Streets of Fire, Page 2

  ‘Five years.’

  McCorkindale smiled confidently. ‘Well, I been sitting at this same desk for a lot longer than that, and they’s not ever been a missing person report done for anybody out of Bearmatch. They just don’t come to us with stuff like that.’

  ‘Well, it’s not just a missing person,’ Ben said, ‘it’s a murder case. Somebody shot this little girl in the back of the head.’

  McCorkindale smiled slyly. ‘And the guy that did it, he’ll end up with a bullet in his own head, too, or sliced up like a big old piece of pie.’ He laughed quietly. ‘Don’t worry, Ben, he won’t get away with killing no little girl. Not in Bearmatch. Not for a minute. Because they’ll handle it among themselves, and to tell you the truth, they’ll get the job done a lot faster than we ever could.’

  Ben stared at him, unconvinced.

  ‘I mean it,’ McCorkindale said emphatically. ‘They’ll give the son of a bitch a real fair trial. Probably in some alley somewhere, or in the back of a shothouse. Then they’ll cut his goddamn throat and that’ll be the end of it.’

  ‘All right,’ Ben said wearily. It seemed useless to argue any further. ‘But if anything does come in, let me know.’

  ‘You’ll be the first to hear about it, Ben,’ McCorkindale assured him. ‘The very first.’

  *

  Ben walked back to his own desk, then sat down. Besides McCorkindale, he was entirely alone in the cramped detective bullpen. Several metal cots had been set up to accommodate the increased manpower which had been brought in to deal with the demonstrations. They remained rumpled and unmade, their sheets and blankets spilling over the sides or resting in tangled heaps on the bare mattresses. Outside the dim, unwashed windows, sirens rang continually as one paddy wagon after another made its way down the avenue, then turned abruptly and dove toward the basement of the building. In that dark, concrete cavern, the demonstrators would be hustled out of the sweltering wagons and rushed upstairs to the large holding cells the Chief had set aside for them. It had been going on like this for days, and everyone was exhausted. As the demonstrations had continued, everything had become increasingly on edge. At first there had been some talk of handling King as the police in Albany, Georgia, had, killing him with kindness, ‘filling up the jails, of course,’ as Luther himself had put it one day in the detective bullpen, ‘but doing it politely.’ It was a way of handling things that quite a few people in the department had rallied behind at first. But as the weeks had passed, the better part of that idea had gotten buried under a steadily darkening cloud of anger and exhaustion. Sit-ins at the segregated lunch counters of major department stores and mass marches through the central business district had turned the city into a riot zone. And now, as Ben let his eyes drift over the bullpen, he could sense that Luther had grown harder, along with almost everybody else, that the whole city had tightened up, that there was no more give anywhere, in anybody. By six in the evening, a few withered detectives would trudge in, slump down on their cots and get whatever sleep they could for the next three or four hours. Then they’d hit the streets again, dirty, smelly, sitting four to a car as they patrolled the colored sections of the city, or kept a round-the-clock surveillance on some designated leader, staring blankly at the darkened windows of his house or motel room while they balanced coffee cups on the shotguns in their laps.

  ‘Well, ain’t you the lucky one.’

  Ben turned and saw Harry Daniels as he made his way through the scarred double doors of the bullpen.

  ‘You mean to say that in the middle of all this shit, there’s one cop with nothing to do but sit on his ass?’ Daniels added loudly. He turned and called to his partner. ‘What do you think about this, Charlie?’

  Charlie Breedlove strolled up to Ben’s desk. ‘I hear they kicked you onto the Bearmatch beat, Wellman,’ he said.

  Ben nodded.

  ‘Of course, that beat’s pretty much the whole city these days,’ Breedlove added. He smiled mockingly. ‘So you shouldn’t feel like you’ve been singled out or anything.’

  ‘I don’t,’ Ben said.

  Daniels took a long slow drink of Coke, then wiped his mouth with his fist. ‘So what they got you working on, Ben?’

  ‘A little girl somebody found in that football field off Twenty-third Street,’ Ben said.

  Daniels leaned forward and cupped his hand behind his ear. ‘Found where?’

  ‘Off Twenty-third,’ Ben repeated. ‘In a football field.’

  Daniels straightened himself slowly. ‘Football field?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Who called it in, one of the Black Cat boys?’

