“Fine. So?”
“So?” Flynn rears back. It was hardly the reaction he’d been expecting. Praise was what he’d been hoping for. A slap on the back. A hearty well done. Possibly even some paltry expression of gratitude. Not this jeering, irascible “So?” But, of course, he should have known better. Should not have been fooled by the cigar and the oddly soothing voice. Should have known that the Chief could not stay civil for more than five minutes at a stretch.
“So?” Flynn jeers right back. “So all I wanted to tell you was that I matched those prints to prints we found plastered all over that shack.”
“So now you’ve got the scene of the crime. So what?” Konig shuffles coldly through the papers and the morning mail stacked on his desk. “With that goddamn bloody tub in there, did you ever doubt it?” Flynn starts to reply but Konig rushes right on. “How does any of that help me?” Konig bulls on ruthlessly.
“Well, after all, you’ve got—”
“What about that goddamn underwear you were blowing your horn about?”
“Well, Jesus Christ”—Flynn’s face reddens—“if you’d just let someone else get a word in edgewise.”
“Go on. Go on,” Konig jeers. “I’m sitting here waiting for the past half-hour—”
“Christ—I ain’t been here no half-hour.”
Konig checks his watch. “Almost fifteen minutes. Sue me. Will you get to the goddamn point.”
“I’m tryin’ to—I’m tryin’ to, goddamnit.” Flynn reddens. “If you’d only let me—I’ve been tryin’ to tell you that I wired Washington about the serial number we found in the waistband.”
“You told me that yesterday. So what?”
“So”—the detective appears to be close to apoplexy—“today they wired back.” He yanks a yellow sheet of telex paper from his inside pocket and starts to read in a high, shrill voice. “RA 12537744.”
“Right.”
“The serial number we found in—”
“—in the waistband. Right. Right.”
“Belongs to a chap by the name of Browder, Sergeant Raymond Browder. 82nd Airborne, Fort Bragg, North Carolina.”
“Fine. So you called Bragg. Where’s Browder?”
“They don’t know,” Flynn says with barely smothered rage in his eyes. “Disappeared around sixteen months ago. Military authorities down there now report him as a deserter.”
“So?”
“So—so—so,” Flynn booms and a long white ash of cigar crumbles onto his jacket and into his lap. He slaps frantically at it as if he feared going instantly up in flames. “Is that all you can say? So? So? I’m tryin’ to tell you somethin’ and you just sit there like King Tut. Lordin’ it over me like I was dirt. Treatin’ me like a turd. Where the hell do you—”
“So,” Konig mutters impassively, “tell me more.”
“So I’m tellin’ you,” the detective goes on in a voice ominously low, restraining himself in an act of superhuman will. “This Browder, missin’ sixteen months, is a thirty-five-year-old RA type. A paratrooper. Gung-ho career guy if you get the picture.”
“I get the picture.”
“Fought in Vietnam. Got all kinds of decorations. DSC, Medal of Honor, Purple Heart. The whole shmeer. Right?”
“Right.”
“So about sixteen months ago, the 82nd Airborne is put on alert. Activated and ordered back to Southeast Asia. Vietnam. You follow?”
“I follow.”
“So the night before the unit’s supposed to pull out, this Browder goes over the hill.”
“You said that already.”
“I know I did,” Flynn smolders. “I know what the hell I said. But right now, this minute, I’m sayin’ this Browder looks like one of them fricasseed chickens you got glued together downstairs.”
“So,” murmurs Konig, leaning back in his chair, the tips of his fingers forming a bridge above the slight swell of his paunch. “So,” he murmurs once again. But this time it is an entirely different so from all the others—the combative and jeering and derisory so’s. These are full of rumination, conjecture, inward reflection. “So?”
Flynn leans back in his chair, puffing at his cigar, certain he has at last made his point. “So I sent your set of prints down to Bragg this morning. They’ll check ’em against their set. We oughta hear something in forty-eight hours.”
“Will they send medical records? Dental charts?”
“I spoke to the CO down there today,” Flynn muses. “Funny.”
“What’s funny?”
