City of the Dead

»32«

“Hello, Fergie.”

“Hello, Paul.”

“How’s business?”

“Lousy. I trust things are the same with you.”

“I got your buggies here,” Ferguson Dell, Chief Curator, Department of Entomology, Museum of Natural History, wheezes into the phone. “Where’d you get these little beauties? No—don’t tell me. It’s probably something disgusting.”

“Calliphora, aren’t they?” Konig asks, doodling on a pad.

“Unquestionably.”

“How old?”

“All depends.” With a great gargle of sputum, Dell clears his throat. “Report here says the stuff they were found on had been submerged.”

“That’s right. I can’t tell you how long it had been submerged, but the stuff wasn’t down very far. A foot, maybe eighteen inches at the most. Lot of it probably washed up recently.”

“Well, you’ve got to take that into account.”

“I already have.” Konig doodles furiously. “So what’ve you got for me?”

“Well, let’s see,” Dell says. “These little guys generally lay eggs on meat when it’s fresh, less commonly when it’s decayed.”

“Putrefaction on this stuff was not too advanced.”

“So you figure this thing took place pretty recently?”

“I didn’t say that,” Konig snaps. “I said that to my mind the putrefaction on this stuff wasn’t too far advanced. He can hear Dell’s puzzlement at the other end of the wire. “All I’m saying, Fergie, is that the normal factors that generally control the rate of putrefaction just don’t apply here. Very little blood left in the bodies. Only partial viscera recovered, therefore hardly any gastrointestinal microorganisms to feed on and start to break down the tissue. So the whole process of decomposition is delayed. And the thing is further complicated because of the submersion of the stuff—temperature, excessive moisture. I’m trying to put the time picture together, but it’s not easy. So I’m falling back on the maggots. What can you tell me?”

“Nothing’s ever easy with you, is it, Paul?” Dell sighs wearily. “Well, this variety of maggot deposits its eggs in groups of about one hundred and fifty. Depending on the temperature of the environment, they hatch in—oh, say—from eight to fourteen hours. Cold weather delays the hatching.”

“It’s been pretty warm all month.”

“Right. Unseasonably. Too goddamn warm for me. How I dread the summer.”

“Skip the meteorology, will you, Fergie? Just get on with it.”

“Okay—okay. All I’m saying is that in all probability that first hatching wasn’t delayed by climatic conditions. So we can figure the eggs hatched in, say, eight to fourteen hours after they were deposited on the meat. And they were deposited not during the time of submersion but only after the stuff washed up.”

“Okay,” Konig grumbles. “Go on. Go on.”

“I am, for Chrissake. What the hell’s the matter with you, Paul? You all right?”

“Sure—I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine. You sound—”

“I’m fine. Fine. Never mind me. Let’s get on with it.” Konig scribbles large, intertwining circles on his pad.

A pause of consternation follows, then Dell continues. “Well, as I was saying, that first larval instar persists for eight to fourteen hours. Then the skin of that larva is shed and you get a second instar, similar to the first, but larger. These little guys hang around for two,’ three days. Do you follow so far?”

“I’m right with you, Fergie.” Konig’s face trembles and a large throbbing has begun to pound mercilessly at the back of his head.

“Then the third instar is your typical maggot. Typical little bluebottle Calliphoras—like those you’ve got here.”

“How long do they feed?”

“They feed like pigs for six days,” Dell goes on with mounting zest.

“How old are the ones I sent you?”

“Well, I’m looking right now at one of the largest you sent over, and I can tell you right now that the total life of this little bruiser could not have exceeded twelve days.”

“Twelve at the outside,” Konig mumbles and scribbles on his pad.

“But was probably less,” Dell continues, “since from everything you tell me, it’s highly unlikely that these eggs had been laid more than a day or two after the deposit of the remains in the river.”

“I’m figuring two days for the tidal wash to have uncovered the remains.”

“So,” Dell continues, “put the age of the biggest larvae at ten days and that makes a period of twelve days from the time the body was deposited to the time you recovered these maggots. How does that jibe with your thinking?”

“Beautiful.” Konig feels the surge of exhilaration that always comes when his own carefully thought out hypotheses have been confirmed. “Just from the state of the remains, I’d already jotted down in my notes a figure of ten to twelve days. That’s perfect, Fergie. I’m very grateful to you and your buggies.”

