“Like I told the sergeant here, I was delivering a package to one of the offices up there—”
“Good. We can check the package and the return address on it later. Please continue.”
“And this guy comes up to me.”
“In the stairwell?”
“Yeah—in the stairwell. And he hands me that.”
“The pipe?”
“Yeah. And he says, ‘Hold this for me, please. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’”
“Oh, I see,” says Haggard with his most effusive magnanimity. “This guy, the one who comes up to you in the stairwell. Ever see him before?”
“No. Never.”
“And so you just stood there holding the pipe for him?”
“Yeah,” the boy says, full of fake bravado. “That’s right.”
“Sounds perfectly plausible to me.” Haggard nods sympathetically. “What about you, Sergeant?”
“Sounds beautiful to me, Lieutenant.”
“Well, Douglas”—Haggard’s eyes twinkle merrily—“I hope Papa’s a real good lawyer. If he’s not, you’re going away for a long, long time.”
Haggard watches the defiance ooze from the boy’s eyes. Soon, he is certain, in just a few more minutes of questioning, those snotty, self-assured postures, all learned and imitated from trashy TV crime serials, will start to run all leaky and soft, like an overripe cheese.
“As it turns out, Douglas,” the detective goes on now, almost liltingly, “I’m not very interested in you. You’re too dumb to hold my attention very long. You’re small stuff. A fart in the blizzard, as they say. But I do have a few questions I want answered. If you can answer them, who knows—it may win you some points from the judge. Personally, I hope it doesn’t. Personally, I hope they toss you into a hole for about thirty years and bury you there. Thirty years. That’s what the bombing of public buildings is going for on the open market these days. Am I right, Fox?”
“That’s right, Lieutenant. Twenty to thirty in the Federal cooler.”
“Let me see—that’ll make you almost fifty when you get out. Fifty’s not a bad age, Douglas. There’s still some time left to beat the world.” Haggard watches with harsh amusement the notion of lengthy incarceration register behind the boy’s eyes.
“In your travels as a bomber, Douglas,” he hammers on pitilessly, “ever run into a chap named Klejewski?”
“Who?”
“Klejewski—Janos Klejewski. Some people call him Kunj or Kunje.”
The boy ponders the name a moment, then shrugs. “Never heard of him. Who is he?”
“A big monkey. Likes to play around with firecrackers, like you. What about the name Meacham? Ever hear of a young dude called Wally Meacham?”
The boy stares blankly at the detective. And in that blank stare, the detective can read all too clearly the answer to his question. As he turns from the boy, he can feel all the hope he’d been savoring for the past hour or so—since Wershba had called him with something “hot”—running out from him now, running out the way time, too, was running out for him. Suddenly there is a cold sickness in the pit of his stomach.
Fox follows him out the mail-room door, closing it gently behind him. Then in the bank once more, together the two men, heads tilted toward each other, confer for a moment.
“These are not your guys, ay, Lieutenant?”
Haggard nods, stands silently, arms folded, wondering where to go next. What to try. He pushes the battered gray fedora far back on his head and scratches the scalp beneath the white, fleecy, cotton-candy hair. “’Fraid not These are just small-town kids come to the big city to make good. See that bomb in there? Junk. Tinny. Lot of mickey mouse. Couldn’t blow a note on a trombone with twenty of ’em. Nope, the boys I’m looking for are pretty sophisticated with this kind of stuff. Timing mechanisms. High-powered concentrated explosives. Japanese firing pins. The works. None of this cheap pipe stuff.” Haggard sighs. “‘Well—better be on my way.”
He crams the fedora forward on his head and pulls up the collar of the rumpled trench coat.
Fox sees him through the lobby of the Pan Am Building, back out to 45th Street, where the curious crowds are still milling.
“All this got something to do with the ME, don’t it?” he asks when they reach the waiting patrol car.
Standing at the open door of the car, Haggard cocks a sharp glance back at him. “Where’d you hear that?”
“Heard something about his daughter.”
“Who told you?”
“No one. It’s around though—grapevine stuff, that’s all.”
