Scorch City Page 2

  Frings nodded. “I get the situation. I’m not clear what you think I can do about it, though.”

  “We’d like you to talk to someone on the force, convince them to alter the circumstances of the body’s … disposition.”

  “Wait a second. If I’m hearing you right, you want to move the body?” Frings was incredulous. “Why didn’t you just do it yourself; keep it simple?”

  Eddings snorted a cynical laugh.

  Washington removed his glasses and rubbed the lenses on the front of his shirt. Rivulets of sweat eased down his temples. “We thought about that. Two reasons we didn’t. First, we feared that if someone had, in fact, planted the body in the Community, they might have in some way documented this fact and our moving the body would simply further implicate the Community in the crime. Second, we want a police investigation.”

  Frings ran his fingers back through his hair and pulled them away wet. “Really? You want the police to doctor the crime scene to absolve the Uhuru Community but also conduct an actual investigation into the crime? That’s your plan?”

  There was a pause before Betty said, “Yes. And we’d like you to make it happen.”

  3.

  Frings sat in a booth at an all-night diner, waiting for Piet Westermann, a cop. The bright lights showed the place’s filth. Frings couldn’t imagine eating here, but the coffee was strong. The only other customer was an older man wearing a tweed suit despite the heat, mumbling manically to nobody. Frings half-read a flyer someone had left on the table.

  Truffant for Mayor

  End the Communist Threat

  Restore Christian American Values to the City

  He rolled the flyer up and then twisted the roll until it was tight. He’d just met with part of the “Communist Threat.” He was aware that in Truffant’s eyes, he might even be part of the Threat. But it was hard to imagine Washington, Eddings, and Askins posing much danger to the City. He thought about the humiliation—maybe even anger—they must have felt coming to him for help. It made him uncomfortable; put real urgency into this meeting.

  Looking over the opposite side of the booth, he saw Westermann push through the door. Frings tossed the twisted flyer into the empty booth behind him.

  Westermann, foggy-eyed, slid onto the bench across from Frings, looking wrung out, his sweat-damp hair pushed back, showing a creeping widow’s peak. He was a big guy, lean, movie-star looks, but with a softness about him, too. Frings couldn’t put his finger on it exactly—maybe it was what Frings knew about Westermann rather than what he saw—but it was unusual for a cop.

  “Frank, I’m eager to hear what would compel you to get me out of bed at this time of night.” Westermann also had the movie-star baritone.

  Frings laughed cynically. “You’ll like this.” Frings laid out the scenario that he’d heard earlier at the Palace, leaving out the request to move the body. Westermann sat relaxed, listening with his arms spread across the back of his bench. When Frings was done, Westermann was silent, thinking.

  “Awake yet?” Frings asked.

  “Getting there, Frank. This couldn’t wait?”

  “Let’s walk this through, okay? First, on its face, do you think this crime was probably committed by someone in the Uhuru Community?”

  “Doubtful, but possible, I guess. Look, there’s almost no reported crime in the Uhuru Community. They are either basically crime-free or they don’t call the police. I have my guess about which one’s true, but either way, we don’t get out there much. If they have crime—and they must have some—it’s contained within the Community population. That doesn’t mean Community people don’t commit crimes outside the compound, but it just doesn’t make sense to bring this woman or I guess maybe her corpse back to the shanties. Why ask for trouble? That’s hardly rock solid, but at first glance, I’d say it’s more likely not to involve someone from the Community.”

  “So the body ends up in the Community compound either by chance—washing up onshore—or someone puts it there deliberately, probably trying to implicate the Community.”

  Westermann nodded. “That sounds right.”

  “The second consideration,” Frings said, motioning to the waitress for more coffee, “is what happens if this situation goes public.”

  “Right. I think the Community would be in a lot of trouble. A lot.”

  “I think there’s a consensus on that point. Mel Washington and his people wanted me to talk to you, to convince you that we need to take steps to prevent any connection between the Community and the body.”

  The old man at the counter barked out a short, wicked cackle and returned to his mumbling.

  Frings made sure he had Westermann’s eyes. He needed Westermann to see how serious he was. “They want the body moved. But they don’t want to do it.”

  Westermann smiled—or maybe grimaced. “Jesus. Listen, you know Mel Washington is communist, right? I mean, it’s one thing to be tampering with a crime scene. It happens. But for Mel Washington?”

  Frings kept eye contact, letting Westermann protest enough to satisfy his conscience, but knowing he’d acquiesce eventually. Frings would leave him no choice. He let Westermann keep talking.

  “I have no issue with Mel Washington. But the force … he’s not real popular.”

  Frings nodded dismissively, thinking, Neither are you. “Look, the other piece of this is that they want an investigation. Not a sham investigation, but a real one. They think this is a provocation and I’m inclined to agree with them. They need this person, these people, to be caught.”

  Westermann nodded. Frings watched him think, Westermann rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands, still trying to chase away the fog of sleep.

  “This is a hard one, Frank. I don’t know.”

  “It sounds queer now. It did to me, too. But it grows on you.” “Yeah …”

  Westerman was deep in thought.

  Frings leaned forward, ratcheting up the pressure.

