Scorch City Page 4

  Morphy pulled the sheet up, covering the corpse’s face. “When are you going to give the body a closer look?”

  “Today, sometime. Maybe after lunch.”

  “Be sure you get back to us,” Morphy said.

  Pulyatkin nodded wearily. He knew his personal stake.

  “You hear from your relatives back in the motherland recently?” Grip asked, almost as an afterthought.

  “I haven’t been in contact with anyone from the USSR in well over a decade.”

  Grip smiled in an unsettling way. “You know what to do if you ever are contacted by one of the comrades.”

  “My first call, in that case, would be to you.”

  Grip winked at him.

  “We’ll be waiting to hear from you,” Morphy said, “about the corpse.”

  9.

  Frings woke to his alarm clock, slamming the top to stop the ringing. He lay back against his pillow and turned to the empty space next to him, remembered that Renate hadn’t come home. Sunlight came through the east window, illuminating the framed concert posters—BRAZILIAN SENSATION RENATE CONCECAIO SINGS THE BOSSA NOVA—he had given her on her birthday, her twenty-fourth.

  He took a quick shower, water lukewarm; shaved; pulled on a brown, summer-weight suit; smoked a reefer while he waited for the coffee to percolate; read the obits and the police log in the morning paper. The reefer tasted good, felt good; his body relaxing, his mind easing into the day.

  He read the front section of the paper with his coffee, noted Truffant going after the mayor for being insufficiently vigorous in his efforts to root out communists in the City government. Frings doubted there actually were communists in the City government. But it was always something, every day, the drumbeat of criticism, all in the service of painting the mayor as a corrupt patsy of communists. Frings sighed, frustrated that the paper ran these bleatings as if they were news, instead of invective.

  He finished his coffee, tossed the paper on his metal-topped kitchen table, and decided to pick up a bagel at Sheffer’s around the corner from the station.

  The Gazette had moved into a brand-new building only three years before, yet Panos, the managing editor, had managed through some strange alchemy to turn his office seedy and musty in this short time. Panos himself had the haunted, gaunt look that previously fat people sometimes have. He was alternately sucking on a Cuban and hacking a wet cough. His mustache drooped unhealthily beneath his sad eyes.

  Frings had watched Panos’s physical decline from the bearlike man he had been only a decade ago, to this new, wasted body. His Mediterranean skin had gone sickly yellow. Panos was not forthcoming about his health, but Frings knew something had been wrong for a while now.

  “Frank,” Panos said to Frings, sitting in the chair opposite, cradling a mug of black coffee. “There’s something you want?”

  “You know the Uhuru Community, Chief?”

  “Sure. Of course. Over by the river.”

  “You know we’ve never given them any ink. Not them; not Father Womé.”

  Panos’s shoulders sank as he shook his head. “We haven’t given any ink. Is there a story here, Frank? Something that’s more important than the election?”

  “The election? Plenty of time for that. Listen for a second, this is the kind of stuff that will sell papers. Cult community in the City? Weird rituals, the whole bit. People will eat it up. Voodoo, Panos.”

  Panos brushed this last bit away with a wave of his hand. “I’m sorry, Frank, where is it we are headed with this?”

  “I want to interview Father Womé.”

  “Frank—”

  “Listen, Panos,” Frings interrupted. “This is an interesting story. I’m telling you, we run something, the other papers will be all over it, but we’ll be there first. People will eat it up.”

  Panos squinted. “I’m surprised by this, Frank. I expect this type of thing from Latapy, maybe. All flash. But you, Frank?”

  Frings didn’t say anything.

  Panos thought. “I’m sorry, the Uhuru Community, it is communist, no?”

  “Don’t look for a reason not to do this.”

  “So I am right.”

  “There are some communists involved in the Community, yes. Mel Washington, you know him. But the Community as a whole? Father Womé? I don’t think so.”

  Panos frowned. “This is serious, Frank. We cannot be the newspaper that is friendly to communists. It hurts circulation—”

  Frings began to protest, but Panos waved him away.

