Scorch City

by Toby Ball

  Westermann rode shotgun, talking over his shoulder to Frings, while his partner, a two-decade vet named Klasnic, steered the prowl car through block after City block. It was fall—a cool night, light breeze. Westermann came off cocky, as if he had it all figured out. Frings knew how to read people, though, and Westermann was hiding something behind the bravado. Westermann talked and Frings took notes, ignoring the words and jotting impressions, psychological conjecture, and philosophical musings about class and law enforcement and entitlement. Frings’s head was buzzing with thoughts. He was stoned to the gills.

  Klasnic took a call. A disturbance, apparently, in a tenement a couple blocks away, two men arguing; a chance for Frings to catch Westermann in action. They hightailed it to the scene, siren and lights off. A tattered notice condemning the building was nailed to the front door. Westermann led them up narrow, shadowed stairs with Klasnic in the rear. Frings sensed that this was not their usual order.

  The place was in terrible shape, doors missing off the dim hallways; puddles of stagnant water on the landings; sounds of despair, anger, and psychosis echoing around the walls. These places had to be squats. No way anyone paid money to live like this.

  Shots exploded above them, unsettling a pack of rats that fled down the stairs, scrambling under the feet of the men as they ascended. Frings’s skin prickled; his adrenaline flowed. The human noises above them had stopped. No one wanted to attract the attention of a man with a shotgun.

  They took the remaining two flights of stairs three at a time and arrived at a hallway lit by a bare bulb that flickered like a frenzied strobe. Westermann and Klasnic advanced with their guns drawn, Frings trailing. The carpet in the hall was damp under their feet, smelled of mold. Bugs crawled where floor met wall. The two cops found the right door and pressed against the wall on either side, listening.

  Only one voice seemed to be coming from inside: ranting, howling expletives and threats, the words barely comprehensible. The guy in there was either drunk or insane or both. Frings watched Klasnic nod to the door and hold up three fingers, then fold each one in turn until none remained and he pushed against the door, easing it silently open, the voice now coming louder into the hall. Klasnic disappeared through the door. Westermann waited a five count and then followed. Frings walked over to the threshold and looked in, but there was only an empty foyer, so Frings kept on edging down a short hallway to his right.

  The tone of the ranting changed, like a drop in air pressure; a sudden focus, words sharper.

  “Who the fuck are you? Drop the piece or I’ll blow his fucking head off. I will blow his fucking head off.”

  Westermann’s voice: “Drop the weapon. Drop the goddamn gun.”

  Klasnic’s voice, high with tension: “Shoot him. Shoot.”

  The ranting voice: “Shut your goddamn trap. You shut your goddamn trap.”

  Frings rounded the corner and took in the situation. The light in the room was mostly dim, but shotgun smoke defined sheets of bright light knifing down from slits in the ceiling. Klasnic stood in the opposite doorway, pistol at his feet, staring wide-eyed at a man, spotlit in the center of the room, a sawed-off trained on Klasnic. The man—tall and lean, red hair flaked with gray, huge sideburns—Frings recognized as Blood Whiskers McAdam, a criminal and habitual murderer with who knew how many victims, mostly mob guys. At McAdam’s feet lay what was left of a man who’d just caught two shotgun shells from close range. Westermann stood just in front of Frings, visibly trembling, his gun all over the place.

  Klasnic’s eyes were on the shotgun, his voice desperate. “Fucking shoot him.”

  “He doesn’t have the balls,” McAdam growled.

  Westermann tried to steady his gun with a second hand. It was quiet for a minute. Frings heard a radio playing big-band music in some other apartment; cars honked on the street; a baby cried a story below.

  Growing anxious, McAdam said, “Goddamn it,” and adjusted his grip on the shotgun.

  Klasnic flinched and McAdam fired, blowing a hole in Klasnic’s chest. Westermann fired six times, hitting McAdam with four of the shots, driving him to the floor, his body half in light and half in shadow. He seemed to smile before dying.

