Streets of Fire (5 page)

For a long time, his parents had been mostly ghosts to him, his father brought down by a slow disease, his mother simply dead for a reason no one at Hillman Hospital had ever bothered to explain. In the summer, as he remembered now, they’d sometimes fallen asleep in their swing while he remained inside, listening to the radio. Later he would find them slouched to one side, the old man’s face buried in his wife’s large, fallen breasts, the old woman’s head dropping so far down toward her husband’s that it looked half-severed, and both of them snoring wheezily while the lightning bugs twinkled in the humid air. But now they suddenly returned to him as more than bodies floating silently in a little wrought-iron swing, and for a moment he found himself wondering about what their lives had really been, what they had thought about as they sat together, listening to the crickets and katydids, the slicing sound the traffic made after a fierce summer rain, the tinkling bells of the trolleys, what they would think about even now if they were alive, what they would think about the uproar in the city, about the nameless little girl beneath the goalpost, what they, knowing about all this, would tell hi in he should do.

The clack of the radio sounded suddenly, and after it, the dispatcher’s voice. ‘Headquarters calling Car 17.’

Ben picked up the microphone. ‘Car 17.’

‘That you, Ben?’

‘Yeah. What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing much,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Patterson, at the Coroner’s Office, he wants you to give him a call when you get a chance.’

‘Is he at Hillman?’

‘I guess so.’

‘I’m not too far away,’ Ben said. I’ll drive over. Everything okay at headquarters?’

‘About the same.’

‘I’ll come over as soon as I leave Hillman,’ Ben said.

He snapped the radio back into its cradle, then paused a moment, staring out once again into the field. Perhaps a hundred yards away, he could see groups of children gathering under the goalpost. They looked as if they were dressed in their Sunday best, the girls in clean white dresses, the boys in dark trousers and plain white shirts. For a moment, Ben thought it might be some kind of memorial service for the murdered girl, some strange Bearmatch rite which no outsiders knew about. Then, suddenly, a tall young man in a dark blue suit stepped from their midst and shouted something. Instantly a smattering of placards shot into the air. They were made of white poster-paper tacked to spindly wooden slats, and they were the sort Ben had seen a great many of since the demonstrations had begun. The thick, black lettering conveyed the same protests and demands, and as the children filed silently off the littered field, two abreast, holding hands, smiling with what seemed to him an odd and unknowable happiness, Ben wondered if, under different circumstances, the murdered girl might have been among them, her hand in someone else’s, her buckled shoes skipping lightly across the parched ground, her face emboldened with the same bright smile.

Patterson was going through a stack of files in the outer office when Ben arrived.

‘Well, they got to you pretty fast,’ he said.

‘What do you have?’ Ben asked.

‘I wish I had more, to tell you the truth,’ Patterson told him. ‘You find out who the girl was yet?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I probably can’t help you much with that,’ Patterson said. ‘But I did find something you might want to see.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Especially since the front office is so hot for the Coroner’s Office to work this case.’ He pushed himself back from the desk slightly and opened the top drawer. ‘I vacuumed her dress, and while I was doing that, I found something.’ He drew a plastic bag from the desk drawer and handed it to Ben. ‘It was in one of her pockets. I’m surprised you guys didn’t find it when you dug her up.’

Ben lifted the bag up to the light. He could see a metal ring. The plated imitation gold was already turning green. Its setting contained a large, purple oval of cut glass.

‘Not exactly a priceless piece, is it?’ Patterson said softly. ‘But what with her being from Bearmatch, it probably meant something to her.’

Ben continued to look at the ring. ‘Where’d you find it?’

‘It was tucked inside one of her pockets,’ Patterson said. He shrugged. It’s just a piece of old costume jewelry, but the little girl probably thought it was worth a lot.’

Ben turned the bag slowly before his eyes. ‘Then why wasn’t she wearing it?’ he asked. Then he looked at Patterson. ‘Where is she?’

‘Still in the freezer,’ Patterson said. ‘We’re not burying her until late this afternoon.’

‘I’d like to see her again.’

‘She didn’t come back to life overnight,’ Patterson said. ‘We can’t do that for her.’

Ben turned abruptly and walked into the adjoining room. The girl was still in Compartment 7. He opened the door, pulled out the carriage and drew back the sheet.