  ‘No,’ Ben told him. ‘Front desk said it sounded like an old colored man.’

  ‘How old’s the girl?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure. Twelve, thirteen, something like that.’

  ‘Down in Bearmatch, that’s old enough to whore,’ Breedlove said. ‘You ought to check with Kelly down in the file room. He knows a lot about the whores down there.’ He laughed. ‘Matter of fact, the talk is that he had something sweet going on with one of them a few years back.’ He draped his arm over Daniels’ shoulder and gently moved him toward the row of cots on the other side of the room. ‘Let’s get some sleep, partner,’ he said. ‘We got a long night ahead of us.’

  They were asleep almost instantly, and even from his place at the far end of the room, Ben could hear Breedlove snoring loudly as he lay faceup beneath the window.

  For a while Ben remained at his desk. He expected to get a call that would put him back on surveillance or send him circling Bearmatch again, idly circling, as he’d done for a few slow rounds after leaving the football field, and which, after a few minutes, had begun to make him feel more like a prison guard than a homicide detective. Within that circle, life might well go on as McCorkindale had described it. But outside the circle, from the fake antebellum mansions to the bleak trailer parks and greasy spoons of the sprawling industrial neighborhoods, Ben could feel a kind of dreadful trembling in the atmosphere, one that was as palpable in the station house as it was along the reeking drag strips of Bessemer and Irondale. He could feel it like a thousand knifepoints in the air, and after a time, it urged him from his chair, and he walked out of the bullpen and headed out into the steamy day.

  THREE

  The phone was ringing urgently as Ben struggled up from sleep. He looked at the clock. He’d come home for a brief nap, but slept for over an hour. He stepped over quickly and answered the phone.

  ‘Ben, this is Captain Starnes,’ Luther yelped. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘I waited around headquarters for a while,’ Ben explained. ‘Then I came home for a nap.’

  ‘You can nap at the station like everybody else,’ Luther said irritably. ‘You missed the Chief’s speech.’

  ‘What speech?’

  ‘The one he all of a sudden decided to make to the whole goddamn department,’ Luther snapped. He paused, as if waiting for a response, then continued. ‘Now you get back down to headquarters right now.’

  Ben nodded wearily. ‘All right, Captain.’

  A few men were still lingering in the briefing room when Ben arrived at the station house. Plainsclothesmen and uniformed patrolmen milled about, along with the top brass who’d come along with the Chief. Clouds of tobacco smoke hung heavily in the air, and the harsh, sporadic clack of police radios could be heard clearly over the murmur of the crowd.

  ‘Get anything on that little girl yet?’ Charlie Breedlove said as he walked up to Ben. He was smoking a thick black cigar clenched tightly between his teeth.

  Ben shook his head.

  ‘Probably never will,’ Breedlove said. ‘It’s over and done with.’

  Ben glanced toward the front of the room. The Chief stood in the distance, chewing his cigar. One of the Langley brothers huddled next to him, listening intently.

  ‘Chief made a real barn-burner,’ Breedlove told him.

  ‘He knows how to get them going
,’ Ben said.

  ‘Told us we didn’t have to take shit from anybody. Now, I agree with that.’ Breedlove plucked the cigar from his mouth and glanced at the tip. ‘Lost my fire,’ he said. ’Got a light?’

  Ben took out a packet of matches and relighted the cigar.

  Breedlove took a deep draw, then blew a tumbling cloud of thick blue smoke into the already stifling air. ‘You didn’t see Harry on the way in, did you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He disappeared on me,’ Breedlove said. ‘It’s rough having a partner who’s always disappearing on you.’ He smiled. ‘They give you a partner yet? I mean, since Gifford left?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you’re just working that Bearmatch thing yourself?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Breedlove shrugged. ‘Well, when all this shits over, they’ll give you a new partner. They just got all they can handle right now.’

  ‘I don’t mind working alone,’ Ben said:

  ‘You’re a loner type, is that it?’ Breedlove asked.

  ‘I guess.’

  Breedlove’s eyes narrowed somewhat, as if he were studying him. ‘Well, I’m not like that,’ he said finally. ‘I like a partner. Speaking of which, I better find the rotten son of a bitch.’ He nodded quickly, and left the room, his thin, wiry frame disappearing into the pale green corridor like something caught up in a wave.

