The Anatomy of Deception (30 page)

We took great care on our walk to the cemetery, secreting two short shovels under our overcoats. Eakins also carried a hooded lantern, which was kept shut, emitting virtually no light. We glanced over our shoulders frequently and occasionally stopped abruptly to listen for other footsteps. Except for the distant barking of dogs and a lone owl, we heard nothing. It was dreamlike, prowling down the quiet streets in long coats on a cool, dark night, the moon and stars largely obscured by an overhang of low clouds. For his part, Eakins seemed to observe the night as a panoply of muted color, a study in composition and design.

We arrived at the back fence of St. Barnabas in about fifteen minutes, and once more waited in silence to ensure that
we had no unseen companions. It was then that my heart began to race and my hands grew moist. Even in the half-light, I could see the painter had been affected similarly.

The fence was low and easy to scale, and we were over in a matter of seconds. Once we entered the cemetery grounds, we had journeyed to the far side of the law. If apprehended, we had agreed that our only defense was to admit exactly why we were there, of our suspicions of foul play in the death of Rebecca Lachtmann, and a desire to determine if those suspicions had any basis before leveling accusations. That explanation might not totally spare us the wrath of the authorities, but might mitigate against the most serious of charges. We fervently hoped, of course, that no such account would be necessary.

With April soon upon us, the ground had lost the hardness of the winter frost and we made our way silently through the cemetery, navigating carefully through the rows and rows of graves. It was a simple matter once I had noted the designations of two or three of the rows to move toward the location where the five cadavers in question had been interred.

The section that St. Barnabas had allocated for Reverend Squires’ charges was an uncared-for area at the far end of the cemetery. The rows of shabby graves were interspersed with large trees and would most certainly be avoided by anyone who did not have specific cause to be there. I wondered how much worse Potter’s Field could have been than this grim and neglected place.

Although the silence was, in its own way, as unnerving as sound, we were both relieved that we were so unlikely to be discovered while completing our task. I counted eight graves up from the marker at the end of the proper row to a recently filled mound of earth marked with a simple cross. Without a word passing between us, Eakins and I threw off our coats, grabbed our shovels, and began to dig.

Immediately under the surface, the soil was rocky and surprisingly difficult to move for being filled in so recently. I
was unused to such labor and tired quickly. Eakins, however, despite his slight frame had impressive reserves of strength, much as Charlie had shown shoveling the ice. I began to wonder if common assumptions of size and musculature might not be completely false.

We had gotten down about eighteen inches when my shoulders began to ache. Fortunately, just a few inches later, Eakins’ shovel hit the flat wooden top of the pine coffin. Paupers’ graves, even when subsidized by Reverend Squires, were not deep. About three minutes later, we had shoveled off the remaining earth and cleared the top of the lid. Eakins’ shallow breathing was the only sound I heard.

I wondered in what state the body would appear, how much decomposition would have occurred, even in cool weather. Other than identifying the body, would I be able to learn anything at all? A feeling of horrible ghoulishness passed through me that I was eager to lift off the lid. I reached down, took a deep breath, and used the end of the shovel to pry it up.

Eakins gasped. “My God, what is that?” he exclaimed although his voice barely rose above a whisper.

Inside the coffin, rather than the remains of a slender, light-haired young woman, there lay a large, dark, shriveled object. The stench was overpowering and immense insects were everywhere. A moment later, a rat scurried from under the body out a hole it had gnawed in the coffin’s soft pine. Eakins turned away to keep from retching. As I had predicted, witnessing surgery had not prepared him for this. I hastily closed the top.

“What is that?” he repeated, his voice wavering.

“It is a Negro who died of alcohol poisoning,” I replied. “We autopsied him the same day as I saw the girl.”

“Then where is she?” he asked, averting his eyes from the coffin as if it contained a spirit.

“Perhaps I counted wrong.” I lifted myself out of the hole, and checked the row again. Holding the lantern closer to the ground, I saw that I had missed a grave and therefore we had
dug one too far. When I told Eakins of my error, he could barely restrain his fury, but there was little time for recrimination. We fixed the top of the Negro’s casket, filled in the hole, and dug another, one site over. By this time, my shoulders were quivering with fatigue and my palms burned.

