For a long moment Konig stands there gazing down at the canvas, not speaking, seeing only a flood of color and light—grays, greens, blues, dazzling ocher, and yellows. Then gradually a configuration of line and motion come together on the canvas, and suddenly Konig is aware of cold sweat erupting on his forehead. His legs buckle and he nearly sags.
“Marvelous,” Redding enthuses, unaware of Konig’s reaction beside him. “Isn’t it marvelous? Look at the gorgeous way she’s handled—”
Konig’s feverish eyes range avidly over the familiar lines of his house in Montauk. There it is, lovingly recreated. Every last detail of it—windows, balconies, decks, shrubbery, the dunes running out from the back of it. And there’s the high sand bluff on which it sits, the long sweep of empty beach below, and beyond that a gray-green slab of gently undulant surf, glinting with sunlight, unfolding like a scroll onto the beach below.
But it is not that, not simply that, that has caused his wrenched heart to slug so in his chest, beneath his shirt, like a huge mallet It is the face in the center of the canvas, the dear, beloved face of Ida Konig smiling out at him from beneath the huge brim of an old, floppy sun-bonnet. How well he knew that bonnet. It is still out there in Montauk, stored away somewhere in the attic in a stack of cartons that contain the rest of her things, hastily packed and stored away when she died. Her eyes smile warmly out at him. She is kneeling in the garden, her garden, with huge blood-red poppies nodding all about her. The poppies seem like living creatures, tall, slender, graceful things with fiery heads. They delight in her presence.
The painting is literally awash with sunlight. Suffused with love. And in all that dazzling incandescence of feeling, there is only one shadow—rather large and portentous—a gray eminence framed in an upstairs window. It is a faceless figure staring down on the scene below, and though it is small in relation to the size of the painting, it nevertheless succeeds in casting a pall over everything else in the canvas. It is as if the artist, having succeeded out of love (for the painting was pure love) in recapturing some precious moment of her past, then had, for inscrutable reasons, known only to herself, to ruin it, deface it, sully it, with this rather dirty thumbprint stain of gray.
“Simply smashing,” Mr. Anthony Redding enthuses, manufacturing fresh banalities in his quickly regained fraudulent British accent.
“I’ll take it,” Konig says. He can barely speak. His voice is choked.
“Oh, but Doctor—I’m afraid—”
“I’ll take it.” Konig turns fiercely on him.
Redding gapes into that wild, demented face. “But I don’t even know what to ask. I have to at least consult the artist.”
“Then consult her. Speak with her,” Konig shouts, scarcely fathoming his own words.
“But I can’t.” Redding pleads, now genuinely terrified of the madman standing there before him. “I can’t. I haven’t been able to reach her in weeks. I’ve got money here for her. A few thousand in addition to what you’ve just given me. She must be out of town. She’ll be back. Listen—the minute I get in touch with her. I’ll—”
“I have to have it now.” Konig snatches the painting. Redding tries in turn to snatch it back. Then for a moment or two they do an idiotic little dance, a tug of war with the canvas jerking back and forth between them.
“Doctor—please, please, Doctor.”
“I’ll pay you whatever you want.”
“I can’t,” Redding pleads, “at least not until—”
“I must have it now.” Konig’s voice brings Redding up sharply. Something he’s heard in that strangled sob alerts him, tells him something is profoundly wrong here. At the same time his shrewd merchant’s mind is quickly computing a hefty price to attach to the painting, as well as exacting a neat profit for himself in the transaction.
At last Redding sighs, letting go his end of the canvas, capitulating nobly, as if he’d fought the good fight. “I don’t think I can let it go for a penny less than three thousand.” As he utters the figure, even he is a little awed at his own audacity. But there is in this man, this wild,, rumpled apparition, with the mad eyes and the awful odor of hospital antiseptic all about him, clutching the painting in one hand and waving a checkbook at him with the other, something that tells Redding to try to get shut of the man. Get his money and get him out of there as quickly as possible.
Together they stagger back up to the front of the gallery, Konig still clutching the painting, refusing to relinquish it for even a minute. Even as he scribbles another check, he holds tight to the canvas with his free hand.
