Murder Among the Angels (4 page)

“To lift or not to lift” was not an easy question, she thought as she headed out toward the police station to meet her old friend.

The Zion Hill police station was situated on the Albany Post Road just north of the traffic light at the Zion Hill Road intersection. It was located in a building that also housed a two-bay fire station. Like many of the houses she had noticed in her drive through Zion Hill, the police station was in the Tudor style, which struck Charlotte as being incongruously genteel for a public building. The timber-fronted facade looked more like the backdrop for a sleek advertisement than for the two fire trucks that stood out in front, their chrome fittings gleaming in the morning sun. Entering the station, she announced herself to the dispatcher who sat behind the front desk. No sooner had she done so than Jerry came down the stairs, and, after greeting her warmly, invited her up to his office.

He looked older than when she had last seen him—his mat of tight black curls had turned gray and was receding from his temples, and, although he was still very fit, he was a little heavier. But he looked much happier than he used to. In fact, he glowed with excitement. She knew he was glad to be back in police work, but this had to be more than just that.

“Are you hungry?” he asked peremptorily, as he closed his office door behind them. “I mean, would you mind putting off lunch for an hour or so?”

“Not at all,” she replied. Dr. Louria’s surgical dissection of her face had put a damper on her appetite. Besides, it was still only eleven-thirty, and, like most New Yorkers, she wasn’t accustomed to eating lunch before one.

He grinned. He had a wide grin which the dimples in his round cheeks and the slight gap between his front teeth couldn’t help but make appealing. “Good. I have something to show you.” With that, he opened a metal locker and removed a soccer ball-sized object wrapped in bubble wrap, which he carefully set down in the middle of his desk. As Charlotte looked on, he slowly unwound the bubble wrap, revealing a human skull.

Charlotte raised a dark eyebrow in an expression that was one of her screen trademarks, along with her clipped Yankee accent and her long-legged stride. “A murder victim?” A murder case would explain Jerry’s ebullient mood.

Jerry shrugged his broad shoulders, which pulled at the seams of the lightweight cotton sports jacket he wore over a blue chambray shirt. He had once told Charlotte that homicide detectives never wore wool jackets because the fabric absorbed the corpse reek, which would never come out. Though Charlotte didn’t imagine that Jerry would have had much contact with corpses here, she supposed he found it hard to give up his old habits.

“I dunno,” he said, his Bensonhurst origins still evident in his accent. “But I’m gonna find out.”

“Where did it come from?” she asked.

“A woman found it in a local cemetery the day before yesterday when she was walking her dog. It was resting on top of a headstone.”

“A grave robber?” she asked.

“Could be. We get that kind of thing around here, especially around Halloween. It’s because of our proximity to Sleepy Hollow—the headless horseman and all that. But I doubt it. There weren’t any other bones, and no graves had been disturbed. Besides, there was something else.”

Charlotte crossed her arms and awaited his explanation.

“A bouquet of lilies of the valley had been placed at the foot of the headstone.” He went on: “We had another incident like this late last summer. A skull was found on a headstone in the cemetery at St. James’s.” He nodded in the direction of the road. “You probably passed it on your way up.”

Charlotte nodded. She remembered seeing the Romanesque-style church as she was looking for the turnoff for the Zion Hill Road.

“Also with a fresh bouquet of lilies of the valley,” he said.

Charlotte arched an eyebrow.

“The state forensic anthropologist, Leonore Herman, was able to connect that skull to some body parts that washed up by Fort Tryon Park.” Jerry sat on the corner of his desk and looked into the empty eye sockets of the skull, as if he hoped it would cooperate by providing him with its full name and address.

“Any identification in that case?” prompted Charlotte.

Jerry looked up. “Caucasian female; twenty-five to thirty years old; five foot six inches tall, plus or minus an inch; and weighing approximately a hundred and twenty pounds.”

“Any missing persons fitting that description?”

“Several hundred in the metropolitan area. Thousands if you take in the whole country. There were—and I quote Leonore—‘no other pathological or anomalous features.’ The county boys checked the description against the missing persons reports for Westchester County, but there wasn’t any point in taking it any farther than that.”