“He was very tight-lipped. Evasive. Didn’t wanna say too much over the phone.” The detective drums the desk with his finger. “Got a feelin’ there’s somethin’ funny about all this.”
“But they will make medical records available?”
“Oh, sure,” Flynn says. “I mean, I guess so.”
“You guess so?”
“Well, I mean, they generally do. But this Captain Di-Lorenzo was a little strange.”
The great dome of Konig’s head nods drowsily. His red, sleepless eyes flutter and momentarily close. Rocking gently back and forth in his seat, he appears for just a moment to be dozing; to be far away, dreaming of some remote and tranquil time, of a place unsullied. “Well,” he sighs at last, “I s’pose all we can do for the time being is sit tight and wait.”
For a long while after Flynn’s departure, Konig just sits there, rummaging dispiritedly through his mail. A letter from a missionary in Zaire querying him on a rare form of schistosomiasis. A physician in Tashkent with a question on blood grouping. An immunologist at Tulane who wants to know—
He sits there reading the same page over and over again, trying to concentrate and failing. He is still smoldering from the outrage of the morning, his humiliation before Carslin, who undoubtedly believed that it was he who performed the shoddy autopsy on the Robinson boy; who saw the moment of weakness in his face when he almost asked his former student to conceal his findings, bury the report, fudge it... anything, but save the department. And, of course, Carslin saw all that. Well, thank God he didn’t ask. He didn’t stoop to that. How much it would have pleased Carslin if he had. An opportunity to rise to new and stunning heights of self-righteous indignation. And that poor Robinson boy. He knew now that Robinson didn’t hang himself in his cell, but instead was hanged there by guards who slipped a noose of mattress ticking around his neck and strung him up from an overhead joist after beating him to death. All that would come out now. Good. Some bastard down in the Tombs would pay for it all right. He’d see to that. But what of Strang? What part did he play in it? Was it really an oversight? Omitting to do a tissue study that was almost mandatory in cases such as this? He might be able to forgive mere carelessness. But if Emil Blaylock had gotten to Strang first—made promises, which Blaylock very well could. He was, after all, an extremely influential man in that serpent’s nest, the top inner circle of the City bureaucracy. If such promises were made, Konig, who had some friends too—lower-echelon officials within the municipal penal system, people with a strong urge to rise quickly and no great scruples how they did so—would goddamned well find out and there would be hell to pay.
In the next moment Konig flicks a switch on his phone, picks up the receiver and hears Carver’s voice on the other end.
“Yes, Doctor.”
“Get me Bill Ratchett’s office down at the Tombs,” he snaps, then bangs the receiver back down. Once again he is sitting there fuming. Expecting at any moment the Deputy Mayor’s phone call. The stern rebuke. The chilling admonitions. Hints of dire things to come, all uttered in the lofty verbiage of municipal officialdom, expressing His Eminence the Mayor’s high moral dudgeon—“peeved—vexed—outraged—furious—repeat, furious—”
The buzzer on his phone sounds and it is Carver again. “Ratchett’s not in, Doctor.” Konig grumbles something about leaving a message to call back, slams the phone back down and rises. He has a need now to get away from his desk, away from his office, away from hims
elf. In the next moment he is out his door, storming down corridors emptied by the noon lunch hour, clattering down the green descending spiral of Stairway D.
He has not been down to the mortuary since Haggard found him there in the early hours of the morning, but even at this late hour, four or five gurney carts are still lined up in the receiving area, their grisly cargoes still sacked in canvas, waiting to be unloaded into the huge purring refrigerators.
For a while, cut off from all the world above, he stands there waiting for the silence and the curious isolation of the place to soothe him. But standing there in noonday silence, he feels only estrangement, an alienation, a curious revulsion from things he had formerly loved. For the first time in his life he feels like a stranger here. Like a man who had inadvertently wandered into someone else’s nightmare. Suddenly, the place to him is a horror, a freak show, and he must flee it. Get the stench of it out of his nostrils. Get back up to the sunlight and the fresh air above.
