Thomas Cook - Streets of Fire

Ben nodded silently and watched as Esther bent forward, took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it over the grave.

‘I’ll bring some flowers up here tomorrow,’ she said.

‘I don’t guess you’d have any idea about who might have done this,’ Ben asked cautiously.

Esther shook her head. ‘No, I don’t.’

Again, Ben fell silent while he watched Esther closely. If she were grieving for her niece, it was the oddest grief he’d ever seen, cold, stony, the sort he’d seen in the army when things had been bad for so long that only the hard nub of feeling remained, along with a hatred so raw it seemed to bite into every nerve.

‘Did you ever see anybody hanging around Doreen?’ he asked finally.

Esther looked at him. ‘Hanging around?’

‘Like he might be interested in her,’ Ben added hesitantly, ‘a man, I mean.’

Esther’s lips parted slowly, but she said nothing.

‘Like somebody who might want to force himself on her,’ Ben said.

Esther turned away from him instantly and faced the line of stormclouds that was now billowing darkly over the city. ‘Somebody raped her? Is that what you’re trying to say?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

He saw her shoulders lift suddenly, tremble very slightly, then fall again.

‘I’m awfully sorry to have to tell you this,’ he said.

She kept her back to him and said nothing.

‘It could have been a very big man,’ Ben added. ‘So big it would be noticeable. Did you ever happen to see anybody like that hanging around your house or following you on the street?’

‘No.’

‘White or black, it’s all the same to me,’ Ben said, because he knew he had to.

She turned slowly and faced him. ‘Do you think I believe that?’ she asked hotly.

Ben stared at her evenly. ‘I’m not an animal,’ he said, this time with a measure of his own tingling resentment. ‘I didn’t kill your niece. I didn’t hurt her.’ He could hear his voice shaking almost inaudibly beneath his breath. ‘And I’m trying real hard to find out who did.’ His anger was like a hot wind in his face, fierce, enveloping, moving toward explosion. ‘And maybe I’d like a little help from you,’ he added in a voice that seemed to break suddenly at the very edge of rage, ‘but I’ll go on, Miss Ballinger. I’ll go on whether I get it or not.’ He turned abruptly, strode back to his car and got in.

For a moment, he tried to regain control of himself. Through the dusty film of the windshield, he could see Esther as she continued to stand at the edge of the grave, her arms now folded around her waist, hugging tightly, as if trying to protect an unborn child. He could imagine what she felt, but he realized that he could not grasp it in its entirety, that a certain portion of her grief would always lie beyond the farthest reach of his sympathy, that something in the darkness of her skin was lost to the pallor of his own, so that he could hope for little more than her distant, grudging aid. He knew that if it came, it would be apprehensive and suspicious, but it was no less than he could ask for, and no more than he deserved.

THIRTEEN

Ben was still waiting patiently in the car when Esther finally returned to it, a long dry reed nestled in her hand.

‘I’ll take you home if you want me to,’ he said.

Esther nodded. ‘Maybe you ought to talk to my daddy,’ she said. ‘He might have seen something the day Doreen didn’t come back home.’

Ben nodded slowly. ‘When was that?’

‘She should have come Sunday,’ Esther told him. ‘Late in the afternoon. I was still at work.’

‘Where do you work, Miss Ballinger?’

‘At a little restaurant on Fourth Avenue,’ Esther said. ‘Smiley’s Barbecue. I’m a short-order cook.’ She shrugged. ‘I been doing it for a long time.’

‘What time do you get to work?’

‘About five-thirty,’ Esther said. ‘We have a breakfast crowd.’

‘And your father. What does he do?’

Esther shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

Ben glanced back toward the grave. The air was darkening all around it as the wall of stormclouds drew closer to the city. ‘Would he talk to me?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

Ben turned back toward her. ‘And the neighbors. Can you get them to talk to me?’

Esther shook her head wearily. ‘You picked a real bad time to start poking around Bearmatch,’ she said.

‘I didn’t pick it,’ Ben said. He looked at her pointedly. ‘Maybe we could go someplace and have a cup of coffee.’

She gazed at him wonderingly. ‘What?’

‘Just sit down and talk about Doreen,’ Ben explained. ‘You might remember something.’

Esther continued to stare at him, half-puzzled, half-amazed. ‘You want the two of us to go someplace and have a cup of coffee?’

‘That’s right.’

‘In Birmingham?’

It was only then that the impossibility of such a thing occurred to him.

‘How about that fancy restaurant in the Tutweiler?’ Esther said, almost derisively. ‘Or maybe just the lunch counter at Pizitz’s.’

‘At my house, then,’ Ben said suddenly, to stop her from going on. ‘We could have a cup of coffee at my house.’

The look of wonder was still in her face.

‘It’s not that far from here,’ Ben added firmly. ‘We could be there in a few minutes.’

She seemed to consider it a moment, to take his offer almost as a challenge. Her eyes moved over him as if he were some oddity that had suddenly and unexpectedly appeared in a wholly familiar world. ‘All right,’ she said finally, ‘but after that, you’ll come over to mine, and maybe talk to my daddy.’

It was more than he’d expected from her, and he took it immediately.

‘All right,’ he said quickly as he started up the car.

They arrived at Ben’s house only a few minutes later. Esther got out of the car slowly and stared about as if looking for snipers in the trees.

‘Right this way,’ Ben said. He swept his hand out over the small cement walkway. ‘Watch your step, though, some of the slabs are jutting up. Sometimes I nearly trip, myself.’

Esther made her way gingerly up the walkway, then stood stiffly while Ben opened the door.

‘Forgive the look of this place,’ he said as he led her inside. ‘It’s a bachelor’s mess, you know.’

For a moment the two of them stood awkwardly in the front room. Ben could see a strange uneasiness gather slowly in Esther’s face.

‘You want coffee?’ he asked quickly. ‘Or maybe a glass of iced tea?’

A quick nervous laugh broke from her. ‘Iced tea? All right. I’ll have a glass of iced tea.’

It was made from a brown powder and it looked like muddy water, but she drank it quickly when he brought it, then set the nearly empty glass down on the small table in front of the sofa.

‘Guess I was thirsty,’ she said tensely.

‘The heat’ll do that,’ Ben said.

She smiled at him. ‘You know I never been in a regular white person’s house. That’s strange. I mean, I been in rich white houses, but never one like this, a regular house.’

‘My daddy was a steel worker,’ Ben said. ‘He left me this little place.’ He shrugged. ‘Otherwise I guess I’d just live in one of those furnished rooms they have downtown.’ He glanced about the room. ‘As you can see, I’m not too fancy.’

‘Got a TV,’ Esther said. ‘All the white people got TVs?’

Ben took a sip from his own glass of tea. ‘I don’t guess so,’ he said lamely.

For a moment, neither of them spoke, and as the silence lengthened, Ben could feel Esther’s growing discomfort at being in his house.

‘Listen,’ he said quickly. ‘About Doreen. When did you say the Davenports had her picked up?’