City of the Dead

»49«

Call, goddamn you, call. Just tell me what you want and when you want it. I’ll get it. I’ll be there. Just call. Please call. Give me back my kid.

The Chief sits in the stuffy shadows of his unlighted office. Behind a littered, unattended desk, he waits, staring unblinkingly at his telephone, all his concentration focused upon it, as if invoking some enormous effort of will to make it ring.

He has been sitting there for the past hour or so in those shadows, staring at the small, dark shape, conjuring it. In his head he carries on a series of imaginary dialogues with Wally Meacham. What he will say. How he will say it. What he will concede. He knows, of course, that he will concede everything. Everything is negotiable. But there is, too, buzzing annoyingly at the back of his head, Haggard’s stern admonition. “Don’t go it alone. Wait for me before you do a thing.”

Several times during that afternoon the phone has rung—reporters and the network lice trying to scare up a scandal. Not only do they have the delicious grisliness of a body-snatching scandal, but now it’s the Robinson business, and Carslin issuing a new press release every quarter-hour or so from the DA’s office. An opportunity for high moral dudgeon on the editorial page.

Konig had declined to speak with any of the media people. But when Benjamin called he had no choice but to speak. There was little doubt in his mind what the call was in regard to, and when the Deputy Mayor reminded him to appear the following morning at the DA’s office, he merely mumbled his assent. It occurred to him at that point that he didn’t particularly care what they did to him anymore.

Several times during the afternoon he had lumbered down the hall to Haggard’s office. There were questions and he was seeking reassurance. Finding no one there each time, he would leave vague, incoherent little notes on scraps of paper on the desk, then lumber back to his own office.

He had not been down to the autopsy rooms once that day. On his desk there were protocols to be read, death certificates to be signed, insurance reports to be filled out, innumerable calls and floods of mail to respond to. He had done nothing. He had let his work slide. He had assiduously avoided seeing any of his colleagues. He knew they had questions for him, as they always did, and that he was holding up their work unpardonably. He knew they sensed something was wrong. Drastically wrong. He knew they were uneasy and that they talked amongst themselves. That Strang, rest assured, was somewhere out there, even now, slandering him, promoting himself among the Mayor’s well-paid lackeys at City Hall.

For all that, he cared little. He viewed his dereliction of duties, his almost certain professional decline, with a rather eerie indifference. He dissociated himself from it, as if it were happening to someone else. Anyone seeing him just then, anyone who had known him, that is, known the enormous energy, that inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, would not have recognized him. They would have been struck dumb by the spectacle of this gray, haggard figure slumped untidily over his desk, work neglected, eyes glassy and dazed, jaw slack, the spectacular lassitude of the man.

Still, he sits there in the gathering shadows, staring at the phone and waiting. Then it rings. He jumps as the harsh jingle of the bell rouses him from his torpor. He listens as Carver answers for him, lest it be the press, some prying reporter trying to make a name for himself. He hears the muffled tones of her voice through the closed door. Then a buzzer sounds on his own phone and he snatches it up.

“Flynn,” says Carver. “You want to talk to him?”

“Flynn?” For a moment the name doesn’t even register. “Flynn—God, no.” He starts to fling down the phone, then snatches it back. “Wait a minute—better put him on.”

A moment, a click, then Sergeant Edward Flynn talking. At first it’s all jokes, mild banter, chatter. All unintelligible. Too fast. His drugged, torpid mind can scarcely keep up.

“—and that’s when Browder—”

“Browder?”

“What?”

“You just mentioned Browder.”

“I know,” says Flynn, puzzlement in his voice. “What about him?”

The name has caused Konig’s mind to clear a bit, like a fog beginning to rise. “You just said something about Browder.”

“I know I did. Ain’tcha been listenin’? I said we got his prints up from Bragg. They match a set we found all over that shack.”

“Oh,” Konig says, lapsing once more into indifference. “Nothing else?”

“Nothin’ else? Isn’t that enough? We got ID’s on the two of them now. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? You sick?”

“I’m fine,” Konig mutters. “Just a toothache. Where you been?”

“South Street. Lookin’ over some real estate.”

