Scorch City

by Toby Ball

  The guy was unconscious and bleeding a little from the mouth. Winston and the kid each grabbed an arm and dragged him back to where the Community posse was assembling by the road. Reaching them, they laid the man out next to his three unconscious companions, lined up in a row like sardines by the street. The men talked in their Caribbean patois, but were more somber than boastful. This was work, not sport.

  Something up the street caught the men’s attention, and Winston looked to see another set of headlights several blocks away, creeping in their direction. The men backed a few feet away from the bodies, forming a semicircle around them. The car decelerated gradually as it approached and came to a stop next to the bodies—a black Rolls. The window rolled down and behind it was Father Womé, wearing a homburg. He looked at the bodies, frowning thoughtfully, then up at the assembled men. He nodded to them, turned to face forward, and the window rolled up again.

  54.

  Grip arrived at Crippen’s around midnight, carrying his sweat-wilted jacket over his shoulder. The streets in this part of town were mostly deserted tonight. People were just too goddamn exhausted, Grip thought. Himself included. He’d grabbed a shot and a beer with Morphy at a dive on the edge of the Hollows, fending off the local working girls and trying to shake the weird sensation lingering from the empty streets of Godtown; the strangeness brought into relief now by what empty streets really felt like: not really empty, not really quiet. But Godtown, if there were crickets in that part of the City, you would have heard them tonight.

  Whatever attempt had been made to clean the skull-and-top-hat graffiti from Crippen’s door had been largely unsuccessful, and it stared back at Grip as he approached the door. The bar was nearly empty, just a couple of old-timers with crew cuts sitting at one table and a geek named Reinholdt—or something like that—talking with the bartender, waving his free hand about while cupping his beer like the Holy Grail itself.

  Grip nodded to the old-timers, wondered if Reinholdt would come over to him if he sat alone at a table, and decided that if Reinholdt did, he would just drink up and leave. Grip was exhausted, probably wouldn’t have even come here if he’d given it any thought.

  He threw his jacket over a chair and sat down in another, resting his forearms on the table. He looked over to the bartender and was a little annoyed when the guy waved him over. Grip shot him a pissed-off look, but the bartender persisted and Grip hauled his ass out of the chair and over to the bar. At the bar, he stood with his back to Reinholdt, cutting him out of the conversation.

  The bartender looked at Reinholdt and then at the old-timers, who had stopped their conversation and were watching Grip.

  “This afternoon I come in to open the bar, yeah? Door’s locked, same fuckin’ skull shit on the front, couldn’t get it off yesterday. So I come in—door’s locked right, have to open it with my key—and guess what I find on the bar, set up so it’s greeting me?”

  Grip held his hands up, how could he possibly know?

  The bartender stepped aside and gestured with his hand as if he were a magician introducing his assistant. Behind him, on the back bar, was arranged a shot glass filled with something amber—maybe whiskey—in front of a pair of dark sunglasses against which leaned, pointing forward, three black feathers. A half dozen human teeth were arranged in a semicircle in front of the shot glass.

  “The hell’s that?” Grip asked.

  Reinholdt started laughing, a little too loud.

  The bartender shrugged. “That’s it. Don’t know what it means, yeah? Who put it here, how they got in. None of it.”

  “Who else has a key?”

  “Owner upstairs. I talked to him. He don’t know anything.”

  “You think the guy who painted the skull?”

  The bartender shrugged again, finding this amusing; Grip not sure that he should. “That’d be my guess.”

  Grip decided to have a shot along with his beer.

  Grip ended up having several shots and several beers. He’d felt his thinking go fuzzy and his stress grow, and, therefore, his anger, until he finally snapped and pushed the yammering Reinholdt so hard that the geek flipped off his chair and fell into an empty table. He stood up moaning something about his ribs. The bartender sent them both home, making Grip wait ten minutes so that Reinholdt could get good and clear.