“And what about the body parts this time?”

He nodded. “We have body parts. We always have body parts. The Hudson is very good at turning up body parts. In fact, we have a partially decomposed lower torso—what Leonore calls a ‘butt’—of a Caucasian female, twenty-five to thirty years old; approximately five foot six inches tall; and weighing approximately one hundred and twenty pounds—that some shad fishermen netted near the municipal park early last week.”

Charlotte grimaced. “I bet that was the end of their shad fishing days.”

“I hope not,” Jerry said. “I’m fond of shad. To say nothing of shad roe.”

A pause followed this comment, during which Charlotte suspected that Jerry’s thoughts had drifted to the same subject as hers: a plate of shad roe sautéed in butter and served on toast points.

Jerry continued in a more serious vein: “A matching lower arm minus the hand turned up a couple of days later below the high tide line at the local yacht club. We think the butt and lower arm go with this skull, but there’s no way to prove it. Leonore estimated in both cases that the victims had been murdered ten days to two weeks beforehand.”

“How did you prove the skull went with the body parts in the other case?”

Jerry smiled. “I thought this would be right up your alley.” He went on to answer her question: “By the pattern of the cuts left on the tissue and the bone by the cutting instrument that was used.”

“What kind of cutting instrument?” Charlotte asked.

“A meat cleaver,” he replied. “In the other case, some of the cervical vertebrae were still attached to the skull, so we could match the patterns of the cuts. The head had been cut off just below the Adam’s apple. But this time, there aren’t any cervical vertebrae.”

Charlotte looked down again at the skull, which was neck-less. “No suspicious characters hanging around the graveyard?”

Jerry shook his head. “We don’t even know how long it was there. In the other case, we had a rough idea because the maintenance men had been mowing in the vicinity the day before the skull appeared. But this skull could have been there for weeks. The cemetery where it was found is off the beaten track.”

“It couldn’t have been there for weeks if it belongs to the body parts that turned up at the town park a couple of weeks ago,” she said. “Were the flowers fresh?” she asked.

Jerry nodded.

“Was the pattern of the cuts on the”—she paused—“the butt, and the—what was it, the lower arm?—that were recently found the same as the pattern of the cuts on the body parts that went with the other skull?” she asked.

He nodded again, and looked up at Charlotte with the kind of anticipatory smile that one reserves for another who shares one’s enthusiasms, and with whom one is about to indulge them. “What’s your schedule like? The county boys are tied up with that sensational murder case down in Yonkers, which leaves me pretty much on my own.”

“What about your men?” Charlotte asked.

Jerry rolled his eyes. “In the first place, I don’t have that many. It’s a small department. In the second place, I can’t talk to the ones I have. My so-called right-hand man has been here for twenty-seven years, and hasn’t had an original thought in the last twenty-six. I could use some help.”

Charlotte smiled. “I think I could manage to fit in a few trips to Westchester,” she said. “What do we do now?”

“You and I and our mysterious young lady here”—he looked down again at the skull resting on his desk—“at least I think she’s a young lady—are going to pay a visit to a friend of mine.” With that, he rewrapped the skull and tucked it under his arm like a running back breaking for a run. Then he headed for the office door.

“And, if I may be so bold as to ask, who might that be?” Charlotte inquired, as Jerry held the office door open for her.

“A man named Jack Lister. Who happens to be one of the world’s foremost forensic sculptors. And who also happens to live just a mile from here.”

“Aha,” said Charlotte. This was getting interesting.

3

They headed back the way Charlotte had just come: down the Zion Hill Road, and left onto River Road. Instead of stopping at the parking area just before Dr. Louria’s house, however, they continued on. Seeing Dr. Louria’s house, which Jerry informed her was called Archfield Hall, straight on, Charlotte was impressed at how big it was: a magnificent stone mansion in the Romanesque style. It was by far the largest of the large houses that lined this stretch of the river. Continuing on, they arrived five minutes later at the end of River Road, where a winding access road marked by entrance gates led up a hill to yet another remarkable house. This house was perched on a knoll high above the river, a wedding-cake affair of five stories, each story slightly smaller in diameter than the one beneath it, and each taking the shape of an octagon. The portion of the roof of each story not occupied by the story immediately above it was taken up by a balustraded balcony, and on the fifth and top story, where, were it actually a cake, a spun-sugar bride and groom might have stood hand in hand, stood a glass-walled belvedere crowned by a gilded onion dome, and surrounded by yet another balustraded balcony. The walls were made of stucco on which columns of ivy had firmly established themselves, and the entrance was via a columned portico facing a circular gravel driveway. Huge old black locust trees, their branches still bare, surrounded the house.

