Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

Konig smiles graciously in the direction of the young assailant. The boy blanches and at the same moment the smirk begins to quickly fade. The Chief rises and steps down from the stand, nodding cordially, first to the judge and then to counsel, whose mouth has fallen open and is working uselessly. Striding out of the court, he has a sense of enormous satisfaction.

Once again the Chief has won. His reputation as a formidable witness remains intact. The media will report the incident glowingly. Congratulations and kudos will redound to the Medical Examiner’s Office. What does it matter that Konig deliberately misled the court. Fudged a bit. That business of the left hand, coming out of left field the way it did, leaving the defense in total disarray. That, he knows, was not exactly so. Assuming Wilton had shot himself with the left hand, a simple involuntary spasm might have brought that same left hand back over the left breast after Wilton had dropped the gun and lapsed into total unconsciousness, despite the motor paralysis he’d suffered subsequent to the second shot.

But that was not the way it happened, and Konig knew it. The sly, unctuous, pettifogging attorney with the fancy but preposterous left-hand theory knew it too. So did the judge and the whole court know it. But the system being what it is, all are powerless to do anything. All except Konig, who was not powerless.

With his deepest instincts, the Chief knows the smiling young jackal in the court to be guilty of heinous murder. From his years of pounding about police courts and morgues, he knows everything there is to know about this boy. Past and future. He might even hazard a guess as to when that same dangerously childish fantasy life will no doubt earn the boy a place in one of the morgue’s large refrigerated lockers—but not before many other innocent people die. And this, Konig cannot—will not—permit. So what does it matter that he fudged a bit? He’d done it before and he would do it again. Unhesitatingly, if he thought he was right. And this wasn’t actually an outright lie. It could very well have been exactly the way Konig said it had been. It very probably was. Of that Konig is convinced. His sense of justice tells him so, and that, after all, is enough for him. He’d gotten the bastard.

“She did or she didn’t?”

“I said she did.”

“I know, but a minute ago you said she didn’t.”

“I said she hung up a minute after she heard the clicking.”

“No, you didn’t, Paul. You said she hung up right after the clicking. Right after is not a minute after. A minute after right after is fifty-nine seconds.”

Konig sits opposite a tall, sinewy man, late fifties, with red leathery skin, a craggily handsome pockmarked face, and the small, vivid blue eyes of a china doll. The man wears sleeve garters and a shoulder holster. With his boyish face and flocculent, cotton-candy hair, he gives the impression of a man gone prematurely white overnight.

“What the hell’s the difference?” Konig bellows.

“Plenty, my friend, plenty. And stop shouting at me.”

A shaft of dust-blown sunlight streams through the window at Francis Xavier Haggard’s back, slants across his litter-strewn desk, and falls on a 6″ x 9″ white form headed DD13. The form trembles ever so slightly in Haggard’s long, bony, curiously artistic hand—the hand of a sculptor or a musician, certainly not the hand of a detective.

“She knows the calls are being traced.” Konig’s face flushes a violent red. “Sounds like a goddamned drum when that thing starts banging.”

“But still she keeps right on calling—right?”

“Right. But I want that thing off my phone. Here, as well as at home.”

“Fine. Take it off. But when that goes, I go, too—right? I’m off the case—right?”

“I don’t want you off the case. I want you on.”

“Oh, no, pal. It doesn’t work that way. My way or no way.”

“It’s been your way for five months.”

“Fine. It may have to be my way another five months.”

“Oh, no. No, sir.”

“Fine. Do it your way. I’m off the case.”

Konig flings his hands upward in despair. “That tracer is no goddamned good. It inhibits her. She won’t even talk to me with—”

“A minute ago you said she knew there was a tracer on that phone—right?”

“Sure, but—”

“Never mind the ‘buts.’ You said it—right?”

“Well, you’d have to be one helluva God-awful idiot not to—”

“So obviously it doesn’t matter to her whether the line’s bugged or not—right?”

“Will you please stop with that ‘right’ thing every other minute?”

“She calls, doesn’t she? Lemme see—she’s called”—Haggard’s long, bony fingers moves like fate down the black-ruled lines of the DD13: Konig, Lauren. Age 22. Sex female. Caucasian. Ht. 5′ 6″. Wt. 118… Last seen—“six times the past three months—right? So bug or no bug, she keeps calling—right?”

“Sure. Then hangs up the minute the goddamned clicking starts.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. I’ve seen enough of this kind of stuff in my time to know this kid’s calling for a reason. She needs to hear a friendly voice. And this card—” Haggard plucks up Lolly’s birthday card and examines it. “You know, you do look a little like this goddamned bear.”

“Christ!” Konig bolts up, winces at the sharp pain in his leg, then starts prowling up and down the room. “I want results. I want something to happen.”

“Sure you do. Sure you do. So do I. But I told you this wasn’t gonna be easy. No Social Security. No work record. An assumed name. If she keeps still, minds her own business, what the Bell are we supposed to go on?”

“I don’t care what the hell you’re supposed to go on.”

“There are eight million people in this city—eighteen thousand kids each year on the lam.”

“I don’t care if there are ten—fifteen—fifty million. Spare me the statistics. I want my kid back.”

The small blue china doll’s eyes fix on Konig very steadily. “And that’s another thing, Paul. Your kid isn’t a kid anymore—”

“My kid—”

“You gotta start to accept that. She’s over eighteen now. Leaving home’s not a criminal offense when you’re over eighteen. As far as the law’s concerned, technically she isn’t even a missing person.”

“Well, if she’s not”—Konig’s face is now a dangerous purple—“if she’s not, I wish to hell you’d tell me exactly what she then A girl gone five months from her home, without once notifying family or giving whereabouts—” The detective rolls a pen slowly back and forth across his desk beneath the palm of his hand. “You know what she is? I’ll tell you what she is—I’ll be glad to. She’s a young lady, twenty-two years of age, who lost her mother, the best friend she ever had, and it knocked her for a loop. So she wakes up one morning, withdraws twenty-five hundred dollars, all her personal savings, from the bank and decides she’s had enough of home. As far as this department is concerned, she’s breaking no laws. A solid citizen-right? Listen, I got refrigerators downstairs full of kids from ten on up who come to the Big Apple from as far west as Texas, California, with parents out there screaming for some kind of lead, some kind of positive identification. What I’m doing for you, I’m not doing as a detective. I’m doing it as a friend, a good, personal friend of over twenty-five years. And when I say that I want that tracing device on your phone—”

“It’s no goddamned good,” Konig half shouts, half pleads. “She’s not calling from her bedroom or the phone down the hall.”