City of the Dead

»48«

“You Haggard?”

“Right.”

“Sid Fox. Wershba told me you were coming.”

“On? Did he way what for?”

“Just a little. Come on in. We’re holding three of ’em over in the mail room of the First National.”

Patrol cars. Fire engines, Mobile TV vans. Throngs of people milling about the entrance of the building. Police cordons. The sound of sirens converging on the spot. Thrown about the 45th Street entrance, a large semicircle of patrol cars, doors open, dome lights rotating. More patrol cars nosing their way slowly up through the cordoned-off street between Vanderbilt and Lexington Avenues.

The door of the patrol car slams behind Haggard as he and Sergeant Fox push through the crowds, preceded by a flying wedge made up of a half-dozen patrolmen running interference.

“How come you got ’em in the bank?” Haggard asks over his shoulder. “They try to bust the pace?”

“Nope—just happened to be convenient. Right up ahead there through the lobby, Lieutenant. Ground floor on your right.”

They spin through revolving doors. Several firemen speed past—men in helmets, bright-red riot jackets—hauling buckets of sand, lines of fire hose.

“How many of ’em you say you got?” asks Haggard.

“Three. There are two more up there. Got ’em pretty well sealed off between the thirty-fifth floor and the rooftop. Pulled around a half-dozen bombs out of the place already.”

“Where’d you find ’em?”

“Trash cans. Mail chutes. Stairwells mostly. They were seeding the joint.”

“Think you got ’em all?”

“Don’t know. It’s a big building. We’re scouring the place from boiler room to rooftop. Got a restaurant up there. Caught a lot of people eating lunch.”

“Get ’em all out?”

Up ahead a patrolman swings a pair of heavy glass doors open before them.

“That was easy.” says Fox. “Manager wasn’t all that happy about it. Wanted us to wait and let ’em have their dessert so he could charge ’em full price.”

They swing on through the glass doers of the First National City Bank, located just below the mezzanine. Inside the bank the hum and buzz of disrupted enterprise going on amidst a semblance of order. Bombs or no bombs, it is business as usual at the bank. Unsuspecting clients bustle in, wanting to cash checks, make deposits, negotiate loans. They’re suddenly caught up in the subdued chaos of the place. Hordes of police, frightened sellers, harried bank officials scurrying about, red in the face, talking in whispers, calming, soothing, reassuring both clients and personnel.

“Right up this way, Sarge.” A patrolman waves them on through a small corridor leading to the back.

“Get anything out of them yet?” Haggard asks.

“Nope. Shut tight as clams.”

Haggard sighs, pushes on through a heavy walnut door and then another door with a pane of frosted glass, the words MAIL ROOM stenciled in gold letters upon it. “All right—let’s take ’em one at a time.”

Beyond the glass door a large mail room. Boxes, cartons, U.S. Post Office canvas wagons, Pitney-Bowes franking machines, an immense wall of pigeonholes, each crammed with envelopes, more bundles of letters waiting to be sorted. And the place crawling with patrolmen and detectives.

Off to one corner, three white youths sit. Somewhere between the ages of eighteen and twenty. They wear identical outfits consisting of fatigue jackets, combat boots, berets. They sit dazed and sullen, slumped in chairs against the wall, while a beefy Irish patrolman named O’Doyle hovers above them, pad and pencil in hand, apparently questioning each.

“Okay, O’Doyle,” says Fox, marching up, “I’ll take it from here.”

“Right, Sarge.” The cop shoots a disapproving scowl at his charges.

“Get anything out of ’em?” Haggard asks.

“Not a thing, Lieutenant. They’re nasty little beggars.” O’Doyle shoots another scowl toward the three youths, speaking suddenly quite loud. “If they give you any smart-ass, Lieutenant, just let me know. Particularly that little mouse-eared bastard over there. Thinks he’s a tough one.”

O’Doyle juts a stubby finger in the direction of a small, pallid, intense youth, more sullen, obviously more defiant, than the other two. “Just lemme know if he gets funny with you, Lieutenant.”

“Righto,” Haggard murmurs softly, his restless, searching blue eyes already recording, assessing, evaluating. “Leave that one here for me. You can take the other two out with you.”

The big patrolman lumbers swiftly toward the youths. “On your feet, you two.” He turns then to the small, sullen youth left behind. “Hear that, sonny?” O’Doyle snaps. “You smart-ass the lieutenant here, I’ll tear your nose off.”

A few of the other patrolmen chuckle, then move out behind O’Doyle and the two boys.

For a long while after they’ve gone Haggard ignores the boy. He studies some notes, gazes thoughtfully around the room, chats quietly off to one side with Fox, letting the youth stew a bit.

