City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  Konig sighs, leaning backward, relief flowing over him like a balm. He knows it is all fake, meretricious. That means nothing to him. All he wants now, craves, is the simple analgesic of her words, like the blessed Demerol coursing through his bloodstream.

  “I feel her trying to reach you. She wants to talk to you. Make contact.”

  He cocks an ear toward her, waiting for the next words. “Yes—but where is she? Can you tell me where she is?” Madam Lesetzskaya’s stubby, bejeweled fingers scratching over the birthday card suddenly halt, then rise tremblingly to her temples. Eyes screwed shut, hunched over the table, she concentrates more deeply, rocking back and forth, on her great haunches, huge buttocks spilling over the sides of a small wooden chair creaking rhythmically beneath her. “A cold, remote place. Far north of here.” Her eyes suddenly open and she stares fixedly at some distant point on the ceiling. “That’s all I see now. The air is beclouded. I have no clear impression. Come back in three days. Bring some article of clothing or jewelry.”

  “Yes,” Konig mumbles and staggers to his feet. “Yes, I will.”

  Going down the murky stairway, he is full of loathing and self-contempt. Next time, perhaps, it will be an astrologer, or an Oriental guru, or some wizard phrenologist who will read the bumps on his head. He feels like an ass, a fool, a rube who’s just been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. And the worst part of it is, he’s not at all certain he won’t be back there in three days with a piece of clothing or jewelry.

  »20«

  2:30 P.M. THE MORTUARY.

  CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.

  Konig sits in a small laboratory off the autopsy suites, a jeweler’s loop screwed fiercely , into his eye, the hand with the lacquered fingernails propped on a desk before him. The hand is rigored now. Hard like stone, frozen into its gesture of beatitude, a curiously penitential expression to it, like a hand broken off a plaster saint.

  The hand has soaked all morning in a mild alkali solution, and while the skin has shriveled, the cuticle has softened to the point where Konig’s small, jewel-like dissecting knives can begin to work on it.

  Through the magnification of the loop Konig can see that the damage to the epidermis around the fingertips has been massive. There’s no doubt that a strong abrasive—a rasp, or possibly a file—was used to obliterate the digital and palmar patterns. But by carefully cutting away the totally lacerated outer tissue, he is able to dissect out several small swatches of dermal tissue bearing faint patterns of whirls and ridges.

  Konig has been up against this kind of situation before, a situation in which the epidermis has been shed from the fingers through putrefaction or through deliberate mutilation. He knows what the mutilator of the fingers doesn’t—that the characteristics of the exposed surface of the dermis are identical with those of the actual fingerprints. Also that the ridges of the papillary layer, just beneath the dermis, are the primary cause of the ridge pattern on the epidermis, which is molded like a glove upon them, thus reproducing their pattern exactly on the surface.

  Even under great magnification these dermal impressions are fainter than ordinary fingerprints, but nevertheless, they are there. Extracted painstakingly, several tiny swatches of dermis hang drying now like old laundry on a line of tautly strung black thread. Here a bit of thumb tissue with papillary ridges intact; there a somewhat sharper print found on a bit of dermal tissue taken from the forefinger.

  Later, when the swatches have dried, they will go to the police lab, where they will be reversed, photographed and enlarged. Hopefully, the police will be able to establish that the prints from the hand are identical to some of those found in the shack near Coenties Slip. Thus the site of the crime will be firmly fixed.

  Like a lapidarist, Konig screws the loop tighter info his eye and bends once more to his work, his tiny blade carefully lifting out the shredded cuticle of the ring finger in order to get at the dermal impression below.

  “Chief”—young McCloskey’s tousled head pokes through the door—“care to have a look at what we’ve got so far?”

  “Among limb segments, no single region is represented in more than duplicate.” Pearsall lounges before the five trays, briefing a handful of staff. “So, we’ve got four upper arms separated at shoulder and elbow—two right and two left which appear to match in pairs. We’ve got three forearms and hands—two right and one left, including a pair. We’ve got four thighs separated at hip and knee—two right and two left which appear to be matchable in pairs. Four legs—two with feet which look like a pair, two without feet which also look like a pair. Attached to each of the thighs forming one pair, we’ve got a patella; two other patellae, also a pair. In addition there’s—Oh, hello, Paul.” Pearsall turns to greet the Chief. “Just doing a rundown of what we’ve inventoried so far.”

