Streets of Fire

  It was already night when the phone rang on Ben’s desk. It was Patterson, and he sounded very tired.

  ‘Well, I’ve put everybody through the wringer, Ben,’ he said. ‘I checked that fingerprint on the ring three ways from Sunday, and it’s absolutely clean as far as I can figure out.’ He drew in a long, exhausted breath and continued. ‘Which means that whoever had that ring had never been arrested or been in the armed forces or worked for a liquor company or done anything that would have required him to be fingerprinted.’

  ‘All right,’ Ben said.

  ‘A big zero,’ Patterson added. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Thanks, Leon,’ Ben told him.

  He hung up the phone and looked once again at the ring, then walked down to his car and headed home.

  The streets were still slick with the long day’s rain, and the whole city seemed somehow refreshed, renewed, as if it had been washed clean of its accumulated grime. Huge pools of water lay placidly under the streetlamps of Kelly Ingram Park, and the shallow gullies which lined Fourth Avenue were empty of the scattered cans and bits of paper and cigarette butts which usually lined it from downtown to the outer reaches of the Negro district.

  He stopped at a traffic signal, and suddenly Kelly Ryan’s face came into his mind. He saw the popped swollen eyes again and the thick, distended tongue, and it made him dread the thought of going home. For a moment he tried to think of some alternative, but nothing came to mind but redneck bars, which he didn’t like, or drive-in movies where, shoved in among carloads of necking teenagers, he’d feel like some kind of pathetic middle-aged bachelor leering hungrily at young love. There were always the sizzling all-night cafes of Bessemer, where the Dawn Patrol gathered for scrambled eggs and bacon, but even his little house cradled among the factories seemed more appealing than such bleak and lonely haunts, and for an instant he gave up the search and headed toward it. Then he thought of Esther, of the way she had sat quietly in his front room, and he made a hard right at the next corner and headed out toward Bearmatch.

  *

  She was in the tiny front yard when Ben pulled up in front of the house and she looked at him curiously as he got out of the car and walked toward her.

  ‘Evening,’ Ben said quietly.

  Esther nodded. ‘My daddy told me that you came by today,’ she said. ‘I just got home from work myself.’

  Ben smiled softly. ‘Me, too.’ He looked down at the green cuttings which she held in her hand. ‘Planting something?’

  ‘A rosebush,’ Esther said. ‘For Doreen, I guess.’ She hoed slowly at the unbroken earth, easily turning the wet ground. ‘Sort of like she’s buried here.’

  Ben kept his eyes on the cuttings. ‘I like roses,’ he said. ‘I have a few bushes in my backyard. Red. What color will those be?’

  ‘Red,’ Esther said. She continued to dig at the ground, inching the blade deeper and deeper with each stroke.

  ‘My daddy planted them,’ Ben told her, ‘the red roses in the backyard. Most of the time you think it’s the woman. But I’m not sure flowers meant much to her.’

  Esther leaned the hoe against the wobbly, chicken-wire fence that bordered the yard. ‘I don’t know if Doreen liked them,’ she said. Then she took the small spade that had been lying on the fencepost beside her and knelt down. ‘Could have been, she did,’ she said as she began to shape the small hole. ‘Could have been, she didn’t.’

  Ben eased himself down beside her. ‘Need some help?’ he asked almost lightly.

  Suddenly the spade stopped, and Esther looked at him insistently. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you come to tell me something?’

  ‘Nothing in particular,’ Ben said.

  ‘Just to talk, something like that?’

  ‘I guess,’ Ben said. He stood up immediately. ‘I didn’t mean to bother you.’

  For a moment, Esther lingered on the ground, then she rose slowly and faced him. ‘You just can’t come over here like this,’ she said. ‘It worries people. It gets them to thinking.’

  ‘Thinking what?’

  ‘About what you’re up to.’

  Something in him seemed to break a little. ‘Nobody has to be afraid of me, Esther,’ he said.

  ‘They think I’m letting you know things,’ Esther told him. ‘About the demonstrations and all. They believe you’re over here spying on us. They don’t believe you’re trying to find out about Doreen. Nobody believes that.’

