Thomas Cook - Streets of Fire

Ben did not move, and after a moment Luther’s eyes snapped back toward him.

‘Did you hear me, Ben?’ he demanded.

‘I never saw a person more scared than that old man,’ Ben said.

Luther smiled thinly. ‘They’re a little rough, the Lang-leys,’ he said. ‘Everybody knows that. They’ve put the squeeze on a few things.’

Ben said nothing.

‘But you got to be a little rough to work Bearmatch,’ Luther added. ‘If you don’t beat it, it’ll beat you. Look what happened to Kelly Ryan.’

‘Can they just do anything?’ Ben asked. ‘Don’t they answer to anybody?’

Luther looked at him squarely. ‘And what are you saying they’ve done, Ben?’

Ben did not answer.

‘Are you saying they had something to do with killing that little girl?’

Ben said nothing.

‘Huh?’ Luther demanded. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’ He did not wait for an answer before rushing on. ‘Do you have one little tiny piece of evidence that connects the Langleys to that girl’s murder?’

Ben shook his head helplessly. ‘No.’

Luther went back to the ledger. ‘Well, if you ever do, let me know.’

Ben walked over to his desk and leaned into it. ‘I want to see your face when you tell me that,’ he said.

Luther looked up. His voice was absolutely resolute when he spoke. ‘If you ever find anything on the Lang-leys, let me know.’

Ben nodded quickly and turned back toward the door.

Luther took a deep, weary breath. ‘Look, Ben, after this business with Kelly, the department figured Bearmatch needed a certain kind of people to keep an eye on it.’

‘Like the Langleys.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Who decided that?’

Luther laughed. ‘Who do you think?’

‘The Chief?’

‘He hires the police,’ Luther said, as if he were explaining the facts of life to a child. ‘He hires the firemen. He is the Commissioner of Public Safety.’

‘So they answer to him,’ Ben said.

‘Everybody but Jesus answers to the Chief,’ Luther said. There was a troubled weariness in his voice. ‘And that’s the way it is.’ He drew himself heavily out of his chair and turned toward the window, pressing his face near the glass. Not far beyond him, lines of Negro children could be seen standing, soaked and chilled, in the steadily sheeting rain.

‘Can’t they be brought inside?’ Ben asked as he joined Luther at the window.

‘No,’ Luther said sharply. ‘No room.’ His eyes drifted to the right where, at the entrance to the lot, Teddy Langley could be seen standing in a black rainslick, a double-barreled shotgun pointed toward the sky. ‘But I won’t say I think it’s right,’ he whispered. ‘Nobody can ever get me to say I think it’s right.’

SEVENTEEN

The rain had finally subsided by early evening and the warm orange glow of a radiant summer sunset drifted down on the city. Ben sat at his desk, rethinking the slender threads of the case while he twisted the large purple ring in his fingers. In his mind, he could see Doreen as clearly as if she stood before him, bright and smiling in her clean white dress. But who had brought her to Bearmatch? How had she gotten home from Mountain Brook? And if it was Davenport who had taken her, why had he not brought her all the way home, as his driver always had? Why had she been let out? And where? Had someone seen her, perhaps for the first time, as she made her way home that afternoon, some gray figure watching her from one of the dark windows of the scores of shanties she must have passed on the way?

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.’