  “Good. Flynn send over the new stuff?”

  “Arrived about a half-hour ago,” McCloskey says. “Two more feet, badly mutilated—”

  “Probably match that set of footless legs,” says Strang. “No doubt,” Konig snaps. “Flynn mentioned something about another trunk.”

  “Right.” McCloskey nods. “An upper half with three cervical vertebrae—”

  “Looks more and more like two people,” Delaney murmurs quietly to himself.

  Konig’s eyes range avidly over the trays. “I’ll buy that, just as long as we’re absolutely certain there’s not a stitch of evidence that implies more than two—a spare bone, an extra limb that goes to neither. The minute we’ve got that we’ve got nothing.”

  “So far we’ve found no odd parts. We’re in pairs on everything.” Bonertz stirs from a far corner. “At least with the bone, and it seems unlikely we’ll find it in the soft parts. We’ve already sent out a dozen samples of bone tissue for age determination.”

  “Fine.” Konig rubs his hands eagerly. “Well, let’s see if we can’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.”

  “We’ve already started with the trunks,” McCloskey says. “Looks like we’ve got an upper and a lower half matched already.”

  The group now converges on the tray containing the three trunk portions. Hakim now takes over. “Two upper trunks,” he begins in his thin, clipped enunciations. “Trunk number one comprising two cervical vertebrae, the full twelve thoracic vertebrae, and two lumbar vertebrae. Trunk number two comprising three cervical, twelve thoracic, and three lumbar. The only lower trunk portion we have contains a pelvis and three lumbar vertebrae—”

  “So you matched the lower with your upper trunk number one to get the full five lumbar vertebrae.” Konig nods in agreement.

  “Yes, sir. When we brought these two sections of trunk together, the lower vertebra of the upper portion articulated perfectly with the upper vertebra of the lower portion.”

  “So,” Konig rattles on, his mind computing, anticipating, “the trunk was divided by cutting through the intervertebral disc between the second and third lumbar vertebrae.”

  “We even found the knife marks on the bone at that point,” Strang says.

  Konig cocks a somewhat jaded eye at him. “How many?”

  “Three,” Strang replies. “The first cut through and broke off the tip of the articular process. The second took off another piece of the same process, which we don’t have.”

  “Probably broke off,” says Konig. “Still in the mud down there on the river. Go ahead.”

  “The third,” Strang continues, “cut through the elastic ligament joining the two vertebrae.”

  “Fine,” Konig goes on brusquely, the memory of Strang’s treachery still rankling him. “Any X rays?”

  “Over here, Paul,” Bonertz calls from a far corner where a radiographic scanner, already lit, has the first X-ray print mounted on it.

  In the next moment, the assembled group clusters before the ghostly gray-white pattern of a human spinal column showing the lumbar region of a reconstructed trunk.

  “Not the most perfect fit, I’m afraid,” says Hakim apologetically.


  “Still”—Konig scours the screen—“there’s little doubt they’re from the same body. Reason they’re sitting a little lopsided like that is because of that clumsy cut at the tip of the articular process in the second lumbar vertebra. Hand me my dissecting kit, somebody.”

  The light of the scanner is flicked off and moments later the group is assembled around Konig, bent over the separated upper and lower portions of trunk. Jeweler’s loop screwed back in eye, small dissecting knives flashing beneath the harsh white glare of fluorescent overheads, Konig proceeds to carefully extract the small, broken-off slivers of bone. In a setting of absolute silence, he works deftly and swiftly before a rapt audience, a situation he loves.

  In a matter of moments he has carved out several minute slivers of bone, then taken the small slivers of extracted bone found on each vertebra and attached them to the articular process of the other vertebra to make a precise fitting—broken-off pieces of bone, one taken from each trunk portion and fitting, respectively, broken surfaces on the other portion.