Haggard regards him silently for a while. Then slowly his index finger rises to the sergeant’s lips and remains there momentarily. A hushing gesture. Then he’s gone.
»49«
Call, goddamn you, call. Just tell me what you want and when you want it. I’ll get it. I’ll be there. Just call. Please call. Give me back my kid.
3:00 P.M. KONIG’S OFFICE.
The Chief sits in the stuffy shadows of his unlighted office. Behind a littered, unattended desk, he waits, staring unblinkingly at his telephone, all his concentration focused upon it, as if invoking some enormous effort of will to make it ring.
He has been sitting there for the past hour or so in those shadows, staring at the small, dark shape, conjuring it. In his head he carries on a series of imaginary dialogues with Wally Meacham. What he will say. How he will say it. What he will concede. He knows, of course, that he will concede everything. Everything is negotiable. But there is, too, buzzing annoyingly at the back of his head, Haggard’s stern admonition. “Don’t go it alone. Wait for me before you do a thing.”
Several times during that afternoon the phone has rung—reporters and the network lice trying to scare up a scandal. Not only do they have the delicious grisliness of a body-snatching scandal, but now it’s the Robinson business, and Carslin issuing a new press release every quarter-hour or so from the DA’s office. An opportunity for high moral dudgeon on the editorial page.
Konig had declined to speak with any of the media people. But when Benjamin called he had no choice but to speak. There was little doubt in his mind what the call was in regard to, and when the Deputy Mayor reminded him to appear the following morning at the DA’s office, he merely mumbled his assent. It occurred to him at that point that he didn’t particularly care what they did to him anymore.
Several times during the afternoon he had lumbered down the hall to Haggard’s office. There were questions and he was seeking reassurance. Finding no one there each time, he would leave vague, incoherent little notes on scraps of paper on the desk, then lumber back to his own office.
He had not been down to the autopsy rooms once that day. On his desk there were protocols to be read, death certificates to be signed, insurance reports to be filled out, innumerable calls and floods of mail to respond to. He had done nothing. He had let his work slide. He had assiduously avoided seeing any of his colleagues. He knew they had questions for him, as they always did, and that he was holding up their work unpardonably. He knew they sensed something was wrong. Drastically wrong. He knew they were uneasy and that they talked amongst themselves. That Strang, rest assured, was somewhere out there, even now, slandering him, promoting himself among the Mayor’s well-paid lackeys at City Hall.
For all that, he cared little. He viewed his dereliction of duties, his almost certain professional decline, with a rather eerie indifference. He dissociated himself from it, as if it were happening to someone else. Anyone seeing him just then, anyone who had known him, that is, known the enormous energy, that inexhaustible intellectual curiosity, would not have recognized him. They would have been struck dumb by the spectacle of this gray, haggard figure slumped untidily over his desk, work neglected, eyes glassy and dazed, jaw slack, the spectacular lassitude of the man.
Still, he sits there in the gathering shadows, staring at the phone and waiting. Then it rings. He jumps as the harsh jingle of the bell rouses him from
his torpor. He listens as Carver answers for him, lest it be the press, some prying reporter trying to make a name for himself. He hears the muffled tones of her voice through the closed door. Then a buzzer sounds on his own phone and he snatches it up.
“Flynn,” says Carver. “You want to talk to him?”
“Flynn?” For a moment the name doesn’t even register. “Flynn—God, no.” He starts to fling down the phone, then snatches it back. “Wait a minute—better put him on.”
A moment, a click, then Sergeant Edward Flynn talking. At first it’s all jokes, mild banter, chatter. All unintelligible. Too fast. His drugged, torpid mind can scarcely keep up.
“—and that’s when Browder—”
“Browder?”
“What?”
“You just mentioned Browder.”
“I know,” says Flynn, puzzlement in his voice. “What about him?”
The name has caused Konig’s mind to clear a bit, like a fog beginning to rise. “You just said something about Browder.”
“I know I did. Ain’tcha been listenin’? I said we got his prints up from Bragg. They match a set we found all over that shack.”