‘What are you doing?’ Patterson asked as he stepped up beside him.

Ben did not answer. He took the ring out of the bag, lifted one of the girl’s hands from the carriage and inserted the ring onto her little finger. It was too large to hold it. He tried the index finger, the middle finger and finally the thumb. The ring was far too large to fit any of them.

‘She wasn’t wearing it because it wasn’t hers,’ he said as he dropped the ring back into the bag.

Patterson nodded. ‘Boyfriend’s, maybe?’ he asked hesitantly.

Ben looked at him. ‘I don’t know. She could have worn it on a chain around her neck. She could have picked it up on the street.’ He walked over to the small metal desk at the rear of the room and looked at the ring under the desk lamp, turning it slowly in his fingertips. ‘No name,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘No initials.’ He dropped it back into the plastic bag and handed it to Patterson. ‘Send it over to be dusted,’ he told him, ‘and tell them to let me know what they find.’

‘Okay,’ Patterson said with a slight edge of sarcasm. Whatever they want in the front office, that’s what we do.’

Ben did not seem to hear him. ‘Where’s her dress?’

Patterson pointed toward a plain cardboard box which rested beneath a long wooden table. ‘Over there.’

Ben walked over to the box, took out the dress and spread it across the table. ‘Which pocket did you find it in?’

Patterson pointed to a single shallow breast pocket. ‘Right there.’

Ben gazed steadily at the dress. In addition to the one on the right front of the dress, it had two side pockets, and he inserted his hands into each of them. ‘They’re a lot deeper,’ he said.

Patterson looked at him oddly. ‘So what?’

‘Well, I was just thinking,’ Ben said. ‘If I were a little girl who wanted to keep from losing my ring, I’d put it in one of my side pockets.’ He looked at Patterson pointedly. ‘Wouldn’t you, Leon?’

Patterson glanced down at the dress, then back up to Ben. ‘Yeah, I would,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Unless I was careless.’

Ben picked up the dress by the shoulders and turned it slowly in the light. It was badly soiled from the burial, and there were bloodstains on the skirt.

‘Those bloodstains,’ Ben said. ‘Where’d they come from?’

‘The rape,’ Patterson replied authoritatively. ‘Where else would they come from?’

Ben twisted the dress around so that Patterson could see the back of it. ‘How come there’s no blood on her collar?’ he asked. ‘She was shot in the back of the head. I lead wounds are usually pretty bloody.’

Patterson stared silently at the white, ruffled collar for a moment, then looked at Ben. ‘I can’t answer that, Ben,’ he said at last, ‘I really don’t know.’

‘I do,’ Ben said. He glanced back over toward the body. The small dark hand dangled from the metal carriage, casting a tiny shadow across the polished tile floor. She was naked when somebody shot her,’ he said. He lifted his right hand, fingers spread, and held it suspended in the air at about four feet from the floor. ‘She was naked, and she was standing about this high, Leon,’ he continued softly. ‘And somebody a whole lot bigger came up behind her and put a gun a few inches from the back of her head and pulled the trigger.’

Something very dark silently passed over Patterson’s face. ‘Let me know if I can help you any more on this one, Ben,’ he said finally. Then he turned very quickly and walked away.

SEVEN

During the night, police barricades had been set up at the entrance of the underground garage at headquarters, and several uniformed patrolmen now stood determinedly behind them, nightsticks already drawn, and with their eves squinting menacingly as Ben pulled to a halt.

‘Looks like you boys are getting ready for a rough day,’ Ben said as one of the patrolmen approached his car.

‘We’ve been told to expect anything,’ the patrolman replied. ‘Do you have business here?’

Ben took out his identification.

‘Fine, Sergeant,’ the patrolman said instantly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.’ He looked over at the line of patrolmen who stood silently behind the barricade. ‘Open up,’ he called loudly. ‘Sergeant Wellman passing through.’

The other patrolmen pulled back one of the long saw-horse barricades and Ben drove past them, nosing his car downward into the garage. On either side, men were lined up in marching formation, their commanders taking them through the paces of a military drill. At the southern corner of the garage, metal tables had been set up like a subterranean field headquarters, complete with telephones, typewriters, and, at the far end of the table, a cardboard box filled with an assortment of what looked like civilian handguns: thirty-eights, forty-fives, a few puny twenty-twos, and snuggled among them like a nest of sleeping vipers, a .357 Magnum, a P.38, and a few other high-powered pistols.