  Westermann said, “What’s this to you, Frank? You’ve got a thing for the Uhuru Community?”

  “Sure,” Frings said, not wanting to let Westermann change the focus.

  “People trying to get a little taste of freedom. That a problem?”

  Westermann closed his eyes. Frings knew that Westermann didn’t really have a choice, didn’t even have time to see what he was getting into.

  Westermann opened his eyes, looked wearily across the table. “All right, let’s go take a look.”

  As they walked out, Frings tossed a couple of dollars in front of the old-timer. This seemed to jar him from his mumblings and he started yelling in some language Frings didn’t know.

  4.

  The heat seemed to suck the stench out of the river and into the stagnant night. Humid air clung to Frings’s face like a hot towel. The moving water reflected a shimmering full moon, and the scene at the riverbank was nearly twilit. Westermann had a flashlight anyway as he, Frings, and Washington followed an older Negro—one of the pair who’d found the body. The Uhuru Community shanties were on a plot of flat land where the river took a sharp bend just downstream from a large abandoned industrial compound. The shantytown ended about fifty yards from the shore, maybe to get some distance from the odor.

  The older man worked his way along the rocks on the shore while the others watched from higher ground, until he shouted that he’d found the body. Frings could see the corpse’s outline in the moonlight, stuck on the bank and partially submerged in the current. She was clothed, and even with her thin dress matted up against her by the water, Frings could see she was too thin.

  Until now, Frings had felt the urgency of the Uhuru Community’s plight and the risk he and Westermann were about to take. But this situation had had a vagueness as he thought it through. Seeing the body made everything concrete. His body tingled from the stress, even as his confidence in the choice he’d made strengthened. You are your deeds.

  “I’m going down to have a look,” Westermann said. Frings and Wash
ington caught the implication and hung back on the bank.

  They watched Westermann conduct a closer examination of the body, following his progress as the flashlight beam made a circuit of the corpse, starting with her pale, fragile face, her eyes open, staring at the moon; then her thin arms—Westermann zeroing in on them, putting his face up close; then where the sodden dress lay plastered to her chest; and finally her legs and bare feet. There wasn’t much to the dress; probably a pro, Frings thought.

  He leaned toward Washington, eyes still on Westermann and the body. “What does Father Womé have to say about this?”

  When no reply came, Frings turned to face Washington. “Doesn’t he know?”

  Washington kept his eyes on Westermann below them. “It’s complicated, but, no, he doesn’t know.”

  Frings shook his head at this piece of subterfuge. He could pick out a faint orange glow to the east; the first hint of sunrise. He reached into his pocket and pulled a cigarette pack from his jacket and tapped out a reefer. He lit it with a battered metal lighter, took a drag, and held it out to Washington.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “I get migraines,” Frings said, feeling the need to explain, and this was technically true. Then: “Why is it complicated with Father Womé?”

  “We’re at cross-purposes in many ways. He wants to create a separate Negro community. We want to create a separate Negro community. But the Father, his eyes are to heaven. We are trying to work here on earth.”

  “But this is his community, right?”

  Washington sighed. “It wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for the Father, no question. The thing is that he’s content to provide for his people and leave them to their own devices as long as they are free. What they do with that freedom …” Washington let the thought trail off. “But you can’t keep a community together that way. Not this kind, at least. There needs to be organization. Right now the Community needs to be protected from the City. That’s not what Womé does. He simply doesn’t understand or think about it. So, it’s complicated.”

  Westermann climbed up from the rocks to join them. Frings stubbed the reefer out on the sole of his shoe and slipped the stub into his pocket.

  Westermann caught the whiff of marijuana smoke as he climbed up the bank to Frings and Washington. He’d seen dozens of dead bodies and there was nothing particularly different about this one. She did have sores—maybe measles or something like that. He’d taken his time with the examination; thinking through the next move. The choice to move the body had been made. It was a career-ending decision if he was caught, but Frings could end his career—would end his career—if he didn’t. His real choices were how to move the body, and where.

  “I can’t tell for sure, but my guess is she drowned. No blood, though that could have been washed away by the water. No wounds that I could see. But in the dark … a coroner really needs to take a look. It’s strange, though, she has these blisters. I didn’t want to touch them, but they’re all over her body. And she’s so thin. There’s something wrong with her. She’s sick. Or she was.”

  Frings asked, “How’d she end up on the rocks?”

  Westermann shook his head. “The river maybe? Washed up? Could be overland. Just park back there”—he nodded in the direction of the road, one hundred yards or so in the distance. “She can’t weigh ninety pounds.”

  “What do you suggest we do?” Washington asked, his fingertips brushing his lips, his body hunched with exhaustion.

  Westermann looked downstream. “Easiest thing to do is push her back out into the river, see where she ends up. Just like she never washed up here in the first place, or maybe got pulled loose from the bank.” There wasn’t much of a crime scene down among the rocks. The current was continuously washing away any evidence, even of his own presence. He could just shove her back out into the river, “discover” her body wherever it ended up, and conduct the investigation from there. It wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t terrible and had the benefit of being simple.

