Scores and Transgressions
Frances Glessner Lee, Burned Cabin, c. 1944-48. | Collection of the Harvard Medical School, Harvard University, courtesy of the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, Baltimore, Maryland. i
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Tiny Murders
Before it was possible to use radar to solve crimes, Frances Glessner Lee created the Nutshell Series of Unexplained Deaths. Her miniature dioramas that reproduced true crime scenarios, dollhouse scale, are still used by students of forensic science. At first glance, the models speak of childhood and make believe and cleverness—that pie tin was once a bottle cap, the ironing board’s legs are jumbo-size paper clips, the lampshade is a pleated candy paper—but on closer examination, the doll is lying at an odd angle, like someone no longer alive, which is what she’s meant to represent. The body could be half-in, half-out of a bathtub, lying in a bed or on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. There’s a lot of red paint or ink, but sometimes the spatter isn’t obvious, then you see it, the signs of terror, chaos, mayhem. In some rooms, many tiny cigarettes overflow ashtrays and amber-colored whiskey bottles might be scattered on floors and tabletops. The kitchens, living rooms, bedrooms, attics—all appear cute in their miniaturization, and reflect what those rooms would have looked like in the 1940s and 1950s, but when you look more closely at that table or chair, what you’re seeing isn’t only the charm of a human-sized world reduced. According to a magazine article about Lee, “Grandma: A Sleuth at 69,” elements of her own life percolate through the rooms. Lee was from a very wealthy family, the owners of International Harvester, but she worked as a detective, the first female police captain in the United States, and had a special interest in the lives of working-class victims, so easily overlooked. The rooms are like works of art, as full of meaning and longing for memory as the boxes of Joseph Cornell or the miniature urban ruins of Mohamad Hafez. Even if all Lee was trying to figure out was who did it, the Nutshell Series of Unexplained Death seduces with the props of a child’s playroom but houses a version of adult horrors meant to challenge the viewer’s powers of observation and deduction. In the doll hanging from a rope, the miniscule books and toys stored in a broken attic, the angle of bullet holes made by pressing thumbtacks into cardboard walls, deadly intent left its marks on objects of domestic order. If the quarter-inch cigarette had been smoked halfway, Lee personally smoked the thing down to half. Accuracy mattered. The highly detailed Nutshells were meant to explain and instruct how you examined a crime scene for evidence, how you look, the ways of seeing that are possible. When is a half-off shoe just a half-off shoe? When is it a sign this was no accident?
Weegee-like, Lee would go to a crime scene, view a partially decomposed body discovered in early morning hours under a back porch, lying on a roof, or propped up in a garage and write in a notebook: knitting left mid-stitch on a chair, tools scattered as if thrown around, oil spill underfoot. For her dollhouse version, she used straight pins as knitting needles to knit tiny garments and spent hours painstakingly making each twig of furniture, each dime-size possession or prop, the signs of domestic tranquility mixed with nightmares made real on a 1/12-scale, all in service of putting the pieces together so as to teach detectives how to identify the bad actor behind the crime, and then, assuming justice would be served, flipped off tiny working electrical lights.
She would go to an autopsy to observe the placement of organs within the ribcage after a gunshot or a stabbing. All her work was based on true crime stories. By spending hours in the house of murder and mayhem, committed by perpetrators who could have been acquaintances, family members, or strangers, she found a way to jettison the reality of her refrigerator fortune, with its treasures and responsibilities, and escape an early marriage with its own domestic fears and tedium.
In Dreams Begin Responsibility
I didn’t know the identity of every object in my mother’s house. That would have been an impossible task, even if she had remained a more or less sanguine person, but that was not what happened and had never been the case anyway. No sanguinity here, ever. After retiring from the hospital where she worked, she transformed into the kind of person who was overtaken by rage or the anger had always been there, it just now took the upper hand in all things, no matter how trivial. Conversations with her were delayed as much as possible, and when they did occur, the phone had to be put down until the churning subsided. Offenses, possibly real or possibly imaginary, small things out of order were markers of chaos. Everything was kindling. Everything was on fire. Once clean and neat to the point of obsession, she became a hoarder for whom the idea of trash was a foreign concept, and as a limited number of items went irrevocably into the garbage, this became a perfect way to keep family, friends, and strangers at bay. Few wanted to go into that house.
