Streets of Fire

by Thomas H. Cook

  Coggins turned away slightly and wiped a line of sweat from his lip. His hand was trembling. ‘I just came up here about those kids they have out in the parking lot. That’s all I came up here for, and I got into this shit.’

  Ben said nothing.

  ‘It’s going to rain like hell,’ Coggins went on, ‘and those kids shouldn’t be left out in it like a herd of cows or something.’

  Ben eased himself back down on the desk behind him and folded his arms over his chest.

  ‘They used to be able to treat us that way,’ Coggins added angrily, ‘but no more, goddammit!’ He sucked in a deep, shaky breath, and let it out in a loud burst. ‘No, sir,’ he proclaimed loudly, regaining his resolve, ‘I’m not afraid to die.’

  ‘Then you’re a fool,’ Ben said.

  Coggins’ eyes shot over to him. ‘Don’t you believe there’s anything worth dying for?’

  ‘Quite a few things, I guess,’ Ben said. But what’s that got to do with fear?’

  Coggins eyes squeezed together. ‘You trying to make a fool out of me?’

  ‘I admire you,’ Ben heard himself say with a sudden surprise.

  Coggins laughed bitterly. ‘Yeah, I bet you do.’

  Ben pulled the photograph of Doreen Ballinger from his pocket and held it up in front of Coggins. ‘You ever seen this little girl?’ he asked.

  Coggins looked closely at the photograph. ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘Murdered,’ Ben said. ‘Shot in the head. Buried in that little ballfield over on Twenty-third Street.’

  Coggins smiled cagily. ‘And you’re trying to pin it on me,’ he said, as if everything had now suddenly come clear to him.

  Ben let it pass. ‘Do you know her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you ever seen her?’

  Coggins glanced back at the photograph. ‘She looks familiar. A lot of people do.’

  ‘Her aunt said she saw her in a group of young girls that was hanging around you on Saturday afternoon,’ Ben said.

  ‘Whereabouts?’

  ‘Outside the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ Coggins said. ‘I remember that. A few of them came up and asked some questions about the Thursday march.’ Again, he looked at the picture. ‘She could have been there, but I don’t recognize her in particular.’

  ‘Are you from Bearmatch, Mr Coggins?’ Ben asked.

  ‘No, I’m from Ensley,’ Coggins said. He looked at Ben knowingly. ‘I know what you’re thinking, just another one of those rich niggers trying to get the poor ones stirred up.’

  ‘Doreen was from Bearmatch,’ Ben said. ‘She was deaf. Her father ran off when she was three. Her mother died last year. Did your father run off, Mr Coggins?’

  ‘My father is a doctor,’ Coggins said.

  Ben continued to hold Doreen’s picture in front of him. ‘You’re right, a lot of people look familiar. But they don’t live the same.’

  ‘I can’t help how I was born.’

  ‘Doreen couldn’t either,’ Ben said as he pocketed the photograph. ‘Who can?’ He was about to say more, routinely ask Coggins to report anything he might learn about the girl, but suddenly Luther burst into the room.

  ‘You’re goddamn lucky they canceled that speech at First Pilgrim,’ he shouted to Ben from across the room. ‘Because I get the feeling you never made it over there.’

  Ben said nothing, and Luther’s eyes slid over to Coggins.

  ‘What are you doing up here, Leroy?’ he asked.

  Coggins’ body stiffened, as if he were coming to attention. ‘I came to formally request that the children that have been gathered together in the parking lot be brought inside.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Because it’s about to rain,’ Coggins said.

  ‘It’s already raining,’ Luther said. ‘Request denied.’

  Leon Patterson walked into the detective bullpen a few minutes after Coggins had been escorted back down to his cell. He smiled brightly as he came up to Ben’s desk.

  ‘Got something for you,’ he said excitedly. He dropped the ring onto the desk. ‘Remember that yellowish powder we found on that thing? It’s not pollen, after all. It’s just plain old chalk dust.’

  ‘From a school?’ Ben asked.

  Patterson laughed. ‘Not quite, unless school’s changed a whole lot since my day.’ He glanced down at the ring. ‘It’s chalk dust like from a poolhall, that stuff you use to cue the ball. It was all over that guy’s ring.’ He looked at Ben and smiled. ‘Maybe you ought to start looking for a pool hustler.’

