Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“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.