By prearrangement, Frings and Westermann met after lunch at Veteran’s Park, a modest triangle of grass nestled in the angled intersection of two streets near the Gazette building. A statue of a World War II soldier carrying an apparently windblown flag stood high on a pedestal overlooking a grassy common and the occasional wooden bench, most of them occupied by sleeping derelicts. Beneath the statue, a crowd had gathered around a Negro in a sleeveless T-shirt, bowler, and dark glasses, who was speaking with great animation into a microphone attached to an amplifier that spit out his words, distorted and angry. From this distance, Westermann couldn’t make out what he was saying. Another man distributed leaflets to the crowd, which seemed evenly split between whites and Negroes.
Frings arrived and shook hands with Westermann.
“You know what’s going on over there?” Westermann asked.
“One of the reporters checked it out. They’re Community guys, trying to get donations. Proclaiming the Gospel according to Father Womé.”
Westermann blanched at this unexpected Community presence.
“You all right?” Frings’s tone was more challenging than sympathetic.
“Yeah, I’m making it.”
“Do we have a problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“One of our reporters, Art Deyna, looks like he’s taken an interest.”
“Maybe you can tell me.”
“I can tell you that he’s got a photo of you and Mel in front of the shanties. I can tell you that he’s not stupid. But that’s all I’ve got.”
Westermann was surprised that Frings wasn’t more concerned about this; putting it all on Westermann. “What are you—the Gazette—going to do with the photos?”
“Nothing right now. Sit on them. But I’ve got no guarantees about later. It might be a matter of days. Or a day.”
“Shit. You know what that’ll do to me.”
“I’ll do what I can, Piet. But this isn’t in my control.”
Westermann closed his eyes.
Frings said, “How about on your end? Anyone getting close?”
Was anyone getting close? Grip? “One of my guys, he’s interested in how the currents work down there; tossing sticks in to see where they end up.”
“Really? He find the spot?” From the tone, it seemed that Frings was more interested in this news from a technical viewpoint—how did Grip figure it out?—than he was alarmed.
“I don’t think he’s got it that exact, but he thinks he knows basically where the body came from.” Westermann decided to keep the second body to himself for now; he was beginning to feel the weight of desperation, and this was the only leverage he held.
Frings nodded.
Westermann said, “There’s no reason for him to connect me or you to it.”
Frings thought that this was probably true. “I was down in the Community today, talking to one of the kids who was jumped the other night. There’ve been several assaults on Community people over the past week. They don’t seem to think the police are taking it all that seriously.”
“Wait.” Westermann saw all the crime stats and he hadn’t seen anything about assaults near the Community. “You sure? Several assaults?”
“I saw the kid myself. Somebody’d done a number on him.”
“There’s no record of it.”
“Well, it was called in and an officer, at a minimum, interviewed the victim. Like I said, there wasn’t a whole lot of confidence that he did much else. Guy named Sergeant Wayne.”
“Wayne?”
“Yeah.”
Westermann shook his head in disgust. “I know him. He was the guy put on the Community assault case?” It wasn’t hard to imagine Wayne burying it. “I’ll look into it.”
“Let me know what you find.”
Frings didn’t think Westermann looked so sure about that.
“Don’t jerk me around, Piet. Jesus. Cops, you’d let anything happen before you’d put the brakes on another cop. What’s more important, Piet, some bent cop or justice?”
“Because institutions, Piet, you start making them more important than people, that’s how things get balled up. You’re smart enough to understand that.”
Westermann nodded and changed the subject. “You run anything about the girl in the Gazette?”
Frings gave him a long look, then decided to move things along. “Couple of grafs buried in the middle. Jane Doe on the riverbank. You know …”
They noticed by its absence that the amplified speech had come to an end and the small crowd was dispersing. The speaker and the man who’d been passing out leaflets were gathering their things and preparing to leave.
Watching this, Westermann said, “I don’t like the way the Community’s looking for attention.”
“Nothing we can do about that, but I think we’re okay. Even if someone figures where the body was originally, it’s a long step to connecting it to us.”
“Maybe not to Mel Washington.”
Frings shook his head. “Mel? Maybe, but I don’t see it. What’s his connection?”
Except that he was connected, Westermann thought. He was very much connected and so was Frings and so was he.