Streets of Fire (8 page)

‘One set of fingerprints,’ Patterson said. ‘I’m having them traced every way I can.’

Ben walked over to the desk and took the bag from Patterson’s fingers. ‘Just one set?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And they weren’t the girl’s?’

‘No,’ Patterson said. ‘No trace of hers at all.’ He pulled a manila folder from the same drawer. ‘These are the prints.’

Ben took them out and held them under the lamp on Patterson’s desk. ‘The ring – was it wiped?’

‘Not that I could tell’

‘So the girl never touched the ring?’

‘That would be my conclusion,’ Patterson told him. ‘And as far as the prints go, it looks like you were right.’

Ben looked at him. ‘About what?’

‘Well, I remember yesterday, how you said that someone a whole lot bigger than the girl came up behind her and put that little pistol upside her head and shot her.’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, just that if the guy that owned this ring was the one that did it,’ Patterson said, ‘well, then you were right. Chances are he was a whole lot bigger than the girl.’ He smiled. ‘Probably a whole lot bigger than you or me, too.’

‘How do you know?’

‘By the prints,’ Patterson said. ‘It works like a dog’s paw. Big hand, big man. At least most of the time.’ He glanced down at the prints. ‘And these were real big. Maybe the biggest I’ve ever seen.’

Ben continued to look at the prints. Wide gray whorls spiraled upward from the black negative and finally formed a rounded nub at the apex of each finger.

‘He’s not exactly a giant,’ Patterson said, ‘but I wouldn’t want to bet my house that I could beat him arm-wrestling.’ His eyes darkened. ‘And I guess that’s why she was torn up so. You know, in her privates.’

Ben returned the prints to the envelope.

‘And we found this, too,’ Patterson added. He handed him a rectangular microscope slide. ‘Some kind of sticky stuff was on the ring. I’m having it tested tomorrow.’

Ben took the slide carefully between his thumb and index finger. He could make out a granular yellowish powder which had been smeared across the glass. ‘What do you think it is, Leon?’ he asked.

Patterson shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Could be something like pine pollen. There’s plenty of that around in the summer.’ He smiled. It could be that yellow stuff that sticks to your fingers after you eat a bag of Korn Kurls.’ He shrugged again, this time more helplessly. ‘In other words, it could be just about anything.’

Ben handed back the slide. ‘Well, let me know what you find out.’ He looked into the adjoining room. He could see the plain wooden box where the girl now lay, the little blue dress covering the thick black stitching which he knew ran in an upside-down Y formation from her throat to head to her abdomen.

‘What do you want to name her, Ben?’ Patterson asked suddenly.

‘Name her?’

‘For the record, I mean,’ Patterson said. ‘Unless you want me to just use a number. Plenty of times that’s what I do.’

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘A name.’

Patterson sat down at his desk, picked up a pencil and held it poised an inch or so above a sheet of white paper. ‘Well, what’ll it be? Give me a name.’

Ben looked at him wonderingly. ‘Me?’

‘Why not,’ Patterson said offhandedly. ‘Hell, Ben, you’re as close to being her daddy as anybody else right now.’

For a moment he allowed a list of names to flow featurelessly through his mind. He thought of movie-star names, then those of the colored singers he’d heard of. Nothing seemed to fit the way he wanted it to, but he finally called her ‘Martha,’ after his own mother.

‘Okay,’ Patterson said, as he wrote it down. ‘And what about a last name?’

He glanced back toward the small wooden box, then returned his eyes to Patterson. ‘Give her mine,’ he said.

A large middle-aged white man walked into Patterson’s office a few minutes later. He was followed by two young blacks, both of whom were dressed in the uniforms of the city jail.

‘I’ve come to pick up a body,’ the white man said. He squinted hard at Ben and Patterson. ‘Who do I see about that?’

‘Me,’ Patterson said immediately. ‘Where’s Kelly?’

‘Kelly who?’

‘Kelly Ryan from the Property Department,’ Patterson told him. ‘He usually does the colored burying.’

The man shrugged. ‘I don’t know nothing about that,’ he said. ‘I work with the Highway Department. I just got a call to pick up a couple of hands from the jail and then come on over here for a body.’

‘You know where the cemetery is?’

‘They got a place dug for it in Gracehill,’ the man said.

