“But it’s a homicide.”
“Yes,” says Saul. “But again, there is pressure from the family and the community to have the body buried.”
“Are you telling me that Rivka Mendelssohn is going to be buried without an autopsy?”
“Yes.”
“Is that even legal?” I ask, dumbfounded. How could the police even begin trying to figure out who murdered her if they don’t examine her body?
“There is no law that says there must be an autopsy done on a body. That is entirely up to police discretion. And in a case like this, when a member of the ultra-Orthodox community is dead, the police have been known to defer to the wishes of the family, or whoever is representing them. The Hasidim vote, and most vote for who their rebbe tells them to vote for. In Brooklyn, the ultra-Orthodox vote can mean the difference between being the current or former district attorney, or city councilman. And if a powerful man like Aron Mendelssohn calls the rebbe and the rebbe calls someone in the DA’s office and asks him to tell the precinct commander to let Chesed Shel Emes take a body, the precinct commander may let that body go.”
“Who?”
“Chesed Shel Emes. They are a privately funded group-some with schooling in mortuary science. Jewish law says that every drop of blood and strand of hair of the deceased should be buried with him. Officially, they prepare the dead for burial. They come to crime scenes and clean up, and then cleanse the body to make it pure.”
“They destroy evidence.”
“That is one way to look at it.”
“I saw them take her away, from the yard. The M.E. and this other van, with Hebrew letters drove up at the same time. The… Chesed… they ended up taking her.”
“Yes. And they brought her here.”
I am about to say that this arrangement seems utterly fucked, and ask Saul how many other special interest groups get to keep bodies from the authorities after violent crimes, when a woman walks in. She is probably in her late thirties, and she’s wearing a white coat. She is petite, small-boned, and, I realize, wearing a wig. I don’t think I would have noticed that it was a wig yesterday, the deep brown hair looks very natural, cut in a bob and parted on one side with bangs that sweep across her forehead. But now that I have the idea in my head that ultra-Orthodox women wear wigs, it’s easy to see that it’s not really her hair. It’s a little too shiny, and the place where the part meets the bangs seems too perfectly perpendicular. She says something in Yiddish to Saul, and Saul responds back in English.
“This is my cousin’s daughter,” he says, gesturing toward me. “She is considering police work. Rivka, this is Malka Grossman.”
“Hello,” I say. Why is Saul lying?
Malka nods. “If you want to view her, we should hurry,” she says to Saul. “Her family will be here by four o’clock.” I glance at my watch. It is two thirty.
“Please,” says Saul.
We follow Malka through a door, down a hallway, and into a small room, where she directs us to don paper hats and paper booties. While Malka is out of earshot, I ask Saul why he referred to me as Rivka.
“Rivka is Hebrew for Rebekah,” he says.
“I know that,” I say.
“Malka won’t feel comfortable speaking to you unless she thinks you grew up in the community.” I decide not to argue and we descend a narrow set of stairs into the basement, where a body, covered with a white cloth, lies on a table. A young woman is sitting on a chair beside the body. She is praying. Malka says something to the woman in Yiddish and she leaves without acknowledging us. Saul and I keep our coats on.
“I never allow a man to view a woman’s body. But your cousin is a friend to our family. And I hope he can help the police find who did this. Rivka Mendelssohn was a good woman.”
Malka pulls down the shroud over Rivka’s body, and the first thing I think is that she looks dry. At crime scenes, there are fluids. Bodies leak when damaged. But here in the basement of the funeral home a day after being found, Rivka Mendelssohn’s shredded skin looks like someone has painted a coat of polyurethane on it. The gashes torn into her legs, her arms, her belly, her neck have been cleaned out. The flesh bunches against the deepest wounds, creating wrinkles. The smaller ones, the scratches, are red, but bloodless. Where there are no open wounds, her pale skin is covered in bruises; clouds of purple and blue and red and yellow. If Malka told me she had been attacked by wolves, I would have believed her.
Saul begins to speak. “This looks like blunt force trauma, here and here.” He points to Rivka’s head. You can see the skull wounds clearly because she has no hair. Someone has, mercifully, closed her mouth.
Malka is silent and Saul continues. “It looks like she was hit multiple times, very hard, on the back of the head.” Malka, as if on cue, lifts Rivka’s head slightly and turns it, pointing to one particularly devastating wound just above her left ear. “See the blows to the neck? Here and here. They seem to be both pre- and postmortem.”
“She did not die easily,” says Malka.
I can’t speak. What is happening inside my chest is not anxiety. It is the low rumble of a feeling I thought I might have outrun: sadness. Heavy, weeping sadness pulling at the corners of my mouth, tightening around my throat. Rivka Mendelssohn was about my height and weight, but lying on the table she seems tiny. Like a child. She has an old scar, maybe from a cesarean birth (or two), just below her belly button. I remember reading Catch-22 in high school and getting to the end where Snowden, the airman who gets shot, “spills his secret,” and his secret is literally his guts. Man is matter. Drop him out a window and he will fall. Set fire to him and he will burn. Something like that. I always remembered those lines. To me it felt like a carpe diem thing. Like, you’ve got this body, this life, and it’s all you’ve got. But looking at Rivka Mendelssohn I think maybe he meant it more literally. Rivka Mendelssohn was a woman, and then, suddenly, she was a pile of meat and bones. And it didn’t take a war to do it. If I had a bat, I could have done it myself.
“I’ve seen bodies in worse condition,” says Malka. “But usually in deaths involving motor vehicle accidents. See these?” She points to marks on her wrists. “I’m not certain, but she may have been restrained.”
My phone rings. I dig into my pocket to silence it, but my hands feel light, and as I pull it out I drop it onto the concrete floor. It bounces twice and lands beneath Rivka. I drop to my knees to retrieve it. UNKNOWN-it’s probably the desk, though I don’t know why they’re calling me. I flip the switch to silent and put the phone back in my pocket. Malka looks uncomfortable; she glares at my phone. If I were really named Rivka, I think my phone would be off for the Sabbath.
“Sorry,” I say.
“I know this would just be an opinion,” says Saul, “but might you be willing to entertain a scenario?”
Malka nods.
“Rivka, perhaps you should write this down,” says Saul. I nod and dig into my bag for my notebook. My hands are trembling. “Based on what I see, my opinion is that Rivka Mendelssohn was struck from behind and knocked down. See her hands, and knees.” He points to Malka, who obliges, gently lifting Rivka’s left hand. She turns it over to reveal broken fingernails and scratching. She sets it back down and lifts the other. The knees, I can see, are scratched and bruised, though so is the rest of her.
“The wounds to the head and neck look pre-mortem. If I had to guess at a cause of death, I would probably say cerebral hemorrhage due to repeated head trauma. But obviously I can’t be sure. Much of the rest-especially the bruising and ripping in the skin-seems to be postmortem. It is possible that much of this came from the… material in which she was found.”