Scorch City Page 16

  To those unaware of the Uhuru Community, this clapboard hamlet is an experiment in Negro self-government and relative isolation. This endeavor is presided over in a rather remote and idiosyncratic fashion by a visionary named Father Womé. I had the occasion to hobnob with Father Womé and receive explication of the purpose of this movement. The crux of the Uhuru Community’s existence is the extension to Negroes therein of a degree of freedom not achievable in Caucasian-dominated municipalities. Freedom.

  Truffant and his ilk will, whether with deepest sincerity or the most craven deviousness, point to a small cadre, numbering less than ten, of alleged communists associated with the Uhuru Community and, with this anemic justification, demand the dismantling of the Community and the dispersal of its residents.

  This is a piece of foolhardiness that only people with a cruelly misguided appraisal of their own cogitative abilities and moral sense would advocate. Who can predict with any certainty at all the consequences of leaving the Uhuru Community to its own devices? The answer to this is clear as is the essential choice to be made in this instance: whether to allow the Negroes in this Community to be free or to deny them freedom. This is the choice. There is no other choice to be made.

  This choice should not be considered within external frameworks constructed by opponents of the Uhuru Community that do not bear on the essential choice. This choice should not be delegated to others who stake capricious claim to knowledge that is both unfounded and unknowable. Delegation of the choice is not a choice.

  So how to make this choice between freedom and not-freedom? This, as with all choices made by an honest man, must be made on universal principles. If we are to deny these Negroes freedom, it is because we choose to deny all men freedom. If we choose to grant them leave to pursue their freedom, it is because we would afford freedom to all men.

  Consider these principles and I trust the correct, that is, honest, choice is clear.

  45.

  Eleven in the morning and Westermann was a little disheartened to see a smattering of prostitutes out in this neighborhood of run-down shops and workers’ tenements. They seemed deflated, leaning against walls, smoking or chatting listlessly, not working the pedestrians. This time of day, anyone looking for a trick would have to come to them.

  He found Vesterhue’s business address, a storefront clinic called Wilhelm Health Center; Wilhelm because of the street it was on. Also on the block: a butcher’s, a Christian reading room, a barbershop, Madame Pristina’s Palm Reading and Fortune Gazing, and a place called Dreiburg’s—chintz in the window under a maroon valance. Half sheets of paper littered the sidewalk, as if someone had thrown them up into a wind and let them lie where they fell. He read one: “Your Mayor Is Asleep at the Switch, No to Communism, Yes to Truffant.”

  Earlier, Westermann had pared down the investigation team to just Grip, Morphy, and himself, releasing the others to work on ongoing cases or new ones that came in. No eyebrows rose. Even with a second girl murdered, investigations into dead prostitutes simply didn’t merit much attention. Five or six—then you had something worthy of a real delegation of manpower. He’d reminded Grip and Morphy of the Chief’s admonition to play it subtle. They’d nodded and given at least a show of getting it.

  The coroner’s report had come back on the second girl: still no identification; near certainty that she carried the same disease as Lenore; cause of death—asphyxiation by strangling. Different from Lenore. Lenore had drowned; her lungs had been full of water.

  Westermann wondered what this meant. Was this second girl dead before she reached the river? Why would she be left in the same spot as Lenore? Westermann chewed on his lip while he walked, thinking this over.

  Pushing Lenore into the current.

  No turning back.

  * * *

  All eight chairs in the waiting area at Wilhelm Health Center were filled. An old guy in an expensive but ancient suit coughed phlegm into a white handkerchief he kept over his mouth, even during the brief periods when he was not hacking. Two mothers—clean, young, blissed-out expressions—had three young children between them, sitting in chairs, playing with tin army men. An elderly couple sat holding hands, watching with inscrutable expressions as the kids battled.

  Westermann nodded to the two mothers, who smiled demurely back. A heavy woman with her hair piled up on her head and bifocals perched on the end of her nose sat behind a desk, eyeing Westermann.

