Streets of Fire

  ‘Now we don’t know much about what happened yet,’ he said, ‘but one of our brothers is dead by a violent hand. Captain Starnes will fill you in on the details, and I want to assure you that he’ll be very frank in what he tells you about this tragedy. So all I need to add is this.’ He drew in a deep dramatic breath. ‘Gentlemen, despite the fact that we have our hands full these days, we are going to find out who killed Charlie Breedlove, and we’re going to see to it that that person is severely punished for doing it.’

  Again a wave of noise swept the room, lingering for so long this time that the Chief lifted his hands to bring it to an end. ‘Now I’m telling you all this because it’s going to be in the papers anyway,’ he said. ‘And there are probably a lot of people in Birmingham who will try to use this to embarrass us, or make us look stupid. Now don’t any of you let that happen. Just go on with your duties, and let the officers who have been assigned to this case do theirs.’ He stopped, stared at the group of detectives that were gathered before him for a moment, then nodded briskly. ‘That is all.’

  Luther took the Chief’s place immediately, described what he and Ben had seen earlier in the morning, and then darted away as quickly as the Chief.

  Ben turned from the front of the room just as Luther disappeared behind the rear doors. He could see Daniels slumped down in the chair behind his desk. Several detectives had gathered around him, and he was talking quietly to them. The Langleys stood alone in the opposite corner, talking so intently to one another that they did not see Ben until he was almost on them.

  ‘Hey, Teddy,’ Ben said. He looked at Tod. ‘How you doing?’

  The two brothers stared at Ben expressionlessly.

  ‘Terrible about Breedlove,’ Ben said.

  Tod nodded, but Teddy stared rigidly at Ben.

  ‘I didn’t know him very well,’ Ben said. ‘Did you?’

  Teddy watched Ben intently. ‘Is this your case, Well-man?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They must have assigned it to somebody,’ Teddy said, and it wasn’t to me.’

  Ben shrugged. ‘They didn’t give it to me either.’

  Teddy stared at him knowingly. ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Why would they give it to me, Teddy?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Because Daniels is too close to it, and everybody else is too busy.’

  ‘I’m busy, myself,’ Ben said. ‘I got that little girl thing.’

  Teddy laughed. ‘That’s a nigger case,’ he said. ‘You could drop that and nobody would give a shit.’

  ‘But I haven’t dropped it,’ Ben said.

  ‘Maybe you better.’

  ‘You know something I don’t, Teddy?’ Ben asked.

  ‘That nobody gets ahead in this department by working a nigger case,’ Teddy said.

  Daniels suddenly appeared at Ben’s side. ‘How does a person get ahead around here, then?’ he asked in a voice that was mildly accusatory.

  Teddy glared at him. ‘Well, you ought to know, Harry, you’ve been greasing the pole for a few years now.’

  Daniels’ body tightened. ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  Langley laughed mockingly. ‘Oh, come on, Harry. Everybody notices the way you’re always brownnosing the Chief.’

  Daniels moved toward him slightly. ‘You better shut your mouth, Teddy.’

  ‘There was a time when the Chief come to me for things,’ Teddy went on resentfully. ‘Now he goes to people like you. Young guys. People who are ready to make a deal with the niggers, give them what they want.’

  Daniels took another step toward him, glaring fiercely, his body clenched.

  Teddy grinned coldly. ‘What do you want to be, Daniels? You want to take the Chief’s place, or do you want to be mayor, or what?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You talk a good game, you and Breedlove, and most of the rest of the new people around here. But you’re just in it for yourselves. You don’t have no feeling for what you do.’ He shook his head. ‘You think I don’t notice how you’re always having little huddles with the Chief, or following the Captain around? You think I don’t notice that?’ He shrugged. ‘Well, one of these days you may have Birmingham all to yourself, but it’ll be a mongrelized, no-account place with nothing but white trash and niggers in it.’

  Daniels cocked his head slightly, mocking him. ‘And you’re going to stop all that, right, Teddy? You’re going to save the whole goddamn white race.’