  Later, Frings sat on a stoop opposite the tenement, drinking a cup of coffee he’d been given by a cop, and watching orderlies carry the body bags out to the police van, the figures ghoulish in the blue police lights. His mind ran through the—what? Five seconds?—in which it had all happened; trying to alter his memory so that it fit the story he’d given the police. In this story, Westermann arrived as McAdam pulled the trigger, catastrophic fractions of a second too late. Westermann was almost more heroic, in this telling, for the tragedy of the timing.

  Westermann walked over to Frings. It had taken him a while, but he seemed to have his legs back and was making at least a show of confidence. Cops patted his back and gave shallow smiles. They still hated him, but they weren’t so cold as to abandon him after something like this. In days this benefit of the doubt would evaporate as the whispers on the street concentrated on Klasnic’s death, and Westermann’s unpopularity, even then, made it easy for cops to place the blame on him. Only Frings, though, knew the truth.

  Westermann sat. Frings offered a cigarette. Westermann shook his head.

  “You’re going to be okay,” Frings said, not looking at Westermann.

  “Am I?”

  “As far as I’m concerned.”

  Westermann stared dully ahead. Frings could see him puzzling over this, trying to figure out the tally book between them. He gave up.

  “What do you want?”

  Frings shrugged. “Nothing. Maybe someday. I don’t do blackmail, Piet. That’s not how I got where I am. But this is a big one.”

  “I know.”

  “So, maybe you’ll remember it someday.”

  Westermann nodded. “Yeah, this isn’t one I’m going to forget.”

  Meetings finally over, Frings was back at his desk, smoking a Camel and leafing through the day’s Gazette without taking much in, contemplating which contact to call at Headquarters to get a handle on who, exactly, had been handling the assaults near the shanties. He knew a fair number of cops and had chits that he could call in, but this was a tricky one. Cops got suspicious about giving out this kind of information. The inference would be that Frings had cops in his sights, and cops got mum real quick when this was the case, protecting their institution—the police—above all else. He settled on a records clerk named Klein and flicked through his contacts book until he located the name and gave him a call.

  Frings recalled Klein as a good-looking blond kid, kept off the beat by a missing eye, gouged out while he was trying to bring order to a near riot on a block of bars. He had no depth perception anymore. He was a big guy, though, muscular. Frings had heard that he boxed and wondered how the hell he made that work.

  “Klein, it’s Frank Frings with the Gazette.”

  “Hey, Frank, how are you?” Klein seemed genuinely happy to hear from him.

  “I’m fine. How’re the wife and kids?”

  “Good, Frank. Real good. What’s up?”

  “Listen, I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”

  “You bet. As long as it doesn’t come back to me.”

  “Has it ever?”

  “Okay, shoot.”

  Frings explained the nighttime assaults on the Community people. “I want to know who was assigned to those cases.”

  There was a brief silence. “Jeez, I don’t know, Frank. This doesn’t sound kosher to me. You looking to nail cops? ’Cause if that’s what’s up, you know, I can’t help you.”

  “It’s not about the cops. It’s about whether these attacks really occurred and whether anything was done about it. I’m not looking to name names. Have you known me to pull one over on a cop? If I was trying to take someone down, I’d tell you. I live on my rep.”

  There was a brief pause, Klein thinking it over on the other end of the line. “Okay,
Frank. Your word is good here. I’ll take a look for you, get back to you sometime tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Klein. I owe you.”

  20.

  The storm arrived suddenly, a sun-scorched afternoon quickly becoming twilight beneath a towering, purple-and-blue thunderhead. The heavy air came to life, crackling with latent electricity, huge volumes of air barreling through the canyons formed by high buildings. Grip drove with Morphy shotgun and Westermann reclining comfortably in the backseat. They rolled the windows up as the first marble-size drops were annihilated against the windshield.

  Westermann watched adults scurry for cover while children stayed, faces lifted to the sky, welcoming the relief.

  “The fuck’d this come from?” Grip asked.

  Westermann registered Grip’s nervousness, talking to break the silence. A clap of thunder came from somewhere close, sounding like a bomb detonating.

  “How’d yesterday afternoon go?” Westermann asked.

  There was a pause.

