Flesh and Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  “Not much,” he admitted.

  “Well, Hannah Karlsberg worked in it all her life,” Tannenbaum said. An edge of bitterness swept into his voice. “It’s a real intense business atmosphere, Frank,” he added coolly. “Very competitive. Cutthroat, you might say.”

  “Where does that lead, Leo?”

  “Well, it adds an extra dimension,” Tannenbaum said. “We could look into the woman’s personal life, maybe come up with something kinky, somebody who gets rich on double indemnity, something like that.”

  “Have you found anything like that?”

  “Not yet, and we assume it’s a dead end. If there was something funny on that score, you can be sure the insurance people would have been nice enough to give a call and supply a neat little motive.” He smiled knowingly. “They’re very cooperative when it comes to things like that.”

  Frank nodded. “Anything else?”

  “The professional angle,” Tannenbaum added. “A business beef of some kind, maybe a disgruntled employee. According to Covallo, Hannah had chewed out a few people in her day.”

  “Do you have anything really solid on that score?” Frank asked.

  Tannenbaum smiled. “Why are you asking, Frank?”

  Frank said nothing.

  “We don’t have anything solid at all,” Tannenbaum told him. “We know she wasn’t robbed.” He shrugged. “If you want to know the truth, it looks like a lone psycho right now.” He nodded toward the report. “Read that, you’ll understand.” He finished the hot dog in one final bite, then washed it down with soda. “Got to get back to the cophouse,” he said as he stood up. He looked down at Frank and smiled. “You PIs live the life of Riley, if you ask me. No schedules, no snotty little superiors, practically no paper work.” He shook his head slowly. “The Life of Riley. I mean it.”

  “What about her apartment?” Frank said. “Can I get in there?”

  “Why not?” Tannenbaum said. “We’ve been over it from top to bottom.” He shrugged casually. “It’s not a pretty sight,” he added, “but you’ve been there before, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll need an escort,” Tannenbaum added. “Will I do?”

  Frank nodded. “When?”

  “I can fit it in this afternoon,” Tannenbaum told him. “Around three okay with you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Tannenbaum touched his finger to his hat, then turned to walk away.

  “Miss Covallo,” Frank said quickly. “She says you don’t like her much.”

  Tannenbaum turned toward him instantly, his eyes slowly darkening. “Is that right?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “I don’t know a thing about Covallo, Frank,” Tannenbaum said. “But I know about the rag trade. I know plenty about that.” His face suddenly took on a slowly boiling resentment. “My mother worked her fucking heart out in one of those goddamn sweatshops they used to have down on the Lower East Side. You know what she got out of it? Nothing. They used her for a while, then they flushed her down the toilet.” He shook his head. “Sometimes, between you and me, I hope there is a God. A real God, mad as hell. You know why? So you can say to a guy, ‘Don’t do this. Don’t do this, you fuck. Because if you do, you’ll rot in hell.’”

  He turned quickly, as if to hide his face, and as he walked away, his long black overcoat flapped wildly in the cold, hissing wind.

  5

  It was only a few blocks back to the office on 49th Street, but Frank walked it slowly, taking his time. The cold winter air was refreshing, and it reminded him of his first weeks in the city. It had been a happy time, those first days when he’d spent his time discovering New York with Karen as his guide. He could recall long, lingering afternoons in the park or strolling through the galleries on Madison Avenue or down in Soho. Karen had never seemed closer to him, and this closeness had appeared to lend both their lives a strange, somber happiness.

