Streets of Fire (10 page)

People continued to filter in and out of the house as he approached it through the covering darkness. Others lounged idly on the small front porch, and as he drew steadily closer, he could hear them talking and laughing, but he still could not make out any details. A single lone figure stood silently at the end of the front walkway, glancing left and right down the street, his body bathed in the bluish glare of a streetlamp not far away. His body tightened as Ben emerged suddenly from out of the shadows, still walking slowly but with a steady, determined gait. For a moment the young man stood completely still, his eyes staring straight at Ben as he chewed his lower lip nervously. Then he glanced back toward the house, nodded quickly and raced away.

Instantly the voices on the front porch fell silent.

Ben turned up the walkway. From behind, he could hear several of the cars start their engines and pull away, some peeling loudly as they dashed from the curb.

When he reached the first small step of the front porch, he stopped and looked silently at the people who still remained in place. He could see a tall slender woman in a bright red dress, and another, larger woman beside her. A tall, heavyset man stood behind them, his enormous arms draped loosely over their shoulders.

‘You sure you in the right place?’ the man asked finally.

‘I think so,’ Ben said.

The man pushed his way between the two women, strode to the middle of the porch and glared down toward Ben, his enormous frame blocking the light from the front windows and throwing Ben once again into deep shadow.

‘What you want, mister?’ he asked in a hard, demanding voice. ‘A little jelly-roll?’

‘What?’

‘A little poontang, maybe?’ the man added. He glanced at the women. ‘A little chocolate poontang?’

The women laughed as the man returned his eyes to Ben.

‘So what you want, huh?’

Ben moved his hand inside his coat, reaching for his police identification.

‘Hold it right there now,’ the man said instantly.

Ben’s hand froze in place, then lowered slowly to his side.

‘You wouldn’t happen to be toting a piece, would you now?’ the man asked.

Ben nodded.

The man’s eyes widened. ‘That’s not nice. That’s not friendly. How come you toting a piece?’

‘It’s just my service revolver,’ Ben told him, hoping that would explain it.

The man looked at him oddly. ‘Service revolver? You in the service? How come you ain’t wearing no uniform?’

‘Police Department,’ Ben said.

The man took a step toward him, his eyes darting about nervously. ‘You with them Black Cat boys?’

‘No.’

‘Well, what you want then?’

‘I’m looking for Roy Jolly.’

The man looked surprised. ‘You is? How come you looking for Mr Jolly?’

‘I want to talk to him about something.’

The man smiled, his large white teeth glowing yellow in the kerosene lamp which rested on the rail beside him. ‘You sure them Black Cat boys didn’t send you?’

‘I’m sure.’

The smile disappeared. ‘Well, you ain’t too smart coming over here all by yourself, looking for Mr Jolly.’

‘Is he here?’

The man took the lamp from the rail of the porch and held it up to Ben’s face. ‘I don’t know you,’ he said, ‘and I bet Mr Jolly don’t know you neither.’ He lowered the lamp toward Ben’s chest. ‘Open your coat.’

Ben drew back the sides of his jacket, and in a single, smooth motion, the man quickly reached beneath his arm and snapped out the pistol. ‘Nasty little thing,’ he said as he tossed it over Ben’s shoulder.

It plomped softly into the dry grass, and at the very edge of his vision Ben could see it glinting dully in the lamplight.

‘I’m not here to cause anybody any trouble,’ he said.

The man continued to stare at Ben suspiciously. ‘What you want then?’

‘A little girl was murdered a few days ago,’ Ben said.

‘So what?’

‘A little colored girl.’

The man stared at Ben expressionlessly.

‘So I was hoping Mr Jolly might be able to help me find out who did it.’

The man said nothing. He placed the lamp back on the railing and stepped forward slightly. A purple stud-pin winked from his shirt. Two enormous fingers adjusted it unnecessarily, then crawled up to straighten a light-blue silk tie.

‘We found her body over in that old ballfield not far from here,’ Ben added.

The man cocked his head slightly, as if to listen to the chorus of crickets and katydids that filled the air around them.

‘Just a little girl,’ Ben said. ‘About twelve years old, something like that.’

In a movement that was blindingly swift, the man suddenly swatted at a moth that had swept up from the lantern. ‘Got it,’ he hissed. His hand squeezed together, then opened, and one of the women stepped up and wiped the crushed moth from it with a white handkerchief.