  Westermann flashed the woman his badge. “I’d like to see Dr. Vesterhue, when he has a moment.”

  The woman barked a short, sardonic laugh. “You, me, those two women over there, Dr. Phillipi, others who came yesterday; we’d all like to see Dr. Vesterhue.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Dr. Vesterhue didn’t show up for his hours today. Or yesterday, or the day before. Dr. Phillipi’s trying to pick up the slack, but he can’t do it himself. We sent some patients down to City Hospital, mostly the working girls.” As an aside, she said, “Dr. Phillipi doesn’t like to see them.”

  “You tried to get in touch with Dr. Vesterhue at home?”

  “Of course. You think we wouldn’t? Nobody there. No word to us that he was sick or anything like that.”

  “This happen before?”

  “No.”

  “You worried about him?”

  She shrugged, not seeming very concerned. “Be nice to have him show up” was all she could manage.

  Westermann sighed, taking a look around the room again as he gathered his thoughts. Again, the two mothers caught his eye and smiled. He nodded a little.

  “Listen. I know Dr. Phillipi must be extremely busy, with Dr. Vesterhue not here, but I need five or ten minutes with him, and quickly. Like after his current patient. Also, I need records for Mavis Talley and a woman named Lenore; I don’t know her last name.”

  The woman looked back at him with undisguised exasperation. “Really, I hardly think …”

  Westermann put his hands on her desk and leaned over so that he was near her ear. He whispered, “We are conducting a murder investigation. We can argue about this in front of your patients, but I don’t think that does anyone any good, do you? Ten minutes, tops, with the doctor. You pull a couple of files, maybe have to do a little searching for one of them. You want to make a big deal of this?”

  The woman reddened considerably, though it was unclear whether she was angry, embarrassed, or chastened. Without another word, she stood and disappeared through the door behind her. Westermann turned from the desk to look at the magazines spread across the waiting-room coffee table. Reader’s Digest. Life. And a number of anticommunist rags: “Is This America’s Future?” A woman shielding her two apple-cheeked boys from sinister-looking men in gray suits, her face contorted in horror. Westermann was bending to pick it up when the woman returned.

  “Dr. Phillipi will see you,” she said curtly.

  Westermann straightened and followed her back down a short hallway with four doors, three of them open. They passed one on the right, file shelves to the ceiling, and then on to the next room on the right opposite the closed door. The woman stood aside for Westermann to enter, then left without a word. Westermann studied a wall chart, a person in profile, the organs detailed along with the muscles in the arms and legs. Westermann pegged the figure as a man, though it had no genitalia. There was a rap on the door and Westermann turned to face a small, trim man with sunken eyes and wide mouth, maybe in his fifties.

  “Lieutenant Westermann?”

  “Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice, Dr. Phillipi.”

  He nodded, hanging in the doorway. His graying hair was disheveled; he looked stressed.

  “Could we talk in private?” Westermann asked, nodding at the open door.

  Phillipi gave an annoyed shrug, but stepped in, closing the door behind him. Strange.

  “I understand that your partner’s been missing a few days.”

  “My partner?” Phillipi asked, confused.

  “Dr. V
esterhue.”

  Phillipi puzzled on this for a moment. “I’m not sure I’d describe him as my partner. But, yes, he hasn’t been here for three days. Damned inconsiderate to be honest, leaving me to deal with his patients.”

  “Aren’t you concerned that something might have happened to him?”

  “Concerned?” he said, as though it hadn’t occurred to him. “I suppose. Has something happened to him?”

  “I don’t know,” Westermann said, squinting at Phillipi, trying to get a grip on his reaction. “We have some questions for him about a couple of his patients.”

  Phillipi spoke with venom. “I see. Are they whores or people from that church?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Phillipi took a breath. “I’m sorry, that wasn’t called for. Lieutenant, I’m sorry if I seem callous. Dr. Vesterhue and I share rent on this property and split Mrs. Lansing’s salary. Beyond that, we are not partners. We have very different clienteles and, I dare say, different philosophies of care. Vesterhue mostly sees people from that church in the Hollows.”

