Streets of Fire

by Thomas H. Cook

  ‘I heard you quit the police today,’ he said.

  Ben nodded.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘They had me doing stuff I didn’t want to do.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Following King around, writing down what he said,’ Ben told him. He shook his head in mild disgust. ‘That’s not decent work for a man, Lamar.’

  ‘Well, spraying people with water hoses ain’t much better,’ Lamar said wearily. He walked over to the chair opposite Ben and sat down.

  ‘Want some ice tea?’ Ben asked, lifting his half-empty glass.

  ‘Tea? No. But I wouldn’t say no to a beer.’

  ‘All gone.’

  ‘Mine, too,’ Lamar said. ‘I went out to get another six-pack, but the package store was closed.’ He smiled. ‘So I just kept on driving around. Finally I ended up over here.’

  ‘Something on your mind?’

  ‘I’m thinking about quitting, too,’ Lamar said flatly. ‘You know, the same thing you did.’

  Ben smiled. ‘Well, good for you,’ he said. ‘I hope everybody quits.’

  ‘I don’t think the landlords would feel that way.’

  ‘You’d get another job.’

  ‘I guess so,’ Lamar said. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I guess I’ll get another one too.’

  ‘You got much money to live on till then?’

  Ben smiled. ‘Three hundred and seventeen dollars is what I’ve got in the bank.’

  Lamar laughed. ‘Four dollars more than me,’ he said. Then, suddenly, the smile disappeared. ‘Charlie Breedlove was my cousin, did you know that, Ben?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he ever talk to you much?’

  Ben shook his head, his eyes suddenly focusing more closely on Lamar’s face.

  ‘You got any idea who killed him?’ Lamar asked bluntly.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Ben said.

  For a moment Lamar watched Ben intently. ‘You got any idea what he was up to?’ he asked at last.

  Ben straightened himself slightly. ‘What are you getting at, Lamar?’

  ‘He wasn’t what he looked to be,’ Lamar said, his voice suddenly taking on a strange softness. ‘He was a lot better than he looked to be.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘He couldn’t trust anybody in the department,’ Lamar went on. ‘He couldn’t even trust you. At least not for sure.’ He stared at Ben warily. ‘Hell, Ben, I’m not even sure I can trust you, but when I found out you’d quit over this King thing, I figured I’d have to take a chance, and you were the only guy I felt like I could take it with.’

  ‘A chance on what?’

  ‘Telling a few things,’ Lamar said. ‘About Charlie.’

  ‘What things?’

  Lamar hesitated.

  ‘You’ve gone too far to go back, Lamar,’ Ben said. He shrugged. ‘Besides, I’m just a regular citizen now.’

  Lamar shook his head assuredly. ‘No, you’re not. If I thought that, I wouldn’t be here.’ He took a long slow breath, inhaling deeply, then holding it in for what seemed an impossibly long time while his eyes stared piercingly into Ben’s face.

  ‘Okay,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll let it fly. Once I’m done, it’s up to you.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Ben said without hesitation.

  ‘I don’t know if it has anything to do with his death or not,’ Lamar began, ‘but whoever killed him got it right.’

  ‘Got what right?’

  ‘Well, that he was an informer.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who’d he work for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lamar said. ‘But he was gathering stuff on people, and he was going to let it all out some way.’

  ‘What kind of stuff?’

  ‘Racial stuff,’ Lamar said. ‘You know, about the situation here.’

  ‘You mean things about the Klan, things like that?’

  ‘Things in the department,’ Lamar said. ‘Police things. He was keeping an eye on what was going on in the department.’

  ‘But you don’t know who he was reporting to?’

  ‘No, I don’t, Ben,’ Lamar said. ‘I really don’t. But the way I see it, somebody could have found out about Charlie, and that’s why they did what they did to him.’

  ‘How do you know about this?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Charlie told me.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause he was getting scared,’ Lamar said. ‘Real scared. But I’m not sure it was for himself, you know?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He was close to something,’ Lamar said, ‘and it was scaring him to death.’

  ‘When did you talk to him last?’

  ‘The night he died,’ Lamar said. ‘He called me up and said he’d sent Susan and Billy out of town for a while. He said he was checking up on a few things.’

  ‘But he didn’t say what?’

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ Lamar said. ‘But that night, the one he died, he was really on edge, and he did something he’d never done before. He called me up, he said, “Lamar, do you remember when we used to go caving together?”’ Lamar’s face softened. ‘We used to go caving up in De Kalb County. You know, just boys looking for danger.’

  Ben nodded.

  ‘Anyway,’ Lamar said, returning to the subject, ‘Charlie said, “Well, you know how we used to let somebody know where we was going, just in case we got stuck?” I said yeah, I remembered that, and he said, “Well, this is where I’m going tonight,” and he gave me an address.’

  Ben felt his bones grow hard within his flesh, stiffen, turn to steel. ‘What address?’

  ‘I wrote it down,’ Lamar said. He reached into his pants pocket and handed Ben a folded piece of lined paper. ‘Here it is.’

