City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  “What do you mean—out of your hands?”

  “I mean this man marched in here this morning—” Flustered, Strang struggles to regain his composure. “Came all the way from Salt Lake City. Wanted to claim his cousin’s body.”

  “His cousin?”

  “Kaiser.”

  “The one they found last week in a doorway?”

  “Right. He was a lush. A bum. Drifting from one flophouse to the next. Who’d have thought anyone would’ve bothered to claim the remains?”

  “This man, the fellow from Salt Lake City. What’s his name?”

  “Wilde.”

  “That’s right—Wilde. How’d he find out?”

  “About Kaiser? Says he saw the notice published in a local obit. How the hell those things get into the papers twenty-two hundred miles away—Anyway, he got right on the phone the minute he read it. Hopped the first plane out and came right over from the airport. Still had his suitcase with him.”

  The Chiefs eyes narrow shrewdly behind the lenses of his spectacles. Nodding, he listens to Strang’s story with disquieting calm.

  “Said this Kaiser—his cousin—had been missing forty years,” Strang rushes on. “Just got up one morning and walked out on his wife, his family, his job. Said they gave up looking for him years ago. Just assumed he was dead, until they saw that notice. He said all he wanted now was to take the body back and bury it in the family plot in Salt Lake City. Then when I told him somebody else, a ‘friend,’ had already claimed the body, went through the routine procedure for burying mendicants at City expense, the guy almost went through the roof. Kaiser was no mendicant. Apparently the family’s pretty well heeled and they want the body. Demanded I call up the ‘friend’ right then and there. Find out who he was—”

  “And so of course you called the name listed on the petitioner’s application”—Konig leans backward in his chair, the tips of his fingers arching together to form a bridge—“and had the so-called ‘friend’ tell you he never knew anyone by the name of Kaiser.”

  “Right. That’s right, Paul. And I can tell you right now, this man Wilde’s no pushover, no fool. He’s not going to be bullied and conned.”

  “We’ve never bullied or conned people. We’ve always tried—”

  “I didn’t say we did. I was only saying that this man is not going to sit still for any kind of run-around. He was red in the face when he left here and on his way to the DA’s office.”

  “You probably gave him the address.”

  Silence settles over the moiled and troubled air.

  “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  “I’m sorry, too.” Konig’s voice lowers with contrition. “I apologize. I had no business saying that. I’ve had a lousy day and—”

  “Tell me something,” Strang cuts him short. “Do you at least intend to find out who it is here leaking information to these morticians?”

  Konig’s eyes lower once more to the tiny figures and ruled lines of the departmental fiscal budget. “I already know who it is.”

  Eyes still lowered, nevertheless he can sense Strang sitting there, open-mouthed, gaping at him. He turns his pencil once more to the budgetary sheets, shortly hearing Strang rise and the sharp, percussive click of his feet striding swiftly from the office.

  2 full-time Deputy Chief Medical Examiners $40,500

  2 Associate Medical Examiners $33,000

  Recommended promotion of two Assistant to Associate Medical Examiners at increments of $13,000

  The phone rings. Konig jumps. His pencil snaps, and while the phone continues to ring, he carves large, fierce circles over the face of the budget with the shattered edges of the pencil.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello—Chief? That you there?”

  “No. I’m home. You’re talking to a recording. What the hell do you want, Flynn?”

  “Listen. You gotta get down here.”

  “No way. It’s after six. I’m not—”

  “You gotta. We turned up a graveyard. Regular butcher shop. Arms. Legs. Balls. The works.”

  “Forget it. I’m on my way home.”

  “You can’t,” Flynn gasps breathlessly. “I mean you just can’t. The place is right down at the river’s edge. The tide’s risin’. I’m afraid we’re gonna lose half the goddamned stuff. Somebody who knows somethin’ has gotta look at this stuff right here before we can move it. Don’tcha have someone up there you can send?”

  “Everyone’s left. It’s after six. What the hell do you think this is here—an all-night car wash?”

  A stand-off pause. Both men listen to each other breathing. Finally Konig breaks the silence. “How far down’s the stuff?”

