Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(26)

“So you, like, pretend to be observant?”

“It is important that I have the trust of the people in the community,” he says. “I am observant. But not so much as some.”

I wait for him to explain further, but he does not.

After about ten minutes, we reach the funeral home, a large low building with a parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. There is one entrance marked for men. Another for women. We enter through the women’s door and stand in a kind of vestibule. Saul speaks in a hushed voice.

“When a Jew dies, the family receives the body almost immediately. Tradition forbids embalming or extracting part of the body, which is what the medical examiner would do. And the deceased is to be buried as soon as possible, usually within twenty-four hours. If today was not Shabbos, she would have been buried this morning. Instead, the service will be after sundown.”

“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 f*cked, 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.