City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

“Curious.”

  “Not really. Not in lower-income classes. Fairly common. They’re generally big sugar eaters, and they don’t get their teeth cared for. Just chew with them till they fall out, then chew with their gums. But I did find something curious. Look over here on the lower left central incisor. See that milky white patch?”

  “Where?” Konig squints upward at the scanner.

  “Right there. Incisal third of the outer surface.”

  “Oh, yes.” Konig nods. “Small stain in the center of it What is it?”

  “Don’t know.” Rossman shakes his head. “Can’t figure out what the hell it is.”

  “Nicotine?”

  “Wouldn’t think so. Those are not smokers’ teeth. No signs of tar anywhere else.”

  “Looks like a fairly young mouth,” says Konig.

  “It is. All four of the wisdom teeth are unerupted. But the left upper is showing signs of impaction. See there? Just look at the jaws.”

  Squinting up at the negatives, Konig can see clearly all four of the wisdom teeth still embedded in the jaws, completely unerupted. He knows quite well that wisdom teeth rarely appear before the seventeenth year, and that they are most commonly all erupted by the twenty-first to twenty-fourth years.

  “And look at those roots, Paul,” Rossman chatters on eagerly. “Note how they don’t appear completely in the radiographs.”

  “Meaning they’re not fully calcified?”

  “That’s right. That suggests a person not fully mature.” Konig’s steely eyes quickly run down a list of notes on the condition of Ferde’s remains... “‘No sign of cloture in any of the skull sutures. All epiphyseal seals of limb bones united but some not completely fused.’” He looks up from his notes. “I’d say between eighteen and twenty-five, but based on the unerupted wisdom teeth, I’d say closer to eighteen. Ferde eighteen. Rolfe thirty-seven.” Konig scribbles into his pad then claps it shut. When he looks up again, Rossman is beaming down upon him with pleasure.

  “Thank you, Barney. That was very helpful.”

  “Always a pleasure, Paul. Oh—just one other thing. Just as a matter of passing interest, the job done on Ferde was not as clean as the one done on Rolfe.”

  “Nor as thorough,” Konig agrees. “Only seven extractions as compared to the fourteen done on Rolfe.”

  “Right.” Rossman nods. “It’s as if the maniac who did this—”

  “—ran out of time,” Konig says, completing the thought for him. “The dismemberment obviously started with Rolfe, took more time than was anticipated. The cutting is much cleaner, the mutilation much more, extensive on the older cadaver. By the time our man got to Ferde he was getting sloppy. Either he was tired or he was running out of time. Yes’, Barney, I thought of that too.”

  For a moment the two men gaze at each other. Suddenly Rossman’s phone rings. As he picks it up Konig waves at him and starts out “Yes, he’s here,” Rossman murmurs into the phone. “Just a moment, please. For you, Paul.”

  Moving back across the room Konig feels an icy sense of mounting fright. Almost afraid to take the call, his hand trembles as he reaches for the receiver. But it’s only Carver. The moment he hears that warm, husky voice the fear melts. Once again he’s in command, brusque and as imperious as ever.

  “Ratchett calling, Chief. You want me to switch it up there?”

  “No”—Konig chews furiously on the end of a cold cigar—“I’ll take it in my office.”

  »38«

  “I can’t do that, Paul.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Are you kidding? They’d fry me alive if they ever found—”

  “Oh, cut the crap, Bill. Listen, you owe me a couple, don’t you?”

  “Sure. I’m not saying I—”

  “Don’t forget that Mendoza business.”

  “I’m not, but—”

  “I’ve got a whole file on that. Then there’s the Bartholomew job. To a lot of people I know downtown that still stinks out loud. And I’m not forgetting—”

  “Okay. Okay, Paul. What the hell do you want exactly? Just spell it out.”

  4:00P.M. KONIG’S OFFICE.

  Konig leans back in his chair, puffs deeply on his cigar, then withdraws it and for a moment regards its glowing tip. “Blaylock’s appointment book,” he says very quietly, “for the month of March.”