When I pried open the top of this second coffin, we faced another decomposing corpse, this time of a young girl with fair hair, wrapped in a brown shroud. The skin on her face had shrunken taut. Vermin had been at the eyes. As I moved the thin fabric aside, I heard Eakins emit a series of soft sobs. With one quick cut of the scalpel, I cut through her paper-dry skin, down to the ribs, and exposed the telltale nodules. There could be no doubt now: We had found Rebecca Lachtmann.

But I was not yet finished. I barked at Eakins to hold the light over her abdomen. In the slanted light from the lantern he looked as ashen as a cadaver himself.

My main objective was to determine if an abortion had been performed or begun, and to that end my first task was to determine if any fetal evidence remained in the uterus. From there, I was hoping to discover some indication as to the cause of death, but there was a quite severe limit to the information I might hope to extract from Rebecca Lachtmann’s corpse. Drug residue was undetectable and, in any case, it is unlikely that anesthetic would have been used in such a procedure. Ordinarily, the most likely cause of death from abortion would have been internal bleeding—all but impossible to detect, particularly in a cadaver at this stage of decomposition. In this case, however, I suspected another immediate cause of death if the operation had been botched.

I made a vertical cut through the desiccated skin of the girl’s abdomen from breastbone to pubis, then transverse cuts on top and bottom. The skin peeled back easily. The intestines and uterus were almost gone, but what was left was sufficient to tell me what I needed to know.

I looked up at Eakins. He was struggling to hold the lantern steady, a look of frozen horror on his face.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll be on our way in moments. Our time wasn’t wasted. I found what I came for.”

“Thank God for that anyway,” he replied in a raspy whisper.

“And when you fine gentlemen tell me, we’ll all know,” said a voice from the shadows.

Eakins and I lifted our heads. A man in a bowler hat was moving forward toward the grave site. He sported a handlebar mustache and had a revolver leveled directly at us.

J
ONAS LACHTMANN LIVED ON DELANCEY
Place, a few streets south of Rittenhouse Square. His town house was not as large or opulent as Hiram Benedict’s but, from the brief glance we had on our way in, there was no mistaking his wealth or position. The Lachtmanns’ taste was more modern than the Benedicts’, and Eakins, despite our predicament, could not hide his contempt when he noted the paintings on the walls.

“Impressionists,” he sniffed. “What rot! In ten years all of their paintings will be in the trash bin.”

Given what I had heard about Jonas Lachtmann, I was less inclined to discuss art than was Eakins, and marched silently through the house, the mustachioed man walking just behind us. We were directed to an open door, which led to a study in which Lachtmann himself stood rigidly before a set of long, midnight blue draperies at the far end. The room was illuminated only from two low-set wall sconces. The light cast elongating shadows over Lachtmann’s eyes, and the effect was unsettling, almost Satanic. We might easily be standing in the way station to Hell.

Lachtmann stared at us through unblinking eyes, although he seemed to quiver as he struggled to maintain control. I could not be sure from the stolidity whether fury or grief was the emotion he was most forcefully suppressing at that moment.

Even the man with the gun seemed unnerved. He hesitated
before padding softly across the room to whisper a few words in Lachtmann’s ear. Lachtmann nodded perfunctorily, then took one step forward, extending his hand toward two armchairs. His hand moved slowly but did not waver. “Come in, gentlemen.” He pronounced each syllable with studied civility. “Please sit.” He perused our dirt-covered clothes. “I see that I will have to have this room cleaned in the morning. Now, where have you two been rummaging about?”

Neither Eakins nor I responded but rather took seats as ordered.

“Ah, yes,” Lachtmann went on, the words studied, his tone almost artificial. “Now I remember. St. Barnabas Cemetery, wasn’t it?” He pressed his lips together and forced himself to continue. “Brandy?” he asked, gesturing toward a decanter and two snifters on a side table. “Keuhn,” he said to our escort, without waiting for an answer, “would you please pour for these gentlemen?” Lachtmann cocked a thumb in the man’s direction. “Keuhn is from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They offer a remarkable variety of services. They pour brandy, they track the scum who defile other men’s daughters, and they have even been known to use physical force when asked by their employers. Isn’t that right, Keuhn?”

