Dead Center by Shiya Ribowsky

Author:Shiya Ribowsky [Shiya Ribowsky and Tom Shachtman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061741975
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

Of all the investigations I’ve done in which a body arrived dead to New York City, one revealed to me that some people really do have actual skeletons in their closets. In what became one of my more memorable cases, I was summoned to a most unusual clothing store in which human remains had been found. The store was actually a large apartment in an Upper West Side pre–World War II building—the kind of apartment that has fourteen-foot-high ceilings and a seemingly endless number of rooms—and the shop specialized in transvestite clothing and costumes. The owner of the store, the sole occupant of the apartment, was a cross-dresser who ran “her” shop out of four of the apartment’s twelve rooms. Before going to the scene, I received this information over the phone from a detective who also told me that the owner had recently died, but that it was not her death that I would be investigating.

According to the detective, the storeowner had evidently been beloved in the cross-dressing world for providing the very best in women’s clothes for men. After her death, some of her friends had gotten together and thrown a party and rummage sale at the shop to raise money for her funeral. During the sale, a mummified body had been found in a closet.

When I arrived on the scene, I learned that the finder of the remains had been poking around in the back of a very large walk-in closet and, on a top shelf, had found a surprisingly heavy valise at which he tugged until it came crashing down. The determined shopper, I was informed, was an off-duty NYPD detective, who had been at the rummage sale in search of a costume for the upcoming Halloween parade in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. Prying open the locked valise, the detective had found it filled with a large black plastic garbage bag. He also noticed a certain musty aroma, which, I am sure, must have worried him. He opened the bag and found yet another plastic garbage bag inside of it. Abandoning the gentle approach, he ripped open a hole in a corner of the four bags covering the contents, and revealed a dried and shriveled human hand. Peeking through the hole, he discerned the mummified remains of a human being.

For the detective, finding these remains must have initially presented a dilemma, I mused, because making a report of this mummified person might well mean that he’d have to tell his superiors his reason for being in the shop in the first place. But this didn’t stop him for very long, if at all, because he did his duty.

Arriving at the scene, I realized that the off-duty detective had done a great job of securing it, because the valise was still in the closet. A uniformed cop and a couple of squad detectives watched me with no attempt to hide their amusement as I pushed my way through racks of long pink boas, neon-colored sequined evening gowns, piles

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