  There’s a pause in which Konig can hear the agitated breathing, the palpable desperation on the other end. Finally it erupts in hissing torrents. “Are you mad? Crazy? He keeps that right on his desk. He’d know in a minute if—”

  “You’re an appointments secretary, aren’t you, Bill?”

  “Yes. What the hell’s that got to—”

  “You keep a log of his appointments, don’t you?”

  “A log?”

  “Don’t play dumb, Bill. I’m in a rush. I’ve got no time for games. You’re an administrative assistant. No one sees Blaylock without going through you first. Right?”

  “Right, but—”

  “No buts. So you have a log. Right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Where is it?”

  “In my desk drawer.” Ratchett’s voice is now grim, resigned, all the protest leaking out of it.

  “Very good. Now, take it out of your drawer.”

  “Now?”

  “Now.”

  “Paul—I can’t do it now. Let me have twenty-four hours on this. First I’ve got to—”

  “Now,” Konig growls into the phone. “If I don’t get the information I want from you this minute, the Mendoza file and the Bartholomew file are going to be tied up in pink ribbon and hand-carried to the District Attorney’s office.” There is complete silence from the other end of the phone. For a moment Konig believes they’ve been disconnected or that Ratchett has hung up. But in the next moment he can hear quite distinctly the slow, rasping sound of a drawer sliding open a few miles south of where he himself is sitting at that moment. Then comes the sound of papers rustling. Then William Ratchett’s agitated breathing back on the horn.

  “Okay,” says Konig. “You got it?”

  “I got it.”

  “Fine. Now open it to the month of March.”

  Konig can hear papers flipping quickly.

  “Okay,” says Ratchett. “I’m at March. What part of March are you interested in?”

  “Linnel Robinson was found dead in his cell on March seventh. He was autopsied here March ninth. I want you to tell me if between the seventh and the ninth Blaylock had a visit from Carl Strang.”

  Konig carefully lays the receiver down on his desk and rummages through a protocol while all the choking and gagging come sputtering through the receiver. When the voice seems to have quieted, he slowly lifts the phone again. “Finished now?”

  “I can’t, Paul.”

  “But you will.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

  “Fine,” says Konig, a strange, resolute calm in his voice. “At least you can’t say I didn’t warn you of my intentions.” He starts to put down the phone.

  “Paul—wait.”

  “Yes?”

  “Paul, if I divulge that information they’ll know. They’ll know that kind of thing could only have come from me.”

  “Probably.” Konig nods sympathetically. “But you’re a resourceful fellow, Bill. Well versed in the manly art of survival at City Hall. I’m sure you’ll be able to find someone else, some poor duffer, to hang it on.”

  “Paul—”

  “Goodbye, Bill.”

  “Paul, wait.”

  “I’m still here, Bill.”

  The pages flip again—a rapid, susurrant sound. Then Ratchett’s weary, beaten voice croaks through the receiver. “Strang was here to see Blaylock on the seventh and the eighth of March.”

  “Thank you, Bill. That was very helpful.”

  »39«

  “And you say the man wore a uniform?”

  “Yes, sir. A Salvation Army uniform.”
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  “People saw him?”

  “At least four people claim to have seen him.”

  “Going in and out of this awful place you describe?”

  “Yes, sir. Just a shack, really.”

  “Sort of a crash pad for derelicts and outcasts?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Poor devils. What a ghastly business.”

  “Business?”

  “What they do to each other.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  4:20 P.M. GENERAL HEADQUARTERS, SALVATION ARMY.

  “And the chap in our uniform,” says Major General Henry Pierce, Division Leader, Salvation Army, Eastern District, “he’s a suspect in this grisly business?”

  “Yes, sir,” Flynn says in quiet awe of the tall, elderly gentleman sitting in uniform across the desk from him. “I’m afraid so.”

  “You know, of course, Sergeant, it’s not at all difficult to come by one of our uniforms.”

  “Yes, sir. I know most Army-Navy stores carry them.”

  “And will sell them to just about anyone. They’re not supposed to without written authorization, but they do.”

