Murder Among the Angels (5 page)

“It’s taken me almost thirty years,” he said. “Fortunately, the phrenological collection had been stored in the garden house, so it was spared the water damage. It’s also taken thirty years to catalogue everything.”

“There were—what was it. Jack?—something like thirty thousand documents alone,” said Jerry. He turned to address Charlotte: “Most of them went to the Museum of the City of New York.”

Lister corrected him: “Thirty-three thousand documents, and”—he paused, one hand resting on the knob of the inner door—“five hundred and two skulls.”

As Lister opened the door, Charlotte stepped across the threshold into her second bizarre museum of the morning. The museum was set in a large, high-ceilinged room that appeared to comprise half of the first story of the eight-sided building. Directly ahead was a door that opened onto the stairwell of a spiral staircase that was illuminated by sunlight from the glass-walled belvedere overhead. A sentence had been painted on the wall above this door in gold lettering: “In this museum of skull and race; a grand bazaar of head and face.” The displays were arranged on shelves lining the diagonal walls that comprised four sides of the octagon. They consisted of shelf after shelf of human skulls, punctuated only by the tall windows that illuminated the room. Looking around, Charlotte had the feeling of being in a Roman catacomb that had become so overcrowded that every inch of wall space was taken up by skulls. Seeing them, the thought struck her that the skull in the cemetery might have been stolen from here as a prank, but then she noticed that the skulls on display had yellowed from age, whereas the one Jerry had shown her had been as white as a freshly laundered sheet.

Lister stood with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, surveying the room. “The phrenologists believed that the shape of the skull reflected the underlying shape of the brain, and that certain parts of the brain represented particular traits, such as piety, sympathy, and leadership. The original owner of this house collected skulls and cranial reproductions in order to study the correlation between skull shape and personality traits. We’ve got the skulls of presidents, savages, pirates, saints, murderers—you name it. He called his collection his ‘Phrenological Cabinet.’” He led them over to a skull on a lower shelf. “For instance, the phrenologists believed in studying the skulls of criminals in order to identify the cranial characteristics of the criminal personality.” He nodded at a skull on the shelf directly in front of them. “This is a reproduction of the skull of Dr. Harvey Crippen. He was a doctor who poisoned his wife, dismembered her body, and buried her under his cellar floor. It was the most famous murder case of the day.”

Charlotte and Jerry looked at Dr. Crippen’s skull, which to Charlotte’s untutored eye gave no hint of the murderous propensities of its former owner, and then followed Lister to another shelf.

“And here we have the devices that phrenologists used to take their measurements: craniometers, cephalometers, callipers, measuring frames, et cetera,” Lister went on. “For each skull reading, the phrenologist would measure sixteen different skull dimensions.”

“I understand the Nazis did the same thing,” said Jerry.

“Exactly,” said Lister. “To determine who was an Aryan and who wasn’t. They even used some of the same instruments.”

“That’s what doesn’t make sense to me about it,” Charlotte said. “Isn’t it terribly deterministic? I mean: what about the poor bloke who was born with bumps indicating a criminal personality? Was there any hope for him?”

“Fowler would have said not, although people did try to alter their skulls,” Lister said. He led them to yet another shelf. “This is a display of the special hats and lotions that were used to develop the desirable parts of the brain, and hence the cranial contours.” Lister bowed again, this time to Charlotte. “Forgive me, Miss Graham,” he said. “But you speak as if we view things differently today. I would argue that physiognomy is just as much destiny now as it was then, perhaps even more so.”

“What do you mean?” Jerry asked.

“Only that we’re just as likely to judge a person by appearances now as we were then, except that instead of using cranial protuberances as our measure, we judge people by youthfulness of appearance, or amount of hair.”

“By that measure, I’m losing ground quickly, and you’re out of the game altogether,” said Jerry.

Lister smiled.

He was perfectly right, Charlotte thought. Why else was she here in the first place than to improve her chances of success by improving her appearance?

“The standards by which people are judged may change, but the need to judge remains the same. Take the nose, for instance: Roman, aquiline, turned-up—all have been in fashion at one time or another. Case in point,” he said, heading toward a door to the right of the stairwell.

