Streets of Fire

by Thomas H. Cook

  For a few minutes they sat together in silence while the long line of Negroes filed past the car. Down below, the first sirens had begun to wail, and Ben could hear the engine of the Chief’s tank as it started to grind loudly at the far end of the park.

  Coggins watched the demonstrators for a while, nodding to a few as they passed. Then he turned to Ben. ‘It’s strange, what you did,’ he said, ‘the way you just pulled over and stopped when you saw the people coming over the hill. Why’d you do that?’

  Ben shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It’s what country people do.’ He looked at Coggins. ‘You ever lived in the country?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I haven’t either,’ Ben said. ‘But once, when I was visiting a cousin, we were heading down the road in his old truck when we met a funeral procession. My cousin pulled over and stopped and waited for it to pass on by.’

  ‘Why?’ Coggins asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ben said. ‘I guess out of respect.’

  ‘For the dead, you mean?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben told him. He watched as the last few stragglers moved haltingly forward at the end of the first wave. They were mostly older people, gray and unsteady. One of them was an old woman who pushed an aluminum walker before her. When she’d finally gotten by, Ben started the car and moved quickly to the far edge of the park, then made a hard right just as the second wave of marchers began to stride, clapping and singing down the avenue.

  The Alabama Rubber Plant occupied a huge sheet-metal warehouse in the southern corner of the city. A guard was posted at the gate, and Ben waited quietly until he ambled over to the car.

  ‘How ya’ll,’ the man said with a grin as he leaned into the window.

  Ben took out his badge. ‘I understand you’ve got a few storm drains around the plant.’

  The man nodded. ‘They’s a big old one right down yonder,’ he said as he pointed to the northern corner of the lot. ‘But don’t nobody use it no more.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Ben asked.

  The man’s face suddenly registered something. ‘I mean the plant, it don’t use it. But they’s a nigger fellow that lives in it sometimes, I think. Nice fellow.’ The guard lifted his hand to his head and twirled his index finger. ‘A little loose in the head, you understand, but nice.’

  ‘A big man,’ Ben said. ‘People call him Bluto.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the guard said. He looked at Ben pointedly. ‘Is he in trouble?’

  ‘I just need to talk to him about something,’ Ben said. ‘Have you seen him lately?’

  The guard shook his head. ‘Naw, I ain’t seen him,’ he said. ‘Not for a couple days.’

  ‘When did you see him last?’

  The guard shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Last weekend maybe. I don’t go poking around over there much. Sometimes Bluto’ll come by here and talk awhile. It ain’t no secret that he sleeps in that drain in the summertime.’

  ‘Well, I need to drive out there and see if he’s around,’ Ben said.

  ‘Go right ahead,’ the guard told him as he stepped away from the car.

  A long tail of dust wagged behind the car as Ben drove through the back lot of the factory and out to the storm fence which bordered it. Near the far right corner he could see a small gully open up in the flat earth, and he pulled the car to the edge of it and stopped.

  As he walked the crest of the gully, Ben could see the rounded cement border of the drain. It was packed in loose earth and gravel, and as he half-walked half-skidded down the side of the ravine, scores of small stones swept down in front of him and leaped into a chain of small puddles which still remained after the rain.

  Coggins remained at the top of the gully, staring down apprehensively.

  ‘You don’t have to come,’ Ben told him.

  ‘No, no,’ Coggins said immediately. ‘I’ve gone this far.’ He skidded down the side of the ravine, his arms thrust out for balance, and joined Ben in the narrow gully.

  Up ahead, the storm drain could be seen clearly. It was a circular cement pipe which protruded only a few inches from the embankment. A large white sheet, muddied at the bottom, covered the entrance like the flap of a tent. An assortment of tin cans and paper wrappers lay strewn about the floor of the gully, and just to the right, only a few feet from the drain’s rounded entrance, there was a dark mound of what looked to be human excrement.

  ‘Oh, God,’ Coggins breathed.

  Ben moved forward slowly and Coggins, after a moment’s hesitation, came along beside him.

  The sheet billowed out lazily as Ben and Coggins continued to move toward it, but it revealed nothing but a quick glimpse of piled clothing and a stack of rain-soaked magazines.