  Grip made his unsteady way home, wishing he would come upon Reinholdt; feeling as if a good workout with his fists would restore some normalcy to his life, cleanse his psyche. But Reinholdt’s place wasn’t on his route home. He found himself on his own block, surprised in that he didn’t recall parts of the trip, as if he somehow managed to skip five blocks. An elderly Asian couple walked on his side of the street, as they often did at early hours of the morning. Beyond them, and across the street, a Negro man stood beneath a streetlight. Grip saw him with great clarity: very dark skin, skinny, wearing a thin white shirt unbuttoned to his stomach, threadbare pants, and some sort of sandals. His face had wide cheekbones above sunken cheeks, and large eyes, whites showing all the way around the pupils. Fuck. Grip recognized the guy who’d looked in at Wayne, Koss, and himself at the Uhuru Community headquarters. Him again.

  Grip shuffled to the door of his building and the man still stood there, maybe thirty yards away, maybe watching Grip. Grip froze at his door, not sure of his next step, his back tense, some instinct telling him not to go over to the Negro, not to pound him into the sidewalk. Without warning, the man turned and walked away with a strange, jangly-limbed gait, as if he were a marionette. Grip had never seen anyone move like that and he stared, transfixed and troubled.

  55.

  The next morning arrived with storm clouds that left the impression of night, but a night seared with violent slashes of lightning. The storm provided little relief at police headquarters, where the windows were pulled shut against sheets of wind-driven rain and the hot air stagnated, cigarette smoke rising slowly to the ceiling.

  Westermann drank stale coffee at his desk, looking over the report from Pulyatkin, the coroner: no matches on fingerprints or dental from Lenore; no John Does matching Vesterhue’s description; no progress on the second girl’s identity. This on top of the fruitless phone canvass of hospitals. Further, a note from Kraatjes: Night walk in Godtown?

  The shift was arriving; Souza and Plouffe dragging in, looking put out, their pants soaked where the wind had blown the rain past their umbrellas.

  Westermann decided that there was no point in delaying the inevitable and took the stairs to the fifth floor and Kraatjes’s modest corner office. Rain rocketed against Kraatjes’s windows like buckshot. Kraatjes’s eyes were as dark as the weather.

  “The Chief got a call this morning.”

  Westermann exhaled loudly. “The mayor?”

  “You want to explain why you had Morphy and Grip, of all people, doing a night walk through Godtown?”

  Westermann was expecting the question and he’d thought about the answer, deciding to keep it theoretical, try to avoid the specifics.

  “Let me ask you a question first,” he said. “This case, two dead prostitutes, just a first name on one and nothing on the second; but two things: One is that they’ve both got some kind of disease the doctors can’t seem to get a handle on. The other—and this is the one that’s interesting—is that at least one of them’s connected to two parts of town that as far as our stats go, there isn’t any crime. Ever. So, I figure there’s two things here: Why aren’t there any crimes reported in these two neighborhoods, and why is this crime connected to both of these places?”

  Kraatjes nodded, pulling off his glasses and wiping them with the front of his shirt. He didn’t say anything, but Westermann knew the implied question.

  “Why isn’t there any crime in Godtown? Prosper Maddox says he doesn’t want the police canvassing his neighborhood because his people aren’t worldly enough to answer our questions.”

  Kraatjes coughed. “That might not be the correct interpretation.”

  W
estermann frowned. “Even if it isn’t, a place like that: no B and E, no street robbery? Come on. And then, last night, no one’s even in their houses. The whole goddamn neighborhood is empty except for Maddox’s man. It’s begging to be looted.”

  “Maddox’s man. You mean Ole Koss?”

  “Right. You see the point?”

  Kraatjes nodded, looking thoughtful. “But, in the end, what did you accomplish?”

  “I’m still working on it.”

  “Working on it,” Kraatjes sighed. “Piet, we talked yesterday. I gave you a pass on the newspaper piece because I hadn’t told you to lay off Maddox, yet. But you were in the Gazette, and I know you were in the right and just doing your job, but the photo and the article—they weren’t helpful. If it wasn’t you, Piet, the Chief wouldn’t be so … charitable. But, after we talk, sending goddamn Grip and Morphy that same night? That’s reckless, Piet. Reckless.”