  Ben looked at her pointedly. ‘Do you?’

  She did not answer.

  ‘Do you, Esther?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  He started to take her shoulders in his hands, but stopped himself. He felt a deep longing sweep over him, dense, demanding, barely controllable. ‘I don’t mean any harm,’ he said helplessly.

  ‘It can’t look right, though,’ Esther said. ‘It just can’t look right.’

  Ben could feel his longing giving way grudgingly, as if it were being driven from him like a hungry animal from the fire.

  ‘I won’t come again,’ he said, ‘unless it’s about Doreen.’ He nodded gently. ‘Good night, ma’am.’

  He started to turn, but she reached out quickly and touched his arm.

  ‘Wait.’

  He turned toward her.

  ‘What do you think about all this?’ she asked bluntly.

  ‘All what?’

  ‘All this trouble we’re having,’ Esther said. ‘All this business in the streets.’

  ‘I’m sorry about it.’

  ‘But us, the Negroes,’ Esther asked insistently. ‘What do you, yourself, think about us?’

  He realized suddenly that he had never been asked, and for a moment he couldn’t find an answer. But he remembered how as a little boy he’d first noticed that the Negroes always took seats in the back of the trolley. He’d once asked his mother about it, and she’d only said, ‘ ‘’Cause they like it.’ But his father shot back, ‘No, they don’t. Nobody d like having to do that.’ Having to do that? It was the first and last exchange he’d ever heard about the matter, and yet in all the years that followed, he’d never glanced toward the back of a trolley to see the dark faces staring toward him without thinking of what his father said.

  Now he looked at Esther. ‘Well, I think that people ought to have a chance to do something, or be something, that makes sense to them,’ he said. ‘I think everybody ought to have that chance.’ He could feel the hard, insistent quality of the belief rising in him. ‘Nobody should have to give them that in the first place. But if it comes down to it, they should just up and take it.’

  She watched him with an odd intensity. ‘Good night, then,’ she said.

  He drove directly home and slumped down in the little swing on his front porch. The long day’s rain had cooled the air and filled it with an aromatic lushness. He could smell the rich sweetness of the flowers which grew across the street in Mr Jeffries’ yard.

  He pressed his feet to the floor and pushed himself back, then swung forward. The wind hit him lightly, ruffling his hair, and he thought of Ryan again, not dead, but living as he should have lived, with that girl he’d met and come to love, living far away, no matter how far, in the place he should have taken her, north toward the huge anonymous cities, or west into the islands of the Pacific, but somewhere far away from the little house in which he died. He could see the house in his mind, but it was the smell of it that lingered in his memory. Ryan’s smell, and only Ryan’s smell. How long, he wondered, did someone have to live alone before he sank his own isolated smell into everything around him? How long did it have to go on, such loneliness, before someone said, ‘Enough.’

  He felt a sudden wrenching agitation cut through him like a strand of barbed wire, and his hand jerked up and took the purple ring from his shirt pocket. He lifted it slowly and let the gray light of the streetlamp sweep over it. It winked dully, like a dead eye, but he held on to it anyway, as if, in all the
world, it was all he had.

  EIGHTEEN

  Stacks of mattresses lined the walls of the lobby when Ben got back to headquarters the next morning, and Luther was busily directing a couple of highway patrolmen in how to carry them.

  ‘Over your goddamn shoulders,’ he said irritably. He heaved one onto his own shoulder. ‘Like this.’

  Each of the patrolmen began wrestling awkwardly with a mattress.

  Luther shook his head helplessly as he walked over to Ben. ‘Shit for brains,’ he said. ‘Where does Lingo find these assholes?’ He glanced back over to the two men. They had finally managed to hoist the mattresses to their shoulders. ‘Now take them down to the cells and throw them in with the female prisoners. The bucks can sleep on the fucking springs.’

  The two men lumbered toward the stairs, one of them giggling mindlessly.

  Luther turned to Ben. ‘By the way, I didn’t have time to ask you last night. What’d you find over at Kelly’s?’

  ‘Just the body.’

  ‘No sign of foul play?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘Not that I could see. Daniels and Breedlove were going over the place when I left.’