  He looked at the two men. Washington seemed fatigued, Frings energized for some reason. “What do you think?”

  Washington nodded, lost in thought.

  Frings shrugged. “You’re the cop.”

  This bothered Westermann, Frings putting all the responsibility on him when they were both complicit. He caught Frings’s eye and wondered if, maybe, this squared their debt.

  5.

  Westermann caught two hours of sleep, woke up in his clothes, and made it to headquarters in time for Frings’s anonymous call reporting the body on the riverbank in the vicinity of a cluster of derelict ware houses just downstream from the Uhuru Community shanties. There were some jurisdictional complications, but this was not a promising case and no one objected much to Westermann’s claim.

  Without the dark to fill in the spaces, the area around the Uhuru Community was remarkably empty. The Community shantytown, from the outside, was a low amalgamation of scrap lumber, sheet tin, and assorted other found building materials. It spread for more than two hundred yards across flatland. Several hundred yards of weed-infested asphalt, abandoned road, and empty lots teeming with bugs and rodents lay between the Community and a district of ware houses abandoned when the railroad supplanted the river as the main route for cargo transport. Vultures and crows hovered above, searching for a meal.

  The sun out here was merciless. In the field near the shanties, two young Negro girls, their hair in braids, fanned a cow with leafy branches. The cow was white and brown and sickly. Westermann saw that three of the cow’s legs were brown and the fourth was white. Odd, to notice something like that.

  Uniformed cops were already at the site, taking photos and sifting through the surrounding weeds for evidence that Westermann knew did not exist. He walked across the no-man’s-land with two of his detectives. Westermann had six detectives under his authority and he’d brought the two best with him, Larry Morphy and Torsten Grip. They cut an interesting profile walking toward the riverbank. Westermann and Morphy were both well over six feet, but where Westermann was lanky and languid in his movements, Morphy was broad shouldered and strutted with a big man’s confidence. By contrast, Grip was just over five and a half feet, built like a keg, and walked as if he were trying to punish the ground with each step.

  “How’d you pull this case?” Grip asked, his voice rasping with cigarette damage.

  “Statistically anomalous homicide,” Westermann said, forcing a half smile, trying to hide the anxiety. Grip chuckled. Morphy, not generally one for a lot of conversation, took in the surroundings as they walked. Smoke came from different points in the Community, and the smell of burning wood and spiced meats drifted across the field to them.

  They arrived, dripping sweat, at the riverbank. The uniformed cops taking photos of the body and examining the rocks made way. Westermann flashed on six hours earlier, the same body but lying differently. This time she’d made shore facedown, held in place against the current by jutting rocks, black hair fanned out in the water like a starburst. He had the animal urge to grab her, get her away from the water; destroy a crime scene that, however improbably, could point to him.

  “The fuck are these assholes doing?” Grip said, jerking his head toward the uniforms searching the brush farther off the shore. “They think someone dragged her all the way over here, dunked her, and then pulled her back up on the bank? Jesus. They get paid for this?”

  Morphy snorted and shot a contemptuous look at the uniforms.

  “No stone unturned,” Westermann said, climbing down on the rocks to get a better view of the body.

  “Right. Turn over every fucking stone,” Grip said. “Hey, you assholes done taking pictures of the girl?”

  One of the police photographers answered in the affirmative and Westermann watched Morphy, sitting on a rock, take off his shoes and socks and then stand, remove his jacket and his pants, and fold them neatly on top of his shoes.

  “What the hell are you doing?” said Grip.
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br />   Morphy, in shirt, tie, and boxer shorts, looked back at Grip. “You going in the water?”

  Grip shook his head, muttering, “Jesus Christ,” and walked upstream.

  Westermann watched Morphy wade into the river to get a better vantage on the corpse. Westermann had done much the same inspection just a few hours prior and knew what Morphy would find. No trauma. Presumed death by drowning. But those blisters and her weight … Wait for the coroner’s report.

  It was goddamn hot out in the sun without any cover. Westermann took off his jacket and held it by a finger over his shoulder as he walked closer to the body. “What do you think?”

  “Drowned.” Morphy didn’t look up as he moved the woman’s chin. Westermann noted leaves and other small debris stuck in her snarled hair.

  Emaciated. Ended up in the Uhuru Community. He had moved the body. Was it too late to take it back? What if he confessed now, to Morphy? He caught himself. Fatigue. It kept him from thinking straight. Calm down.

  Morphy climbed back up onto the bank, amber water dripping from his legs. He shrugged at Westermann. “The coroner can do his job.”

  The uniforms got to work bagging the body for delivery to the morgue.

  Morphy dressed, sitting on a rock to pull on his socks and shoes. Westermann paced, uncomfortable with nothing to do, ready to get out of there. He looked upriver and saw Grip standing on a rock at the river’s edge, watching as the current pulled detritus downstream.

  Back at the station, Westermann sent Morphy and Grip to handle the paperwork and headed to the bathroom to douse his face and neck with cold, rust-tinged water from the tap. He checked himself in the mirror: bags under his eyes, two days’ growth. He ran his wet fingers through his hair, smoothing it back into place. He’d made it through the first step. He needed sleep so that he could think more clearly.