Scorch City Read online

  The bathroom door swung open and a cop in uniform entered and took a sink two down from Westermann’s. Westermann rolled his neck and noticed the cop glaring at him in the mirror. He knew this guy, an anticommunist fanatic named Ed Wayne.

  Westermann said, “Something I can help you with, Sergeant?”

  Wayne sneered.

  Westermann checked out their reflections side by side in the mirror—Westermann tall and broad shouldered; Wayne stocky, a little overweight, but with a brawler’s look about him; thick neck under his fat, red face.

  Westermann turned to leave, walking by Wayne on his way to the door. The two men exchanged stares until Westermann winked and walked out, heart pounding, forcing a chuckle.

  6.

  Off duty that night, Grip was at the wheel of his DeSoto—all four windows down to get some air—creeping through a neighborhood of low buildings with heavy doors. It was twilight here, a jaundiced light rendering every color false. Two men accompanied Grip. Ole Koss rode shotgun, working a toothpick, listening to some preacher on a Christian radio station. He was a big, muscular vet, close-shaved head, weird scar on his mouth that made his upper lip move a little funny when he talked. Grip wasn’t sure what Koss did for work, but he always seemed to have time for these things. Grady Filkins sat in the backseat, a corporate geek on his first time out, looking to get his thrills. Grip had picked up that Koss didn’t like Filkins; the geek physically frail, a desk zealot still in bow tie and straw fedora.

  Koss read off street numbers as they eased along through sparse traffic. Grip saw cops every few blocks, walking with their hands on their truncheons. Campaign posters for the mayor were plastered onto brick walls along with posters for his opponent, Vic Truffant, and anticommunist propaganda: giant, vaguely Asian eyes captioned THE ENEMY IS AMONG US; shady, Semitic-featured men lurking under the hammer and sickle. Above them, the night clouds were lit red and purple from below.

  On the radio, the preacher was going on about the Antichrist or something; Grip hated that shit, but there was never much profit in arguing with Koss. Filkins chain-smoked in the back, nervous as hell. He wasn’t the type of guy you’d peg for rough work.

  “Yeah, up here,” Koss said, indicating a cinder-block building with a cargo door and an entrance to its right.

  Grip glided to a stop at the curb. Koss pulled a sack from under his seat and produced two guns. He secured one in the back of his waistband and tossed the other to Filkins, who recoiled as if it were a live grenade landing in his lap.

  “Put it in your pocket,” Koss said. “We’re going to leave you at the bottom of the stairs. Someone shows up, you stick the gun in his face and bring him to us. Don’t be weak with the piece. If someone gets his hands on it, I’ll have to kill them and that would be too bad.”

  “I don’t …”

  Koss sucked in his lips.

  “You won’t have to do anything,” Grip said gruffly, trying to head this off before it turned into a disaster. “Stand at the door, maybe have your gun out. Don’t talk, just stand there. Nobody’s going to show up. We’ll only be up there for a couple minutes.”

  Filkins seemed uncertain. Koss turned in this seat and shot him a withering look. “You going to get it together?” It came out like a question, but it wasn’t.

  They waited in the car for ten minutes, listening to Christian radio while Filkins made humming noises in the backseat, trying to get his nerves under control. The wall was peppered with Truffant posters—maybe the Reds thought this was some kind of camouflage.

  A heavy guy in a white shirt padded down the street and approached the door to the cinder-block building. He stopped, pulling keys from his pocket with a surreptitious look both ways. Grip was out of the car quickly, moving on the guy with practiced efficiency—a cop move. Koss followed him. The guy turned, surprised, and Grip stuck a pistol in his ribs.

  “Open up, real quiet.”

  The man’s eyes were wide with fear, but he unlocked the door and Grip followed him through. They left Filkins, hands shaking, on the ground floor while Grip pushed the fat guy up the stairs with a pistol in his back. Koss followed, gun drawn.

  At the top of the landing they listened; heard a sliding sound that came at long intervals, and muffled conversation. Grip motioned the guy to go in, the guy looking as if he were going to be sick. Grip moved his pistol up to the man’s head and he swallowed hard and opened the door. Grip pushed him into the room and followed tight behind.