  “Yes, sir, I know that.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve had people posing as officers in our Army, supposedly doing the Lord’s work but actually out hustling money for themselves.”

  “Yes, sir. I can appreciate that. All the same—”

  “—the possibility still exists,” General Pierce muses quietly, “that the chap seen going in and out of that shack was actually one of our people. I quite agree, Sergeant.”

  “Yes, sir,” Flynn murmurs awkwardly, his eyes straying out the window, where the head of a pigeon has suddenly appeared, bobbing along the length of the ledge.

  General Pierce catches Flynn’s preoccupation and smiles. “Pretty soon you’ll see his friends come along and join him out there. We put crumbs out along about this time.”

  The General rises, hobbles stiffly to a closet at the back of the room, then disappears within it. In the next moment he’s back out carrying a plastic bag of stale rolls and bread. “You can almost set your clock by them. Four-twenty, four-thirty, they’re here, cooing, making an awful racket, looking for their crumbs.”

  In the next moment the General flings open the window. Suddenly, Flynn sees an explosion of feathers just outside on the ledge. The noise of the cooing mounts till it sounds like the hum of a single huge generator, and the upper half of the General’s body at the open window merges joyously with his feathered flock.

  Shortly after the disbursement of crumbs, he closes the window, hobbles back to his desk and sits. “Still”—he resumes his thread of thought now, as if he’d never paused for a moment—“it’s extremely improbable that this person is one of our people.”

  “How so, sir?” Flynn asks, leaning forward.

  “Well, for one thing, we no longer run a shelter in that area. Used to have one on the old South Street pier until about ten years ago, before the area underwent this big urban-renewal transformation. In those days you’d see a lot of lost souls down that way—derelicts, drunks, runaways, aliens avoiding fhe immigration people, sailors who’d jumped ship. Old neighborhood then, full of elderly people and artists who could rent cheap space down there. Quite charming in its way. Colorful. Now the place is full of glass skyscrapers. Bankers. Brokers. Wealthy merchants. And now, of course, the old seaport’s a tourist attraction. Can’t have a lot of these poor souls lurching all about the place bumping into people. The police have understandably chased them all out. So there was no further need for us to run a shelter down there. No flock to minister to. Those people have crept into different areas of the city now and we’ve followed them.”

  “I see,” Flynn says quietly. Part of him is still out there on the ledge, wondering where all the pigeons have gone. “What happened to the people who used to run that shelter for you?”

  “The old South Street shelter? Oh, they’ve all been reassigned. Some of them, I imagine, are dead.”

  “Yes, sir,” Flynn muses on. “Still, I wonder if you keep a record of the names of people who did staff that shelter.”

  “We keep a duty roster for every shelter in the city. Still, it’s been ten years. That’s a long time.”

  “Is it still down there?”

  “The shelter?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Oh, yes. We still own the property and the building. Probably sell it soon. Real-estate market is booming down that way. We’ve already had a number of inquiries on it.”

  “I don’t suppose I could go down and have a look around the place.”

  Mildly astonished, the General looks up. “Can’t imagine what you’d find. Place’s been locked up for years.”

  “Probably just a lot of roaches and rats.” Flynn shrugs. “But I’d like to have a look anyway.”

  The General’s long, finely tapered fingers roll a pencil mindlessly across the blotter of his desk. Then he smiles. “Why not? I’ll arrange to get you a key.”

  “That would be fine, sir.”

  General Pierce rises suddenly as if to signal the termination of their meeting. “Now you wanted the duty roster for the old South Street shelter too?”

  “Yes, sir.” Flynn bounces up, falling into step behind him. “If you’ve got one.”

  “We’ll never know till we look.” The General turns and beams back at him. “Right, Sergeant?”

  »40«

  “This is far too big, Max. It’ll never fit.”

  “Push a bit harder.”

  “I am. It won’t go, I tell you. It’s no fit. The damned sneaker’s about ready to burst.”

  “All right. Hand me the other mold.”

  4:45 P.M. MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE. MORTUARY.