  “The Church of Last Days?”

  “Yes, that one,” Phillipi said with distaste. “Those people and also prostitutes. Do you know how unsettling it can be for my patients—they’re mostly elderly, some younger but chronically ill—how unsettling it can be to share a waiting room with prostitutes and cultists?”

  “Cultists?”

  “I’m sorry. Again, maybe too strong. They are devout Christians, I suppose, but their manner … I think there might be a couple of them out in the waiting room right now.”

  “I saw them.”

  “A strange bunch, I can assure you.”

  “So, Dr. Vesterhue …,” Westermann prompted.

  “I don’t know what I can tell you, Lieutenant. He hasn’t been here in three days. No notice to me. Mrs. Lansing went by his apartment, but no one was home.”

  “No one answered?”

  “That’s right. No one answered.”

  “So, he could have been home.”

  “And not answering the door?”

  “Or maybe not able.”

  “I see,” Phillipi said. “Mrs. Lansing can give you his address.”

  Mrs. Lansing did have his address, but not much else. She slid a thin folder, Mavis Talley’s, across her desk to Westermann, who noted the expression on her face: something close to pleased with herself. The folder was empty, save for a sheet of paper stapled to the inside with an address, date of birth, and vitals; except for the date of birth, he already had that information.

  “Nothing for a Lenore?”

  Mrs. Lansing was working through some papers on her desk. She didn’t look up when she answered. “Not that I found.”

  “Someone took out the contents of this folder?”

  She looked up at him, exasperation in her eyes. “Dr. Vesterhue, he kept some of the files to himself. I insisted that he leave at least that information for my sake, but he kept some of his patients’ files—the real files—with him.”

  “That normal? Does Dr. Phillipi do that?”

  Still absorbed in her work. “Normal? No, it’s not normal. Neither’s Dr. Vesterhue.”

  46.

  Grip and Morphy met Westermann at a Greek diner across the street from Vesterhue’s apartment. They waited as Westermann finished his coffee, then the three of them crossed the street to Vesterhue’s building, soot-stained brick. Westermann scanned the street for Deyna—the guy had been turning up everywhere—but he wasn’t there.

  Vesterhue’s apartment was on the second floor, above a grocer’s run by a first-generation Latvian couple. Two doors on the second-floor landing led to a front apartment and a rear apartment. Vesterhue’s was the front. Grip pounded the door with his fist.

  “Dr. Vesterhue. Police.”

  No reply, no sounds of motion from within. There was another sound though, a sound that was familiar to Grip though it was too faint for him to place.

  Grip pounded again. Yelling this time. “Dr. Vesterhue, this is the police. Please open the door.”

  The door from the back apartment opened and Westermann noted that Grip jumped, hand going for his gun.

  An old man—head shaved, gray stubble on his chin—leaned through the open door, the whites of his eyes ringed with angry red.

  “No one been in that apartment for half a week.”

  “Sir?” Westermann said.

  “No one in or out of that apartment in four, five days.”

  “You sure about that?”

  The old man nodded. Westermann could see it: the old man sitting in his quiet apartment, picking up every sound on the landing and probably the apartments above as well.

  “Thank you,” Westermann said. “We may want to speak with you.”

  The old man closed his door without answering, the sliding dead bolt audible. The police shared a look, Morphy chuckling a little, Grip still pale.

  Westermann said, “Which one of you wants to do the honors?”

  Grip needed it more, so Morphy stood aside. It took three stomps before the hinges gave way and the door fell in.

  The smell came at them hard, familiar, but not the smell of death; rotting food in a sealed-up apartment, stagnant air, almost a furnace. The sound Grip had heard was a radio tuned to the same anticommunist station they played at Crippen’s. They did a quick recon. Grip found the radio and turned it off. The silence was sudden and stark.