He turns, but in that moment he is suddenly aware of faint scratching noises coming from the autopsy suites behind him. At once, in his feverish, overwrought mind, he imagines more foul play. Who’s in there now—at this hour when everyone is supposed to be out to lunch?
He crosses quickly to the doors leading to the autopsy rooms. Reaching there, he peers through the glass window panes set in the doors and sees there the tall, white-robed figure of Tom McCloskey hovering above the reconstructed Tinkertoy figures of Ferde and Rolfe. With a long steel tape, like a tailor measuring a man for a suit, the young man is very carefully taking limb and torso measurements, then tabulating them in a notebook.
Konig watches, with an odd pleasure, the quiet, purposeful motions of the young pathologist—all smooth, thorough, methodical. Then suddenly, for the flicker of an instant, Konig is forty years younger, a boy of twenty-three or so, just out of medical school. He is standing in that same suite of rooms, just where McCloskey is standing now, wearing just such a long, white, foolish surgical robe. Beside him stands old Bahnhoff, that black noisome cigar screwed into the center of his mouth, puffing furiously, and observing with a finicky vigilant eye the young man hovering there, above a flayed body, scalpel in hand, carrying out an extremely delicate arterial survey.
Such an ache comes suddenly upon him. Such a longing. Such a need to reach out and touch that moment again, drag it forcibly back across the spate of years, hug it to his chest as you would a lost child—those two figures lost irretrievably somewhere in the vanished years. As if he might simply walk through those doors and be that boy again. Stand there trembling beside old Bahnhoff, trying desperately to please him.
A rush of curious affection suddenly overtakes him. Not for the ghost of his vanished youth. That he knows was too mawkish and painful to feel anything other than contempt for. But it is rather an affection for young McCloskey with his tape measure and pad—and that ridiculous, ill-fitting surgical robe. Such affection. Such grief. If he could only warn the boy.
In the next moment, he turns and goes.
»33«
“Who did you say is the artist?”
“Emily Winslow. Name’s right there in the corner.”
“Oh, yes, of course... Winslow.”
“Not terribly well known yet. But she will be.”
1:00 P.M. THE FENIMORE GALLERY,
MADISON AVENUE AND 67TH STREET.
“Greatly talented,” says Konig.
“Yes, she is.”
“Greatly talented,” he murmurs again a little foolishly. “Greatly talented.”
And for a while the two men stand there, Konig and Mr. Anthony Redding, gazing at the three little gouaches.
“And you just have the three?” Konig asks finally.
“’Fraid so.” Redding glances somewhat disapprovingly at the rumpled figure with tie askew and slightly demented eyes. “We’ve sold quite a bit of her painting though. This is all we have left. Unfortunately,” he goes on apologetically, “these are not the most appealing of her works.”
“Not appealing?” Konig’s brow arches. “On the contrary, I find them very appealing. Oh, I s’pose there is a certain air of morbidity about them. I quite agree. But still I find they say something to me.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I do,” Konig goes on, fiercely protective, warming to his subject. “Something universal. I’m profoundly touched by them.”
“You are?” An expression of puzzlement and suspicion mingles on Mr. Redding’s sallow features. “Well,” he goes on agreeably, “she is a superb draftsman. Unusual to see that kind of discipline in one so young.”
“Is she young?” Konig asks slyly, enjoying in some odd way this utterly bogus role he plays.
“Yes, quite young. Early twenties, I should judge. I’m not sure. And utterly different from the other young painters of her generation, opportunists all trying to look chic and trendy. Winslow’s not trendy at all. Not voguish. Not afraid to be conventional. A little old-fashioned. Not hung up on style for style’s sake, and absolutely determined to master the tools of her craft. Yes, she has something to say. She is very good.”
“Yes.” Konig swells a bit with pride. Oddly enough, he’s moved. At a loss for words. Once again his eyes pore hungrily over the three little canvases. Displayed rather prominently as they are in this sleekly elegant gallery, exuding opulence and taste, they seem to take on a curious air of importance. Oddly enough, he’s impressed. But still, the paintings are profoundly sad. That woeful little shack in the burned-out field—so desolate, so forlorn. And even more disturbing, the study of broken glass, lethal little shards. And then the soiled underpants moldering in the fetid shadows of some tenement gloom. Something like a shiver courses through him.