“The Octagon House,” said Jerry as they passed through the gates. “It was built by a follower of a man named Orson Fowler, who launched a fad for octagon houses in the mid-nineteenth century. He maintained that the octagon was the truest building form because it enclosed the most amount of space in the least amount of wall. No space was wasted in the corners.”

“A nineteenth-century version of Buckminster Fuller and the geodesic dome,” Charlotte commented, as she craned her neck to get a better view.

“Yeah,” said Jerry. “I guess he was. Fowler lived in Fish-kill, which is just up the river, so we have quite a few octagon houses still surviving in this area. But I understand this is the best example.”

“The name sounds familiar. I must have read about him somewhere.”

“Probably in connection with phrenology. In addition to starting the octagon fad, he also started the fad for phrenology, which was the science of determining character from the shape and position of the bumps on the head.”

Charlotte nodded. She had seen plaster phrenological busts in antique shops, with sections of the skull marked off for such attributes as friendship, sympathy, and self-esteem.

“Got very rich on it too, from what I understand,” Jerry continued. “But Lister can tell you more about it. He has a little museum inside. I’m sure he’ll be happy to show it to you. He bought the house lock, stock, and barrel from the heirs of Fowler’s follower, and it was crammed with stuff.”

They had come to the circular driveway at the front of the house, where they were greeted by a sign which read: “Omega Studios: Sculpture and Ecclesiastical Monuments in Marble and Granite.” Above the words was the horseshoe-shaped symbol for the last letter in the Greek alphabet.

“Lister has a business making gravestones and the like,” Jerry explained. “It’s called Omega Studios, for ‘the alpha and the omega.’”

“Very cute,” said Charlotte.

As they got out of the car, the proprietor of the studios emerged from the house, and stood waiting for them under the portico.

“I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss Graham,” Lister said, once they had joined him at the front door. “I’ve always been a great fan of yours. Still am, for that matter. I watched a videotape of
The Scarlet Lady
just last night.”

“I’ve been meaning to watch that one myself,” she said. Even the most obscure of her old movies were slowly being transferred to videotape, and the opportunity to see them again gave her great pleasure.

Lister, as Jerry referred to him, was a short, lithe man of about fifty whose jutting jaw; long, sharply ridged nose; and deep-set gray eyes overset with flaring eyebrows gave his face a devilish aspect, which was heightened by the fact that his scalp was clean-shaven, giving him a strong resemblance to Vladimir Lenin. In fact, had the original owner of his house been present, he would not have needed to feel the bumps on Lister’s head to determine his character: a glance alone would have been sufficient, so prominent were the various protuberances on his shiny skull.

With the introductions complete, Lister’s sharp-eyed glance fell on the bubble-wrapped bundle that Jerry carried in a shopping bag. “I hear you have another specimen for me,” he said eagerly.

“Another Jane Doe,” Jerry said. “At least, I think she’s a Jane Doe. Leonore hasn’t had a chance to look at her yet. But I wonder if you’d show Miss Graham around first. I think she’d be interested in seeing your collection.”

“But of course,” Lister replied, bowing slightly as he bade them to enter. “Are you familiar with Orson Fowler?” he asked.

“A little,” Charlotte replied as she stepped into a paneled entrance foyer in which a phrenological bust was displayed on a pedestal.

“I bought this house in 1966 from a descendant of a follower of Fowler’s. It had been vacant for thirty-one years.” He clapped a palm to his shiny foreskull. “Mama mia, what a mess. Nobody had bothered to drain the pipes, and there was water damage everywhere.”

“It’s a wonder you were able to restore it,” said Charlotte, looking at the walls, which appeared to be in excellent shape.