City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Sure we got a billing department.” Mr. Charles struggles on with even greater tolerance. “We even got all our customers on a computer. Fancy. Modern. Right? But to dig out that information, separating customers by postal zone numbers, that’s still gotta take a couple of people at least a couple of days working on the machines. Right? Then, after I get you the names, I gotta pull out every invoice and see who did and who didn’t order the paper for that day. That’s a lot of time. You understand? A lot of money. I’d like to help you out, pal. Really, I would. You seem like a nice guy. But I can’t. I got a lot of troubles of my own, see? What’s the big deal about this lousy piece of paper anyway?”

  Flynn pauses, regarding the man silently. Then he speaks. “The guy who bought this lousy piece of paper might’ve murdered two other guys.”

  “Murdered?” Mr. Charles’s eyebrows cock. “When was this?”’

  “Around three weeks ago. Dug up the pieces down by the East River this week.”

  “All cut up?”

  “That’s right. Chopped into little pieces.”

  “Sure—sure,” Mr. Charles says, curiosity mounting. “I read about that. A dog found the hand. Right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Son of a bitch.” Mr. Charles is full of sudden wonderment and awe. “And you think one of my customers did it?”

  “Maybe—or more probably, one of your customers’ customers.”

  Mr. Charles shakes his head and whistles softly to himself.

  “It’s a long shot,” Flynn goes on, fanning the man’s obvious interest, “I admit it, but I can tell you, one of the heads was wrapped in this piece of paper.”

  Mr. Charles gapes down at the torn and crumpled front page with the picture of the Puerto Rican beauty queen peering out between the creases. “Wrapped in that?” He whistles softly to himself again and shakes his head in quiet awe. “Son of a bitch.”

  All the fierce tension seems to melt from the man. Suddenly limp, he leans wearily against one of those floor-to-ceiling towers of newsprint. “This used to be such a good city. Beautiful city. Best goddamned city in the world. Now it’s a toilet. The goons and freaks have taken over. Had a cousin of my own shot to death a couple of months ago. Over in Flatbush. Couple of freaks—hopheads—come into his shop over there. Shot him to death. For what? For nothing. For thirteen dollars and some change. He was closin’ up and they come in and shot him. Just like that. The way you swat a fly. Young guy. Thirty years old. Just startin’ out. A couple of kids. Fuckin’ creeps.”

  For a moment both men are silent.

  “And you got no leads?” Charles asks suddenly.

  “Nothin’ great. Just this piece of paper. And even if I find the guy who bought it, that don’t necessarily mean he’s the one who did it.”

  “Nope—it don’t,” Mr. Charles murmurs distantly. “Look—the auditors and the IRS bastards were here yesterday. This morning a U.S. Marshal handed me a subpoena. I got a tax man coming over in a few minutes. I’m up to my ass here right now. See? Gimme a day or two. I’ll get back to you.”

  Going out, Flynn glances back to wave at Charles. But already the fierce little man has turned back to his clipboard. He is standing near the end of one of those endless avenues of paper, between , two enormous towers of unsold magazines. Their monumental size diminishes him. They emphasize his smallness. They slope precariously inward, as if they were about to topple down upon him like the crumbling pillars of some ancient temple. Mr. Stanley Charles, standing there at the foot of them, clipboard poised at the ready, gazing up at them, appears finally cowed. Whatever pitiful pose of defiance with which he confronted these towers before is now all gone. Instead, he looks now very much like a man who has lost something and is trying very hard to find it again. And indeed, he has lost a few things—a city, a cousin, and now, so it appears, he is even about to lose a business.

  »55«

  3:00 P.M. FOREST PARK, QUEENS.

  Young Sam DeSoto sits alone on a park bench in the cool shade of a full-blooming chestnut. The big white blossoms, like great puffs of cotton, hang low from the branches all about him. On the ground, strewn about his feet, are the myriad tiny blossoms that have showered intermittently downward during the past three-quarters of an hour he has been sitting there.

