Streets of Fire

  ‘When was the last time you saw Bluto?’ Ben asked him when he returned to the guardhouse.

  ‘That would have been on Sunday afternoon, I think,’ the guard said. He watched the truck as it made its way to the enormous warehouse a few hundred yards away.

  ‘He was killed that night,’ Ben said. ‘Probably between eight and one or two in the morning, the coroner says.’

  The guard’s eyes snapped over to him. ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Do you remember about when it was you saw him?’

  The guard thought for a moment. ‘Well, I saw him a few times on Sunday. I’ve got a twelve-hour shift on the weekend.’

  ‘When does it begin?’

  ‘Noon.’

  ‘So you were here until around midnight.’

  ‘Until exactly midnight,’ the guard said. ‘I don’t try to beat the company. I’m not like that.’ He looked back toward the truck, his eyes focused on the large cloud of dust that tumbled up from behind it. ‘We’ve been having some things disappear off the lot,’ he explained. ‘I got to keep my eyes open.’

  Ben nodded quickly. ‘And during that twelve-hour shift, you said you saw Bluto several times?’

  ‘Yes, sir, I did.’

  ‘Could you tell me when that was, exactly?’

  The guard thought a moment. ‘Well, I walk the grounds when I first get here,’ he said. ’I have me a cup of coffee, then I walk all over the place, you know, to check things out.’

  ‘And you saw Bluto then?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the guard answered. ‘He was sitting up on that little ditch, the one above the pipe.’ He shook his head. ‘He was sort of curled up, you know. Had his knees crunched up against hisself.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Said, “Howdy, boss.” That’s all.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything else?’ Ben asked insistently. ‘It doesn’t matter what it was. Just anything at all.’

  The guard tugged at the brim of his cap. ‘Said, “Looks to be pretty, don’t it?”’ He smiled. ‘The weather, that’s what he was meaning. He always had something to say about the weather. I don’t think he knew about much of anything besides rain and shine, you know?’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’

  ‘I just kept walking,’ the guard said, and that was it.’

  ‘When did you see him the next time?’

  ‘Well, that must have been around six, I guess,’ the guard said. ‘That’s when I go looking around again.’

  ‘Where was Bluto then?’

  ‘In the pipe,’ the guard said. ‘I heard him carrying on down there. So I sort of peeped over the edge of that little gully and took a look.’

  ‘What was he doing?’

  ‘Sanging, that’s all,’ the guard said. ‘He loved to sang, that old boy.’

  ‘And he was in the pipe?’

  ‘Sitting in there by hisself, that’s right,’ the guard told him, ‘just a-sanging away.’

  ‘Did you speak to him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘I don’t figure he saw me,’ the guard said. I just took a quick little peep at him. I didn’t say nothing.’ He shrugged. ‘It was real hot that day, even after it got late, and so I wasn’t in no hurry to stand out there by them pipes and have a talk with Bluto.’

  Ben took out his handkerchief and wiped his neck and face. ‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘But you saw him again, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ the guard said. ‘Now this was later. ‘Bout nine at night. He come wandering right through the front gate, big as you please. It ’bout knocked my eyes out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, he never come through the front gate before,’ the guard said. ‘He ain’t allowed to do that.’

  ‘How does he get in?’

  ‘They’s a place cut in the fence,’ the guard explained matter-of-factly.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Right near the pipe,’ the guard said. ‘That’s how Bluto always comes and goes. He don’t use the front gate. It ain’t allowed.’

  ‘Except this last time,’ Ben said.

  ‘That’s right,’ the guard said. ‘This last time he just come right up. Says, “Well, boss, I’m going to town. Got to get back pretty soon, though.” Says, “I’m a-getting married.”’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Plain as day, that’s what he says.’

  ‘Had he ever said anything like that before?’

  ‘Not to me, he hadn’t.’

  ‘Did you ever see him with a woman?’