  Ben opened the paper and looked at the address. ‘Have you taken a look at this place?’

  Lamar shook his head. ‘No, I haven’t,’ he said quickly. ‘I’m not like Charlie was. I’m an ordinary-type guy. But Charlie, he was brave.’ He smiled quietly. ‘You’d have to be to think the things he did.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Against the Chief,’ Lamar explained. ‘Against the way things are.’

  ‘So you don’t think he was doing it for money?’ Ben asked.

  ‘Informing, you mean?’ Lamar asked. ‘For money?’ He waved his hand. ‘Oh, hell, no, Ben,’ he said. ‘Not Charlie. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it for his own self.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Let me tell you something,’ Lamar replied. ‘When Charlie was just a boy, he lived in a small town in the Black Belt. It was one of those one-horse towns – you know, the kind with one main street, unpaved.’

  Ben nodded.

  ‘When it rained, the place turned to mud,’ Lamar went on. ‘And there was only one narrow sidewalk on each side of the street. And one time, after a rain, Charlie was walking down one of those sidewalks. An old colored woman was walking on it too, walking toward him, an old woman, with her arms full of groceries. And she stepped off into the mud and let Charlie pass by. Without a thought, she stepped right off that sidewalk and went down ankle deep in mud. Charlie never forgot that. So when this whole business started with the colored, he decided to do what he could for them.’

  Ben watched Lamar silently while he thought about Breedlove again, about the things he said, the way he joked with the Langleys or slammed Leroy Coggins up against the wall.

  Lamar’s right eye narrowed somewhat. ‘Did you see him, Ben?’ he asked after a moment. ‘His body, I mean.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I heard it was real bad.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘I hope something can be done about it,’ Lamar added, as if in conclusion. ‘It shouldn’t be left to rest.’

  For a moment Ben saw Charlie Breedlove’s ravaged body as it hung lifelessly from the tree, the head slumped forward, concealing the blasted face. ‘It won’t be,’ he said.


  THIRTY-FIVE

  Ben glanced down at the address Lamar had given him, matching it carefully with the small frame house which faced him from across the street. The house itself looked bleak and untended, and the yard which stretched out in front of it was bare except for occasional clusters of wild onions or crabgrass. A stand of poke salad rose along the sides of the tiny cement porch, but there were no flowers or green shrubbery to relieve the overall feeling of abandonment.

  The driveway was little more than two parallel ruts in the muddy ground, but even from his position across the street, Ben could see recently made tire tracks. For a moment he stared at them, as if the pattern of the tread marks might suddenly form itself into a written message. Then, slowly, he settled his eyes once again upon the house.

  Despite the heat its windows remained tightly closed with wooden shutters, as if someone were trying to seal off the interior, protect it from prying eyes. For a long time Ben watched the shutters, trying to peer through their bleak, unpainted slats. He was looking for movement, a passing shadow, anything that might signal someone’s presence in the house. Finally he gave up, drew in a long slow breath and got out of his car.

  He circled the house once, then again, concentrating on the windows. Shutters had been put up over most of them, but a few had simply had their glass panes covered over with a thick, impenetrable black paint on the inside.

  The back door was nailed shut, and the front was secured by what Ben assumed to be a dead bolt. He knew that he would have to batter the door down, that it would not simply spring open if he slammed into it. Once again he circled the house, his eyes searching for some less daunting entrance. But the house had been converted into a wooden fortress, impregnable to the usual means.

  He circled the house once again, then shrugged helplessly. He couldn’t simply take the fireman’s ax from the trunk of his car and splinter the door. For a moment he stood silently in the still, dark air and stared at the house, his eyes moving along the tiny porch, then up the front door, and finally over the drooping metal drains to where a short brick chimney sat firmly at the crest of the roof. A dark, smudgy layer surrounded the chimney vents, and Ben realized instantly that the chimney had once been used to draw up the thick, black smoke of a coal stove. Because of that, the house had to have a coal chute somewhere along its foundation.

  It took him only a few minutes to find it, a small square which had been cut out of the cement foundation and covered over with a flimsy wooden door. Ben glanced around, hoping that he had not been seen, then crawled quickly through the hole.

  In the dank, musty darkness, he could see a square made of thin lines of light He lowered himself onto his belly and slowly pulled himself across the ground until he was directly beneath the light. Then he turned over and pressed upward, his hand flat against the underfloor. The tiny metal hinges of the trapdoor creaked very slightly as it opened, flooding the crawlspace with light.

  For a moment he waited, his back pressed against the ground, and listened. Then he pulled himself up slowly, opening the trapdoor further and further until it fell backward and slammed onto the floor.

  He got to his feet quickly, hoisted himself up into the house, then closed the trapdoor. A single lamp was burning in the room, and in its faded yellow glow Ben could see a huge blue circle painted on the opposite wall. Inside the circle two black zigzag lines ran parallel to one another and vertically from the lower curve of the circle. Two words had been painted in white, their full letters pressing out against the dark lines. They spelled out the words PURE BLOOD. Two grainy photographs had been taped to the wall on either side of the blue circle. They showed a young white girl being kissed passionately by an old Negro man who stared wickedly at the camera.

