Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

Together they stagger back up to the front of the gallery, Konig still clutching the painting, refusing to relinquish it for even a minute. Even as he scribbles another check, he holds tight to the canvas with his free hand.

Redding dabs petulantly at his brow with a silk foulard, muttering, “Highly irregular. Highly irregular.”

“Here’s your check.”

“Are you taking the big one with you, too?” Redding leans back, exhausted.

“Yes.”

“Then at least let me wrap it so that you don’t damage—”

“No time now.”

“It’ll take just a minute.”

“No time—no time.” Konig backs toward the street door, bowing and smiling foolishly, canvases jammed under both arms.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” Redding, terrified, trails him out.

“I’m fine. Fine.”

“Dr. Konig.” Redding cries after him.

Startled, Konig turns. “Yes?”

“You’re her father, aren’t you?”

For a moment they stand there gawking at each other across a troubled space. Then in the next moment, Konig is out on the street, in the warm April sunlight of Madison Avenue. Running. Jostling through startled lunchtime crowds. Flying like a wild man, not even aware that he is crying.

“Digital imprint on wine bottle in kitchen.”

“Sixteen ridge characteristics in agreement with left forefinger.”

“Digital imprints on plate in kitchen sink.”

“Fourteen and ten ridge characteristics in agreement with left middle and ring fingers respectively.”

“Digital imprint on canister of gelignite Type C in front foyer.”

“You got there sixteen ridge characteristics in agreement with right middle finger. Imprints of finger and thumb also identical.”

Haggard scribbles hastily on his pad. “What’s that left palmar imprint on the dining-room table look like?” Sergeant Leo Wershba holds a set of print cards up to the light, scanning them quickly with his bright, shrewd eyes. “Pretty messy,” he says after a while. “It was a glass tabletop and it looks like somebody wiped it. But we got thirteen ridge characteristics in agreement.”

Haggard sighs, snaps his pad shut, and leans back in his chair. “Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

“Couldn’t look better, Frank. This is your boy.”

For a while the two men regard each other silently. “Lemme see that ugly puss again,” the detective growls. Wershba tosses a standard police mug shot across the desk at Haggard, who lights a cigarette while studying it intently. “Janos Klejew—How the hell you pronounce that?”

“Klejewski—the w is silent.”

“Klejewski.” Haggard says it over and over again, forming the word slowly with his lips. “Lovely-looking boy, isn’t he?”

“I’m sure his mother thinks so.” Wershba, a short, moon-faced man with a bald head and enormous compensatory mustache, smiles brightly. “I got a book on this guy as thick as the Manhattan Yellow Pages.”

“Klejewski.” Haggard resumes his quick, barely audible lipreading. “Known to associates as Kunj or Kunje. Has repeatedly been identified with persons who advocate the use of explosives and may have acquired firearms. Considered extremely dangerous.”

The detective’s eyes range over the broad, flat, slightly acromegalic features. They are thick and not at all sharply defined. There is, too, something profoundly disquieting about the eyes, a blank, drowsy quality beyond which lurks an air of easily eruptible violence.

“Big mother, ain’t he?” says Wershba, reading the detective’s thoughts.

“Got any leads?”

“Maybe. Who knows? Nothing that amounts to very much anyway. Got an all-points out for him now, but the guy’s been at large two years. Busted out of stir twenty-three months ago. And this bombworks up on Fox Street is the first pickup we got on him in all that time.”

“What was he in for?”

“Arson—Kunje has a fondness for matches and big firecrackers.”

Haggard nods slowly. “Where’d you say he busted from?”

“I didn’t But it was Danbury.”

“Danbury?” The detective ponders the word aloud, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. “Wasn’t that where—”

“—Meacham was,” Wershba says, glowing like a Christmas light. “Right you are, pal. That’s where the two lovelies met.”

“Jesus.” Haggard’s fist cracks loudly in the palm of his hand. “If I can only get my hands on the son of a bitch he’ll lead me right to Meacham.”

“What makes you so sure they’re not together right now?”

“No way.” Haggard shakes his head. “All you hadda do was see this place up in The Bronx. Clothes in the drawers, food still on the plates in the kitchen. They left prints all over the place. They got out fast. Then all of ’em split. Went separate ways.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“A mob that size? Eight or nine freaks traveling together? Stand out like a sore thumb. Nope—they split, probably with plans to meet at some future time. Meacham and maybe two, three of the other freaks took the girl with them. The rest of ’em all went their own ways.” Haggard hops to his feet and starts pacing. “Identify any of the other prints up there?”

“Not yet. Still working on it. But Meacham and Klejewski we got nailed. Both on the Fox Street place and the loft on Varick. We’ll get you the others too. All we need is a little time.”

“That’s all you got, Wershba. Just a little. If I read this Meacham right, he isn’t giving us much more than that.”

“Humerus—32.3 centimeters.”

“Is that left or right?”

“Right. But the left is the same.”

“Radius—23.3 right, 23.2 left.” Tom McCloskey deftly completes tape measurements of a set of upper limbs and proceeds without pause to the legs. “Femur—43.1 centimeters right, 43.1 centimeters left. Tibia is 34 on both right and left.”

“Thirty-four both right and left tibia.” Pearsall jots figures quickly on a pad. “So directly measured with trunk length, neck, head, lower limbs, and deducting the two centimeters for postmortem lengthening, that puts our friend Rolfe at 188 centimeters. Right?”

“Right.” McCloskey nods. “Say about six feet two inches.”

“About six feet two inches.” Pearsall scribbles on his pad. “Okay. What do we have on Ferde?”

“Nothing as good as we have on Rolfe.”

They have both fallen quickly into the use of the adoptive names with which Konig has christened the dismembered corpses and taped to each of their wrists the night before.

“Since the torso’s incomplete, I had to rely entirely on the Pearson formulae.”

“No choice, really.” Pearsall sighs and peers through bottle-thick lenses at McCloskey’s carefully elaborated tables of computation. “At best, all we can say we have then on Ferde is a projection of stature based on average proportion of limbs in relation to total stature.”

“’Fraid so.” McCloskey shrugs. “With a built-in probability of error of two to eight centimeters.”

“Which I see you’ve already figured in,” Pearsall says, studying the chart. “So with all things considered, you put Ferde at—”

“One hundred and sixty-four centimeters.”

“Small—five feet four, five feet five.”

“Roughly speaking. And I still find the sex ambiguous.” Pearsall glances up, a little surprised. “You do?”

“Sure. No lower torso. No pelvis. No genitalia. That’s pretty ambiguous right there.”

“You used Pearson’s tables for sexing the limbs?”