  Removing the loop from his eye, Konig looks up smiling at the assembled group. “I think you’ll find now, Hakim, when you X-ray again, that you have here a true anatomical picture.”

  A small murmur of admiration ripples through the crowd. It is an admiration not only for Konig but for themselves. For it is the rather unique gift of the Chief’s to make a group of widely disparate men feel a common sense of pride and self-respect in work well done, the potent combination of skill, knowledge, and a kind of reverence.

  Konig’s smile beams from one man to the next, until that smile reaches Carl Strang, whereupon it turns into a grin of spiteful malice, and for a moment they regard each other thusly.

  “Well,” Konig booms cheerily, “now that we’ve got one whole trunk together, why don’t we give it some arms and legs?”

  »21«

  “Pigs—goddamn pigs. Whadda hell I s’pose to do now? Dis goddamn mess—I can no rent like dis.”

  4:15 P.M. 1622 FOX STREET, THE BRONX.

  Francis Haggard gazes impassively into the lengthening shadows encroaching on a squalid four-room flat, recently vacated, and from all visible signs, vacated in great haste. He moves slowly around the room followed by Mr. Guzman, the peppery little Puerto Rican superintendent of the building.

  “Whadda hell I s’pose to do now wid dis goddamn mess?”

  Haggard cannot answer his question. Actually, Mr. Guzman is luckier than he knows. The devastation visited on this squalid little flat with its punctured walls and peeling plaster is nothing compared to what Haggard had seen Friday evening in the loft on Varick Street.

  Except for the obvious filth of the place, as evidenced by the battalions of roaches diving for cover the moment they had entered, and the heavy mosaic of graffiti inflicted on every bare inch of wall, the detective sees nothing that plaster, sizing, and several gallons ‘of cheap latex paint won’t cure.

  His eyes roam searchingly through the spray-can calligraphy—this lingua franca of the slums—for some clue to the whereabouts of the recent occupants. But very little seems to emerge from all the curlicues and numbers other than more street shibboleths of the “Power to the People” variety, cant and sloganeering, bombastic rhetoric, all strident and admonitory. A mixture of agitprop banalities out of the underground press combined with a kind of comic-strip mentality. But suddenly, once again, smeared in bright, gaudy letters near the top of the wall, that opaque and faintly unnerving message he’d read on the Varick Street wall gleams down upon him.

  THE DAY OF THE MUFFLED OAR IS COMING

  “Alla time here, nine, ten years ago, we got nice people,” Mr. Guzman laments. “Family people, hardworking church people, you know? Now jus’ a lotta junkies and freaks.”

  Haggard nods abstractly. His pebble blue eyes watch a wasp dive into an overhead light, collide with a sickening crack, then plummet downward to the floor where it lies on its back buzzing and pedaling its legs fecklessly in the air.

  “Now I gotta spend coupla hundred bucks—clean up dis goddamn mess—”

  “That’s too bad.” The detective shakes his head commiseratively. “When did they pull out?”

  “I dunno. Two, t’ree days maybe. I come up to collect de rent and dere’s no one here, you know? I open up wit’ de key and find dis goddamn mess.”

  “Uh-huh.” Haggard nods. “How many of them were there?”

  “Here?” Mr. Guzman points to the floor.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I dunno. A lot. Always different faces. Maybe two, t’ree regular—maybe five, six. I dunno. Never de same. Come and go all time day and night.”

  “They bother anyone? Make a lot of noise?”

  “No. Dat’s one t’ing. Dey very quiet. You never know dey in or out.”

  “Uh-huh.” The detective nods. “Any women?”

  “Women?”

  “Yeah. Did they ever bring women here?”

  Mr. Guzman pauses, baffled by the question, the barrier of language having momentarily stumped him. “Women?”

  “Yeah—you know—girls.”

  “Oh, girls.” The clouds part. Guzman smiles deeply, flashing a gold incisor. “Sure. Plenty girls.”

  “Ever see this one?”

