City of the Dead

by Herbert Lieberman

  “Perfect?” Konig shouts. “How can it be perfect? It’ll never be perfect. You busted the goddamned acromion. How the hell can you ever expect now to restore the exact fitting in relation to that humerus?”

  “But, Paul,” Pearsall steps in, trying to draw some of the withering fusillade away from the boy, “the X rays are showing nearly perfect articulations. These arms do go with this trunk.”

  “Who asked you?” Konig wheels, turns his fire now on Pearsall, whose features blanch under the heat. “Who the hell asked any of you?” He wheels again, his raging, accusatory eyes flashing from one man to the next. Disheveled, bleary-eyed, unshaven, his gray hair tousled wildly, seeming suddenly white, as if it had turned right there before them, Konig has the look of some Old Testament prophet, crazed, half-lunatic, half-divine, a Jeremiah or an Ezekiel, full of lamentation and woe. “Who the hell asked any goddamned one of you?” He flails the air with his fists.

  Strang, standing off to the side, arms akimbo, quietly observes this maniacal performance, a slight, enigmatic smile on his thin, taut-cord lips. Konig wheels again, just in time to catch that smile, then turns on him. “What the hell’s so funny?”

  “Funny?” Strang affects a deeply aggrieved look. “I don’t think it’s funny, Paul. I think it’s very sad. Very goddamned sad.” He turns sharply on his heel and strides out.

  “Go on,” Konig shouts after him. “Go ahead. Run to the Mayor or the District Attorney. Run to The New York Times. Maybe they’ll take your picture. Put it in the goddamn paper—right on the front page—”

  By this time Konig is ranting, his voice bouncing off cold porcelain and stainless steel, shattering the normally sepulchral hush of the mortuary. An elderly Negro attendant inadvertently stumbles on to the scene. His wide, startled eyes blooming open in fright like huge white peonies, he turns and stumbles back out.

  “I don’t need any of you. I’ll do better by myself. Get the hell out.” Konig flails the air as the others still stand about, heads lowered out of shame for their leader.

  “Go on. Get the hell out. All of you,” he bellows like a wounded animal. “Go on. Go on. Get out.”

  Slowly, one by one, they turn and go—Bonertz, Delaney, Grimsby, Hakim, Pearsall, still white and shaken from the ordeal, until no one is left there but Konig and young McCloskey, facing each other across a table, the two partially reconstructed corpses, stony and recumbent, like figures on Egyptian sarcophagi, between them.

  “Well, what the hell are you waiting for?” Konig snarls. “You get the hell out of here too.”

  McCloskey doesn’t stir. For a moment they stare at each other, the younger man still flushed with shame, his questioning gaze full of puzzlement and hurt. His lips move, attempting speech, but no sound comes. In the next instant he turns and goes.

  For a long while after Konig stands there, riveted to the spot, silence rushing in upon him, in a solitude of his own making. Having driven everyone from him, alienated his staff, denounced colleagues, and humiliated a young man whose crimes were nowhere near as great as Konig had magnified them, he is at last profoundly alone.

  In the next moment he flings off his jacket and seizes a pair of radii there in the trays awaiting assignment.

  »27«

  “I don’t give a goddamn if it does stink like a toilet.”

  “Have a heart, will ya, Flynn?”

  “How many holes we gotta dig before ya see it’s a bust?”

  3:15 P.M. THE SHACK NEAR COENTIES SLIP.

  Detective Sergeant Edward Flynn sits in shirt sleeves, tilted backward on a raddled bridge chair, eating an apple, and supervising the excavation of the earth beneath the little shack near Coenties Slip.

  In contrast to the night Konig was there, the place is now stark and empty, the sum of its cluttered accretion of refuse and scrap all crated now and carted off to various police laboratories for blood analysis, fingerprints—dust gathered carefully in glass phials, and innumerable little envelopes of nail parings and hair all collected. Dozens of people—specialists—are already at work at various points around the city analyzing, testing, collating. Nothing remains there of the former wilderness of junk and disarray but the large, dirty old Victorian tub with the curiously ornate legs that is attached to no source of water. The solitary nature of the thing just standing there now makes it seem even more grandly ludicrous.

