City of the Dead

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“No—we got no Salvation Army customers, pal. The way my customers pay bills, I’m the only Salvation Army around-here.”

“Know what you mean. Thanks a lot.”

“My pleasure, pal.”

Sergeant Edward Flynn stands outside a small neighborhood grocery that happens to sell newspapers and magazines. “QUINONES Bodega” it says in faded yellow letters on the window. Then the word “Grocery” printed in smaller letters beneath it.

Flynn stands there in the bright April sunlight scanning a list of seventy names of which Mr. Quinones was the forty-third. Incredibly, at 9:30 this morning, Mr. Stanley Charles had furnished him with a list of names. In alphabetical order, it had been scaled down from the intial hundred-odd retailers who on March 31 might have sold issue number 3118 of the Clintonian to a man who may or may not have been a Salvation Army officer.

“Don’t thank me,” snarled Stanley Charles, much beleaguered and fuming, muttering intermittently _about the “lawyer leeches” and the “tax bastards.”

“Thank the little fourteen-year-old black kid who works for me on the trucks. He’s better than all the goddamned computers put together.”

“You mean he actually worked out a system with those serial numbers?” Flynn asks incredulously.

“Yeah, but don’t ask me to explain it. He tried to explain it to me but I’ll be damned if I can understand it. Something about the order he stacks them on the truck for delivery. Anyway, he narrowed down the list of 100 or so to the bare possibilities. That’s seventy names. They’re in alphabetical order. That’s all I can do. The rest is up to you.”

And so it was. Since ten o’clock that morning he’d seen forty-three people. He’d walked up and down Eighth and Ninth Avenues between 40th and 59th Streets. Then he’d trudged as far west as Eleventh Avenue, where he could see the river and smell the warm, bilgy odors of it. He’d been to newsstands, luncheonettes, drugstores, supermarkets, groceries, subway vendors—any place where newspapers were sold. Asking the same questions and getting the same unsatisfying answers. Certainly no one recognized the serial number, which was never listed on their invoices from the distributor. And so far no one had a customer who walked around in the uniform of a Salvation Army officer.

It is quite warm now, and from where Flynn stands he can see way down to the piers on the river and the big white smokestacks of a docked Italian liner, its gaily colored pennants flapping listlessly in the breeze, and gulls screeching overhead. It makes him think of travel; foreign lands; long, white sandy beaches; palm trees waving; beautiful, accessible women—many things he’s never had.

The gentle breeze is soughing eastward off the river, bringing with it the smell of low tide. Flynn is hot and tired. His feet hurt and his underwear, sticking to his seat, has chafed a raw welt on his inner thigh.

There are twenty-seven names left on his list. He is physically incapable, he knows, of finishing the list today. But before quitting, he will see just a few more.

Next on the list is a newsstand vendor by the name of Resnikoff—Tenth and 49th. After that, Siegel’s candy store—Eleventh and 49th. After that, a grocer by the name of Salerno—Eleventh and 46th.

At that very moment, Francis Haggard is leaving the New York offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation on East 69th Street. He’d spent the afternoon there going through mug shots, comparing prints and data with the Federal agents assigned to the Lauren Konig case.

Because of a number of remarkably similar incidents involving the bombing of public buildings in the greater Boston area, the Bureau has a theory that both Wally Meacham and Janos Klejewski are somewhere in that vicinity with a number of their cohorts, as well as with Lauren Konig. For that reason they have concentrated their search in the Boston area, going as far north as Concord, as far south as Walpole.

They had presented to Haggard that day a lot of solid evidence to substantiate their beliefs, the most impressive being a recent sighting of Janos Klejewski, positively identified on closed-circuit television during the course of a bank robbery in Boston nearly a week ago. The second link in that theory is substantiated by the Bureau’s contacts with paid informers who insist that Meacham and Klejewski, old friends from Danbury days, are back working together again.

Finally, the Bureau’s agents concluded on a somewhat more ominous note. The body of a young girl had been exhumed from a peat bog outside of Worcester three days ago. She’d been beaten, strangled, put in a sack, then submerged in the bog. She’d been part of Meacham’s coterie—in fact, his girl friend.

The force of the first two facts is impressive. The third is something the detective doesn’t even wish to contemplate. But Haggard is still dubious. He cannot refute videotape or privileged information bought at high cost from reliable sources. But all his instincts tell him that Meacham is right here in the city. It’s not merely yesterday’s fiasco in Forest Park that makes him feel that. That could have simply been a few of Meacham’s people doing business for him down in the city while he remains far north, up in New England, out of harm’s way. In fact, that would be the most sensible thing for Meacham to have done, Haggard reasons, with so much heat on for him in the city.

Still, the detective cannot let go of the idea that Wally Meacham is somewhere right around him. Under his nose, so to speak. Within spitting distance. Most important, however, and to his distinct disadvantage, he could not possibly know that both Meacham and Lolly had been at Konig’s house the night before. How could he? Konig hadn’t told him. Nor did he intend to. And had Haggard known that Konig was keeping such crucial information from him, he probably would not have blamed him. Not after the colossal blunder of the day before.

More perplexed than ever, and with a slow but relentlessly mounting sense of panic, of time slipping through his fingers, the detective starts for home.

In Riverdale, Paul Konig has just finished hanging the portrait of Ida. He’s hung it in a commanding position, directly above the marble mantel, having removed from that spot a fine old Hudson River painting. The effect of it has been to brighten the room immeasurably. The brilliant seaside light of Montauk seems to be shimmering off the canvas. It pierces the musty, tenebrous shadows of the room like a shaft of sunlight, and Ida’s smile, glowing there above him, has a salubrious effect So much so that for those brief moments he feels very close to her. Once again her spirit is back with him in the house.

He checks his watch now. He has been checking it all day. It is nearly 6 p.m. and the countdown to 3 a.m. is already well under way. Moving about the house now, his feet have almost a spring to them. He has stocked the refrigerator with food, the first of any substance that has been in there in months. On the walls of the stairway he has hung Lolly’s three small paintings. Going up the stairs he chuckles gleefully as he views them. And upstairs in his den his fishing rods and tackle box are out, bright, gaily colored plugs lie scattered all about, oil and rags all waiting there for him to apply to the reels that he’s brought down from the attic.

Once more he glances quickly at his watch.