  ‘I’ll do my goddamn best,’ Teddy said determinedly. ‘But don’t think that I don’t already know that if the Communists and racemixers get desperate enough, they’ll set somebody up, somebody like me, like Tod, like anybody they want out of the way.’

  ‘You think you’re going to be set up, Teddy?’ Ben asked seriously.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Who would do that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Do you have any idea who killed Breedlove?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Or why?’

  ‘The only thing I know is that they didn’t give me the case,’ Teddy said. ‘And that don’t seem right to me.’ He laughed derisively. ‘But nothing seems right about this thing. I mean, tying him to a tree like that. Calling it in to the local sheriff.’ He grimaced. ‘That’s the sort of thing you do when you want to get attention or set somebody up. Any other way, it don’t make no sense.’

  Daniels glanced over to Tod. ‘You feel that way, too?’

  Tod started to speak but Teddy interrupted. ‘My brother agrees with everything I say.’

  ‘Stay together pretty much, is that right?’ Daniels asked.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, you boys better be careful,’ Daniels said sneeringly. ‘People might get the idea that you’re closer than nature ought to allow.’

  Langley’s body tensed but he did not move.

  ‘Were you two patrolling Bearmatch last Sunday?’ Ben asked quickly.

  Teddy nodded.

  ‘Around that old ballfield?’ Ben added pointedly. ‘Maybe at about five in the afternoon?’

  Teddy smiled. ‘This about that little girl?’

  ‘Why did you pull Horace Davenport over?’ Ben asked bluntly.

  Daniels’ lips parted. ‘You pulled Horace Davenport over?’ he asked, astonished.

  ‘That’s right.’

  Daniels laughed. ‘You know who he is, Teddy? He could be the next mayor of this town.’

  ‘He was speeding,’ Teddy said sternly. ‘And I don’t allow no speeding in Bearmatch.’

  Daniels laughed again. ‘My God, you are an idiot.’

  Teddy stared at him coldly. ‘Why don’t you go find out who killed your partner,’ he snapped. ‘That’d really get you in tight with the big wheels.’

  ‘Davenport lied to me,’ Ben said to Teddy. ‘He told me that he let that little girl out because she saw a friend of hers playing in the field.’

  ‘Maybe he did.’

  ‘He said that was the only reason he stopped in Bearmatch.’

  Teddy said nothing.

  ‘But you pulled him over,’ Ben said. ‘You and Tod.’

  The two brothers looked at each other nervously.

  ‘Why did you pull him over?’ Ben demanded.

  ‘We pull over a lot of people in Bearmatch,’ Teddy said harshly. ‘We like to keep a close eye on things. Shit, Wellman, we pulled over a guy just before Davenport.’

  ‘Norman Siegel,’ Ben said. ‘I know. I talked to him.’

  Teddy looked surprised. ‘You really are working the shit out of this case, ain’t you?’ He looked at his brother and sneered. ‘Maybe Ben’s going to try to pin this little nigger cunt on us, too.’

  Before he could stop himself, Ben saw his own hand fly out and slap Teddy Langley’s face, then fly back and slap it again, backhanded. Langley tumbled backward, stumbled over a chair and sprawled onto the floor.

  Tod Langley’s body stiffened, but he did not move forward. Instead, he pressed his back reflexively against the wall behi
nd him and stared at Ben, thunderstruck. Daniels seemed almost equally astonished, his eyes wide and staring, but a thin, satisfied smile growing on his face.

  For an instant the room was completely silent. The few detectives who had remained after the Chief’s speech looked on in motionless disbelief as Langley pulled himself to a sitting position on the floor, but did not rise. He was still resting, half-dazed on the floor, as Ben slammed through the doors of the detective bullpen and headed for his car.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Ben had already tromped down the stairs and pulled himself in behind the wheel before he realized that he had no place to go. It was almost two hours before King was scheduled to speak, and he had been assigned no duties in the meantime except to continue looking, in whatever way he could, for the man who’d killed Doreen Ballinger.