  Already most of the floor planking has been torn up and lies strewn about the place wherever it happens to have been tossed by the two beefy patrolmen laboring there in skivvies and hip waders in yet another fetid, muddy trench.

  “Why the hell don’t he come down here and stick his own ass in this goddamn toilet?” comes the muffled muttering of one of the diggers from below. “See how he likes standing in all this bunjara.”

  A spadeful of black tarlike ooze comes hurtling up out of the trench and lands with the plopping sound of cow dung on the floor.

  “Quit the goddamn grousing, will ya?” Flynn snarls at the two stooped figures grunting in the hole.

  “I tell you, there’s nothin’ here, Flynn.”

  “I know there’s nothin’ there but I’m gonna rip up every square inch of goddamn floor anyway—”

  “You’re gonna rip up?” A scornful laugh bursts upward from the hole. “Hear that, Del Vecchio? He’s gonna rip up.”

  “Yeah—don’t give yourself a hernia, Flynn.”

  More scornful laughter. More grunting and more plopping. Then after a short while: “If there’s nothin’ here, how come we gotta break our ass in all this bunjara?”

  “Because that’s your lot in life, dummy”—Flynn pops three Maalox into his mouth all at one time and chews them ruefully—“diggin’ sumps. Now if you’d had your asses reamed today like I had—Goddamn him, if he ever pops off at me like that again, I’ll haul him up before the Commissioner—I swear it. Goddamn it, next time he pulls that crap on me—”

  “Ah, what the hell you care what that old fool says?” Another loud plop of black ooze.

  “He’s bananas. Like everybody knows, the guy’s a nut.”

  “See the paper? DA’s gonna have his ass on this body-snatchin’ thing.”

  “Crazy old fool.”

  “Quit it.” Flynn bolts up, kicking the chair aside behind him. “Quit the goddamn grousing, I told you. All right—I’ve had it. Let’s get the hell outta here.”

  “Hallelujah.”.

  “Close up that dung hole.”

  “My pleasure.”

  Two muddy, befouled figures scramble out of the hole and with a kind of boyish exultation start spading mud back into it while Flynn prowls uneasily through the shadowy reaches of the shack, his eyes yellow and shifting like those of a panther stalking prey. He comes to rest at last before the sorry old Victorian tub. What a curious thing to be sitting there now in the middle of a bare, malodorous little shack. It had, no doubt, seen better times. A relic of a more tranquil age. Probably it had graced the bathroom of some tawdry old pleasure palace out of the gilded age, like the Astor or the Ritz, now demolished, its site turned into a parking lot. It had been witness to the daily ablutions of bankers, brokers, rich matrons traveling with their hubbies. And it had ended its days ignominiously, as a butcher’s block for a maniac.

  It stands there in the corner now, solitary, forlorn, its pipes all hanging out, plunked down on a six-foot-by-six-foot strip of old linoleum on which is stamped a pattern of faded, liverish-colored flowers.

  “Okay, Sarge.” The two beefy young cops come panting up to him like pups eager to get out to play.

  “Finita la commedia,” says the more lyrical Italian one. “Let’s blow this shithouse,” says the more direct Irish gentleman. They hustle for the door, leaving Flynn back in the shadows, still contemplating the tub and the six-by-six strip of linoleum.

  “Wait a minute,” he bellows over his shoulder, stopping the two young cops dead in their tracks, just at the brink of their escape into the sunlight and fresh air at the door. “Let�
�s just have a wee peek under that linoleum.”

  “Mannagia diavolo,” the Italian moans balefully.

  “For Chrissake, Flynn,” the Irishman whimpers. “Have a heart.”

  “Quit the bellyachin’ and pick up that goddamn tub like I told you.”

  »28«

  6:15 P.M. MORTUARY.

  CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.

  “There is a better fit of the ends of the supraspinatus tendon on the right side than on the left. Portions of the lubricating bursa between the capsule of the shoulder joint proper on the top of the humerus and the under surface of the acromion are still in position and come together as the head slips under the acromion. Appear to come naturally together.” Konig scrawls hastily into his pad. “Thus the two humeri of the longer set of upper limbs appear to belong to the same body as the reconstructed trunk.”

