Frank Frings’s apartment smelled of marijuana smoke, the half-smoked reefer stubbed out in an ashtray on the coffee table. Frings leafed through the early edition of the Gazette, taking his time with a bottle of beer. He didn’t have a column in the day’s paper, so he skimmed through the headlines, perused the obits, read up on the horses. He checked his watch—ten past one. Renate wasn’t home.
Frings finished with the paper, picked up his beer, and walked to the window, looking down onto the street. A couple of cabs crept along, looking for fares. A group of young men, their ties loose around their necks, made drunken, boisterous conversation as they jostled down the block. Two derelicts huddled in a doorway, sharing a smoke. Frings finished his beer, took it and the newspaper into the kitchen, and left them on the counter next to the sink.
She would have been off the stage by eleven forty-five and home by twelve thirty. That’s the way it always was, except when she didn’t come home. Frings sighed, drank a glass of water. He didn’t wonder whom she was with tonight. He was annoyed that he’d stayed up waiting for her and would be tired the next day. He was annoyed that he would be alone in his bed tonight. But he didn’t think about her in another man’s bed. It didn’t matter to him.
He undressed, set his alarm clock. The phone rang.
His shirt pasted to his back with sweat from the cab ride, Frings walked into the Palace, shook hands with the bouncer, and glanced around at the crowd—maybe a couple hundred people—which seemed to be suspended in the thick air. Years ago, a few whites had been regulars at the Palace, but tonight there wasn’t another white person in the joint. Frings felt eyes on him and then, because he was a regular, the attention returning to the stage. He watched as the owner came his way, weaving gracefully between tables, nodding, smiling, giving the occasional brief handshake. Floyd Christian was about Frings’s age, but could have passed for ten years younger if not for the beginnings of gray in his hair. His body was still lean, the coal black skin of his face unlined. He might have been the only person in the place not sweating.
“How are things at the Gazette, Frank?” Christian asked by way of greeting, gripping Frings’s hand, flashing a grim smile.
“Good. Fine. You know what time it is?” It was a rhetorical question; they both knew it was two in the morning. Christian had rung him, pulling him out of bed, the urgency in Christian’s voice getting Frings here in yesterday’s clothes, no time to pull out new ones. He was rumpled, his face greasy from the pillow. Christian didn’t make calls like that, dragging the best-known newspaperman in the City over to his club during the wee hours. Frings wondered what the hell was going on.
Christian said, “Sorry to pull you away from the lovely Renate.”
“You didn’t pull me away from her.”
Christian raised his eyebrows, concerned.
“It’s nothing,” Frings said. “She’s young.”
Christian frowned and clapped Frings on the shoulder. “Come on. Let’s go back to my office.” Frings followed him along the back row of tables. Frings, at just under six feet, was shorter than Christian and a little thicker around the waist, too. But despite an unmemorable face, Frings had a smile that drew people in, and the presence that sometimes comes to those who are comfortable with their celebrity.
Christian turned his head and yelled over his shoulder, “What do you think of them?”
Onstage a band was playing languid jazz, the musicians dressed in maroon tuxedos. The crowd murmured dozens of low conversations and smoked and drank. Frings wobbled his hand. So-so. It wasn’t his kind of thing.
Christian knocked twice on his office door, which opened from within. Christian went in first. Frings followed.
He eyed three Negroes sitting at Christian’s meeting table; two men, one woman. His mouth went dry. He’d met one of the men before and could guess who the other two were. Something was really wrong. Christian wouldn’t have brought Frings together with these people at this time of the night and in secret unless it was big. He didn’t like it. Christian could have filled him in, warned him about what he was walking into.
The man in the middle stood up—tall, very thin, black-framed glasses, close-cut hair.
Christian said, “I think you know Mel Washington.”
Frings had met Washington before, smart, elegant, rumored homosexual. Frings’s editor’s, Panos’s, take on Washington: Black, queer, and Red? God doesn’t hate nobody that much.
Mel Washington extended a slender hand with long, pianist’s fingers. They shook. “Nice to see you again, Mr. Frings.”
“Frank.” Frings saw the tension in Washington’s jaw.
“Okay. Do you know Warren Eddings and Betty Askins?”
“Only by reputation.”
The other two nodded in silent greeting. Washington, Eddings, and Askins: the City’s three leading Negro communists. Frings looked at Christian. Christian nodded, acknowledging the difficult situation he’d put Frings in—better to have done this during the day, in public. Right now things looked suspicious.
Frings and Washington sat. Christian stood by the door, overseeing, removing himself from the conversation. The room was furnished in black leather; a one-way mirror looked out on the club floor. Barbershop fans pushed the stifling air around the room to no effect. Eddings and Christian smoked Luckies. It was hard to breathe.
“Frank,” Washington began, elbows on the table, fingers steepled, “we asked Floyd to bring you here to meet with us because we have a very difficult situation. A very difficult situation. We’re hoping you’ll be … discreet. We’re coming to you because we know you are sympathetic to our cause. Can we trust you to be discreet?”
Frings looked at Washington, then turned in his seat to give Christian a questioning glance.
“Frank, I wouldn’t bring you …”
Frings nodded, trusting Christian. He turned back to Washington. “Okay. We can talk.”
“Two men over at the Community were fishing tonight on the riverbank. They found a dead woman in the rocks. A dead white woman.”
“On Community land?”
Betty Askins nodded along with Washington. Warren Eddings scowled at his hands folded in his lap.
“Yeah, that’s not good.” A dead white woman by the all-Negro Uhuru Community was trouble.
Washington continued, “We don’t know what happened yet, but it doesn’t really matter, does it?”
Frings shook his head. It didn’t. Frings knew how perception worked in the City. Anticommunists and the blue press would make lurid speculations, and these would be digested by many people as unquestioned truth. The Uhuru Community, he thought, would burn.
Betty spoke. She was younger than the two men and attractive in a finishing-school sort of way; her hair in a chaste bob. “We have people trying to find out if it was someone in the Community that did this. We can’t rule it out, but …”
“What would a white girl be doing there?” Frings said.
“Exactly,” agreed Washington.
“Working girl?”
Betty Askins looked down at the table, embarrassed.
Washington said, “Could be. But our understanding”—he looked uncomfortably at Betty—“is that … this type of commerce is generally kept within the Community.”
Frings nodded.
Warren Eddings wore a skullcap. He had high cheekbones and a narrow patch of beard that hung a couple of inches below his chin. His voice was low and controlled. “This is a setup, white folks putting this on the Community.”
Washington looked pained. “Frank, I realize this might put you in an awkward position.”
Frings’s pulse hammered in his ears. “Jesus, Mel, I don’t know why you say that.” Why was he here?
Eddings and Betty looked to Washington. “We need this to be kept quiet.”
They’d said that. “That’s going to be difficult.”
Washington said, “I’m afraid I’m not getting to the point. We need this situation taken care of. We can’t let this crime be associated with the Uhuru Community. The Community’s the most successful Negro endeavor in this City’s history. Its existence is at stake. You know that white folks won’t tolerate the Community if this news gets out. They won’t. And I’m worried that, like Warren said, this is a setup, specifically to put the Community at risk.”
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.”