often just close it up and dig another one, near the first.”

  “This may be off topic, but what did they use for, uh, paper?” Shelby asked.

  “Whatever they had,” Lissa said. “Out in the country, that would be grass, leaves, corncobs, maybe scraps of sheep’s wool. In the city, maybe newspapers or, if you had money, cloth. Standards were a bit different in those days.”

  “I’m glad I live now,” Eric said.

  “And we think this pit was a privy, why?” Shelby asked.

  “Because it lay just outside the foundation of the original building on this site, which was built over just after 1900,” Lissa told her.

  “I don’t see any paper or cloth here,” I commented. “Would they have survived? Some of the wood did.”

  “Maybe?” Lissa replied. “That’s not really my area of expertise.”

  “What? There aren’t graduate courses in sanitary management of the eighteenth century?” Shelby joked.

  “Let’s stay focused here,” I said, trying to keep this discussion on track. Despite its absurdity, we were dealing with the death of a man. “With the old mansion, the privy would have been outside, but when the new building was built, the addition would have extended past its location. Ergo, we can deduce that the wooden item with the brass thingies went into the pit around the same time as the new building was built, because there wasn’t a whole lot of stuff down there.”

  “Nell, you want me to call that detective for you, so you can tell her about this metal thing?” Eric volunteered.

  I thought for a moment. “Let’s hold off on that just a bit. I do think we should share the hardware with her—she’ll want to show it to the bartender and see if he recognizes the escutcheon—but first I want to take some pictures and measurements and all that important stuff, because once we turn it over to her, we may not see it again.” Was I on shaky legal ground here? I wasn’t concealing anything, and I did plan to turn over the escutcheon to the police. “It’s not like she’s going to get any fingerprints from it, not after this long,” I rationalized.

  “Will she want the wooden pieces, too?” Lissa asked.

  How was I supposed to know? I was concerned that if the dead man had walked out of the Society with a twin to this escutcheon, and someone had seen it at the bar and killed him because of it, then what we had here could be important, although the downside was, if the pieces matched, that pointed straight to the Society. But I wasn’t sure if Hrivnak would see how a bunch of splinters could help. Maybe there was a compromise: what we needed was someone who specialized in antique furniture, or things with handles. There should be a record of one or more members who did somewhere in the Society’s files . . .

  “What’s going on?” Marty was standing in the doorway, staring at the four of us all still kneeling on the floor, around the array of century-old trash.

  Maybe the solution had just walked into the room. “We’re trying to figure out what it was that Carnell Scruggs showed the bartende
r.” When Marty looked blank, I realized I hadn’t told her about Hrivnak’s latest crumb of information.

  “The good detective told me this morning that the police had found where Scruggs had dinner after he left the Society. He showed the bartender a metal thing, which attracted the attention of a stranger, who then left with Scruggs. The bartender gave kind of a weird description of it—it was metal, curly and flat, and possibly old—and I figured that since Scruggs had been sent down the pit in the basement to clean it out, maybe he found something there that he pocketed, figuring it wasn’t important. I asked Joe Logan to let me have the other stuff that they’d hauled out of the pit, and that’s what we’re looking at here.”

  “Let me get this straight,” Marty said. “You’re trying to figure out why this man died by sifting through trash from our basement?”

  “Exactly.”

  Maybe her question had been facetious, but Marty being Marty, she immediately zeroed in on the critical piece among the scattered objects. “That came from the pit?” She pointed to the escutcheon.

  “It did,” I said. “You know what it is?”

  “Hardware from a piece of eighteenth-century furniture, I’d guess. Why was it in the pit?”

  “That is an excellent question, to which we have no answer. You have any idea what kind of item it came from?”

  Marty shook her head. “I’d have to do some digging.” She realized that Lissa and Shelby were looking at her with curiosity. “Terwilligers know furniture,” she said bluntly. “Nell, you think this matches the thing that Hrivnak told you Scruggs showed the bartender?”

  “I think it may,” I answered. “First we need to record what we have here, and then I need to call the police and tell them what we’ve found. I was hoping you might know someone who could analyze these pieces—the wood and the metal and the finish and anything else—and tell us what they used to be.”

  “Sure, I know a guy. Let me make a call.” Even as she spoke, Marty kept her eyes on the pieces of metal. What was so fascinating about them to her?