“Oh,” Konig says, lapsing once more into indifference. “Nothing else?”
“Nothin’ else? Isn’t that enough? We got ID’s on the two of them now. What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? You sick?”
“I’m fine,” Konig mutters. “Just a toothache. Where you been?”
“South Street. Lookin’ over some real estate.”
“What real estate? What the hell is this real estate you keep babbling about?”
Flynn sighs like a man sorely put upon.
“The real estate I keep babblin’ about, my friend, is the old Salvation Army shelter down there.”
“Salvation Army?” Konig repeats the words slowly; then something suddenly inquisitive comes into his tone. “Find anything?”
“Nothin’,” Flynn snaps. “Pretty much of a dead end. Just the way I think this Salvation Army phantom is gonna be a dead end. Place’s been shut up ten years. Lots of old furniture and junk. Rats and leaky faucets. Nothin’ much else.”
Konig ponders this information for a while. “So where do you go from here?”
“I don’t know.” Flynn chuckles. “I’m up a tree. We pulled about a dozen different sets of prints out of that shack. We’re trackin’ every one of them down. We’re casin’ the neighborhood, pullin’ in local derelicts. Anyone who can give us a lead. Even got a couple of guys dressed like winos prowlin’ around the area with a few pints of Thunderbird on their hips. So far, nothin’. The only real lead we got is this so-called Salvation Army guy, and I don’t think that’s gonna pan out.”
Even as Flynn’s voice drones on, Konig’s mind is elsewhere, his eyes roaming restlessly around the office.
“So I don’t put too much hope in—”
Suddenly Konig’s wandering gaze falls on a shadowy place beneath a long trestle table opposite his desk. It’s a table full of reports, books to be read, specimens excised from cadavers, sections of organs enclosed in jars of formalin. He is staring intently at a cheap, shabby suitcase. The kind of vinyl thing purchased in a Whelan’s or a Liggett’s for about $5.99. This one is old and battered. Scored with mud and old college paper pennants. It is the suitcase in which the two severed heads exhumed from beneath the shack near Coenties Slip arrived at the Medical Examiner’s office.
Konig has a sudden sharp memory of opening that case, the trembling, anxious fingers fidgeting at the clasps, the almost breathless sense of expectation as he unwrapped each head from the newspaper coverings—Newspaper coverings.
Suddenly he’s on his feet, talking quickly, breaking abruptly into Flynn’s chatty conversation. “Listen—where are you?”
“What?”
“I said, where are you? Where the hell are you right now?”
“Where am I?” Flynn goes suddenly peevish. “I’m in a piss-hole phone booth talkin’ to you, goddamnit.”
“Where? What phone booth?”
“Outside a Howard Johnson’s on Eighth Street. What the hell does that—”
“Give me the number.”
“The number?”
“Yes, the phone number. Are you thick? Goddamnit, give me the phone number. I’ll call you back in five minutes.”
The moment after he’s hung up Konig is lumbering across the room to the trestle table, stooping and hauling up the battered little suitcase, prying open its rusty clasp, plunging his hands into the smeared, crumpled news-sheets.
It’s not the sheets of the Daily News or the Post he’s looking for. These are there in abundance—mud-streaked, bits of clotted gore still clinging here and there, a slight excremental odor rising all about them. All these are dated between March 27 and March 31, all quite consistent with a time of death having been established at approximately April 1.
But these are not what he’s looking for. Several days back, when the heads arrived in that small satchel, shortly after he had succeeded in assigning each head to its proper trunk, he recalls coming back to this grisly little carrying case and picking through the papers. Then, oddly enough, he recalls sitting down at a chair by the window and reading them—one in particular.
Riffling now hectically through those same old newspapers, he ransacks his brain, trying to recall exactly what it was he read that sticks so sharply in some dark, inaccessible corner of his mind.
There is a great deal of international and national news that flies past his eyes. Strife in the Middle East. Bombings in London. Mass starvation in Pakistan. Senate investigations of the Chief Executive. On the moldy yellowing pages of the Daily News, Konig pauses over the face of a murdered policeman; an East Side madam along with a stable of her hostesses being arraigned in night court; the picture of a small, timid-looking fellow with ferret eyes and a goatee who’d beaten his three-year-old daughter to death.
