Streets of Fire (4 page)

He nodded to a few of them as he walked toward the cement stairs that led to the first floor, but he didn’t stop to talk. The unventilated basement always smelled faintly sour, but now the odor was even denser, and Ben realized it came from the overheated tires of the paddy wagons, rubber which had melted slightly, as if from hurtling back and forth down streets of fire.

It was better upstairs, where the large rotating fans whirred continually, and Ben took a deep, refreshing breath as he walked into the detective bullpen and sat down at his desk.

‘Anything come in, Sammy?’ he called to McCorkindale in the back corner of the room.

McCorkindale glanced toward him, then shook his head vigorously.

‘Captain Starnes around?’

‘Just stepped out to take a leak,’ McCorkindale said dully.

Luther walked back into the office a few minutes later, still pulling casually at the zipper of his trousers.

‘Heard you sort of strongarmed the guy in the Coroner’s Office,’ he said as he strolled up to Ben’s desk.

‘A little.’

‘Good, good,’ Luther said happily. He took a chair from another desk and sat down. ‘Well, what’d you find out?’

Ben took out the original report and handed it to him. ‘That’s all Patterson had from his first look at her,’ he said, ‘but he didn’t learn much more after a full autopsy.’

Luther glanced briefly at the report. ‘The rape looks good though,’ he said. ‘If it was a race thing, some kind of KKK killing, something like that, there wouldn’t have been a rape.’ He slid the report back onto Ben’s desk. ‘Good job, Ben,’ he said. He reached over and squeezed his shoulder. ‘I think that’s about all we need.’

Ben leaned forward slightly. ‘For what?’

‘To close the case,’ Luther said matter-of-factly.

‘I just started on it.’

‘And you already got as far as you’re ever going to get,’ Luther told him. He smiled. ‘It’s a Bearmatch thing, Ben. If you’d ever worked that part of town before, you’d know what I mean.’

Ben’s eyes drifted down toward the report, then back up toward Luther.

‘I have a lead,’ he said.

Luther looked at him doubtfully. ‘A lead? What kind of a lead?’

‘A name. Somebody who knows a lot about what goes on in Bearmatch.’

‘What name?’

‘A Mr Jolly,’ Ben said. ‘Roy Jolly.’

Luther’s face broke into a broad grin. ‘Mr Jolly?’ he said with a chuckle, ‘You mean old Roy-Joy? That’s your contact?’

Ben nodded slowly.

‘You know who Roy-Joy is, Ben?’ Luther asked. ‘He’s the biggest pimp in Bearmatch, maybe the biggest in Birmingham, maybe even the biggest in the whole goddamn world.’ He stopped, then looked at Ben coolly. ‘Who gave you his name?’

For an instant, Ben started to identify the old attendant. Then, suddenly, something stopped him as fully and abruptly as if a hand had shot up to cover his mouth.

‘It was just something I heard on the street,’ he said with a slight shrug. ‘Nobody in particular.’

Luther placed his hands palms down on Ben’s desk and leaned into them. ‘If you want to know about things in Bearmatch, you ought to ask the Langley boys. They been working it for the last two years.’

‘I’ll do that,’ Ben said.

Luther straightened himself. ‘Look, Ben,’ he said quietly, ‘if you want to work this case a little more, go ahead. It just makes the department look better if you do. But you’ve still got to cover King until all this shit is over.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘He’s scheduled to make a speech at the First Pilgrim Baptist Church tonight at eight o’clock. Be there.’

Ben nodded quickly. ‘All right.’

‘And as far as this little girl goes, talk to the Langley brothers,’ Luther said insistently. ‘They should be chowing down at Smith’s Cafe right about now.’

‘Okay,’ Ben said.

Luther started to leave the room.

Ben touched the sleeve of his coat to stop him. ‘That picture you took of the little girl,’ he said. ‘You got it with you?’

‘Yeah,’ Luther said. He patted his coat pockets. ‘Here it is,’ he said as he handed Ben the photograph.

Ben lifted the picture slightly in order to bring it into a better light. It was a small, square Polaroid, shot in a grainy black and white, but he could see the girl’s face quite plainly as it looked up toward him from the grayish dusty ground. It had the same look the dead always had. No matter how big or how small, how much or how little had been done to them, they always looked as if they’d never had a chance.

Black Cat 13 sat obliviously at rest in an emergency parking zone in the alleyway behind Smith’s Cafe. It was gray with black side stripes, and a large black cat, yellow-eyed and with its silver claws exposed in an outstretched paw, had been hand-painted on the hood. The number 13 had been scrawled in white across its side, and a dab of red hung like bloody drool from its snarling mouth.