  “Not far. Two, three feet. Might’ve been deeper once, but the tide’s been workin’ on it pretty regular. We’re findin’ it all over the place and I’m just afraid we’re gonna lose—”

  “Okay—okay,” the Chief sighs. “Where the hell are you?”

  “Coenties Slip. Right off Water Street—on the river.”

  “Okay. Send a car.”

  “It’s probably out front there right now,” Flynn’s voice smirks. “I sent it about twenty minutes ago. Pick me up on the corner of South and Cuyler’s. We’ll go in together.”

  »10«

  6:45 P.M. COENTIES SLIP AND SOUTH STREET.

  “The guy’s out walkin’ his dog, see? Right along the river. ’Bout six a.m. The dog’s runnin’ around off the leash, see? And the guy’s just suckin’ up the breeze. Enjoyin’ the sunrise—”

  “Skip the poetry, will you, Flynn? Just get on with the details.”

  Flynn seems momentarily injured by the Chief’s impatience, but he continues. “Anyway, the guy whistles for Rover. The dog starts runnin’ toward him, see? Tail wag-gin’. All full of piss and vinegar. Only he’s got a goddamn hand in his mouth.”

  “A hand?”

  “Yeah—a human hand.”

  Konig and Flynn are speeding down Coenties Slip toward the river. The car streaks in past Jeanette Park and the Seamen’s Church. At the Heliport they turn left and start to nose into milling crowds streaming toward a brilliantly illuminated area up ahead. The siren on the patrol car whoops frantically and ‘a path clears, falls away before them.

  They wheel into a large cleared circle, a police cordon of patrol cars, vans, sawhorses, badly harried foot patrolmen. A soft, pale purple has fallen over the day with a kind of tangible weight. The bright beacons and guide lights from the Heliport have begun to shimmer and flash on the brown pasty surface of the river.

  Somewhere between the Heliport and the Old Slip, the police have set up a number of temporary floodlights. Also, the klieg lights of a TV mobile camera crew have just begun to bore through the twilight indigo dusk.

  Just at the edge of the river, where the water slaps and lollops at the shoreline, a dozen men in rubber hip waders, armed with lantern helmets and shovels, move calf-deep through the mucky water like a flock of crows foraging a meadow. It is into this glaring circle of illumination that Flynn and Konig come.

  “Watcha got?” the Chief says to a beefy young Irish cop with a high flush who appears to be directing the operation.

  “Shoulder loin. Top round. Ground chuck. Ribs. Filet mignon. Fricassee. You name it, we got it.”

  A burst of laughter and crude joking. Konig scowls and barges over to another area where several patrolmen appear to be standing guard over a number of ill-shapen parcels strewn about the place and wrapped in clear plastic bags.

  “Here’s a little goody for you, Chief.” Eyes glinting wickedly, Flynn holds out one of the bags to Konig. In it is contained a severed hand, the fingernails of which have been lacquered a bright, lurid purple.

  Unimpressed, Konig scowls first at the hand, then at Flynn. “All right—let’s have a look.”

  “Help yourself, Chief.” The beefy young cop slings down before Konig a package containing what appears on first glance to be a large section of quartered beef. A few of the others lau
gh and shuffle nervously.

  The Chief kneels down, the same sciatic agony of the morning shooting rockets from his back down into his leg. He opens the bag, and beneath, the white glare of klieg lights and the puttering drone of an ascending helicopter from the nearby terminal, he studies the contents.

  There before him, spilling out of the bag, are the remains of a badly hacked thoracic section. A great deal of the outer flesh has been stripped from it, but even in that light, and with the most cursory glance, Konig can see several stab wounds on its surface, one of which, he is certain, has penetrated the pericardium.

  “That’s fairly recent,” he says, making a mental note of the degree of putrefaction. Slowly he rises and moves down the line from one parcel to the next. Here is a leg minus the foot; there a forearm; after that a thigh encased in a covering of mud and slime, the arteries and smaller blood vessels sheared off and dangling like disconnected wires. The next parcel contains a pelvic section. Then come several packages containing gobbets of flesh and innards hacked indiscriminately out of various parts of the anatomy. In addition, there are a number of smaller parts, odds and ends, toes and ears, a full set of male genitals, the split testes gleaming gray-white, like broken eggs.

