Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

There must have been at least a half dozen of them living there at one time, Flynn speculates. They’d found at least that many sets of separate and distinct fingerprints. Starving, freezing to death in that unheated little shack, without sanitary facilities, no doubt they became increasingly desperate, quarrelsome, ultimately preying upon one another for small treasures—a crust of bread, a few coins. At a certain point they fought. Two of them were unlucky. Those were the two poor bastards they’d exhumed from the mud along the river. After the awful thing was done, the others must have then fled. Each going his own separate way.

So the man he was looking for, he was reasonably certain, would be an itinerant, a drifter. A man with no address, no next of kin, and a record of arrests ranging from common vagrancy right on up to assault and manslaughter. He’d seen enough of such men in his time to know the type.

Upstairs, on the fourth floor, he stumbles into an old music room and startles a fat, sleek grackle that had, no doubt, entered through one of the numerous broken windows. The frightened bird rises, the awful drumming of its wings whirring past the detective’s shoulder, and soafs upward to the high, pitched ceiling where it bats about, making its awful chugging sound and skirling beneath the eaves. Finally it comes to rest on an overhead pipe and, perching there, turns its yellow beady eyes down upon the detective. They stare at each other for a while, as if carefully taking the measure of each other. “Sorry, pal.” Flynn chuckles softly and waves at the bird. “Didn’t mean to disturb you.” He shrugs and turns. He really hadn’t expected to find anything there. But after days of checking fingerprints, studying mug shots, checking out leads that invariably terminated in dead ends, he was ready to try anything.

Out in the corridor once again, he starts down through the gloom, his slow, descending steps reverberating on the floors below.

Curious, how ghastly noise sounds in a deserted place where none should be. Especially one’s own noise, as if the mere sound of it made one suddenly vulnerable. Flynn tries to step more lightly, to go down more slowly, to reduce his own noises.

Down he goes, and still there is that sound of dripping water, loud, regular, and echoing through the cavernous structure. But here, on the third floor, it seems loudest of all.

Inexplicably he veers toward the sound, never having intended to, drawn toward it as if tugged forward on some invisible leash. For Edward Flynn is a finicky man. Parsimonious and rather compulsive. The sort of man who straightens wall pictures and turns out electric lights in unoccupied rooms. The dripping, profligate water tap needs his immediate attention.

His steps lead him past a succession of small, cell-like rooms, austerely furnished but better appointed than the dormitories. Better beds, thicker mattresses, a small bureau, a night table, a standard mail-order lounging chair, and a floor lamp in each. Identically furnished; one indistinguishable from the next. And each with its own private lavatory.

Undoubtedly staff quarters, Flynn reasons, and enters one of the lavatories. A sink, a wall mirror, a toilet, a stall shower. All very correct, utilitarian. All as uniform and unimaginative as the bedroom. Smiling, he gazes at the dripping faucet, as if he, the detective, had tracked the criminal to his lair. He walks slowly toward it. The spigot is cold and clammy to the touch, beaded with sweat. “Washer’s shot,” he murmurs to himself, twisting back hard on the faucet handle as far as it will go. Still he cannot get the drip to stop.

Although he’s late now, due to report back to the precinct within the hour, the drip has nevertheless become something of a cause for him. He stands there, scratching his head, pondering a solution. If only he had a wrench—

In the next moment he twists the faucet full on and a rush of clear cold water gushes noisily into the sink.

“Now that is odd,” he muses, turning the spigot off so that it settles once more into its steady drip. Not the gush, of course, but the fact that the water in a building shut up for ten years has never been turned off. And something more—that clear cold gush of water. Taps that have gone unused for a decade are invariably rusty. When first turned on, they tend to cough and spit. And the first water to flow out of them is usually rusty, full of sediment, and putrid.

“Odd,” he murmurs once more, suddenly seeing his own gray, puzzled face peering back at him from a mirror above the sink. The mirror is the door of a medicine cabinet. Jerking it open, he sees a half-dozen roaches disporting themselves on the back wall of the cabinet. The sudden intrusion of light sends them all off in different directions, scurrying for cracks.

Left there now are three dusty glass shelves with a meager scattering of abandoned toiletries—old bottles of prescription medicines, an eyecup, a mug of shaving cream, an injector razor, a beaver-brush applicator, and a toothbrush.

It is the injector razor that first attracts Flynn’s eye. Not that it is in any way an unusual inject razor. The model is a fairly common well-known brand name—a Gillette Trac II. Ordinary enough, but not the kind of razor one associates with a decade ago. This, to Detective Sergeant Edward Flynn, has a fairly current ring to it. Also, the blade is by no means rusty. On the contrary, it looks rather fresh.

And then, the beaver-brush applicator. Damp, rather wettish to the touch. Now that is odd, he thinks.

Shortly after he leaves the old South Street shelter, clapping shut the big brass padlock on the front gate, Flynn ducks into a coffee-shop phone booth. In the next moment or so he is talking once more with General Pierce at the Army’s division headquarters. Had the Army made any provision for keeping a watchman on the premises of the old shelter at night, he inquires of the General, and is promptly informed that no such provision is now or, indeed, was ever in force.

“You Haggard?”

“Right.”

“Sid Fox. Wershba told me you were coming.”

“On? Did he way what for?”

“Just a little. Come on in. We’re holding three of ’em over in the mail room of the First National.”

Patrol cars. Fire engines, Mobile TV vans. Throngs of people milling about the entrance of the building. Police cordons. The sound of sirens converging on the spot. Thrown about the 45th Street entrance, a large semicircle of patrol cars, doors open, dome lights rotating. More patrol cars nosing their way slowly up through the cordoned-off street between Vanderbilt and Lexington Avenues.

The door of the patrol car slams behind Haggard as he and Sergeant Fox push through the crowds, preceded by a flying wedge made up of a half-dozen patrolmen running interference.

“How come you got ’em in the bank?” Haggard asks over his shoulder. “They try to bust the pace?”

“Nope—just happened to be convenient. Right up ahead there through the lobby, Lieutenant. Ground floor on your right.”

They spin through revolving doors. Several firemen speed past—men in helmets, bright-red riot jackets—hauling buckets of sand, lines of fire hose.

“How many of ’em you say you got?” asks Haggard.

“Three. There are two more up there. Got ’em pretty well sealed off between the thirty-fifth floor and the rooftop. Pulled around a half-dozen bombs out of the place already.”

“Where’d you find ’em?”

“Trash cans. Mail chutes. Stairwells mostly. They were seeding the joint.”

“Think you got ’em all?”

“Don’t know. It’s a big building. We’re scouring the place from boiler room to rooftop. Got a restaurant up there. Caught a lot of people eating lunch.”