City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  “—or a bullet hole.” Flynn repeats the final words and Konig can hear the sound of his pencil scratching across a pad as he writes. “That all, Chief?”

  “That’s it. Anything else?”

  “Yeah. We gotcha a few more assorted parts from down on the river.”

  “Heads?”

  “Nope. Got a couple of feet though. A few toes. Upper half of a trunk, and some chunks of stuff I can’t begin to figure out.”

  “Where’d you find it? Same place?”’

  “No—about five hundred yards away. Tide washed it down. What’s it all look like so far?”

  “A goddamned mess,” Konig goes on, his eyes continuing to scan autopsy reports. “Two, maybe three bodies. One definitely male. The others, I don’t know. Could be anything. Can’t say till I get the stuff assembled. You gotta get me some heads. I need heads.”

  “And I need prints. Listen—we’re liftin’ a slew of prints out of that shack. If you could get me some corroborating prints—”

  “With what? You’ve got to have fingertips to do that I’ve got no fingertips. All of them were hacked off—”

  “You’ve got the set with the pretty nails though, don’tcha?”

  “All the cuticle’s been torn off with a rasp,” Konig snorts. “The bastard who did this job must be some cool number.”

  “A pussycat.”

  “I’m going to try to lift a set off that hand this afternoon. It’s tricky stuff. Call me later on. After six. What about that shack?”

  “What about it?”

  “Said you were checking the Bureau of Records—”

  “Oh, yeah—the deed of ownership. Just like we figured. The City owns it. Originally belonged to a widow lady name of Chatsworth. Died intestate about fifty years ago and the place reverted by escheat to the City—who naturally don’t do a goddamned thing for it. Past few years it’s become a haven for junkies and winos.”

  “What about that Salvation Army lead?”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” Flynn snaps. “Been on to the Army this mornin’. They got no record of any of their people assigned to that area.”

  “Odd.”

  “Yeah. Still a couple of storekeepers down there insist they seen some Salvation Army guy goin’ in and outta the place from time to time.”

  “Oh, come on, Flynn. What the hell does that mean? Anyone can walk in off the street to any Army-Navy store and pick up a Salvation Army uniform—”

  “That’s right, Chief,” Flynn smirks into the phone. “Now suppose you let me do my job and you do yours. See if you can’t get me some prints off that hand.”

  “Fine,” Konig snorts. “You see if you can’t get me some heads.”

  No sooner does Konig slam down the phone than it rings again. This time it is Carver speaking from just outside the door. “Deputy Mayor been tryin’ to reach you all morning.”

  “Jesus Christ.” Konig rumples a wad of paper, crushes it in his fist. “Put him on.”

  “You know anything about this other man—this Carslin?” snaps the Deputy Mayor.

  “Yes. He’s very good. Trained under me.”

  “Haven’t they all?” the Deputy Mayor snarls sarcastically. “Harris tells me he’s got something of a grudge against you.”

  “Oh, that old business. Nothing. Just an ego thing.”

  “Just an ego thing?” A scornful laugh rings through the receiver. “That’s precisely why these Robinson people have retained him. Their lawyer is sure this Dr. Carslin will come in with a verdict that will show the boy did not—repeat, did not—commit suicide—”

  “But was beaten to death by six sadistic prison guards—right?”

  “Not so improbable, my friend. It wouldn’t be the first time—given all the glories of the City penal system. Goddamn it, it does look ninny As a matter of fact, it stinks out loud. The City Medical Examiner’s Office finding no evidence of a beating. Then a hick funeral director up in the boondocks receives the body and finds all kinds of evidence of injuries not mentioned in the Medical Examiner’s report.”

  The Chief Deputy Mayor’s voice drones on while Konig’s eyes linger on the cartoon grizzly bear of Lolly’s birthday card.

  “Paul—are you there?”

  “Of course I’m here.”

  “Well, answer the goddamned question.”

  “What’s the question?”

  “What sort of injuries would this funeral director be talking about?”

  “Maury, we’ve been through this a dozen times.”