  Inside, three men looked up, stunned. They were working a small printing press, churning out commie posters: crude block prints of Mao; a blond guy with a scythe looking heroic in front of a field of wheat; WORKERS UNITE. Two wore Lenin beards; they were all small, wiry. Grip thought Koss could probably take all three of them at once, no problem.

  “What the hell?” one of them sputtered as they instinctively retreated to the far side of the room. Koss pushed the fat guy toward them. Grip covered them with his gun, closing the distance. They didn’t look to have the nerve or the ability to put up any resistance. Still, you never knew.

  Koss took the press, flipped it on its side, and began stomping on it, splintering the frame, red ink pooling on the floor, the chemical smell filling the room. One of the guys began to protest, but Grip sighted the gun on his forehead and he backed down. The fat one was sitting on the floor, shaking.

  The press in shambles, Koss gathered posters, throwing them on the shattered press. He paused with one, a block portrait of a wide-browed Negro above the slogan THE UHURU COMMUNITY MUST LIVE! Koss showed it to Grip. Grip shook his head in disgust.

  Koss asked the Reds, “You in bed with the Uhuru Community?”

  They looked back at him, intimidated into silence. Koss laughed—a nasty sound. Koss threw the whole stack of Uhuru Community posters on the pile. He pulled a tin of matches from his jacket pocket.

  One of the Reds said, “Don’t.”

  Grip turned on him. “Shut it.”

  Koss lit a match on the sole of his shoe and tossed it on the pile of paper.

  Then he tossed another. And another. The posters caught, flames rose. The small, scattered flames began to find each other and the fire grew.

  Koss’s face was neutral. “Come on,” he said, and walked toward the exit.

  Grip nodded at the flames. “Good luck with that,” he said to the Reds.

  Later, Grip sat with Ed Wayne at a bar called Crippen’s, chasing whiskey shots with beer in sweating glasses. A dozen or so men—and one woman—smoked and drank balefully. Filkins sat at a separate table with a Mexican prostitute, leaning into her and speaking quietly in her ear. Koss, an alleged teetotaler, had gone home.

  From somewhere came the sound, half static, of someone ranting on the radio. This bar was a headquarters of sorts for anticommunists, run by a World War I vet below a seedy Italian joint.

  Grip recounted for Wayne the incursion on the printing press, embellishing a little; the Reds needing more physical coercion in his telling. Wayne nodded along to all this drunkenly. He was a stupid prick, but their shared politics made conversation tolerable.

  “Shit, I nearly forgot,” Wayne said, nearly slurring his words, “I saw your boss this morning.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Restroom at the station. Making himself pretty.”

  “Okay, Ed. Whatever you say.”

  “Whatever I say?” Wayne laughed. “How about this? I say your boss is an asshole.”

  Grip reddened. “Know what, Ed? Shut the hell up about shit that you don’t know about, all right?”

  “Get fucked,” Ed growled.

  Grip stood up, leaning over the table. “Fuck you.” They locked eyes, Grip daring Wayne to stand up and do something about it.

  Finally, Wayne broke and returned to his beer. “He’s still a bastard,” he muttered.

  “Jesus,” Grip said, holding up two fingers for a shot and a beer.

  Filkins and his whore got up from their table holding hands. In a we
ird euphoria driving back from the press, Filkins had babbled on about rewarding himself for his night’s work with this girl—Grip couldn’t remember her name now—until Koss had finally snapped at him to shut it and Filkins had spent the remainder of the ride huddled in the corner with a little grin on his face. Grip wondered if he could somehow work it out so that he’d never have to see Filkins again.

  7.

  Lou Souza walked the dirt alleys of the Uhuru Community shantytown carrying a handkerchief that he used to mop his brow every few steps. It wasn’t just the heat. The smell of the shanties was getting to him, too: spices, exotic-wood burning, sweat, baked dirt, marijuana, and, underlying it all, sewage and rotting garbage.