  Ben lingered in the room awhile longer, standing idly to the side as the last of the people filtered out into the hallway. Like all the world around them, they seemed to move in pairs. Partners on patrol went home to their separate wives, coupling up once again. There were times when it had appealed to him, this notion of someone at his side. But each time he’d moved toward it, it had slipped beyond his grasp. A secretary in the Records Department had moved abruptly to Galveston. A bank teller at First Alabama had finally decided to go with what Ben himself imagined to be a better man. Each time he’d taken it well, but each time it had worn him down a little, so that he’d made few attempts in the last few years to be anything but alone. Each night he made his supper, read the paper, then fell asleep on the sofa or in his large orange recliner, his ears tuned to the muffled wail behind the black and white Indian-head test pattern on his television screen. And each morning he awoke needing less and less to make it through the day. It was a life that seemed to suit him, and he no longer felt it necessary to apologize for it, or to look for some way out of it. Even Gifford’s wife had finally stopped trying to marry him off to some perfect woman she’d met while squeezing oranges at the A&P. Now it seemed to him that she had been his last hope, and that when she’d finally given up, he’d been able to curl into his aloneness like a bed.

  *

  Luther was waiting for him when Ben got back to his desk. He was sitting in his chair, his hair lifting lazily with each pass of the large rotating fan that stood near the back of the room.

  ‘When you left the ballfield, where’d you go, Ben?’ he asked immediately.

  ‘Back on surveillance,’ Ben said.

  Luther rose slowly from the chair, then eased himself onto the top of Ben’s desk. ‘You mean King?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben said. He pulled the small notebook from his jacket pocket and handed it to Luther.

  Luther glanced at it idly. ‘Anything new?’

  Ben shook his head.

  Luther pocketed the notebook. ‘So what did you do then?’

  ‘I came back here,’ Ben said. ‘I talked to Sammy.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That little girl.’

  Luther looked pleased. ‘Good. What then?’

  ‘I went home for a rest, and then the phone rang.’

  ‘So then you came back to headquarters?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben said.

  ‘Okay,’ Luther said thoughtfully.

  ‘What’s this all about, Captain?’ Ben asked. ‘All these questions, I mean.’

  Luther looked at Ben as if he were a small child in need of basic instruction. ‘Well, like I said at the ballfield, this little girl could be a problem for us. If you want to know the truth, she could be a problem in several ways.’ Luther lifted his hand and shot a finger into the air. ‘First, they’ll be certain people who figure this is some sort of KKK killing or something like that. We have to make sure that it’s not.’ A second finger poked the air. ‘And we also have to make sure that we’re looking into this killing, that we’re not just letting it go because the victim is colored.’ The two fingers curled back into Luther’s fist. ‘See what I mean? We want to cover ourselves in both directions.’ He smiled quietly. ‘That’s why it’s important that you really work this case, Ben,’ he added. ‘That’s why it looks good that you checked with Sammy. But that’s also why it looks bad that you went home and took a nap after being at the ballfield. That makes it look like you don’t give a shit one way or the other about this girl.’ He looked at Ben closely. ‘You see what I mean, don’t you, Ben?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s not like we’re checking you out in particular,’ Luther said. ‘It’s just that things being the way they are, everybody has to be careful.’

  ‘I understand,’ Ben said.

  Luther rose slowly, then squeezed Ben’s upper arm affectionately. ‘I knew you would.’ He stepped away, stopped suddenly, then turned back toward him. His face seemed suddenly strained, and his voice took on a tense and apprehensive tone. ‘Things are going to be real hard over the next few days, Ben,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you the truth, the closer you stay to this little case, the better off you’re going to be.’ He turned again, and this time pressed forward without stopping, head down, his back slightly hunched, his feet slapping loudly against the checkerboard tile floor.

  FOUR

  There was a note on Ben’s desk when he got back to the detective bullpen. It was written on a plain square of white paper, and it was from Leon Patterson, one of the medical examiners in the Coroners Office. It said that he’d finished with case number three-zero-six, which Ben figured was the number he’d assigned to the little girl, and that he’d be in his office at Hillman Hospital until six.

  Patterson was already on his way out when Ben met him in the hallway.