“What real estate? What the hell is this real estate you keep babbling about?”

Flynn sighs like a man sorely put upon.

“The real estate I keep babblin’ about, my friend, is the old Salvation Army shelter down there.”

“Salvation Army?” Konig repeats the words slowly; then something suddenly inquisitive comes into his tone. “Find anything?”

“Nothin’,” Flynn snaps. “Pretty much of a dead end. Just the way I think this Salvation Army phantom is gonna be a dead end. Place’s been shut up ten years. Lots of old furniture and junk. Rats and leaky faucets. Nothin’ much else.”

Konig ponders this information for a while. “So where do you go from here?”

“I don’t know.” Flynn chuckles. “I’m up a tree. We pulled about a dozen different sets of prints out of that shack. We’re trackin’ every one of them down. We’re casin’ the neighborhood, pullin’ in local derelicts. Anyone who can give us a lead. Even got a couple of guys dressed like winos prowlin’ around the area with a few pints of Thunderbird on their hips. So far, nothin’. The only real lead we got is this so-called Salvation Army guy, and I don’t think that’s gonna pan out.”

Even as Flynn’s voice drones on, Konig’s mind is elsewhere, his eyes roaming restlessly around the office.

“So I don’t put too much hope in—”

Suddenly Konig’s wandering gaze falls on a shadowy place beneath a long trestle table opposite his desk. It’s a table full of reports, books to be read, specimens excised from cadavers, sections of organs enclosed in jars of formalin. He is staring intently at a cheap, shabby suitcase. The kind of vinyl thing purchased in a Whelan’s or a Liggett’s for about $5.99. This one is old and battered. Scored with mud and old college paper pennants. It is the suitcase in which the two severed heads exhumed from beneath the shack near Coenties Slip arrived at the Medical Examiner’s office.

Konig has a sudden sharp memory of opening that case, the trembling, anxious fingers fidgeting at the clasps, the almost breathless sense of expectation as he unwrapped each head from the newspaper coverings—Newspaper coverings.

Suddenly he’s on his feet, talking quickly, breaking abruptly into Flynn’s chatty conversation. “Listen—where are you?”

“What?”

“I said, where are you? Where the hell are you right now?”

“Where am I?” Flynn goes suddenly peevish. “I’m in a piss-hole phone booth talkin’ to you, goddamnit.”

“Where? What phone booth?”

“Outside a Howard Johnson’s on Eighth Street. What the hell does that—”

“Give me the number.”

“The number?”

“Yes, the phone number. Are you thick? Goddamnit, give me the phone number. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

The moment after he’s hung up Konig is lumbering across the room to the trestle table, stooping and hauling up the battered little suitcase, prying open its rusty clasp, plunging his hands into the smeared, crumpled news-sheets.

It’s not the sheets of the Daily News or the Post he’s looking for. These are there in abundance—mud-streaked, bits of clotted gore still clinging here and there, a slight excremental odor rising all about them. All these are dated between March 27 and March 31, all quite consistent with a time of death having been established at approximately April 1.

But these are not what he’s looking for. Several days back, when the heads arrived in that small satchel, shortly after he had succeeded in assigning each head to its proper trunk, he recalls coming back to this grisly little carrying case and picking through the papers. Then, oddly enough, he recalls sitting down at a chair by the window and reading them—one in particular.

Riffling now hectically through those same old newspapers, he ransacks his brain, trying to recall exactly what it was he read that sticks so sharply in some dark, inaccessible corner of his mind.

There is a great deal of international and national news that flies past his eyes. Strife in the Middle East. Bombings in London. Mass starvation in Pakistan. Senate investigations of the Chief Executive. On the moldy yellowing pages of the Daily News, Konig pauses over the face of a murdered policeman; an East Side madam along with a stable of her hostesses being arraigned in night court; the picture of a small, timid-looking fellow with ferret eyes and a goatee who’d beaten his three-year-old daughter to death.

