It had been a morning of wall-to-wall meetings, and Frings took advantage of a brief break by sitting out on the fifth-floor fire escape, sharing a reefer with a young beat reporter named Latapy. A group of four pigeons—the same four pigeons that always came—perched on a metal railing. Frings and Latapy blew marijuana smoke at them.
Frings liked Latapy. Latapy was young and eager—Frings didn’t necessarily like him for that—but smart and savvy enough to listen to the more experienced reporters. And he was funny. He wasn’t a prima donna, trying to rewrite the rules. Had Frings been a prima donna at that age? Probably, to be honest.
Frings asked, “Do you know Art Deyna at all?”
“Deyna? Sure. Don’t you?”
Frings took a hit off the reefer, holding the smoke in as he shook his head.
Latapy said, “Why? What’s up?”
“He a decent gink?”
“Gink?”
“What? Am I dating myself? Is he a decent ‘chap’? ‘Bloke’? ‘Guy’?”
Latapy laughed, exhaling a plume of smoke at the pigeons. “He’s fine. Not my cup of tea, but fine.”
“Why? What’s the problem?”
“I don’t know. He’s a little serious, I guess. Looks out for himself. Not the kind of guy to be friends with, really.”
“He good on the beat?”
“He thinks he’s good. And he’s probably right. Look, Frank, what’s the story?”
Frings shrugged, not wanting to make this a bigger deal. “We’re working on different parts of the same story. I just wanted a sense of him.”
“You two are working the same story?” Latapy was genuinely surprised. Most of the younger reporters looked up to Frings; were even intimidated by his reputation. One of that generation actually competing for a story with Frings was a big step up. “I don’t know how he’ll be with you, Frank. But if it was me, I’d keep my eye on him. He’ll go after the story hard. He likes to compete and you would be a big trophy.”
Frings sighed, staring at the stoned pigeons.
In an editorial meeting, Frings’s mind wandered to Westermann, the man he had chosen as a coconspirator. He liked Westermann, to a degree, and considered him one of the smarter cops Frings had known—maybe the smartest. But Frings also knew how weak Westermann could be; had seen it himself, doing research for a feature he’d written on Westermann just as the police were rolling out the System.
There was a story Frings could have written, should have written; the story would have sold papers, put him back in the spotlight, rendered the truth. The story would have sent Westermann back to a desk somewhere or out of the force entirely, and this had stopped Frings. Not so much what would befall Westermann, but the fate of his system. The events of that night didn’t call into question anything about the System, but they called into question everything about Westermann as a cop, and Frings knew that the System’s opponents would use its creator’s failings to impeach the thing itself. So he’d written a different story, one where heroism and cowardice were inverted.
What happened: Frings was spending the night as a ride-along with Westermann, getting material for a story on the force’s controversial “Golden Boy.” Smart, good-looking college boy with a world of possibilities chooses to be a cop and soon has the majority of the force despising him.
Then there was his father, Big Rolf Westermann, maybe the best-known lawyer in the City, with a penchant for rich clients and headlines. Cops hated Big Rolf’s grandstanding, his belittling of police, but Big Rolf evoked fear, too. No one wanted to look like a fool, or worse, corrupt, on the stand. His son, Frings thought, might be an attractive proxy.
Westermann rode shotgun, talking over his shoulder to Frings, while his partner, a two-decade vet named Klasnic, steered the prowl car through block after City block. It was fall—a cool night, light breeze. Westermann came off cocky, as if he had it all figured out. Frings knew how to read people, though, and Westermann was hiding something behind the bravado. Westermann talked and Frings took notes, ignoring the words and jotting impressions, psychological conjecture, and philosophical musings about class and law enforcement and entitlement. Frings’s head was buzzing with thoughts. He was stoned to the gills.
Klasnic took a call. A disturbance, apparently, in a tenement a couple blocks away, two men arguing; a chance for Frings to catch Westermann in action. They hightailed it to the scene, siren and lights off. A tattered notice condemning the building was nailed to the front door. Westermann led them up narrow, shadowed stairs with Klasnic in the rear. Frings sensed that this was not their usual order.
The place was in terrible shape, doors missing off the dim hallways; puddles of stagnant water on the landings; sounds of despair, anger, and psychosis echoing around the walls. These places had to be squats. No way anyone paid money to live like this.
Shots exploded above them, unsettling a pack of rats that fled down the stairs, scrambling under the feet of the men as they ascended. Frings’s skin prickled; his adrenaline flowed. The human noises above them had stopped. No one wanted to attract the attention of a man with a shotgun.
They took the remaining two flights of stairs three at a time and arrived at a hallway lit by a bare bulb that flickered like a frenzied strobe. Westermann and Klasnic advanced with their guns drawn, Frings trailing. The carpet in the hall was damp under their feet, smelled of mold. Bugs crawled where floor met wall. The two cops found the right door and pressed against the wall on either side, listening.
Only one voice seemed to be coming from inside: ranting, howling expletives and threats, the words barely comprehensible. The guy in there was either drunk or insane or both. Frings watched Klasnic nod to the door and hold up three fingers, then fold each one in turn until none remained and he pushed against the door, easing it silently open, the voice now coming louder into the hall. Klasnic disappeared through the door. Westermann waited a five count and then followed. Frings walked over to the threshold and looked in, but there was only an empty foyer, so Frings kept on edging down a short hallway to his right.