  Everyone else was very busy, as Ben could easily see as he glanced about. The firemen were mustering on the steps again, surrounded by scores of uniformed policemen and Alabama Highway Patrol. They stood in ranks, or gathered together in small knots, but always separate from each other, the firemen looking oddly sad and disengaged, while they warily watched the police swagger up and down the stairs, their thumbs notched in their thick black gunbelts. For a moment Ben remembered how often he’d seen Breedlove do exactly that, his shoulders hunched, his long shadow cutting jaggedly at the steps as he moved toward the glass door. Now he tried to imagine what Breedlove must have thought as he laughed with the Langleys, or joked with his partner, or slammed Coggins against the wall of the detective bullpen with such pretended fury that even Daniels had been fooled by it, and had finally moved in to stop him. But it had all been an act, and it seemed to Ben that to create an atmosphere in which such acting could be called for, in which decency had to wear a grim disguise, was itself a grave and desperate wrong. He wished that he’d known about Breedlove before it was too late, because he realized now that he would have behaved differently toward him, perhaps touched his arm from time to time, or offered him a subtly pointed look, anything that might have let him know that even within the ranks of his fellow detectives, he was not entirely alone.

  Ben looked at his watch and tried to imagine some way to kill the next two hours. For an instant he saw Doreen’s face in his mind, then Esther’s, then Ramona’s as she swung beneath the tree, watching Doreen saunter toward her from the other side of the field. After that it was a stream – Kelly Ryan swaying in summer heat, then Bluto’s body swelling with decay, and after him, Breedlove, his arms stretched out like broken wings, his shattered head drooping toward his chest. It was as if some dark angel had descended upon the city, randomly swinging its sword, slicing whoever stood within its path.

  He glanced back up toward City Hall. The Chief had just stepped out of the building, casting his short, stubby shadow across the stairs. The men on the steps stiffened immediately, and they were still standing at attention when Ben hit the ignition and fled down the avenue and away.

  ‘You got anything for me?’ Ben asked as he walked up to Patterson’s desk.

  ‘The girl’s in the ground, Ben,’ Patterson said resignedly, ‘and it’s going to be just like it would have been with any other little girl from Bearmatch.’ He shrugged. ‘I knew it would. I said so from the beginning.’

  ‘I mean on Breedlove,’ Ben told him.

  Patterson straightened up from the paperwork on his desk. ‘You working that case, too?’

  ‘Just a little,’ Ben said. ‘Sort of unofficial.’

  ‘Unofficial? I never heard of that.’

  ‘I don’t know who they’ll finally turn it over to,’ Ben told him. ‘But for now I’m just checking up on it. You know, on the side.’

  Patterson stared at him suspiciously. ‘Which means what, exactly?’

  Ben did not answer.

  Patterson smiled slyly. ‘They don’t have anybody else they can trust, do they?’

  Ben remained silent.

  Patterson shook his head. ‘Is it really that bad?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘It’s complicated, Leon,’ he said.

  ‘Like everything else lately.’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Patterson stood up. ‘Well, what do you want to know?’

  ‘I’d like to take a look at the body.’

  ‘Okay,’ Patterson said. He led Ben back into the freezer room, opened the vault and pulled back the cover. Breedlove’s body lay naked on the stainless steel carriage.

  ‘He was shot in the mouth,’ Patterson said. ‘Then they cut him up and tied him to the tree. He was dead when they did that.’

  ‘Has he been officially identified?’

  ‘By his wife,’ Patterson said.

  ‘His wife? She came down here?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘About an hour ago,’ Patterson said. ‘And she was real upset. And not just about her husband. Other stuff.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, when the body came in, the wedding ring was missing,’ Leon said. ‘She made a big stink about that. I even made sure that he’d worn a ring.’ He lifted Breedlove’s left hand and held it up to the light. ‘He’d had a ring all right,’ he said as he pointed to the faintly pale circle around Breedlove’s finger. ‘But I never saw it.’

  ‘Where do you think it is?’

  ‘Could have fallen off during all that was happening to him,’ Patterson said. He returned the hand to the carriage. ‘Who knows?’

  ‘I’ll call the sheriff up there,’ Ben said. ‘Maybe they found it in the field or in his car or something.’

  ‘Were you up there?’ Patterson asked as he pushed the carriage back into the wall.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Pretty soggy, I guess.’

  Ben looked at him. ‘Soggy?’