  ‘Bluto? No, I never seen him with much of anybody,’ the guard said. ‘Matter of fact, I asked who the girl was. He said he didn’t know yet. So I said, “Well, where is she?” And Bluto, he just said, “She’s coming later,” and that was the last of it. He went right out the gate.’

  ‘And what time did you say this was?’

  ‘I’d put it right at nine o’clock.’

  ‘Did you see him come back?’

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ the guard said. ‘It was only about an hour later.’

  ‘Around ten?’

  ‘’Bout then,’ the guard said. He smiled. ‘And, my God, did that ole boy look happy.’

  ‘He came through the main gate?’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ the guard said. ‘I figure he caught the way I looked at him when he done that before.’ He shook his head. ‘No, he didn’t use the gate no more. I guess he must have come back through the fence.’

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘When I made my final rounds,’ the guard said, ‘I always say goodnight to him before I go home. That’s what I went over to the pipe for.’

  ‘Was he in the pipe?’

  ‘He was sort of cleaning it up,’ the guard said. ‘Straightening things out. He was sanging, too.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘Said, “Hey, boss, what you think about my new TV?”’ the guard told Ben with a chuckle. ‘Somebody’d probably wanted that ole thing toted off, so they fooled him into thinking it’d work without no electricity or anything like that.’

  ‘And that’s the last you saw of him?’

  ‘That was it.’

  ‘Did you see anyone else around?’ Ben asked. ‘I mean, a girl maybe?’

  The guard laughed. ‘A girl? What would a girl be doing around Bluto?’

  ‘The one he was talking about marrying,’ Ben explained.

  The guard waved his hand. ‘Oh, that was just Bluto’s way of saying things. He didn’t have no sense when it come to talking to people.’

  Ben straightened himself slowly. ‘That hole in the fence,’ he said. ‘The one he used. Where is that?’

  ‘Right close to the pipe,’ the guard said. ‘You want to go look at it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The guard turned and pointed to the southeastern corner of the lot. ‘Right out there,’ he said. ‘You can’t miss it if you walk along the fence.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Ben said as he stepped out of the shade of the guardhouse and headed out across the flat dirt field.

  It took him only a few minutes to pass beyond the still littered drainpipe and find the hole in the fence. It looked as if it had been made long ago with a pair of industrial wire-cutters. The tips of the severed fence were rusted over, and the hole had been widened over the years as Bluto’s large body had passed in and out of it. The ground around it was smooth and grassless, and a narrow footpath could be seen as it snaked from the opening back to the ditch and its exposed drainpipe. Ben allowed his eyes to move up and down the path. He could not imagine Doreen having ever walked down it. He leaned against the fence, then he pulled himself up again and walked along the trail to the edge of the ditch. He could see the drainpipe below him, and as he stood, staring into its dull gray eye, he tried to put the events in some kind of chronological order. Bluto had left the plant through the front gate at around nine. By then he’d come up with the idea of a wife. At ten, he wa
s cleaning his place, as if in preparation for her arrival. A few hours later, both he and Doreen Ballinger were dead.

  Ben lowered himself onto the stony ground, his eyes still staring into the cement cave of the drain He tried to imagine what must have gone on there at some time between nine and midnight only a few days before. ‘She’s coming later,’ Bluto had told the guard, and it seemed to Ben that this meant that he had expected someone to arrive of her own free will, a woman for whom he had cleaned what amounted to his house, trucked home a battered television, and for whom he had seemed to feel in his own childish way an unparalleled delight. ‘She’s coming later,’ Ben repeated in his mind. But had he expected her to come by herself, or be delivered to him by someone else and placed into his hands, like a prize?

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  The few people who were seated inside Smiley’s Cafe turned instantly toward Ben as he stepped through the door. They seemed frozen in place, stunned into a strange and utterly motionless silence.

  ‘I’m looking for Esther Ballinger,’ Ben said quietly as he closed the torn screen door behind him.

  ‘She’s out back,’ said the small man behind the counter. He wiped his hands on the soiled apron which hung from his neck. ‘What you want with her, boss?’

