Scorch City Read online

  Also by Toby Ball

  Invisible Streets

  The Vaults

  Copyright

  First published in paperback in the United States in 2014 by

  The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.,

  141 Wooster Street

  New York, NY 10012

  www.overlookpress.com

  For bulk and special sales please contact [email protected], or write us at the above address.

  Copyright © 2011 by Toby Ball

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  ISBN: 978-1-4683-0986-7

  Contents

  Also by Toby Ball

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Chapter 101

  Chapter 102

  Chapter 103

  Chapter 104

  Chapter 105

  Chapter 106

  Chapter 107

  Chapter 108

  Chapter 109

  Chapter 110

  Chapter 111

  Chapter 112

  Epilogue

  Chapter 113

  Chapter 114

  Chapter 115

  About the Author

  About Scorch City

  For Mom and Dad

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am indebted to Faith and Jonathan Ball and Glenda Kaufman Kantor, who all read early versions of this book and provided valuable insight and encouragement.

  Thank you to my agent and friend Rob McQuilkin, and to his colleagues at Lippincott, Massie, McQuilkin. Once again, Michael Homler was the steady hand steering this book from manuscript to what you have in your hands. Many thanks to him and to Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Loren Jaggers, and Emily Fry at St. Martin’s.

  There are a number of other people who deserve mention for their support, enthusiasm, and friendship: Susanna, Peter, Jackson, and Julia Kahn; Terrence, Lisa, Owen, and Sophie Sweeney; Martin Sweeney and Heidi Kim; Julian, Kate, and Meghan Gross and Jill McInerney; Paul, Riley, Adelaide, and Leo Nyhan and Samantha Neukom; Nick and Maria Aretakis; Carter, Julien, and Charlotte Strickland and Nicole Gueron; Michele Filgate, Liberty Hardy, and everyone at RiverRun Bookstore; and my friends at the Durham Public Library.

  And, mostly, thank you to Deborah, Jacob, and Sadie.

  1.

  Moses Winston had learned from years of being a stranger everywhere he went—such was the life of an itinerant musician—how to recognize trouble and how to avoid it without backing down. It never did him any good scrapping in a place where he wasn’t known. So, as he walked through the smoky shantytown alleys, breathing fumes from the tar roofs baking in the sun, he kept his head up and his eyes on nothing in particular, save the occasional passing woman who, even today, earned his glance. This day, of all days, was one to stay out of trouble.

  He moved quickly through the maze of shacks, the route playing with him, disorienting him. The way out never seemed quite the same. The configuration of the alleys seemed to be constantly changing, like dunes shifting in the wind.

  Children appeared out of the smoke like apparitions. Winston moved to the side to make way, stepping into the threshold of a shanty. A baby was crying inside.

  He walked toward where he thought the way out was. His skin prickled in the heat, his eyes burned red from the smoke. On his back he carried a guitar case with a rope rigged as a strap. He’d left Billy Lambert’s shack minutes before, after several hours spent rooted to his bedroll, paralyzed into inaction, watching Lambert’s bruised body across the room, chest expanding and contracting with each sleeping breath.

  Inside the little shack he’d felt isolated, even protected, as if history didn’t exist there. But he had a gig tonight and had reluctantly left, trading static anxiety for the uncertainty of the shantytown alleys.

  Winston turned a corner and found himself at the far end of an alley from a group of four older men who were sharing a pipe and watching his approach. Winston knew of these men and his pulse quickened. Trouble. He kept his head up and eyes focused beyond the men, down the shantytown alley. These were big, hard men with indifferent expressions but malevolent eyes. Winston didn’t worry about much, but men like these concerned him more than the teenage kids who roamed the shanties like jackals, looking for isolated prey. The kids had material wants. Who knew what the hell these men wanted? Maybe nothing.

  Their gazes as he passed them had a physical quality, repelling Winston into a new alley, this one a confusion of chickens pecking wildly in the dirt and a tethered goat lying either asleep or dead.

  Eventually he found his way out, emerging from the shantytown into a field defined on one side by the river and on the opposite by crumbling low-rise buildings. The fresh air hit him like waking from a dream; but
with this wakefulness, fear.

  Winston was playing that night at a broken-down joint called the Checkerboard, located in the midst of several seedy blocks of bars and clubs—the streets haunted by hustlers, whores, and working-class drunks—where the edges of Capitol Heights drained into the Negro East Side. The Checkerboard was run by a fat white cat by the name of Cephus, who kept the drinks weak and ran a half dozen whores who looked better than the usual fare on the street.

