Streets of Fire

by Thomas H. Cook

  Ben looked down at the small yellow envelope that was nestled beneath Patterson’s arm. ‘What’s in the report, Leon?’ he demanded.

  Again, Patterson hesitated, but only briefly. ‘Nothing much, if you want to know the truth. The cause of death was pretty obvious. Like it always is.’

  ‘Is there anything that wasn’t obvious?’

  ‘Just that Breedlove must have been on the move a little bit that night.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘From what I scraped off his shoes,’ Leon said. ‘He had two different kinds of soil on them. One was a regular loose-grained loam. The kind you find in the fields to the north.’

  ‘Like the one we found the body in,’ Ben said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Patterson said. ‘It was stuck to another layer of something else, though. Some kind of whitish clay, very acidic. Those two kinds of ground, they don’t exactly end up side by side.’ He smiled helplessly. ‘I know that’s not much help.’

  ‘Is there anything else?’ Ben asked immediately.

  ‘As far as the … well … the mutilation, that was done after he was dead,’ Patterson told him.

  ‘Anything on the knife that was used?’

  ‘It had a serrated edge,’ Patterson said unenthusiastically. ‘And the blade was about an inch and a half wide at the hilt.’ He shrugged. ‘That’s about all the help I can give you. Not much, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You making any headway?’

  Ben shook his head.

  Patterson leaned toward Ben, lowering his voice as he spoke. ‘Is it true he was an informer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘A lot of people think so.’

  ‘For the federal boys, you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, it must have been somebody,’ Patterson said emphatically. ‘I mean, what’s an informer do if he doesn’t report to somebody?’

  Suddenly Ben felt a strange night breeze envelop him, saw a dark lake glimmering in his mind.

  THIRTY-NINE

  The lights of the city blinked brightly behind the large office window, and as Davenport stood before it, they seemed to wrap around him like a shimmering cape.

  ‘Has there been some break in the case?’ he asked as he shook Ben’s hand.

  ‘Which case?’

  Davenport looked at him, puzzled. ‘Doreen’s case. Isn’t that why you’re here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Davenport said. ‘I thought you probably came over to report on some new development.’

  ‘Are you used to that?’ Ben asked pointedly.

  ‘Used to what?’

  ‘Getting reports from the Police Department.’

  ‘No,’ Davenport said. ‘Should I be?’

  Ben thought a moment, then decided to go at it from another direction, drawing Davenport in slowly, entangling him in enough information so that finally he would not be able to squirm out of the net.

  ‘Do you remember the last time we talked?’ he began.

  ‘Yes,’ Davenport answered. ‘It wasn’t very pleasant. But then, you were accusing me of something. I’m not sure what. But it seemed to me that you thought I had something to do with Doreen’s murder.’

  ‘Did you?’ Ben asked flatly.

  Davenport stared at him coldly. ‘Of course not.’

  Ben watched him silently.

  ‘Why would I hurt a little girl?’ Davenport asked. ‘What would I have to gain?’

  Ben did not answer. ‘You said something about lives being at stake.’

  A fleeting look of sorrow passed over Davenport’s face. It came and went so quickly that it appeared to have escaped from some deeply guarded quarter of his mind. For an instant it fluttered in his eyes, then vanished into the stern lines and set jaw which now watched Ben coolly from behind the polished desk.

  ‘What lives?’ Ben asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Davenport said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Davenport repeated. ‘Let it go at that.’

  ‘Why doesn’t it matter?’

  Davenport said nothing. He stared at Ben unflinchingly.

  ‘Because it’s too late now,’ Ben said. He paused, waiting for Davenport to respond.

  Davenport continued to sit stiffly in his chair.

  ‘When you warned me not to keep at this case,’ Ben said, ‘you told me that I should let someone else do it. Do what?’

  ‘I don’t know what I meant by that,’ Davenport said, his voice weak, unconvincing, ‘I’m not even sure I said it’

  ‘Let someone else do the looking,’ Ben replied insistently. ‘That’s what you said.’