  Slightly after three o’clock now, with school out, the park is beginning to swarm with children. They bike past the bench where DeSoto sits reading a Sports Illustrated and looking like a hobo; they roll past him on skates; mothers push infants past in carriages. Back up to the left in’ a concrete playground encircled with a wrought-iron fence, kids swing on swings, slide on slides, soar up and down on seesaws, and stream all over a Junglegym. Out beyond the playground, in a field across the way, there are kite fliers and softball players. Almost directly behind him, in a thick clump of trees, an old circus carousel whirls more squealing children around and around to the tune of Strauss waltzes wheezing out across the park.

  Along with the very young there are, of course, the very old. They sit idly on benches, some dozing, some reading—the retired pensioners, the sick and the resigned.

  DeSoto glances up now from the glossy pages of the Sports Illustrated. His eyes stray fleetingly off to the right, to a bench about one hundred yards down from him. There sits another man, an innocuous-looking fellow with colorless hair and a recessive chin. His dress is shabby but respectable enough—shirt, tie, suit, raincoat, although there is not the slightest sign of rain. The tatty, rather soiled appearance of the man suggests that he hasn’t changed his costume for quite some time. He reads a newspaper, and beside him on the bench sits the battered old Gladstone.

  Sam DeSoto has followed this man out from the city, out from Grand Central Station. For the first part of the trip he followed him in the gray unmarked radio patrol car along with Haggard, Zabriskie, and DeGarmo; then later he rode with him in the subway, when he’d taken over from Donnello, who’d followed the man out of Grand Central Station onto 42nd Street and west to Sixth Avenue, where they had both descended into the IND.

  By means of small, powerful radio transmitters carried by Donnello, his movements in the subway had been quite easily charted from the patrol car riding along above. Just before entering a train, Donnello had been able to radio that he was boarding an eastbound F train. From there it was a relatively simple matter to follow a series of steady, rhythmic beeps along the well-known route of the F train, moving east under the river and out toward Queens.

  The chief danger of this technique was that the followers would, in turn, be followed by Meacham’s people. Since the trains in the early afternoon are fairly empty, anyone lingering too long in proximity to the man carrying the Gladstone would be conspicuous. In order to minimize that danger, they had worked out yet another fairly simple system of rotation that involved the patrol car’s reaching stations along the route shortly before the train itself. This, too, was a fairly simple matter. And so it was that when Donnello got off the train at Lexington and 53rd, Zabriskie got on. He stayed in the-small vestibule one car down from the pick-up man, watching him through the glass door all the way under the East River, through 23rd and Ely and on through Long Island City. When Zabriskie got off at Roosevelt Avenue and Jackson Heights, young Sam DeSoto, who’d arrived there seven minutes before, got on.

  It had all gone quite smoothly. When the man with the Gladstone got off at 71st and Continental Avenue, so did DeSoto. From there, by lagging quite far behind and moving at a stroller’s pace, he had shadowed the man through the quaint, narrow, Tudorish streets of Forest Hills Gardens right on out through to Woodhaven Boulevard and across to the park, where he sits now far enough away from the man to arouse no suspicions.

  He has been sitting there now for nearly an hour, ostensibly reading a magazine but actually watching the man with the Gladstone’s every move. His orders from Haggard were not to let the man out of his sight, and under no circumstances to apprehend him.

  DeSoto glances at his
watch. It’s going on 3:30 now, and it troubles him a bit that no one has yet shown up to rotate him out of there. Surely any of Meacham’s people in the area to pick up the money had observed him by now. He has simply been sitting there too long to go unnoticed. Obviously, they wouldn’t move until they were absolutely certain about him. DeSoto sits there now with a growing sense of unease.

  Still, he’s not unduly alarmed. He knows that DeGarmo is to replace him there. True, DeGarmo is now a half-hour late, but the small, powerful radio transponder beneath his shirt continues to beep reassuringly, beaming out sharp, powerful electronic signals that will guide the men in the unmarked patrol car directly to him.

  DeSoto puts his magazine aside now and sits back, closing his eyes, pretending to sleep, but watching the man on the bench through the moist cage of his eyelashes. The thudding oom-pah-pah of Strauss waltzes from the carousel continues to roll out, stridulous and tinny, across the park. And in the air, mingled with the scent of hyacinth, jasmine, and the first lush growth of grass, is the smell of frankfurters and sauerkraut wafting from the vendor’s refreshment stand near the carousel.