  ‘It’s police business,’ Ben said. ‘About her niece.’

  The man glanced questioningly at the others as if unsure of what to do next. ‘Well, I guess you ought to see her then,’ he said finally, his eyes darting away from Ben’s. ‘Just go on round back. She out there throwing away the garbage.’

  Ben turned and walked out immediately, then headed around the corner of the building to the alley which ran behind it. He could see Esther at a large wooden bin. She was breaking down a large assortment of cardboard boxes, then tossing them into the bin.

  ‘Afternoon, ma’am,’ Ben said politely as he stepped up to her.

  Esther looked up from her work but did not speak. She continued to tear at the boxes, pulling at the locking flaps until they were flat. She wore a light-blue blouse, and a line of perspiration swept in an arc across her chest. Her hair was pulled back and knotted, and in the bright summer light she looked suddenly much younger than in the past few days. Only the expression in her face aged her, the weariness in her eyes.

  ‘I’m still working on your case,’ Ben said to her, ‘and I’ve found out a few things.’

  Esther wiped her forehead with her arm, then began breaking down another box. ‘Go ahead, then,’ she said, almost absently, as if there were greater things to consider now, her niece’s death reduced in her mind to a small incident in a larger history.

  ‘Well, I may have found out who raped Doreen,’ Ben said. ‘It was a colored man. A guy named Bluto. Ever heard of him?’

  ‘No,’ Esther replied crisply.

  ‘He’s dead.’

  Esther suddenly began to rip more violently at the box in her hands, tearing at its cardboard flaps.

  ‘Shot,’ Ben said. ‘Might have done it to himself.’

  Esther nodded curtly and tossed a large piece of cardboard into the wooden bin at the back wall of the cafe. ‘Is that the end of it, then?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Ben told her.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, there’s something that keeps bothering me,’ Ben said matter-of-factly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t figure out how Doreen got to his place,’ Ben said. He picked up one of the boxes, tore apart one of the flaps and broke it down. ‘So I’d like to just ask you just a few more questions.’ He threw the box into the bin. ‘Is that all right with you?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Esther said, her eyes turning from him oddly, as if she did not want him to see what was in them.

  ‘Did Doreen ever give you the idea that somebody was watching her or keeping track of her in any way?’

  Esther shook her head. ‘I think she could have let me know if somebody was scaring her.’

  Ben pulled out a picture of Bluto. ‘Have you ever seen this man?’

  Esther stared expressionlessly at the photograph. ‘Is that him?’

  ‘Well, this was taken at the morgue,’ Ben said, ‘so it doesn’t look quite right. But, yes, it’s him.’

  ‘The man who raped Doreen?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Esther’s eyes shot away from the picture. ‘I don’t recognize him.’

  ‘You never saw him hanging around your house or neighborhood, or anything like that?’

  ‘No,’ Esther said crisply.

  ‘He was real big,’ Ben went on. ‘Did Doreen ever indicate that she knew or had seen a big man?’

  ‘No.’

  Ben returned the photograph to his pocket. ‘You know the rubber plant not far from Bearmatch?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did Doreen ever mention going over there?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think she might have hung around that place?’ Ben asked. ‘Maybe with other kids?’

  Esther looked at Ben, puzzled. ‘No. Why would she?’

  ‘That’s where the guy lived.’

  ‘Around the rubber plant?’

  ‘Inside the fence,’ Ben said. ‘In a storm drain.’

  Esther’s eyes glistened. ‘Is that where …?’

  ‘It looks that way,’ Ben told her. ‘But I still can’t figure out how she got over there.’

  ‘Maybe he took her there,’ Esther said.

  ‘I thought about that,’ Ben said, ‘But Mr Davenport says that he let her out at around five in the afternoon. He says that she wanted to play with another little girl she saw in the ballfield. You got any idea who that little girl might have been?’

  Esther thought for a moment. She seemed to move back toward him from some distant place she’d occupied during the few preceding minutes. ‘There’s a little girl named Ramona. She lives over near the ballfield. I’ve seen Doreen play with her.’