  “Fine. Let’s do it another dozen times. What sort of injuries?”

  Konig’s eyes roll heavenward, as if seeking mercy. A long, weary sigh expires from somewhere deep within him. “Inverted V-shaped abrasions about the neck—”

  “In English, Paul. Plain, simple English for the stupid, unlettered layman.”

  “Bruises caused by a noose of mattress ticking.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “Crusted lacerations on the front of the left wrist. Half-inch-long abrasion over the left eyebrow. Fracture of skull. Ecchymosis—”

  “Ecce what?”

  “Hemorrhage—over the left scalp, overlying the fracture.”

  “Is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  There’s a pause while both men gain time listening to each other’s breathing.

  “Now tell me this, Paul,” the Deputy Mayor continues cagily. “Why isn’t any of that down in the Medical Examiner’s report?”

  “It is down in the medical report. You’d know that if only you’d read it through. But of course you didn’t. You had some lackey read it for you and then give you a summary. Am I right?” The silence at the other end provides him his answer. “I didn’t expect that you would read it. That isn’t the question these people want answered, however.”

  “Well, what the hell is the question?” the Deputy Mayor asks, a little cowed by Konig’s sudden onslaught.

  “They want to know if Robinson’s death is attributable to any of those injuries.”

  “Rather than the hanging?”

  “Right. What Carslin will try to show is that Robinson died as a result of head injuries inflicted during a beating. That he was then strung up by the panicky guards to make it look like suicide.”

  “Well, in that case,” says the Deputy Mayor, the cagey note coming back into his voice, “what determination did this mystery examiner of yours make with regard to the time the head injuries were inflicted?”

  Konig senses the Deputy Mayor inching closer to target “The determination was that the head injuries occurred after the victim’s death. When the body hit the floor of the cell subsequent to being cut down.”

  “How is that determined?”

  “By simply doing a tissue study of the area around the head wounds. If the injuries are inflicted before death, a tissue study will show leukocytic infiltration—thousands of white blood cells flowing to the injured area. That’s a vital reaction. It can occur only in a living creature. If Robinson sustained those injuries before he died, Carslin will see those leukocytes under the microscope. On the other hand, if Robinson was dead, as we claim he was, when the injuries were sustained, there’ll be no leukocytes. Get it?”

  “Perfectly.” There is a pause and Konig can hear the Deputy Mayor beginning to zero in now for the kill. “Now tell me this, Paul. Did your mystery man do such a tissue study before submitting his report?”

  Konig has been expecting that question. Still, now that it’s come, it takes his breath away. He knows he will have to make a plausible response. Any fancy, technical sophistries would be immediately detected and scorned. “No tissue study was done because the pathologist in charge was completely satisfied that the head injuries were superficial and sustained after death.” Even as he’s saying it, he can hear it falling flat, his own voice sounding hollow with pathetic lack of conviction.

  “And you buy that?”

  “Yes, I do. I have complete faith in the men of t
his department. I’ve trained them all. I’ll stand behind their determinations.”

  “Well—good for you. That’s admirable, but I don’t buy it.” The Deputy Mayor’s voice sounds suddenly sympathetic. “And I don’t believe you do either. To me the whole thing stinks. It stinks to high heaven. And I tell you something else, my friend, the stink I detect is a very particular stink. It’s the stink of Emil Blaylock. I smell Warden Blaylock all over the lot. I feel the oily grip of that fine Byzantine hand behind all this. Covering up the dirty stuff. Sweeping it all under the rug. Prestidigitation—now you see it, now you don’t. By the time Blaylock gets finished doing his PR job on the Tombs, the place’ll sound like a milk farm in the Catskills. And I’ll tell you something else, my esteemed friend, dig a little deeper into that sacrosanct department of yours and you’ll find a fink. Blaylock got to your fink, Paul.”

  “He did not.” Konig’s voice rises ominously. It is enough to stop the Deputy Mayor dead in his tracks. There is a long pause on the other side, and then, at last, a sigh.