  Luther shrugged. ‘Well, they had nothing better to do. The rain had put a damper on the demonstrations. At least for a while.’ He glanced toward the front door where bright shafts of warm sunlight could be seen cascading through the glass. ‘Not like today. Today we’re going to get it.’

  ‘That guy Coggins,’ Ben said. The one Breedlove was after yesterday. Is he still in custody?’

  ‘I’d keep that agitating bastard in jail for twenty years, if it was me,’ Luther snapped. ‘The idea of putting little kids in jail. It makes me sick.’

  ‘Is he still around?’ Ben repeated.

  Luther looked at him as if he were a naive little boy. ‘Well, nobody’s trying to get out, Ben. Shit, that’s the whole idea, fill up the jails.’ He shook his head. ‘We got them in Mountain Brook, Irondale, Bessemer. We’re hauling by the truckload all over Jefferson County.’ He sighed loudly. ‘When’s it going to end?’

  ‘Coggins,’ Ben said. ‘I want to talk to him.’

  ‘All right,’ Luther told him, ‘he’s in one of the cells with the rest of the male prisoners. Ask McCorkindale. He’s supposed to be keeping track of people.’ He glanced nervously at the stairs. ‘Let me go check on those two monkeys,’ he said irritably. ‘They could end up trying to stuff those mattresses down the goddamn toilet.’ Then he rushed away.

  Ben found McCorkindale straddling a metal chair at the entrance to the cellblock.

  ‘Howdy, Ben,’ he said. ‘They got me watching the niggers.’ He frowned unhappily. ‘They’ll probably have me doing a lot of this shit now that Kelly’s gone.’

  Ben looked down the hallway to the lines of cells. Scores of black hands could be seen clutching loosely to the bars.

  ‘Looks like you’re full up,’ he said.

  McCorkindale lifted a small box of chocolate candy toward him. ‘Want one?’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Ben said.

  McCorkindale popped one into his mouth and chewed it slowly. ‘Nothing to do down here but feed your face.’

  ‘I’m looking for one of the prisoners,’ Ben told him.

  ‘Take your pick, son,’ McCorkindale said. ‘They all look alike.’

  ‘Leroy Coggins.’

  McCorkindale smiled. ‘Oh, one of the big boys. Got a mean mouth on him, too.’

  ‘Captain Starnes said you might know where he was.’

  McCorkindale scratched his chin. ‘They brought him down yesterday afternoon,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He was bitching about something upstairs.’ He peered off down the hall. ‘I believe he’s in that far-left cell. You know what he looks like?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, go check that far-left cell,’ McCorkindale said. ‘I think that’s where I put him.’

  Ben made his way slowly toward the cell McCorkindale had indicated. A murmur rose slowly among the prisoners as he passed them, and, as if in response to some silent cue, some of them began to sing and clap their hands. On either side, the individual cells were packed tightly. Young black men sat Indian-style on the bare springs of the metal bunks or stood, shoulder to shoulder, on the cramped cement floor. The cool which had swept over the city with the rain had not penetrated to the cellblock, and the suffocating smell of hundreds of sweaty crowded bodies thickened the air.

  ‘You a lawyer?’ someone called desperately as Ben continued toward the rear of the cellblock. ‘You gone git me out of here?’

  In response, a chorus of boos and low moans swept the cellblock.

  ‘You staying like the rest of us, chickenshit,’ someone cried, and a series of cheers and catcalls broke from the stifling cells.

  At the last cell, Ben stopped and looked in. Scores of young men and teenage boys milled about, and near the center of the cell one of them was urinating into the single toilet.

  ‘Looking for somebody, Preacherman?’ someone asked suddenly.

  Ben glanced to the right and stared into a face that poked toward him from behind the bars.

  ‘Leroy Coggins,’ Ben said.

  The man studied him a moment, then called toward the back of the cell. ‘Hey, Leroy. Preacherman’s here to see you.’

  The crowd shifted about and a space opened up, as it seemed, between two dark furrows. At the end of it, Ben could see Coggins standing idly, his back to the rear wall.

  ‘What do you want?’ Coggins asked.

