Streets of Fire

THIRTY-SIX

It took Ben several hours finally to spot Black Cat 13. It was parked under a shade tree in the heart of Bearmatch, and Langley was resting leisurely on the hood, a cigarette dangling from his mouth and a bottle of Double Cola in his hand.

‘I wouldn’t mess with me if I were you,’ Langley said as Ben approached him. ‘That shit at headquarters, that was a free one. It’s the only one you’re ever going to get.’ He took a hard pull on the bottle, then wiped his forehead with his fist.

‘I been trying to find you all morning,’ Ben said.

Langley laughed sneeringly, the cigarette bobbing up and down from the right corner of his mouth. ‘Well, maybe you got me so scared of you I was hiding out.’ He smiled grimly. ‘I guess that’s what ever-body in the department thinks, anyway.’ He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it out into the street. ‘But they don’t know everything. Not by a long shot, by God.’

‘Where’ve you been all morning?’ Ben asked crisply.

‘Here and there.’

‘Don’t you ever report in to headquarters?’

‘When I want to.’

‘Everybody else has to do it whether they want to or not.’

‘Everybody else works something besides Bearmatch,’ Langley said. This time the smile had an edge of bitterness. ‘Niggers got their own time, and that’s what I got to keep track of.’

Ben leaned against the tree, nudging his shoulder up hard against it. ‘Where do you live, Teddy?’

‘Right in town.’

‘I mean the address.’

Langley eyed him cautiously. ‘What do you care where I live? You ain’t invited to supper.’

‘I looked your address up in the personnel file,’ Ben said. ‘It said you lived in a trailer park on the south side.’

‘So what?’

‘Do you still live there?’

‘What’s it to you where I live?’ Langley asked resentfully.

‘Scottish Glen Trailer Park, is that right?’

Langley watched him irritably. ‘You doing the census?’

Ben let it pass. ‘What’d you know about Charlie Breedlove?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Nothing.’

‘Did you like him?’

‘Nothing special.’

Ben stared at him evenly. ‘You glad he’s dead?’

Langley shrugged halfheartedly. ‘It didn’t mean much to me one way or the other.’

‘Some people might think that’s a strange attitude,’ Ben said cautiously.

‘What do I care what some people think?’ Langley said irritably. ‘Some people think we should eat and go to school and have babies with niggers.’

‘Is that what Breedlove thought?’

A short, edgy laugh suddenly broke out of Langley. ‘Well, I’ll be shit, Ben, you must have figured Breedlove out.’ He slapped his knee and laughed again, this time more freely. ‘Hell, boy, you’re better than I thought.’

‘What are you talking about? Figured out what?’

‘That Breedlove was an informer.’

‘What makes you think that?’ Ben asked, astonished at Langley’s bluntness.

‘Hell, I’m no fool,’ Langley said. ‘It was easy to spot. He was always overdoing it. Nigger this and nigger that. Always yelling at them, pushing them around. He was always doing that kind of shit.’

‘So do you.’

‘Yeah, but with some people, when they do it, it’s for real. You can tell. They got blood in their eye, you might say.’

‘And Breedlove didn’t?’

‘Hell, no,’ Langley said. ‘With Breedlove it was all an act.’ He waved his hand. ‘I always knew that. It was just for show. There was nothing to it. He was just doing it to cover up for something.’

‘And because of that, you fingered him for an informer?’

‘Well, you figure it this way: Maybe it’s an act because he wants to be like the rest of us, a real tough guy, something like that. So. to look good, he slaps a dumb burrhead up against the wall once in a while. Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe he’s acting this way because these ain’t his real feelings at all. Matter of fact, his real feelings is just the opposite.’ He took an idle swig from the bottle. ‘That’s how I figured it with Breedlove.’

Ben nodded. ‘But did you have any proof?’

‘Proof?’ Langley asked. ‘That he was an informer? No, I never had no proof. I just knew it, that’s all.’ His eyes slid up toward the overhanging limbs, then dropped back to Ben. ‘Just like I know you for a nigger lover, Ben,’ he said. Then he smiled. ‘Course, you don’t make much a secret of that, do you?’

‘I guess not.’

Langley drained the last of the cola, then tossed the bottle into the yard beyond the cracked sidewalk. ‘They decide to put you on the case?’ he asked.

‘Which one?’

‘The Breedlove thing.’

‘You might say that,’ Ben told him.

‘Why you?’

‘Maybe because I’m a nigger lover.’

Langley laughed. ‘You know why I didn’t beat the shit of you back at headquarters?’

Ben did not answer.

‘’Cause that’s exactly what the niggers would want,’ Langley said. ‘A full-scale fight between two white cops would have got us both fired.’ He shook his head. ‘And then I wouldn’t be busting heads in Bearmatch anymore, breaking up their crap games, raiding their stinking shothouses, smashing their little basement stills and chasing their whores out of town.’ He smiled cunningly. ‘That’s why I didn’t whop your ass, Ben,’ he said with a sudden coldness. ‘But I can’t always be depended upon to control myself.’