  Davenport nodded. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Who was that someone else?’

  Davenport’s body grew tense. He did not answer.

  ‘It was someone else in the Police Department,’ Ben told him. ‘Someone who was reporting to you.’

  Davenport remained silent.

  ‘Charlie Breedlove,’ Ben said flatly.

  Davenport drew in a long, slow breath. ‘And so I told you the truth, didn’t I? There was a life at stake.’

  ‘How long had he been reporting to you?’ Ben asked immediately.

  ‘For several weeks.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘The FBI was concerned that there might be some kind of Death Squad in the Birmingham Police Department. They were worried about their agents, and a few other targets. One federal judge in particular, and a few other people. They mentioned a few names. There was a prominent businessman who’s been actively trying to work with the Negroes. They thought he might be ripe for assassination.’ He shook his head. ‘Breedlove never really developed anything. He came up with the idea that Doreen’s death might have been done to provoke the Negroes, cause them to riot. He thought the Death Squad might be behind it.’

  ‘Did he find any evidence of that?’

  Davenport shook his head. ‘No. He told me that he got desperate one night and went after you.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘In your house,’ Davenport said. ‘He told me that he thought he scared you pretty well, but that you didn’t tell him anything.’

  ‘I didn’t know anything,’ Ben said.

  ‘That’s what Breedlove figured,’ Davenport told him with a slight smile. Then he stood up. ‘I could use a drink. Want one?’

  ‘No.’

  Davenport walked to a small bar at the opposite end of the room and made himself a drink. For a moment he simply stared at the amber liquid he’d poured into the glass. Then he downed it quickly and returned to the desk. ‘I don’t have to tell you how important it is for you to keep your mouth shut about all this. I mean, that Death Squad – it may still be out there.’ He shrugged. ‘Or it may be nothing. It may be purely imaginary, something they dreamed up in Washington.’

  ‘Well, somebody killed Charlie Breedlove,’ Ben said.

  ‘Yes, somebody did,’ Davenport said. ‘Teddy Langley.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘I don’t know it for sure,’ Davenport said. ‘But Charlie was afraid of Langley. He thought that Teddy suspected him, and that if anybody had the making of a Death Squad type, it was Langley. I mean, for God’s sake, he’s been going after Bearmatch like some kind of avenging angel. And according to Charlie, he’s really gotten brutal since the demonstrations began, talking even meaner than before.’ He hesitated, glanced at the window, then back at Ben. ‘There are times when I think he killed Doreen,’ he said. ‘Maybe he found out about me, too, and just decided to get even in some way.’

  ‘Would killing Doreen make it even?’ Ben asked doubtfully.

  ‘We’re not talking reason here, Sergeant Wellman,’ Davenport said. ‘We’re not talking high intelligence.’ He shook his head. ‘We’re talking about something in the guts, like a fire in the guts. Who knows what that could lead to?’

  ‘Did Charlie ever mention Langley�
��s house?’

  ‘House?’ Davenport asked. ‘What house? I thought they lived in a trailer.’

  ‘They do,’ Ben said. ‘But Teddy Langley had a house, too.’

  ‘What kind of house?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ben said, ‘if Charlie never mentioned it.’

  ‘Yes, but –’

  ‘Did Charlie suspect anybody else?’ Ben asked quickly.

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Of knowing that he was an informer.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Davenport answered.

  ‘Starnes? Daniels? McCorkindale? Even the Chief?’

  Davenport shook his head.

  ‘Anybody outside the department?’

  Davenport’s lips curled downward. ‘I don’t think Charlie knew many people outside the department.’

  ‘So you don’t have any idea who fingered him?’

  Davenport shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not.’ He turned toward the window. Beyond it, the city glowed in the summer darkness. ‘It could have been anybody,’ he whispered. ‘Anybody at all.’ He looked back at Ben. ‘That’s the trouble with a situation like this,’ he said. ‘You just don’t know who’s who.’

