Then out on the street again, and even as the patrol car inches its way through the mobs, the sound of fists pounding on the right rear fender reverberates through the vehicle. The grim, silent occupants do not even bother to look back.
8:45 a.m. 113th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. More clogged traffic. More police vans. More wailing patrol cars with rotating dome lights. More police cordons and megaphones. Outside, up on the rooftops, six stories up, the heads of patrolmen peer down onto the choked and littered street.
Six flights up on a filthy landing, near a door leading to the roof, more detectives, more lab men, more flashing bulbs.
“Watcha got?” the Chief says.
The sergeant in charge reads from identification cards found in a cheap red vinyl wallet. “Rosales, Barbara. Nineteen. Hooker. They know her around here.”
Once again this morning the Chief stoops down—this time to the torn and crumpled form of a rather coarse and plain-looking Spanish girl with bad skin.
“Junkie, too,” the Chief says, permitting the still-limp arm with the needle tracks to fall back down onto the cold floor of the stairwell.
“Probably turning a trick up here,” says Morello, looking around. “Picked the wrong John this time.”
“Hazard of the profession.” The Chief kneels, makes a series of mental notes while examining the body.
The girl is half sitting, half lying on her side, right shoulder propped against the wall, obscene graffiti figures scrawled on the moldy plaster above her. A huge wad of Kleenex has been stuffed down her mouth all the way into the windpipe. A single shredded edge of the stuff dangles out of the corner of her mouth. A pair of cheap black rayon panties have been yanked down below the knees, which are badly bruised and bleeding, showing how and in what position the girl struggled. Great white splotches of dried semen are all about the inside of the thighs and pubic area, and extruding from between the buttocks, an unfinished half pint of Southern Comfort, the neck of the bottle rammed up hard into the rectum.
“Okay.” The Chief, completing his survey, rises to his feet. “When you finish up here, wrap it up and send it down to me.”
“Hey, Doc,” says a burly Italian patrolman, stooped over the body, “what’s all the funny little puncture marks around her face?”
“Rat bites,” the Chief says, turning to his driver. “All right, let’s get out of here.”
As he is leaving, the burly Italian cop tugs the unfinished bottle of Southern Comfort down from its snug berth and holds the mouth of it up to his partner. “Hey, Fazello—how about a shot?”
Loud, raucous laughter cascades down the narrow stairway, following the descending figure of the tall, gray-haired man.
Back in the patrol car again, tooling down the FDR Drive. The Chief sits hunched far back in the rear seat. Long, cramped legs sprawled out sideways for comfort, he watches the wide brown swatch of the East River slide backward past the window, unraveling like a filthy carpet. His face wears a perpetual scowl. He seems a harsh, vindictive sort. Not one of your enlightened liberals. He’d known too many murderers. He abhorred violence and mourned the passing of the electric chair. He was suffused with a kind of Old Testament eye-for-an-eye morality. Though now in his sixties, his job had turned him gray at twenty-nine.
April again. Burgeoning spring. Tax time and the month of suicides. Gone now are February and March, season of drowned men, when the ice on the frozen rivers melt, yielding up the winter’s harvest of junkies, itinerants, and prostitutes. Soon to come are July and August—the jack-knife months. Heat and homicide. Bullet holes, knife wounds, fatal garrotings, a grisly procession vomited out of the steamy ghettos of the inner city. Followed by September-early fall—season of wilting vegetation, self-guilt, and inexplicable loss. Battered babies with the subdural hematomas and the petechial hemorrhages. Then October—benign, quiescent; the oven pavements of the city cooling while death hangs back a little while, prostrate from all the carnage. Only to rush headlong into November and December. The holiday season. Thanksgiving and the Prince of Peace. Suicides come forth again.
Like so many other thriving enterprises, Paul Konig’s is a cyclical business. He has his slack season and his busy season. Salad days and dog days. His good times, which, he knows, always proclaim the certainty of the approaching bad. He is, after all, subject to the same pressures and uncertainties as any other businessman, but his trade is unique. He is a forensic pathologist. Chief Medical Examiner, City of New York.
»2«
Konig at his desk. Crystals of doughnut sugar melting on his lips. The bitter morning taste of paper-container coffee and the first cigar, muzzy on his palate. Stacks of reports are strewn before him. A calendar agenda with that day, April 12, circled in red—an 11 a.m. lecture and laboratory at’the University; a 2 p.m. call at the Criminal Courts Building. There is, in addition to the regular avalanche of correspondence he carries on with pathologists all over the world, the usual assortment of invitations to address conferences, teaching offers for prestigious university seats, letters from coroners, doctors, and medical missionaries halfway round the world petitioning his advice on some tiny, arcane point of pathology. Sensing the absurdity of it all, he would answer each letter himself, feeling that doctors, just like clergymen, had an obligation to at least pretend to a wisdom they didn’t really possess. For his part, the longer he practiced and studied, the deeper and more inescapable grew his conviction that he knew nothing. Nothing that really mattered.
On his desk, too, are the department’s budget, which has to be completed for the City’s fiscal planners; a number of bills, including a mortgage payment for a beach house in Montauk; and a stack of recent protocols, death reports: “This is the body of a well-developed, well-nourished white male, approximate age 26, height 5’ 9"—” Finally, separate from all the rest, is an envelope marked “Personal.” He picks that up first, his fingers trembling ruefully on the flap before he tears it open. In it he finds a birthday card—an outlandish caricature of a large, shaggy bear in a doctor’s robe with a stethoscope around its neck. It’s signed with a big, untidy scrawl of red letters—“Dear Daddy, Sorry, Sorry, Sorry. Love.”
Once again he lights the dead cold ashes of his cigar from a Bunsen burner, ponders the card, then reaches for a pot of coffee bubbling on a cooking ring behind him. Then he is reading and riffling through his reports. A short time later he’s moving around the office with a sprinkling can, watering the jungle of pots and planters lining the long wall of windows—the begonias and the azaleas, the narcissus, the hyacinths he is forcing, the huge lantana, the spider plants, the long, muddy rows of spiny succulents, and the fabulous green-pink profusion of wandering Jew. His movements have a precise rhythm—several steps and a splash, several steps and a splash. On he goes from one pot to the next, cigar screwed into the center of his mouth, pausing only to flick off a wilted blossom or a dead leaf. He moves slowly and easily through the impeccably ordered chaos of his office, through the controlled disarray, past a brain floating in a tank of formalin, a table stacked with innumerable tissue slides, a slope of mortuary records stacked on the floor and reaching to the ceiling—the threatened landslide of the past fifteen years. It all has an order and rhythm perceptible only to him.
Halfway through the thrice-weekly ritual of the sprinkling can, the phone rings. Picking it up, he hears Carver’s throaty voice through the receiver at the same moment that he hears her speaking just outside his door in the anteroom.