Thomas Cook - Streets of Fire

‘Like the Langley brothers?’ Ben asked tensely, a steely edge creeping into his voice.

Davenport said nothing.

‘All of you were together when she disappeared,’ Ben said.

‘There’s no law against that.’

‘There’s a law against lying about it in a criminal investigation,’ Ben reminded him. ‘You’re a lawyer, you must know that. We’re talking about murder.’

‘We’re talking about a colored girl,’ Davenport said hotly. ‘And I might add that you would be very wise not to forget that, Sergeant Wellman.’

Ben could feel a wave of heat shoot up his back. ‘Mr Davenport, I was raised by people who believed in manners. I don’t want to lose control of mine.’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said icily, surprising himself. ‘I surely am.’

Davenport laughed. ‘Don’t make me insult you, Mr Wellman,’ he said.

‘I’m going to find out what happened to Doreen Ballinger,’ Ben told him resolutely. ‘And whatever I find out, everybody’s going to know it.’

Davenport shook his head. ‘Do you honestly believe that I had something to do with Doreen’s murder?’

‘All I know is that you’ve told a few lies.’

‘Maybe I had reasons for doing that.’

‘What reasons?’

‘Reasons that are my own,’ Davenport replied stiffly.

‘Not anymore they’re not.’

Davenport turned away slightly.

Ben stood up, and as he did so, Davenport’s eyes flashed back to him.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ he snapped.

Ben shrugged casually. ‘I thought I might head on back to the station. The Langleys ought to be coming back on duty pretty soon. I figured I might have a little talk with them about all this.’

Davenport jumped to his feet. ‘You will do no such thing,’ he said firmly. ‘You don’t know what’s going on, and you’re better off not knowing.’

Ben turned toward the door, slowly raising his hat to his head.

Davenport grabbed his arm. ‘Sit down, Wellman.’

Ben spun around, grasped Davenport by the collar and pushed him backward in his seat. ‘Don’t ever put a hand on me,’ he said coldly.

Davenport stared up at him, thunderstruck. ‘You are one of those old stubborn boys, aren’t you? You think you know everything. Well, this time you don’t. Believe me, you haven’t even scratched the surface.’

Ben said nothing.

‘The water’s rising,’ Davenport added darkly. ‘All around you.’

Ben stared at him lethally. ‘I’m not going to rest until I find out what happened to Doreen Ballinger.’

Davenport watched Ben’s face intently for a moment, as if trying to find a way into his mind. Then his face suddenly relaxed, his eyes softening very subtly. ‘Let someone else do it,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Not you,’ Davenport said, almost in a whisper. ‘Someone else.’ His eyes took on a strange intensity, as if he were trying to speak through them.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Lives are at stake.’

‘What do you mean?’

Davenport started to answer, then closed his lips tightly.

Ben watched him closely. ‘What are you talking about?’ he repeated.

Davenport said nothing. Instead, he rose slowly, walked out of the room, then to the front door of the house. ‘Good evening, Sergeant,’ he said as he opened it.

Ben stepped out into the night, and Davenport followed him, closing the door behind him.

For a moment the two of them stood together on the curved white stairs, the moonlight pouring over them, the lake shining mutely out of the summer darkness.

‘No one will ever know who the real heroes were,’ Davenport said quietly.

Ben stared at him quizzically. ‘What heroes?’

Davenport’s eyes drifted toward the lake. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said, as if he were talking to some distant presence, a vision in the trees. For a moment he simply continued to stare out across the lush wet grass. Then he turned to Ben. ‘I can tell you this, and it’s the last thing I’ll ever tell you.’ For a moment he considered his words carefully, then he leaned forward slightly, his voice taking on a conspiratorial intensity. ‘Whatever it is you’re thinking,’ he said, ‘you’re completely wrong.’

The second floor of Police Headquarters had the look of a fortress that had been vigorously defended for a while, then abandoned altogether. The cots remained empty and unmade, sheets and bedding spilling out onto the unmopped tile floors. Everywhere, desks and shelves and windowsills were littered with soda cans and plastic cups and greasy sandwich wrappers. Only his own desk remained more or less clean of such disarray, but as Ben slumped down in the chair behind it, he realized that this was only because he hardly ever used it, preferring instead the rushing forward movement of his car or the drum of his feet across the cement walkways of the city. ‘A deskman is a dead man,’ his father had once told him, speaking with a sudden, amazing clarity out of the final haze of his senility.

But now, as he leaned back in his seat and drew his long slender legs up onto the top of the desk, he was not so sure. Somewhere, he knew, people did clean things, worked at nice, clean jobs, studied questions whose answers were oddly innocent, harmless, whose solutions hurt no one at all. Police work was entirely different from that. It had a cruel edge that seemed to slice in all directions, wounding randomly the good and the bad, turning everyone into some kind of helpless victim.

He thought of Doreen Ballinger and tried to figure out exactly what kind of victim she was. Maybe Bluto had killed her for sex. Of all the dangerous things any female had to watch out for, the most dangerous was male desire, and it seemed possible that Doreen’s life had ended because a strong, childlike man, in a single unbearable instant, had lost control of himself.

For a time Ben lingered on the possibility of such an action, but with each pass, it seemed to grow more faint, while Davenport’s final words grew louder and more insistent.

Whatever it is you’re thinking, you’re completely wrong.

So he headed back along the lines that had brought him to Davenport in the first place. Perhaps it was Siegel who was lying. Maybe he was trying to shift the blame to Davenport. Maybe all those toys scattered everywhere, dolls lying faceup in the grass, maybe the answer was somewhere deep in all of that, hiding like a serpent in some secret corner of Norman Siegel’s unknowable mind.

Whatever it is you’re thinking, you’re completely wrong.

It could even be Jacob, the driver. After all, the first place you look for a murderer is in the face of a bitter, resentful employee. He already knew of a great many cases in which the rage of such people had caused them to bomb buildings, set fire to factories, pump one shotgun blast after another into the boss’s bedroom window. He had seen it more than once. Like everything else, it was at least possible.

Whatever it is you’re thinking, you’re completely wrong.

He took out a cigarette and lit it, allowing his mind to continue backward, flowing slowly, like a tidal stream. Names and faces swept by him. Kelly, Breedlove, Daniels, the Langleys. It caught for a moment on the two brothers. There was no doubt that they operated as laws entirely unto themselves while they prowled the depths of Bearmatch. ‘After me,’ Kelly had said, ‘they wanted something different in Bearmatch.’ They had certainly got it, but sometimes Ben wondered if they had shot beyond the mark when they had turned it all over to Black Cat 13. Or maybe the Langleys continued to be exactly what was wanted. He could remember what Luther had said the day he’d asked about them: ‘Who do you think controls them, Ben? Is that what you want to know? Well, who do you think? Who does all the hiring and firing ‘round here?’ The Chief controlled them, and only the Chief.