Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“Didn’t say anything.”

“Nothing? No money? No ransom?”

“Nothing. Just the screaming.”

Emanating from partial shadows, Konig’s voice sounds distant.

“Have another drink.” The detective tilts the bottle and splashes another massive shot into Konig’s glass. “Didn’t stay on long enough for that tracing device to work, did he?”

“No more than a minute or so.” Konig gulps down his Scotch with a shudder. “Called twice.”

“Twice?”

“I hung up once.”

“You hung up?”

“Couldn’t take that screaming. That goddamned screaming. Couldn’t take that.” Konig gulps deeply and reaches for the bottle, this time pouring his own drink. Haggard, sitting there looking ludicrous in fedora and pajama tops, studies him closely.

“That screaming—”

“What about it?” Konig grumbles, his voice and manner growing more vague, diffuse.

“Could be a phony, too, you know.”

“A phony?” The word jolts Konig out of his daze.

“Sure. One of the girl friends screaming into the phone on cue. Just an act. Make you think it’s her. Just to soften you up.”

“Oh, yeah?” Konig laughs harshly, a bit of the old truculence coming back in him. “Well, I’m softened. I’ll pay. Just let ’em tell me what they want and where. I’ll pay. Christ—I’ll pay anything. I’ll be there with bells on.”

“Okay.” Haggard stands. “Whyn’t you go up to bed now?”

“Bed? What the hell do I want with a bed? My kid’s out there and—” Konig’s voice cracks and he turns sideways, back into the shadows. “Hurting her like that. Sons of bitches. No need—no need—”

Embarrassed, the detective turns away and saunters up the length of the library, eyes riveted upward at the shelves of books, pausing every now and then, pretending to study titles, pretending not to hear the sad noises coming out of the shadows.

“Come on,” he says after a moment “Go on up to bed. You look awful. What the hell did you do to your mouth? Looks like somebody smacked you in the chops. Go on now. I’m gonna sit right down here and drink Scotch. I don’t get such good Scotch at home.” He starts around the desk where Konig sits and reaches for the slumped, slightly stuporous figure. “Come on. I’ll take you up.”

“Take your goddamned hands off me. I’m not going to bed.”

“Come on. Come on.” Haggard laughs and hauls the hefty, lumpen figure to its feet.

“Lay offa me. Lay offa me. I’m not going to bed, I tell you.”

The detective laughs louder, taking the great, stumbling hulk of the man hard against his hip.

“You son of a bitch,” Konig bawls as he’s dragged gently to the stairway, then up. “Take your hands offa me. Take your goddamned hands offa me, I tell you.”

“’Atta boy, Tiger.” Haggard’s hearty Irish laughter roars upward through the gloomy silence of the house. “That’s my boy talking now.”

MEDICAL EXAMINER LINKED TO COVER-UP IN TOMBS DEATH; MAYOR TO SEEK MAJOR CLEAN-UP

BODY SNATCHING: THREE MIL $ RIP-OFF AT THE NYME

Paul Konig sits numb and listless, gazing down at the morning papers. They’re strewn across his desk exactly where he’d tossed them at 7:15, when he’d first arrived there, driven by Haggard, who had spent the night with him in Riverdale.

“Medical Examiner Linked to—” Once again his eyes glance over the front-page story in the Times. His picture is there and he scans it perfunctorily, with a kind of dull, limp indifference, as if the face were that of someone else, a perfect stranger, a silly ass who’d gotten himself in a God-awful mess. Even the frequent recurrence of his own name on the page has a curiously alien look. He cannot associate it with himself.

He had not slept the night before. Haggard had put him forcibly to bed, turned out the light and shut the door. But even with nearly a half a fifth of Scotch in him, he didn’t sleep. Dozed fitfully, for a few minutes at best, but didn’t sleep. Early in the morning there was a drenching downpour. He lay there for some time in the predawn hours listening to it drilling on the ground outside; then later, after it stopped, to the doleful dripping of the trees around the big old Tudor house. But nothing, no sound, could stop, or even muffle, the screaming that persisted in his head. All he could do was lie there, constricted in his sheets, laved in a cold sweat, a great pulse thudding at his temples, trying not to hear the screams, and waiting for the first gray streaks of dawn to poke through the chinks of the window blinds.

At 5 a.m. he rose, unrested, unrefreshed, stripped off the clothes he hadn’t changed since Tuesday, then showered and dressed. Downstairs, he found Haggard asleep in a chair, his raincoat spread over him, the gray felt fedora tipped forward over his eyes and nose, his mouth slung open just beneath it.

They made some coffee and at 6 a.m. they were on the road, motoring downtown in Haggard’s car. The detective had dropped him off at the office and then had gone home for a fresh shirt and tie.

“You get another of those calls, you lemme know,” he urged just before driving off. “Don’t try anything on your own.”

Konig mumbled something and went inside.

When he got to his office, there amid the copious mail were messages taken by the night man to call Newsweek and New York Magazine , the latter wanting to do a two-part story on the “body-snatching racket at the morgue.” Channels 2 and 5 wanted to come down there and take his picture, presumably to lambaste him on the evening news for the “cover-up at the Tombs.”

“Medical Examiner Linked to—Once again his eyes glide ruefully over the banner head of the Times , but he is long past caring.

Limp, groggy, the way one is after a bout of drinking and massive doses of Librium, he has been dimly aware of the increasing tempo of the workday outside his door, the building coming to life. He decides now to take a stab at the mail, but his hands tremble so that he cannot get the envelopes open. Still, he riffles through all the envelopes, each and every one, thinking something will be there. A message with instructions. Something about Lolly.

But there’s nothing there. Only the bills, notices of medical conferences going on halfway around the world, the interminable flow of letters from colleagues seeking his advice, universities and foundations petitioning his services. Then, a long, white envelope, expensive bond with a richly embossed letterhead: Graham, Dugan, La-mont, Peabody. A Madison Avenue law firm representing the family of Lionel Robinson, serving the Medical Examiner’s Office and the City of New York with a $3 million lawsuit for damages. “Modest, aren’t they?” Konig mutters. “Christ, these lice move in fast.” He jams the first cigar of the day into his mouth.

Carver bustles in now with his coffee, an anxious, wary look on her face. She knows something’s wrong. She knows nothing about Lolly, but she too has seen the papers this morning. “You want to talk to them people?”

“What people?”

“The TV people. They called again.”

“Tell ’em to shove it.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Tell ’em I’m not in. Tell ’em I’m at the dentist.”

“Dentist?”

“That’s right. Broke my tooth. Got an appointment for this morning.”

“You not gonna be here this mornin’?”

“That’s what I just said, didn’t I?” he growls at her, but in twelve years of serving him, she’s learned not to take his growling seriously.

“What about the others?”