  Aside from the tension of his job there, the scene is all very pleasurable to young DeSoto, a weed sprouted on the city streets, sprung from the hot pavements, the airless brown brick tenements sprawling up around the Hunt’s Point district of The Bronx. For him, grass and trees, the sound of children rooting at a softball game, squealing on a carousel, are rare pleasures, and despite the urgency of his job, he succumbs to them. He does not know, has no way of knowing, that Haggard, along with his replacement, DeGarmo, and several others, is still somewhere back there in Jackson Heights, where the battery of the unmarked patrol car had given out, cutting all radio communication between him and them. At that very moment, while the battery is being replaced, Haggard has not the slightest idea where young Sam DeSoto has gone.

  »56«

  “Fifteen old extractions.”

  “Right.”

  “Shell gold crown on the mandibular right third molar.”

  “Right”

  “Partial denture,”

  “Right”

  “Including upper left lateral incisor, canine, and first premolar.”

  “Right Any scars? Identification marks?”

  “Vaccination. Right upper arm.”

  “No skin on the right upper arm.”

  “No skin? Well, what about an old bayonet wound, left side of the pelvis?”

  “No skin left on the pelvis either. Stripped off clean. Part of the dismemberment.”

  “Jesus.”

  3:25 P.M. MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.

  “Was he on any medication?” Konig asks, and the voice of Colonel Angus McCormick, dry, perfunctory, comes instantly back at him through five ‘hundred miles of wire from a dispensary office of the post hospital, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Both men have been at it for the past three-quarters of an hour. Trading data. First merely general physical characteristics—age, height, weight, blood type, and so forth. Then on into ever and ever more specialized clinical detail.

  “Codeine, cortisone, and steroids,” McCormick replies dryly.

  “We picked up the cortisone on gas chromatography. Great deal of codeine in the blood. Arthritic, wasn’t he?”

  “Certainly looked that way. He’d been in and out of the dispensary approximately thirty times during his last year here. Lived on APC’s. Pains in the—”

  “—hipbone and sacroiliac?” Konig offers, a vision of Haggard flashing through his mind.

  “That’s right, although nothing very much showed up on his X rays. How’d you catch it?”

  “Reassembling the spinal column. Pronounced osteoarthritic changes in the right hipbone, sacroiliac. Lipping changes in the cervical vertebrae. Must’ve had a helluva lot of pain.” Where is Haggard now? he wonders. Has someone picked up the cash?

  “Not just physical either. There was a great deal of psychological pain as well. Browder was a bit of an oddity around here.”

  “So I gather,” Konig remarks. Somewhere far back in his head is the sound of a girl shrieking on a street corner, and even farther back, yet another shriek, more terrified, more anguished.

  McCormick goes on. The initial reticence past now, he is more eager to talk. “Browder was a man of extraordinary courage. Decorated five times. Citations of valor. Super-patriotic. Gung ho, I guess is what you’d call him. Joined as a kid. Never knew anything else but Airborne. Served in Vietnam. Rose quickly through the ranks. Very proud of being a jumper. But he was getting a little long in the tooth for jumping, and when the arthritic problems worsened, we simply had to ground him. He was reassigned to training cadre. Very cushy job around here. Lot of men love it, but he took it as a setback. Couldn’t stand being grounded. Began drinking. Then Ussery entered his platoon. That’s when he really fell apart.”

  Very shortly McCormick and Konig are trading data on Billy Roy Ussery. Konig, armed with X rays and dental charts on his desk, drones wearily into the phone. “No previous extractions.”

  “Right. He had all his teeth, but they were in pretty poor condition.”

  “Extensive caries. Marked abrasions due to bruxism.”

  “Right on both counts.”

  “All four wisdom teeth unerupted.”

  “Right.”

  “Left upper showing signs of impaction.”

  “Right”

  “Many roots not yet fully calcified.”