  “I’m having trouble breathing,” Souza said to Remy Plouffe as the two detectives trod warily through the claustrophobic alleys on the edges of the shantytown.

  “It’s in your head, Lou.”

  Negro children in ragged clothes scattered laughing when they saw the two white men in suits and straw fedoras approaching. Something about these kids bothered Souza, made him uneasy.

  “I’m telling you, there’s something in the air. Something’s working on my lungs.”

  Plouffe shook his head. “What’s in the air is this shit smell and the heat.”

  Souza mumbled something under his breath and Plouffe said, “What did you say?” and Souza told him to never mind and nodded up ahead of them where four men stood, passing a huge reefer between them.

  The morning had been frustrating. They wore their badges clipped to their jackets, neither one comfortable in the shanties and counting on their authority to give them some kind of protection. They’d been met with silent wariness, fear, and hostility. Their attempts to question people had consistently been rebuffed, the people either ignoring them or claiming ignorance.

  “Have you seen or heard about a young white woman around the shanties the last few days?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but I haven’t.”

  Souza saw Plouffe’s increasing frustration in the set of his jaw and the narrowing of his eyes. Souza didn’t much care if they came away with nothing from this canvas. Some whore found dead? Was it that important? And there was something he didn’t like about the group of men they were approaching, the way they dominated that end of the alley; the way the other Negroes seemed to walk down side alleys so as not to walk past them.

  Souza and Plouffe stopped a few feet from the group of men. Up close, Souza saw their matted hair and yellowed eyes. The men met the two detectives with a heavy-lidded, menacing silence.

  Plouffe said, “We’re investigating a missing person. White girl; word is that she was seen around here. Any of you seen a white girl hanging around here? Or heard about one?” His voice had an edge, the morning’s frustrations creeping in.

  The men stared back without expression, but their eyes burned.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear me,” Plouffe said, moving forward a stride, stepping up the tough-cop vibe. “I asked if you’d seen or heard about a white girl around here the past couple days.”

  One of the Negroes stepped forward. He had a good five inches on Plouffe and tilted his head back to look down condescendingly.

  “We’ve heard nothing.” Deep voice. Island accent.

  Souza saw Plouffe’s back tense. Plouffe wasn’t real fond of Negroes to begin with.

  “Rem,” Souza whispered. Plouffe was in a staring match with the big Negro and ignored Souza. Souza saw people beyond the other three Negroes, out of their shacks to see what was going on. He looked over his shoulder and saw more standing in the alley, checking out the action. Souza rolled his left shoulder back a little, pulling the jacket away from his shoulder holster in case he needed to go for his gun. Behind the standoff, the crowd parted to allow a short, thin man with coal black skin move up front. He wore round sunglasses. Souza felt the man’s eyes upon him.

  The big Negro said, “You asked your question, Mr. Cop, and got your answer. Now you can go.”

  Souza moved up quickly next to Plouffe, trying to head off Plouffe’s response.

  Souza whispered in Plouffe’s ear, “Rem, look around. We’ve got to be smart here.”

  Souza saw Plouffe break off the staring match and look down the alley. The onlookers weren’t belligerent, but Souza didn’t know how they’d react if the confrontation escalated. The little man was still there, standing motionless.

  “Come on, Rem. Let this one go. They probably haven’t seen anything anyway.”

  Plouffe nodded. He looked at the big man. “Next time.”

  The big man snorted and then laughed. His friends joined in. Souza felt his face flush and he grabbed Plouffe by the elbow as they retreated down the alley. The crowd seemed to understand what was going on—or they were looking to buy some favor with the four men—because they began to laugh as well, the noise gathering volume as it echoed through the narrow confines of the alleys. Souza cleared a path through the people with his right arm as he pulled Plouffe along with his left. Plouffe had his hand on the gun still holstered under his arm, and Souza thanked God that he had the good sense not to pull it.