  Grip said, “We went back to the river. I had an idea I wanted to try out. While Morphy was taking his fucking clothes off the other morning, I was watching the currents, how shit was flowing down the river. It gets kind of funny by the banks because of all the docks and everything that fell into the water. So I noticed that maybe the girl had to have been put in the water in a certain place to wash up where she did, you know?”

  “Okay.”

  “So we tested it out.”

  Morphy said, “We tossed logs in the river, is what he’s trying to say. Saw where they ended up.”

  “And?”

  Grip said, “Looks to me like she probably got dropped in the water a little upstream from the Uhuru Community.”

  “If she wasn’t just put on the bank where we found her, you mean.”

  Grip shook his head. “That doesn’t seem right, Lieut. Why just dump her in the rocks? Why wouldn’t you put her in the river, get the body away from the scene, wash the evidence off her?”

  It made sense, of course. But had she been put in somewhere farther upstream, only to wash up where Westermann had found her before pushing her back in the water?

  “Are you sure,” Westermann asked, “that the body would float the same way your logs would?”

  Grip shrugged. “Why not?”

  Westermann straightened in his seat, leaning forward to get his head between Grip and Morphy. “So what’s your conclusion?”

  Grip chose his words carefully. He was already on thin ice because of his treatment of Mel Washington. There wasn’t any angle in having Westermann think he was targeting more Negroes, commie Negroes at that. “That there’s a distinct possibility that someone put the murdered girl in the river at a point near the Uhuru Community. This would seem to point to the Community as a possible source of the perpetrators.”

  “Souza and Plouffe couldn’t find anyone who’d seen a white woman around the Community.”

  Morphy laughed.

  “Jesus,” Grip muttered.

  Left unsaid: Even if Souza and Plouffe had done a competent job of canvassing, there was no reason to believe that the Community people would tell them anything, even if they had seen the woman. And this, Westermann realized, was the unknown; where he might have made a terrible blunder. If she had been killed near the Community, he had tried to cover up a real crime; and he had failed.

  Westermann thought about Art Deyna and the photographer and was about to ask Grip and Morphy whether they’d heard from the press when Grip pulled to the curb.

  They left the prowl car parked by a fire hydrant and took the stairs down to the basement, where Pulyatkin kept his office just down the hall from the morgue. They found Pulyatkin smoking at his desk, his door open. Westermann led the other two in, leaning over the desk to shake Pulyatkin’s hand. Westermann knew that Pulyatkin liked him, considered him moderate and judicious. He assumed that Pulyatkin had asked him to come to chaperone Grip and Morphy, who made everyone nervous.

  Pulyatkin said, “I’m sure that Detectives Morphy and Grip reported to you that the woman you brought in the other day was very sick.”

  Westermann nodded.

  “I’d never seen anything quite like that before, the way the disease was attacking the organs. She couldn’t have had much time left. But I remembered something I’d heard from the doctors at City Hospital. We talk sometimes if we run across something unusual. ‘Compare notes,’ I think they say. Well, I remembered that they’d called a couple of weeks ago about a young woman who had come to the hospital, very ill. Blisters, like your girl. She was vomiting, in pain. No one there had seen this combination of symptoms before, so they took blood and tissue and considered quarantining her.” Pulyatkin paused to take a sip of coffee.

  Westermann looked over at Grip and Morphy, wondering if they knew what was going on. Grip shrugged and Morphy raised his eyebrows.

  “I remembered this conversation, so I sent blood and tissue samples from the girl over to City to have them compared with the samples from that woman.”

  “And they matched?”

  “I don’t know. They seem to be having a difficult time laying their hands on the original sample. I don’t know if they haven’t looked hard or maybe it’s gone. But this unusual set of symptoms recurring in this short time frame—it’s hard to believe it’s not the same disease.”

  “Who’s the woman? Is she still there?”

  Pulyatkin laughed ruefully. “No. She left the hospital soon after the samples were taken. It was at night—no doctors on the ward—but the nurses said a man came and got her and they had no choice but to discharge. The doctors were furious, of course.”

  “Was she …?” Grip asked.