  Ben picked up the ring and twirled it slowly between his fingers.

  Leon pulled a chair up beside Ben’s desk and sat down. ‘I figure this was the guy’s lucky ring, the one he wore when he played. What do you think about that theory?’

  Ben said nothing.

  ‘There was so much of that shit on the ring, he must have worn it every time he played. We’re talking about a very heavy residue here, very heavy, and it doesn’t look like he ever bothered to wash it off, or shine up the ring or anything like that.’

  Ben continued to look at the ring. It winked bright-dark, bright-dark as he turned it slowly in the light.

  ‘Like it was maybe a sacred object or something,’ Patterson went on. ‘What do you think about that?’

  Ben placed the ring on the desk, then turned toward him. ‘Any idea where it was made?’

  ‘Best guess, Cracker Jacks,’ Leon said. ‘Or some circus sideshow where you get a cheap prize if this asshole can guess your weight.’ He shook his head. ‘That ring never saw the inside of a real honest-to-God jewelry store, I can tell you that.’

  Ben was about to make the guess that the ring could have been bought at one of the two or three costume jewelry stores that squatted between the barbecue stands, curling parlors and poolhalls of Fourth Avenue when Luther once again dashed into the room. He scanned the empty desks, then marched over to Ben.

  ‘I got nobody else to give this to,’ he said.

  ‘What is it?’ Ben asked.

  ‘I want you to get over to Kelly Ryan’s place,’ Luther said hastily. ‘It looks like the poor bastard killed himself last night.’

  Kelly Ryan’s little house looked a good deal like his own, and as Ben pushed himself through the rain toward the front door, he could not help but remember the night before, the way Kelly had seemed to disappear into the night, his shoulders hunched, his back to the world.

  A uniformed patrolman was stationed at the front door. He nodded as Ben came up onto the porch.

  ‘He’s in the bedroom, Sergeant,’ he said quietly as he opened the door.

  Ben stepped into the front room and realized that it had been a long time, perhaps years, since anyone but Kelly had been in the house. It had Kelly’s rumpled clutter, his barely controlled drinking, even his odd, distinctive odor, a sweet rubberish musk that had been joked about in the department for years. There was no other smell in the front room, or the little den, or finally the bedroom where he hung motionlessly from a large oak beam.

  He had thrown a rope over the beam, knotted it around his neck, climbed up on a small kitchen chair, handcuffed himself with a pair of Police Department issue, and then kicked it from beneath his feet. His face was now a purple-blue and his tongue hung from the side of his mouth like a piece of unchewed meat.

  Ben suddenly felt a great wave of weariness pass over him. He slumped down on the bed, folded his hands in his lap and stared toward the single open window of the bedroom. Outside, the rain poured down in dense gray curtains, slapping mercilessly at the little mimosa tree that grew beside the house. He was not sure how long he sat there, but only that when he finally heard a voice in the outer room, it took him a moment to recognize it.

  ‘Well, this sure puts the cherry on top,’ someone said.

  Ben glanced toward the door and saw Daniels and Breedlove standing inside it.

  ‘Is there any doubt it’s a suicide?’ Breedlove ask
ed as he stepped into the room.

  Ben got to his feet. ‘None that I can see.’

  The two men circled the dangling body slowly.

  ‘At least he didn’t mess himself,’ Breedlove said. ‘These twisters usually do.’ He pulled off his hat and slapped it against his coat. A spray of droplets leaped from it and spilled on to the floor. ‘A real toad-stringer we got going out there.’

  Daniels lingered at the entrance to the room, his body half-hidden behind the flowering curtain that hung across the doorway. He pointed to Ryan’s wrists. ‘Pretty cut up.’

  Breedlove shrugged. ‘Probably changed his mind at the last minute. Strangling gives you time to reconsider.’ He gave the body a sudden small push. ‘No more morning roll calls, Kelly,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you just leave him alone,’ Ben said as politely as he could.

  Breedlove looked at him oddly but said nothing.