“Where to now?” asked Jerry.

“My sculpture gallery,” he replied. Opening a set of double doors, he led them into the room that comprised the third quadrant of the ground floor, the most striking feature of which was a larger-than-life marble statue of a beautiful angel with long, flowing hair and outstretched wings.

“Here we have the late nineteenth-century ideal of feminine beauty: low forehead; level eyebrows; wide, almond-shaped eyes; high cheekbones; long nose; strong jaw. I think she’s gorgeous, but that’s because, being a sculptor, I like strong features. I don’t think most people today would think so.”

Charlotte looked up at the statue, which loomed over the room like the Nike of Samothrace over the stairwell in the Louvre. The face was curiously androgynous—it could have belonged to a man or a woman—but it had a heroic beauty. “Were you the sculptor?” she asked.

“No. My father was. But I’ve carved seven exactly like her.” He explained: “The plans for the Zion Hill Church call for twenty-four identical angels to be mounted above the nave arcade. But my father had only carved six when he died. I picked up where he left off.”

“That means you still have eleven to go,” Jerry said.

He nodded. “I do them when I have the time.” He looked up at the angel’s face. “I keep her here as my model. The real model was Lillian Archibald, who was one of the daughters of the founder of Zion Hill. She was a famous beauty of her day. My father was in love with this face. As, I think, am I.”

“She’s exquisite,” Charlotte said.

“Yes,” Lister agreed, staring up at the statue. “Look at that jaw! Society doesn’t have the same appreciation for beauty that it once did. The face that’s considered beautiful today is too perfect. No one part stands out more than any other. In my opinion, the result is bland, bland, bland.”

Charlotte had to agree. She couldn’t see the appeal of the models who were being held up as today’s great beauties.

“Now Lillian’s era!” Lister continued. “That was an era in which beauty was appreciated. Crawford: what a face. Bacall. Graham.” His devilish eyes twinkled at Charlotte. “If I may be permitted, Miss Graham: none of the faces I’ve mentioned would be considered classically beautiful.”

Jerry looked over at Charlotte as if he were studying her face.

“The jawline might be too strong, the lips too full”—Lister’s glance fell once again on Charlotte—“the eyebrows too heavy.”

She smiled. He was referring to the famous incident in Holly wood history when, as a young starlet, she had caused a minor scandal by refusing to let the studio’s makeup men pluck her eyebrows to the pencil-line thinness that was then in fashion.

He continued: “But it is faces like these that are the great faces, because it is these defects, if I may call them that, that lend a face interest and mystery.” He held up a forefinger. “I quote Francis Bacon: ‘There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.’”

“Well said!” Charlotte remarked, and thought again of the unnatural perfection of the computer image of her surgically improved face.

Passing through the sculpture gallery, Lister explained that although the four rooms on the first floor had originally been designated as living room, dining room, parlor, and music room, the house had been designed so that they could be opened into one large hall, which was used for the display of the Phrenological Cabinet, and as an examining room for phrenological readings. Opening the double doors on the far wall of the gallery, he revealed a room identical to the one they had just left. Like the Phrenological Cabinet, this room also displayed a collection of skulls, this time on worktables lined up on either side. Actually, as Lister explained, they were not real skulls, but plaster casts of original skulls. Each rested on a cork collar to keep it in place. And next to each skull was Lister’s reconstruction of the face of the person to whom the skull had belonged. Each of the skulls had belonged to someone who had been murdered. Their skulls had been found months, even years later, and taken to Lister by the police for the faces to be reconstructed in hopes that someone would come forward to identify them. There were dozens of them.

“Jack calls himself the ‘Recomposer of the Decomposed,’” said Jerry as Charlotte wandered from one reconstruction to the next, marveling at the detail. Each face was painted in an extraordinarily lifelike manner, and each bore its own individual expression. Some seemed to be pining after the life they had left behind; others wore beatific expressions, as if they’d at last found peace of mind. Still others looked angry or bored or sad.

“How do you do it?” she asked.