  “Tell me you think there’s nothing strange there; no reason to look into Godtown.”

  “I don’t dispute it. But, you know the connection is weak and the situation that you’re putting the Chief in with the mayor.”

  “But the Chief said he would interfere—”

  “Okay, Piet. Okay. But for God’s sake, do us—do yourself—a favor and at least make it look like you don’t have some kind of bee in your bonnet about Maddox. Show the mayor you’re working other angles.”

  Bee in your bonnet? “Okay.”

  Kraatjes apparently didn’t sense enough conviction in Westermann’s answer. “Listen, we are cutting you a remarkable amount of slack. For your sake and the sake of the people who are putting their necks out for you, don’t ball this up. And for God’s sake, don’t send Grip and Morphy to handle anything requiring tact.”

  Westermann nodded.

  The rain outside had stopped.

  56.

  Grip leaned into Morphy as they approached the entrance to the Community shantytown. “There’s something different. You feel it?”

  “Feel what?” Steam was rising off the broken asphalt of the roads around the shanties, the traces of the morning’s rain evaporating, the air becoming suffocating.

  The answer was Something different, but Grip knew this sounded stupid and instead mumbled something about the noise. Now that he’d thought of it, there did seem to be more noise coming from the shanties. Nothing in particular, just more of the ambient shanty din; behind it, the whine of insects in the field, the giant whoosh of feathers as enormous turkey vultures dipped and then ascended again, waiting for something unseen in the weeds to die.

  He’d put out word that morning that he needed to speak with Ed Wayne and was disconcerted to find that no one knew, exactly, where he was. Headquarters had instituted the usual protocol for cops missing-without-leave. Grip thought about the skull graffiti and the man with the funny walk. He’d feel better once he heard that Wayne had been tracked down.

  As seemed always the case, Community kids were playing in the weeded lot outside the shanty entrance, their skin gleaming with perspiration as they ran in the heat. Grip pulled from his pocket a piece of paper with a rough copy of the skull-and-top-hat design. He pulled out a handful of dimes.

  Morphy, as they’d planned, slipped inside the shantytown and stood by the entrance, notebook in hand, to delay anyone coming out. Grip shook the coins in his hand and smiled kindly as the kids forgot their game and gathered around him, wondering how they could get at the money. Grip didn’t even have to ask; just showing his drawing got the kids going.

  “Samedi. Baron Samedi.”

  Grip threw some dimes out. The kids muscled each other to catch them.

  “Who’s Baron Samedi?” Grip asked, jingling the dimes.

  The kids looked at him as if they could hardly believe his ignorance.

  One of the older ones, maybe ten years old, flashed a hopeful grin. “Samedi’s a lwa. A spirit.”

  “Okay, a lwa. Sure. Why would someone paint him on a door?”

  The kid shrugged. Grip tossed him several dimes.

  The kid shifted them around in his open palm, counting. “Maybe Samedi is someone’s lwa. Maybe somebody wants Samedi to visit the person behind the door.”

  “What do you mean?” Grip asked, tossing a few more dimes over, aware that he only had a few left.

  “When Samedi visits you? I don’t know. Is Samedi your lwa? If Samedi isn’t your lwa, you don’t want him to visit.”

  Grip tossed him the remaining dimes. “You know a man, kind of thin; not like me,” Grip said, forcing a carefree chuckle of sorts. “Walks funny? Like a puppet?”

  The kids looked among themselves, not really confused, just consulting. Finally the same kid said, “Could be anyone, any of the lwas.”

  “What do you mean, lwa?” Grip asked, but the kid was turning away from him, laughing. The kid threw some of his dimes up in the air, and his friends scrambled madly to pick them up where they lay, glistening in the sun, like tiny pools of water.

  57.