“How many bodies you find down there, anyway?”

“Two—I’m reasonably certain of that now.”

“When did you find the stuff?”

“April twelfth.”

“That means the poor beggars probably got it around April first.”

“That’s right.” Konig’s laugh is a snarl. “April Fool’s Day.”

No sooner had he hung up than the door bursts open and he stares at the short, burly figure of Detective Edward Flynn bulling his way through the door with plucky little Carver, yipping fiercely, like an enraged puppy, at his heels.

“What in God’s—” Konig lumbers half out of his seat. “He just come bustin’ through, Doctor.” Carver waves her arms wildly through the air. “I told him to wait.”

“I ain’t waitin’ around here all day,” Flynn blusters. “I got business too.”

“I told him to wait, Doctor. He just come bustin’ right on past me.”

“That’s all right, Carver. You can go now. Sit down, Flynn.”

“I don’t wanna sit,” Flynn snaps. “I wanna stand.”

“Stand then.” Konig flings up his arms in exasperation. “Stand on your head if you like.”

“Who’s he to come bustin’ in like that?” Carver mutters, deeply aggrieved. He ain’t nobody.”

“All right, Marion.” Konig, on his feet now, grips her under the elbow and steers her toward the door. “That’s all right. You can go now, I said. I’ll take care of this myself.”

She’s still muttering when the door closes behind her, and Konig turns back to the detective. “Now what the hell is all this about?”

“I’ll tell you what the hell it’s all—”

“First of all, stop your goddamn hollering. This isn’t a bowling alley. It’s a mortuary. There are mourners here. And the dead. Show some respect.”

The argument works. A devout man, Flynn is mortified at his own unseemly behavior.

“Now sit down, Ed,” Konig says assuagingly, grasping the fact that the detective’s nose is still out of joint from their last phone conversation. In the next moment he thrusts a humidor at him. “Have a cigar.”

Red-faced and puffing, a look of puzzlement in his eyes, Flynn reaches for one of the Chief’s better cigars. But his hand stops in midair as if invisible forces held it there and something like suspicion creeps into his eyes. “I ain’t forgettin’ how you talked to me yesterday.”

“Sorry about that.” Konig’s voice melts with a vaguely bogus contrition. “I had to get those heads. They meant everything to me just then. The difference between identifying and not identifying those poor bastards you dug up the other night.”

“Don’t tell me you got ID’s on them already?”

“Not yet, but I’m getting there. Still, I had no business popping off at you like that. I’m sorry. Here—let me light that cigar for you.” Konig whisks the Bunsen burner under Flynn’s cigar and holds it there while the detective, perplexed and utterly buffaloed, sucks noisily while lighting it. Then, somewhat appeased, he leans back in his chair and puffs contentedly.

“Well, I had no business bustin’ in like that either,” he says. “Guess I was still just steamin’ from that call.”

“Okay,” the Chief says abruptly. “We’re even now. What can I do for you?”

“I just come to tell you that them swatches of skin you sent over to the lab the other day—”

“What about them?”

“We were able to lift a couple of prints off them. Left index, ring, and thumb.”

“Fine. So?”

“So?” Flynn rears back. It was hardly the reaction he’d been expecting. Praise was what he’d been hoping for. A slap on the back. A hearty well done. Possibly even some paltry expression of gratitude. Not this jeering, irascible “So?” But, of course, he should have known better. Should not have been fooled by the cigar and the oddly soothing voice. Should have known that the Chief could not stay civil for more than five minutes at a stretch.

“So?” Flynn jeers right back. “So all I wanted to tell you was that I matched those prints to prints we found plastered all over that shack.”

“So now you’ve got the scene of the crime. So what?” Konig shuffles coldly through the papers and the morning mail stacked on his desk. “With that goddamn bloody tub in there, did you ever doubt it?” Flynn starts to reply but Konig rushes right on. “How does any of that help me?” Konig bulls on ruthlessly.

“Well, after all, you’ve got—”

“What about that goddamn underwear you were blowing your horn about?”

“Well, Jesus Christ”—Flynn’s face reddens—“if you’d just let someone else get a word in edgewise.”

“Go on. Go on,” Konig jeers. “I’m sitting here waiting for the past half-hour—”

“Christ—I ain’t been here no half-hour.”

Konig checks his watch. “Almost fifteen minutes. Sue me. Will you get to the goddamn point.”

