Privy to the Dead (7 page)

“Lunch?” Marty asked before she got up.

“Shoot, is it that time already?” It had been a busy day, and now it was half-gone. And everything I'd done so far had been unscheduled, which meant the scheduled stuff was falling way behind. Solving mysteries seemed to eat up a lot of time. “Sure, fine. I get cranky when I don't eat. Where?”

“Someplace on Chestnut Street, maybe?”

Hmm. Chestnut Street was where Carnell Scruggs had stopped for his last meal at a bar. I'd like to check what the walking distance actually was. “Sounds good. I don't know if I should clear up this mess . . .” I waved at the junk scattered all over the floor.

“Get Eric to do it—that's why you have an assistant,” Marty said firmly.

She was right, although I hated to ask other people to do my dirty work. Especially in this case, when the work was actually dirty. I gathered up my bag and jacket and went out
into the hall. “Eric, Marty and I are going to go find some lunch. Would you mind putting all that junk on the floor back into the box? Except for the brass fittings and bits of wood—see if you can find a small box for those. We're going to show them to someone this afternoon. You mind?”

“Not at all. I'll leave the small box in your office.”

I turned to leave, then remembered to add, “Oh, please keep the other stuff somewhere—don't just toss it. You never know—there might be something else important in there that we missed.”

“Got it. Have a nice lunch.”

Marty and I walked out of the building—after a short detour to wash our hands—and turned right, then left at the corner, heading for Chestnut Street. I didn't get as many opportunities to walk in the city as I would like, and things changed quickly. Plus, as an amateur historian I carried around in my head images of buildings that were long gone—according to old photographs and maps, the parking lot there had once been a school, and the pet food store on the next block had once sold tack for horses.

As we walked I started mentally counting how long it took to reach Chestnut Street. Not long. Marty and I found a nondescript restaurant and settled at a table. I wondered if she had an agenda—Marty usually did—or if she simply wanted to have lunch with me again. After we ordered, I decided to take the lead. “Do you think I'm making too much of this killing? Should I be doing my best to ignore it and pretend it's just an ordinary crime in the neighborhood?”

Marty raised one eyebrow at me. “You just gave yourself away when you said
pretend
. You know, your instincts are usually right. What does James think?”

“He says he's staying out of this. Not his jurisdiction. He will provide an opinion only if asked by me, and then only officially, and he will not perform any special favors.”

“You sound peeved about that.”

“Peeved? No, not really. I don't have any right to be, because he's right. I can't ask for help and drag him in every time I have a problem, even if it's a potentially criminal one. We have to keep some boundaries.”

“Maybe,” Marty said. She did not sound convinced.

Our sandwiches appeared and we dug in. Sorting through trash was apparently harder work than I had thought, and I was hungry. While I ate, I thought about Marty's
maybe
response. Was I being too cautious? My only significant prior relationship was decades behind me now, and yet I had been surprised to find how much I didn't want to repeat past mistakes with James.

When at least half of our sandwiches were gone, I responded, “You think I'm setting up walls between James and me? Or he is?”

“Not walls, necessarily. Maybe fences. Picket fences, with slats so the wind blows through. Ah, forget metaphors. Look, I know you're both feeling your way into this, and I think you're doing fine, both of you. But I also know it's tricky when your professional lives overlap in unexpected ways.”

It struck me that Marty seemed to be trying to say something without coming out and saying it. “What's this really about?” I asked.

Marty picked at the tomato on her plate. Finally she said, “I'm saying it might be happening again—you and the police butting heads over some kind of crime, with
James hovering in the background, whether or not he wants to be.”

My senses went on high alert. “What? How?”

Marty didn't meet my eyes. “You think this Carnell Scruggs picked up something from the privy trash and took it with him, and you think you've found something that fits the description—a second one. The police think it may be murder. So that links the Society to it. You're its president, and Jimmy is your whatever. Like I said, it's happening again.”

“And I'm going to keep him out of it,” I said.