  “Want me to powder this one too?” Arthur Delaney asks.

  “Sure,” says Bonertz. “But slip the sock on first.”

  It’s near the end of the day now. All the autopsy tables are cleared and the dieners are scrubbing and scouring them in preparation for the daily morning onslaught.

  A number of the others, finished for the day, stand about—Grimsby, Hakim, Strang, McCloskey, Pearsall—taunting and teasing their colleagues. There’s a great deal of jesting, the objects of which are two casts of the human left foot. One of these is the foot of Ferde, the other that of Rolfe.

  For each foot, a skilled specialist has produced a master cast taken directly from the badly mutilated left foot of each corpse. From that a piece mold was produced in plaster, and from that a further refinement—a perfect copy of each left foot reproduced in a flexible material made from gelatin, glycerin, and zinc oxide, a compound used because of its great plasticity and because it can be made to imitate very well the consistency of the living foot. Also, there is virtually no risk of breakage.

  With great comic flourish, Carl Strang applies huge puffs of talcum powder to the inside of the ragged sneaker, filthy to the point of a green moldy patina—the same sneaker found in the shack near Coenties Slip. At the same time Delaney slips a navy-blue sock onto the moulage of Ferde’s left foot.

  “All right, Carl.” Bonertz scowls. “Enough with the powder already. I’m choking on the stuff.”

  “Sorry, old man,” Strang clucks sympathetically, “but the foot odor from this thing is atrocious.”

  More jesting and bawdy hilarity as Bonertz snatches the powdered sneaker from Strang and prepares to fit it onto the mold. “Now, gentlemen,” he proclaims, “the big test.”

  For a moment there’s breathless silence as the sneaker slides smoothly onto the stockinged mold.

  “Voilà,” squeals Hakim and ties a huge bow with the laces.

  “Perfect,” says Delaney.

  “Looks pretty good,” Bonertz agrees dourly. He removes the sneaker from the mold and studies the inside of it. “The widest part of the foot corresponds perfectly with the widest part of the sneaker,” he murmurs. “And the projecting base of the big toe fits reasonably well
into the concavity of the sneaker.”

  The others gathered around him nod their assent.

  Suddenly Strang snatches both molds and proceeds to march them around the room and up the walls. There is something wildly funny about the way these two disembodied left feet stride up and down the walls, and soon several of the others are marching after the feet with a great deal of hooting and raucous laughter. Shortly the place resembles a locker room full of boisterous, hellbent undergraduates.

  “What the hell’s all this?” Konig booms, appearing suddenly, like a specter, through the swinging doors. The laughter dies on a stifled guffaw and for a moment Strang, standing on a chair, teeters foolishly off balance, still holding the two molds wearing their oddly incongruous cotton navy socks.

  “Anything wrong?” Konig stares up at Strang.

  Strang grins sheepishly and steps down from the chair. “Nothing, Paul. Just cutting up a bit.”

  The two men regard each other silently while the others shuffle awkwardly and study the floor.

  “Had a bit of luck, Paul.” Bonertz bustles forward with the sneaker.

  “Oh?”

  “We’ve matched the sneaker to the mold of Ferde’s left foot.”

  Konig limps stiffly to the table. “May I have a look?” Strang hands the mold to Konig, who silently examines it, along with the sneaker. “What size did the chiropodist say the mold is?” he asks.

  “Eight and a half, triple E,” says Bonertz. “Same as the sneaker.”

  “Luck.” Konig smiles. “The other mold must’ve been far too big.”

  “Couldn’t even begin to get it on,” says Delaney.

  Konig whips out a pad and jots a few notations in the Ferde section. “Chiropodist find anything else unusual on the foot?”

  “Well, of course,” says Bonertz, “there was a great deal of mutilation. Some toes missing. Skin stripped from the foot. A deep slash right through the sole of the foot.”

  “Right,” Konig snaps, the line of his jaw tautening as he waits for information. “So?”

  “The chiropodist’s report says that from what was left of the foot, toe bones specifically, he could determine that several of the toes were bent up and humped. Evidence of bunions.”