  More plastic bags are hauled up from the river and stacked with the others. Konig, in turn, examines these. They are a chaos and tangle of unrelated bits and pieces. He has no idea how many bodies are represented by all those parts. But already his cool professional eye has picked up a pattern of regularity. Great quantities of flesh had been stripped from all the parts; the blood had been drained from the bodies; and there are no heads. The massive stripping of flesh had been done to make the job of identification difficult. The absence of heads would make it nigh onto impossible.

  “Never seen nothin’ like it,” murmurs an older Italian cop standing behind Konig, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “No heads?” Konig snaps.

  “Not yet. We’re still lookin’.”

  The Chief rises wearily, still pondering the plastic parcels, rates of calcification at the epiphyses, formation of pelvic bones, size of sacral bones, while police cameras flash all about him and batteries of technicians scavenge meticulously over the surrounding area.

  A number of detectives and patrolmen hover about, staring, speechless at the incomprehensibility of it all. The Chief knows their thoughts. He can read them as if they were writ on parchment. The marvel and mystery of it all, these broken bits and pieces lying there beneath cold white light like shattered toys, once a part of life. Once walked and talked. Incomprehensible.

  “You boys got all this stuff tagged?” Konig asks.

  “Tagged and pinpointed for location,” replies the beefy young cop.

  “It all come from the same general area?”

  “From out there.” One of the other cops points to a place where the men in hip waders and lantern helmets stumble through the shallow water. “Some of it’s uncovered at low tide.”

  “Trouble is the goddamned tide’s comin’ in now,” Flynn says. “We’re gonna lose half the stuff.”

  “You probably lost half already. What time’s high tide?” Konig asks.

  “About eight p.m.”

  “Be a good idea to get the place cleaned out before too much more of it gets washed away.”

  “We’re doin’ our best, Chief,” says the Irish cop. “We’ve had the place cordoned off and a dozen guys diggin’ down there since this mornin’. I figure we got it pretty well cleaned now. There ain’t too much more to dig.”

  “There’s more,” Konig remarks casually, his eyes scanning the bloody parcels. “You boys hit a graveyard.”

  Flynn gazes at him questioningly.

  “Number one,” Konig continues, more to himself than to those assembled, “those remains don’t all come from the same body. Offhand, I’d say you’ve got parts from two or three different bodies there. Number two, all these parts have been buried about the same length of time.” He prods a splintered edge of femur protruding from one of the bags. “The putrefaction in this thigh, for instance, is about the same as in that thoracic section. It’s a young leg, too, judging from the degree of calcification. I’d say it belonged to a young male, early twenties—”

  “What about them balls, Doc?” one of the young cops joshes.

  “Pretty well hung, ay, Whitey?” More laughter and rude joking.

  “And number three,” Konig goes on mechanically, computerlike, gathering data, collating, filing in his head, scarcely hearing any of the raucous, irreverent banter of the weary men around him. “The person who did the dismembering had some sophistication—not a great deal, but he knew his anatomy and where to cut. Used a hacksaw. You can see the teeth marks in that femur—”

  “We got the saw too,” says Flynn.

  Jarred for the first time out of his quiet ruminations, Konig glances up. “Where?”

  Flynn smirks broadly. “Come on with me.”

  Together they walk back up through the cordons and the milling crowds, drawn there by the excitement of television crews working under bright lights. They trudge down along the shoreline, past the bustling Heliport, like two old friends taking an after-dinner stroll along the water. From where they are they can see an endless stream of car lights flowing over the Brooklyn Bridge, and traffic pouring toward the Battery Tunnel. Far out over the water, the lights from Brooklyn Heights all the way down to the Erie Basin are flickering magically.

  “Where the hell you taking me now?” Konig snarls, pain shooting down his leg.

  “Right up ahead, where you see the lights.”

  They trudge along the shoreline to a drab tiny shack squatting like a toadstool at the edge of the water. A dim orange light glows from within, and at the front several patrolmen hover at the doorway, smoking and chatting quietly.

  As Flynn and the Chief appear through the thick velvet dusk, the cigarettes are quickly extinguished and the men step aside from the door.