  FORTY

  Outside his bedroom window, Ben could hear the agitated sounds of the crickets and the katydids. The soft whir of the single rotating fan served as a gentle background, but did nothing to relieve the heat. He lay on his back, a single sheet beneath him, his underwear clinging to his chest and thighs. Inside the room, the darkness was nearly total except for the small gray rays that came through the window, a sure sign that Mr Jeffries was up and about, incessantly roaming the dingy corridors of the house across the street. From time to time a single car would whiz down the narrow street, some teenage hot rodder on his way to the late-night drag strips which dotted the rural counties that surrounded Birmingham and whose fabled ability to strip city boys of their hard-earned money had been legend since his youth.

  He turned onto his side, closing his eyes tightly, drawing himself into a perfect darkness. He tried to think of nothing at all, shut down his mind entirely. But as the minutes passed, he found that his thoughts couldn’t be marched into some separate room, locked up for the night and then released again in the morning. They were insistent, nagging, sleepless, and they plagued him like small animals gnawing at his flesh.

  He saw Esther in his imagination as he had never seen her in his real life, stretched out on the iron bed he’d glimpsed briefly the day he’d come inside her house. She lay like him, sweaty, sleepless, her body shifting left and right, her eyes closed at first, then peering out into the darkness, peeling it back as she stared at the opposite wall, lingering first on the scattering of pictures her niece had taped to the unpainted walls, then on the single black and white photograph of Doreen, herself, a little girl in a worn, checkered skirt and black, buckled shoes who posed motionlessly on the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

  He made a full turn, resting on his stomach, his face pressed into the pillow. Now the darkness was complete, and for a moment he almost slipped into its comforting oblivion. But his mind continued to resist, and so he squeezed his eyes together even more tightly, turned back onto his back, drew in a deep breath, waited a few minutes and then, finally giving up on sleep, opened them widely.

  The soft gray rays which had penetrated the room a few moments before had disappeared, and so he assumed that Mr Jeffries had returned to bed. He stood up and peered out the window, his eyes watching the gentle rise and fall of the slender branches of the small mimosa that stood beside his house. For a long time he remained at his window, trying to pull some of the night’s determined quiet into his own mind. But the restlessness continued, and so he pulled himself to his feet, put on his trousers, walked into his living room and sat down in the old wooden rocker that rested near the center of the room.

  The heat was thick and stifling, but rocking back and forth in the chair relieved it slightly, and Ben remembered how he’d slept in his father’s arms, his small white face pressed into the old man’s gray flannel workshirt. It was a gentle memory, but in his present frame of mind it became a disturbing one, mocking innocence, full of a strange despair, and to escape it, he got to his feet again, walked out onto the porch and sat down in the rickety, unpainted swing.

  For a long time he sat quietly, his mind still moving from Doreen to Breedlove, pausing here and there to concentrate on some point in one case, then move on to some detail of the other. Slowly, his exhaustion began to overtake him, coax him back into the house. He walked into the living room, his head bent forward slightly as he headed back toward the bedroom.

  The floor had not been swept in days, and a small rounded ball of dust and grit rolled silently across its wooden surface. He stopped, glanced about the floor, gearing himself up for the quick cleaning it already needed. Everything needed it. A layer of light dust and pollen lay on everything. The chairs, the small telephone stand, the coffee table. But the floor was worse than anything. A whitish dust had gathered in one corner of the room, layering there like a light, gritty snow. Other things had come from the yard, bits of leaves, grime, small slivers of sunbaked grass. But the dull white dust which had accumulated in the corner, blown there by the breezes that swept over the room each time he’d opened the front door, that was different, and as his eyes lingered on it, he realized that it had come from somewhere else.

  Patterson’s voice was thick with interrupted sleep. ‘What, what?’ he stammered. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘It’s Wellman.’

  ‘Ben?’ Patterson said, wonderingly. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Around three in the morning,’ Ben answered quickly. ‘Leon, listen, I’m sorry to wake you up, but I got a question for you.’