  “The same as our woman? No. I checked the physical description. Different altogether.”

  “How about a name? An address? She must have registered.”

  Pulyatkin nodded and pulled a folder from the top of a pile on his desk. He read from a page. “Mavis Talley. Eighty-six Newton Avenue.”

  The rain had stopped and steam rose off the streets as they rolled down Newton Avenue, eyeing tired row houses and storefronts with bars over the front windows. Westermann knew the stats—assault, rape, robbery, murder; all occurred with alarming frequency here. It wasn’t the worst district, but not far removed from it. Morphy and Grip could have told you the same thing just by looking around at the young men, idle and menacing on the stoops and the street corners; the absence of women on the street; the defiant postures as the prowl car passed. Hell of a place for a young woman to live.

  Eighty-six Newton Avenue was a row house in a block of row houses marked by peeling paint and sagging stoops. Grip parked out front. Not many cars at the curb in this neighborhood.

  “You think we’ll find it in one piece when we get back?” Grip asked, maybe rhetorically.

  Morphy rapped on the door and stepped back to stand with Westermann. Grip stood below them, at the foot of the steps. When no one answered, Morphy pounded, yelling, “Police. Please open the door.”

  Slow footsteps sounded from inside and Morphy stepped away again, fingering the grip of his Colt. Seeing this, Grip did the same. The door opened against a security chain and Westermann saw a small face, crabbed with age.

  The voice was a woman’s, gravelly and suspicious. “What d’you want?”

  “Mavis Talley?” Westermann asked.

  “What you want Mavis for?”

  “Just need to speak with her. Nothing serious.” Keeping it calm, projecting authority.

  “That makes two of us need to speak to her,” the old woman said. “Haven’t seen her in a couple weeks.”

  It took some cajoling from Westermann, but the woman—a broad, stooped widow named Mrs. Levesque—eventually let them in to see the room that Mavis Talley rented. There were four doors off the third-floor landing, one to the shared bathroom and the other three to rented rooms. Mavis Talley’s was the middle of the three. Clearly, no one had been there in a while. Roaches cra
wled over a molding half loaf of bread placed next to a stack of papers and pamphlets on a small, round kitchen table. The bed was carefully made, the blue sheets faded and threadbare with age. Morphy began opening drawers in her bureau and Grip opened a narrow closet. Westermann picked up the stack of pamphlets on the table and brought them down hard, scattering the roaches. He took a look at the pile. There were anticommunist pamphlets—“They Live Among Us,” “The People Who Abandoned God,” “The Threat to Freedom”—programs from the Church of Last Days, and letters signed “Mom” or “Juliet.”

  “Torsten,” Westermann said, waving a handful of the pamphlets. “She seems like your type. A fellow God-fearing patriot.”

  Grip walked over. “There’s nothing in the closet.” He took some of the pamphlets and looked them over, tossing them on the table when he was done. “Typical shit. You can find it anywhere.”

  “How about this?” Westermann read from one of the church brochures:

  “ ‘Will Christ Return to the New Israel?’ Let’s see.” He sifted through the brochures. “ ‘Is the Antichrist Alive and Among Us?’ What do you think?”

  “About the Antichrist?” Morphy asked, still looking through drawers.

  “What church is that?” Grip asked, ignoring Morphy’s crack.

  “The Church of Last Days. You know it?”

  “Sounds familiar,” Grip said, thinking that it sounded familiar because of Ole Koss; that maybe it was his church, or that he listened to it on the radio.

  21.

  Westermann had Morphy and Grip drop him at City Hospital before they went back to the station and then home. City Hospital seemed always on a knife’s edge, the chaos caused by the sheer number of patients threatening to overwhelm what little order the staff could maintain. In line at the checkin desk, a Negro was leaking blood from some kind of wound in his arm; a stout white woman in Gypsy clothes was kept upright by two younger men with trim beards; a drunk had his eyes swollen shut and his lips misshapen and bleeding. Maybe two dozen people sat against the walls in various states of medical distress. A baby cried. Westermann moved past them, flashing his badge. He only had a question.