  “Suit yourself, Paul. But a word to the wise. If I were sixty-three, with a distinguished record, two years to retirement, and a freightload of enemies, I’d keep a low profile. If the Medical Examiner’s report is proved wrong, someone’s head down there is going to roll. That’s straight from the horse’s mouth—repeat, the horse’s mouth. And when The New York Times man shows up here and the Savage Skulls start to build a fire around Grade Mansion, I’ll refer them all to you. See you at the autopsy—Wednesday morning—ten o’clock sharp.”

  »18«

  “The paintings just got sadder and sadder. Got harder and harder to peddle the stuff.”

  “I see.” Francis Haggard nods wearily. “And when did you say was the last time you saw her?”

  1:15 P.M. THE FENIMORE GALLERY,

  MADISON AVENUE AND 67TH STREET.

  “I didn’t say,” Mr. Anthony Redding replies curtly. “But it must have been about three months ago. She brought in a batch of new things. But we spoke on the phone quite regularly—only last week, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh?” Haggard’s eyes roam restlessly about the room. It is a room in which he is distinctly uneasy, a room that is aggressively and expensively comtemporary. It seems to cry out, “I am chic. I am modern. I am with it.” Actually a suite of rooms, it is a tasteful exercise in eclecticism, Louis XVI pieces with a lot of stainless steel and leather, Mies chairs and tole, fine old Sirhouks and Khazaks strewn all about. The cork-lined walls are hung with a variety of paintings.

  “She called to say she would be sending some new things. Well, I wasn’t entirely—”

  Mr. Anthony Redding chatters on, a nervous, petulant man who talks incessantly. He too, like his gallery, is very chic. Tall, elegant, patrician, the sort of man who sets Haggard’s teeth on edge. A somewhat exotic-looking individual, the great glabrous dome, the compensatory bushy beard flowing out over his throat, the caterpillar eyebrows, the nose, blade-thin and saturnine—all conveying an impression of urbanity and taste. And then the carefully studied attire, the blue denim shirt (not the proletarian blue denim of Navy issue, but rather the blue denim of expensive East Side boutiques) with a red silk foulard tied rakishly around the throat; the exquisitely tailored trousers, tight at the top, flared widely at the bottom, and whispering as he walks. And most grating of all to the detective, born and raised in Coney Island, the obviously affected British accent, carefully cultivated for the titillation of the wealthy uptown matrons who are his stock in trade.

  “—thrilled at the prospect of another shipment. As I say, the stuff hadn’t been going well. Listen, is she in some kind of trouble?”

  “No—no trouble: These hers over here?”

  “Right. Those three gouaches—they’re all I have left. I did much better with the oils. How’d you know they were hers?”

  “Aside from the fact that they’re signed Emily Winslow”—Haggard saunters toward a small cluster of paintings—“I recognize the style.”

  “Oh?” Mr. Redding trails after the detective, looking startled and a bit uneasy.

  Redding is right, Haggard muses, standing, arms crossed, before the three pale gouaches. The pictures are sadder. Certainly sadder than what he saw in the loft on Varick Street. Even in the state those were in, they conveyed a certain vitality, a kind of serene celebration of the grandeur of simple things—sunlight, ocean, great empty beaches running into sky. They throbbed with a kind of life, flora and fauna abounded. These are rather drab, gray, dispirited things. Terminal subjects. Landlocked. No water about anywhere. One, a shack, squatting like a toadstool, lists sideways in a vacant field.

  Looking at that field, one has the feeling that once it was verdant, full of mint, phlox, pennyroyal, vervain, fringed gentian, scorpion grass. Now, it is dry, sere, a scorched place where only pauper’s weed will grow. And the shack has a dismal, unsavory air about it. A door hangs open on a hinge and the punched-out windows have the look of eyeless sockets in a skull. An abandoned, derelict place, you imagine it was once the site of some ghastly act. Then another painting depicting merely shards of broken glass. And then—most disquieting of all—a pair of badly soiled underpants lying in a heap in the dirty corner of some tenement privy.