Still, that’s not what he’s looking for. He rummages on, tears like a cyclone through this noisome paper, bits of human hair, brain tissue mizzling downward as his feverish eyes search. If he could only recall what it was he’d been reading that night. Or wasn’t it early in the morning after having worked through the night? It was that night, after McCloskey had gone home, and he’d finally succeeded, along about four or five in the morning, to assign each head properly to a body. He’d sat down in that straight-backed chair over there by the window. It was warm in the office and so he’d opened the window. The damp night air came in and cooled him. Roused a bit his tired brain. And then he’d started reading. It was something about—Something about—a contest. A beauty contest. That was it, a beauty contest. Feeling a sense of mounting excitement, he mutters the words aloud to himself, “A beauty contest,” and in that quiet moment of articulation, the words just off his lips, in his mind’s eye he sees a picture. It is a photograph of a tall, angular girl in a bathing suit. She wears a banner across her bosom, and as a man, shorter than she, reaches up to crown her with a cheap rhinestone tiara, she is smiling a wide, toothsome Latin smile.

Then suddenly, even as his mind is conjuring the page, there it is—crumpled, wadded, buried somewhere near the bottom. In the next moment he’s holding it in trembling hands, sweeping off debris, smoothing out the creases of the page on ihe surface of the long trestle table. And there, finally, is the very picture he imagined—the smiling girl; the short gentleman with the tiara. Above it, a headline, partially torn and obliterated, reads:

Then an inverted pyramidal subhead: “Gloria Melendez to Represent Clinton at City-Wide Beauty Finals.”

His eyes gloss quickly over the story, all the details suddenly flooding back to him. Then he realizes what it was that had registered in his mind, several days back, but which, at the time, he didn’t fully comprehend. It’s not the story, which is innocuous and common enough to be completely forgotten moments after it’s read. No. Rather it’s the page upon which the story appears. Not a page of one of the big city dailies that are crammed into that valise. Instead, it is the front page of a small publication called the Clintonian, one of those little community sheets that come out three or four times a year, distributed as a special slip edition with one of the larger tabloids.

Somewhat smaller than a regular tabloid-size page, this one is crammed with news about the Clinton community, that sprawling ghettolike area running north and south through the Forties and Fifties, and east and west from Eighth Avenue all the way to the Hudson River. Once known as Hell’s Kitchen, it is now an area in rapid flux. Crumbling old brownstones next to urban-renewal projects. Factories and warehouses side by side with small merchants—Greek butchers, Italian bakers, Puerto Rican bodegas and costermongers. Black dudes and their hookers. And the lower-middle classes there fleeing burgeoning crime.

And that’s what had stuck in Konig’s head. Not the pretty Puerto Rican girl with the cheap tiara crown. No. It was this little neighborhood newspaper, crammed full of homey little items about a famous local community. Mr. Karolides, the butcher, announces the engagement of his daughter, Rosanna, to Nicholas Magos, a local florist. Mr. Joseph Pappalia slashes all prices by half in his small haberdashery. A picture of Miss Lottie Munoz, proprietor of a local beauty parlor, waving the hair of Miss Flossie Jewel, cashier at the local cinema, and so forth.

Konig rummages about in the valise for other pages of the publication, but this is the only one he finds. The front page. It bears the date, Sunday, March 31, 1974. In the upper right-hand corner is the serial number 3118. On the opposite side of the page is the photograph of Gloria Melendez.

In the next moment, Konig is back on the phone, dialing Flynn at the phone booth on 8th Street.

“Where the hell ya been?” Flynn growls before Konig can get a word out. “There’s three people waitin’ on line outside this goddamn booth making faces at me.”

“Make a face back,” snarls Konig. “Now listen to me.”

“You said five minutes,” Flynn carps. “Instead you keep me waitin’—”

“Listen to me, goddamnit. Where’d you get that paper?”

“What paper?”

“The paper you packed the heads in.”

“That’s the paper they were wrapped in.”

“The paper you found them in?”

“Yeah, for Chrissake, didn’t I just say so?”

“Okay, that’s all I wanted to know,” Konig shouts. “I’m sending you a page of newspaper—”

“What the hell for?”

“Never mind what the hell for. I’m telling you what for.”

“Don’t you start your goddamn shoutin’—”

“Shouting?” Konig’s voice booms into the speaker. “I’ll come down there myself and stuff this paper down your throat. Now you listen to me, goddamnit—”

“Now just a min—”

“Don’t interrupt me. Just shut your mouth and do exactly as I tell you.”