“Good luck with that. Anyway, now I'm taking you to see my furniture expert pal because I may know something about that brass piece you found today, so you can take it to your detective.”

I was surprised, yet not surprised. “Hold on—are you going to tell me what it is you know or think you know?”

Marty shook her head. “No, not yet, because I'm not sure.”

That hesitation was very unlike Marty. “I've never known you to hold back when you have an opinion. What's different about this?”

“If what I suspect is right, it's complicated. It goes far beyond that poor guy's murder. And back in time. And may bring James right back into it.”

“But you aren't going to tell me about it?” I protested.

“Not until I'm sure. Let's wait until we've talked with Henry Phinney.”

“That's your furniture guy?”

“He is. And he's a relative, too, but not close. Point is, he knows everything there is to know about Philadelphia
furniture. It's not just his stylistic opinion—he's pretty sharp on the science side, too.”

“Like a forensic analyst for furniture?” I asked.

Marty nodded, her mouth full of sandwich. I took the opportunity to finish my own. It was not surprising that Marty knew someone useful like this Henry Phinney, nor that she was related to him, because she knew everybody in the greater Philadelphia region and was related to half of them. Including James. What was more interesting was that she thought a more rigorous scientific analysis was desirable in this case. When our mouths were both empty, I asked, “What time are we seeing him?”

“Three.”

“Is he nearby?” I hoped he wasn't out in the burbs.

“He has a shop just off Market Street, close to the Delaware River—we can walk over together.”

“And that's all you're going to tell me?”

“Yup. For now.”

I couldn't get anything more out of her, and after lunch, Marty headed off for the stacks to do . . . whatever the heck she did. She didn't have an office or a real role at the Society, apart from her seat on the board, but she spent a lot of time in the stacks somewhere. I went to my office to find that Eric had tidied up as promised, and there was a plastic shoe box sitting on the blotter on my desk, carefully lined with bubble wrap. I pulled off the top to find the brass bits nestled safely inside, along with the larger shards of wood. Sitting on my desk, which was mahogany, the old wood looked a lot like mahogany to me, but I was no expert. Could someone extract DNA from wood? Were there DNA profiles of different kinds of wood?

“Lissa came back and took some pictures of all the pieces,” Eric told me.

I'd forgotten about doing that, and was glad she hadn't. I didn't know if the mysterious Henry would need to keep what we'd found, including our flat, curly thing, aka The Escutcheon. So at least we'd have a record—and something to give Detective Hrivnak, if Henry for some reason held on to the brasses. If after talking to Henry we still thought there was something to tell.

Marty reappeared in my office at two thirty, looking unhappy. When I raised an eyebrow at her expression, she shook her head. Still not ready to share, it seemed.

“Here's what Eric assembled for us.” I held up the box.

“Everything?” she asked.

“I think so. We're walking?”

“Yeah. I could use the air.”

We set off again, heading for the river, past the back end of Independence Hall. I always enjoyed envisioning the city as it once was, when the blocks closest to the Delaware had been home to the grand houses of the city's elite in the later eighteenth century. Those glory days hadn't lasted long, and shops and factories and warehouses had taken over quickly in the early nineteenth century. Henry Phinney's place of work occupied a narrow brick building that looked as though it had been there for a couple of hundred years itself. There was no shop front, merely a shabby paneled door embellished with a handsome brass knocker. Antique or reproduction? I couldn't tell. Seemed like a furniture expert would have an original, but then again I wondered if a real one would long since have been ripped off. Either way, Marty rapped it smartly, and the door opened quickly.

Marty's relatives were a mixed bunch. I'd been half picturing a gnomelike character sprinkled with wood shavings, but Henry Phinney was a thirtysomething young man with close-cropped hair, and his arms, revealed by his ratty T-shirt, sported a variety of tattoos. He looked more like a biker than an expert on antique furniture.

“Hey, Auntie M! Good to see you! This is your pal?” He looked at me.