Ben could feel his skin tightening around him. ‘Somebody shot her,’ he said. He pointed to the back of his head. ‘Right here.’

The man grinned lethally. ‘You scared, mister? You look scared.’ He turned to the women and laughed. ‘Don’t he look scared to you?’

‘He gone die of it pretty soon,’ one of the women said jokingly.

Ben nodded quickly and offered her a thin, nervous smile. ‘Yes, ma’am, I think I might,’ he told her.

For a moment the man regarded him closely. Then his belly shook with a small laugh and he stepped back toward the front door of the house. ‘I’ll check with Mr Jolly,’ he said almost playfully. ‘Come on in.’

The people inside stopped talking immediately as Ben followed him slowly through the whole narrow length of the house. The front room was almost entirely filled by a large pool table, but in the second the walls were lined with pinball machines. An odd assortment of chairs and settees were scattered about in the center of the room, along with a few makeshift card tables. Men and women sat drinking from paper cups or playing at the pinball machines whose bells and whistles echoed throughout the smoke-filled house. Their eyes followed him intently as he continued through the house, elbowing his way left and right through the steadily thickening crowd. At the rear of the house, a large bar had been set up, its top covered with a dull speckled formica top, and behind it a man in a dark-blue shirt dispensed bonded whiskey by the bottle, and clear white lightning by the cup. A large sheet of plywood had been spread out near the center of the room, and people danced languidly on it while an old woman in a flowered dress and pillbox hat played honky-tonk tunes on a baby-blue upright piano.

The man stopped abruptly at the door of the last room of the house and tapped lightly at its heavy metal.

‘Yeah?’ someone said in a husky voice.

‘It’s Gaylord, Mr Jolly,’ the man said. ‘I got a fellow wants to talk to you ’bout that little girl they found.’

When there was no answer, Gaylord gently opened the door, then stepped aside and let Ben pass into the room.

Roy Jolly looked enormously old as he sat behind a plain wooden desk in an unlighted corner of the room. His hair shot out from the top of his head like thin silver wires, and his watery yellow eyes stared out from a face that looked as if it had been carved from a dark, crumbling wood. His breath broke from him in shallow gasps, and his voice sounded as if it came from somewhere deep beneath a pool of water.

‘Go on back to the front,’ he snapped at Gaylord, who instantly left the room, closing the door tightly behind him.

His eyes shifted over to Ben, as his hand waved over the stacks of money which were piled on his desk. ‘Set down,’ he commanded.

Ben took a seat opposite the desk. In the corner of his eye, he could see another man in the room, tall, his body half hidden in shadow, but with just enough of it visible that Ben could make out the stock of the shotgun he cradled in his arms.

Jolly leaned back in his chair and drew in a loud, wheezing breath. ‘Gaylord say you come ’bout that dead gal?’

‘Yes.’

Jolly took a white meerschaum pipe from a rack of twenty or thirty of them and shakily filled the bowl with tobacco, his palsied hand scattering dark-brown fibers across the length of his desk. ‘What fur?’ he asked after he had lit it.

‘I’m with the police.’

Jolly’s eyes rolled upward toward a ceiling which, Ben noticed, had been carpeted with a dark-blue shag. ‘That don’t mean shit to me,’ he said. ‘Even them Black Cat boys is with the police, and they ’bout sorry as you can git.’ He blew two columns of smoke into the air, one from each corner of his mouth. ‘How come you mess with me?’

‘I didn’t come to make trouble,’ Ben told him.

Jolly didn’t seem to hear him. He reached for a pair of gold-rimmed glasses, the lenses a solid, impenetrable black, and put them on slowly. ‘Police ain’t nothing but trouble,’ he said. Then he laughed to himself. ‘Like most everything else.’ The two black lenses settled on Ben like the twin barrels of a shotgun. ‘Old man, he deserve his peace, don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

‘How come you disturbing mine, then?’

‘I’m just trying to find out something about a murdered girl.’

‘What’s a murdered little colored gal to you?’ Mr Jolly demanded harshly.

‘A case,’ Ben said.

‘We had gals dead from murder before,’ Jolly went on. ‘How come ain’t nobody seen you then?’

‘I’ve never been assigned to Bearmatch.’

Jolly’s lips parted slowly, revealing an array of golden teeth. ‘So it ain’t been your problem before?’