  “Right,” McCormick drawls. “Wouldn’t be, of course. Still just a kid.”

  Konig shuffles the X rays on his desk, plucks one out of the pile. “Do you happen to have a picture of the lower left central incisor there?”

  “Lower left central incisor,” McCormick murmurs half aloud to himself.

  Konig waiting there can hear the crinkling sound of papers being rummaged on a desk. Then, creeping through the conscious stream of his thought, yet another sound—the voice of a man, soft, infinitely refined, lethally gentle, whispering at him, all around him. “Dr. Konig. Dr. Konig.”

  “Yop.” McCormick’s voice drowns out the other. “Got it right here. Lower left central incisor.”

  “Fine,” says Konig. “Now look at the upper third of the outer surface.”

  “Upper third, outer surface. Oh, yes, little cloudy white patch.”

  “That’s it,” Konig says with a surge of mounting excitement. “Yours have a small stain in the center of it?”

  “Sure does. What the hell is it?”

  “I don’t know. I was going to ask you. Our dental people couldn’t figure it, either.”

  For a while the two men are silent, each pondering the mysterious cloudy white patch on the radiographs before them.

  “Beats me,” McCormick sighs. “Probably just congenital discoloration of the enamel.”

  “Could be,” Konig concedes. “He on any special drugs? Medication?”

  “Reserpine.”

  “Right. We caught that.”

  “Mild essential hypertension. High-strung boy. Actually, I believe it was just a passing thing with him but we were watching it closely.”

  “Probably linked to the stress of his situation there.”

  “Right. All in all, Ussery was a pretty healthy boy. Just minor things.”

  “Any history of foot problems?” Konig asks.

  “Now how the hell did you know that?”

  “Reassembling a foot. X-rayed it. Found a hallux valgus.”

  “In the right or left?”

  “The left.”

  Konig waits while McCormick consults his records. “Nope” comes the voice at last. “Nothing down here in Ussery’s records about a hallux valgus. At least we never diagnosed it. But he did have to wear special shoes.”

  “What size?”

  “Eight and a half, triple E, says here on his clothing requisition. His toes were humped and he had bunions too. Problem no doubt grew out of the hallux valgus.” Konig whistles. “Hallelujah! Our boy had bunion
s too. Also wore an eight and half triple E sneaker.”

  For a while they continue to talk, trading additional details, but already Konig’s mind has turned off. He has closed the book on Ferde and Rolfe to his own satisfaction. The two cadavers glued together in the morgue below are Browder and Ussery. No doubt of that. Now in the place of coolly dispassionate clinical talk, all he can feel is his own slowly mounting sense of terror. His mind is elsewhere. As the shriekings return, he can no longer fight them down. He can barely sit in his chair, chatting with the colonel. There’s a feeling of flush in his face and a suffocating fullness in his chest. His cheeks are burning. He has the feeling he is about to blow apart. The shrieks come again, filling him with a sense of impotence and rage turned inward against himself. Like a man running as hard as he can against a concrete wall. He can barely manage another civility to the colonel.

  “Well,” McCormick sighs at last, “looks like we can close the books on this.”

  “Looks like it.” Konig fidgets nervously. “Just need the medical records now to tie it all up. Make it official.”

  “You’ve already got both sets of fingerprints.”

  “Right. Browder’s came yesterday.”

  “Good. Sent them directly to your man.”

  “Flynn?”

  “That’s the chap. He told me the whole story. Nasty business.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Knew them both fairly well,” McCormick says, a weary note in his voice now. “Nice boys, both of them. Browder was a fixture around here. Ussery I knew only briefly. Came into the dispensary a lot.”

  “The foot problem?”

  “The feet. The teeth. The blood pressure. Lots of other vague complaints. Nothing you could ever put your finger on. Psychosomatic, most of it. He was a kid with a lot of problems. And he knew he had them. Wispy, pretty little thing. Almost girlish. Browder was like a father to him. How the hell a kid like that got into this kind of an outfit—” McCormick chuckles. “Funny though. Airborne is full of that kind of thing. Scared kids trying to act tough. Boys with problems trying to prove they don’t have them.”