Herbert Lieberman - City of the Dead

Inside, the place is jumping. A blur of motion. Carts rolling in and out. People shouting. Phones ringing. The doors of the cold lockers banging open and closed.

Konig is scarcely noticed as he rolls his cart into one of the empty autopsy rooms. He looks like anyone else there, hard at work, going about his business. No one knows anything of his grief.

Unloading his burden onto one of the examination tables, the top of the sack comes undone and a coil of soft honey-brown hair spills up over the top of it.

Now he stands there over the half-opened sack, his legs wobbling beneath him, thinking that he’s about to throw up. But nothing happens. The worst of it is that nothing really happens. He feels nothing. Forty years in the business have made a zombie of him, and after the wobbly legs and the slight nausea, he is once again the dispassionate professional, that highly skilled, carefully calibrated instrument, measuring, recording, deducing.

Finally Lolly Konig is out of the canvas and lying there on the table. He can see where they’d beaten her, the blackened eyes, the large contusions about the face and head, the ugly weals on her shoulders and ribs, the black-and-blue marks circling like dark planets about her temples. He can see nail marks and the dull yellow-violet abrasions across her throat where she’d been strangled. Palpating the area gently, he can feel the fracture of the thyroid cartilage, and quickly suspects the cause of death to be an avulsion of the hyoid membrane with fractures to the great horn of the hyoid bone.

Her tongue protrudes slightly and is bruised where she’d bitten deeply during the process of being throttled. He tucks the tongue gently back in, reducing somewhat the harsh effect of rictus on her features. Her eyes are still half open and with a thumb he carefully rolls the lids up, revealing the widespread petechial hemorrhage beneath the conjunctivae and the unmistakable signs of tache noire just beginning to radiate out from the pupils.

There is little sign of rigor and, as of yet, no lividity. She is still warm, her body temperature, he estimates, only a few degrees below the norm. Very soon it will start to take its dip.

With his thumb he gently presses the lids closed. She seems now almost to be sleeping, an oddly peaceful expression about her features. Just as she used to look as a child when he’d come in late from work and poke his head through her door to have a look at her. She looks just like that now, an innocent little girl sleeping, her face wreathed in tousled honey hair, dreaming of toys and dresses and birthday parties. He has a sudden image of her pedaling toward him on a tricycle. Poor bird. Poor pretty bird. This little torn, crumpled sleeping thing was his child. He might just nudge her now and she would stir in the sweet warmth of her bed. Then turn and yawn, glance up at him through drowsy eyes and smile.

For a moment he’s the old mad king again, lurching across the stage in an ill-fitting costume in a laughably inept college production. “Howl, howl, bowl.”

Gazing down at her now he pushes the tumbled hair from off her face and smoothes it. Suddenly, looking down at her, he sees the lineaments of his own face staring up at him. To him she’d always looked like Ida. Now in death he could see his own face in her reposeful features.

“ Looks exactly like you, Ida. ” He laughs and it’s more than twenty years ago in a maternity ward on Long Island. “ The spitting image. ”

“ No—I’ve seen her too. That’s your daughter, Paul Konig. Your chin. All your —”

“ Don’t push the child so, Paul. ”

“ Who’s pushing her? Hell, she’s got to learn. ”

“ Hurry, Lolly, hurry. The bus is coming. If you miss that damn thing, don’t expect me to drive you way the hell up to camp —”

Suddenly the door of the autopsy room bursts open. “Chief?” It’s the night doorman from upstairs. “Phone call for vou.”

“Who is it?”

“Sergeant Flynn.”

“Tell him I’m not here.”

The attendant gawks at him helplessly.

“I don’t want to talk to him,” Konig says quietly. “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

The man shrugs. The door closes and once more Konig is alone. For a while he merely sits there, holding the cold, stiffening hand of his child, waiting for her to awaken, calling up in his mind old, lost memories—holidays, picnics, long vacations at the shore. Ida is there and so is Lolly. Always Lolly—a bright, funny little girl, animated, irrepressible, so invulnerable to harm. They’re all there. All together again.

Again the door opens, and once more the attendant is standing there, shamefaced and stammering. “Sorry, Chief. It’s Flynn again. Says he’s gotta talk to you Says it’s an emergency.”

“Tell him I don’t care.” Konig stares listlessly at his child. “Tell him to go away.”

“I did, but he says he’s just gotta talk to you.”

“Tell him—” Konig sighs, still gazing at Lolly. Then, knowing he can do nothing more there, he covers her gently and turns to follow the night man upstairs, up the green spiral steps of Stairway D and out of the underworld of 30th Street.

“You were right. Goddamn it, you were right.”

“Right? Right about what?”

“That newspaper with the serial number—”

“Oh,” Konig murmurs disconsolately.

“What a brainstorm,” Flynn roars into the phone. “What a goddamn brainstorm.”

“You get the guy?”

“Get him? Did I get him? You bet your sweet ass I did. Don’t ask me all the details. I’ll show you the blisters on my feet when I see you. But I got him. Walked right in on the son of a bitch. No sooner than I laid it on him than the poor bastard broke down, started to bawl. Confessed the whole thing. Said he was glad I found him ’cause he was gettin’ all set to do it again. Had the guys all picked out too. Another pair of queens. Live down the block from him. Got a thing about fags, this guy, and if you ask me, he walks a little tippytoes himself.” Flynn howls gleefully. “I tell you—”

Konig sits at his desk, his hand covering his eyes to block out the glare of sunrise streaming through his window. “Was it the Salvation Army guy?”

“Sure it was. Knew it all along. Had a hunch,” Flynn roars, full of the exhilaration of victory. “When I come in, the son of a bitch was still in his collars. Colonel Divine he calls himself. Divine. Can you beat that? Guy was a missionary in Africa.”

“A doctor?”

“No, but he had medical training. Worked in a hospital out in the bush somewhere. Knew a lot about medicine. Used to assist the doctors in the surgery. Pull teeth. Sew up holes. Stuff like that. Place was full of old medical journals. Had a whole drawer full of medical instruments. Forceps, sutures, the works.”

“That figures,” Konig murmurs listlessly. “How come he left the church?”

“Did I say he left the church?”

“You said he was a medical missionary.”

“Oh—right. So I did.” Flynn laughs.” You’re some smart guy for a sawbones. He didn’t actually leave the church. The way he tells it he had a crisis of faith. But what actually happened was that he got busted.”

“Defrocked?”

“What?”

“Never mind. Go on.”

“Sure,” Flynn says, momentarily puzzled, the wind out of his sails. “Anyway, I contacted the church organization that sent him out there, and they refused to discuss the case. Just said he was asked to leave. Turn in his collar, so to speak.” Flynn giggles meanly. “So he came back to the States and joined the Salvation Army. They canned him too. Around seven years ago. I just got off the phone with the commander of the New York Division. Chap by the name of Pierce. He wasn’t too anxious to talk about it either. Just said Divine was asked to leave for conduct unbecomin’ and so forth and so on. A lot of fancy argle-bargle, but you get the picture.”