‘You might say that,’ Ben told him.

The old man shifted uncomfortably in his seat, wincing with pain as he did so. ‘That’s the way it is. Uh huh. If it ain’t your trouble, don’t mess with it.’ He pushed himself to the left, revealing a sharp, leathery profile. ‘Now we had murdered gals over here before,’ he said. ‘We always find out who done it. When we do, don’t nobody see them guys no more.’ He allowed the pipe to droop from the side of his mouth like a curled white tongue. ‘That’s the way it is over here.’

‘Do you know who killed the girl we found in the ballfield?’ Ben asked directly.

‘Naw,’ Jolly said. ‘I ain’t looked into it that good.’

‘Do you know who she is?’

‘Naw,’ Jolly said. Then he grinned menacingly. ‘You looking for something free, Mr White Policeman? Seem like you looking for something free.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You think it done for free?’

‘What?’

‘Us finding out who done it.’

Ben stared at him, puzzled.

‘You want to find something out for free?’ Jolly asked again. He stuck out his hand, palm up, gnarled fingers raised toward the ceiling. ‘You got something for Mr Jolly?’

‘No,’ Ben told him.

Jolly drew his hand back and laughed. ‘Where you from, Mr White Policeman? You from Beulah Land?’ His eyes dropped toward the stacks of money. ‘You see all these niggers in the streets? Huh? You see them?’

Ben said nothing.

The old man’s dark, rasping laughter broke across the room. ‘They make me sick. They set next to Mr Whiteman, they think they’re in Heaven; they think they’re in Beulah Land, setting there with God hisself.’ He turned away as if to spit on the floor, then looked back at Ben. ‘But they’re still broke. They ain’t got a dime. You know why? ’Cause they ain’t yet figured out that don’t nobody do nothing for free.’ He laughed again, a hard, thick laugh that ended in a slight, trembling cough which he willfully brought under his control. ‘They talk about dirty money. These newfangled preachers they done brought in here, they talk about dirty money. But money is the cleanest thing in the world. Clearest, too. It don’t bullshit you. It tell you right to your face what you worth.’ He allowed another burst of laughter to escape him for a moment, then sucked it back in. ‘Now ’bout this gal,’ he said. ‘Maybe I know a little. What you got I want, Mr Whiteman?’

‘Nothing,’ Ben said without hesitation.

‘Nothing?’ Jolly asked. He leaned forward slightly. ‘You can buy anything, did you know that? You can buy gals. You can buy cars.’ He grinned thinly. ‘Hell, you can even buy yourself a whole new way of thinking. But if you can’t buy nothing, you ain’t nothing.’

Ben stood up immediately, his contempt washing over him like a hot wave.

Jolly’s eyes followed him. ‘I ask you one more time,’ he said. ‘You got anything I want?’

‘No,’ Ben said curtly.

Jolly looked at him as if he were something filthy which had washed into his life. ‘Now ain’t that a funny thing?’ he said mockingly. ‘A white man – all growed up – and he don’t have one thing a nigger wants.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘That’s pitiful, ain’t it?’

Ben walked out quickly, leaving the door open behind him. He could hear the old man laughing to himself, and the laughter seemed to snap at him like the end of a long, black whip.

It took him only a few minutes to reach his small house, and once there, he poured himself a whiskey and sat out in the little iron swing on his front porch. It was a quiet neighborhood, filled mostly with workers from the iron and rubber plants, too tired to make a fuss, as his father used to say. To the right, he could see the illuminated spire of the Methodist Church, and beyond it Vulcan’s torch lifted high over the brow of Red Mountain. He had grown up practically beneath its shadow, but its once majestic power now seemed shrunken and besieged. It creaked like the old iron swing, grew rusty, fell apart.

He took the small notebook from his shirt pocket and went over King’s speech, but this time there didn’t seem to be anything in it that the Chief could use, and so he simply checked his notes for spelling and legibility and put them back into his pocket.

He leaned back deeply and let his legs thrust out, pumping the swing softly to stir the air. Far in the distance he could hear the shift-horns call from the foundries and mills and power plants that surrounded his small neighborhood like a jagged metal wall. It was the shift they called the Dawn Patrol, and he could remember the many years his father had worked it, trudging out into the deep night and not returning until almost noon. He had thought that by choosing the police, he had chosen a different life, but it struck him now that he, too, had joined the Dawn Patrol.