Westermann sat at a table toward the back of a dark road house out in the sticks. He was thinner now and his beard had come in red. He wore workman’s clothes, dirty and damp from the misty air outside. He’d never actually met Moses Winston before and saw the irony that when it finally happened—now—it was out of the City, way out. Their paths hadn’t crossed so much as Westermann had tracked Winston down, wanting to clear up some unresolved business.
The place was small but full of impoverished laborers and farmhands, drinking clear liquid from mismatched glasses. The place stank of sweat and foul alcohol. Westermann drank a beer; he was the only one drinking beer so far as he could tell. Winston was sitting on a stool, an electric guitar in his lap, picking with his right hand and working a slide with his left; occasionally singing some blues number.
Westermann had spent a couple of long weeks waiting to see if the disease would show itself, monitoring every ache, every unusual sensation, like a hypochondriac. But nothing had happened. Either the syringe hadn’t contained the disease or he was somehow immune, as Koss had been.
He was hungry and exhausted, but no longer plagued by interloping thoughts. He wouldn’t be able to keep this up forever—his money was already running low—but he felt he had somehow found room to think, to experience without the crushing pressure and stress that he felt in the City.
Winston announced that he’d be breaking after one more song, so Westermann ordered two beers and waited. Winston finished to enthusiastic applause and left the stage, walking out a screen door at the back. Westermann followed, holding the necks of both beer bottles between the fingers of one hand. The door creaked as he stepped out to the narrow stairs that descended to the ground. Winston sat on the third step, hunched over, steam rising off him in the cool, damp air. Winston didn’t turn until Westermann sat on the step beside him, offering a beer. Winston took it, a little suspicious.
“Hello, Moses. Do you know who I am?”
Winston shook his head, waited.
“My name’s Piet Westermann. I was a City cop up until recently.” He paused. Winston pulled on his beer, looking off into the distance. Westermann watched him, trying to read his reaction, getting nothing.
“I worked a case—a series of cases—of girls we found murdered on the riverbank down by the Uhuru Community. You know about those murders, right?”
“I do.”
“You were staying in the Uhuru Community when these murders occurred, right?”
Winston nodded without much interest.
“And you left the City when? After they tore the shanties down? I was there that night, Moses. You were, too.”
Winston looked at Westermann now. “So you say.”
“Let me tell you something. I’m not a cop anymore. I’m not going to be again. But there’s something that I’ve been thinking about and I thought maybe you could help me.”
“That right?”
“Ole Koss—the guy we arrested that night in the shanties—he confessed to several murders. A good number. But he says that he didn’t kill the first girl we found on the riverbank, a girl named Lenore.”
Winston flinched, caught himself, frowned.
Westermann nodded. His face was wet from the cold mist, his clothes beginning to cling to him. “You see, that made some sense because the girls he murdered, he strangled somewhere else and dumped them at the riverbank. Lenore, she was drowned. So, we didn’t solve Lenore’s murder. But even though I left the police, Moses, I can’t get past the fact that we didn’t get her justice, you know? And I thought about her being killed on the riverbank by the Community, but it not being someone from the Community, because then word would’ve gotten around.”
Winston nodded.
“But you weren’t really part of the Community, so it makes sense that you could’ve done it and nobody’s the wiser.”
Westermann paused, looking at the dark silhouettes of the trees against the starless night. After all that had happened, all the sacrifices, the answer was right here—an itinerant musician and a prostitute. Suddenly exhausted, he returned his gaze to Winston, locking eyes. “Did you kill her, Moses?”
Winston thought about it for a minute. “You ain’t a cop?”
“Look at me.” Westermann pulled on his frayed shirt, held up his bearded chin, his neck thin, his shoulders gaunt. “I’m not here to hassle you. I just want to know what happened to that girl.”
Winston tipped his beer into the side of his mouth and then started to talk.
“I got a weakness for the ladies, and they seem to have a weakness for me. Some ladies, they take me home, sometimes not. I pay if I have to; no shame in that. When I got to the City, I was playing street corners, you know? I didn’t have a place to start, but I knew when people heard me play, I’d get a paying gig somewhere. I always do. So, this cat Cephus, he gets me playing at his club, Checkerboard. He runs whores out of there, too. I figure y’all know about that because a couple blues come in every week for their piece. Anyway, I got friendly with Lenore—she was one of Cephus’s whores. Real nice girl. I paid for it with her a couple times, but then I didn’t pay no more. We enjoyed each other’s company, I guess you’d say. But she was sick, real sick—lost weight, had these sores. Cephus, he’s not such a bad cat, he tried to do what he could for her, and she was seeing this doctor some church sent to her. Anyway, it was hard for her.”
The screen door opened. An older man—white, skinny, missing teeth—said, “Moses, you’re due back onstage.”
Winston didn’t turn around but raised his beer in acknowledgment. “Couple of minutes, Mr. Harvey. I need to finish up with this.”
The old man clucked but returned inside.
“One night, okay, after my show, she comes find me, says she’s too sick to work; says she wants to talk. So we pick up a bottle at a liquor store and walk down to the riverbank, down by the shanties, and we just sat back in the rocks and smoked some mesca, drank some whiskey, listened to the river, you know. And we got real lit up—real lit up—and just talked like crazy drunks, and then she went down to the river and washed her face, and when she got back, all her makeup’s gone and she’s got these sores on her face. I said, ‘Child, it’s just getting worse,’ and she rolls up her sleeves and she’s got the sores there, too. She’s just not getting better. She has a couple friends real sick like this, too, and another one that died.”
Winston paused, taking a pull on his beer. Westermann looked at his hands. Such a small thing. Such a small thing, and it had led to everything.
“She says to me that she knows she’s dying and that this doctor that checks in on her, sees how she’s doing, she says she thinks it’s this guy that’s got her sick, and she says she don’t want to do it anymore. She looks at me and she asks me, can I drown her? All up in my face, crying. And I’m drunk and been smoking mesca and I don’t know what to think, and she’s crying and saying, ‘Please, please, do it.’ ”
Winston shook his head, tears at the corners of his eyes.
Westermann felt as if he were fading away. “You did it?”
Winston nodded. “Drowned her. She took a big drink off that whiskey and her eyes all rolled up, you know. So I kind of set her down in the water, held her there. It didn’t seem real, but it was. I drowned her and I walked away.”
Westermann nodded and they were silent for a moment.
Westermann said, “That’s a lot to carry around with you.”
Winston nodded.
The old man poked his head out the door again, barked, “Winston.”
“Time to go,” Winston muttered, took another drink of beer, and walked into the road house, leaving Westermann alone. He stood on the stoop, his back to the light and noise of the bar, and stared into the darkness. He took another drink of beer and closed his eyes, trying to call up the release he had felt in the Holiness Church and finding that he couldn’t. Not even close.