Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

“—hipbone and sacroiliac?” Konig offers, a vision of Haggard flashing through his mind.

“That’s right, although nothing very much showed up on his X rays. How’d you catch it?”

“Reassembling the spinal column. Pronounced osteoarthritic changes in the right hipbone, sacroiliac. Lipping changes in the cervical vertebrae. Must’ve had a helluva lot of pain.” Where is Haggard now? he wonders. Has someone picked up the cash?

“Not just physical either. There was a great deal of psychological pain as well. Browder was a bit of an oddity around here.”

“So I gather,” Konig remarks. Somewhere far back in his head is the sound of a girl shrieking on a street corner, and even farther back, yet another shriek, more terrified, more anguished.

McCormick goes on. The initial reticence past now, he is more eager to talk. “Browder was a man of extraordinary courage. Decorated five times. Citations of valor. Super-patriotic. Gung ho, I guess is what you’d call him. Joined as a kid. Never knew anything else but Airborne. Served in Vietnam. Rose quickly through the ranks. Very proud of being a jumper. But he was getting a little long in the tooth for jumping, and when the arthritic problems worsened, we simply had to ground him. He was reassigned to training cadre. Very cushy job around here. Lot of men love it, but he took it as a setback. Couldn’t stand being grounded. Began drinking. Then Ussery entered his platoon. That’s when he really fell apart.”

Very shortly McCormick and Konig are trading data on Billy Roy Ussery. Konig, armed with X rays and dental charts on his desk, drones wearily into the phone. “No previous extractions.”

“Right. He had all his teeth, but they were in pretty poor condition.”

“Extensive caries. Marked abrasions due to bruxism.”

“Right on both counts.”

“All four wisdom teeth unerupted.”

“Right.”

“Left upper showing signs of impaction.”

“Right”

“Many roots not yet fully calcified.”

“Right,” McCormick drawls. “Wouldn’t be, of course. Still just a kid.”

Konig shuffles the X rays on his desk, plucks one out of the pile. “Do you happen to have a picture of the lower left central incisor there?”

“Lower left central incisor,” McCormick murmurs half aloud to himself.

Konig waiting there can hear the crinkling sound of papers being rummaged on a desk. Then, creeping through the conscious stream of his thought, yet another sound—the voice of a man, soft, infinitely refined, lethally gentle, whispering at him, all around him. “Dr. Konig. Dr. Konig.”

“Yop.” McCormick’s voice drowns out the other. “Got it right here. Lower left central incisor.”

“Fine,” says Konig. “Now look at the upper third of the outer surface.”

“Upper third, outer surface. Oh, yes, little cloudy white patch.”

“That’s it,” Konig says with a surge of mounting excitement. “Yours have a small stain in the center of it?”

“Sure does. What the hell is it?”

“I don’t know. I was going to ask you. Our dental people couldn’t figure it, either.”

For a while the two men are silent, each pondering the mysterious cloudy white patch on the radiographs before them.

“Beats me,” McCormick sighs. “Probably just congenital discoloration of the enamel.”

“Could be,” Konig concedes. “He on any special drugs? Medication?”

“Reserpine.”

“Right. We caught that.”

“Mild essential hypertension. High-strung boy. Actually, I believe it was just a passing thing with him but we were watching it closely.”

“Probably linked to the stress of his situation there.”

“Right. All in all, Ussery was a pretty healthy boy. Just minor things.”

“Any history of foot problems?” Konig asks.

“Now how the hell did you know that?”

“Reassembling a foot. X-rayed it. Found a hallux valgus.”

“In the right or left?”

“The left.”

Konig waits while McCormick consults his records. “Nope” comes the voice at last. “Nothing down here in Ussery’s records about a hallux valgus. At least we never diagnosed it. But he did have to wear special shoes.”

“What size?”

“Eight and a half, triple E, says here on his clothing requisition. His toes were humped and he had bunions too. Problem no doubt grew out of the hallux valgus.” Konig whistles. “Hallelujah! Our boy had bunions too. Also wore an eight and half triple E sneaker.”

For a while they continue to talk, trading additional details, but already Konig’s mind has turned off. He has closed the book on Ferde and Rolfe to his own satisfaction. The two cadavers glued together in the morgue below are Browder and Ussery. No doubt of that. Now in the place of coolly dispassionate clinical talk, all he can feel is his own slowly mounting sense of terror. His mind is elsewhere. As the shriekings return, he can no longer fight them down. He can barely sit in his chair, chatting with the colonel. There’s a feeling of flush in his face and a suffocating fullness in his chest. His cheeks are burning. He has the feeling he is about to blow apart. The shrieks come again, filling him with a sense of impotence and rage turned inward against himself. Like a man running as hard as he can against a concrete wall. He can barely manage another civility to the colonel.

“Well,” McCormick sighs at last, “looks like we can close the books on this.”

“Looks like it.” Konig fidgets nervously. “Just need the medical records now to tie it all up. Make it official.”

“You’ve already got both sets of fingerprints.”

“Right. Browder’s came yesterday.”

“Good. Sent them directly to your man.”

“Flynn?”

“That’s the chap. He told me the whole story. Nasty business.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Knew them both fairly well,” McCormick says, a weary note in his voice now. “Nice boys, both of them. Browder was a fixture around here. Ussery I knew only briefly. Came into the dispensary a lot.”

“The foot problem?”

“The feet. The teeth. The blood pressure. Lots of other vague complaints. Nothing you could ever put your finger on. Psychosomatic, most of it. He was a kid with a lot of problems. And he knew he had them. Wispy, pretty little thing. Almost girlish. Browder was like a father to him. How the hell a kid like that got into this kind of an outfit—” McCormick chuckles. “Funny though. Airborne is full of that kind of thing. Scared kids trying to act tough. Boys with problems trying to prove they don’t have them.”

“Common enough,” says Konig. “We see a lot of that here on the Force too.”

“As for Browder,” McCormick goes on, “you wouldn’t have thought he had any problems. Big tough son of a bitch. Wouldn’t have wanted to tangle with that one.” He laughs suddenly. “Should’ve seen the two of them together. Mutt and Jeff. Thick as flies.”

“Got pretty sticky, I imagine,” Konig says, so desolate now he can barely speak.

“Sticky? My God—downright embarrassing. Should never have tried to separate them though. Should’ve discharged them both. Medical discharge. Clean. Easy. Probably both still be alive if they hadn’t had to go off and hide out like that.”

“Well—” Konig sighs, his voice trailing off, wanting desperately to put down the phone, to go off somewhere himself and hide.

“Sad,” McCormick continues his dirge. “Nice boys.

Both of them. Weren’t hurting anybody. How’d they get messed up in this thing anyway?”

“Who knows?” says Konig, forcing himself to be civil. “I’m up to my neck here with nice boys and girls who get messed up in this city. It’s a big, noisy, scary place. I used to love this city. Now, quite frankly, Colonel”—Konig laughs bitterly—“the place gives me the goddamned creeps. Who knows? Who knows?” His voice trails off, then picks up again. “Do you think you might be able to release those medical and dental records? We’ll need copies, affidavits for our own files.”