“I’m tryin’ to—I’m tryin’ to, goddamnit.” Flynn reddens. “If you’d only let me—I’ve been tryin’ to tell you that I wired Washington about the serial number we found in the waistband.”

“You told me that yesterday. So what?”

“So”—the detective appears to be close to apoplexy—“today they wired back.” He yanks a yellow sheet of telex paper from his inside pocket and starts to read in a high, shrill voice. “RA 12537744.”

“Right.”

“The serial number we found in—”

“—in the waistband. Right. Right.”

“Belongs to a chap by the name of Browder, Sergeant Raymond Browder. 82nd Airborne, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”

“Fine. So you called Bragg. Where’s Browder?”

“They don’t know,” Flynn says with barely smothered rage in his eyes. “Disappeared around sixteen months ago. Military authorities down there now report him as a deserter.”

“So?”

“So—so—so,” Flynn booms and a long white ash of cigar crumbles onto his jacket and into his lap. He slaps frantically at it as if he feared going instantly up in flames. “Is that all you can say? So? So? I’m tryin’ to tell you somethin’ and you just sit there like King Tut. Lordin’ it over me like I was dirt. Treatin’ me like a turd. Where the hell do you—”

“So,” Konig mutters impassively, “tell me more.”

“So I’m tellin’ you,” the detective goes on in a voice ominously low, restraining himself in an act of superhuman will. “This Browder, missin’ sixteen months, is a thirty-five-year-old RA type. A paratrooper. Gung-ho career guy if you get the picture.”

“I get the picture.”

“Fought in Vietnam. Got all kinds of decorations. DSC, Medal of Honor, Purple Heart. The whole shmeer. Right?”

“Right.”

“So about sixteen months ago, the 82nd Airborne is put on alert. Activated and ordered back to Southeast Asia. Vietnam. You follow?”

“I follow.”

“So the night before the unit’s supposed to pull out, this Browder goes over the hill.”

“You said that already.”

“I know I did,” Flynn smolders. “I know what the hell I said. But right now, this minute, I’m sayin’ this Browder looks like one of them fricasseed chickens you got glued together downstairs.”

“So,” murmurs Konig, leaning back in his chair, the tips of his fingers forming a bridge above the slight swell of his paunch. “So,” he murmurs once again. But this time it is an entirely different so from all the others—the combative and jeering and derisory so’s. These are full of rumination, conjecture, inward reflection. “So?”

Flynn leans back in his chair, puffing at his cigar, certain he has at last made his point. “So I sent your set of prints down to Bragg this morning. They’ll check ’em against their set. We oughta hear something in forty-eight hours.”

“Will they send medical records? Dental charts?”

“I spoke to the CO down there today,” Flynn muses. “Funny.”

“What’s funny?”

“He was very tight-lipped. Evasive. Didn’t wanna say too much over the phone.” The detective drums the desk with his finger. “Got a feelin’ there’s somethin’ funny about all this.”

“But they will make medical records available?”

“Oh, sure,” Flynn says. “I mean, I guess so.”

“You guess so?”

“Well, I mean, they generally do. But this Captain Di-Lorenzo was a little strange.”

The great dome of Konig’s head nods drowsily. His red, sleepless eyes flutter and momentarily close. Rocking gently back and forth in his seat, he appears for just a moment to be dozing; to be far away, dreaming of some remote and tranquil time, of a place unsullied. “Well,” he sighs at last, “I s’pose all we can do for the time being is sit tight and wait.”

For a long while after Flynn’s departure, Konig just sits there, rummaging dispiritedly through his mail. A letter from a missionary in Zaire querying him on a rare form of schistosomiasis. A physician in Tashkent with a question on blood grouping. An immunologist at Tulane who wants to know—