  But although, as the days passed, the dark memory of her sister’s murder had slowly disappeared from Karen’s mind, it had clung tenaciously to Frank’s, and there were nights when it all came back to him with a sudden, irreducible fury, and he saw Angelica’s body sprawled across the weedy lot, her hair spread out around her head, a clump of dirt lodged beneath her tongue. Then, in an instant, Caleb was dying in his arms, and an instant later Toffler was beneath him and he was plunging his fists downward again and again until Toffler’s cold blue eyes had been transformed into small bloody pools. He had felt a terrible joy at that moment, and the memory of it disturbed him now as much as it had in the days following Toffler’s arrest. To escape it, he let his eyes drift up toward the towering buildings and the vast, unpopulated blue which hung above them. Slowly, as he walked southward down Ninth Avenue, the immense brick high-rises gave way to the ancient tenements of Hell’s Kitchen until, at 50th Street, an entire city block had been torn down, and looking across the shaved ground of the construction site, Frank could see the little iron gate that led down to his office.

  Two young men in denim jackets were leaning next to it, their short-cropped blond hair all but gleaming in the light. They eyed Frank suspiciously as he moved toward them from the corner of 49th Street. One of them tucked his hand beneath his jacket, and in his mind Frank could see its stubby, pale fingers wrapped around the grip of a .38. They could be anything, and as he continued to walk toward them, he tried to find some small detail that would clear things up. In the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, they could be a couple of undercover cops working out of Midtown North, or they could be two mean-tempered Westies, members of a local gang of mostly Irish thugs. Frank hoped they were cops, but as he came steadily nearer and stared into their eyes, he thought Westies a better guess. They had the look of men who would, according to the word on the street, smoke absolutely anybody for two thousand a pop, and as he came up to the iron gate, he felt his own hand tense suddenly and crawl upward toward the .45 he kept tucked at his back.

  He was almost on top of them before he stopped, his eyes locked on the hand beneath the jacket. He could feel his heart leap forward as the hand jerked out suddenly. It was empty, and in its emptiness it struck him as naively vulnerable.

  “Got to get through,” Frank said quietly as he nodded toward the gate.

  “Oh, sure,” one of the boys said. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  The two young men moved quickly to either side of the gate.

  “Excuse me,” one of them said.

  “No problem,” Frank repeated, this time with a quick smile. He passed between them and headed down the stairs and then into the narrow corridor which led to his office. Something deep within him was disappointed, and he realized with a sudden astonishing sorrow that some lost and aching part of him—the same part, he thought now, that must have finally triumphed over everything else in his daughter—had wanted the pistol to jerk out from behind the flap of denim and fire and fire until he couldn’t hear it anymore.

  Once behind his desk, Frank turned on the antique lamp and spread the lab report Tannenbaum had given him beneath it. It was written on the sort of unadorned police form that he’d seen a thousand times before, and, as always, it gave a concise account of what the autopsy had revealed. Fact by isolated fact, the last few hours of Hannah Karlsberg’s life began to emerge, however ponderously, from the flat scientific language.

  She had begun the day as a “well-developed Caucasian female” of approximately seventy years of age.

  Although she had been suffering from no deadly illness, she’d had a “slightly enlarged liver,” and her lungs had shown “marked signs of deterioration, particularly alveolar inflexibility, consistent with a diagnosis of advanced emphysema.”

  At the moment of her death, her heart had weighed four grams, her brain seven.

  She had eaten a late dinner which included chicken and asparagus tips. Toward midnight, she’d had a cup of tea.

  She’d had no alcohol, no drugs. She’d taken no medicines in the
past twenty-four hours.

  At around two in the morning, someone had attacked her.

  She’d fought him off with her bare hands, and because of that, they were now marked with “slits and cuts indicative of defensive wounds.”

  She had not succeeded in defending herself. She had died at approximately two o’clock in the morning.

  Her body had remained undiscovered for around twelve hours, long enough for rigor mortis to come and go. Once dead, her body had not been moved, but had simply remained, face down, so that her blood could follow gravity downward through a dense maze of steadily collapsing tissue and into the inevitable state of “fixed frontal lividity,” which it had reached by the time the medical examiner first observed it.

  She had not been raped, either before or after death.

  But something had been done to her which seemed no less perverse, and as soon as he read it in the flat language of the report, Frank realized why Hannah Karlsberg had not yet been buried. “Right hand severed at the wrist.”

