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his work seem chic. We had recently consulted him to
determine the identity of a body that had been reduced to charred
pieces of bone and left in the furnace of an abandoned building in
Harlem. The ex-lover who killed his pregnant girlfriend was convicted
on the basis of the forensic work, and as a result of Dorfman's
success, the chief medical examiner hired him away from his academic
position at a Texas university.
    "Look, Mr. Chapman.
Can we just lock up the basement and get about our business? Surely
this… this"-Professor Davis waved his hand at the silent skeleton-"this
can wait until tomorrow."
    "You got somebody's
briefs you got to get into? We can handle this without you."
    Davis fidgeted and
kept looking to the staircase. It was not unusual for people to be
uncomfortable in the presence of death, but these remains looked more
like an exhibit in a museum or medical school display case than those
of someone who had recently shuffled off his mortal coil.
    "The dean asked me to
wait with you. Of course I'll stay."
    "How old's this
tenement?" Mike asked.
    Nan had gone upstairs
to refresh our glasses of wine and bring one for Mike. The dean had
swept everyone else out of the building, including the bartenders, who
had abandoned their station but left their cargo behind.
    "It was built more
than two hundred years ago," Davis said. "That's what all the community
fuss was about when the law school trustees bought the place.
Neighborhood people wanting to declare it a historic landmark, even
though it wasn't architecturally significant. I handled the lawsuit for
the university."
    Mike lifted his glass
to the Thin Man. "Cheers, buddy. We'll have you out of that wall in no
time."
    "Can these scientists
actually tell, Detective, how long this body has been here?"
    "It's a little bit of
modern forensics and a lot of circumstantial evidence. Me, I like when
you find one of these guys clutching an old newspaper with the date on
it. The 1805 town crier, with the latest reports on Napoléon's
victory over the Austrians at Austerlitz. Short of that, I turn it all
over to the medical examiner," Mike said.
    "Strange way for
someone to go to his eternal rest, isn't it?" I asked. "Standing up
inside a brick coffin."
    "And naked. Unless his
drawers fell down to his kneecaps and I just can't see them in there,
he's stark naked. Somebody could have had the decency to spring for a
black suit, don't you think?" Mike said, turning back to the professor.
"Were there people living here when the university bought the building?"
    Davis nodded. "Yes, it
was completely occupied until a couple of years ago. This basement was
the original kitchen of the house, which explains some of the pottery
and cooking tools that have been dug up. Then in the 1940s it was a
restaurant called Bertololloti's, refitted for apartments in the
sixties. In fact, it's generally been students and faculty who've lived
in here going back decades. The way the campus has grown, it's
conveniently in the middle of things."
    "I know a few guys who
are gonna hate you for this, Coop. Some poor slob over at the cold case
squad will be digging through occupancy records and census data till
his pension vests, trying to figure out whether any tenants disappeared
or people were reported missing over the past few centuries."
    Professor Davis had
seated himself on the edge of the table in the far corner, where the
recently dug artifacts were displayed. "You don't hear a heartbeat, do
you?"
    Mike smiled at him. "I
didn't see you drinking, Mr. Davis. These bones have been picked clean."
    "The floorboards,
Detective. I'm not talking about the chest cavity."
    Mike looked at me
quizzically but I was just as puzzled as he.
    "No telltale heart,
Mr. Chapman? I'll give your colleagues a head start. This building was
once the home of Edgar Allan Poe. This grim little structure was known
to the neighbors as Poe House."

    5
    Mike Chapman ushered
Andy Dorfman down the narrow staircase shortly after 9