  ‘I came over to see about that little girl,’ Ben said.

  Patterson glanced at his watch. ‘Can it wait till tomorrow, Ben?’

  ‘No.’

  Patterson looked puzzled. ‘Why? She kin to somebody important?’

  ‘I don’t know who she’s kin to, Leon,’ Ben said. ‘But I don’t want to wait until tomorrow.’

  Patterson shrugged heavily. ‘All right, then,’ he said wearily. ‘Come back in and I’ll show you what I got.’

  Ben followed Patterson as he walked back down the hallway and into a small room where two stainless steel tables rested beneath a bank of fluorescent lights. An old black man, gray-haired and somewhat stooped, was hosing blood from one of them. It flowed in a broad swath into the drains on either side of the table, then washed down into the two separate buckets beneath them.

  ‘Woman out in Bush Hills,’ Patterson explained. ‘Sudden death. Big insurance policy. DA wanted a full autopsy.’

  ‘Did you do a full one on the girl?’ Ben asked.

  Patterson laughed. ‘Come on, Ben. What for? Anybody could see what happened to her.’ He walked over to a large metal file cabinet and pulled out a plain manila envelope. ‘Read it for yourself. It won’t take you long. Just about three lines. Death by gunshot wound. You could have figured that out yourself.’

  ‘I want a full autopsy,’ Ben said.

  Patterson’s eyes widened. ‘For God’s sake, Ben, didn’t you see the back of her head?’

  ‘Full autopsy, Leon,’ Ben told him. ‘Orders from the top.’

  Patterson’s eyes narrowed. ‘From the top?’ he said unbelievingly.

  ‘I’d like for you to do it now, Leon.’

  ‘I’ve got this woman to do first.’

  Ben shook his head
. ‘She’ll have to get in line.’

  Leon stared at Ben piercingly. ‘Who is this girl, anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Nobody knows.’

  ‘Well, I don’t believe that, Ben,’ Patterson said, ‘but I’ll go along with you anyway.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Just understand that it’s going to be a quick cut-and-paste job.’

  Ben shook his head. ‘Can’t do it, Leon. It’s got to be thorough.’

  ‘Thorough?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Ben said firmly.

  Patterson shrugged. ‘Okay, I’ll call you when I’m finished.’

  Ben did not move. ‘I’ll stay and watch,’ he said.

  Patterson smiled. ‘Oh, yeah? You ever seen a full autopsy before, Ben?’

  ‘No.’

  The smiled broadened. ‘Well, you’re in for a treat,’ Patterson said. He stepped around him and called to the old man. ‘Bring me that little girl in the freezer.’ He looked back at Ben, the smile now large and mocking. ‘Step right over, Ben. You want a full autopsy? By God, I’ll give you one.’ He walked over to one of the tables, then motioned for Ben. ‘Well, come on over,’ he said teasingly. ‘I want you to have a ringside seat.’

  Ben stepped over next to Patterson and stood, his hands folded in front of him, while the attendant carefully laid the girl’s body onto the bare table. It was naked, and against the bright, blue steel it seemed infinitely dark and pliant. Rigor mortis had already reached its peak, and was now diminishing, so that the legs lay nearly flat on the tabletop, and only a slight arching upward could be seen along the spine.

  ‘Well, let me suit up,’ Patterson said. He pulled on a white lab coat which had been draped over a stool at the table, then sunk his hands into a pair of transparent rubber gloves. ‘Beginning to get the idea, Ben?’ he asked with a slight laugh.

  Ben said nothing.

  Patterson looked at the body for a moment, then swept his hand out over it. ‘Well, as you can see, Sergeant, there is no lethal trauma to the body.’ He placed his large hands on either side of the girl’s face and twisted her head sharply to the left. ‘Except for this hole right here.’ He moved his index finger in a circular pattern around the dark, reddish hole. ‘Now I’ll do a scraping if you want one,’ he said, ‘but as you can see, we got powder burns all around the wound, which indicates that she was shot at extremely close range, probably no more than a couple of inches.’ He poked his finger into the hole. ‘From the size of it, I’d say a twenty-two-caliber slug, maybe a short, maybe a long. I’ll have to dig it out to determine that.’ He looked up at Ben and smiled. ‘Ready?’