When it became time to finally clear it out, there were piles of things I’d never seen before: long expired rolls of film in yellow cardboard boxes, stacks of unopened Tylenol from the dollar store, Band-Aid tins filled with coins and twist ties. Among the objects with no known purpose was a wooden box painted black, lid attached with suitcase latches, the top a series of buttons, dials, and seismograph censors, like something you could hammer together in your garage or basement. I took a picture of the object and looked it up online. This is what I learned.
The Deceptograph which “claimed to measure the electric conductivity of human skin” to determine if a person was lying during a criminal investigation had been manufactured by C.H. Stoelting Company in 1955, but the lie detector’s accuracy had been subject to doubts and came under judicial scrutiny with no clear results either way, so it was demoted to an oddity with no clear purpose. The era when the gadget was considered the height of forensic technology was a time when investigators and subjects smoked in interrogation rooms, wore hats, and rolled shirtsleeves and neck ties as a matter of course. Women left the house in dresses, lipsticks in the red range and powdery compacts in their bags. Why my mother had a Deceptograph and when she had acquired it, all were unknown. It could have been sitting in the closet for years.
One afternoon a neighbor brought over a carton of enormous strawberries, and though I told her they looked lovely, as soon as the door shut behind her, the machine croaked that fist-size strawberries were freakish, tasteless, and mostly water and that I knew as much when I said they looked delicious, and yes, of course, I was lying. I was relieved the Deceptograph waited until the neighbor had left until it blasted its truth, but in this way, I discovered the machine was capable of vocalizations, assessments based on such nearby data as it could absorb. Human bodies didn’t have to be attached to it for judgements to issue from the contraption. Discredited as my accidental associate had been in the past, it seemed to be pretty accurate in the present. The Deceptograph only had to be in close proximity to sentient humans to make its judgements. When contractors such as roofers, mold remediators, and exterminators entered the house and gave an estimate of what the required work would cost, the machine had a field day unmasking duplicities. Then things got worse. If you left your phone near it, the machine would go berserk. Was this the cause of my mother’s misdirected rage? What had it told her during those moments when she was consumed by fury? I always liked your ex! You must have done something! Some people shouldn’t have children, there’s no seat at the table for them! I would never know the answer.
I put the box back in the closet, but once unleashed, its powers seemed to increase, and its vocalizations could be heard in the next room. Going back online, I learned the Smithsonian had a Deceptograph on display in the Museum of National History. Unlike most of the objects left in the house, this one could be valuable.
We had a garage sale, and odd things were snatched up to become prized possessions of someone else: Thanksgiving pilgrim-shaped candles, the six-volume set of Graetz’s Jewish History, a picture frame from the 1966 World Expo in Montreal. All kinds of things went into backpacks, bags, and the trunks of cars, but a fair amount was left over, including the Deceptograph, though I’d labeled it, As Seen in the Smithsonian Museum of National History. It had remained silent throughout the sale, as if it knew it had to pretend to be a simple black box, as if it were, in its own way, capable of deception. Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just sitting here, silently minding my own beeswax. Or perhaps its moments of revelation were like seizures, uncontrollable and involuntary, and this was just some downtime and relief from internal demons, from knowing far too much.
The following weekend, we had another garage sale, and this time a solitary man sporting a Freddy Mercury mustache, an earring in the shape of a golden musical note, Celtic knot tattoos circling his forearms, and a porkpie hat on his head bought the machine, paid me ten dollars cash, and drove away. It was a sunny afternoon, the house was slowly reverting to an earlier state. I looked at the emptying rooms with pleasure, as if the place were being exorcised. There were still a number of things left over, so I decided to have a third and final sale the following weekend. I wish I had just rented a dumpster and been done with it, but some voice of my mother came through the miasma and reminded me there was some good stuff in there, give it another go. Then, true to character, the ghost got angry, so I felt I had no choice but to give it another go. This time I posted a sign that said “yard sale,” which was closer to the truth anyway. I’d set things up in the yard, not in the garage.
Just as the third morning was getting started, the man in the porkpie hat drove up, opened the passenger side of his car, and shoved the Deceptograph out like a dried-out Christmas tree in February. It won’t stop orating, the man said, you can keep my ten bucks. He tried leaving it in a field, he shouted, then put it in a neighbor’s trash, but it wouldn’t shut the fuck up. He even threw it off a roof. But like the broom in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, bits and pieces rolled around and twitched on his driveway, uttering vocalizations in competing strings of sound that did make some sense, accusing him of theft, of false witness, of gossip malign and divisive. Some of the old magic had been retained in its structure, wrecking small havoc on his property for anyone who had ears. He fixed all the pieces back together, returned it to me, accused me of being a witch, then was gone.