Then suddenly he turns, marches back, coming abruptly at the boy, taking him by surprise. “Stand up.”

“What?” Startled, the boy gazes up only to see those two small pebbly blue eyes boring down upon him.

“Stand up, I said.”

The boy continues to sit, an impudent little smirk creeping slowly across his face. In the next moment he is jacked straight to his feet, hauled up unceremoniously by the collar, and rammed up hard against the wall.

“When I say stand,” Haggard snarls between gritted teeth, “I mean stand.”

“Hey, now look, man—”

“Man?” Haggard’s eyes bulge from his head. His voice booms like a clap of thunder. “Man? Who the hell are you calling man? My name isn’t man. When you address me, it’s Lieutenant, or sir, or your Lordship. None of this man crap. Get it?” He crowds the boy up harder against the wall, twisting the collar tighter around his throat, so that he makes a gagging sound. “Get it, sonny?”

Red-faced and gasping, the boy nods with some difficulty, while Haggard’s huge paw tightens its grip on his collar.

“Now, what’s your name?”

This time the youth, cheeks flared red, eyes tearing not from hurt but inner rage, swallows hard.

“Name?” Haggard says once more.

“I refuse to answer any questions until I’ve had benefit of counsel,” the boy says, bristling with defiance. He’s obviously educated. Middle class. And with that snotty, well-fed, never-deprived manner, that you-can’t-do-anything-to-me attitude of a youth brought up in a comfortable suburb who’s never had to contend with anything more than his own boredom.

“Benefit of counsel.” Haggard whistles, and calls over his shoulder at Fox. “I take it he’s been apprised of his rights.”

“He has, Lieutenant. Name is Douglas Mears. Seventeen years old. Comes from Greenwich, Connecticut, according to identification in his wallet.”

Haggard’s beady eyes pin the youth back hard against the wall. “Don’t you have anything better to do with your time, Douglas, than making a goddamn pain in the ass of yourself?”

“I refuse to say another word until I’ve had the benefit of legal counsel.”

“Endangering the lives of a lot of innocent people? Dressed up in that silly costume—a beret and a fatigue jacket? Like a road-company Fidel Castro.”

“I refuse to—”

A sharp crack across the jaw from Haggard’s open palm stifles the rest of the reply.

“He call his lawyer?” the detective asks.

“His father’s his lawyer.”

A slow, mean grin widens Haggard’s features. “That so, Douglas?”

“It damned well is,” the boy hisses. “And you’re gonna be sorry you used your hands on me.”

“Me? Sorry?” Haggard laughs out loud. “That little shot’s given me more pleasure than I’ve had all week.”

Fox lifts a heavy section of lead pipe and walks it slowly across the room to Haggard. “Caught him with this little beauty in a stairwell on the thirty-second floor.” Haggard takes the device, now safely deactivated, and studies it. It’s a pipe bomb of a fairly typical sort—center filled with about a pound of gelignite, simple wire fuse. A fairly crude thing. A child might have easily assembled it.

“Pretty stupid for a smart boy like you, Douglas.” Haggard slowly shakes his head from side to side. “Getting caught like that, holding all the goods. Hope Papa’s a good lawyer.”

Haggard and Fox both laugh spitefully. In the next moment, the boy’s cockiness appears to melt a bit. Suddenly his eyes seem puzzled and not a little frightened. “Like I told the other pig—”

“Pig?” Haggard wheels and peers hard at him.

“That’s right.” The boy sneers. “That pig cop.” He thrusts a finger at Sergeant Fox.

“Hear that, Fox,” Haggard calls over his shoulder. “Douglas here calls you a pig.”

“That’s a lie,” Fox says, deeply aggrieved. “I’m a Democrat.”

“That was very unkind of you, Douglas,” says Haggard sorrowfully. “The sergeant here is a very fair man. A Democrat. A husband. A father. Would you call his children sucklings?”

“I’m sorry,” young Mears stammers, obviously baffled. “I didn’t mean—I meant only him. That guy.”

“What guy?” says Haggard, staring around as if he saw no one.

“That guy.” Once again the boy thrusts his finger at Fox.

“Oh, you mean the sergeant?”

“That’s right.”

“Well then, Douglas, say that. Say ‘the sergeant.’”

“Yeah—like I told him.”

“Not him, Douglas—the sergeant. Say ‘the sergeant.’”

“The sergeant—like I told the sergeant.”

“That’s better,” Haggard says gently.

The boy’s face is flooded with exasperation. “I was just standing around—”

“In the stairwell?”

“Yeah—in the stairwell.”

“Do you always stand around in stairwells, Douglas?”

“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.