  ‘To talk to you.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That girl.’

  ‘Ooo wee,’ someone cried in a high, mocking voice. ‘Leroy, you got a girl?’

  Coggins smiled. ‘Not one that would have anything to do with you,’ he said.

  The crowd laughed.

  ‘That dead girl,’ Ben said.

  ‘She’d sure have to be dead to have anything to do with Leroy,’ the same voice shouted, and once again the crowd laughed.

  Ben smiled, his eyes fixed on Coggins. ‘How about it, Mr Coggins?’ he said.

  Coggins hesitated a moment, then pried himself from the wall and ambled leisurely to the front of the cell.

  ‘I’ve already told you everything I know,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ Ben told him. He glanced down the hallway. ‘Sammy,’ he called, ‘come here a minute.’

  McCorkindale lumbered down to them. ‘What can I do for you, Ben?’

  ‘Open up,’ Ben told him. ‘I want to take Mr Coggins out for a minute.’

  McCorkindale opened the cell immediately, but Coggins did not step out of it.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ McCorkindale said tauntingly. ‘Scaredy-cat?’

  Coggins straightened himself quickly and strode boldly out of the cell. ‘Not of anything you crackers can dish out,’ he snapped at McCorkindale.

  McCorkindale’s face reddened instantly. ‘You better watch yourself, boy,’ he blurted.

  Ben stepped between them and took Coggins lightly by the arm.

  ‘This way,’ he said as he tugged him forward quickly and led him up the stairs. He did not speak to him again until they were back in the detective bullpen.

  ‘You got to want to die to talk to people like you do,’ Ben said, almost lightly, as he sat down behind his desk.

  Coggins remained standing, his face grim. ‘Maybe a part of me wants to do just that,’ he said.

  Ben looked at him seriously. ‘Well, let the other part take over for a while,’ he said, ‘because we both know you’ve got work to do.’

  Coggins face softened suddenly, but he did not move.

  Ben nodded toward the empty chair which rested beside his desk. ‘I’d be much obliged if you’d take a seat.’

  Coggins studied Ben’s face a moment longer, then he slowly sat down.

  Ben took the purple ring from his jacket pocket and handed it to Coggins. ‘The fellow that killed that little girl – this might be his ring.’ He shrugged. ‘I do
n’t know that for sure, but right now it’s all I’ve got to go on.’

  Coggins looked at the ring. ‘Well, you don’t have much, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  Coggins laid the ring on the top of the desk. ‘I’ve never seen it. Where would I have seen it?’

  ‘I’m not expecting you to recognize it,’ Ben said.

  Coggins leaned forward slightly. ‘Well, what exactly are you expecting, then?’

  ‘That ring had chalk dust all over it,’ Ben told him. ‘The kind you use on a pool cue.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘It’s the kind of ring you see down in some of those shops on Fourth Avenue.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Coggins said. ‘Up until recently I hadn’t spent much time down there. I’m from Ensley, remember?’

  ‘I was thinking it might belong to a Negro.’

  ‘Well, you certainly wouldn’t want it to belong to a white man.’

  Ben let it pass. ‘And that this Negro just might hang around some of the poolhalls down on Fourth Avenue.’

  Coggins smiled. ‘You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,’ he said.

  Ben let that pass too. ‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘the people who hang out on Fourth Avenue aren’t in much of a mood to talk to someone from the Police Department.’

  ‘Well, maybe if you had some Negro policemen in Birmingham, you wouldn’t have that problem,’ Coggins said.

  ‘I can’t deny that, Mr Coggins,’ Ben said. ‘I really can’t. But right now I’ve got a little girl, and I’ve got to find out who killed her.’ He looked at Coggins determinedly. ‘I got to find that out right now, not a few months or maybe even years from now, when things may be different.’

  Coggins eyes returned to the ring. ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘I want you to come with me down to Fourth Avenue,’ Ben said. ‘I want to go in some of those poolhalls, bring this ring with me, ask a few questions.’

  Coggins looked up slowly. ‘I’m not sure I can do that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because of the way it would look,’ Coggins said. ‘I mean, working with you. The way it would look to my people.’