  Someone had cut off her right hand and taken it with him.

  Those were the facts, but they seemed fleshless to Frank, as they always did, and so he sat back for a moment and tried to imagine their human face. In his mind he could see Hannah as she ate her dinner, see her grow weary as the night wore on, see her go to bed, then rise suddenly at a sound, lift herself up, startled, and walk into the living room. A few seconds later, perhaps in total darkness or in the light she’d turned on suddenly to see her way, the blade had swept down upon her.

  But what had happened during the next few appalling seconds was always the part that remained essentially unimaginable. The room must have filled with the sound of her body as it spun about in the throes of its defense. A chair must have tumbled over, a lamp must have crashed onto the floor as the air filled with the pink spray of her blood. There must have been a cry of some kind, either a wrenching, unbelieving scream, or simply a low, helpless groan. Somewhere in the building, beside, beneath, above her, another human being must have heard some part of this, questioned it for a single sleep-numbed instant, then dismissed its darker possibilities as grimly unthinkable and turned back to the pillow, the late show, or the book. Whatever small hope still remained for Hannah Karlsberg had died at that moment, and a few terrible seconds later, she had died as well.

  Only the pictures were left, and Tannenbaum had included them in a separate envelope. They showed nothing but the aftermath of what had happened, and each time Frank went through the slender stack of such photographs, he had the dreadful sense that everything that was redeemable in life, everything that sweetened or enlivened, gave it meaning, inevitably came a few seconds, minutes, days or years too late.

  Hannah Karlsberg lay on the carpeted floor of her living room. Her head faced the camera, the left eye open, staring, the right pressed closed against the blood-soaked carpet. One arm rested parallel to her body. The other seemed to reach frantically for something above her head. Her legs were spread wide apart, the balls of her feet rising like small pink mounds from the floor. The heel of one of them was dark red where she had stepped into her own blood. She was dressed in a dark blue terry cloth robe that had been slit open from the back. Flaps of skin and small white chips of severed bone could be seen beneath the wide slit, and as Frank stared down at Hannah’s butchered body, he was once again struck by the awful vulnerability of the flesh, by how tenuously it maintained its tiny grip on life.

  There were eleven photographs in all, and after Frank had slid the last of them back into the envelope, he reached into the bottom drawer of the file cabinet behind his desk and took out the bottle of Bushmills he kept there.

  He’d been fighting off the first shot since early morning. He’d wanted one during the predawn walk to Times Square, and he’d been around the neighborhood long enough to know that he could have gotten one easily enough, despite the fact that New York State required the bars to close at 5 A.M. What New York State wanted was very different from what some of its more desperate citizens required, and a great many of them tended to gather in the small after-hours drinking holes that dotted the west side of the city from 34th Street to Central Park. Frank preferred the one on Tenth Avenue at 50th Street because it was dark and quiet, and each customer seemed to sense and respect the noble isolation of the other, the hard determination of its grip.

  He took the small glass that rested, bottom up, on the neck of the bottle and poured himself a round. It went down smoothly, as it always did, as the very first one had long ago. Even then, when he was fifteen, there’d been no sudden grimace or wrenching cough, no knot of older men laughing at his inexperience from the other side of the room. That first drink had been as good as the last one, and after it, he’d felt nothing but the soft, uplifting ease which had slowly overtaken him, and which he’d instantly realized he could neither surrender to entirely, nor entirely live without.

  The phone rang suddenly and Frank quickly capped the bottle and answered it.

  “Frank Clemons,” he said crisply.

  “Frank, it’s Karen.”

  He could remember how the sound of her voice had once thrilled him, how he had longed to hear it during the sweltering summer days in which he’d hunted down her sister’s murderer.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “I was thinking of taking you to dinner tonight,” Karen said brightly.