Tod and Teddy Langley sat in the far left corner of the cafe, each of them finishing up what looked like the usual blueplate special: hamburger steak, mashed potatoes and a faded mixture of green peas and tiny cubes of carrot.

Teddy sat up slightly as Ben approached.

‘Well, hello, Ben,’ he said. He smiled thinly. ‘I hear they put you on King.’

Ben pulled one of the chairs from beneath the table and sat down. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘How are things in Bearmatch?’

Teddy laughed. ‘Couldn’t be better, now that we’re filling up the jails.’ He pulled a bottle of Coke over to the side of the table, opened a package of salted peanuts and poured them into the bottle. A hissing brownish fizz boiled up almost to the rim of the bottle, then settled back slowly.

‘Well, not all of them,’ Tod said quietly. He took the last crust of biscuit into his mouth and chewed it slowly. ‘Not all of them, right, Teddy?’

‘That’s right,’ Teddy said. He took a long pull on the bottle. ‘So what’s the story, Ben? What’s King’s next move?’

Ben let his eyes wander aimlessly about the diner, from the front, where the cafe’s menu was written on a chalkboard in the front window, to the rear wall where two photographs hung from either side of a Coca-Cola clock, one of Governor Wallace, and the other of Vice-President Johnson. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Breedlove and Daniels are watching King, too,’ Teddy said matter-of-factly, as if demonstrating how much he already knew. ‘And there are probably a few more in undercover.’

Tod laughed. ‘Undercover?’ he screeched. ‘How you get undercover with them – paint your face black?’

Ben smiled limply. ‘So what are you boys doing instead of Bearmatch, loading the paddy wagons like everybody else?’

‘Hell, no,’ Tod said excitedly. ‘We got a special –’

‘Shut up, Tod,’ Teddy said. His eyes shot over to Ben. ‘Never seen you in Smith’s before,’ he said.

‘I don’t come here very much.’

‘So why are you here now?’

Ben shrugged casually. ‘I saw your car outside, and I thought –’

Teddy leaned toward him. ‘Word is, they’s an informant in the department,’ he said. ‘Somebody who’s working for the other side.’

‘I thought you might help me with this case I’m working on,’ Ben continued without hesitation.

Teddy’s eyes squeezed together. ‘What case is that?’

‘Something that broke this morning,’ Ben told him. He took the photograph from his coat pocket and laid it down on the table. ‘A little girl. Somebody shot her in the head and buried her in that old ballfield off Twenty-third Street.’

Teddy leaned back slowly, his eyes casually lingering on the picture. ‘She from Bearmatch?’

‘I guess so,’ Ben told him. ‘But the front office still wants a full investigation.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘So the murder can’t be made to look like a racial thing,’ Ben said.

‘They’re worried about that, huh?’ Tod asked.

‘A little.’

Teddy shook his head resentfully. ‘Then we’ve already lost, Ben.’

‘It’s what the Chief wants,’ Ben said.

‘That’s how it looks,’ Teddy said emphatically, ‘but that’s not how it is.’ He smiled helplessly. ‘Don’t you see, Ben? Don’t you see how it really is?’

Ben said nothing.

‘Even the Chief is having to pay attention to them,’ Teddy explained. ‘We’re having to be worried about what they think.’ He looked at his brother angrily. ‘When the fuck did we ever have to do that before?’ He shifted his eyes back over to Ben. ‘You know what a mongrel is?’ he asked. ‘You ever see an old mongrel dog?’

Ben didn’t answer.

‘That’s what they want to turn us into,’ Teddy said darkly. ‘A race of mongrels.’

Tod’s eyes shot over to Ben. ‘That’s right,’ he said emphatically. ‘That’s what they want.’

Teddy paid no attention to him. He kept his eyes on Ben. ‘They don’t really give a shit about eating with us, or going to school with us, or anything else like that. They just want to ruin us, ruin our race, so they can take over everything.’ He shook his head wearily, painfully. ‘And they’re doing it, too. They’re already making us do what they want. And before long, we’ll just be like a bunch of mongrel dogs.’ He picked up the picture, held it a few inches from Ben’s face and slowly ripped it in two. ‘I am loyal to my race, Ben,’ he said darkly, ‘before everything.’ He released the photograph, and its torn parts fluttered back down onto the table.

Ben stared at him silently for a moment, then gathered up the two halves of the photograph and returned them to his coat pocket. ‘I’m just doing my job, Teddy,’ he said quietly.