  Winston arrived early. The bartender unlocked the front door to let him in, locked up again. Winston grabbed a shot of rail whiskey and a bottle of beer from the bar and sat on the tiny wooden stage, playing with the amplifier, tuning his guitar. It was just Winston on the stage and the bartender stocking his bar for the evening when Cephus rolled in from the back wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt that could have doubled as a pup tent. The collar and underarms were dark with perspiration, and the top buttons were undone to reveal a mass of damp, white, hairless flesh.

  Winston watched Cephus amble over and register the empty shot glass and half-empty beer sitting on the stage. Winston didn’t normally drink before playing. Cephus knew that.

  “You don’t look so good, Moses,” Cephus said in his high, wheezy voice.

  Winston kept to his tuning. “No?”

  “No, you don’t. And the drinking … Something wrong, boy?”

  Winston looked up, not liking this fat-ass cracker calling him “boy.” But something in Cephus’s face, some kind of ignorant sincerity, made Winston think that Cephus probably called his white musicians “boy,” too. Probably. And now that Winston had a good look, Cephus didn’t seem to be doing so well himself, his face an alarming shade of red under a sheen of sweat. The early-evening heat was taking its toll.

  “Nothing wrong,” Winston said, forcing himself to hold the fat man’s eyes for a couple of beats before turning back to his guitar. Nothing wrong.

  Cephus shrugged. “I must be mistaken.” He thought for a moment, then asked, “You need something from the bar, Moses? Another whiskey, or a beer, or something?”

  “I don’t believe so.”

  “Suit yourself.” Cephus gave a concerned scowl, seemed to contemplate saying something further. Instead, he made a kind of clucking sound, checked his pocket watch, and headed to the front door. Winston watched him go, heart pounding.

  2.

  Frank Frings’s apartment smelled of marijuana smoke, the half-smoked reefer stubbed out in an ashtray on the coffee table. Frings leafed through the early edition of the Gazette, taking his time with a bottle of beer. He didn’t have a column in the day’s paper, so he skimmed through the headlines, perused the obits, read up on the horses. He checked his watch—ten past one. Renate wasn’t home.

  Frings finished with the paper, picked up his beer, and walked to the window, looking down onto the street. A couple of cabs crept along, looking for fares. A group of young men, their ties loose around their necks, made drunken, boisterous conversation as they jostled down the block. Two derelicts huddled in a doorway, sharing a smoke. Frings finished his beer, took it and the newspaper into the kitchen, and left them on the counter next to the sink.

  She would have been off the stage by eleven forty-five and home by twelve thirty. That’s the way it always was, except when she didn’t come home. Frings sighed, drank a glass of water. He didn’t wonder whom she was with tonight. He was annoyed that he’d stayed up waiting for her and would be tired the next day. He was annoyed that he would be alone in his bed tonight. But he didn’t think about her in another man’s bed. It didn’t matter to him.

  He undressed, set his alarm clock. The phone rang.

  His shirt pasted to his back with sweat from the cab ride, Frings walked into the Palace, shook hands with the bouncer, and glanced around at the crowd—maybe a couple hundred people—which seemed to be suspended in the thick air. Years ago, a few whites had been regulars at the Palace, but tonight there wasn’t another white person in the joint. Frings felt eyes on him and then, because he was a regular, the attention returning to the stage. He watched as the owner came his way, weaving gracefully between tables, nodding, smiling, giving the occasional brief handshake. Floyd Christian was about Frings’s age, but could have passed for ten years younger if not for the beginnings of gray in his hair. His body was still lean, the coal black skin of his face unlined. He might have been the only person in the place not sweating.

  “How are things at the Gazette, Frank?” Christian asked by way of greeting, gripping Frings’s hand, flashing a grim smile.

  “Good. Fine. You know what time it is?” It was a rhetorical question; they both knew it was two in the morning. Christian had rung him, pulling him out of bed, the urgency in Christian’s voice getting Frings here in yesterday’s clothes, no time to pull out new ones. He was rumpled, his face greasy from the pillow. Christian didn’t make calls like that, dragging the best-known newspaperman in the City over to his club during the wee hours. Frings wondered what the hell was going on.

  Christian said, “Sorry to pull you away from the lovely Renate.”

  “You didn’t pull me away from her.”

  Christian raised his eyebrows, concerned.

  “It’s nothing,” Frings said. “She’s young.”