The tone of the ranting changed, like a drop in air pressure; a sudden focus, words sharper.
“Who the fuck are you? Drop the piece or I’ll blow his fucking head off. I will blow his fucking head off.”
Westermann’s voice: “Drop the weapon. Drop the goddamn gun.”
Klasnic’s voice, high with tension: “Shoot him. Shoot.”
The ranting voice: “Shut your goddamn trap. You shut your goddamn trap.”
Frings rounded the corner and took in the situation. The light in the room was mostly dim, but shotgun smoke defined sheets of bright light knifing down from slits in the ceiling. Klasnic stood in the opposite doorway, pistol at his feet, staring wide-eyed at a man, spotlit in the center of the room, a sawed-off trained on Klasnic. The man—tall and lean, red hair flaked with gray, huge sideburns—Frings recognized as Blood Whiskers McAdam, a criminal and habitual murderer with who knew how many victims, mostly mob guys. At McAdam’s feet lay what was left of a man who’d just caught two shotgun shells from close range. Westermann stood just in front of Frings, visibly trembling, his gun all over the place.
Klasnic’s eyes were on the shotgun, his voice desperate. “Fucking shoot him.”
“He doesn’t have the balls,” McAdam growled.
Westermann tried to steady his gun with a second hand. It was quiet for a minute. Frings heard a radio playing big-band music in some other apartment; cars honked on the street; a baby cried a story below.
Growing anxious, McAdam said, “Goddamn it,” and adjusted his grip on the shotgun.
Klasnic flinched and McAdam fired, blowing a hole in Klasnic’s chest. Westermann fired six times, hitting McAdam with four of the shots, driving him to the floor, his body half in light and half in shadow. He seemed to smile before dying.
Later, Frings sat on a stoop opposite the tenement, drinking a cup of coffee he’d been given by a cop, and watching orderlies carry the body bags out to the police van, the figures ghoulish in the blue police lights. His mind ran through the—what? Five seconds?—in which it had all happened; trying to alter his memory so that it fit the story he’d given the police. In this story, Westermann arrived as McAdam pulled the trigger, catastrophic fractions of a second too late. Westermann was almost more heroic, in this telling, for the tragedy of the timing.
Westermann walked over to Frings. It had taken him a while, but he seemed to have his legs back and was making at least a show of confidence. Cops patted his back and gave shallow smiles. They still hated him, but they weren’t so cold as to abandon him after something like this. In days this benefit of the doubt would evaporate as the whispers on the street concentrated on Klasnic’s death, and Westermann’s unpopularity, even then, made it easy for cops to place the blame on him. Only Frings, though, knew the truth.
Westermann sat. Frings offered a cigarette. Westermann shook his head.
“You’re going to be okay,” Frings said, not looking at Westermann.
“Am I?”
“As far as I’m concerned.”
Westermann stared dully ahead. Frings could see him puzzling over this, trying to figure out the tally book between them. He gave up.
“What do you want?”
Frings shrugged. “Nothing. Maybe someday. I don’t do blackmail, Piet. That’s not how I got where I am. But this is a big one.”
“I know.”
“So, maybe you’ll remember it someday.”
Westermann nodded. “Yeah, this isn’t one I’m going to forget.”
Meetings finally over, Frings was back at his desk, smoking a Camel and leafing through the day’s Gazette without taking much in, contemplating which contact to call at Headquarters to get a handle on who, exactly, had been handling the assaults near the shanties. He knew a fair number of cops and had chits that he could call in, but this was a tricky one. Cops got suspicious about giving out this kind of information. The inference would be that Frings had cops in his sights, and cops got mum real quick when this was the case, protecting their institution—the police—above all else. He settled on a records clerk named Klein and flicked through his contacts book until he located the name and gave him a call.
Frings recalled Klein as a good-looking blond kid, kept off the beat by a missing eye, gouged out while he was trying to bring order to a near riot on a block of bars. He had no depth perception anymore. He was a big guy, though, muscular. Frings had heard that he boxed and wondered how the hell he made that work.
“Klein, it’s Frank Frings with the Gazette.”
“Hey, Frank, how are you?” Klein seemed genuinely happy to hear from him.
“I’m fine. How’re the wife and kids?”
“Good, Frank. Real good. What’s up?”
“Listen, I was wondering if you could do me a favor.”
“You bet. As long as it doesn’t come back to me.”
“Has it ever?”
“Okay, shoot.”
Frings explained the nighttime assaults on the Community people. “I want to know who was assigned to those cases.”
There was a brief silence. “Jeez, I don’t know, Frank. This doesn’t sound kosher to me. You looking to nail cops? ’Cause if that’s what’s up, you know, I can’t help you.”
“It’s not about the cops. It’s about whether these attacks really occurred and whether anything was done about it. I’m not looking to name names. Have you known me to pull one over on a cop? If I was trying to take someone down, I’d tell you. I live on my rep.”
There was a brief pause, Klein thinking it over on the other end of the line. “Okay, Frank. Your word is good here. I’ll take a look for you, get back to you sometime tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Klein. I owe you.”