Redding dabs petulantly at his brow with a silk foulard, muttering, “Highly irregular. Highly irregular.”
“Here’s your check.”
“Are you taking the big one with you, too?” Redding leans back, exhausted.
“Yes.”
“Then at least let me wrap it so that you don’t damage—”
“No time now.”
“It’ll take just a minute.”
“No time—no time.” Konig backs toward the street door, bowing and smiling foolishly, canvases jammed under both arms.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Redding, terrified, trails him out.
“I’m fine. Fine.”
“Dr. Konig.” Redding cries after him.
Startled, Konig turns. “Yes?”
“You’re her father, aren’t you?”
For a moment they stand there gawking at each other across a troubled space. Then in the next moment, Konig is out on the street, in the warm April sunlight of Madison Avenue. Running. Jostling through startled lunchtime crowds. Flying like a wild man, not even aware that he is crying.
»34«
“Digital imprint on wine bottle in kitchen.”
“Sixteen ridge characteristics in agreement with left forefinger.”
“Digital imprints on plate in kitchen sink.”
“Fourteen and ten ridge characteristics in agreement with left middle and ring fingers respectively.”
2:20 P.M. PRINT LAB, 17TH PRECINCT, NYPD.
“Digital imprint on canister of gelignite Type C in front foyer.”
“You got there sixteen ridge characteristics in agreement with right middle finger. Imprints of finger and thumb also identical.”
Haggard scribbles hastily on his pad. “What’s that left palmar imprint on the dining-room table look like?” Sergeant Leo Wershba holds a set of print cards up to the light, scanning them quickly with his bright, shrewd eyes. “Pretty messy,” he says after a while. “It was a glass tabletop and it looks like somebody wiped it. But we got thirteen ridge characteristics in agreement.”
Haggard sighs, snaps his pad shut, and leans back in his chair. “Looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”
“Couldn’t look better, Frank. This is your boy.”
For a while the two men regard each other silently. “Lemme see that ugly puss again,” the detective growls. Wershba tosses a standard police mug shot across the desk at Haggard, who lights a cigarette while studying it intently. “Janos Klejew—How the hell you pronounce that?”
“Klejewski—the w is silent.”
“Klejewski.” Haggard says it over and over again, forming the word slowly with his lips. “Lovely-looking boy, isn’t he?”
“I’m sure his mother thinks so.” Wershba, a short, moon-faced man with a bald head and enormous compensatory mustache, smiles brightly. “I got a book on this guy as thick as the Manhattan Yellow Pages.”
“Klejewski.” Haggard resumes his quick, barely audible lipreading. “Known to associates as Kunj or Kunje. Has repeatedly been identified with persons who advocate the use of explosives and may have acquired firearms. Considered extremely dangerous.”
The detective’s eyes range over the broad, flat, slightly acromegalic features. They are thick and not at all sharply defined. There is, too, something profoundly disquieting about the eyes, a blank, drowsy quality beyond which lurks an air of easily eruptible violence.
&n
bsp; “Big mother, ain’t he?” says Wershba, reading the detective’s thoughts.
“Got any leads?”
“Maybe. Who knows? Nothing that amounts to very much anyway. Got an all-points out for him now, but the guy’s been at large two years. Busted out of stir twenty-three months ago. And this bombworks up on Fox Street is the first pickup we got on him in all that time.”
“What was he in for?”
“Arson—Kunje has a fondness for matches and big firecrackers.”
Haggard nods slowly. “Where’d you say he busted from?”
“I didn’t But it was Danbury.”
“Danbury?” The detective ponders the word aloud, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. “Wasn’t that where—”
“—Meacham was,” Wershba says, glowing like a Christmas light. “Right you are, pal. That’s where the two lovelies met.”
“Jesus.” Haggard’s fist cracks loudly in the palm of his hand. “If I can only get my hands on the son of a bitch he’ll lead me right to Meacham.”
“What makes you so sure they’re not together right now?”