I stepped forward and offered my hand. “I'm Nell Pratt, president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society.” Wow, I sounded pompous even to my own ears.

The younger man recoiled in mock horror. “Oh my God, the president herself! Please enter my humble abode.” He stepped back and made a sweeping gesture.

“Henry, behave yourself,” Marty said mildly. “We need your help, fast.”

Henry grinned, unfazed by the reprimand. “You wouldn't say much over the phone. What's the story?”

“I didn't say much because I didn't want to prejudice you. We have some items that we want you to look at. They may come from an old piece of furniture.”

“Yeah? You probably know more about styles and makers and all that stuff than I do.”

“Maybe,” Marty said, “but we want your special expertise. We need to know if the remains really are old, and if so, how old.”

“Why the rush?”

Marty and I exchanged a glance, and I let her decide whether she could trust her nephew. Apparently she could. “It's connected to a police investigation,” she said.

“Whoa!” Henry's face went serious quickly. “Would I have to, like, testify or anything?”

“I don't think so, but I won't say no. Right now it's just to satisfy my—our—own curiosity. That's all I'll say for now. Will you take a look?”

“Sure, no problem. But if I have to go to court, you'll have to buy me a suit. Come on back.”

We followed him farther inside. The building was typical of early Philadelphia row houses, with a narrow hallway next to equally narrow stairs on one side; closed doors presumably led to adjoining rooms. Henry kept going toward the back, where what had once been a kitchen had been converted into a workroom-slash-laboratory, ringed with large windows that let in a lot of light. It was surprisingly neat, given that Henry must deal with a lot of wood, and it smelled of pungent solvents mixed with lemon oil. Odd dismembered pieces of furniture were scattered around the room—a leg here, an arm there.

That much I had expected. What I hadn't foreseen was his array of high-tech machines I couldn't begin to identify. I spied what I thought was a binocular microscope in a corner, protected by a clear plastic cover, but that was where my expertise ended. It was as though the eighteenth and the twenty-first century had collided head-on in this room.

Henry was watching me with an amused expression. “Go on—you can ask.”

“Okay. What the heck is all this stuff, and what do you do with it?”

“How much has Aunt Marty told you?”

“Next to nothing. Plus my scientific expertise is limited, so keep it simple, please.”

“No problem. I analyze and restore furniture, okay? A buyer or seller can bring a piece to me and ask if it's authentic, or if it's been repaired and when. If a piece gets damaged, I can fix it, well enough that ninety-nine percent of people could never even tell. It's both a skill and an art. The fancy equipment allows me to analyze woods so I can tell you where they came from, and what I'd need to use to patch a piece. I can also analyze finishes—and then replicate them. And it's not as simple as whittling a new piece of wood or slapping on some replacement hardware. I have to make sure it matches visually.”

“Wow,” I said, impressed. “I didn't know people like you existed. Of course, I don't have anything that needs your kind of high-end attention. In fact, I don't have much of anything at all in the way of furniture. Not to be rude, but can I assume you make a good living at this?”

“Good enough. I'm a contract consultant for a couple of the museums in town as well of some others, and I live pretty simply. A lot of what I make goes into the high-tech stuff, but they're my toys and I love to play with them. So, Auntie M, what is it you want me to check out?” Henry asked.

Marty handed him the box. “Tell me what we're looking at.”

He took the box and opened it, then removed the contents one piece at a time, and spread them out on a clean worktable. He shuffled them around until he was satisfied with the arrangement. Given what he'd said about the nature of his work, I was almost surprised that he didn't slip on gloves. The ensemble now looked a bit like a reassembled skeleton,
and I guessed that he was trying to reconstruct what the original piece might have been, with a lot of missing bits. He perched on a stool and studied the arrangement, then began picking up individual pieces, starting with the escutcheon. Then he turned his attention to the screws, which surprised me, since they didn't seem that special, and finally the wood shards. For the last he pulled over a magnifier mounted on an arm and studied the grain of the wood carefully. Then he looked at Marty. “Where'd these come from?”