“I’ll take the three,” says Konig suddenly.
“You will?”
“Yes, of course.” Konig is a little shocked at the sound of his own voice. As if someone else had spoken those rash words. “I said so, didn’t I?”
A look of something like wariness comes into Redding’s eyes. This man in his tatty suit—hardly the sort of person he’s accustomed to selling paintings to.
“They’re not inexpensive,” Redding says rather grandly. “I hardly imagined they would be,” Konig snaps, matching the grandeur.
The gallery owner is baffled. Somewhat at a loss. Not certain whether the man is a wealthy eccentric or merely a crackpot in off the street. “I can let you have the three for fifteen hundred,” he offers cautiously, half expecting the man to bolt out the door.
“Fine,” says Konig, whipping out his checkbook. “You will take a check?”
“Certainly,” says Redding, suddenly in a tizzy. Even his British accent lapses. “Come right this way to my desk, Mr.—”
“Konig.”
“Yes. Of course. Mr. Konig. Come right this way. We’ll make out the papers.”
Redding, on little maroon velvet pumps, scurries up to the front of the gallery, with Konig trailing a short distance behind.
Redding slips easily into the Mies chair behind the elegant little escritoire. “You have some identification, Mr. Konig?”
“Certainly.”
The gallery owner glances through driver’s license, registration, AMA card, jotting down details. “Ah, I see it’s not Mr. but Dr. Konig,” he says, by this time glowing with that kind of benevolence that only hard cash can engender in a merchant’s heart. “Very good, Doctor,” he says, handing back the identification. “I think you’ve chosen quite shrewdly. This girl’s work is going to be quite valuable some day. Funny, you know, only the other day, another gentleman was in here inquiring about her.”
“Another gentleman?” Konig’s eyes narrow to slits. “Who?”
“A very big collector from the Middle West. I’m not at liberty to divulge his name, you understand.”
“Yes, of course,” says Konig, his curiosity raging. “I don’t suppose you could tell me what he looked like?” Redding seems startled by the request, yet for Dr. K
onig and his checkbook, he seems eager to comply. He laughs a little uneasily. “Well—he was a big man. Quite tall; white curly hair—”
As Redding drones on animatedly, it suddenly dawns on Konig that the big collector from the Middle West was obviously Frank Haggard, and that Mr. Anthony Redding is lying in his teeth.
“—and that’s why I say, Doctor,” he effuses, “you made a very sound investment today. Within the next few years Winslow’s work is going to be very much in demand. Big people are beginning to take notice. If you’d like, I can have those three gouaches sent up to you in Riverdale today.”
“No—I’ll take them with me.”
“But—”
“That’s all right,” Konig says emphatically. “They’re small.”
“Well”—Redding shrugs—“you’re the boss, Doctor.” He giggles a little foolishly. “If you can wait just a minute, I’ll have my boy pack them for you.”
Redding scurries to the back of the gallery where Konig can hear him calling down to someone on the floor beneath. In a few minutes he returns, face glowing unnaturally, and carrying a three-foot-by-four-foot package wrapped in brown paper.
“A fantastic coincidence, Doctor,” Redding bubbles excitedly. “I was just down in our storeroom. We had a shipment come in around two weeks ago. Most of the stuff is not even unwrapped yet, just sitting around down there waiting to be catalogued and inventoried. Anyway, look what I found right on the top of the heap.”
He thrusts the package at Konig. Large, black Crayola letters in the upper left-hand corner read: “Emily Winslow. 324 Varick Street. New York City.”
Suddenly Konig’s legs are trembling beneath him.
“Shall we open it, Doctor?”
“Yes,” says Konig, his mouth suddenly dry. “By all means.”
“I’m dying to see it myself.” Redding slashes the cords rather gleefully with an Exacto razor. Then the two of them are tussling with the wrappings. Beneath the coarse brown outer wrapping is a layer of newssheet lying directly over the canvas. They lift that in turn and then step back.
City of the Dead Page 21
