Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

For all that, he cared little. He viewed his dereliction of duties, his almost certain professional decline, with a rather eerie indifference. He dissociated himself from it, as if it were happening to someone else. Anyone seeing him just then, anyone who had known him, that is, known the enormous energy, that inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, would not have recognized him. They would have been struck dumb by the spectacle of this gray, haggard figure slumped untidily over his desk, work neglected, eyes glassy and dazed, jaw slack, the spectacular lassitude of the man.

Still, he sits there in the gathering shadows, staring at the phone and waiting. Then it rings. He jumps as the harsh jingle of the bell rouses him from his torpor. He listens as Carver answers for him, lest it be the press, some prying reporter trying to make a name for himself. He hears the muffled tones of her voice through the closed door. Then a buzzer sounds on his own phone and he snatches it up.

“Flynn,” says Carver. “You want to talk to him?”

“Flynn?” For a moment the name doesn’t even register. “Flynn—God, no.” He starts to fling down the phone, then snatches it back. “Wait a minute—better put him on.”

A moment, a click, then Sergeant Edward Flynn talking. At first it’s all jokes, mild banter, chatter. All unintelligible. Too fast. His drugged, torpid mind can scarcely keep up.

“—and that’s when Browder—”

“Browder?”

“What?”

“You just mentioned Browder.”

“I know,” says Flynn, puzzlement in his voice. “What about him?”

The name has caused Konig’s mind to clear a bit, like a fog beginning to rise. “You just said something about Browder.”

“I know I did. Ain’tcha been listenin’? I said we got his prints up from Bragg. They match a set we found all over that shack.”

“Oh,” Konig says, lapsing once more into indifference. “Nothing else?”

“Nothin’ else? Isn’t that enough? We got ID’s on the two of them now. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? You sick?”

“I’m fine,” Konig mutters. “Just a toothache. Where you been?”

“South Street. Lookin’ over some real estate.”

“What real estate? What the hell is this real estate you keep babbling about?”

Flynn sighs like a man sorely put upon.

“The real estate I keep babblin’ about, my friend, is the old Salvation Army shelter down there.”

“Salvation Army?” Konig repeats the words slowly; then something suddenly inquisitive comes into his tone. “Find anything?”

“Nothin’,” Flynn snaps. “Pretty much of a dead end. Just the way I think this Salvation Army phantom is gonna be a dead end. Place’s been shut up ten years. Lots of old furniture and junk. Rats and leaky faucets. Nothin’ much else.”

Konig ponders this information for a while. “So where do you go from here?”

“I don’t know.” Flynn chuckles. “I’m up a tree. We pulled about a dozen different sets of prints out of that shack. We’re trackin’ every one of them down. We’re casin’ the neighborhood, pullin’ in local derelicts. Anyone who can give us a lead. Even got a couple of guys dressed like winos prowlin’ around the area with a few pints of Thunderbird on their hips. So far, nothin’. The only real lead we got is this so-called Salvation Army guy, and I don’t think that’s gonna pan out.”

Even as Flynn’s voice drones on, Konig’s mind is elsewhere, his eyes roaming restlessly around the office.

“So I don’t put too much hope in—”

Suddenly Konig’s wandering gaze falls on a shadowy place beneath a long trestle table opposite his desk. It’s a table full of reports, books to be read, specimens excised from cadavers, sections of organs enclosed in jars of formalin. He is staring intently at a cheap, shabby suitcase. The kind of vinyl thing purchased in a Whelan’s or a Liggett’s for about $5.99. This one is old and battered. Scored with mud and old college paper pennants. It is the suitcase in which the two severed heads exhumed from beneath the shack near Coenties Slip arrived at the Medical Examiner’s office.

Konig has a sudden sharp memory of opening that case, the trembling, anxious fingers fidgeting at the clasps, the almost breathless sense of expectation as he unwrapped each head from the newspaper coverings—Newspaper coverings.

Suddenly he’s on his feet, talking quickly, breaking abruptly into Flynn’s chatty conversation. “Listen—where are you?”

“What?”

“I said, where are you? Where the hell are you right now?”

“Where am I?” Flynn goes suddenly peevish. “I’m in a piss-hole phone booth talkin’ to you, goddamnit.”

“Where? What phone booth?”

“Outside a Howard Johnson’s on Eighth Street. What the hell does that—”

“Give me the number.”

“The number?”

“Yes, the phone number. Are you thick? Goddamnit, give me the phone number. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”

The moment after he’s hung up Konig is lumbering across the room to the trestle table, stooping and hauling up the battered little suitcase, prying open its rusty clasp, plunging his hands into the smeared, crumpled news-sheets.

It’s not the sheets of the Daily News or the Post he’s looking for. These are there in abundance—mud-streaked, bits of clotted gore still clinging here and there, a slight excremental odor rising all about them. All these are dated between March 27 and March 31, all quite consistent with a time of death having been established at approximately April 1.

But these are not what he’s looking for. Several days back, when the heads arrived in that small satchel, shortly after he had succeeded in assigning each head to its proper trunk, he recalls coming back to this grisly little carrying case and picking through the papers. Then, oddly enough, he recalls sitting down at a chair by the window and reading them—one in particular.

Riffling now hectically through those same old newspapers, he ransacks his brain, trying to recall exactly what it was he read that sticks so sharply in some dark, inaccessible corner of his mind.

There is a great deal of international and national news that flies past his eyes. Strife in the Middle East. Bombings in London. Mass starvation in Pakistan. Senate investigations of the Chief Executive. On the moldy yellowing pages of the Daily News, Konig pauses over the face of a murdered policeman; an East Side madam along with a stable of her hostesses being arraigned in night court; the picture of a small, timid-looking fellow with ferret eyes and a goatee who’d beaten his three-year-old daughter to death.

Still, that’s not what he’s looking for. He rummages on, tears like a cyclone through this noisome paper, bits of human hair, brain tissue mizzling downward as his feverish eyes search. If he could only recall what it was he’d been reading that night. Or wasn’t it early in the morning after having worked through the night? It was that night, after McCloskey had gone home, and he’d finally succeeded, along about four or five in the morning, to assign each head properly to a body. He’d sat down in that straight-backed chair over there by the window. It was warm in the office and so he’d opened the window. The damp night air came in and cooled him. Roused a bit his tired brain. And then he’d started reading. It was something about—Something about—a contest. A beauty contest. That was it, a beauty contest. Feeling a sense of mounting excitement, he mutters the words aloud to himself, “A beauty contest,” and in that quiet moment of articulation, the words just off his lips, in his mind’s eye he sees a picture. It is a photograph of a tall, angular girl in a bathing suit. She wears a banner across her bosom, and as a man, shorter than she, reaches up to crown her with a cheap rhinestone tiara, she is smiling a wide, toothsome Latin smile.