  “More important, if we do this, we can’t go after Truffant in the race. He’ll accuse us of being communists, and then what do we say? We will be impotent.”

  Frings exhaled in frustration. “Communism is such a small—”

  Panos held up his hand and shook his head. “They could be goddamn Boy Scouts; the public thinks they are communists so that’s what they are. We cannot be the newspaper that supports this communist experiment.”

  “Look, let me talk to Womé. You want, you run an editorial criticizing the Community for their commie ties, okay? I wouldn’t do it, but maybe you need the cover.”

  Panos studied his cigar, which was how he dealt with misgivings. “Frank, do you forget we have a mayor’s election? This is news. The Uhuru Community?” Panos showed his palms, indicating that the Community, in his eyes, did not rate particularly high. “I thought I’d be pulling you off that fascist Truffant, that you would tear his throat out. But this?”

  “Don’t worry, Panos, I’m going to get my teeth into Truffant. But at least let me interview Womé first. I’ll write it up, run it by you, and then you can make the call. You don’t have to run it. You’re the chief.”

  “I’m the chief,” Panos echoed dubiously. “Frank, you go ahead, but remember that this story, I don’t know …”

  “Of course. Thanks, Panos.”

  Frings was out the door before Panos could reconsider.

  10.

  Westermann sat slumped, knee jiggling, in a windowless, third-floor conference room along with the deputy superintendent, a wraith of a man name Kraatjes, and a mathematician from the Tech who contracted part-time with the force.

  Westermann was distracted, worrying about what his men might be doing in the field. Even if he weren’t in this meeting, he could do precious little other than monitor developments—he couldn’t be everywhere. This was the balance he had to find, giving his men enough leeway to conduct a real investigation while making sure they didn’t find the truth about where the body had originally lain. His chest was tight.

  They sat around a detailed map of the City, divided into quadrants and covered in dots of various colors of ink. The paper was damp from the humidity, books on each corner keeping the map flat. The men had pulled off their ties and sweated into their open collars. Drops of perspiration fell on the edges of the map, raising little wet welts.

  Kraatjes, who oversaw the compiling of the crime data that produced the dots on the map, talked in his high, nasal voice, identifying areas of the City that had seen a notable increase or decrease in crime over the past month. The mathematician took fastidious notes in the ruled notebook that he always brought to these meetings.

  This was a System meeting. The System was Westermann’s brainchild and it had brought him equal measures of reverence and disdain. Fortunately for his career, the reverence mostly came from the administration and the disdain from the cops on the street.

  The System was a mathematical method for deploying police assets throughout the City, putting police in high-crime areas. This idea, on the face of it, was simple enough. The problem was that if you moved the cops from low-crime areas to high-crime areas, you risked criminals’ becoming savvy to this redeployment and crime increasing in previously safe neighborhoods. The System was a complicated mathematical formula that prescribed police deployment largely to high-crime areas while also maintaining a presence in relatively safe ones. It also mandated that the presence in low-crime areas be deployed w
ithout a pattern, so that observant criminals were not provided predictable windows of opportunity.

  The System was implemented as an enhancement to the traditional cop-on-the-beat modus operandi that had dominated the force for decades. But despite its maintaining a credible number of beat cops, the duties of a large group of uniforms were radically changed. This, along with a presumption that the System was an attack on the fundamentals of good traditional policing—community relations, instinct, presence—left Westermann deeply unpopular with a large percentage of the cops on the beat, particularly the old guard, who saw the minor corruptions of protection money and patronage suddenly become nonviable.

  Westermann did not intend the System as an inherent criticism of traditional police work or an instrument to mitigate police corruption. It was simply a way to allocate resources, and the effect on crime rates since its implementation four years prior had been substantial. But, truth be told, he was ambivalent about his unpopularity in some quarters. He hadn’t sought hostility and did not feel he deserved it. Yet, in some way, it validated the profundity of the change he’d advocated. And he would rather be reviled than ignored.