  “Sounds good,” Frank said. He glanced to the right and allowed his eyes to linger on one of her paintings, the one he’d bought himself in Atlanta and which had seemed to capture her entirely at that time, a ghostly vase of flowers that appeared by some odd play of color to be radiantly fading.

  “No special occasion,” Karen added. “Just for fun.”

  “Okay,” Frank said.

  “How about a very nice place?”

  “Wherever you say.”

  “Irini’s on Thirty-eighth Street?”

  “All right.”

  “Around eight?”

  “Okay.”

  “Good, see you there.”

  Frank hung up the phone. For a moment, he thought about going back to the photographs, but instead he returned to the report, and read it once again, this time more slowly. He had been through dozens like it in the past. Meticulously, he had copied their details into the little green notebooks in which he recorded the progress of his cases. He’d collected scores of them over the years, and after he’d moved from Atlanta, his brother, Alvin, had boxed them up and sent them to New York. They now rested in the corner of the room’s only closet, and each time he thought of them, or started a new one, the full fury of each death swept over him. One face after another swept into his mind, lingered there for an instant, torn, slashed, exploded, and then swept out again, only to be replaced by another, until the whole grisly parade was over, and he could go on to the next body sprawled by the river, or slumped behind the wheel, or, as in the case of Hannah Karlsberg, face down in the morning light, face down in her own apartment high on the fourteenth floor, with all the city’s noise and movement oblivious beneath her, and nothing above her but the empty sky.

  6

  Hannah Karlsberg’s apartment was in a large brick building on the corner of 76th Street and Central Park West. It was an old building, but from the look of the outside, the recently installed windows and sandblasted brick facade, it had been well maintained.

  A doorman in a large black greatcoat with enormous brass buttons waited under the outer canopy. He looked as if the whole play of the street and the sidewalk had come to bore him inexpressibly, and his eyes seemed to come alive only as Frank drew uncomfortably near the front door of the building.

  “May I help you?” he asked sternly.

  Frank took out his identification, a small laminated card with his picture on it, along with the official seal of New York State and his private investigator’s license number.

  The man glanced indifferently at the card. “If you’re going to start pumping me for dirt on anybody in
this building, forget it,” he said.

  “Hannah Karlsberg,” Frank said.

  The doorman looked at him intently. “I guess you know she’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, you should talk to the police,” the man said.

  “I already have.”

  “So you don’t need me, right?”

  “Were you on duty the night she was murdered?” Frank asked.

  “No,” the man said. He shrugged. “Nobody was on duty. This building’s regular doorman died about two weeks ago. Nobody had replaced him yet. The murder made them do that right away.” He smiled broadly. “Meaning me.”

  “So you never met her?”

  The man shook his head. “To tell you the truth, this doorman outfit is just for show,” he said. “I’m with a security company. I’m just here until they get a permanent doorman.” His lips curled downward. “I wouldn’t work this kind of job full-time. All that bowing and scraping to the tenants. I’d rather sit in a warehouse in Brooklyn.” He smiled. “Crates of computer parts don’t snap their fingers at you, or make you haul your ass out in the rain to whistle them up a cab.”

  “I’m here to see the apartment,” Frank said.

  “You allowed to do that?”

  “Not without an escort,” Frank told him.

  “I can’t leave the lobby.”

  “I mean a cop,” Frank said. “I’m waiting for one.”

  “Fine with me,” the man said. “You want to wait inside?”

  “Thanks.”

  The lobby of Hannah Karlsberg’s building looked like a great many others on the border of Central Park. Most of the furniture looked as if it had been selected with only one idea in mind: to convince the privileged residents that they had achieved a certain place in life, one from which, in all likelihood, they could never be dislodged. There were large, gilded mirrors and richly detailed oriental carpets. The walls were paneled in dark mahogany, and the floors were made of a polished green marble. The air itself smelled as if it had been recently cleaned, and Frank wondered how often Hannah had breathed it quietly, calmly, with no hint of what lay ahead.