Streets of Fire

SIX

On his way to work the next morning, Ben parked at almost the same spot on Twenty-third Street where he’d stopped the night before. But by seven o’clock, when he finally pulled over to the curb, the streets were already busy. Small knots of people strolled briskly up and down the sidewalks and across the ballfield. Children sped past on their rusting bicycles, and the traffic along the street and the adjoining avenues was quick and noisy. It was as if the whole neighborhood had been resurrected with the morning light, and now, when people approached his car, they didn’t hesitate or step aside, but simply continued forward without so much as a break in stride. The bright sunlight seemed to serve them as a kind of shield against the dangers which inevitably returned with the night, and under its brief protection, they strode openly to the bus stops, talking quietly as they walked.

For a while Ben sat behind the wheel and watched, just as he had the night before. But this time, he knew that he had only a few minutes to linger at the edge of the ballfield before the inevitable voice from the radio ordered him to headquarters. By now the detectives on the morning shift would be trudging up the cement stairs to receive what they had lately come to call their ‘combat orders,’ assignments which shifted by the minute, but which generally had to do with handling the crowds, paperwork and jailhouse overflow caused by the demonstrations. It was as if everything else had stopped, all the burglaries, assaults and domestic quarrels, and that now there was only this single, dreadful preoccupation with the streets, a great black pit into which everything else, the whole varied texture of daily life, had fallen.

And yet, as Ben continued to sit in his car, his eyes slowly moving from one corner to the next, he could see that much of the general flow of life continued. Bearmatch went on with its routine, and from behind the wheel, he could sit quietly and take in its pace, its odors, the broad tone of its common life. He could see how the maids in their white uniforms gathered in little knots at the bus stops, how the laborers in their gray worksuits or shirtless beneath their tattered bib-overalls moved like a slow, silent army toward the railroad yards and sweltering steel mills. He could hear the morning shift-horns as they sounded loudly through the alleyways and over the sloping shanties, and he remembered that in his youth, they had sounded over his house too. He could smell the bacon grease, redeye gravy and warm half-risen biscuits, and for an instant they seemed to come from his mother’s kitchen, and he could recall how, in the morning, after breakfast, his own father and mother had moved out onto the street like the people who now flowed around him, taking him first to school, and then trudging on down the avenue to board the old electrical trolleys that crisscrossed the city on a grid of wire and steel.

For a long time, his parents had been mostly ghosts to him, his father brought down by a slow disease, his mother simply dead for a reason no one at Hillman Hospital had ever bothered to explain. In the summer, as he remembered now, they’d sometimes fallen asleep in their swing while he remained inside, listening to the radio. Later he would find them slouched to one side, the old man’s face buried in his wife’s large, fallen breasts, the old woman’s head dropping so far down toward her husband’s that it looked half-severed, and both of them snoring wheezily while the lightning bugs twinkled in the humid air. But now they suddenly returned to him as more than bodies floating silently in a little wrought-iron swing, and for a moment he found himself wondering about what their lives had really been, what they had thought about as they sat together, listening to the crickets and katydids, the slicing sound the traffic made after a fierce summer rain, the tinkling bells of the trolleys, what they would think about even now if they were alive, what they would think about the uproar in the city, about the nameless little girl beneath the goalpost, what they, knowing about all this, would tell hi in he should do.

The clack of the radio sounded suddenly, and after it, the dispatcher’s voice. ‘Headquarters calling Car 17.’

Ben picked up the microphone. ‘Car 17.’

‘That you, Ben?’

‘Yeah. What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing much,’ the dispatcher said. ‘Patterson, at the Coroner’s Office, he wants you to give him a call when you get a chance.’

‘Is he at Hillman?’

‘I guess so.’

‘I’m not too far away,’ Ben said. I’ll drive over. Everything okay at headquarters?’

‘About the same.’

‘I’ll come over as soon as I leave Hillman,’ Ben said.

He snapped the radio back into its cradle, then paused a moment, staring out once again into the field. Perhaps a hundred yards away, he could see groups of children gathering under the goalpost. They looked as if they were dressed in their Sunday best, the girls in clean white dresses, the boys in dark trousers and plain white shirts. For a moment, Ben thought it might be some kind of memorial service for the murdered girl, some strange Bearmatch rite which no outsiders knew about. Then, suddenly, a tall young man in a dark blue suit stepped from their midst and shouted something. Instantly a smattering of placards shot into the air. They were made of white poster-paper tacked to spindly wooden slats, and they were the sort Ben had seen a great many of since the demonstrations had begun. The thick, black lettering conveyed the same protests and demands, and as the children filed silently off the littered field, two abreast, holding hands, smiling with what seemed to him an odd and unknowable happiness, Ben wondered if, under different circumstances, the murdered girl might have been among them, her hand in someone else’s, her buckled shoes skipping lightly across the parched ground, her face emboldened with the same bright smile.

Patterson was going through a stack of files in the outer office when Ben arrived.