  The penance he paid for the System was this monthly meeting with Kraatjes, whom he genuinely liked and respected, and the mathematician. The irony was that while Westermann disliked these meetings, this work was where his talent lay—not the cop work on the street. He was self-aware enough to understand this and have it bother him.

  The mathematician and Kraatjes discussed how the body found on the riverbank should be treated as an anomaly and not factored into the next month’s deployments.

  Westermann’s mind was on the two detectives he’d felt compelled to send to the Uhuru Community to question anyone who’d been on the riverbank that night to find out if they’d seen or heard anything. There was no way to avoid taking this risk—the investigation required it—yet it was also the first and conceivably most likely point at which the original location of the body might be disclosed, and with it, the moving of the body. Souza and Plouffe, counting the weeks until their pensions, were the least likely of his men to uncover anything during a canvas. It was the best he could do at the moment. He turned his thoughts to the river and the flow of detritus caught in the current and how intently Grip had watched.

  He shuddered involuntarily, realizing that he had, without their knowing, alienated himself from his own men.

  “Too cold for you, Piet?” Kraatjes asked.

  11.

  Pulyatkin, the coroner, pulled a sour face when he saw Grip and Morphy return. Grip sucked on a toothpick and surveyed the room under heavy lids, as though something or someone might be trying to hide from him. Morphy, as always, was more laconic, disconcerting Pulyatkin with an unblinking stare.

  “You figured anything out, comrade?” Grip asked, close to the old man and leading with his chest.

  Pulyatkin took a step back. “Something, yes. I haven’t been able to identify her, but, well, let me show you.”

  The two cops followed Pulyatkin to the far examination table where Pulyatkin pulled back the sheet to expose the corpse’s face. Grip was again taken with how attractive she must have been when life had animated her features. In death, she retained the quality of beauty that one might find in a statue.

  “So, again, this is her,” Pulyatkin said. “I can tell you this, no identifying birthmarks or major scars. I’m waiting on fingerprints, but it will take a while. Dead prostitute, no sign of foul play….”

  Grip was fixed on her face, mottled with the little sores. “You said you were going to show us something.”

  “I don’t know for certain, but I would guess she’s not American. Not originally, at least.”

  Grip jumped on this. “She’s foreign? From where? How do you know?”

  Pulyatkin looked over at Morphy, who was slowly walking around the room, his head tilted slightly as if at a better angle for hearing.

  Pulyatkin hesitated; Morphy’s wandering had thrown him off. The humming sound of the lights filled the void. “I took a look at her possessions, what was found on her body: a necklace, a cross with an inscription in Cyrillic letters.”

  Grip said, “Yeah?”

  “It didn’t say anything interesting, Detective. You aren’t that lucky. A good-luck charm that would be common in rural Russia.”

  Grip nodded, his eyes eager. “Could she have gotten it here? Maybe from a relative?”

  Pulyatkin shrugged. “Could be, but I don’t think so. You get a sense of bodies when you’re in this business as long as I’ve been. You can tell things. She isn’t American. Her body doesn’t have that history.”

  Grip nodded, not sure he was convinced. He looked to Morphy, but Morphy was leafing through a folder he’d pulled off a metal table by the wall.

  “Detective,” Pulyatkin called to him. Morphy finished reading the paper and tossed the folder back on the table.

  “There’s another thing you might find of interest.” Pulyatkin reached into a bowl and pulled out a pink-and-purple mass.

  “Jesus,” Grip said. “The hell’s that?”

  “Her liver.”

  “Fuck,” Grip said.

  Morphy walked over, hands behind his back. “What are those white marks?” he asked, nodding to the slightly raised white welts that formed a lattice over the organ.

  “Lesions of some sort. I haven’t seen anything quite like them before.” Pulyatkin replaced the liver and pulled a second organ from a different bowl. “Her heart, also with the white lesions.”

  Morphy took a close look, his face inches away. Satisfied, he straightened up. “That doesn’t look healthy.”