  ‘You know the address?’ Ben asked immediately.

  ‘It’s that light-blue house at the far end, the downtown corner.’

  ‘Twenty-second and First,’ Ben said.

  ‘That’s right,’ Esther told him. ‘hat corner.’

  Ben threw the last box into the bin. From the corner of his eye he could see several dark faces staring at him from behind the dusty window at the back of the cafe.

  ‘They’re all watching us,’ he said to Esther.

  ‘Course they are,’ Esther said edgily. ‘What do you expect?’

  ‘Do they know about your niece?’

  ‘Just that she’s dead,’ Esther told him. ‘The rest of it, that’s nobody’s business.’

  ‘I’m going to find out who did it, Miss Ballinger,’ Ben said.

  ‘I thought you already had.’

  It was only then that it struck Ben how little he thought he knew, how much more there was to know. He shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said quietly, in a voice that seemed aimed at no one but himself.

  It was almost evening before he glanced in his rearview mirror and saw a few weary stragglers as they trudged across the bare, unseeded ground toward the downtown corner of the old ballfield. All through the late afternoon hours, Ben had remained in his car, carefully eyeing each passerby who approached the small light-blue house. With each passing second, the air had seemed to grow heavier, and as he sat in his car and listened to the steady blare of sirens, he could sense that something had surely gone wrong on Fourth Avenue or beneath the swaying elms of Kelly Ingram Park. He could see it in the drawn angry faces of the people who glared at him as they slogged up the street in their sopping wet clothes and tangled hair. Their pants and skirts were ripped and caked with dirt, as if they’d been rolled in a muddy field, but Ben did not get out of his car to find out what had happened to them until, toward evening, he saw a tall, slender woman pass through the rusty gate of the light-blue house. A young girl clung to her hand, and she only appeared to grip it more tightly as Ben stepped out of his car a
nd moved toward them.

  ‘Afternoon, ma’am,’ he said as he took off his hat.

  The woman’s eyes stared at him fearfully. She did not speak.

  ‘I’m looking into something that happened to one of your neighbors,’ Ben added softly, ‘Doreen Ballinger’

  The woman continued to watch him suspiciously. ‘What’s that got to do with me?’

  ‘Well, I’m told that Doreen sometimes played in this old ballfield with a little girl named Ramona Davies,’ Ben said. He glanced down at the little girl, then back up at the woman. ‘Is this Ramona?’

  The mother instinctively drew the little girl up against her waist. ‘What you want with her?’

  ‘Just to talk to her,’ Ben said. ‘About Doreen. It’s possible that your little girl was the last person to see her alive.’

  ‘You with the po-lice?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Ben said.

  ‘They sprayed us today,’ the woman snapped bitterly. ‘And sicked them dogs on us.’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Ben said.

  ‘They wasn’t no call fer ’em to do it,’ the woman said fiercely. ‘We was peaceful, all of us.’

  Ben nodded gently. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘And they just done it out of meanness,’ the woman added sharply. ‘Just pure ole meanness.’

  Ben’s eyes fell toward the girl. He smiled quietly, but she only stared at him expressionlessly, her small fingers tightening around her mother’s hand.

  ‘You wasn’t there, was you?’ the woman asked.

  Ben looked at her. ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘I guess you might say I’m trying to stay out of it,’ Ben told her. ‘I just want to figure out who killed Doreen Ballinger.’

  The woman’s eyes seemed to search his face. ‘Well,’ she said after a moment, ‘I guess I could let you talk to Ramona.’

  ‘I’d appreciate it,’ Ben said.

  The woman looked at her daughter. ‘You stay in the front yard with the man, here,’ she said. ‘I’ll go fix supper.’

  The girl did not let go of her mother’s fingers.

  ‘It’s all right, Ramona,’ the woman assured her. ‘I’ll be right inside here.’ She tugged her fingers free of the little girl’s grasp. ‘You holler if you need anything,’ she added as she headed up the walkway toward the house.