Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“You mean you could’ve sent that paper to any one of forty outlets?”

“More like a hundred, pal. I didn’t mention the cigar stores, the luncheonettes, the drugstores, the markets—”

Another short, fierce laugh. Flynn is momentarily buffaloed.

“Okay—can you at least tell me this-—”

“Tell you what?”

“When those papers come in here from Triangle, how do they arrive?”

“On a truck. How the hell else would they arrive? On a goddamned camel?”

Flynn reddens. “I know on a truck. What I mean is—in a carton? In separate packages? How?”

“Separate packages of fifty.”

“Packages of fifty.” Flynn’s face brightens. His slight expression of pleasure is a source of great irritation to Mr. Charles.

“So what the hell does that tell you? Just that you got forty packages of newspapers to distribute. Don’t tell you where the hell you sent them.”

“How do they come off the truck?” Flynn goes on doggedly.

Mr. Charles screeches to another halt. “If you think they come off in numerical order with serial numbers attached, and then I send them out again in numerical order with serial numbers attached to a hundred separate invoices—”

“Well, don’t you?”

Mr. Charles’s goitrous eyeballs bulge even more ominously than usual. Unable to speak, he is reduced to a few choked splutters. Flynn recalls Mr. Murray Bloom’s parting words to him when he was leaving the Triangle Printing Corporation—the business about telling Charles that he was a cop and there to collect past-due bills. Standing now with bulging eyes and wattles quivering, Mr. Stanley Charles does have the look of a badly harried man with a surfeit of past-due bills on his desk.

“You must be crazier than I thought you were,” he snarls. “Look, I got no more time for this. I’m up to my ass in problems here.” He jerks his clipboard up and once again starts pedaling madly up the aisle.

“Okay, okay.” Flynn scoots after him. “You say you got about a hundred customers in that area?”

“Mister, I got thousands of customers. All over this goddamned city. Thousands of ’em. See?”

“But you said around a hundred in that area.”

“If I said that, that’s what it is.”

Charles halts before a newly delivered crate of girlie magazines with fairly lurid covers and titles —Black Leather, Satanic Nights, Dears and Rears, and other such items. Charles glances at the cover of one and shakes his head. “Look at this garbage,” he mutters and in the next moment plunges ahead.

“Well, what I wanna know is”—Flynn puffs along behind him—“did every one of these hundred customers of yours take a delivery of this Clintonian? ”

“Some did. Some didn’t.”

“Which ones did?”

“Oh—is that all you want to know?” Charles smirks at him. “That’s easy, fella. All I gotta do is go into my books and dig out every one of those invoices for March thirtieth and see which ones took the Clintonian. Crazy. All crazy,” he mutters and moves on.

“Is that hard?”

Charles laughs again. But this one is not short and fierce. Instead it’s rather languid, world-weary. Tinged with exhaustion and futility. “You’re a lulu, pal. A real lulu.”

“Well, what’s the big deal?” Flynn scurries after the wiry little man. “I’ll dig ’em out. Just show me where your books are.”

“Books. Books.” Mr. Charles smiles mournfully. “I got books here up to my ears. Books coming out of my ass. I need a whole new warehouse just for books. Books? You couldn’t begin to—Look”—he whirls around, suddenly compassionate, a note of pleading in his voice—“you think them hundred names are all in a neat little , pile somewhere with a ribbon tied around them? They’re in a huge central card index around a block and a half long. All in alphabetical order. Someone would have to go through those files, look at every address and zip code and see which ones are in Clinton. There are thousands of cards in there. You know how long that’d take?”

“Don’t you have a billing department that keeps that information right at hand?”

“Sure we got a billing department.” Mr. Charles struggles on with even greater tolerance. “We even got all our customers on a computer. Fancy. Modern. Right? But to dig out that information, separating customers by postal zone numbers, that’s still gotta take a couple of people at least a couple of days working on the machines. Right? Then, after I get you the names, I gotta pull out every invoice and see who did and who didn’t order the paper for that day. That’s a lot of time. You understand? A lot of money. I’d like to help you out, pal. Really, I would. You seem like a nice guy. But I can’t. I got a lot of troubles of my own, see? What’s the big deal about this lousy piece of paper anyway?”

Flynn pauses, regarding the man silently. Then he speaks. “The guy who bought this lousy piece of paper might’ve murdered two other guys.”

“Murdered?” Mr. Charles’s eyebrows cock. “When was this?”’

“Around three weeks ago. Dug up the pieces down by the East River this week.”

“All cut up?”

“That’s right. Chopped into little pieces.”

“Sure—sure,” Mr. Charles says, curiosity mounting. “I read about that. A dog found the hand. Right?”

“That’s right.”

“Son of a bitch.” Mr. Charles is full of sudden wonderment and awe. “And you think one of my customers did it?”

“Maybe—or more probably, one of your customers’ customers.”

Mr. Charles shakes his head and whistles softly to himself.

“It’s a long shot,” Flynn goes on, fanning the man’s obvious interest, “I admit it, but I can tell you, one of the heads was wrapped in this piece of paper.”

Mr. Charles gapes down at the torn and crumpled front page with the picture of the Puerto Rican beauty queen peering out between the creases. “Wrapped in that?” He whistles softly to himself again and shakes his head in quiet awe. “Son of a bitch.”

All the fierce tension seems to melt from the man. Suddenly limp, he leans wearily against one of those floor-to-ceiling towers of newsprint. “This used to be such a good city. Beautiful city. Best goddamned city in the world. Now it’s a toilet. The goons and freaks have taken over. Had a cousin of my own shot to death a couple of months ago. Over in Flatbush. Couple of freaks—hopheads—come into his shop over there. Shot him to death. For what? For nothing. For thirteen dollars and some change. He was closin’ up and they come in and shot him. Just like that. The way you swat a fly. Young guy. Thirty years old. Just startin’ out. A couple of kids. Fuckin’ creeps.”

For a moment both men are silent.

“And you got no leads?” Charles asks suddenly.

“Nothin’ great. Just this piece of paper. And even if I find the guy who bought it, that don’t necessarily mean he’s the one who did it.”

“Nope—it don’t,” Mr. Charles murmurs distantly. “Look—the auditors and the IRS bastards were here yesterday. This morning a U.S. Marshal handed me a subpoena. I got a tax man coming over in a few minutes. I’m up to my ass here right now. See? Gimme a day or two. I’ll get back to you.”

Going out, Flynn glances back to wave at Charles. But already the fierce little man has turned back to his clipboard. He is standing near the end of one of those endless avenues of paper, between , two enormous towers of unsold magazines. Their monumental size diminishes him. They emphasize his smallness. They slope precariously inward, as if they were about to topple down upon him like the crumbling pillars of some ancient temple. Mr. Stanley Charles, standing there at the foot of them, clipboard poised at the ready, gazing up at them, appears finally cowed. Whatever pitiful pose of defiance with which he confronted these towers before is now all gone. Instead, he looks now very much like a man who has lost something and is trying very hard to find it again. And indeed, he has lost a few things—a city, a cousin, and now, so it appears, he is even about to lose a business.