‘They give you a plot number?’ Patterson asked.

The man shook his head. ‘They didn’t say nothing but come over to Hillman and pick up a body.’

‘Okay,’ Patterson said wearily. He led the three men into the freezer room and stood beside the coffin. ‘This is it.’

‘A kid?’ the white man asked.

‘That’s right,’ Patterson told him. ‘And it’s a murder, too, so I want you to remember where you put her. Find a tree or a stump or something and remember where it is. I’ll get a plot number later.’

Ben stepped up beside the two young men. ‘I’ll go, too,’ he said.

The white man nodded quickly. ‘Well, with the four of us, we can do it the right way,’ he said, ‘one shoulder at each corner, just like they’d do it in church.’

The four of them took their positions, one at each corner of the coffin, and lifted it up onto their shoulders.

As he headed out toward the parking lot, Ben could feel the body shift slightly as they juggled the coffin awkwardly, and he could imagine the girl’s face jerking left and right inside, as if looking for a way out of the darkness.

A dusty, mud-spattered pickup truck sat waiting for them in the parking lot, its battered front fenders sloping wearily toward the ground. The white man took down the tailgate with one hand while continuing to balance his corner of the coffin precariously on his shoulder.

‘Okay, just set it down real slow,’ he said, after he’d undone the gate. Then he turned cautiously and eased the coffin down onto the bed of the truck.

‘All right, let’s just shove it in now,’ he said. ‘But soft-like. We got a little child here.’

When the coffin was in place, the two black youths hauled themselves into the back of the truck and sat silently on either side of it, their hands resting motionlessly on the top of the coffin.

Ben and the other man crawled into the cab of the truck.

‘Name’s Thompson,’ the man said as he started the engine. ‘Lamar Thompson.’

‘Ben Well man.’

Thompson eased the truck forward, moving slowly toward the avenue and then out into it.

‘You some kind of preacher or something?’ he asked when he brought the truck to a halt at the first traffic signal.

‘No,’ Ben said, ‘I’m with the Police Department.’

Thompson smiled. ‘I figured you might be coming along to say a few words over the body. I thought maybe the state provided something like that.’

‘No.’

‘Want me to do it then?’ Thompson asked immediately.

‘If you want to,’ Ben said indifferently.

‘You got any idea what this child was?’

‘She was a Negro,’ Ben told him.

‘I figured that,’ Thompson said. ‘They don’t bury white people in Gracehill. But what about her religion?’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘Well, I’m a Primitive Baptist, myself,’ Thompson said. ‘You know, an old foot-washing Baptist, what you might say.’ He smiled softly. ‘With us, it don’t matter what this child was, because in the end, she was, what you might say, a child of God.’ He pulled a red handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his neck vigorously. ‘So what I mean is, well, I could say a few simple things over her, if that’s all right with you.’

‘It’s all right with me,’ Ben said. He kept his eyes straight ahead, peering out into the deepening night as the truck moved shakily alongside Kelly Ingram Park and then on ahead into the Negro district. To his right, a string of poolhalls stretched out for nearly a block. A soft green light glowed behind their painted windows, and he could imagine the people inside, lined up along the wall in small wooden chairs or bunched over the tables, their bright, gleaming eyes following the flight of the balls.

‘How long you been a policeman?’ Thompson asked after a while.

Ben drew in a deep breath. ‘Long time.’

‘I’ve worked with the Highway Department for a long time, too,’ Thompson said cheerfully. ‘It’s rough in the summer. You spread that steaming black tar all over everything. It steams right up in your face. You blow your nose when you get home from work, it looks like you’re blowing coal soot out of your head.’

Ben nodded slowly, but said nothing. He could hear the jukeboxes humming noisily in the night air, loud, pulsing, rhythmic, as if they were being played to warn off an approaching danger.

‘I used to think about doing something else,’ Thompson went on, ‘but by the time I got to thinking real serious about that, I was near to forty, with three kids and a big car payment.’ He hit the brake suddenly to avoid a small dog, and the coffin slid forward and bumped loudly against the cab of the truck. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ Thompson said quickly. ‘Didn’t want to hit that dog, though.’

The truck moved steadily down Fourth Avenue, then out beyond it, to where more and more vacant lots lined the increasingly bumpy and untended streets.

‘They ought to get a crew out here,’ Thompson said. He peered to the right. ‘There it is,’ he said.