  Working steadily for the past four hours, all by himself in the solitude of the abandoned autopsy room, no sound within the place but the dripping of a water tap behind him, Konig has managed to assign all the remaining limbs to either one torso or the other. Both now have arms and legs.

  Working that afternoon with both sets of arms, he has found that the heads of the shorter humeri were too small to fit the shoulder joints of the reconstructed trunk, just as the heads of the shorter femora were found to be too small to fit the hip joints.

  But when he attached the longer set of humeri to the same trunk, not only did the sockets fit neatly, but with the addition of the longer pair of forearms, the arms appeared in correct proportion to the length of the trunk. The tips of the fingers, allowing for the removal of the terminal segments, were suddenly in correct relation to the thighs. But when the shorter pair of humeri and forearms were attached to that same pair of shoulder joints, the fingertips came just below the level of the hip joints, an impossible proportion for a normal body.

  So Konig’s hypothetical case based upon only two bodies is building slowly toward an incontestable fact. He sits silently now before the two broken, battered things, which, albeit headless, nevertheless have begun to bear the unmistakable configuration of mortal man. Though still unidentified, still mysterious, unknown figures, it is now at last possible to see the lineaments of humanity in the reconstituted parts. Both bodies have undergone partial resurrection, and Paul Konig, like an old, demented dollmaker, sits before his half-creations now, still baffled by the numerous unassignable soft parts, odds and ends, human debris scattered all about him. He gazes down upon these half-creatures, pondering their curiously peaceful repose, trying to decipher the riddle contained in a handful of bones.

  Number 1 and Number 2—the short and the long—already he knows a great deal about each. Even as he gazes over them, he feels a growing affection, a growing intimacy, a physician’s intimacy, as their various parts merge slowly into anthropomorphic form. They’re now a bit like old friends. Working on Number 1’s badly mutilated feet, which had been viciously slashed across the arches and had had several toes amputated in an attempt obviously to erase some identifiable feature, Konig has found a curious metatarsal deformity, an unnatural curving outward of the big toe, hinting at a painful foot problem. Then, too, Number 2’s back in the area of the fourth and fifth lumbar vertebrae reveals definite disc displacement as well as a pelvic asymmetry, as if he’d walked for many years with a compensatory gait in order to alleviate severe sacral pain.

  It was curious the way the heads arrived, just as Konig was going to get up and go home. Not that he wanted to go home. He dreaded the prospect, but there seemed nothing left to do, and his leg had started shrieking again. Then they came, in a cheap vinyl suitcase plastered over with a lot of paper college pennants and swabbed with mud. They’re carried in by a young cop, looking frightened and a little queasy. He doesn’t know exactly what it is he is carrying, only that it’s “something” and that he wants to get shut of it as quickly as possible.

  Konig, however, knows what it is, knows instinctively the moment he grasps the muddy handle and slings the case onto a table. The heft of the thing and the dull, sickening thud of the stuff inside bumping together tell him all he needs to know.

  His fingers tremble as he fumbles with the clasps, and raising the lid of the case, he feels a rising sense of excitement, an inner gush, rather like the confluence of innumerable tiny streams suddenly merging into a single roaring torrent.

  All he sees at first is a lot of old crumpled newspaper, as muddy as the case itself and spattered with innumerable tiny spots of red. The paper is evidently there as a kind of cushion for the contents, rather like the way you pack fragile porcelain or glass in excelsior. On top of all that newspaper lies a small white piece of bond, torn from a memo pad, upon which is indited in a large, hectic scrawl:

  Here are your heads.

  I hope you’re happy.

  Flynn

  P.S.

  You were right, goddamn you.

  They were under the floorboards.

  In the next moment, his hands are pushing through the crumpled newssheet, thrusting aside paper with tiny bits of adherent hair, shards of clotted gore. Then suddenly, there they are.

  Konig is not a squeamish man. In nearly forty years of service at the Medical Examiner’s Office, he has seen some pretty grisly sights. For the most part, such things have left him unfazed, or at least inured. But the condition of these two heads, or rather what remains of them, has shown him a wholly new, undreamed of dimension of man’s capacity for visiting havoc on his fellow man.

