Thomas Cook: Streets of Fire

‘Nothing around her,’ Ben said. ‘That’s why I thought I’d check with you.’

McCorkindale ponderously eased himself forward and rooted his elbows on the top of his desk. ‘Well, run the description by me.’

‘I’d say between eleven and maybe thirteen years old,’ Ben said.

McCorkindale took a pencil and paper and began to write it down. ‘Did you see any distinguishing features?’ he asked. ‘You know – warts, moles?’

Ben shook his head.

‘All right, go on,’ McCorkindale said.

‘Dressed in a white, flowered dress, brown shoes, white socks,’ Ben continued.

‘Okay, good,’ McCorkindale said, his eyes following the pencil as its tip scurried across the page.

‘The body was found buried in a football field off Twenty-third.’

The flight of the pencil slowed.

‘Negro,’ Ben said.

The pencil stopped. McCorkindale looked up. ‘You mean you got a little Bearmatch girl here?’ he asked.

‘That’s right.’

The pencil dropped to the desk and McCorkindale leaned back in his chair. ‘How old are you, Ben? Thirty-five? Forty?’

‘Thirty-seven.’

‘And been living in Birmingham all that time?’

Ben nodded.

‘Then you ought to know better than to waste your time on something like this,’ McCorkindale said. ‘They don’t report nobody missing out of Bearmatch.’ He squinted slightly. ‘Haven’t you ever done that beat before?’

‘No.’

McCorkindale shook his head. ‘Well, they got their own way of doing things over there. They don’t come to us with things like this. Right or wrong, they just don’t do it. If they got somebody missing, they do all the looking their own selves.’

‘This little girl had to belong to somebody,’ Ben said.

‘I’m not saying she didn’t,’ McCorkindale said. ‘But it just don’t matter, because they don’t report nobody missing out of Bearmatch.’ He shifted slightly in his chair, and the springs groaned painfully under his weight. ‘How long you been a detective, Ben?’

‘Five years.’

McCorkindale smiled confidently. ‘Well, I been sitting at this same desk for a lot longer than that, and they’s not ever been a missing person report done for anybody out of Bearmatch. They just don’t come to us with stuff like that.’

‘Well, it’s not just a missing person,’ Ben said, ‘it’s a murder case. Somebody shot this little girl in the back of the head.’

McCorkindale smiled slyly. ‘And the guy that did it, he’ll end up with a bullet in his own head, too, or sliced up like a big old piece of pie.’ He laughed quietly. ‘Don’t worry, Ben, he won’t get away with killing no little girl. Not in Bearmatch. Not for a minute. Because they’ll handle it among themselves, and to tell you the truth, they’ll get the job done a lot faster than we ever could.’

Ben stared at him, unconvinced.

‘I mean it,’ McCorkindale said emphatically. ‘They’ll give the son of a bitch a real fair trial. Probably in some alley somewhere, or in the back of a shothouse. Then they’ll cut his goddamn throat and that’ll be the end of it.’

‘All right,’ Ben said wearily. It seemed useless to argue any further. ‘But if anything does come in, let me know.’

‘You’ll be the first to hear about it, Ben,’ McCorkindale assured him. ‘The very first.’

Ben walked back to his own desk, then sat down. Besides McCorkindale, he was entirely alone in the cramped detective bullpen. Several metal cots had been set up to accommodate the increased manpower which had been brought in to deal with the demonstrations. They remained rumpled and unmade, their sheets and blankets spilling over the sides or resting in tangled heaps on the bare mattresses. Outside the dim, unwashed windows, sirens rang continually as one paddy wagon after another made its way down the avenue, then turned abruptly and dove toward the basement of the building. In that dark, concrete cavern, the demonstrators would be hustled out of the sweltering wagons and rushed upstairs to the large holding cells the Chief had set aside for them. It had been going on like this for days, and everyone was exhausted. As the demonstrations had continued, everything had become increasingly on edge. At first there had been some talk of handling King as the police in Albany, Georgia, had, killing him with kindness, ‘filling up the jails, of course,’ as Luther himself had put it one day in the detective bullpen, ‘but doing it politely.’ It was a way of handling things that quite a few people in the department had rallied behind at first. But as the weeks had passed, the better part of that idea had gotten buried under a steadily darkening cloud of anger and exhaustion. Sit-ins at the segregated lunch counters of major department stores and mass marches through the central business district had turned the city into a riot zone. And now, as Ben let his eyes drift over the bullpen, he could sense that Luther had grown harder, along with almost everybody else, that the whole city had tightened up, that there was no more give anywhere, in anybody. By six in the evening, a few withered detectives would trudge in, slump down on their cots and get whatever sleep they could for the next three or four hours. Then they’d hit the streets again, dirty, smelly, sitting four to a car as they patrolled the colored sections of the city, or kept a round-the-clock surveillance on some designated leader, staring blankly at the darkened windows of his house or motel room while they balanced coffee cups on the shotguns in their laps.

‘Well, ain’t you the lucky one.’

Ben turned and saw Harry Daniels as he made his way through the scarred double doors of the bullpen.

‘You mean to say that in the middle of all this shit, there’s one cop with nothing to do but sit on his ass?’ Daniels added loudly. He turned and called to his partner. ‘What do you think about this, Charlie?’

Charlie Breedlove strolled up to Ben’s desk. ‘I hear they kicked you onto the Bearmatch beat, Wellman,’ he said.

Ben nodded.

‘Of course, that beat’s pretty much the whole city these days,’ Breedlove added. He smiled mockingly. ‘So you shouldn’t feel like you’ve been singled out or anything.’

‘I don’t,’ Ben said.

Daniels took a long slow drink of Coke, then wiped his mouth with his fist. ‘So what they got you working on, Ben?’

‘A little girl somebody found in that football field off Twenty-third Street,’ Ben said.

Daniels leaned forward and cupped his hand behind his ear. ‘Found where?’

‘Off Twenty-third,’ Ben repeated. ‘In a football field.’

Daniels straightened himself slowly. ‘Football field?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Who called it in, one of the Black Cat boys?’

‘No,’ Ben told him. ‘Front desk said it sounded like an old colored man.’

‘How old’s the girl?’

‘I don’t know for sure. Twelve, thirteen, something like that.’

‘Down in Bearmatch, that’s old enough to whore,’ Breedlove said. ‘You ought to check with Kelly down in the file room. He knows a lot about the whores down there.’ He laughed. ‘Matter of fact, the talk is that he had something sweet going on with one of them a few years back.’ He draped his arm over Daniels’ shoulder and gently moved him toward the row of cots on the other side of the room. ‘Let’s get some sleep, partner,’ he said. ‘We got a long night ahead of us.’

They were asleep almost instantly, and even from his place at the far end of the room, Ben could hear Breedlove snoring loudly as he lay faceup beneath the window.

For a while Ben remained at his desk. He expected to get a call that would put him back on surveillance or send him circling Bearmatch again, idly circling, as he’d done for a few slow rounds after leaving the football field, and which, after a few minutes, had begun to make him feel more like a prison guard than a homicide detective. Within that circle, life might well go on as McCorkindale had described it. But outside the circle, from the fake antebellum mansions to the bleak trailer parks and greasy spoons of the sprawling industrial neighborhoods, Ben could feel a kind of dreadful trembling in the atmosphere, one that was as palpable in the station house as it was along the reeking drag strips of Bessemer and Irondale. He could feel it like a thousand knifepoints in the air, and after a time, it urged him from his chair, and he walked out of the bullpen and headed out into the steamy day.