Gracehill Cemetery rested on a small, rounded hill near the far southwest corner of the city. Small unpaved roads snaked windingly among the small gray stones, slowly curling upward toward the crest of the hill. All along the gently sloping banks, tombstones jutted out of the ground in broken clusters, their bases covered by the unmown grass. The mounds of dirt which stretched out from them were decorated by clumps of plastic-flowers rooted in dirt-filled tin cans and quart jars. Here and there a plywood cross leaned unsteadily toward the earth, or a plain brown stone lifted from it, jagged, nameless, accompanied by a small one at the foot of the mound.

‘It’s supposed to be right around here,’ Thompson said matter-of-factly. He craned his neck out the window, his eyes searching through the ever-deepening brush.

The grave had been dug in a slender trench between two others, and when Thompson finally spotted it, he wheeled the truck over, then backed it in, as if preparing to dump the coffin like a load of sand.

‘Okay,’ he said as he turned off the engine.

Ben got out and walked to the back of the truck. The two youths had already lowered the tailgate and pushed the coffin to the edge of it. They now stood above it, their eyes lifted up over the hill, toward the distant twinkling lights of the city.

‘Okay, now,’ Thompson said. ‘We’ll just lower it down real slow. Don’t drop her.’

Within a few minutes, the coffin was in the ground, and Thompson walked to the head of the grave and bowed his head. The two young men bowed theirs as well, while Ben slumped back on a large stone and sank his hands in his pockets.

‘Dearest and most gracious God,’ Thompson began, ‘we commend to your care the soul of your servant …’ He stopped and glanced up at Ben. ‘What’s this child’s name?’ he asked.

‘Martha Wellman,’ Ben told him.

Thompson lowered his head again. ‘We commend to your care the soul of your servant, Martha Wellman.’ He folded his hands together gracefully. ‘We know that she was your child, that her soul was saved long before it was even clothed in flesh. For the grace of Jesus Christ is a gift which cannot be refused.’

Ben’s eyes drifted over to the two black youths. They stood on either side of the grave, their heads bowed reverently, their lips pressed tightly together. Behind them, the nightbound city glittered silently. Ben’s eyes drifted down toward the grave, then back up again. The city lay utterly quiet in the darkness, a grid of streets lit by what seemed in the distance a thousand tiny fires. He wondered how many streets the girl had come to know, which ones she had liked, feared, the last one she’d walked down before she died.

King had not yet begun to speak when Ben arrived once again at the Sixteenth Baptist Church, but the crowds were already singing and clapping as they filled the streets which fronted the church.

Ben got out of his car and stood beside it, leaning on the hood, his pen and notebook already in his hand. From his position he could see a group of black leaders standing on the small porch at the side of the church. They were talking quietly and fanning themselves with paper fans from A. G. Gaston’s Funeral Home. Just beyond them, Breedlove and Daniels were squatting together in front of a bush, and even from several yards away, Ben could see that they had both taken out their own pens and notebooks.

Just as the day before, the crowd suddenly grew quiet, and then King’s voice rang out.

‘Today was D-Day in Birmingham,’ he cried, his voice already at that high pitch which it had achieved the day before. ‘But there will be many more D-Days in Birmingham. There will be Double D-Days in Birmingham until we have won our freedom.’

Daniels was writing furiously in his notebook, when Ben looked up, but Breedlove had vanished. For a moment he looked for him, a pale white face in a sea of black, but it was as if he had disintegrated where he squatted, dissolved into the warm evening air.

‘The eyes of the nation are on Birmingham,’ King intoned, and the crowd cheered wildly. ‘The eyes of the world are on Birmingham.’ The cheers grew louder and more ecstatic. The eyes of God are on Birmingham.’ A wave of trembling jubilation lifted the crowd inside the church, then swept out over the people surrounding it, passing back and forth over them again and again like the flow of wildly eddying waters.

Ben’s pen scurried across the page, the point burrowing into the white paper, scarring it as he wrote.

‘So don’t get tired,’ King cried.

‘No!’ the crowd screamed in return.

‘Don’t get bitter.’

‘No!’

King’s deep, sonorous laughter settled over the crowd. Then, suddenly, his voice rose out of it like a lick of fire.

‘Are you tired?’ he shouted.