  Guzman’s eyes roam quickly over the small photo of Lauren Konig on the DD13. “No—I never see.” He thrusts it back at JHaggard, then jerks it back again and holds it, squinting, at arm’s length from his body. “I dunno—maybe. Dere so many. Come here all times of day and night. For the boys. Boff, boff, boff they go—fast. In de bed and out. You know? Den dey go ’way.” He looks at the photograph once more and shrugs. “No—I never see dis one. Mostly I see de guys. Longhairs. Freaks. Dirty. Filthy. Never bathe, you know? Stink.”

  “Yeah, I know. What about this Eggleston?”

  “Oh—Mr. Eggleston. He de boss.”

  “The boss?”

  “Sure. He pay de rent. Handle de money. Always telling de others what to do. You go here. You go dere. He very nice. Very polite. Not like de others. Know what I mean?”

  “Uh-huh.” Haggard nods wearily. “And you got no idea where he’s gone?”

  “No. How I got an idea where he’s gone? If I know where he go, I go get my rent. I make him pay for de goddamn mess here. I go myself. I don’t care. He beat me for two months’ rent. Now I gotta pay.”

  The detective listens, making a show of sympathy. But he listens without really hearing, his eyes gliding over the simple-minded wall scribblings without really seeing. But it is the empty carton of-TNT sticks that really rivets his attention, the empty canisters of gelignite, the empty boxes oi percussion caps and cheap Japanese detonators, the small wisps of wire coil, the unmistakable odor of cordite hanging over the place that scares him sick.

  “I ever see dis guy,” Mr. Guzman fumes on, “I break his legs. What de hell he do? He some kinda crook?”

  Haggard turns, evading the question. “I wanna get this guy, too, Mr. Guzman. And you’ve got my word, I’m gonna get him. Lock this apartment now. Don’t touch anything. Don’t let anyone in here.” He starts out, then turns back. “Listen—these guys ever come back for this stuff”—he waves his arm around the room—“you call me. Hear? Understand?”

  “Yeah—sure.”

  Haggard scratches two telephone numbers on a pad. “You can’t reach me at the first, try me at the second. Okay?”

  “Yeah—sure. Sure. Okay. Whadda hell you gonna do about my place here?” Mr. Guzman gazes desolately about the wreckage of his rooms.

  “First I wanna get some fingerprints outta here. Then I’m gonna send the bomb squad in.”

  “Bomb squad?” Guzman squeaks. But already the detective has gone out the door without hearing him or seeing the queasy, sickish grin fading in the shadows behind him.

  »22«

  “Basically it’s a ball-and-socket arrangement. Ball of the humerus to the scapula socket; ball of the femur to the acetabulum socket.”

  7:15 P.M. AUTOP
SY ROOM,

  CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.

  Konig and young McCloskey hunch over the trays shuffling long bones around, attempting to match one of the two sets of limbs to the reconstructed trunk. They work on, rapt, intent, unaware that as they have labored through the afternoon, the others, one by one, have gradually departed. They are not now even aware of those departures. It is just them together and the job at hand. Nothing else.

  “It’s a trial-and-error thing,” Konig rattles on. “It’s a bitch. Time-consuming. Hardly worth what you get for it at the end. But that’s the only way to do it.”

  For the past several hours they’ve been trying to match a set of arms and a set of legs to a single trunk—the reconstituted trunk—for that’s the only one complete with two shoulder sockets and two hip sockets. The other trunk portion is only half complete, only the upper trunk. To that, hopefully, they will be able to match a pair of arms. But they will have to wait for the men still digging on the river near Coenties Slip to unearth a pelvis and lower torso, to which, hopefully, they will be able to assign a pair of legs.

  So they have juggled bones for the past several hours, sorting them on the basis of general appearance, texture, and dimension. Then in turn trying to match each limb segment in pairs of rights and lefts.

  “The articulations have to be completely harmonious,” Konig muses aloud as he shuffles bones, lifts them, hefts them two at a time, using his own hands like a pair of scales. “You can’t force anything in this. The moment you have to force you know you’re wrong.”

  McCloskey watches the skilled, deft motion of the older man’s hands, rather like a child watching an old magician at some dazzling feat of prestidigitation. With long cotton swabs he reams out the acetabulum socket of the right hip into which he is about to insert the ball of a right femur. “Every reasonable doubt has to be eliminated.”