Still, that’s not what he’s looking for. He rummages on, tears like a cyclone through this noisome paper, bits of human hair, brain tissue mizzling downward as his feverish eyes search. If he could only recall what it was he’d been reading that night. Or wasn’t it early in the morning after having worked through the night? It was that night, after McCloskey had gone home, and he’d finally succeeded, along about four or five in the morning, to assign each head properly to a body. He’d sat down in that straight-backed chair over there by the window. It was warm in the office and so he’d opened the window. The damp night air came in and cooled him. Roused a bit his tired brain. And then he’d started reading. It was something about—Something about—a contest. A beauty contest. That was it, a beauty contest. Feeling a sense of mounting excitement, he mutters the words aloud to himself, “A beauty contest,” and in that quiet moment of articulation, the words just off his lips, in his mind’s eye he sees a picture. It is a photograph of a tall, angular girl in a bathing suit. She wears a banner across her bosom, and as a man, shorter than she, reaches up to crown her with a cheap rhinestone tiara, she is smiling a wide, toothsome Latin smile.
Then suddenly, even as his mind is conjuring the page, there it is—crumpled, wadded, buried somewhere near the bottom. In the next moment he’s holding it in trembling hands, sweeping off debris, smoothing out the creases of the page on ihe surface of the long trestle table. And there, finally, is the very picture he imagined—the smiling girl; the short gentleman with the tiara. Above it, a headline, partially torn and obliterated, reads:
CARNIVAL QUEEN CROWNED
Then an inverted pyramidal subhead: “Gloria Melendez to Represent Clinton at City-Wide Beauty Finals.”
His eyes gloss quickly over the story, all the details suddenly flooding back to him. Then he realizes what it was that had registered in his mind, several days back, but which, at the time, he didn’t fully comprehend. It’s not the story, which is innocuous and common enough to be completely forgotten moments after it’s read. No. Rather it’s the page upon which the story appears
. Not a page of one of the big city dailies that are crammed into that valise. Instead, it is the front page of a small publication called the Clintonian, one of those little community sheets that come out three or four times a year, distributed as a special slip edition with one of the larger tabloids.
Somewhat smaller than a regular tabloid-size page, this one is crammed with news about the Clinton community, that sprawling ghettolike area running north and south through the Forties and Fifties, and east and west from Eighth Avenue all the way to the Hudson River. Once known as Hell’s Kitchen, it is now an area in rapid flux. Crumbling old brownstones next to urban-renewal projects. Factories and warehouses side by side with small merchants—Greek butchers, Italian bakers, Puerto Rican bodegas and costermongers. Black dudes and their hookers. And the lower-middle classes there fleeing burgeoning crime.
And that’s what had stuck in Konig’s head. Not the pretty Puerto Rican girl with the cheap tiara crown. No. It was this little neighborhood newspaper, crammed full of homey little items about a famous local community. Mr. Karolides, the butcher, announces the engagement of his daughter, Rosanna, to Nicholas Magos, a local florist. Mr. Joseph Pappalia slashes all prices by half in his small haberdashery. A picture of Miss Lottie Munoz, proprietor of a local beauty parlor, waving the hair of Miss Flossie Jewel, cashier at the local cinema, and so forth.
Konig rummages about in the valise for other pages of the publication, but this is the only one he finds. The front page. It bears the date, Sunday, March 31, 1974. In the upper right-hand corner is the serial number 3118. On the opposite side of the page is the photograph of Gloria Melendez.
In the next moment, Konig is back on the phone, dialing Flynn at the phone booth on 8th Street.
“Where the hell ya been?” Flynn growls before Konig can get a word out. “There’s three people waitin’ on line outside this goddamn booth making faces at me.”
“Make a face back,” snarls Konig. “Now listen to me.”
“You said five minutes,” Flynn carps. “Instead you keep me waitin’—”
City of the Dead Page 30