‘Well, they got to you pretty fast,’ he said.

‘What do you have?’ Ben asked.

‘I wish I had more, to tell you the truth,’ Patterson told him. ‘You find out who the girl was yet?’

‘No.’

‘Well, I probably can’t help you much with that,’ Patterson said. ‘But I did find something you might want to see.’ He smiled slyly. ‘Especially since the front office is so hot for the Coroner’s Office to work this case.’ He pushed himself back from the desk slightly and opened the top drawer. ‘I vacuumed her dress, and while I was doing that, I found something.’ He drew a plastic bag from the desk drawer and handed it to Ben. ‘It was in one of her pockets. I’m surprised you guys didn’t find it when you dug her up.’

Ben lifted the bag up to the light. He could see a metal ring. The plated imitation gold was already turning green. Its setting contained a large, purple oval of cut glass.

‘Not exactly a priceless piece, is it?’ Patterson said softly. ‘But what with her being from Bearmatch, it probably meant something to her.’

Ben continued to look at the ring. ‘Where’d you find it?’

‘It was tucked inside one of her pockets,’ Patterson said. He shrugged. It’s just a piece of old costume jewelry, but the little girl probably thought it was worth a lot.’

Ben turned the bag slowly before his eyes. ‘Then why wasn’t she wearing it?’ he asked. Then he looked at Patterson. ‘Where is she?’

‘Still in the freezer,’ Patterson said. ‘We’re not burying her until late this afternoon.’

‘I’d like to see her again.’

‘She didn’t come back to life overnight,’ Patterson said. ‘We can’t do that for her.’

Ben turned abruptly and walked into the adjoining room. The girl was still in Compartment 7. He opened the door, pulled out the carriage and drew back the sheet.

‘What are you doing?’ Patterson asked as he stepped up beside him.

Ben did not answer. He took the ring out of the bag, lifted one of the girl’s hands from the carriage and inserted the ring onto her little finger. It was too large to hold it. He tried the index finger, the middle finger and finally the thumb. The ring was far too large to fit any of them.

‘She wasn’t wearing it because it wasn’t hers,’ he said as he dropped the ring back into the bag.

Patterson nodded. ‘Boyfriend’s, maybe?’ he asked hesitantly.

Ben looked at him. ‘I don’t know. She could have worn it on a chain around her neck. She could have picked it up on the street.’ He walked over to the small metal desk at the rear of the room and looked at the ring under the desk lamp, turning it slowly in his fingertips. ‘No name,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘No initials.’ He dropped it back into the plastic bag and handed it to Patterson. ‘Send it over to be dusted,’ he told him, ‘and tell them to let me know what they find.’

‘Okay,’ Patterson said with a slight edge of sarcasm. Whatever they want in the front office, that’s what we do.’

Ben did not seem to hear him. ‘Where’s her dress?’

Patterson pointed toward a plain cardboard box which rested beneath a long wooden table. ‘Over there.’

Ben walked over to the box, took out the dress and spread it across the table. ‘Which pocket did you find it in?’

Patterson pointed to a single shallow breast pocket. ‘Right there.’

Ben gazed steadily at the dress. In addition to the one on the right front of the dress, it had two side pockets, and he inserted his hands into each of them. ‘They’re a lot deeper,’ he said.

Patterson looked at him oddly. ‘So what?’

‘Well, I was just thinking,’ Ben said. ‘If I were a little girl who wanted to keep from losing my ring, I’d put it in one of my side pockets.’ He looked at Patterson pointedly. ‘Wouldn’t you, Leon?’

Patterson glanced down at the dress, then back up to Ben. ‘Yeah, I would,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Unless I was careless.’

Ben picked up the dress by the shoulders and turned it slowly in the light. It was badly soiled from the burial, and there were bloodstains on the skirt.

‘Those bloodstains,’ Ben said. ‘Where’d they come from?’

‘The rape,’ Patterson replied authoritatively. ‘Where else would they come from?’

Ben twisted the dress around so that Patterson could see the back of it. ‘How come there’s no blood on her collar?’ he asked. ‘She was shot in the back of the head. I lead wounds are usually pretty bloody.’

Patterson stared silently at the white, ruffled collar for a moment, then looked at Ben. ‘I can’t answer that, Ben,’ he said at last, ‘I really don’t know.’

‘I do,’ Ben said. He glanced back over toward the body. The small dark hand dangled from the metal carriage, casting a tiny shadow across the polished tile floor. She was naked when somebody shot her,’ he said. He lifted his right hand, fingers spread, and held it suspended in the air at about four feet from the floor. ‘She was naked, and she was standing about this high, Leon,’ he continued softly. ‘And somebody a whole lot bigger came up behind her and put a gun a few inches from the back of her head and pulled the trigger.’

Something very dark silently passed over Patterson’s face. ‘Let me know if I can help you any more on this one, Ben,’ he said finally. Then he turned very quickly and walked away.