Sammy McCorkindale sat behind the box, routinely cataloging the serial numbers of one pistol at a time.

Ben picked up an old German Luger, shifted it slowly from one hand to the other, then threw open the cartridge clip. It was fully loaded. He shoved the clip back into position, then laid it down on the table in front of McCorkindale.

‘What the hell is this all about?’ he asked.

McCorkindale looked up slowly. ‘What does it look like?’

‘It looks like a lot a firepower,’ Ben said. ‘But what are you doing with it?’

McCorkindale returned to his ledger. ‘Chief wants all confiscated weapons to be put in working order,’ he said casually.

‘Why?’

‘Case we need them, I guess,’ McCorkindale said.

‘Need them for what?’

‘To arm the deputies.’

‘What deputies?’

‘The ones the Chief’s going to swear in if we need them.’

‘You mean civilian deputies?’

‘That’s right,’ McCorkindale said idly. He pulled a forty-five automatic from the box and began to write down its serial number.

Ben glanced to the left. A group of civilian office workers was busily unloading wooden crates filled with tear-gas canisters from a police van with Mississippi license plates and a large Confederate flag festooned across its rear double doors.

‘Looks to me like they’re expecting the shit to hit the fan,’ McCorkindale said. He looked up from the ledger and grinned. ‘They’re even going to put my fat ass on the line.’

Ben drew his eyes back over to McCorkindale. ‘How long’s it been since you fired a gun, Sammy?’

‘You mean my service revolver? You mean in the line of duty? I ain’t never fired it, Ben.’

Ben shook his head irritably, then picked up the Magnum. ‘You think these so-called deputies will know how to use a thing like this?’

McCorkindale smiled cagily. ‘Well, I figure if things really get out of hand, they’ll learn pretty quick,’ he said. ‘And I figure that’s what the boys in the front office are thinking, too.’

Ben placed the Magnum back down on the table. ‘They’ll shoot their own toes off, or they’ll shoot each other, or they’ll shoot one of us, Sammy, and that’s what’s going to happen.’ He looked down at the Magnum, then back up at McCorkindale. ‘You just don’t hand somebody a gun like that and then tell them to go on out and make up the rest.’

‘I’m not saying I agree with it,’ McCorkindale said, almost in a whine, ‘but we can’t just let the whole town go up in smoke.’

Ben’s eyes drifted over to the right, past a line of cement columns to where the Chief’s white tank rested near the garage entrance. Black Cat 13 was parked only a few feet away, and next to it, one of the bright red station wagons the Fire Department used to whisk the Chief from one blaze to another across the city.

‘I mean, I’m just an ordinary dogface in the depart meat, Ben,’ McCorkindale continued. ‘They don’t come to me for the big decisions.’

Ben returned his eyes to McCorkindale. He smiled softly. ‘Sometimes I wish they did, Sammy,’ he said quietly. ‘Sometimes I sure do wish they did.’

Upstairs on the first floor, Ben found the lobby crowded with what looked like a completely new contingent of Alabama highway patrolmen. They wore flat-gray uniforms, Sam Browne holsters and the sort of rounded black hats that Gifford, Ben’s former partner, had called ‘Wyatt Earps.’ Ben didn’t recognize any of them, and after a moment he realized that they must have been brought in from the distant rural counties which surrounded Birmingham. They had the look of country boys who were uneasy in the city, and who had spent most of their lives pulling over the occasional teenage speed-demon on some unpaved backwoods road. It was the sort of half-frightened, half-baffled look that he remembered from the war when a batch of reinforcements would suddenly show up, fresh-faced boys who’d been trained for thirty days, then handed an M-1, shipped to the Pacific, spewed out onto a rocky island and told to kick the hell out of a dug-in, battle-hardened army of suicidal Japanese.

For a moment, Ben simply stood to the side and watched them, trying to figure out what use they could possibly be on the streets of Birmingham, or why they had suddenly appeared in such large numbers, unless it was to make the very idea of resistance to them unthinkable.

He was still considering it all when Luther walked up and leaned against the wall beside him.

‘King’s scheduled for a speech at the Sixteenth Baptist Church late this afternoon,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I want you to be there.’