  Daniels stepped from behind the curtain, then shrank behind it once again. ‘Well, it seems to me he’s beyond caring about what anybody does,’ he said to Ben. Then he glanced at Breedlove. ‘Seem that way to you, Charlie?’

  Breedlove glanced toward his partner. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Way beyond.’ His eyes darted back to the body, following its line upward from the feet.

  Daniels bent down slightly and peered out the single bedroom window. ‘Imagine seeing this every morning,’ he said. Nothing but barbed wire and blast furnaces. No wonder he got tired of it.’

  ‘Nobody trusted him,’ Breedlove said matter-of-factly. ‘Not after the business with that girl in Bearmatch.’ His eyes shot over to Ben. ‘He ever tell you about that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Fell in love with a girl over there,’ Breedlove said with a slight laugh.

  ‘Yeah, he had a problem with that all right,’ Daniels said. He laughed lightly. ‘But you know, I sort of liked old Kelly. He could come up with the craziest ideas.’

  Breedlove smiled. ‘Like what, Harry?’

  Daniels thought for a moment. ‘Well, one night about four months back, he got about three sheets in the wind at this bar downtown. I wasn’t with him, I just happened to run into him there. He started crying in his cups about some nigger that had disappeared. He claimed he knew for an absolute fact that the Langleys had killed this old boy and buried him in a chert pit in Irondale.’ He laughed mockingly. ‘I said to Kelly, I said, “Kelly, if the Langleys killed a nigger, they wouldn’t even bother to bury the son of a bitch. They’d hang him from a streetlight in Bearmatch.”’

  ‘That’s the truth, too,’ Breedlove said as the two of them laughed together.

  Ben turned away abruptly and walked to the door. ‘You fellows can handle it from here,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Breedlove said as the laughter trailed off. ‘It’s a job for the coroner, anyway.’

  For a moment Ben paused and looked back into the room, leaning his shoulder against the unpainted door-jamb. Breedlove and Daniels were casually going through the drawers of Ryan’s dresser, as if he might have left a note for them nestled among his underclothes. The body, itself, continued to hang motionlessly above the unswept wooden floor, and thinking back to the night before, Ben tried to imagine if there might have been something he could have said or done to save him.

  ‘Goddamn,’ Daniels said as he pulled out the bottom drawer of the dresser. ‘You’d think he’d of folded something once in a while. Look at this mess.’

  Breedlove glanced quickly toward Ben, then back at Daniels. Then he laughed loudly as he waved his hand dismissively. ‘Aw, that’s just the way you get,’ he said, ‘when you lose your best girl.’

  FIFTEEN

  The heavy rain had slowed traffic considerably, so it was already early afternoon before Ben made the graceful turn down the circular driveway of the Davenport house. It was a large colonial mansion, complete with tall white columns and a rounded portico. Even in the rain the dark-blue façade appeared grand and inviolate.

  The great oak door opened almost immediately, and the woman who stood behind it looked surprised to see Ben standing on her front porch. She was small, with a pale, angular face, and her gray hair was gathered in a small bun which sat at almost the exact top of her head.

  ‘May I help you?’ she asked.

  Ben showed her his badge.

  ‘My goodness,’ the woman said softly. ‘I am Mrs Davenport. Has something happened?’

  ‘May I come in?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Of course,’ the woman said. She stepped out of the door and allowed him to pass into the foyer. ‘Please now, what is it?’ she asked urgently.

  ‘You have a little Negro girl who works for you, I believe?’ Ben said.

  ‘Yes,’ the woman said.

  ‘Doreen Ballinger,’ Ben said.

  ‘Little Doreen, yes,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘Has something happened to her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The woman’s right hand lifted to her throat. ‘What?’

  ‘She’s dead, Mrs Davenport,’ Ben told her.

  The hand curled gently around her throat. ‘Hit-and-run?’

  ‘She was murdered,’ Ben said.

  The hand dropped softly to her side. ‘May I sit down?’

  Ben nodded.

  The woman’s hand swept to the left toward a large sitting room. ‘In here, please,’ she said.

  Ben followed her into the room and watched as she took a seat on a large floral sofa.

  ‘Such a pretty little girl,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘So sweet.’ She looked up at Ben. ‘Please, sit down.’

