Streets of Fire

THREE

The phone was ringing urgently as Ben struggled up from sleep. He looked at the clock. He’d come home for a brief nap, but slept for over an hour. He stepped over quickly and answered the phone.

‘Ben, this is Captain Starnes,’ Luther yelped. ‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘I waited around headquarters for a while,’ Ben explained. ‘Then I came home for a nap.’

‘You can nap at the station like everybody else,’ Luther said irritably. ‘You missed the Chief’s speech.’

‘What speech?’

‘The one he all of a sudden decided to make to the whole goddamn department,’ Luther snapped. He paused, as if waiting for a response, then continued. ‘Now you get back down to headquarters right now.’

Ben nodded wearily. ‘All right, Captain.’

A few men were still lingering in the briefing room when Ben arrived at the station house. Plainsclothesmen and uniformed patrolmen milled about, along with the top brass who’d come along with the Chief. Clouds of tobacco smoke hung heavily in the air, and the harsh, sporadic clack of police radios could be heard clearly over the murmur of the crowd.

‘Get anything on that little girl yet?’ Charlie Breedlove said as he walked up to Ben. He was smoking a thick black cigar clenched tightly between his teeth.

Ben shook his head.

‘Probably never will,’ Breedlove said. ‘It’s over and done with.’

Ben glanced toward the front of the room. The Chief stood in the distance, chewing his cigar. One of the Langley brothers huddled next to him, listening intently.

‘Chief made a real barn-burner,’ Breedlove told him.

‘He knows how to get them going,’ Ben said.

‘Told us we didn’t have to take shit from anybody. Now, I agree with that.’ Breedlove plucked the cigar from his mouth and glanced at the tip. ‘Lost my fire,’ he said. ’Got a light?’

Ben took out a packet of matches and relighted the cigar.

Breedlove took a deep draw, then blew a tumbling cloud of thick blue smoke into the already stifling air. ‘You didn’t see Harry on the way in, did you?’

‘No.’

‘He disappeared on me,’ Breedlove said. ‘It’s rough having a partner who’s always disappearing on you.’ He smiled. ‘They give you a partner yet? I mean, since Gifford left?’

‘No.’

‘So you’re just working that Bearmatch thing yourself?’

‘Yeah.’

Breedlove shrugged. ‘Well, when all this shits over, they’ll give you a new partner. They just got all they can handle right now.’

‘I don’t mind working alone,’ Ben said:

‘You’re a loner type, is that it?’ Breedlove asked.

‘I guess.’

Breedlove’s eyes narrowed somewhat, as if he were studying him. ‘Well, I’m not like that,’ he said finally. ‘I like a partner. Speaking of which, I better find the rotten son of a bitch.’ He nodded quickly, and left the room, his thin, wiry frame disappearing into the pale green corridor like something caught up in a wave.

Ben lingered in the room awhile longer, standing idly to the side as the last of the people filtered out into the hallway. Like all the world around them, they seemed to move in pairs. Partners on patrol went home to their separate wives, coupling up once again. There were times when it had appealed to him, this notion of someone at his side. But each time he’d moved toward it, it had slipped beyond his grasp. A secretary in the Records Department had moved abruptly to Galveston. A bank teller at First Alabama had finally decided to go with what Ben himself imagined to be a better man. Each time he’d taken it well, but each time it had worn him down a little, so that he’d made few attempts in the last few years to be anything but alone. Each night he made his supper, read the paper, then fell asleep on the sofa or in his large orange recliner, his ears tuned to the muffled wail behind the black and white Indian-head test pattern on his television screen. And each morning he awoke needing less and less to make it through the day. It was a life that seemed to suit him, and he no longer felt it necessary to apologize for it, or to look for some way out of it. Even Gifford’s wife had finally stopped trying to marry him off to some perfect woman she’d met while squeezing oranges at the A amp;P. Now it seemed to him that she had been his last hope, and that when she’d finally given up, he’d been able to curl into his aloneness like a bed.

*

Luther was waiting for him when Ben got back to his desk. He was sitting in his chair, his hair lifting lazily with each pass of the large rotating fan that stood near the back of the room.

‘When you left the ballfield, where’d you go, Ben?’ he asked immediately.

‘Back on surveillance,’ Ben said.

Luther rose slowly from the chair, then eased himself onto the top of Ben’s desk. ‘You mean King?’

‘Yes,’ Ben said. He pulled the small notebook from his jacket pocket and handed it to Luther.

Luther glanced at it idly. ‘Anything new?’

Ben shook his head.

Luther pocketed the notebook. ‘So what did you do then?’

‘I came back here,’ Ben said. ‘I talked to Sammy.’

‘About what?’

‘That little girl.’

Luther looked pleased. ‘Good. What then?’

‘I went home for a rest, and then the phone rang.’

‘So then you came back to headquarters?’

‘Yeah,’ Ben said.

‘Okay,’ Luther said thoughtfully.

‘What’s this all about, Captain?’ Ben asked. ‘All these questions, I mean.’

Luther looked at Ben as if he were a small child in need of basic instruction. ‘Well, like I said at the ballfield, this little girl could be a problem for us. If you want to know the truth, she could be a problem in several ways.’ Luther lifted his hand and shot a finger into the air. ‘First, they’ll be certain people who figure this is some sort of KKK killing or something like that. We have to make sure that it’s not.’ A second finger poked the air. ‘And we also have to make sure that we’re looking into this killing, that we’re not just letting it go because the victim is colored.’ The two fingers curled back into Luther’s fist. ‘See what I mean? We want to cover ourselves in both directions.’ He smiled quietly. ‘That’s why it’s important that you really work this case, Ben,’ he added. ‘That’s why it looks good that you checked with Sammy. But that’s also why it looks bad that you went home and took a nap after being at the ballfield. That makes it look like you don’t give a shit one way or the other about this girl.’ He looked at Ben closely. ‘You see what I mean, don’t you, Ben?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not like we’re checking you out in particular,’ Luther said. ‘It’s just that things being the way they are, everybody has to be careful.’

‘I understand,’ Ben said.

Luther rose slowly, then squeezed Ben’s upper arm affectionately. ‘I knew you would.’ He stepped away, stopped suddenly, then turned back toward him. His face seemed suddenly strained, and his voice took on a tense and apprehensive tone. ‘Things are going to be real hard over the next few days, Ben,’ he said, ‘and I’ll tell you the truth, the closer you stay to this little case, the better off you’re going to be.’ He turned again, and this time pressed forward without stopping, head down, his back slightly hunched, his feet slapping loudly against the checkerboard tile floor.