City of the Dead

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“She did or she didn’t?”

“I said she did.”

“I know, but a minute ago you said she didn’t.”

“I said she hung up a minute after she heard the clicking.”

“No, you didn’t, Paul. You said she hung up right after the clicking. Right after is not a minute after. A minute after right after is fifty-nine seconds.”

Konig sits opposite a tall, sinewy man, late fifties, with red leathery skin, a craggily handsome pockmarked face, and the small, vivid blue eyes of a china doll. The man wears sleeve garters and a shoulder holster. With his boyish face and flocculent, cotton-candy hair, he gives the impression of a man gone prematurely white overnight.

“What the hell’s the difference?” Konig bellows.

“Plenty, my friend, plenty. And stop shouting at me.”

A shaft of dust-blown sunlight streams through the window at Francis Xavier Haggard’s back, slants across his litter-strewn desk, and falls on a 6″ x 9″ white form headed DD13. The form trembles ever so slightly in Haggard’s long, bony, curiously artistic hand—the hand of a sculptor or a musician, certainly not the hand of a detective.

“She knows the calls are being traced.” Konig’s face flushes a violent red. “Sounds like a goddamned drum when that thing starts banging.”

“But still she keeps right on calling—right?”

“Right. But I want that thing off my phone. Here, as well as at home.”

“Fine. Take it off. But when that goes, I go, too—right? I’m off the case—right?”

“I don’t want you off the case. I want you on.”

“Oh, no, pal. It doesn’t work that way. My way or no way.”

“It’s been your way for five months.”

“Fine. It may have to be my way another five months.”

“Oh, no. No, sir.”

“Fine. Do it your way. I’m off the case.”

Konig flings his hands upward in despair. “That tracer is no goddamned good. It inhibits her. She won’t even talk to me with—”

“A minute ago you said she knew there was a tracer on that phone—right?”

“Sure, but—”

“Never mind the ‘buts.’ You said it—right?”

“Well, you’d have to be one helluva God-awful idiot not to—”

“So obviously it doesn’t matter to her whether the line’s bugged or not—right?”

“Will you please stop with that ‘right’ thing every other minute?”

“She calls, doesn’t she? Lemme see—she’s called”—Haggard’s long, bony fingers moves like fate down the black-ruled lines of the DD13: Konig, Lauren. Age 22. Sex female. Caucasian. Ht. 5′ 6″. Wt. 118… Last seen—“six times the past three months—right? So bug or no bug, she keeps calling—right?”

“Sure. Then hangs up the minute the goddamned clicking starts.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. I’ve seen enough of this kind of stuff in my time to know this kid’s calling for a reason. She needs to hear a friendly voice. And this card—” Haggard plucks up Lolly’s birthday card and examines it. “You know, you do look a little like this goddamned bear.”

“Christ!” Konig bolts up, winces at the sharp pain in his leg, then starts prowling up and down the room. “I want results. I want something to happen.”

“Sure you do. Sure you do. So do I. But I told you this wasn’t gonna be easy. No Social Security. No work record. An assumed name. If she keeps still, minds her own business, what the Bell are we supposed to go on?”

“I don’t care what the hell you’re supposed to go on.”

“There are eight million people in this city—eighteen thousand kids each year on the lam.”

“I don’t care if there are ten—fifteen—fifty million. Spare me the statistics. I want my kid back.”

The small blue china doll’s eyes fix on Konig very steadily. “And that’s another thing, Paul. Your kid isn’t a kid anymore—”

“My kid—”

“You gotta start to accept that. She’s over eighteen now. Leaving home’s not a criminal offense when you’re over eighteen. As far as the law’s concerned, technically she isn’t even a missing person.”

“Well, if she’s not”—Konig’s face is now a dangerous purple—“if she’s not, I wish to hell you’d tell me exactly what she then A girl gone five months from her home, without once notifying family or giving whereabouts—” The detective rolls a pen slowly back and forth across his desk beneath the palm of his hand. “You know what she is? I’ll tell you what she is—I’ll be glad to. She’s a young lady, twenty-two years of age, who lost her mother, the best friend she ever had, and it knocked her for a loop. So she wakes up one morning, withdraws twenty-five hundred dollars, all her personal savings, from the bank and decides she’s had enough of home. As far as this department is concerned, she’s breaking no laws. A solid citizen-right? Listen, I got refrigerators downstairs full of kids from ten on up who come to the Big Apple from as far west as Texas, California, with parents out there screaming for some kind of lead, some kind of positive identification. What I’m doing for you, I’m not doing as a detective. I’m doing it as a friend, a good, personal friend of over twenty-five years. And when I say that I want that tracing device on your phone—”

“It’s no goddamned good,” Konig half shouts, half pleads. “She’s not calling from her bedroom or the phone down the hall.”

“That’s right. She’s calling from some phone booth outside.”

“Then she may as well be calling from the moon. We’re never going to find her.”

“Come on, Paul—for Chrissake.” Haggard flings the birthday card down on the desktop. “That isn’t postmarked the moon. Grand Central Station isn’t the goddamned moon. That kid’s right here. In this city. Around the corner, for all I know.”

“If she’s not calling from some fixed address, some permanent base of operations, what the hell do we need this disgusting little tracing device for?”

“Because,” the detective groans wearily, “it gives us a pattern of her movements.”

“When you’re lucky enough to get a reading, before she rings off.”

“I tell you, this kid wants us to find her. How come she calls you here, knowing all the while we got a tracer on your phone?”

The question brings Konig up sharply. His fingers plow his hair exasperatedly.

“Answer me, Paul. How come? You can’t answer because you know it’s true. She wants us to get a reading on her.”

“Baloney.”

“We got two, didn’t we?”

“Two out of six—quite a pattern.”

“One, a phone booth at First Avenue and East Houston. Another, a luncheonette on Astor Place. That’s a pattern, isn’t it?”

“The East Village from First Avenue and East Houston to Astor Place?” Konig laughs scornfully. “It might as well be Bulgaria.”

“Okay. It is pretty feeble. But it’s a pattern. The next reading we get we can triangulate—narrow down. And I gotta feeling this kid’s gonna be calling more often now the warm weather’s coming. I gotta feeling she’s getting a little homesick out there. And the more she calls, the better our chances to zero in. We got descriptions—DD13’s and DD26’s—out in every borough and precinct, every station house knows ‘Konig, Lauren. Age twenty-two.’ They got pictures of her on the walls. You happen to be luckier than most They know it’s the Chiefs kid. They’re keeping it very quiet, but they’re all out there looking. So I say the tracing device stays.”

“It goes,” Konig shouts and flings a fist in the air. “And you can goddamn well go too.”

“Fine. Delighted. As of now, this minute, I’m off the case.”

“Fine with me too. I can do a helluva lot better by myself.”

“Help yourself, pal.”

“Thanks. I will.” Konig whirls around and starts out.

“A pleasure to do business with you. Happy birthday.”

The door slams. A picture slides on the shuddering wall, shatters in a heap on the floor. Moments after Konig’s departure, the dusty, warm air is still reverberating from the sharp concussion.

Haggard sits quietly in the warm, slanting sunbeams of the dying afternoon, the steely blue eyes still pondering the tidy 6″ x 9″ form.

In the next moment he swivels round in his chair and reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket draped across the top of a dusty file cabinet. From the pocket he withdraws a crumpled yellow sheet of paper, a police teletype, dated that day.

The detective’s eyes linger for several moments over the crumpled sheet of teletype. After a moment longer, he crushes the paper slowly in his fist. The squealing swivel action of his chair rotates him a full 180 degrees until once more the sun is at his back, and he is facing his desk, reaching for the phone.