Keuhn, who had finished pouring the brandies and was handing them to Eakins and myself, nodded. His hands were large, with thick knuckles. “Whatever you say, Mr. Lachtmann.” He had a slight western twang to his speech that could have come from Ohio.

“Keuhn is correct,” said Lachtmann, once more directing his comments to us. He was breathing deeply between sentences, gathering himself like a man preparing to undergo a surgical procedure in the days before anesthesia. “It is whatever I say, and at this moment, I am thinking of saying something quite severe.”

I had never in my life been so terrified, but I could not afford to let him speak unchallenged. I wanted to brace myself with a sip of the brandy, but I knew that my hand would
shake if I lifted the glass. I forced out the words. “That would be a mistake, Mr. Lachtmann. Whether you choose to believe me or not, I am very, very sorry that my suspicions turned out to be correct.”

Lachtmann did not interrupt, waiting for me to condemn myself. I went on. “I know how much you loved your daughter, but I can assure you that Eakins and I have had precisely the same aims in this matter as have you. If you do not listen to what we have to say, you will likely never find out who was responsible for what happened to her.”

“He was responsible,”
Lachtmann hissed, leveling a manicured index finger at Eakins. His eyes had gone wide, his face red, and his hand had moved so fast that it was a blur. Eakins cringed and pushed himself backward, as if he were determined to disappear into the chair back. Eakins might exude animal energy in the studio, but he was no match for the enraged creature that now faced him.

“Mr. Lachtmann, you must listen!” I exclaimed. The man needed desperately to lash out and unless I could provide him a reason to do otherwise, there was little to persuade him that Eakins and I would not be suitable candidates for his wrath. If I could not convince him that Eakins was blameless—whether true, untrue, or half true—I was certain neither of us would leave here alive. “Eakins was not responsible for any of Rebecca’s misfortunes. He has been working desperately to try to find her and render assistance. Setting upon him or me will get you no closer to the revenge you seek. You will merely have the satisfaction of watching pain inflicted on two men who were trying only to help.”

“You are denying that he despoiled my daughter?” Lachtmann snapped, still refusing to speak Eakins’ name. The intensity of the man, the homicidal ferocity, was physically oppressive. It robbed me of breath. But, at least he was now addressing himself to me and not my companion.

“Not only am I denying that Eakins was the father of
Rebecca’s child, I am also telling you that he had nothing whatever to do with her death. In fact, he cajoled me into helping because he was so worried about her. It was only because of his overriding concern—and that of Miss Benedict—that I agreed to become involved in Rebecca’s disappearance. It was, as it turns out, fortuitous that they asked me, because I have discovered a great deal.”

“And what exactly have you discovered?” I had stopped him, momentarily at least.

“I will be happy to tell you all I know,” I said, “if you will answer one question for me first. Keuhn here has been following Eakins for days, possibly weeks. Has he come up with one scintilla of evidence that Eakins has been anything but a friend to your daughter?”

Lachtmann refused to respond directly to my question. Instead, he said, “Go ahead, Dr. Carroll. Tell me your story.”

I favored Lachtmann with much the same version as I had given to Eakins and Abigail at dinner, with one extra detail. If Turk was the only culprit in his daughter’s death and he was himself dead, Lachtmann had no incentive to let Eakins and me continue on the loose. He would either turn the Pinkerton man on us, or alert the authorities as to where we had been found. Even if I did not land in prison, Johns Hopkins was unlikely to employ a physician who had been apprehended as a grave robber. Lachtmann had to have reason to let us go, so I added that I believed Turk had an accomplice, someone who may have performed the actual operation from which his daughter died.

“It was only to spare Miss Benedict … and by association, you,” I concluded, “that we undertook something as harebrained as digging up the coffin ourselves instead of going to the authorities. We decided that if the police became involved prematurely, Turk’s associate would be alerted and have the opportunity to cover his tracks.” I finally felt sufficiently in control to down some brandy. “Mr. Lachtmann, do I seem to
you fool enough to risk my career and my freedom on such an act without good cause?” It would be quite an irony if it was only the height of my own stupidity that saved me.