Thomas Cook - Streets of Fire

‘No,’ Ben told him.

Jolly drew his hand back and laughed. ‘Where you from, Mr White Policeman? You from Beulah Land?’ His eyes dropped toward the stacks of money. ‘You see all these niggers in the streets? Huh? You see them?’

Ben said nothing.

The old man’s dark, rasping laughter broke across the room. ‘They make me sick. They set next to Mr Whiteman, they think they’re in Heaven; they think they’re in Beulah Land, setting there with God hisself.’ He turned away as if to spit on the floor, then looked back at Ben. ‘But they’re still broke. They ain’t got a dime. You know why? ’Cause they ain’t yet figured out that don’t nobody do nothing for free.’ He laughed again, a hard, thick laugh that ended in a slight, trembling cough which he willfully brought under his control. ‘They talk about dirty money. These newfangled preachers they done brought in here, they talk about dirty money. But money is the cleanest thing in the world. Clearest, too. It don’t bullshit you. It tell you right to your face what you worth.’ He allowed another burst of laughter to escape him for a moment, then sucked it back in. ‘Now ’bout this gal,’ he said. ‘Maybe I know a little. What you got I want, Mr Whiteman?’

‘Nothing,’ Ben said without hesitation.

‘Nothing?’ Jolly asked. He leaned forward slightly. ‘You can buy anything, did you know that? You can buy gals. You can buy cars.’ He grinned thinly. ‘Hell, you can even buy yourself a whole new way of thinking. But if you can’t buy nothing, you ain’t nothing.’

Ben stood up immediately, his contempt washing over him like a hot wave.

Jolly’s eyes followed him. ‘I ask you one more time,’ he said. ‘You got anything I want?’

‘No,’ Ben said curtly.

Jolly looked at him as if he were something filthy which had washed into his life. ‘Now ain’t that a funny thing?’ he said mockingly. ‘A white man – all growed up – and he don’t have one thing a nigger wants.’ He shook his head in disgust. ‘That’s pitiful, ain’t it?’

Ben walked out quickly, leaving the door open behind him. He could hear the old man laughing to himself, and the laughter seemed to snap at him like the end of a long, black whip.

It took him only a few minutes to reach his small house, and once there, he poured himself a whiskey and sat out in the little iron swing on his front porch. It was a quiet neighborhood, filled mostly with workers from the iron and rubber plants, too tired to make a fuss, as his father used to say. To the right, he could see the illuminated spire of the Methodist Church, and beyond it Vulcan’s torch lifted high over the brow of Red Mountain. He had grown up practically beneath its shadow, but its once majestic power now seemed shrunken and besieged. It creaked like the old iron swing, grew rusty, fell apart.

He took the small notebook from his shirt pocket and went over King’s speech, but this time there didn’t seem to be anything in it that the Chief could use, and so he simply checked his notes for spelling and legibility and put them back into his pocket.

He leaned back deeply and let his legs thrust out, pumping the swing softly to stir the air. Far in the distance he could hear the shift-horns call from the foundries and mills and power plants that surrounded his small neighborhood like a jagged metal wall. It was the shift they called the Dawn Patrol, and he could remember the many years his father had worked it, trudging out into the deep night and not returning until almost noon. He had thought that by choosing the police, he had chosen a different life, but it struck him now that he, too, had joined the Dawn Patrol.

He took out the torn photograph of the little girl, brought the severed halves slowly together and stared at the small face. Her eyes were closed, her cheeks slightly puffed, as if she’d died with a mouthful of candy. The quiet, unresisting look on her face betrayed nothing of what she must have suffered, but he found something disturbing in it nonetheless. He had seen the dead look surprised. He had seem them look frightened. He had even seen them staring up, almost radiantly, as if in the final instant they had grasped some impossible hope. But the face of the little girl looked helpless, vacant, resigned, as if this last assault had not been much different from the first one.

‘Up late,’ Mr Jeffries said as he paused at Ben’s walkway.

Ben quickly tucked the photograph back in his shirt pocket and smiled softly. ‘I reckon so.’

‘Guess you boys have your hands full these days,’ Mr Jeffries added. He hesitated a moment, then moved shakily up the walkway and sat down on one of Ben’s front steps.

‘Pretty much,’ Ben said.

The old man drew the straw bowler from his head and wiped the sweat from his forehead. ‘I got to get up to pee. And after that, I can’t get back to sleep.’ He fanned himself gently with the hat and drew in a deep, appreciative breath. ‘I do love a summer night,’ he said. ‘Peaceful, for all the trouble.’

‘Yes,’ Ben said.

Mr Jeffries eyed him closely. ‘You didn’t get hurt in all this trouble we had today, did you?’

Ben shook his head. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Nor hurt nobody, I hope.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Ben told him. Then he suddenly thought of the photograph, the broken will he saw on the little girl’s face, and with a deep, unsettling shock, he realized that he could not be sure.

TWELVE

Sammy McCorkindale was standing outside the detective bullpen when Ben arrived the next morning. He smiled brightly as Ben approached.

‘Well, the joke’s on me, Ben,’ he said. He shook his head with slight embarrassment. ‘You know that little girl you found in that ballfield?’

Ben nodded.

‘You know how I said nobody’d report her missing?’

‘Yeah.’

The grin broadened. ‘Well, I reckon the joke’s on me.’

‘Somebody’s asked about her?’

‘As I live and breathe, Ben,’ McCorkindale said with a hint of genuine wonder in his voice. ‘First time I ever heard of such a thing coming out of Bearmatch.’

‘Who was it?’ Ben asked quickly. ‘Who asked about her? Did you get a name?’

‘Better than that,’ McCorkindale said. ‘I got the thing itself. She’s sitting by your desk this very minute.’

Ben pushed through the doors instantly and saw a slender, well-dressed black woman sitting in the chair beside his desk. She wore a dark-red, short-sleeved blouse and long, loose-fitting skirt that fell all the way to her ankles. Her hands were folded primly in her lap, and her eyes stared straight ahead.

‘Good morning, ma’am,’ he said to her as he stepped up to his desk. ‘I’m Detective Wellman.’

She started to rise, but he stopped her.

‘No, no,’ he said, ‘sit down.’ He pulled his chair from beneath his desk and sat down. ‘I understand you’re interested in a missing person.’

She stared at him steadily, her lips tightly pursed.

‘Could you tell me a little bit about that?’ Ben prodded.

‘Everybody warned me not to come down here,’ the woman said evenly.

‘Why is that?’ Ben asked politely.

‘They said it was useless, and that it might be dangerous,’ the woman told him. Her voice was crisp and precise, despite the Southern accent, and there was a kind of flame which seemed to burn continually behind her eyes.

‘Are you from Birmingham, ma’am?’ Ben asked.

‘Not always. My family came from New Orleans.’

‘Been here long?’

‘Since I was fourteen,’ the woman said. ‘Why?’

Ben suddenly realized that his questions might seem threatening rather than casual, a way to break the ice. He shrugged, almost playfully. ‘Just wondered,’ he said.