  Ben took a seat at the other end of the sofa. ‘How long had Doreen been working for you?’

  ‘Almost a year,’ Mrs Davenport said. She thought for a moment. ‘Yes, almost exactly a year. It was last spring when she came to us.’

  ‘When did you see her last?’

  ‘She was here on Sunday,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘She attends to my daughter on Saturdays and Sundays.’ She picked a gold frame from the table and handed it to Ben. There was a picture of a small child standing happily beneath the green curtain of a weeping willow. ‘That’s Shannon,’ she said. ‘She’ll be so upset to lose Doreen.’

  Ben handed her back the picture.

  Mrs Davenport gazed lovingly at the photograph. ‘She’s actually my adopted daughter,’ she said.

  Ben shifted slightly in his seat. ‘About Doreen,’ he said. ‘You said you last saw her on Sunday afternoon?’

  ‘Well, no,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘Doreen was certainly here on Sunday afternoon, but I was not.’

  ‘Was she here alone?’

  ‘Goodness, no,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘My husband was here attending to some business. He’s in Atlanta right now, but I’m sure he’d be pleased to talk to you when he gets back.’

  ‘When would that be?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow.’

  Ben took out his notebook and wrote it down. ‘Was anyone else in the house on Sunday?’

  Mrs Davenport considered for a moment. ‘Well, Molly, our maid, was off, but Jacob was here.’

  ‘Jacob?’

  ‘Jacob, our driver,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘He always went and got Doreen, and, of course, took her home when she was through.’

  ‘Did he do that on Sunday?’ Ben asked.

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Is he around?’

  Mrs Davenport’s face grew cold. ‘No, he is not,’ she said crisply.

  ‘When will he be back?’

  Mrs Davenport’s back arched upward. ‘He is no longer in our service.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A question of loyalty,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘Jacob had been with this family for over forty years, then one day he suddenly decided that we weren’t good enough for him anymore.’ She laughed. ‘Can you imagine? Since he was just a boy my husband’s father, and then, later, my husband, had provided him with everything he needed, a place to live, money, everything.’ She shook her head. ‘The passion of the moment, wha
t can you do about it? Especially with Negroes.’

  ‘He quit?’ Ben asked.

  ‘He decided to join the other side.’

  Ben looked at her, puzzled.

  ‘The Negro side,’ Mrs Davenport explained. ‘The demonstrators.’

  Ben nodded.

  ‘Well, if you know anything about the Davenports,’ Mrs Davenport added, ‘you know that you are either with them or against them.’

  ‘So he was fired?’ Ben asked, trying to pin it down.

  ‘Well, I prefer to think that he abandoned us,’ Mrs Davenport said. ‘We had made it clear that we would not tolerate anyone in our service having anything to do with all this business in the streets and lunch counters and that sort of thing.’ She waited for Ben to respond, and when he didn’t she added, ‘It’s not as if we hadn’t made it clear.’

  Ben took out his notebook. ‘What does he look like?’

  ‘Sort of gray around the temples.’

  ‘Big? Small?’

  ‘A large man. Tall. I’d say a little over six feet.’

  ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of him, would you?’

  Mrs Davenport chuckled. ‘Of course not. What would I be doing with a picture of Jacob?’

  ‘Do you have any idea where he went?’

  ‘Not the slightest.’

  ‘Maybe to family,’ Ben suggested. ‘Does he have any family in Birmingham?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Mrs Davenport said.

  ‘Sister?’ Ben asked insistently. ‘Brother? Anything like that?’

  ‘I never mingled in Jacob’s life,’ Mrs Davenport said resolutely.

  ‘All right,’ Ben said exasperatedly. ‘What’s his full name?’

  ‘Jacob, like I said.’

  ‘I mean his last name,’ Ben said.

  Mrs Davenport looked at him with amusement. ‘Now isn’t that funny?’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  She laughed lightly. ‘I don’t know if he had one.’

  The unpaved alleys of Bearmatch had been turned into muddy trenches by late afternoon, so Ben finally pulled the car over to the side and slogged toward Esther’s house on foot.

  The door opened only slightly when he knocked.

  ‘Who there?’ someone asked.