Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

Struggling between rage and disbelief, Carslin sits down again, struck dumb, shaking his head incredulously. The blood has drained from his face. His lips, clamped tight against each other, have the appearance of rubber bands stretched to the point of breaking. “Would you say that again, please?” His voice as he speaks is barely above a whisper.

“Very well,” Konig sighs. “Neither your X rays nor our autopsy reveals any sign whatsoever of either gross injury or hemorrhage in the brain as a result of that fracture. As evidence, those X rays could only be described as circumstantial. So I most definitely do not concede that the fracture shown there is the cause of death.”

“You’re saying to me then”—Carslin struggles to control the tremor in his voice—“that all blows to the head causing death can be shown to produce either gross injury or hemorrhage to the brain?”

“Now what’s all this about?” Benjamin whimpers feebly.

“It’s a very significant medical point,” Carslin snaps, his eyes still fixed on Konig. “Answer the question, Paul. Yes or no?”

“Yes,” Konig replies in a very quiet voice.

“ All blows to the head, Paul?”

“Yes,” Konig whispers. “All.”

“And what exactly does this mean?” Binney asks, sensing he has come now to the crux of things.

“Ask Dr. Konig.” Carslin seethes with scorn. “Let him tell you what it means.”

“What’s he suggesting, Paul?” the Deputy Mayor asks, sensing, too, that something is going wrong. Slipping away from them. “What the hell is he trying to pull?”

“I’ve said all I can say,” Konig addresses the floor.

“Well, if he won’t tell you,” Carslin says, “then I will. There’s not a neuropathologist today who has not described well-documented cases of blows to the head resulting in instantaneous death where the most meticulous examination of the brain at autopsy fails to produce a single visible sign of brain damage. Gross, micro, or whatever. I have seen cases like this and so has Dr. Konig.”

For a long moment only a large clock ticking on Binney’s desk can be heard. When at last he speaks, the District Attorney’s voice is very soft. “Paul?”

Another pause, then, “That may be Dr. Carslin’s experience,” Konig says, his manner grown even more furtive and guarded. “It is not mine.”

There is a moment when no one seems able to speak. There is the sense of a point having been passed, a bridge crossed; a sense of irretrievable loss.

Finally Carslin breaks the silence He seems no longer angry. His expression is full of quiet wonder and amazement. “If I had not been a witness to this, I’d refuse to believe it had ever happened. To see Paul Konig, one of the world’s leading forensic authorities, possibly the outstanding authority, a great scholar, a great teacher, a scientist, reduced to this contemptible face-saving performance.” Carslin stands and starts to gather his papers. All the while Carslin has been speaking, Konig’s eyes have been glued fixedly to the floor, as if he were seeking a sort of sanctuary there. Slumped in his chair, hands folded in his lap, staring resolutely downward, like a child chastised, he has the look of defeat about him More than that, shame. A defeat born of the loss of self-respect.

“Amen.” The Deputy Mayor rises with a sigh of relief. “The skull fracture then was not the direct cause of death.”

“That’s your version,” Carslin snaps, stuffing X rays and papers into a briefcase, “not mine. And I don’t intend to sit around here and permit the Mayor’s Office, the District Attorney, the Correction, Department, the Medical Examiner, the whole goddamned kit and caboodle of you to bury the truth of what I—”

Even as Carslin rants on, stuffing papers into the case and glowering, Konig rises slowly to his feet. Looking neither right nor left, eyes hollow, vacant, like a man in a trance, he stoops and lifts from the floor the battered Gladstone bag. Dumbfounded, the others watch him as he turns his back and, without a word, starts walking slowly out of the room.

“You’re a liar, Paul,” Carslin shouts at the retreating figure. “You know you’re a liar.”

Konig neither pauses nor turns. No sign whatever to signify that he has heard. Sagging a bit beneath the weight of the bag, he just keeps moving straight ahead, out the door, leaving it open as he goes.

“Yeah, that’s ours. We did that job.”

“You did?”

“Sure—come right outta this shop. What about it?”

“Can you tell me somethin’ about it?”

Mr. Murray Bloom bites deeply into a corned beef on rye. Chewing energetically, he waves with almost pontific grandeur at the piece of torn and crumpled newsprint held by Flynn. “Sure. What can I tell you?”

Flynn reaches across the desk and lays the page before him. “Says there you printed this paper on March thirty-first.”

“Wrong. It was distributed on March thirty-first.” Mr. Bloom bites deeply into a sour pickle, then sucks Coke noisily up through a straw. “Ran it off about a week and a half before.” He dabs hectically with a napkin at the pickle juice that has squirted onto his tie.

The phone rings on Mr. Bloom’s desk. He snatches it up, listens a moment, making a series of long-suffering, explanatory faces at Flynn. “Listen—can’t talk now. I got someone here. Call me back in half an hour.” He hangs up, reaches once more for his corned beef on rye, and nods at Flynn to resume.

“Says here,” Flynn goes on, “in the upper right-hand corner, number 3118. What’s that?”

“Serial number.”

“That mean that this here is the three thousand one hundred and eighteenth copy of the paper you printed?”

“Right.” Mr Bloom’s jaws clamp neatly over a full quarter of his sandwich. ‘That’s what that means.”

“Every paper you print have a serial number?”

“That’s right.’ Mr. Bloom nods and chews.

“Can you tell me how many you printed?”

“Oh, Jesus—how the hell would I know? You gotta know that?”

Flynn smiles. “It’d help.”

Bloom presses a buzzer on his desk and stares impatiently out of the glass wall partition of his office. Beyond the glass can be seen rows of Linotype and huge offset machines making monstrous clanking sounds Men wearing sun visors and elbow garters are seated at each. Proofreaders and messengers, galley runners and secretaries, swarm back and forth outside the glass like innumerable small fish in an aquarium.

Shortly an enormous woman of Buddha-like proportions waddles toward the glass door of the office She has a Kewpie-doll face, heavily made up, and she is sweating profusely.

“Come on in, Tessie.” Bloom, sucking his Coke, waves her in. “Tessie, this is Sergeant Flynn of the police. Tessie Balbato.”

They mumble hellos, and for a moment the heavy girl is flustered, overwhelmed with shyness.

“Tessie”—Bloom holds up the sheet of newsprint—“offhand, can you give us the print run on this Clintonian job?”

“We pulled seven thousand five hundred copies,” the girl replies instantly.

“So that this one was pretty near the middle of the run?” Flynn asks.

“If it says 3118”—Bloom ingests the second half of his pickle—“you know then we pulled some four thousand more—right?”

“Four thousand three hundred and eighty-two more,” says the fat girl, instantly supplying the exact number.

Mr. Bloom glances sharply at her. “Right—four thousand three hundred and eighty-two more.”

Momentarily baffled, Flynn glances back and forth at both of them.