“It’s not as hard as it might seem,” Lister replied. “The differences between one person’s face and another’s are largely the result of differences in the shape of the skull. The skull is the armature of the face. In fact, the shape of the skull is so close to the shape of the face that it almost has its own personality. To say nothing of its own individual beauty, or ugliness.”

As he spoke, Charlotte looked at his own hairless head, which offered a living example of his point. She was no connoisseur of beauty in skulls, but she was certain that Lister must have thought of his skull as being quite beautiful to have displayed it so boldly.

Lister continued: “Any artist who does portraits will tell you that after a while you’re able to see the facial skeleton through the skin. What I do is the same idea, but in reverse. I work from the facial skeleton out. A lot of it is scientific,” he went on. “The depth of the soft tissue varies according to where it’s located on the skull, so that you can fit the pieces of the face together as if they were the pieces of a puzzle.”

“But you must take a lot of artistic license, as well,” Charlotte said. “After all, you can’t determine facial expression scientifically.”

“True. Science can only take you so far. The rest is intuition.” He picked up the skull of a young girl and ran his thumb across the cheekbone. “If you spend enough time studying a skull—turning it over in your hands, running your fingers over its surfaces, feeling its bumps—you begin to get a sense of what the person was like.”

“Shades of Fowler again,” said Jerry.

“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe Fowler and I are just coming at the same concept from different angles. Although it isn’t so much a person’s character I sense as their soul. I know it sounds crazy, but …”

“They say a good portraitist can sense the same thing,” Charlotte interjected, thinking of Oskar Kokoschka, the German expressionist who was one of her fourth husband’s favorite painters, and who was said to have painted his subjects as they would look twenty years into the future.

“There you go,” said Lister. “I also sometimes have other information—jewelry, bits of clothing—that gives me a feeling for what the person was like. My reconstructions often turn out to be uncannily accurate. Again and again the families tell me that I’ve gotten the victim’s expression exactly right. Like that one you’re standing next to, Jerry.”

Jerry turned to look at a sculpture of a teenaged girl with long brown hair, her face turned wistfully upward.

“The family identified her from a photo of my reconstruction that was published in the newspapers in the area where her skull was found. They said she always held her head up like that, as if she were searching for hope.”

“Searching for hope,” Jerry repeated ironically as he looked down into the upturned eyes of the murdered girl.

“She took me the longest to complete,” Lister said. “Over four months. She’d been hit over the head with a sledgehammer, and her skull was broken into a hundred and thirty-two pieces.”

“Do police departments pay you to do this?” Charlotte asked.

“No,” he said. “I do it as a public service.” He smiled. “I guess you could say that recomposing the decomposed is my hobby.”

“How did you get into this line of work?”

“My father started the business,” Lister replied. “He was a sculptor who was hired by Edward Archibald to sculpt the angels for Zion Hill Church, as I mentioned. People liked his angels so much, they wanted them for their graves. Non-Swedenborgians, that is. Swedenborgians don’t make a big deal out of their graves. From there, he branched out into headstones, cinerary urns, obelisks, even mausoleums.” He took a seat on the corner of one of the worktables. “During his later years, the business languished. People weren’t into elaborate monuments. But it’s recently picked up again. People are asking for custom-made monuments that reflect their personal interests. In the past year, I’ve done monuments featuring a Corvette, a speedboat, and a Welsh corgi.”

“No kidding!” said Jerry.

“People are strange,” Lister said. “Anyway, to answer your question: I developed a specialty in death masks of the rich and famous. I work primarily with Frank B. Sutherland, which is a funeral home for rich people on the Upper East Side. I’m sure you’re familiar with it, Miss Graham.”

Charlotte nodded. She had been to many funerals there, especially so in recent years, and, although she had made no plans for the ultimate disposal of her own remains, viewed it as well within the realm of possibility that she would end up there herself in the not-too-distant future.

“What’s a death mask?” Jerry asked.

“It’s a cast that’s made from an impression that’s taken of the deceased person’s face immediately after death. It’s a memento of the dead person, like a lock of their hair.” He proceeded to name some of the rich and famous people he’d done death masks of, including a dead president, a famous playwright, and a mobster who’d been gunned down at a clam house on Mulberry Street.