Again, Ben kept silent. He could see the sort of rage that swept back and forth like a hot wind in Langley’s mind, and he wanted to cool it slightly, coax more talk out of him.

‘Where’s Tod?’ he asked finally.

‘Sick,’ Langley answered dully. ‘He’s got a fever, so he didn’t come in.’ He glanced up and down the street, his face grim and oddly bitter. ‘If you worked this shithole,’ he said at last, ‘you’d get just like me.’

‘I thought you liked it.’

‘I do,’ Langley said, lifting his face proudly. ‘You know why?’ Cause I can do some good here. For my own damn race.’ He eased himself off the hood of the car, leaving a wide swath across its dusty, unwashed surface. ‘Well, that’s about all I got to say to you. I mean, you know how it is, a cop’s got to be on the street.’

Ben touched his arm. ‘Not yet,’ he said.

Langley stopped abruptly and turned toward him. ‘I meant what I said just now,’ he said grimly. ‘Don’t you ever make a move on me again.’

‘I took a look inside a little house this morning,’ Ben began.

‘What house?’

‘Little wood-frame thing, over on Courtland.’

Langley’s face turned rigid but he didn’t speak.

‘You know the one I’m talking about?’

Langley did not answer.

‘Sort of let go, the house,’ Ben went on. ‘No paint. A lot of crabgrass.’

Langley shifted nervously on his feet. ‘What about it?’

‘You don’t live there, do you?’

‘No.’

‘Why do you keep it?’

‘That’s my business.’

‘It’s some sort of headquarters, right?’ Ben asked.

‘I can think whatever I want to,’ Langley said bitterly. ‘I don’t have to account for it. And I’ll tell you something else. The niggers, they got some sympathy right now, but deep in every white man’s heart they’s just one truth. You know it, and I know it, and they’s not a white man on earth that don’t know it.’

‘What’s that, Teddy?’

‘A nigger is lower than a white man,’ Langley said authoritatively. ‘He’s closer to the monkeys. Nothing’s ever going to change that fact. Not Martin Luther King, or the Kennedy brothers, or you or Breedlove, or anybody else. Race is race, and that’s the end of it.’ He started for his car again, but this time Ben grasped his upper arm firmly.

‘I have to bring you back to headquarters, Teddy,’ he said.

Langley looked at him astonished. ‘Headquarters?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Why?’

‘Some people want to talk to you.’

‘What people?’

‘Captain Starnes,’ Ben said. ‘Me.’

Langley started to laugh, then abruptly stopped himself. ‘Because of that house?’ he asked with a laugh. ‘Shit, I don’t make no secret about how I feel. I know people don’t like some of the things I got in that house. Those pictures. I know that. But they’ll get used to seeing them. You know why? Because they like the ideas behind them. They know it’s the truth.’

‘I found a ring in your desk,’ Ben told him quietly. ‘Third drawer down.’

‘What desk?’

‘The one you have in that little house on Courtland.’

Langley looked at him quizzically. ‘Who told you about that place, anyway?’ he asked.

‘Breedlove told someone where he was going the night he was killed. He gave the Courtland address.’

Langley stared at Ben wonderingly. ‘He told somebody he was going over there?’

‘Yes.’

‘Was it you he told?’

‘No.’

‘But somebody told you, and you went over there to have a look around.’

‘That’s right.’

Langley laughed bitterly. ‘Shit, Ben, you do more than love niggers, you pimp for them.’

Ben felt his fingers draw more tightly around Langley’s arm. ‘I found a ring,’ he repeated. ‘It was wrapped up in a spool of electrical tape.’ He watched Langley’s eyes as he delivered the last line. ‘It belonged to Charlie Breedlove. He wore it the night he was killed.’

Langley’s face paled in a sudden realization. ‘So that’s it, then,’ he said quietly. ‘They’re going to pin it on me.’

‘Where were you the last night?’ Ben asked.

Langley looked at him mockingly. ‘What difference does it make?’

‘We’re talking about a murder,’ Ben said.

‘And so you want me to come up with some alibi?’

‘I want to know where you were.’

Langley shook his head. ‘It don’t matter. The niggers want me strung up. The big wheels want that, too. I embarrass them.’

‘Where were you?’ Ben repeated.

‘I was with Tod,’ Langley said determinedly. ‘He was sick last night, just like I told you. Had a fever. I tended to him all night.’

‘Did anybody else see you?’

‘No,’ Langley replied. ‘It was just me and Tod in his house. All alone. By ourselves. Just me and Tod. You figure anybody’ll believe that?’

Ben did not answer.

‘Hell, no,’ Langley said firmly. ‘Not a soul.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m already gone. They’ve already stuck me in the pen. Locked up tight.’ He smiled haughtily. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing, by God: when the people come back to their senses, I’ll be a goddamn hero. They’ll bring me out of jail on their shoulders.’

Ben tugged him forward toward his car. ‘Maybe so, Teddy,’ he said. ‘But not yet.’