Long after he’d hung up, Konig continues to sit at his desk while the shadows of the dying afternoon creep all about him From downstairs in the street below the sound of children playing stickball and roller-skating wafts upward through his open windows. But Konig hears nothing. He is watching the phone again and waiting.

Now that the Novocaine has worn off, a dull pain has begun to gnaw at his jaw where the dentist drilled that morning. It is a pain, he well knows, that will mount steadily during the next few hours.

From out of the wide assortment of phials, tablets, and spansules in his lower drawer, he takes a Demerol, and another amyl nitrite to relieve the growing sense of constriction in his chest.

A short time later the mail boy walks in, dumps a banded packet of new mail on his desk, and walks out. Konig never stirs. In fact, he scarcely notices the boy’s coming or going. The mail simply sits there along with the rest of his business, untouched, unattended.

An hour later he is still sitting there. Carver has already poked her head in to say good night, just as she has done religiously each work night for the past twelve years. She warns him against staying too late and then goes herself.

Still he waits and watches his phone, all alone in the encroaching dusk of an April night in the city.

Shortly after seven o’clock he pushes his chair away from the desk and on stiff legs lurches to his feet. He has decided to go. Where, he doesn’t know. Certainly not home Not back there to all that. Incredibly, he’s hungry. It occurs to him that he hasn’t had a thing in his stomach but coffee and Scotch for the past three days.

Putting on his jacket he catches a glimpse of the packet of mail still on his desk bound with a thick rubber band. “Time for that tomorrow,” he mutters and starts out. But something there calls him back Some letter of great urgency His University mail Budgetary matters. A decision on his request for Federal grant monies. International correspondence Something—

With a sigh of resignation he removes the rubber band and flips disconsolately through a stack of envelopes and finds nothing of any great moment But in all that package of stem official-looking correspondence, each with its own glossy and portentous imprint, there is one small, strangely anonymous-looking envelope. It is of a pale-lilac color, suggesting female stationery. The name “Paul Konig” is printed on the face of it in a large, wavering, childlike hand, and it is postmarked Grand Central Station. There is no return address. Inside, he can feel something flat, heavy, metallic.

He studies it for a while, hefting it in his hand, turning it about, uncertain why he feels that sharp visceral spasm. His legs wobble beneath him and in the next moment he has to sit. For a long time he holds the little lilac envelope in his hand, eying it warily, reluctant to open it, like a man trying to evade some long-expected bad news. Then slowly he tears the seal.

The first thing that comes out of the envelope is a large brass key with a flat numbered head that reads “2384. Grand Central Station. Property of Baggage Clerk.”

Inside, on more lilac stationery, is a note put together from words cut out of newspapers and magazines, then glued to the paper. It reads “Friday. 12:15. $300,000. denominations no higher than $20. deposit locker number 2384. after depositing, leave at once. NO TRICKS PLEASE.”

It is not signed, but on the bottom is a small thumbprint pressed in what is unmistakably blood. Beneath that, the word “lolly,” as if to suggest it is her blood.

For a while he sits there holding the brass baggage key, cold and clammy to the touch, the crooked, wobbly little letters of the message swimming before his eyes, the thumbprint of his daughter like the bloody spoor of a small hurt animal.

His first instinct is to hide the letter. His next is to run. Get the hell out of there, lest Haggard blunder in and see the letter. And if not see the letter, then see him. See his face and divine everything. Then trouble. The detective would insist upon going himself. Detailing a squad of plain-clothes men. Staking out the baggage pickup. The hell with that. The hell with Haggard. No sir. Not with his daughter’s life. “No tricks please,” the message said, and there was something ominous, very scary about the quiet tone of civility. “No tricks please.” And they meant it. They even signed it with her blood. Goddamn animals. Freaks. Psychopaths. “No tricks please.” Right you are, Wally Meacham. Right you are. You’re the boss. We’ll do it your way.

But in the next moment he’s out the door of his office like a man with his clothing on fire. Streaking down the corridors to the still-lighted office of Lieutenant Francis Haggard.