  Christian frowned and clapped Frings on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go back to my office.” Frings followed him along the back row of tables. Frings, at just under six feet, was shorter than Christian and a little thicker around the waist, too. But despite an unmemorable face, Frings had a smile that drew people in, and the presence that sometimes comes to those who are comfortable with their celebrity.

  Christian turned his head and yelled over his shoulder, “What do you think of them?”

  Onstage a band was playing languid jazz, the musicians dressed in maroon tuxedos. The crowd murmured dozens of low conversations and smoked and drank. Frings wobbled his hand. So-so. It wasn’t his kind of thing.

  Christian knocked twice on his office door, which opened from within. Christian went in first. Frings followed.

  He eyed three Negroes sitting at Christian’s meeting table; two men, one woman. His mouth went dry. He’d met one of the men before and could guess who the other two were. Something was really wrong. Christian wouldn’t have brought Frings together with these people at this time of the night and in secret unless it was big. He didn’t like it. Christian could have filled him in, warned him about what he was walking into.

  The man in the middle stood up—tall, very thin, black-framed glasses, close-cut hair.

  Christian said, “I think you know Mel Washington.”

  Frings had met Washington before, smart, elegant, rumored homosexual. Frings’s editor’s, Panos’s, take on Washington: Black, queer, and Red? God doesn’t hate nobody that much.

  Mel Washington extended a slender hand with long, pianist’s fingers. They shook. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Frings.”

  “Frank.” Frings saw the tension in Washington’s jaw.

  “Okay. Do you know Warren Eddings and Betty Askins?”

  “Only by reputation.”

  The other two nodded in silent greeting. Washington, Eddings, and Askins: the City’s three leading Negro communists. Frings looked at Christian. Christian nodded, acknowledging the difficult situation he’d put Frings in—better to have done this during the day, in public. Right now things looked suspicious.

  Frings and Washington sat. Christian stood by the door, overseeing, removing himself from the conversation. The room was furnished in black leather; a one-way mirror looked out on the club floor. Barbershop fans pushed the stifling air around the room to no effect. Eddings and Christian smoked Luckies. It was hard to breathe.

  “Frank,” Washington began, elbows on the table, fingers steepled, “we asked Floyd to bring you here to meet with us because we have a very difficult situation. A very difficult situation. We’re hoping you’ll be … discreet. We’re coming to you because we know you are sympathetic to our cause.
Can we trust you to be discreet?”

  Frings looked at Washington, then turned in his seat to give Christian a questioning glance.

  “Frank, I wouldn’t bring you …”

  Frings nodded, trusting Christian. He turned back to Washington. “Okay. We can talk.”

  “Two men over at the Community were fishing tonight on the riverbank. They found a dead woman in the rocks. A dead white woman.”

  “On Community land?”

  “More or less.”

  Betty Askins nodded along with Washington. Warren Eddings scowled at his hands folded in his lap.

  “Yeah, that’s not good.” A dead white woman by the all-Negro Uhuru Community was trouble.

  Washington continued, “We don’t know what happened yet, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?”

  Frings shook his head. It didn’t. Frings knew how perception worked in the City. Anticommunists and the blue press would make lurid speculations, and these would be digested by many people as unquestioned truth. The Uhuru Community, he thought, would burn.

  Betty spoke. She was younger than the two men and attractive in a finishing-school sort of way; her hair in a chaste bob. “We have people trying to find out if it was someone in the Community that did this. We can’t rule it out, but …”

  “What would a white girl be doing there?” Frings said.

  “Exactly,” agreed Washington.

  “Working girl?”

  Betty Askins looked down at the table, embarrassed.

  Washington said, “Could be. But our understanding”—he looked uncomfortably at Betty—“is that … this type of commerce is generally kept within the Community.”

  Frings nodded.

  Warren Eddings wore a skullcap. He had high cheekbones and a narrow patch of beard that hung a couple of inches below his chin. His voice was low and controlled. “This is a setup, white folks putting this on the Community.”

  Washington looked pained. “Frank, I realize this might put you in an awkward position.”

  Frings’s pulse hammered in his ears. “Jesus, Mel, I don’t know why you say that.” Why was he here?

  Eddings and Betty looked to Washington. “We need this to be kept quiet.”

  They’d said that. “That’s going to be difficult.”

  Washington said, “I’m afraid I’m not getting to the point. We need this situation taken care of. We can’t let this crime be associated with the Uhuru Community. The Community’s the most successful Negro endeavor in this City’s history. Its existence is at stake. You know that white folks won’t tolerate the Community if this news gets out. They won’t. And I’m worried that, like Warren said, this is a setup, specifically to put the Community at risk.”