  They walked back toward where Souza thought they had come in, but the alleys didn’t seem the same somehow. Or maybe they did. Plouffe was calming down and they walked in silence, not bothering to question the people they passed. Souza looked down an alley of dilapidated and makeshift huts and thought he saw the man with the sunglasses moving parallel to them. But as soon as the man disappeared from view, Souza thought that maybe he hadn’t actually seen him. His memory of the way the man moved seemed wrong.

  Souza began to feel as if they had walked more than far enough to reach the exit, but there was no way they could have missed it. He looked at Plouffe and saw that he, too, was trying to work it through.

  They passed a small lot between two shanties. It looked as if a shack might have stood there at one point and been torn down or stolen or whatever happened to shacks here. At the far side of the tiny space was a wall made of corrugated tin, and through the cracks in the tin, Souza could see the fields outside the shantytown.

  “Goddammit,” Souza said, took two steps, and put his shoulder into the wall. It sagged. Plouffe joined him and they kicked at the wall until it finally ripped away from where it was attached to the plywood wall of the adjacent shanty.

  8.

  Grip had been mildly disappointed that morning to find that he and Morphy had drawn the task of trying to establish the dead woman’s identity. He’d been looking forward to poking around the Uhuru Community, getting the line on some of the communists there. He also had some thoughts about how the body had ended up where it had, but he could look into that on his own time.

  The City Morgue was painfully bright and clean and smelled sweetly of formaldehyde. Grip’s and Morphy’s footsteps echoed on gleaming tile floors that shone so that the room seemed to be illuminated from every direction. Six stainless steel examining tables were lined up in the room and only two were empty. On three lay bodies covered with white sheets, and at the fourth a small, round man with rimless glasses over his surgical mask peered into an open chest cavity. It wasn’t cool in here the way it was supposed to be. Grip suppressed thoughts of what the heat was doing to the cadavers.

  Grip cleared his throat and the man jerked his head up. He’d been lost in his examination of the corpse of an obese Caucasian man. Grip felt slightly sick, not from the grisly sight of the opened chest, but from his contempt at the condition this man had been in while alive. Disgusting.

  The coroner, an ageless man named Pulyatkin, opened his palms in inquiry. Sweat misted the tops of his lenses.

  “Jane Doe. Came in yesterday,” Grip said.

  Pulyatkin nodded. “One moment please.” He walked back to a sink, and Grip and Morphy watched as he scrubbed his hands and forearms with powdered soap and hung his surgical mask on a peg. Then he came back to the two officers. He didn’t offer his hand.

  “This is one of them,” he said
, and pulled a sheet back to reveal a woman’s waxen body. “There’s two others. One of them’s older, maybe sixties.”

  “This is her,” Morphy said, cocking his head slightly as he looked at the woman’s uncovered face.

  Grip’s first impression—he hadn’t seen the body up close at the riverbank—was that she must have been attractive in life. The structure of her face was delicate and her body had probably been pretty good before she had begun wasting. Then he noticed the blemishes on her skin.

  “We did an exterior exam,” Pulyatkin was saying, “and came up with nothing indicating external trauma. The water, of course, would have washed away most of what we would normally find in the way of fibers and such. There are no external signs of anything potentially fatal, though there are needle marks in her arms.”

  “Hophead?”

  Pulyatkin grimaced at the thought. “Not unless she just picked up the habit. There isn’t the scarring normally associated with any kind of regular use.”

  Morphy had left the conversation and was pulling back the sheets to look at the faces of the other two corpses. Pulyatkin gave him a disconcerted look, but continued.

  “What about these marks?” Grip said, pointing to the blemishes on her face.

  Pulyatkin nodded. “She actually has these same marks all over her body. They appear to be blisters of some sort, though I haven’t had a chance to examine them more closely. We’re very busy here, Detective. The heat … there are always more bodies when there’s heat like this.”

  Morphy was back and had pulled back the other end of the sheet, giving her feet a close inspection.

  Grip asked, “How do you think she got these blisters?”

  “An allergic reaction, maybe. Again, I haven’t had a chance to examine them more carefully, but their dispersal around the body indicates that their origin is internal—systemic—rather than external.”