  “When you spoke with her,” Haggard continues, his eyes roaming the canvases, “how did she sound?”

  “Okay, I s’pose—maybe—”

  “Maybe what?” The detective turns and stares at Mr. Redding.

  “I don’t know. Listen, what’s all this about anyway?”

  “Nothing—absolutely nothing.”

  “Oh, come on now.” Redding’s face grows red and cross. “You come in here flashing badges, asking a lot of questions—”

  “She’s missing,” Haggard growls. “If I knew more, I’d tell you.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “We found her studio a couple of days ago. We knew she was painting. We knew she was selling her stuff through an uptown gallery on the East Side. After that it was just a matter of the Yellow Pages and about eighty patrolmen making a lot of inquiries. What’s your last address for Miss Konig?”

  “Miss who?”

  “Miss Winslow.”

  “That isn’t what you said before.”

  So what? Something rude and pugnacious leaps from the detective’s eyes. “You got that address?”

  Mr. Redding appears resentful but cowed. He stalks sullenly across the gallery floor to a small Louis XVI escritoire with gold fastenings. From a bottom drawer he extracts a small metal file box. He flicks methodically through it, halts at a place, and snaps out a card. “324 Varick Street.”

  Haggard sighs. “Thanks.”

  “Anything wrong?”

  “Nope—only I already have that address.” He starts out.

  “There’s another one here.”

  Haggard turns. “Oh?”

  “She asked me to send her money to some place up in The Bronx.”

  “The Bronx?”

  “About two months ago she called and said she wanted all future checks sent to Fox Street, The Bronx. 1622 Fox Street, care of Eggleston.”

  “Eggleston.” Haggard scribbles quickly into his pad. “Any first name?”

  Mr. Anthony Redding glances back at his card. “W.”

  “W?”

  “That’s it. Just W. W. Eggleston.”

  »19«

  “I see a large body of water.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not an ocean. Somewhat smaller. A large river—or a bay, perhaps.”

  1:30 P.M. AN APARTMENT ON WEST 55TH STREET.

  Konig sits in a large, shadowy room full of the odors of overstuffed furniture and incontinent cats. He sits at a bare, round, wooden table opposite a woman of Buddhistic proportions with a wen on her nose and a furze of dark hair above her lip.

  “I see a small house.”

  “Yes.”

  “With a garden outside and a small fence around it.” Madam Lesetzskaya
leans forward, rocking gently on immense haunches, eyes glazed, lashes fluttering like butterflies above them. She leans into the shadow, craning her neck, as if trying to hear better, words, or a message, coming to her from far away. Konig sits there in the darkened room, behind the drawn curtains, stiffly, warily, a begrudging tolerance upon his face, waiting for her to speak.

  A card pressed on him several weeks before by a friend, and carried in his pocket till only that afternoon, had read: “Madam Paulina Lesetzskaya. Budapest, St. Petersburg, Paris, New York. Spiritualist. Mediumist. Confidante and adviser to—” Then a list of mostly defunct and obscure royalty to whom she had ministered—dukes and princes, shahs and potentates, pages to the royal court. Then the tag line, the kicker: “Contact established with the departed and missing. Results guaranteed,” the card promised in the plain, rather unextraordinary verbiage of an exterminator’s calling card promising to rid you of roaches.

  The two figures lean toward each other in the damp, malodorous shadows, the one rocking slowly back and forth, the other, stiff, recoiling slightly, as if struggling against the impulse to shout.

  The tips of Madam Lesetzskaya’s fingers tremble across the face of Lolly’s birthday card—the shaggy bear in the white copious robes of a doctor, stethoscope dangling absurdly around its neck. Each finger on Madam’s hand has a ring, while depending from her neck is a bezoar stone, a scarab amulet, and a fake jade lavaliere.

  “I see several people—three, possibly four—”

  “Yes.”

  “One female—early twenties.”

  “Yes.”

  “The others, male, somewhat older. Though there is danger about the house, I don’t sense any immediate danger to the girl.”