  Once at the entrance, Ben swept back the sheet. A wave of foul odor burst from the drain. It was thick and sickly sweet, and Ben recognized it immediately. He fanned the air and a swarm of flies lifted from the pile of clothing, hung a moment in the sickening air, then swept down again, buzzing loudly.

  Ben crawled inside the pipe and jerked at the clothing. First one article gave way, then another, until he finally found a hand, blackened, the skin split open and quivering with hundreds of maggots. A small, slender ribbon weaved in and out of the dark swollen fingers, white with tiny red hearts.

  For a moment he simply stared at it, as if it were some holy object, then he returned to the pile, digging furiously through the clothing, flinging tattered shirts and soiled trousers right and left until he found the face. It was large, and staring upward with enormous faded eyes. It had a look he had seen before, only more so. Not just surprise, amazement.

  ‘He’s in here,’ he said finally, as he glanced back toward the entrance to the drain.

  Coggins peered in. ‘Bluto?’

  ‘Yes,’ Ben said.

  Coggins did not move. ‘You want me to come in there? I mean, you need me for anything?’

  ‘No, not in here,’ Ben said. He pulled a card from his jacket and wrote down a number. ‘Go call this number,’ he said as he tossed it to Coggins. ‘It’s the Coroner’s Office. Tell Leon Patterson to get out here as soon as he can.’

  He could hear Coggins’ footsteps rushing up the side of the embankment as he turned back to the twisted clothes and the face that stared up at him from their tangled ruin. The eyes had dried, and a crusty film now covered them, hut they still offered up the strange animal woundedness of something damaged to the core. For a little while he stared at the eyes as if there was something in them that could tell him what had happened. Then he returned to the hand, and the small ribbon that wound itself delicately through its fingers like a sad unraveled bow.

  A half hour later the ambulance from Hillman Hospital arrived to pick up the body. Leon Patterson finally showed up almost an hour after it had left. The heat had been building steadily since early morning, and now a hard bright light swept down upon the ravine. For a long time after the ambulance had departed, there had been no sound but the incessant buzzing of the flies.

  ‘I want this done right,’ Ben told Patterson as the two of them stood in the gulley a few feet from the drain. ‘I don’t want a lot of rookies throwing things all around.’

  ‘I understand,’ Patterson said.

  ‘I want everything bagged and catalogued,’ Ben added. ‘I mean everything.’ He nodded toward Coggins while he stared at Patterson pointedly. ‘We’ll all work together. You got any problem with that, Leon?’

  Patterson shook his head. ‘Nope.’ He grabbed the sheet and pulled it back. ‘Let’s get started.’

  Inside the drain, the heat was stifling. The sweet smell of putrescent flesh seemed to sink into everything, the piled clothes and candy wrappers, the sodden magazines, even the old junk television which rested on a stack of bricks a few yards away from the body.

  Patterson worked methodically, his gloved hands picking relentlessly through the clothing, folding it into neat stacks, then bagging each article in its turn. Beneath the clothing, the body lay on its back, entirely nak
ed. Its right hand still clung loosely to the handle of a twenty-two-caliber pistol. A single sheet was stretched beneath it. There were bloodstains near the top and around the middle.

  ‘Turn him over,’ Patterson said unemphatically, once the body was exposed.

  From crouching positions inside the drain, Ben and Leroy rolled the body over onto its side, then let it tip, facedown, onto the sheet.

  ‘You got fixed lividity on the back,’ Patterson said routinely. He looked at Ben. ‘You don’t have it anywhere else. And that pretty much means this boy died right here. Nobody moved him, turned him over or anything like that. He died right here in this drain.’

  ‘When?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Hard to say,’ Patterson said with a shrug. ‘The heat throws things off. But I’d say sometime on Sunday night.’ He pointed to the side of the head. ‘And there’s the cause of death right there.’

  Ben glanced down and saw a small hole about a quarter of an inch above the entrance to the ear.

