The storm arrived suddenly, a sun-scorched afternoon quickly becoming twilight beneath a towering, purple-and-blue thunderhead. The heavy air came to life, crackling with latent electricity, huge volumes of air barreling through the canyons formed by high buildings. Grip drove with Morphy shotgun and Westermann reclining comfortably in the backseat. They rolled the windows up as the first marble-size drops were annihilated against the windshield.
Westermann watched adults scurry for cover while children stayed, faces lifted to the sky, welcoming the relief.
“The fuck’d this come from?” Grip asked.
Westermann registered Grip’s nervousness, talking to break the silence. A clap of thunder came from somewhere close, sounding like a bomb detonating.
“How’d yesterday afternoon go?” Westermann asked.
There was a pause.
Grip said, “We went back to the river. I had an idea I wanted to try out. While Morphy was taking his fucking clothes off the other morning, I was watching the currents, how shit was flowing down the river. It gets kind of funny by the banks because of all the docks and everything that fell into the water. So I noticed that maybe the girl had to have been put in the water in a certain place to wash up where she did, you know?”
“Okay.”
“So we tested it out.”
Morphy said, “We tossed logs in the river, is what he’s trying to say. Saw where they ended up.”
“And?”
Grip said, “Looks to me like she probably got dropped in the water a little upstream from the Uhuru Community.”
“If she wasn’t just put on the bank where we found her, you mean.”
Grip shook his head. “That doesn’t seem right, Lieut. Why just dump her in the rocks? Why wouldn’t you put her in the river, get the body away from the scene, wash the evidence off her?”
It made sense, of course. But had she been put in somewhere farther upstream, only to wash up where Westermann had found her before pushing her back in the water?
“Are you sure,” Westermann asked, “that the body would float the same way your logs would?”
Grip shrugged. “Why not?”
Westermann straightened in his seat, leaning forward to get his head between Grip and Morphy. “So what’s your conclusion?”
Grip chose his words carefully. He was already on thin ice because of his treatment of Mel Washington. There wasn’t any angle in having Westermann think he was targeting more Negroes, commie Negroes at that. “That there’s a distinct possibility that someone put the murdered girl in the river at a point near the Uhuru Community. This would seem to point to the Community as a possible source of the perpetrators.”
“Souza and Plouffe couldn’t find anyone who’d seen a white woman around the Community.”
Morphy laughed.
“Jesus,” Grip muttered.
Left unsaid: Even if Souza and Plouffe had done a competent job of canvassing, there was no reason to believe that the Community people would tell them anything, even if they had seen the woman. And this, Westermann realized, was the unknown; where he might have made a terrible blunder. If she had been killed near the Community, he had tried to cover up a real crime; and he had failed.
Westermann thought about Art Deyna and the photographer and was about to ask Grip and Morphy whether they’d heard from the press when Grip pulled to the curb.
They left the prowl car parked by a fire hydrant and took the stairs down to the basement, where Pulyatkin kept his office just down the hall from the morgue. They found Pulyatkin smoking at his desk, his door open. Westermann led the other two in, leaning over the desk to shake Pulyatkin’s hand. Westermann knew that Pulyatkin liked him, considered him moderate and judicious. He assumed that Pulyatkin had asked him to come to chaperone Grip and Morphy, who made everyone nervous.
Pulyatkin said, “I’m sure that Detectives Morphy and Grip reported to you that the woman you brought in the other day was very sick.”
Westermann nodded.
“I’d never seen anything quite like that before, the way the disease was attacking the organs. She couldn’t have had much time left. But I remembered something I’d heard from the doctors at City Hospital. We talk sometimes if we run across something unusual. ‘Compare notes,’ I think they say. Well, I remembered that they’d called a couple of weeks ago about a young woman who had come to the hospital, very ill. Blisters, like your girl. She was vomiting, in pain. No one there had seen this combination of symptoms before, so they took blood and tissue and considered quarantining her.” Pulyatkin paused to take a sip of coffee.
Westermann looked over at Grip and Morphy, wondering if they knew what was going on. Grip shrugged and Morphy raised his eyebrows.