He sits there reading the same page over and over again, trying to concentrate and failing. He is still smoldering from the outrage of the morning, his humiliation before Carslin, who undoubtedly believed that it was he who performed the shoddy autopsy on the Robinson boy; who saw the moment of weakness in his face when he almost asked his former student to conceal his findings, bury the report, fudge it… anything, but save the department. And, of course, Carslin saw all that. Well, thank God he didn’t ask. He didn’t stoop to that. How much it would have pleased Carslin if he had. An opportunity to rise to new and stunning heights of self-righteous indignation. And that poor Robinson boy. He knew now that Robinson didn’t hang himself in his cell, but instead was hanged there by guards who slipped a noose of mattress ticking around his neck and strung him up from an overhead joist after beating him to death. All that would come out now. Good. Some bastard down in the Tombs would pay for it all right. He’d see to that. But what of Strang? What part did he play in it? Was it really an oversight? Omitting to do a tissue study that was almost mandatory in cases such as this? He might be able to forgive mere carelessness. But if Emil Blaylock had gotten to Strang first—made promises, which Blaylock very well could. He was, after all, an extremely influential man in that serpent’s nest, the top inner circle of the City bureaucracy. If such promises were made, Konig, who had some friends too—lower-echelon officials within the municipal penal system, people with a strong urge to rise quickly and no great scruples how they did so—would goddamned well find out and there would be hell to pay.

In the next moment Konig flicks a switch on his phone, picks up the receiver and hears Carver’s voice on the other end.

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Get me Bill Ratchett’s office down at the Tombs,” he snaps, then bangs the receiver back down. Once again he is sitting there fuming. Expecting at any moment the Deputy Mayor’s phone call. The stern rebuke. The chilling admonitions. Hints of dire things to come, all uttered in the lofty verbiage of municipal officialdom, expressing His Eminence the Mayor’s high moral dudgeon—“peeved—vexed—outraged—furious—repeat, furious—”

The buzzer on his phone sounds and it is Carver again. “Ratchett’s not in, Doctor.” Konig grumbles something about leaving a message to call back, slams the phone back down and rises. He has a need now to get away from his desk, away from his office, away from himself. In the next moment he is out his door, storming down corridors emptied by the noon lunch hour, clattering down the green descending spiral of Stairway D.

He has not been down to the mortuary since Haggard found him there in the early hours of the morning, but even at this late hour, four or five gurney carts are still lined up in the receiving area, their grisly cargoes still sacked in canvas, waiting to be unloaded into the huge purring refrigerators.

For a while, cut off from all the world above, he stands there waiting for the silence and the curious isolation of the place to soothe him. But standing there in noonday silence, he feels only estrangement, an alienation, a curious revulsion from things he had formerly loved. For the first time in his life he feels like a stranger here. Like a man who had inadvertently wandered into someone else’s nightmare. Suddenly, the place to him is a horror, a freak show, and he must flee it. Get the stench of it out of his nostrils. Get back up to the sunlight and the fresh air above.

He turns, but in that moment he is suddenly aware of faint scratching noises coming from the autopsy suites behind him. At once, in his feverish, overwrought mind, he imagines more foul play. Who’s in there now—at this hour when everyone is supposed to be out to lunch?

He crosses quickly to the doors leading to the autopsy rooms. Reaching there, he peers through the glass window panes set in the doors and sees there the tall, white-robed figure of Tom McCloskey hovering above the reconstructed Tinkertoy figures of Ferde and Rolfe. With a long steel tape, like a tailor measuring a man for a suit, the young man is very carefully taking limb and torso measurements, then tabulating them in a notebook.

Konig watches, with an odd pleasure, the quiet, purposeful motions of the young pathologist—all smooth, thorough, methodical. Then suddenly, for the flicker of an instant, Konig is forty years younger, a boy of twenty-three or so, just out of medical school. He is standing in that same suite of rooms, just where McCloskey is standing now, wearing just such a long, white, foolish surgical robe. Beside him stands old Bahnhoff, that black noisome cigar screwed into the center of his mouth, puffing furiously, and observing with a finicky vigilant eye the young man hovering there, above a flayed body, scalpel in hand, carrying out an extremely delicate arterial survey.

Such an ache comes suddenly upon him. Such a longing. Such a need to reach out and touch that moment again, drag it forcibly back across the spate of years, hug it to his chest as you would a lost child—those two figures lost irretrievably somewhere in the vanished years. As if he might simply walk through those doors and be that boy again. Stand there trembling beside old Bahnhoff, trying desperately to please him.

A rush of curious affection suddenly overtakes him. Not for the ghost of his vanished youth. That he knows was too mawkish and painful to feel anything other than contempt for. But it is rather an affection for young McCloskey with his tape measure and pad—and that ridiculous, ill-fitting surgical robe. Such affection. Such grief. If he could only warn the boy.

In the next moment, he turns and goes.