“No way.” Haggard shakes his head. “All you hadda do was see this place up in The Bronx. Clothes in the drawers, food still on the plates in the kitchen. They left prints all over the place. They got out fast. Then all of ’em split. Went separate ways.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“A mob that size? Eight or nine freaks traveling together? Stand out like a sore thumb. Nope—they split, probably with plans to meet at some future time. Meacham and maybe two, three of the other freaks took the girl with them. The rest of ’em all went their own ways.” Haggard hops to his feet and starts pacing. “Identify any of the other prints up there?”
“Not yet. Still working on it. But Meacham and Klejewski we got nailed. Both on the Fox Street place and the loft on Varick. We’ll get you the others too. All we need is a little time.”
“That’s all you got, Wershba. Just a little. If I read this Meacham right, he isn’t giving us much more than that.”
»35«
“Humerus—32.3 centimeters.”
“Is that left or right?”
“Right. But the left is the same.”
2:30 P.M. MORTUARY. MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE.
“Radius—23.3 right, 23.2 left.” Tom McCloskey deftly completes tape measurements of a set of upper limbs and proceeds without pause to the legs. “Femur—43.1 centimeters right, 43.1 centimeters left. Tibia is 34 on both right and left.”
“Thirty-four both right and left tibia.” Pearsall jots figures quickly on a pad. “So directly measured with trunk length, neck, head, lower limbs, and deducting the two centimeters for postmortem lengthening, that puts our friend Rolfe at 188 centimeters. Right?”
“Right.” McCloskey nods. “Say about six feet two inches.”
“About six feet two inches.” Pearsall scribbles on his pad. “Okay. What do we have on Ferde?”
“Nothing as good as we have on Rolfe.”
They have both fallen quickly into the use of the adoptive names with which Konig has christened the dismembered corpses and taped to each of their wrists the night before.
“Since the torso’s incomplete, I had to rely entirely on the Pearson formulae.”
“No choice, really.” Pearsall sighs and peers through bottle-thick lenses at McCloskey’s carefully elaborated tables of computation. “At best, all we can say we have then on Ferde is a projection of stature based on average proportion of limbs in relation to total stature.”
“’Fraid so.” McCloskey shrugs. “With a built-in probability of error of two to eight centimeters.”
“Which I see you’ve already figured in,” Pearsall says, studying the chart. “So with all things considered, you put Ferde at—”
“One hundred and sixty-four centimeters.”
“Small—five feet four, five feet five.”
“Roughly speaking. And I still find the sex ambiguous.” Pearsall glances up, a little surprised. “You do?”
“Sure. No lower torso. No pelvis. No genitalia. That’s pretty ambiguous right there.”
“You used Pearson’s tables for sexing the limbs?”
“I did. And it’s still ambiguous. Could be either a female or a very small male.”
“What about secondary sex characteristics?”
“Nothing conclusive. There are just too many variables and overlappings in the secondary system. And all that hair and musculature stripped from the body.” McClos-key shrugs again. “I just don’t know.”
Pearsall, followed by the younger man, walks back to the long steel tables where the two reassembled corpses lie supine and oblivious, like sarcophagi figures—ancient kings, newly excavated.
Pearsall begins a casual examination of the corpse called Ferde. First he studies the head and face, or what remains of them. Because the skin has been completely peeled from the skull and face, except for two tiny patches, the hair of neither head nor face remains to give any hint of sex.
“What about the larynx?”
McCloskey smiles wearily. “See for yourself.”
In the next moment, Pearsall, armed with tape and calipers, is measuring the cadaver’s larynx.
When Ferde’s head was severed from the trunk, the larynx had remained attached to the head. The level of decapitation was between the fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae. And, although the larynx normally extends down to the sixth cervical vertebra, Ferde’s was so small that it was found almost in situ above the plane of severance, which extended backward from the level of the lower border of the chin.
Pearsall is well aware that the larynx of a man is, on the whole, about one-third larger than that of a woman. The average length of the adult male larynx is nearly two inches. That of the female, about an inch and a half. Ferde’s larynx on Pearsall’s calipers measures 3 centimeters, or less than an inch and a quarter.
“That is a small larynx for a male.” Pearsall shakes his head perplexedly. “Even a very young male. How old did you figure this one?”