  No one home; dirty dishes in the sink, food gone moldy. The guy hadn’t exactly been getting rich as a doctor. The furniture was old and shabby, the walls bare, except for a couple of crucifixes tacked to the wall—one in the living room and one in the bedroom. The whole place was outfitted like something temporary, as if Vesterhue wasn’t planning on staying long or maybe just didn’t care. The apartment had been tumbled, not by an expert, but by someone who was nonetheless trying to be careful. Books were replaced in the bookshelves, pillows stacked back on couches, a halfhearted attempt at making the bed—maybe an accurate imitation of Vesterhue’s own standards. But there were signs: dust lines that didn’t quite reach to the front edges of books; couch cushions replaced with their darker, bottom sides up. They spent some time, working in silence, trying to find the files for Mavis Talley and Lenore and maybe even the second girl. To no one’s surprise, they came up with nothing.

  Morphy had opened a window to get some air circulating, and they met there to exchange impressions and breathe some fresh air.

  Morphy said, “He was expecting to come back. Didn’t anticipate whatever happened, even if he left on his own for some reason.”

  Grip agreed. A police siren keened from blocks away.

  Westermann said, “And he took those files with him or else someone came here and found them.”

  “Unless they couldn’t find them either. We could tear apart the couch, pull up floorboards,” Morphy suggested.

  Westermann shook his head. “Medical files. Frequent use. He’s not going to open up his couch or pry up floorboards every time he needs them.”

  Morphy nodded. “So?”

  Westermann gazed out the window, thinking. Grip and Morphy were used to this, the lieut taking a minute to think things through, and they waited patiently, taking stock themselves.

  Eventually, Westermann laid it out for them. Interview the geezer across the hall and then do a telephone canvass of the hospitals, see if Vesterhue was checked in anywhere. Westermann would get back with Mrs. Lansing at Wilhelm Health Center to get a physical description of Vesterhue and then run that by Pulyatkin at the morgue for any John Does that fit the description.

  Grip went to use Vesterhue’s john, and Westermann took the opportunity to talk to Morphy, whispering, “What’s got Grip spooked?”

  “Lieut?”

  “He’s jumpy; not talking.”

  “Yeah. I’ll feel him out.”

  “Let me know.”

  Grip emerged from the john, zipping up and giving them a suspicious look as if he knew what
they’d been talking about.

  47.

  Carla sat along with Mel Washington’s compatriot Betty Askins and two other women in the shack of a round woman named Eunice Prendergrast, originally of Barbados and now something of a force in the Community. The air inside was stale but shaded; the aroma of strong coffee rose off a pot just pulled from the coals outside her door. Carla conducted a semiregular meeting with women in the Uhuru Community to get a sense of the Community’s immediate needs.

  Eunice filled and passed clay mugs of coffee. They discussed the condition of a plot of land the women were trying to farm between the Community and the river. The ground wasn’t suitable for the crops they were accustomed to growing—mostly in the Caribbean or in the South—but they were making slow progress.

  Eunice said, “Some of the kids are having diarrhea. It’s getting passed around.”

  Carla nodded. “We’re working on getting a doctor here, having a children’s clinic sometime very soon. Also, we’ll get the kids vaccinated, and the adults, too—mumps, pertussis, smallpox. A lot of people in the City will be more comfortable with the Community—forgive me for saying this—if they know that you aren’t going to be a breeding ground for diseases; if they know the people here have been inoculated.”

  Eunice gave her a sour look, but nodded. “It’s all for the good, I suppose.”

  Betty said, “There’s no reason why the people here shouldn’t receive the proper medical care, same as everyone else.”

  Carla took a sip of coffee, puckering at its acidity, feeling her face flush even more from its heat; new sweat beads formed at her hairline. “I’ll let you know as soon as we work out the details, but, as I said, very soon. Days. If those kids still have diarrhea, take them to City Hospital. Let me know if you do this, and I’ll arrange for payment or whatever needs to be done.”