Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“I don’t know,” Haggard ’says, his eyes swiveling all about the room. “He may be in a lot of trouble.”

“Hah?”

“Lot of trouble,” the detective bawls. “Lot of trouble.”

“Yah, yah.” The old lady nods. “Lot of trouble.”

“You haven’t seen him?”

“No—I no see him mebbe two, three year.”

“Now it’s three years?”

“Hah?”

“Nothing.” Haggard smiles. “Never mind. Okay if I look around?”

“Look around?” The 9M lady, head shaking unceasingly, gapes up at him.

“Yeah—look. Look around the place.”

“Look?”

“Yeah. Look.” Haggard gestures toward the shadowy rear of the apartment.

“Sure. Sure. Look. Look.” She waves abruptly, as if dismissing him.

The detective turns, leaving the gnomish little creature to the game show with its oafish noises and its gray flickering images of idiocy.

Toward the back of the apartment there is a little bathroom, vile and pestilential, with a lot of sodden pinkish-gray old lady’s underthings hanging on a dryer in the tub. Then a kitchen, the floor of which is strewn with saucers of milk and pet food, and liberally scored with cat stools in varying degrees of desiccation.

Farther back is the bedroom. This is a large, shadowy place furnished with heavy, garishly carved oak pieces. There is a big unmade bed with an immense headboard of carved scrollwork. Above that hangs a crucifix. In the corner stands a huge, clumsy chifforobe propped up with books where one of its legs is missing. Beside that is a cheval glass, its mirror cracked. There is one window in the room, curtainless and with a shade hanging askew.

Above all this hovers the smell of old age, that mixture of camphor and medicaments that Haggard associates somehow with approaching death. From somewhere far below in the street comes the squeal and shriek of children playing, then a burst of rapid-fire Spanish hailing down upon them from a window above.

The detective’s eyes sweep quickly through the place. Then in the next moment he crosses to the closet and yanks open the door.

Nothing there but old-lady clothes—black dresses, a couple of hatboxes, a flannel robe, a tatty fur-collared coat with the little, beady fox heads still intact. Nothing there. Nothing out of the ordinary, he feels, starting to turn. But then, there on the floor, along with several pairs of old lady’s black shoes, each pair indistinguishable from all the rest, is a pair of men’s shoes. They too are black, rather formal, and not old. Not the shoes, for instance, of a dead husband, or a married son long gone from the house. No, these are quite new, and with the stubbed toe and greatly elevated heel so modish among the young.

Haggard stoops slowly and lifts the shoes out of the closet, standing there a while and studying them in the shadows. Then, in the next moment, taking the shoes, he strides back out into the living room where the old lady, seated in her rocker and hunched over her cane, watches the game show. The master of ceremonies is now embracing some screaming, mildly hysterical housewife who’s apparently just won a garbage-disposal unit.

“Whose shoes?” He holds them out before her.

“Hah?”

“Whose shoes?” He gestures elaborately at them.

“Hah?” The old lady gapes up at him blankly, her jaws moving unceasingly. But for a fraction of a second he is certain he has seen cognition register in the sharp little gimlet eyes, and something like fear as well.

In the next moment, smiling, he leans down as if about to speak directly into her ear. But he doesn’t. Instead, with the shoes tucked under his arm, he claps his hands briskly beside her ear. One sharp resounding crack. Instantly, her eyes widen, flutter, and she winces.

Still smiling, Haggard places the shoes gently on her lap, straightens up and waves at her. “Okay, Mama—you win.”

Old dresses. Old blouses. Old jeans, patched and faded. Tartan kilts. Slacks. Skirts. Suits—a navy, a plaid. The gown of silk organza with the faint fragrance of orange blossoms still clinging to it. An old terry bathrobe, buttons missing. On the door a shoe bag. Pumps and sandals. Loafers. Saddle shoes. A pair of clumsy cork-soled brogans purchased on a trip to Scotland. She used to rake leaves in them in the fall. Sneakers on the floor. Moccasins. A pair of absurd, floppy purple powder-puff slippers.

Paul Konig stands inside the closet in his daughter’s bedroom, sorting through her things. It is a large walk-in closet, full of good, familiar odors. The orange blossoms, of course, but also that unmistakable mixture of soap and cologne that used to permeate her hair, the slightly animal smell of youthful exuberance; these are still in the closet, clinging to the dusty, mote-filled shadows that hover there above the racks of garments.

Konig removes the terry robe with the patches and the missing buttons, folds it carefully and packs it into a large cardboard carton, along with a lot of Lolly’s other old things. He’ll buy her a new robe this weekend, he tells himself. Take a trip down to Saks or Lord & Taylor’s. She’s had that old robe since high school. She’ll need a new one. And all those shoes in the bag are shot now. All badly scuffed and some are out of style. Hardly worth repairing. She’ll need new ones. What about some of these new things the girls are wearing now? Damned pretty, he laughs. Much more stylish than in my time.

He takes the shoe bag down from the door and starts to carefully pack all of Lolly’s old shoes in a separate carton. He whistles softly to himself as he works, feeling a curious exhilaration, totally inexplicable in the light of the events of that day. Still, he feels good. Relieved about the Strang business, and, oddly enough, optimistic about Lolly. Yes, Lolly was going to be all right He had no reason to make such an assumption but he knew that, down deep inside. He knew it with as great a certainty as it was possible to know anything.

These people would no? harm his daughter. They wouldn’t be that stupid. Oh, they would threaten to all right. Taunt him and demand a large sum of money, which he would give them if he had to. But they wouldn’t hurt Lolly. She was, after all, the daughter of a fairly influential man. The Chief Medical Examiner of New York City, with powerful connections and very close links to the NYPD. It would be a little foolhardy to invoke the wrath of that kind of man. They might rip him off for a goodly sum, but they wouldn’t be stupid enough to hurt his child. The police would never close the books on a case like that. Yes, he would pay them the money and they would give him back his daughter. Fairly straightforward business. Almost routine in this lunatic day and age. The police might even recover some of the money, but he didn’t care particularly about that Yes, he was certain—very soon now his little girl would be coming home to him.

He whistles as he pulls out three or four pairs of old jeans in execrable condition. What in God’s name do kids see in these old rags? Christ. Make a religion out of them, they do. Buy ’em already torn and filthy. He laughs and chucks them onto a pile of other old things in a corner, destined to be tossed out with the morning trash.

Still, as he works, whistling, spirits lifted as they had not been for weeks, months, something gnaws at him. Some queasy unease; a faint sense of constriction in the chest. He is waiting for the phone to ring. He has been waiting for it to ring ever since he got home that evening. Not consciously waiting, for he doesn’t even know that his ears are cocked, and every nerve of his body coiled, waiting to spring at the sound of a bell. For several hours, in fact, he has been waiting to hear that voice—what did Carver call it, “Lovely—soft-spoken—said he’d call you at home tonight.”