“Just based on limbs and skull sutures,” McCloskey stares ceilingward and computes aloud, “oh, I’d say between eighteen and twenty.”
“Odd,” Pearsall ponders aloud. “A larynx of that size in a male of that age.”
“Couldn’t agree with you more.” McCloskey nods. “That’s why I say it’s ambiguous.”
“I wonder where Paul gets the idea this is a male?”
“Beats me. If it is, it’s a very small one.”
“’Lo chaps,” a voice booms cheerily behind the two men. They turn in time to see Carl Strang breeze through the swinging doors and bound energetically up to them. He stops dead in his tracks, seeing the consternation on their faces. “My, my, pitched in gloom, you two. So sober. So earnest.”
Pearsall’s brow furrows. “We’re stuck on the sex of this damned thing.”
“The Chief seems pretty sure it’s a male,” McCloskey says.
“Oh?” Strang’s eyes sweep quickly over the corpse and settle on the paper wrist tag. He tilts his head to read it. “Ferde, ay? Doesn’t look like any Ferde to me.”
Pronounced at once and with such finality as to give it the ring of Holy Writ, both Pearsall and McCloskey are momentarily stunned. Strang continues. “It’s perfectly clear to me this little beauty is a female, and it’s not simply the fancy fingernail polish either. Just look at the stature of the thing—the limbs, the larynx.”
“We’ve just been all through the limbs and larynx,” Pearsall mutters impatiently.
But Strang barges ahead cheerily. “I don’t have to measure the damned thing to see it’s the larynx of a small female—say about nineteen or twenty. And for Chrissake, look at the skull. That’s no male skull. See how delicate it is. How effeminate. Feeble superciliary arches. Thin orbital margins. Vertical slope. Distinct frontal eminences. And just look at those occipital and mastoid regions. Small mastoid process. No muscular markings. My God—you
can read it like a book. That’s no male, chaps. That’s a lady. A poor, sweet young thing come to a sticky finish.” Strang’s lecture concludes with a triumphal flourish, a burst of laughter, and patronizing good will for his baffled colleagues. “Now cheer up, the both of you.”
But Strang’s breeziness, his absolutely unhesitating certainty, rather than relieving their doubts, have only pitched them into deeper gloom.
“You make it sound very convincing, Carl.” Pearsall frowns.
“It is convincing because it’s true. You know it’s true. Both of you.” Strang’s manner has gone from good will to that of faintly amused scorn. “Know what’s wrong with you chaps? Not only you two but all of this damned staff around here. You’re all afraid to think for yourselves. To make an independent judgment. And do you know why? I’ll tell you why.” Strang smiles and there’s a spiteful glint in his eyes. “It’s because you’ve all had your balls cut off by the man upstairs. Dr. Big. Lord God Almighty, for whom we labor daily to his greater glory. He sticks a male name tag on the wrist of a stiff and even though all your training, all your experience, tell you that stiff is a female, you can’t get yourself to believe that you’re right and Dr. Big is wrong. What a funk. What a goddamned pitiful funk you’re all in.”
McCloskey stands there frozen speechless. Pearsall’s frown has turned to a glower. A broad swatch of crimson has leaped to his throat and is now beginning to flame up his cheeks. “That’s true, Carl,” his voice chokes. “What you say is perfectly true. We do listen to Paul Konig. Wait for his final reading on a case. What Paul Konig has already forgotten, most of us have yet to learn. He knows more in his little finger than the whole goddamned total of us combined.” He struggles to suppress the tremor in his voice. “Now if Paul Konig has come in here and tagged this cadaver Ferde, it’s because it damned well is a Ferdinand and not a Sally or a Joan. If Paul Konig says this poor battered, chopped-up heap of flesh and bone is a male cadaver, then it damned well is a male cadaver. Konig is the Chief, and when Konig speaks, he knows. He’s proved that time and time again in more cases and throughout more years than I care to remember. He’s got a track record no one else in this business has ever come close to. That’s why, Carl, when Konig speaks, we listen. He’s the Chief and he’s still the best. When you’re the Chief, hopefully we’ll be able to listen to you too.”
City of the Dead Page 22