  ‘Shot in the head,’ Patterson said, ‘just like that little girl.’ He picked up the small plastic bag that held the pistol. ‘Probably with this little twenty-two.’ He glanced down at the the body, his eyes moving from the wound, down to the shoulder, then along the arm to the outstretched hand. ‘From the angle, I’d say he could have done it to himself.’ He looked at Ben. ‘Murder-suicide,’ he said. ‘Neat as a pin.’

  ‘So he raped the girl,’ Ben said.

  ‘We can make sure the semen in her body and this boy’s blood type are the same,’ Patterson said, ‘but I’d guess that the blood at the top of the sheet is this boy’s, and that the blood in the middle of the sheet belongs to the girl.’

  ‘But even before that, he’d already killed her,’ Ben went on.

  Patterson nodded.

  ‘Then he buried her in that ballfield,’ Ben continued. ‘Came back here and shot himself.’

  ‘That’s my guess,’ Patterson told him.

  Ben glanced about the ravine, then looked at Patterson. ‘Where’s the shovel?’

  ‘What?’

  Coggins smiled. ‘Where’s the shovel?’ he repeated.

  ‘The one he buried her with,’ Ben said. ‘We didn’t find it anywhere around the girl’s body. And we haven’t found it around here.’

  ‘He could have tossed it anywhere,’ Patterson said.

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘To get rid of evidence, of course,’ Patterson said.

  ‘But he kept the gun he killed her with,’ Ben said, ‘and he kept a ribbon from her hair.’ He looked at Patterson doubtfully. ‘Does that make any sense to you, Leon?’

  Patterson’s face darkened. ‘No.’ His whole body seemed to shift into a higher gear. ‘I’ll get all the lab stuff done as quickly as I can, Ben,’ he said. ‘It’ll take a few hours. Will you be home tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll call you the minute I have anything,’ Leon assured him as he gathered the bundles of clothing into his arms and headed quickly toward his car.

  After he’d gone, Ben walked back into the storm drain. It was almost entirely empty now, except for the battered television with its cracked screen, and a few fluttery bits of string and paper. Blood had soaked through the sheet and left wide rust-colored stains in the cement, but aside from them, the drain looked as if no human being had ever lived or died in it.

  ‘It’s not right, that ole boy having to live out here,’ someone said suddenly.

  Ben turned toward the entrance to the drain, half-expecting to see Leroy crouched down and staring into it. But it was the watchman, his stooped body backlighted by the hard noon sun, his dark-blue eyes peering into the drain.

  ‘How well did you know him?’ Ben asked immediately.

  The watchman shrugged. ‘Well as you could, him being the way he was.’

  ‘Did you ever see anybody else out here?’

  The watchman shook his head. ‘He was always alone. But it didn’t seem to bother him all that much.’

  ‘Ever talk to him?’

  ‘Sometimes. So he killed himself, huh?’

  Ben duck-walked his way out of the drain and stood beside the watchman.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Or maybe he was murdered.’

  The watchman looked surprised. ‘That right? I’d never of thought anybody’d want to hurt that boy. He was just like a little kid, you know.’ He smiled gently. ‘I mean, he didn’t know that there was anything wrong with him. With his head, I mean. He was just sort of happy-go-lucky.’ He looked back toward the drain. ‘Thought he was all growed up,’ he said, ‘just like you and me.’ He laughed silently. ‘Wasn’t afraid of nothing. Went out all the time. Claimed he was a policeman.’

  ‘Policeman?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ the watchman said. ‘He had a little toy badge and a little toy pistol. Claimed he’s been deputized.’

  ‘We found the badge,’ Ben said. ‘The pistol, though – you said it was a toy.’

  ‘Yeah, a toy,’ the watchman said, ‘like a little cap pistol.’ The watchman smiled sadly. ‘He used to run around shooting it at things. Tin cans and such like that. You know, like a kid. Sometimes he’d stick it right up to his own head and shoot it off. “I’m dead,” he’d say. “I’m dead.” Then he’d fall right over on the ground.’ He glanced back toward the empty drain and shook his head ruefully. ‘We’re gonna miss that ole boy around the plant,’ he said. ‘An outfit always needs something funny hanging around.’