“I remembered this conversation, so I sent blood and tissue samples from the girl over to City to have them compared with the samples from that woman.”
“And they matched?”
“I don’t know. They seem to be having a difficult time laying their hands on the original sample. I don’t know if they haven’t looked hard or maybe it’s gone. But this unusual set of symptoms recurring in this short time frame—it’s hard to believe it’s not the same disease.”
“Who’s the woman? Is she still there?”
Pulyatkin laughed ruefully. “No. She left the hospital soon after the samples were taken. It was at night—no doctors on the ward—but the nurses said a man came and got her and they had no choice but to discharge. The doctors were furious, of course.”
“Was she …?” Grip asked.
“The same as our woman? No. I checked the physical description. Different altogether.”
“How about a name? An address? She must have registered.”
Pulyatkin nodded and pulled a folder from the top of a pile on his desk. He read from a page. “Mavis Talley. Eighty-six Newton Avenue.”
The rain had stopped and steam rose off the streets as they rolled down Newton Avenue, eyeing tired row houses and storefronts with bars over the front windows. Westermann knew the stats—assault, rape, robbery, murder; all occurred with alarming frequency here. It wasn’t the worst district, but not far removed from it. Morphy and Grip could have told you the same thing just by looking around at the young men, idle and menacing on the stoops and the street corners; the absence of women on the street; the defiant postures as the prowl car passed. Hell of a place for a young woman to live.
Eighty-six Newton Avenue was a row house in a block of row houses marked by peeling paint and sagging stoops. Grip parked out front. Not many cars at the curb in this neighborhood.
“You think we’ll find it in one piece when we get back?” Grip asked, maybe rhetorically.
Morphy rapped on the door and stepped back to stand with Westermann. Grip stood below them, at the foot of the steps. When no one answered, Morphy pounded, yelling, “Police. Please open the door.”
Slow footsteps sounded from inside and Morphy stepped away again, fingering the grip of his Colt. Seeing this, Grip did the same. The door opened against a security chain and Westermann saw a small face, crabbed with age.
The voice was a woman’s, gravelly and suspicious. “What d’you want?”
“Mavis Talley?” Westermann asked.
“What you want Mavis for?”
“Just need to speak with her. Nothing serious.” Keeping it calm, projecting authority.
“That makes two of us need to speak to her,” the old woman said. “Haven’t seen her in a couple weeks.”
It took some cajoling from Westermann, but the woman—a broad, stooped widow named Mrs. Levesque—eventually let them in to see the room that Mavis Talley rented. There were four doors off the third-floor landing, one to the shared bathroom and the other three to rented rooms. Mavis Talley’s was the middle of the three. Clearly, no one had been there in a while. Roaches crawled over a molding half loaf of bread placed next to a stack of papers and pamphlets on a small, round kitchen table. The bed was carefully made, the blue sheets faded and threadbare with age. Morphy began opening drawers in her bureau and Grip opened a narrow closet. Westermann picked up the stack of pamphlets on the table and brought them down hard, scattering the roaches. He took a look at the pile. There were anticommunist pamphlets—“They Live Among Us,” “The People Who Abandoned God,” “The Threat to Freedom”—programs from the Church of Last Days, and letters signed “Mom” or “Juliet.”
“Torsten,” Westermann said, waving a handful of the pamphlets. “She seems like your type. A fellow God-fearing patriot.”
Grip walked over. “There’s nothing in the closet.” He took some of the pamphlets and looked them over, tossing them on the table when he was done. “Typical shit. You can find it anywhere.”
“How about this?” Westermann read from one of the church brochures:
“ ‘Will Christ Return to the New Israel?’ Let’s see.” He sifted through the brochures. “ ‘Is the Antichrist Alive and Among Us?’ What do you think?”
“About the Antichrist?” Morphy asked, still looking through drawers.
“What church is that?” Grip asked, ignoring Morphy’s crack.
“The Church of Last Days. You know it?”
“Sounds familiar,” Grip said, thinking that it sounded familiar because of Ole Koss; that maybe it was his church, or that he listened to it on the radio.