  Ben turned slowly, allowing his eyes to search the room item by item. Several high-powered hunting rifles leaned together in one corner, along with a scattering of automatic pistols. Boxes of ammunition were stacked beside the guns, arranged by caliber, their tops already opened for immediate access.

  A single wooden cot rested just to the left, and beyond it, a small metal desk whose sides were covered with slogans. There was a mail-order catalogue open on the desk. It was from a weapons importer, and it displayed two full-color ads for various foreign-made automatic rifles.

  Ben stepped over immediately, picked up the catalogue and looked at the mailing address. It had been sent to Teddy Langley.

  The desk’s top drawer was not locked, and Ben opened it. There were pencils, pens, sheets of paper and a stack of twenty or thirty copies of the same picture that hung on the wall. Someone had scrawled a sentence above each photograph: Is this what you want for your children????

  The second drawer was also open, and as Ben quickly riffled through it, he found more catalogues of weapons and paramilitary materials, along with messages and memos which appeared to have been written by Teddy Langley to himself or to his brother. They were mostly filled with racial slurs and rabid exhortations to violent action. Ben made a brief effort to comprehend Langley’s mind, so clogged with hatred that it seemed hardly capable of light or air or the simplest of life’s humanities, its small acts of mercy, kindness and generosity. He tried to imagine how Langley, or anyone else, could become so addicted to his own poison that it became his life’s blood. And yet, as Ben continued through the desk, it was clear that this was exactly what had happened to Langley. Without his hatred, he was nothing. It was what gave his life a meaning, a purpose.

  The third and final drawer was cluttered with an assortment of unconnected items. A police badge, a belt buckle, several packs of matches, a pair of scissors, tape, paper clips. There was a twenty-two pistol and a half-empty box of shells, a small pocket knife and a bottle of aspirin. A roll of electrical tape was nestled in the left-hand corner of the drawer, and as Ben picked it up, he noticed a small circular ridge on its surface. He peeled the tape back slowly, spooling it over his hands as he unraveled it. The ridge grew more visible until the last strand of tape was peeled from its surface. It was a gold wedding band, and as Ben turned it slowly in his fingers, he could read the inscription plainly: For Charlie. Love Susan.

  *

  ‘Charlie Breedlove’s ring,’ Ben said as he tossed it onto Luther’s desk.

  Luther picked it up and stared at it unbelievingly. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘His wife told Patterson it was missing,’ Ben said. ‘When I talked to her about it, she told me the inscription.’

  Luther continued to roll the ring between his fingers. ‘Where’d you find it?’

  ‘It was wrapped up in a roll of electrical tape,’ Ben said. ‘I found it in a little house over on Courtland.’

  ‘Courtland?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Whose house?’

  ‘There was some mail in a desk. It was all addressed to Teddy Langley.’

  Luther’s face grew rigid, and his light-blue eyes seemed to go pure white. ‘Langley?’

  ‘It’s full of racial stuff,’ Ben said. He handed Luther one of the pictures he’d found in Langley’s desk.

  ‘Oh, sweet Jesus,’ Luther groaned as he stared at it.

  ‘Did you know Langley was caught up in stuff like that?’ Ben asked.

  Luther shook his head. ‘I knew he wasn’t liked over in Bearmatch, that he was always busting up their shot-houses and roughing people up.’ His eyes shot up to Ben. ‘But no, I didn’t know he was into trash like this.’ He leaned back in his chair. His eyes settled onto the picture once again, held there a moment, then lifted toward Ben. ‘Do you think he killed Charlie Breedlove?’

  Ben nodded. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Why?’ Luther asked. ‘Because he thought Breedlove was an informer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Luther eased himself forward and placed his elbows on his desk. ‘But if Breedlove really was an informer,’ he said, ‘then who in hell was he reporting to?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Luther stared at him accu
singly. ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘I don’t know, Captain,’ Ben said firmly.

  ‘Well, how’d you know about this house on Courtland Street?’

  ‘I got a tip.’

  Luther’s face turned sour. ‘A tip?’ he demanded. ‘What kind of tip?’

  Ben didn’t answer.

  Luther glared at him irritably. ‘Are you telling me that you’ve got your own little nest of informers in the Police Department?’

  ‘Not in the Police Department,’ Ben said. ‘That’s all I can tell you.’

  Luther did not seem to know what to do. His eyes appeared to grow large and menacing, but with an anger which he could not direct toward anything or anyone. ‘All right,’ he said finally. ‘We’ll do it this way. You’re back on the force, Ben.’

  Ben said nothing.

  ‘Do you want to be back on the force?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  ‘Good,’ Luther said. I’m glad to hear it. Because I’ve already got your first assignment for you.’

  Ben waited, half-expecting it to have something to do with Martin Luther King.

  ‘The first assignment, Ben,’ Luther said, almost tauntingly, ‘is to find Teddy Langley and bring his ass to me.’

  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.’