  TWENTY-THREE

  Fourth Avenue looked as if it had been hit by a gigantic thunder-storm as Ben drove Coggins back down toward Police Headquarters. Small oily streams flowed slowly down the gutters, pushing swirling clumps of debris along with them, and in the park across the street, long thin trenches had been dug into the earth and now rippled with pools of muddy water.

  ‘They can clean up all they want,’ Coggins said confidently, ‘but a demonstration leaves more behind than litter.’ His eyes shifted over toward the deserted park. Far in the distance a single fire engine winked bright red in the afternoon sunlight.

  ‘They can spray the streets forever,’ Coggins added. ‘They can try to make them nice and clean. But by the time it’s all over here, everybody in the world is going to know just how dirty Birmingham really is.’

  Ben said nothing. He kept his eyes on the street ahead. A scattering of uniformed patrolmen was pulling down police barricades while a small contingent of the Highway Patrol watched lazily from a few yards away. One of their commanders stood in front of them, very tall and erect. His uniform was perfectly pressed, and his high black boots had been shined to a gleaming finish. He stepped out into the middle of the street, his eyes narrowing in concentration as Ben’s car approached.

  Ben brought the car to a halt, and the commander stepped over to him.

  ‘This area is under heavy security right now,’ he said. He glanced at Coggins, then back at Ben. ‘Do you have some business being around here?’

  ‘I’m on my way to Police Headquarters,’ Ben told him. He took out his badge.

  The commander glanced at the badge, but did not seem impressed. ‘What are you doing with this man here?’ he asked as he nodded toward Coggins. ‘Is he under arrest or something?’

  ‘No,’ Ben said. He glanced at the small black nameplate which had been pinned to the commander’s uniform: Halsey.

  ‘Well, we’ve had some trouble here today,’ the commander said, ‘and so we’re keeping a close eye on things.’

  Ben nodded slowly. ‘Looks like it,’ he said. His eyes drifted to the right of Halsey’s body. He could see what looked to him like an unmarked police car, dark green and very dusty, with nearly treadless blackwall tires, parked at the edge of the park. Two men sat in the backseat, and as their faces moved in and out of the shadowy gray which engulfed the inside of the car, he could tell that one of them was Teddy Langley.

  ‘So my suggestion to you, Sergeant Wellman,’ the commander said, ‘is to get t
his man back to headquarters as soon as possible.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben said dully, his eyes still on the unmarked car.

  Tod Langley suddenly emerged from behind one of the trees in the park, walked to the driver’s side of the dark-green car and got in.

  ‘It’s dangerous to be in this area right now,’ the commander concluded.

  Ben did not answer. Instead he continued to watch as the car pulled out slowly and headed down the avenue. In the small square of light between the commander’s broad body and the end of Ben’s line of vision, Ben could see Teddy Langley’s eyes catch sight of him, then widen slightly as he peered at him through the dusty rear window of the car.

  ‘So be on your way,’ the commander said authoritatively as he stepped away from the car, ‘and be alert to what’s going on around you.’

  ‘Okay, thanks,’ Ben said as he pressed slowly down on the accelerator. In his rearview mirror, he could see the other car as it sped quickly up the still wet street. Its tires threw up a glistening fan of droplets which fell like a silver curtain through the bright air.

  ‘Well, I can’t say I’m exactly glad to be back,’ Coggins said as Ben closed the cell door.

  ‘You boys have a high old time, did you?’ McCorkindale asked with a laugh.

  Ben continued to stare at Coggins. ‘I’ll let you know what I find out,’ he told him.

  An odd, appreciative smile spread across Coggins’ face. ‘Thanks,’ he said. He wrapped his fingers around the bars of the cell. ‘And of course you’ll know where to find me.’

  McCorkindale smiled slyly as he walked down the cellblock. ‘You two look like you’re getting real close,’ he said.

  ‘You’re going to be getting in some stuff from the Coroner’s Office,’ Ben told hiin. ‘Keep a real close eye on it.’

  McCorkindale looked interested. ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Evidence. From a homicide. A gun, at least. It’s being dusted now. The rest will be going to the lab. You probably won’t see that for weeks.’