  Both heads have been drastically mutilated with the deliberate intention of making the possibility of identification extremely remote. Just as the fingers and toes on each corpse had been either mutilated or hacked off, to remove all identification marks, so, too, in the case of the heads, the features of each had been obliterated—eyes, ears, nose, lips, almost all flesh cut away from the face, and nearly all of the hair and scalp removed—violently excised. The skin tissue had been peeled off like a glove so as to reveal the skull beneath; also, many of the teeth in each head had been extracted in order to make identification by means of dental charts very difficult. The less mutilated of the two heads is clearly that of a man. The other—a smaller, somewhat slighter skull—is of equivocal sex. It might well be that of a woman.

  The first head, the more mutilated of the two, had been severed from the neck immediately below the level of the chin. Not only have all the visible facial features been removed, but nearly the whole of the skin of the head and face as well. Two small portions of scalp remain, one over the lower quadrant of the right side and the other just behind the left ear opening. The lips have been entirely cut away; the two upper central incisor teeth have been drawn and the tongue, its tip cut off, protrudes slightly in the gap.

  The second head had been severed from the neck at a level slightly lower than that of the first. A huge chunk of scalp is missing from the right side of the head and most of the skin and underlying tissue of the forehead and face have been removed. Flaps of skin still adhere to each cheek, trailing down to the chin and below it. Both lips have been almost completely cut off and nearly all teeth have been drawn. Between the jaws protrudes a swollen tongue.

  Just before the stump of the left ear there is a tuft of dark hair. The portion of the scalp remaining on the left side of the head bears a curious Y-shaped laceration covered with dark hair. It is clear to Konig that the wound was caused by forcible contact with a blunt instrument. He cannot say for certain whether or not the wound was produced before or after death.

  Konig, examining the first skull under a magnifying glass, quickly locates two fractures. The first is a depressed fracture measuring three-quarters of an inch by a half inch, shelving from behind forward. The injury has broken the outer table of bone, causing a slight depression on the inner table. Slightly behind this fracture, and to the left of the midline, Konig pinpoints the second fracture, affecting the outer table only. This measures a quarter inch in diameter. Once again Konig i
s uncertain whether the fractures have been inflicted before or after death. But he is certain that they resulted from two separate blows with a blunt instrument. Undoubtedly the same instrument that had produced the Y-shaped laceration on the second head. Had they been inflicted during life, the blows would probably have been sufficient to produce unconsciousness, but they do not appear to have been sufficiently violent to have caused death. He must look elsewhere now for the cause of death.

  In the adherent tissue just under the left eye of the first skull, Konig’s sharp gaze spies a deep-seated bruise, roughly an inch in diameter. Then a similar but smaller bruise on the lower border of the jaw on the left side. These bruises lead his eye down further to the place where that purple, swollen tongue, with its tip cut off, protrudes grotesquely just beyond the margin of the jaw. It is that tongue that really starts to tell the story.

  The tip cut from the tongue is about an inch and a half in length. It seems to Konig that it had been removed to facilitate the extraction of teeth. If that is so, its removal is of importance as proof that the tongue protruded just at or immediately after the time of death.

  Studying the tongue further, he notes that the contour of the palate is imprinted on both the upper and lower surface with indentations that correspond perfectly with the remaining dentition in the jaws. These indentations are shallow in front and become deeper toward the back of the tongue. Such marks can be made only when great pressure is exerted on the tongue for an uncommonly long time, and such a condition is sometimes found after throttling.

  Immediately Konig is looking for the telltale bruising signs of manual strangulation. None are to be found in the soft tissue around the neck because this tissue has been stripped away, as if there had been a need to erase all evidence of throttling. But in some of the adherent tissue, Konig discovers several small half-moon impressions, suggestive of those caused by fingernails. He has only to examine next the hyoid bone in the throat to discover there the clean fracture going through it and to know finally that the neck had been forcibly compressed and that the poor, hapless owner of the skull he is now holding in his hand had died an asphyxial death from violent throttling.