Evening began to fall as Grip walked, mind wandering, toward Ed Wayne’s apartment. Heat lightning lit the sky in uneven bursts. In his left hand he carried a bottle of whiskey, still in its liquor-store bag. In his right he had his desk flask of whiskey and he sipped on it frequently as he tried to make sense of that afternoon.
He’d been in a shit mood all day because he’d spent the previous night in the search for goddamn Mel Washington and had only caught a couple of hours of sleep. They hadn’t found him either, though Grip had been sure they’d come close. Most likely at the Palace, but they hadn’t been able to find the hiding place. Grip had made a note to find a reason to toss the place sometime in the future; pay back Floyd Christian for playing coy with them all night. That goddamn Frings wasn’t any better, though Grip knew that getting in a pissing match with a reporter wouldn’t do his career much good, or the lieut’s for that matter. The Chief liked the force to keep a good image in the press, and the lieut had already balled that up once.
So he’d been in a shit mood and the lieut had headed out of town, and Morphy had been a son of a bitch all day, hassling Grip about everything. Jesus.
By the time he arrived at Ed Wayne’s building, he was half in the bag; drunk enough that he almost missed the skull-and-top-hat graffiti, not quite washed off Wayne’s door. Almost. He stared at it for a moment, feeling the hollowness in his gut. Wayne’s wife answered the door. She was pretty well fancied up, for her. She’d probably been receiving visitors all day. Grip smiled at her drunkenly, noticing why Wayne must like her; the generous body, a cute, girl’s face. One thing, drunk or not, he was glad to be out of that hall.
She smiled back at him, took the bottle of whiskey that Grip had forgotten he was holding, and showed him back to the living room where Wayne was half-sitting on the couch, awash in bandages.
“Torsten,” he said, and Grip could tell Wayne was drunk, too.
“Jesus, Ed. You look like hell.” Grip couldn’t quite evoke the cheeriness necessary to make it sound like anything other than an honest appraisal.
Wayne coughed. “Yeah, well …” Both of his eyes were swollen and discolored. His lips were ragged and stitched.
“I saw that skull on your door. Same one as they did on your badge. When’d they do it?”
“My badge?”
“Yeah. You didn’t know? Someone scratched that skull and hat into the back of your badge and left it in Crippen’s.”
“Shit,” Wayne said, thinking.
“Yeah, shit. When did your door get marked?”
“Three days ago, maybe? Right after they did the one at Crippen’s.”
The same day as Grip’s own door. “You know who did it?”
“Community thugs. Same as jumped me.”
Grip knew Wayne was guessing; that he had no idea. “The fuck were you doing down there, Ed? You the guys jumping those kids every night?”
“Of course.”
Grip shook his head.
“Don’t give me that holier-than-thou bullshit. If you spent more time busting Reds and less time taking orders from them …”
Grip tensed. “What’s that?”
“What? You hard of hearing now?”
“Who am I taking orders from?”
“Westermann.”
“He’s Red now? That’s your latest beef with him?”
“I’m telling you.”
“Listen. I know you’re all beat to hell, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to listen to this bullshit.”
“Bullshit? How hard’s your buddy Westermann pushing the investigation into the Uhuru Community’s involvement with these girls who were found on the river? Huh?”
Grip didn’t have much to say to that.
“What I hear, he’s got a hard-on for Prosper Maddox. Now, where I stand, that’s covering up for a bunch of goddamn Reds by going after a good Christian man; an anticommunist, at that.”
“Shut up, Ed.”
Wayne managed a gruesome approximation of a smile with his damaged mouth. “That’s right. Shut up, Ed. You’ve got nothing else to say. Tell you what. Next time you get a chance, why don’t you tail your boss when he gets off work? See where he goes, who he sees.”
“You know something I ought to know?”
“Nah. I’m just suggesting you do it. Maybe it turns out interesting.”
The wind had picked up when Grip emerged from Wayne’s building. Grip, still on edge, wiped the sweat from his face with the sleeve of his coat. He saw that someone had plastered Truffant signs over the mayor’s signs on the wall of Wayne’s apartment building. He also saw someone walking across the street toward him, his hand on his hat and his head down against the wind, something about him familiar.
“Detective Grip.”
Grip got a look at the guy now and recognized him from the night they’d braced Joey Stanic; that reporter now wearing a grin as if he knew something.
“Fuck off,” Grip said, walking down the block.
Undeterred, the reporter walked along with him. “I’m Art Deyna, with the Gazette. I don’t think I’ve introduced myself before. I won’t take much of your time, I just have a question or two.”
Grip kept walking.
“I’ve got it on good authority that the bodies of two women have been found on the riverbank near the Uhuru Community. I’m trying to find out if they were found in the same spot—”
“You’ve got the wrong guy, asshole. I don’t know anything about any bodies.”
Deyna smiled. “That’s perfect. Exactly what I would have expected you to say. Come on, Detective, you’re assigned to the case. You’re part of the investigation.”
“I am, am I? That’s news to me.”
Deyna kept it pleasant. “Is this all I’m going to get from you, Detective Grip?”
Grip ignored this.
Deyna continued, “I’ve asked around about you, talked to some people, and it seems like you’ve got no love for the Reds. That’s good—neither do I. Something you might not know, though, is that your boss, Lieutenant Westermann, doesn’t exactly share your viewpoint.”
Grip stopped; adrenaline raging. “Get the fuck away from me before this gets ugly.”
“Yeah, I’ll go away. I want you to see something first; something for you to think about. Then I’m gone.” Deyna reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out a photo that he handed to Grip.
Grip stared at the photo, his breathing shallow from the booze and now this.
Deyna said, “You know Lieutenant Westermann, of course, and the two Negroes. One’s Mel Washington and the other’s Warren Eddings. I don’t need to tell you who they are.”
Grip pushed the photo back into Deyna’s chest. “I’ve looked. Now screw.”
Deyna pocketed the photo. “Nice to meet you, Detective. We’ll talk again.”