  ‘If it’s about that ring, the news is bad,’ Patterson said. ‘Breedlove’s ring was completely clean. No prints of any kind.’

  ‘It’s not about his ring.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘His shoes.’

  ‘Shoes? Breedlove’s shoes? What about them?’

  ‘You said there were two different kinds of dirt on them.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘One was a sort of white clay?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Patterson asked faintly irritably. ‘I told you – a white clay.’

  ‘Where would you find that?’

  ‘Not up in the northern counties, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Whereabouts, then?’

  ‘Well, it’s the sort of stuff they use on road crews,’ Patterson said. ‘They mix it with plain granite gravel. That’s the kind of clay it is.’

  ‘So where would you find it?’

  ‘Patterson answered immediately. ‘Gravel pits, probably. They’d be your best bet.’

  ‘Thanks, Leon,’ Ben said. He started to hang up.

  Patterson stopped him with a question. ‘What’s this all about Ben?’

  ‘Nothing I’m really sure of.’

  ‘A hunch?’

  ‘Maybe a little more than that,’ Ben said. ‘I’ll let you know when I get back.’

  ‘Get back? From where?’

  Even as he hung up the phone and headed for his car, he was not sure he had an answer.

  Ben dropped his identification on the counter. ‘I was hoping you boys might be able to help me a little,’ he said.

  The uniformed desk sergeant glanced at the badge. ‘Birmingham police, huh? What you doing out here?’

  ‘Checking on a murder.’

  ‘In our jurisdiction?’

  ‘No, mine.’

  The officer looked back toward the nearly empty office. ‘Well, this early in the morning, things thin out a little.’

  ‘I just need some information.’

  The man smiled, relieved. ‘Well, I’d be happy to give you what I can. Who you looking for?’

  ‘Nobody in particular,’ Ben said.
‘A place.’

  ‘Well, we got a map of the whole area right on the wall,’ the man said happily. ‘Shoot.’

  ‘A gravel pit of some land,’ Ben said. ‘You know, where they make chert.’

  ‘You mean in the whole county?’ the man asked.

  Ben thought for a moment, trying to remember. He could see Kelly Ryan’s body swaying gently in the moist air and hear the rain falling across the tarpaper roof of his house. Over the rain, he could hear voices talking about Kelly, about the crazy things he said, the crazy accusations about an old Negro buried in a chert pit in Irondale.

  ‘Just here in Irondale,’ Ben said, his eyes focusing on the officer once again.

  ‘Well, we got one, all right,’ the man said, ‘but they wouldn’t be nobody there until later in the morning.’

  ‘That doesn’t matter,’ Ben assured him.

  ‘Okay,’ the man said with a shrug. He stepped over to the map which had been spread across the wall and pointed to a tiny gray square. ‘It’s right here,’ he said. ‘Dawkins Road goes right by it.’

  Ben found Dawkins Road only a few minutes later. It was long and narrow, and it spiraled its way up a hillside thick with the full summer growth of brush and forest. About halfway up the hill, the black pavement ended in a sudden jagged line. After that, the road narrowed even further, finally becoming little more than two clay ruts cut out of the undergrowth. The twin yellow beams of the headlights jerked violently up and down as the car plunged forward along the pitted road, and in his rear-view mirror, Ben could see swirls of yellow dust rising in the hazy dawn light.

  The gate to the gravel pit was fully open, and after pausing a moment at the entrance, Ben guided the car inside. A second narrow road led through the trees to a flat, unpaved parking area which had been blasted out of the side of the hill. A wall of jagged rock rose at the far end of the parking area, and Ben could see a small shed at its base. A large red sign warned that explosives were housed inside the shed, and that any unauthorized meddling with them was a federal offense.

  Ben got out of the car quickly. For a moment he stared out over the edge of the hill. A few lights could be seen twinkling in the darkness, and far down below, the whistle of a freight train blew long and lean as it chugged toward Birmingham.