‘Well, you’ll have to do it without me,’ Teddy said.

From somewhere deep within him, Ben felt a sudden, inexplicable surge. ‘I intend to,’ he said.

He drove home slowly, turning north, so that he could move along the central boulevards of the city. The streets were almost entirely deserted. The restaurants and cafeterias were tightly closed, and some had already taken the added precaution of boarding up their windows. Even the brilliant chandeliers of the Tutweiler Hotel appeared somehow dim and exhausted in the fully fallen darkness. The streetlamps swung ponderously in the heavy summer air, and the light that swept down from them seemed to fall to earth in thick blue drops. Uniformed policemen patrolled the empty sidewalks two abreast, their holsters already unsnapped, their fingers playing at the handles of their revolvers. In front of Pizitz, black sanitation men were gathering together stacks of broken placards and tossing them into the grinding steel jaws of the compactors, and a little further down, only a few blocks from the park, another crew was hosing waves of accumulated litter into the cement gutters.

The park itself was green and lush, and Ben knew that within only a few hours it would be shimmering brightly in the early morning dew. Far in the distance, he could see the outline of its empty playground. The swings were moving languidly in the air, and under the tall gray lantern, the slide took on a ghostly silver.

To the left, and barely visible through a wall of trees, he could make out the high wire fence of the softball field, and it instantly reminded him of the goalpost off Twenty-third Street. He made a hard left at the end of the park and headed out toward the distant perimeters of Bearmatch.

There were no streetlamps in the ballfield, and so, when he reached it, he could see only a spot of dry ground beneath the covering darkness. No line of benches, no mound of freshly turned earth, no goalpost. Only a wall of impenetrable black which seemed to rise at the very edge of the broken, weedy sidewalk and then extend outward forever. For a while he sat in his car and smoked a cigarette while he stared out into the dark field. From time to time, people would casually approach the car, moving steadily down the sidewalk until they were close enough to notice that the man behind the wheel was white. Then they’d suddenly freeze, as if they’d just stumbled upon a rattlesnake in the brush, eye him cautiously for an instant, then hurry away toward the other side of the street. It happened first one time, then another and another, until Ben grew tired of seeing it, hit the ignition and drove away.

SIX

On his way to work the next morning, Ben parked at almost the same spot on Twenty-third Street where he’d stopped the night before. But by seven o’clock, when he finally pulled over to the curb, the streets were already busy. Small knots of people strolled briskly up and down the sidewalks and across the ballfield. Children sped past on their rusting bicycles, and the traffic along the street and the adjoining avenues was quick and noisy. It was as if the whole neighborhood had been resurrected with the morning light, and now, when people approached his car, they didn’t hesitate or step aside, but simply continued forward without so much as a break in stride. The bright sunlight seemed to serve them as a kind of shield against the dangers which inevitably returned with the night, and under its brief protection, they strode openly to the bus stops, talking quietly as they walked.

For a while Ben sat behind the wheel and watched, just as he had the night before. But this time, he knew that he had only a few minutes to linger at the edge of the ballfield before the inevitable voice from the radio ordered him to headquarters. By now the detectives on the morning shift would be trudging up the cement stairs to receive what they had lately come to call their ‘combat orders,’ assignments which shifted by the minute, but which generally had to do with handling the crowds, paperwork and jailhouse overflow caused by the demonstrations. It was as if everything else had stopped, all the burglaries, assaults and domestic quarrels, and that now there was only this single, dreadful preoccupation with the streets, a great black pit into which everything else, the whole varied texture of daily life, had fallen.

And yet, as Ben continued to sit in his car, his eyes slowly moving from one corner to the next, he could see that much of the general flow of life continued. Bearmatch went on with its routine, and from behind the wheel, he could sit quietly and take in its pace, its odors, the broad tone of its common life. He could see how the maids in their white uniforms gathered in little knots at the bus stops, how the laborers in their gray worksuits or shirtless beneath their tattered bib-overalls moved like a slow, silent army toward the railroad yards and sweltering steel mills. He could hear the morning shift-horns as they sounded loudly through the alleyways and over the sloping shanties, and he remembered that in his youth, they had sounded over his house too. He could smell the bacon grease, redeye gravy and warm half-risen biscuits, and for an instant they seemed to come from his mother’s kitchen, and he could recall how, in the morning, after breakfast, his own father and mother had moved out onto the street like the people who now flowed around him, taking him first to school, and then trudging on down the avenue to board the old electrical trolleys that crisscrossed the city on a grid of wire and steel.