  Grip gave a quick, truncated laugh.

  “No,” Pulyatkin said gravely. “I suspect that she would have died very soon if she hadn’t drowned.”

  “So, what does all this mean, in your opinion?” Grip asked.

  Pulyatkin replaced the heart. He turned from them and walked to the washbasin, talking over his shoulder. “She had some kind of disease, something that I have not seen before. Based on that and the necklace, I would surmise that she picked it up abroad, and I would think not from the USSR. One hears about diseases like this; Africa, maybe South America. I don’t know. It’s just a guess.”

  Pulyatkin turned on the water and began to wash his hands.

  Grip looked at Morphy. “Doesn’t tell us a whole hell of a lot.”

  “I saw the necklace when she was in the river.” Morphy frowned and asked of Puyatkin’s back, “There’s nothing else?”

  Pulyatkin shrugged without turning. “There’s no identification, no personal effects except for her clothes and the necklace. Maybe someone will come and identify her.”

  Something about the coroner’s dismissive tone angered Grip. He stalked over to the washbasin and grabbed Pulyatkin’s shoulder and turned him so that the two men faced each other.

  “Listen, comrade. This is a very important case, right? We don’t have time to wait and hope that someone comes in to identify her. We need to know now. What else can you tell us?”

  Pulyatkin stared back at Grip, keeping his gaze steady, not backing down. They stared at each other for a few moments, then Pulyatkin dropped his eyes to Grip’s hand on his shoulder. Grip pulled it away.

  Pulyatkin spoke quietly. “If someone comes to claim the body, I will let you know. Beyond that there is nothing I can tell you about this woman. Now I have some work to do.”

  Grip continued to stare at Pulyatkin. Morphy put a hand on Grip’s shoulder. “Come on.”

  Grip kept his eyes on Pulyatkin, hesitating as if he had something else to say, but he just shook his head and followed Morphy to the door while Pulyatkin, motionless, watched.

  12.

  The police station smelled of perspired alcohol. A dozen cops tried to steer eight protesting Negroes through the lobby and into booking. Westermann, just arriving back from lunch, paused to watch and noticed Sergeant Ed Wayne, sweating, red-faced, furious. Wayne n
oticed Westermann and, sneering, gave a fierce jerk to the cuffs of one of the prisoners, drawing a bark of pain. Westermann flashed Wayne a wink and continued on to his squad room with the familiar feeling in his gut—he didn’t know how to deal with guys like Wayne. His efforts were hollow and they both knew it. He and Wayne didn’t share a common background, and as police, they were playing on Wayne’s turf: tough, working-class, vet.

  Westermann’s detectives were waiting for him—three teams of two—sitting in folding chairs in their squad room. Kraatjes frequently reminded Westermann that this was the hardest squad he’d ever had to assemble, given Westermann’s unpopularity in so many police circles. Westermann wasn’t sure if Kraatjes was joking. Regardless, he had a group that was at least neutral toward him—some even loyal—if not consistent in their abilities. And he’d betrayed them.

  Everyone smoked cigarettes except for Grip, who was chewing on an unlit cigar, and Westermann, who didn’t smoke. They dispensed quickly with reports: the search warrant carried out on an East Side apartment to find evidence supporting a homicide confession; the questioning of suspects in the murder of a vagrant in a Theater District alley; and so on.

  Souza and Plouffe briefed the squad on their morning in the shanties, changing the details to preserve some dignity but admitting that they had come up empty. Grip and Morphy chuckled at this, and Souza pinched up his face and bulged his eyes but didn’t say anything.

  Grip and Morphy reported last, with Grip, as always, doing the talking. He related the two trips to the morgue and then, anticipating Westermann’s questions, continued.

  “So, no progress as far as actual identities, but the disease angle has possibilities. Maybe this woman, this possibly Russian woman, was in Africa or South America and picked up the disease there, but maybe she wasn’t. It’s possible she caught the disease here from someone else.”