Prospective buyers drove away in his wake, and I was stuck with the thing, and if it was capable of smiling and winking, it was not hard to imagine the smug revenge of Deceptograph. You think you can get rid of me? Think again, wiseass.
The day wore on, a few aimless folks parked and poked around. Parts of my childhood marched off into other people’s lives. The day-and-night doll, the Scrabble game that had provided distraction during a hurricane, ashtrays, even photographs I never wanted to see again; but the Deceptograph remained, unsold and unwanted. Until a family of six pulled into the driveway: father, mother, four children, two boys and two girls. The children looked glum and silent, took no interest in any of the possessions laid out on the lawn. Their mother, crazy short hair and super talkative, was smitten with the Deceptograph. Why are we drawn to the things that compel or seduce us, even if not much is known about them and all signs indicate they are poisonous? One of the girls picked up and put down a book about Japanese pottery, then kicked at the grass, and asked how much longer? When are we going home? How much, the mom asked about the box? I almost said, take it, it’s yours, then found myself saying fifty dollars.
We’ll buy it from you.
No, you don’t want it.
But I do.
The box will make you miserable.
Impossible. We’re already miserable.
It will make things worse. This I know for a fact.
I’ll give you one hundred.
No. I can’t be responsible. This machine is capable of ruining lives.
She turned and whispered to her husband.
Two hundred.
What can I tell you? I caved and helped them load the Deceptograh into their vintage emerald Rambler station wagon. Even while I was counting the twenties they handed me, I tried to tell them they were making a terrible mistake, one they’d be unable to undo, but they paid no attention. They drove off, and I gathered up what was left of my mother’s possessions that no one wanted or no one could find a use for. I assumed the family would return with the Deceptograph, though I planned no further yard sales, but I never saw them again. The house was sold, and that was that.
Night On the Town
The invasion took place at night, at the remains of Ferrara Brothers Concrete, which stood for decades on an edge of the Gowanus Canal at FifthStreet. Ferrara Brothers mixed cement for the World Trade Towers, for subway construction, and it could be said that at any moment you walked in the city, it was very likely the calcined lime and clay from one its sites lay beneath your feet or over your head. Once abandoned, Ferrara’s maze of equipment looked like relics of amusement park rides that could be seen when the F and G trains emerged above ground. A sign, when you surfaced from miles of dark tunnels, coming home after work, that the city was behind you, and the train was making its way through a sliver of a mid-twentieth-century industrial zone complete with a mysterious waterway that would eventually be abandoned, become a ghost town, then a ruin, but there was still that feeling of relief when the workday was over, and you could have your own thoughts again. Before the ruins were bulldozed, what you saw from the train as it passed just south, above the site: massive concrete blocks, scattered pieces of corrugated metal like some giant’s petrified potato chips, jumbo cement trucks painted with polka dots—Kusama or circus style, take your pick—random slopes and peaks of scrap metal, clumps of stinging nettle and knotweed just before the banks of the canal whose water could be the color of coffee dregs or caterpillar innards but way less organic than either. The site was due to be demolished in short order; the destruction seemed to be happening already, though no construction permits or no trespassing signs were in evidence, so the midnight partiers broke no laws by meeting there. The site was slated to give way to colossal boxes of luxury apartments, culture transformers that take over as if the not-so-long-gone cement trucks had no more reality than horse-drawn whatevers. How many times have the plans been luxury towers, as if there is no other architectural citizen possible?
But within days of the final flattening, the group of partygoers trespassed for a planned last night of fun, recording their adventures before the wrecking ball finished its work. They made their way by candlelight. What they saw: the interior of the plant’s abandoned buildings, industrial shells full of broken equipment of unknown usage, chutes, conveyor belts, pipes, and hoses. Enough sand was left behind to become a temporary one-night beach, blankets were spread, outdoor grills set up, and chains attached to metal joists were used as Tarzan swings, don’t let go over pools of suspicious-looking liquid. No nature preserve here, despite the waterway, but yes to human habitation despite the historic toxicity and historic crime site, source of concrete overshoes for all we know.
Using underground radar, photogrammetry, and lidar scanning, Forensic Architecture finds ghosts of earlier buildings without ever putting shovel into dirt. In the future, some other forensic endeavor will find subterranean mysteries on this spot, under the embedded remains of penthouse balconies, marble flooring, gold-plated faucets, glass eyes of surveillance cameras, a bright pink flip-flop left behind like Cinderella’s slipper from that one last night of partying on the edge of a poisonous canal.