  Panos sat behind his big editor’s desk, reading a memo, while he distractedly popped grapes into his mouth. Frings stood in the doorway and gave a stage cough to get Panos’s attention. Panos didn’t look up from the memo or stop eating grapes, but inclined his head toward the chair nearest the door. Frings was surprised to see Deyna in the next chair, smirking. Frings ignored him, grabbing a copy of the morning’s Gazette off Panos’s desk. He scanned the headlines, nothing out of the ordinary: City official on the take; citizens need to curb excess water use to ensure water supplies remain stable; school-bus accident, driver was drunk; etc. He felt Deyna’s eyes on him.

  Panos finally finished his memo and looked up at Frings. “Frank, Deyna here has done some reporting. You remember that, no? He’s working sources, knocking on doors, all that. Tell him, Deyna, what you’ve found.”

  Deyna shifted his chair a little so he was almost turned to Frings. “They found a second body on the river; this one upriver from the first; right by the Uhuru Community.”

  Frings felt the two men watching him, waiting for a reaction. “Okay,” he said slowly.

  “The police are playing this close to the vest. Big pressure to keep it quiet.”

  “Why do you think that is?”

  “You’re the genius, Frings, why do you think?”

  “You really want to know?”

  Deyna stared at him, challenging.

  Frings looked at Panos. “Should I tell him what I think?”

  With a flourish of his hand, Panos told him to go on.

  Frings turned to Deyna. “I think you’re getting this bullshit from Ed Wayne.”

  Deyna’s jaw dropped, but he recovered quickly. “Fuck you.”

  “Have some respect,” Panos growled.

  Deyna held his hand up in apology to Panos. “Sorry.” To Frings, Deyna said, “I’ve—”

  Frings cut him off. “You want to know something about your ‘source’?” Frings turned to Panos. “Remember that story I pitched you about the assaults over by the Uhuru Community?”

  Panos sighed. “How do I forget? This was two, three days ago.”

  “I’ve got some sources myself. Sources who aren’t full of shit. One of these sources just called me, said he was on a two-ambulance call last night down by the Uhuru Community. Said there were four guys—white guys—beat up and laid out side by side, waiting to be picked up.”

  Deyna glared, but Frings saw that this was new to him.

  “So I asked him, could these be the ginks who’ve been assaulting Negroes down by the Uhuru Community? Are they thugs?

  “My guy said they’ve got those lumpy knuckles and that there were a couple of baseball bats and tire irons laid out next to them and a car at the scene with what he described as ‘blunt instruments’ in the backseat. Also, anticommunist leaflets and so on.”

  Panos said, “So these hooligans, they get their comeuppance? Is that the story? What’s the punch line, Frank?”

  Deyna continued th
e hard stare, but with maybe a little doubt creeping in; seeing where this was heading.

  Frings smiled. “So my guy, he said it took a while, but he talked to some people, looked at some charts, and he’s got the four names.” Frings leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head.

  “Get to the point,” Deyna muttered.

  Panos smiled, amused.

  “Okay,” Frings said, leaning forward again. “Three of the names, I don’t recognize. But one … one is a gink by the name of Ed Wayne.”

  Panos’s eyebrows went up.

  Frings said to Panos, “Another thing Deyna might not know is that Wayne’s got the Uhuru Community beat. There’ve been a couple of calls over the past two weeks—assault calls. Wayne sat on them.”

  Deyna said, “I’ve got a second source.”

  Frings shook his head. “You’ve got one source, maybe. Wayne’s already shown his hostility to the Uhuru Community. You can’t source anything to him.”

  Deyna looked at Panos.

  Panos smiled and shrugged. “You’ve got the story. Finding another source, how hard can that be?”

  Deyna stood. “Okay. Right.” He paused to stare down at Frings. Frings saw the hate. Deyna closed the door quietly behind him.

  Panos shook his head. “This kid, he’s going to find another source, Frank. He’s damn good. And when he finds that source, we’ll run the story.”

  “Panos.”

  “We have to run the story. That way no one can say we are commie lovers when we go after Truffant. We sit on this story, nobody takes us seriously.”

  “You’re going to sell out the Uhuru Community so we can write some nasty editorials about Truffant?”

  Panos slammed his fist on the desk. “Damn it, Frank. Girls are being killed.”