  ‘Well, from the look of Breedlove’s shoes.’

  ‘It was a grassy field,’ Ben said. ‘It wasn’t soggy.’

  Patterson’s eyes took on a sudden intensity. ‘Well, Breedlove’s shoes were covered with some kind of thick, pasty clay. White clay.’

  ‘Then he picked it up somewhere else,’ Ben said. ‘Did you run any tests on it?’

  Patterson shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Find out what it is,’ Ben said quickly, ‘and let me know as soon as you can.’

  Susan Breedlove answered the door almost immediately. She was a small, but slightly overweight woman, with reddish hair and pale complexion. Her son stood at her side, staring silently into Ben’s eyes.

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, Mrs Breedlove,’ Ben said as he took off his hat.

  ‘Who are you?’

  Ben took out his identification. ‘Ben Wellman,’ he said.

  Mrs Breedlove stared at him suspiciously. ‘Did you know Charlie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I never seen you with him.’

  ‘We weren’t exactly friends,’ Ben said. ‘Not like Daniels.’

  The woman’s eyes continued to watch Ben apprehensively. ‘Well, thank you for coming,’ she said at last. Then she stepped back and began to close the door.

  Ben caught it in his hand. ‘I’d like to talk to you for a minute.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘I understand that Charlie’s wedding ring was missing.’

  Mrs Breedlove’s body grew taut. ‘Somebody stole it.’

  ‘It might have fallen off.’

  She scowled bitterly. ‘They stole it. The people that killed him.’ She shook her head resentfully. ‘There’s no way that ring fell off. It was too tight for that. Somebody pulled it off Charlie, that’s what happened.’

  ‘He had twenty dollars in his wallet,’ Ben said, ‘nobody took that.’

  For a moment Mrs Breedlove considered Ben’s remark. ‘I don’t know how to explain it,’ she said finally. ‘I just know that it didn’t fall off my Charlie’s finger. Somebody pulled it off.’ She glanced down at her son, then ran her short fingers through his light-brown hair. ‘Go on out in the back, B
illy,’ she said.

  The child backed away reluctantly, his eyes still on Ben.

  Mrs Breedlove waited until he had disappeared into the back of the house. ‘Are you looking into all this?’ she asked, once the screen door had sounded and she knew the boy had made it to the backyard.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How come it ain’t Harry?’

  ‘They figure he’s too close to it, I guess,’ Ben told her.

  She looked at him quizzically. ‘Wouldn’t that be a good thing, though?’

  ‘It might be,’ Ben said.

  She opened the door slightly. ‘Well, come on in, anyway,’ she said with a small shrug.

  Ben followed her into the small living room. There was a short square television in the corner and a brown, hooked rug on the plain wooden floor.

  ‘The ring, it looked just like this,’ Mrs Breedlove said as she placed her hand flat beneath a table lamp. ‘It had one of them little blue stones, just like this.’ She smiled to herself, her voice softening as she spoke. ‘Sapphire they call it. Pretty. It stays that same blue forever. At least that’s what the man at the jewelry store said.’

  Ben stared at the ring. ‘Did it have anything written on it?’

  ‘“For Charlie. Love Susan,”’ Mrs Breedlove said. She shrugged. ‘That’s all.’ Her eyes swept the empty house. ‘I don’t have no family,’ she said as she lowered herself into a small, plastic-covered chair. ‘Charlie didn’t have none either. That’s why it’s like this, empty. Nobody to come and comfort us like family people do.’ She shook her head. ‘Course, there’s been a few dropped by. Harry come over, that was one. And the Chief come. And Mr Starnes. Some of the neighbors come over for a few minutes this morning. But that ain’t the same. Besides them, it’s just been me and Billy setting around the house.’

  Ben took a seat on a small green sofa. ‘I’m real sorry about Charlie,’ he said. He waited a moment, watching her face, trying to determine what to ask next. ‘May I ask you, ma’am, if you knew what Charlie was doing?’

  ‘What do you mean, “doing”?’

  ‘What he was investigating.’

  ‘No, he didn’t never talk about it.’

  ‘And last night,’ Ben continued gently. ‘You were away.’