Streets of Fire

TWENTY-NINE

The day’s heat felt as if it had dissipated very little during the first few hours of the night, and before walking up the broad semicircular stairs to the Davenport house, Ben took out his handkerchief and wiped his face and neck. He could feel his shirt, wet and sticky, at the back, and as he took off his hat, he noticed that a dark line of perspiration had already risen above the dark band. Not far away, a small pond glimmered motionlessly in the moonlight. A ghostly cloud of steam hung heavily over the water A tired old mallard could be seen drifting through it, its dark beak lifted slightly, as if it were drinking from the air.

A maid opened the door, short and stocky, her body draped in a white apron. ‘Yes, sir?’ she asked.

Ben took out his identification. ‘I spoke to Mr Davenport once before. He said it’d be all right for me to come by if I had any more questions.’

The woman stepped back quickly and flung open the door. ‘Come on in,’ she said.

‘Thank you,’ Ben said as he stepped into the house.

‘Just wait here,’ the maid said. ‘I’ll get Mr Davenport.’

Davenport appeared almost immediately. He looked far less formal than at his office. He wore a plaid sports shirt and large, baggy trousers, pleated at the front. A golf club dangled from his right hand.

‘I was just doing some indoor putting,’ he said as he offered Ben his hand. ‘Would you like some refreshment?’

‘No, thanks,’ Ben said.

‘Well, let’s go talk then,’ Davenport said. ‘Come on in here. We can have some privacy.’

Ben followed him into a small, wood-paneled office. Its walls were covered with fox-hunting scenes and animal heads.

‘The place makes me look like the great white hunter, doesn’t it?’ Davenport asked jokingly.

Ben said nothing.

‘Truth is, I didn’t bring down a one of them,’ Davenport added. ‘Not the bobcat or the leopard, and certainly not that ugly wildebeest.’ He laughed again. ‘They all belonged to my brother-in-law, and when he died, they ended up here. My wife didn’t want to part with them, so this room is the result.’ He strode over to a dark-red leather sofa and sat down. ‘Please have a seat,’ he said, pointing to a matching chair. ‘You must be pretty tired if you’re still up working this late in the day.’

Ben sat down.

‘Have you learned anything about what happened to Doreen?’ Davenport asked immediately.

‘A little,’ Ben said.

‘Well, how can I help you?’

Ben leaned forward slightly. ‘When I talked to you in your office, you said that you drove Doreen all the way to the ballfield.’

‘That’s right,’ Davenport said casually.

‘And that you let her out because she saw another little girl playing, and she wanted to go play with her.’

Davenport nodded.

Ben stared at him intently. ‘Is that the only reason you stopped, Mr Davenport?’

Davenport’s eyes grew taut. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, I’m having a little trouble with that idea.’

‘What idea?’

‘That you only stopped to let her out,’ Ben said flatly.

‘Why else would I stop before I got her back home?’ Davenport asked.

‘Maybe you got pulled over,’ Ben said.

Davenport lifted his head slightly. ‘Go on.’

‘By a police car.’

Davenport drew in a long, slow breath.

Ben looked at him piercingly. ‘We got a couple of guys who work Bearmatch — you ever heard of them?’

Davenport did not answer.

‘They ride around in a prowl car made up to look like a big black cat.’

Davenport remained silent.

‘It’s even got a cat painted on the front,’ Ben went on. ‘Have you ever seen a car like that, Mr Davenport?’

For a moment Davenport seemed to resist the question, draw away from it. ‘Yes,’ he said finally. ‘I’ve seen it. They pulled me over, just like you said. But I had already let Doreen out.’

‘Why did they pull you over?’

‘For speeding,’ Davenport said. ‘At least that’s what they said.’

‘Were you speeding?’

‘I may have been,’ Davenport said. ‘Like I said before, I was in a hurry to get back home. I had a very important meeting.’

‘They didn’t give you a ticket,’ Ben said.

‘How do you know that?’

‘I checked their summonses. They gave one speeding ticket out in Bearmatch that day. But it wasn’t to you.’

‘Then how did you know that they stopped me at all?’ Davenport asked.

‘Someone saw them pull over a dark-blue Lincoln,’ Ben said.

‘And you assumed that it was mine?’

‘Yes.’

‘What else do you know?’ he asked finally.

‘It might be better if it came from you,’ Ben said.

Davenport looked at him almost sadly. ‘It can’t.’

‘It has to,’ Ben told him.

Davenport stared at him mutely, his eyes fixed, stony and yet oddly rocked by agitation, squeezing and un-squeezing like two white fists.

‘A little girl is dead,’ Ben added after a moment, ‘and everybody wants me to get to the bottom of it.’

‘Maybe not everybody,’ Davenport said. ‘There may be people who don’t want you to get to the bottom of it at all.’

‘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.

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

The cigarette burned down to his fingertips, and he quickly crushed it into the small tin ashtray on his desk, then lit another. Two mounted fans were whirring softly in the hot evening air, and he leaned back slowly, loosened his tie and let the breeze waft over him. The silence of the bullpen settled over him, and for a time, he simply sat, watching the blades in the gray half-light, until they seemed to watch him back, two dull eyes peering at him from either corner of the room. Then he sat up, blinked rapidly and shifted his vision over to the flat unshuttered windows which fronted the street from the high vantage point of the fourth floor. He stood up, walked over to the window and peered down at the city. It seemed darker than it had ever been before, wrapped in the thick musty heat, smothering like a child beneath a heavy black quilt. He wasn’t sure when he’d stopped loving it, or if he’d ever really loved it, or the South, or anything at all outside the few people who had been drawn to him by blood alone, and who were now gone far beyond recall, almost beyond remembrance, silent as their unbeating hearts.

He was back at his desk, going over everything once again, when McCorkindale came in. He sat up and stared at him, amazed.

‘What are you doing here this time of night?’

McCorkindale stopped dead in the dull light, then turned and flipped on the switch, flooding the room with a hard, bright light. ‘What do you like to sit in the dark for, Ben?’ he asked as he moved forward once again, heading for his desk in the corner of the room.

‘I’m surprised to see you here, Sammy.’

‘Well, I don’t live here like you do,’ McCorkindale said casually. ‘I got a family, and all kinds of shit like that.’

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Ah, my wife’s been sick and I had a prescription filled and left it at work,’ McCorkindale told him as he made it to his desk, snapped up a small paper bag and headed back for the door. ‘I figured she might be able to get through the night without it, but no such luck.’ He was now halfway to the door, still moving ponderously among the desks, the paper bag tucked under his right arm. ‘Thanks for getting that pistol back to Property,’ he said as he made it back to the light switch. ‘You want me to turn these things off again?’

Ben sat up slightly. ‘What pistol?’

‘The one you turned back into Property,’ McCorkindale said impatiently. ‘They’d marked it wrong, though.’

‘Who had?’

‘Morgue.’

‘Are you talking about a twenty-two pistol?’

‘That’s right. Cute little thing.’

‘It was used in a murder.’

McCorkindale laughed. ‘No way, Ben.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because it was missing from Property,’ McCorkindale said. ‘That’s where it came from. Same serial numbers. It was the only weapon that was missing when I was logging everything in a few days ago.’

Ben felt his body rise almost involuntarily. ‘Missing? You mean it had once been in Property?’

‘That’s right,’ McCorkindale said. ‘Confiscated in a holdup.’

‘Who made the arrest?’

‘Breedlove,’ McCorkindale said casually. ‘Good old Charlie Breedlove.’ Then he flipped off the lights.