Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“What others?”

“Those newspaper people.”

“Tell ’em all to shove it.”

“What about Flynn?”

“What about him?”

“He called too.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I did.” Muttering, fuming, she marches around the desk, plucks out of the chaos scattered there a small piece of memo paper and pokes it at him.

“Oh,” he blusters, “—well, you could’ve told me.”

“Well, goodness—I just did, didn’t I?” She groans wearily. “Been sittin’ right there under your nose all this time.”

“What’s he want?”

“What’s he want?” She gasps at him incredulously. “Now how would I know what that man got in his head this hour of the day?” she asks and suddenly she can see how tired he is. “Whyn’t you go on home. I’ll take care of all this—” She waves disparagingly at the mess on his desk.

“He say he’d call back?”

“In a half-hour, he said.” The phone on her desk rings. “That’s probably him right now.” She starts out toward the ringing.

He jams the cold, unlit cigar back into the center of his mouth and lifts the phone. “Konig here.”

“Mornin’, Chief. Just been readin’ all about you in the funnies..”

“What’s on your mind, Flynn?”

“That’s a pretty picture the News ran of you.”

“Skip the gags, will you? Just get on with it. I’ve got no time this morning.”

“Tut, tut, no time?” Flynn clucks into the phone. “Soon as these people get famous, with their faces plastered all over the papers, they’re suddenly too busy for old friends, got no time. Listen, I spoke to Bragg this mornin’.”

“Oh?”

“Them prints I sent down there that were s’posed to be Browder’s?”

“Yeah?”

“They weren’t.”

“Weren’t?”

“That’s what I said. People at Bragg checked them against Browder’s file and they’re not his prints.”

“Swell,” Konig mutters wearily. “So we’re right back where we started.”

“I didn’t say that, did I?” Flynn laughs, suddenly coy and playful. “Those prints you took off them sexy, pretty painted lady fingers?”

“Yeah? What about ’em?”

“Are you sittin’ down?” Flynn taunts merrily.

“Come on, Flynn. Will you cut the crap? Get on with it.”

Again Flynn laughs. There is a hard edge to his laughter. More like a triumphant jeer. “Those prints you lifted belonged to a chap by the name of Ussery.”

“Ussery?”

“Private Billy Roy Ussery from Seven Parishes, Louisiana. Also, like Browder, late of Company G, 82nd Airborne, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”

For a while the two men are silent, listening to each other’s breathing.

“Good God.” Konig stirs finally out of his stupor, a man waking from sleep. “How’d they catch that?”

“Like I said. They checked the prints we sent down against those in this Sergeant Browder’s file and they didn’t jibe.”

“So?”

“So then they checked them against this Ussery’s and they were the same. Right on the button.”

“But what made them check this Ussery’s prints?”

Flynn chuckles again. “Therein lies the tale.”

Konig puts the guttering flame of the Bunsen burner to his cigar and draws deeply. “Yeah? Tell me.”

“Well, ’member I told you this Browder guy went over the hill about sixteen months ago?”

“Right.” Konig puffs deeply at his cigar. “Night before the unit was supposed to ship out to Vietnam.”

“Right. Well, anyway, the night Browder disappeared so did this Ussery.”

“Ah.” Konig tilts far back in his chair, his eyes rolling ceilingward through a mist of curling blue smoke. “I see.”

“Seems Browder and Ussery were close friends.”

“I see. How close?”

“Very close, if you get my meanin’.” Flynn snickers. “I get it. Just get on with it, please?”

“I am, I am—hold your water. Anyway, this Browder and Ussery got to be so buddy-buddy, so goddamned palsy-walsy, it got to be a helluva embarrassment for the other guys. I mean the Airborne don’t like that kind of thing. Not good for their image, if you get my meanin’.”

“I get it. I get it.”

“So they decided to separate them. Browder was to be shipped out to ’Nam. Ussery was to stay on at Bragg.”

“I see,” Konig muses through a loop of curling smoke. “So they decided to bust out together.”

“Right. Night before the unit shipped, they split. That was sixteen months ago. Right around Christmas of ’72. Haven’t been heard from since.”

“Who told you all this?”

“CO down there. A Captain DiLorenzo. ’Member I said this guy was very tight-lipped, cagey—first time I talked to him?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, he was this time too. Just gave me the general details. But I could read between the lines.”

“You could?”

“Well, I don’t have to be no Sherlock Holmes to know I’m dealin’ with a pair of queens.”

“You’re brilliant,” says Konig acidly.

“Beg pardon?”

“Never mind. They give you any details on this Ussery chap?”

“Just general stuff. Enlisted in the Army on his eighteenth birthday. Was in less than a year. Make him about twenty years old now. Height, five feet six. Weight, about a hundred and thirty. Little guy.”

“Sounds about right for Ferde,” Konig mutters half aloud.

“Ferde? Who’s Ferde?”

“Never mind. What about Browder? Anything on him?”

“Same kind of thing. Age, thirty-six. Height, six feet three. Weight, about a hundred and eighty.”

“Looks like we got him, too.”

“No kiddin’.” Flynn whistles. “You boys work fast, don’t cha? Well, we won’t know for sure till I get a set of his prints. They’re sendin’ them up from Bragg today.”

“What about dental records? Medical records? They sending them too?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?” Konig snarls. “What the hell am I supposed to do without records?”

“I told you this DiLorenzo guy was very cagey. Ordinarily they’d send these records right out. They’re as anxious to clear their books on these things as we are. But this—like I said—is pretty sticky stuff.”

“Sticky?” Konig nearly shouts. “What the hell’s so sticky about a couple of queens? Grow up, will you.”

“Well, for Chrissake, if it was your kid mixed up in a stink like that—”

Lolly’s laughing face flashes before his eyes, and suddenly the old ache, the old grief, are back upon him.

“—would you want all the goddamned private records made available to a public agency? First they gotta notify the next of kin. Then see if the records can be released.”

“I see,” Konig murmurs, the great ache, the great tiredness taking hold.

“Hey,” Flynn snaps into the phone, “you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Oh. Thought you’d hung up.”

“No—I’m here,” Konig says again.

Knowing nothing about Lauren Konig and the raw nerve he’d just struck, Flynn pauses, perplexed by the abrupt shift in the Chief’s tone. “You okay?”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure?”

“I’m fine, I said. Just a toothache.”

“Oh,” Flynn says, still perplexed. “Anyway, this CO, this DiLorenzo guy, knows we need dental and medical records to establish, identities. So he said if you call a Colonel McCormick down there—he’s the chief medic—they’ll try and furnish you with most of the pertinent stuff right over the phone.“This way they get around havin’ to release the records.”

“Colonel McCormick,” Konig mutters aloud and scribbles on a desk pad, “Med Corps, Fort Bragg, North Carolina. When’s he want me to call?”