  “How the hell’d you find this place?” Konig stoops beneath the strangely shallow lintel of the doorway and enters.

  “Rover, the little dog who found the hand.” Flynn’s smile is full of self-congratulation. “After he had a whiff of that hand, there was no stoppin’ him. Just turned him loose at the river and he led us right here to the front door.”

  Several detectives prowl about in the dim light. The police photographers and lab technicians still swarm about the place like ants.

  It is a low, vile turn-of-the-century shanty they’ve come to, full of the smell of mildew and rutting cats. One room with a rotting wood floor, the sort of place used for storage by fishermen in more tranquil times but in modern times fallen quickly into disuse—a haven for derelicts and squatters. Discarded beer cans and Thunderbird wine bottles are strewn all about. Two lean, mangy cats mew and wind their way through the fetid rubbish on the floor. There are several rusty, broken beds covered with thin, sheetless, urine-sodden pallets, tufts of mattress filling spewing out of gaping fissures. Old, yellowing copies of the Daily News have been stuffed into the punched-out windows for protection against wind and rain. Several open cans of beans and corn, half empty, lie forlornly on the floor, festooned with a green, fuzzy, faintly luminescent mold.

  “Fragrant, ay,” says one of the cops.

  “Like a shithouse,” remarks Flynn, a handkerchief pressed to his nose.

  “Probably was.” Konig glowers into the rank shadows. “No toilet. No running water.”

  “You got the biggest toilet in the world running right outside your front door.” Detective Morello, emerging from a shadowy corner, waves in the direction of the East River outside. “Hi, Chief.”

  “They haul you down here, too, Morello?”

  “He ain’t goin’ home to the wife and kiddies tonight,” Flynn jeers. “Not while I gotta work.”

  With the tip of his shoe Konig pokes almost coyly at some rubbish on the ground. “Who owns the place?”

  “We’re checking th
e Bureau of Records for the deed now,” Morello says.

  “Whoever owned it”—Flynn waves his arm through a curtain of spider webs—“wasn’t a very good housekeeper.”

  “My guess is it belongs to the City.” Morello scribbles elaborately into a pad. “Anyway, it’s a derelict. Looks like squatters and winos holed up here for the winter. Pulled out at the first crack of warm weather.”

  Konig peers gloomily about. “How do you figure this is where those pretty packages down on the beach came from?”

  Flynn smirks and gestures in the direction of a dark corner of the shack. “Come on over here.”

  Reaching there, Konig peers down the beam of Flynn’s flashlight into an old porcelain tub plucked out of the junk heap of some abandoned and demolished building and borne here to serve no discernible purpose other than possibly ornamentation. Its sides are splashed liberally with dried blood. Within the tub itself there are shards of bone, tufts of hair, clots of gore.

  “The workbench,” Flynn says.

  “The tools are over here,” Morello calls from the other side of the shack.

  They walk back to a small, rickety bridge table covered with a variety of junk—odds and ends, cheap brummagem—harmless enough, but among it all there are an ax, an adz, chisels, a tire iron.

  “There’s your hacksaw.” Flynn points proudly down at a rusty old saw, the blade of which is crusted with dried blood. The Chief’s eyes quickly take in the size and configuration of the teeth, matching them in his mind with the imprint of those he saw shortly before on the bones beside the river. “Got any prints?”

  “I don’t know what we got,” Morello says. “As soon as we get all this stuff back to the lab, we’ll see what we got.”

  “Any leads?”

  “Couple of people in the neighborhood claim they seen a Salvation Army officer goin’ in and out of here from time to time.”

  “Salvation Army officer?” Konig gapes back at Flynn. The detective shrugs wearily. “That’s what they claim.” Outside once again on the beach, a television crew is making its noisy, conspicuous way toward the shack. The thudding, concussive beat of helicopter rotors stirs the air overhead. Down on the river, the men in hip waders and lantern helmets slog in from the muddy water, where the tide has become too high and too swift to work with any safety. Konig and Flynn are standing again in the large circle of white light where men busy at a variety of tasks bustle about amid the growing accumulation of grisly plastic bags.