Weeks later.
Standing at Panos’s window, Frings saw Grip loitering across the street from the Gazette’s main entrance, smoking a cigarette and eyeing the passing women.
Panos noticed the sudden tension in Frings’s posture. “What is it, Frank?”
Frings made a noncommittal noise and turned to Panos. “I’ve got to go, Chief.”
“Someone waiting for you?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
Frings didn’t mind making Grip wait and thought that maybe a reefer would relax him, make it easier to talk. So he sought out Bronstein, who never passed up a visit to the fire escape. They sat on the grated stairs, passing a reefer and watching the street. It was finally cool, a breeze making it almost cold. Two blocks down, they could see the aftermath of a car accident, an improbable volume of steam rising from one of the engines.
Frings took a drag off the reefer, then pointed it down toward Grip. “You know him?”
Bronstein squinted. “Yeah, I think so. Detective Morphy or … no, not Morphy.”
“Grip,” Frings grunted, keeping the smoke in.
“Yeah, that’s right, Grip. Son of a bitch, Grip. Not as bad as his partner, though. That’s who I was thinking of, Morphy.”
Frings nodded. The stoned pigeons had sensed what was happening on the landing and perched on the railing expectantly. Frings blew smoke their way.
Bronstein took a hit, thought for a minute, then blew smoke at the birds. “He waiting for you?”
“I think so.”
“Jesus,” Bronstein said, handing the reefer back. “You’d better have some more of this.”
Grip and Frings sat in the same diner, at the same table, that Frings had weeks before with Ellen Aust. They waited in uncomfortable silence for their coffee.
When it arrived, Grip asked, “You heard from Lieutenant Westermann?”
Frings shook his head.
“You tell me if you had?”
Frings shrugged. “I don’t know. But I guess I would tell you if I hadn’t, because I haven’t and I am telling you.”
Grip nodded at this. “I’m sure you know he’s missing.”
“That’s what I hear.”
“No body’s turned up; he hasn’t been back to his apartment; hasn’t contacted friends.”
“You think maybe he’s in a hospital somewhere? Berdych’s needle …”
Grip shook his head. “Nah, Pulyatkin took a look at what was in the syringe. The lieut doesn’t have to worry about getting the mumps.”
“Look, what are you after, Detective?”
“We off-the-record?”
“Why not?” Frings said, wondering where this was going.
“The lieut took off after we cuffed Koss, right? He and Koss had some words as we were getting out of those fucking shanties, and then the lieut just vamoosed. Well, we took Koss downtown of course and grilled him about what had happened. We had a lot of questions you know—not about the lieut, really, because we didn’t know that he wouldn’t turn up again and we figured we had time.”
Frings nodded.
“So we started in on Koss and the first thing was why did he kill that guy in the Square—guy’s name turned out to be Glélé, don’t ask me to spell it. Koss says he was after Womé but when he got into the Square he sees this Glélé character and he recognizes him; says he met him in Africa and then damned if the guy doesn’t show up here, in the City. Koss said this guy was bird-dogging him down in Godtown. Drove him nuts; thought he might be going crazy—seeing things. But this guy—Glélé—left the skull-and-hat symbol on the church walls sometimes, so he knew there must be someone. You know this guy—Glélé?”
Frings shook his head.
“Look, I know you and the lieut worked this thing together somehow. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s a Red thing; maybe something else.”
“Yeah, we were working together.”
Grip waited for Frings to expand and, when he didn’t, said, “Koss rolled over on everything: Symmes, Vesterhue, Berdych, the dead girls. Says he and Vesterhue were infecting the girls, seeing how the disease worked: how long it took to go through someone, how it could be transmitted, all that.
“We pushed him, you understand. You can’t tell me that this whole thing, that Prosper Maddox didn’t know about it; wasn’t a part of it. But Koss stuck to his story: it was him and Vesterhue. Morphy even got a little rough with him, but the guy was in the Leopard Corps; we weren’t going to break him with a little rough stuff. So Maddox is going to skate. Vesterhue and Berdych are dead, and Koss is going to fry.”
Frings said, “I know all of this.”
Grip leaned forward on the table. “Koss said he needed to kill those girls because he was worried that if they started showing up at the hospital, a bunch of them, that he’d have a problem. Mavis Talley did, and that got him spooked. So he was going to kill Lenore, but someone beat him to it.”
“How’s that?”
“Koss said he went looking for Lenore at the Checkerboard—that’s the joint she worked out of—but he got there and the other whores said she’d left with this musician she liked. Koss said he found out where they sometimes went, the rocks on the riverbank by the shanties, so he went there looking for her. When he got there, she was dead. He said it was perfect because not only was Lenore already dead, but the investigation would have to focus on the Uhuru Community, a place he didn’t much like to begin with. But that’s not what happened—the body ended up downstream. So Koss, he was already going to kill those other girls—the ones who were sick—Koss goes ahead and dumps their bodies at that same spot. He figured that with all these bodies showing up, we’d be all over the Community. But we both know how the investigation went. Lieutenant Westermann ignored the Uhuru Community as much as he could get away with.”
Grip paused, but Frings didn’t volunteer anything.
“I thought at first maybe he was trying to cover for the Community, keep them out of the investigation. But I don’t know that I think so anymore. He ran the right investigation, found the guy that’d been doing all the killing, except Lenore. So I thought about it some more, and there was only one way it made sense to me, that maybe it was the lieut who moved the body. But why would he do that? Which made me think of you.”
Frings took a sip of his coffee.
“I’m not here to take you down, Frings. All this shit, Koss has taken the weight, and while it pisses me off that Maddox is walking free, you got to roll with the punches, right? I just want to know if I got it right.”
“Does it make a difference?”
Grip scratched at the back of his head. “Does to me.”