Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

Strang, standing off to the side, arms akimbo, quietly observes this maniacal performance, a slight, enigmatic smile on his thin, taut-cord lips. Konig wheels again, just in time to catch that smile, then turns on him. “What the hell’s so funny?”

“Funny?” Strang affects a deeply aggrieved look. “I don’t think it’s funny, Paul. I think it’s very sad. Very goddamned sad.” He turns sharply on his heel and strides out.

“Go on,” Konig shouts after him. “Go ahead. Run to the Mayor or the District Attorney. Run to The New York Times. Maybe they’ll take your picture. Put it in the goddamn paper—right on the front page—”

By this time Konig is ranting, his voice bouncing off cold porcelain and stainless steel, shattering the normally sepulchral hush of the mortuary. An elderly Negro attendant inadvertently stumbles on to the scene. His wide, startled eyes blooming open in fright like huge white peonies, he turns and stumbles back out.

“I don’t need any of you. I’ll do better by myself. Get the hell out.” Konig flails the air as the others still stand about, heads lowered out of shame for their leader.

“Go on. Get the hell out. All of you,” he bellows like a wounded animal. “Go on. Go on. Get out.”

Slowly, one by one, they turn and go—Bonertz, Delaney, Grimsby, Hakim, Pearsall, still white and shaken from the ordeal, until no one is left there but Konig and young McCloskey, facing each other across a table, the two partially reconstructed corpses, stony and recumbent, like figures on Egyptian sarcophagi, between them.

“Well, what the hell are you waiting for?” Konig snarls. “You get the hell out of here too.”

McCloskey doesn’t stir. For a moment they stare at each other, the younger man still flushed with shame, his questioning gaze full of puzzlement and hurt. His lips move, attempting speech, but no sound comes. In the next instant he turns and goes.

For a long while after Konig stands there, riveted to the spot, silence rushing in upon him, in a solitude of his own making. Having driven everyone from him, alienated his staff, denounced colleagues, and humiliated a young man whose crimes were nowhere near as great as Konig had magnified them, he is at last profoundly alone.

In the next moment he flings off his jacket and seizes a pair of radii there in the trays awaiting assignment.

“I don’t give a goddamn if it does stink like a toilet.”

“Have a heart, will ya, Flynn?”

“How many holes we gotta dig before ya see it’s a bust?”

Detective Sergeant Edward Flynn sits in shirt sleeves, tilted backward on a raddled bridge chair, eating an apple, and supervising the excavation of the earth beneath the little shack near Coenties Slip.

In contrast to the night Konig was there, the place is now stark and empty, the sum of its cluttered accretion of refuse and scrap all crated now and carted off to various police laboratories for blood analysis, fingerprints—dust gathered carefully in glass phials, and innumerable little envelopes of nail parings and hair all collected. Dozens of people—specialists—are already at work at various points around the city analyzing, testing, collating. Nothing remains there of the former wilderness of junk and disarray but the large, dirty old Victorian tub with the curiously ornate legs that is attached to no source of water. The solitary nature of the thing just standing there now makes it seem even more grandly ludicrous.

Already most of the floor planking has been torn up and lies strewn about the place wherever it happens to have been tossed by the two beefy patrolmen laboring there in skivvies and hip waders in yet another fetid, muddy trench.

“Why the hell don’t he come down here and stick his own ass in this goddamn toilet?” comes the muffled muttering of one of the diggers from below. “See how he likes standing in all this bunjara. ”

A spadeful of black tarlike ooze comes hurtling up out of the trench and lands with the plopping sound of cow dung on the floor.

“Quit the goddamn grousing, will ya?” Flynn snarls at the two stooped figures grunting in the hole.

“I tell you, there’s nothin’ here, Flynn.”

“I know there’s nothin’ there but I’m gonna rip up every square inch of goddamn floor anyway—”

“You’re gonna rip up?” A scornful laugh bursts upward from the hole. “Hear that, Del Vecchio? He’s gonna rip up.”

“Yeah—don’t give yourself a hernia, Flynn.”

More scornful laughter. More grunting and more plopping. Then after a short while: “If there’s nothin’ here, how come we gotta break our ass in all this bunjara? ”

“Because that’s your lot in life, dummy”—Flynn pops three Maalox into his mouth all at one time and chews them ruefully—“diggin’ sumps. Now if you’d had your asses reamed today like I had—Goddamn him, if he ever pops off at me like that again, I’ll haul him up before the Commissioner—I swear it. Goddamn it, next time he pulls that crap on me—”

“Ah, what the hell you care what that old fool says?” Another loud plop of black ooze.

“He’s bananas. Like everybody knows, the guy’s a nut.”

“See the paper? DA’s gonna have his ass on this body-snatchin’ thing.”

“Crazy old fool.”

“Quit it.” Flynn bolts up, kicking the chair aside behind him. “Quit the goddamn grousing, I told you. All right—I’ve had it. Let’s get the hell outta here.”

“Hallelujah.”.

“Close up that dung hole.”

“My pleasure.”

Two muddy, befouled figures scramble out of the hole and with a kind of boyish exultation start spading mud back into it while Flynn prowls uneasily through the shadowy reaches of the shack, his eyes yellow and shifting like those of a panther stalking prey. He comes to rest at last before the sorry old Victorian tub. What a curious thing to be sitting there now in the middle of a bare, malodorous little shack. It had, no doubt, seen better times. A relic of a more tranquil age. Probably it had graced the bathroom of some tawdry old pleasure palace out of the gilded age, like the Astor or the Ritz, now demolished, its site turned into a parking lot. It had been witness to the daily ablutions of bankers, brokers, rich matrons traveling with their hubbies. And it had ended its days ignominiously, as a butcher’s block for a maniac.

It stands there in the corner now, solitary, forlorn, its pipes all hanging out, plunked down on a six-foot-by-six-foot strip of old linoleum on which is stamped a pattern of faded, liverish-colored flowers.

“Okay, Sarge.” The two beefy young cops come panting up to him like pups eager to get out to play.

“ Finita la commedia, ” says the more lyrical Italian one. “Let’s blow this shithouse,” says the more direct Irish gentleman. They hustle for the door, leaving Flynn back in the shadows, still contemplating the tub and the six-by-six strip of linoleum.

“Wait a minute,” he bellows over his shoulder, stopping the two young cops dead in their tracks, just at the brink of their escape into the sunlight and fresh air at the door. “Let’s just have a wee peek under that linoleum.”

“ Mannagia diavolo, ” the Italian moans balefully.

“For Chrissake, Flynn,” the Irishman whimpers. “Have a heart.”

“Quit the bellyachin’ and pick up that goddamn tub like I told you.”

“There is a better fit of the ends of the supraspinatus tendon on the right side than on the left. Portions of the lubricating bursa between the capsule of the shoulder joint proper on the top of the humerus and the under surface of the acromion are still in position and come together as the head slips under the acromion. Appear to come naturally together.” Konig scrawls hastily into his pad. “Thus the two humeri of the longer set of upper limbs appear to belong to the same body as the reconstructed trunk.”