Streets of Fire

‘Did Charlie ever mention Langley’s house?’

‘House?’ Davenport asked. ‘What house? I thought they lived in a trailer.’

‘They do,’ Ben said. ‘But Teddy Langley had a house, too.’

‘What kind of house?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Ben said, ‘if Charlie never mentioned it.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Did Charlie suspect anybody else?’ Ben asked quickly.

‘Of what?’

‘Of knowing that he was an informer.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Davenport answered.

‘Starnes? Daniels? McCorkindale? Even the Chief?’

Davenport shook his head.

‘Anybody outside the department?’

Davenport’s lips curled downward. ‘I don’t think Charlie knew many people outside the department.’

‘So you don’t have any idea who fingered him?’

Davenport shook his head. ‘I’m afraid not.’ He turned toward the window. Beyond it, the city glowed in the summer darkness. ‘It could have been anybody,’ he whispered. ‘Anybody at all.’ He looked back at Ben. ‘That’s the trouble with a situation like this,’ he said. ‘You just don’t know who’s who.’

FORTY

Outside his bedroom window, Ben could hear the agitated sounds of the crickets and the katydids. The soft whir of the single rotating fan served as a gentle background, but did nothing to relieve the heat. He lay on his back, a single sheet beneath him, his underwear clinging to his chest and thighs. Inside the room, the darkness was nearly total except for the small gray rays that came through the window, a sure sign that Mr Jeffries was up and about, incessantly roaming the dingy corridors of the house across the street. From time to time a single car would whiz down the narrow street, some teenage hot rodder on his way to the late-night drag strips which dotted the rural counties that surrounded Birmingham and whose fabled ability to strip city boys of their hard-earned money had been legend since his youth.

He turned onto his side, closing his eyes tightly, drawing himself into a perfect darkness. He tried to think of nothing at all, shut down his mind entirely. But as the minutes passed, he found that his thoughts couldn’t be marched into some separate room, locked up for the night and then released again in the morning. They were insistent, nagging, sleepless, and they plagued him like small animals gnawing at his flesh.

He saw Esther in his imagination as he had never seen her in his real life, stretched out on the iron bed he’d glimpsed briefly the day he’d come inside her house. She lay like him, sweaty, sleepless, her body shifting left and right, her eyes closed at first, then peering out into the darkness, peeling it back as she stared at the opposite wall, lingering first on the scattering of pictures her niece had taped to the unpainted walls, then on the single black and white photograph of Doreen, herself, a little girl in a worn, checkered skirt and black, buckled shoes who posed motionlessly on the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church.

He made a full turn, resting on his stomach, his face pressed into the pillow. Now the darkness was complete, and for a moment he almost slipped into its comforting oblivion. But his mind continued to resist, and so he squeezed his eyes together even more tightly, turned back onto his back, drew in a deep breath, waited a few minutes and then, finally giving up on sleep, opened them widely.

The soft gray rays which had penetrated the room a few moments before had disappeared, and so he assumed that Mr Jeffries had returned to bed. He stood up and peered out the window, his eyes watching the gentle rise and fall of the slender branches of the small mimosa that stood beside his house. For a long time he remained at his window, trying to pull some of the night’s determined quiet into his own mind. But the restlessness continued, and so he pulled himself to his feet, put on his trousers, walked into his living room and sat down in the old wooden rocker that rested near the center of the room.

The heat was thick and stifling, but rocking back and forth in the chair relieved it slightly, and Ben remembered how he’d slept in his father’s arms, his small white face pressed into the old man’s gray flannel workshirt. It was a gentle memory, but in his present frame of mind it became a disturbing one, mocking innocence, full of a strange despair, and to escape it, he got to his feet again, walked out onto the porch and sat down in the rickety, unpainted swing.

For a long time he sat quietly, his mind still moving from Doreen to Breedlove, pausing here and there to concentrate on some point in one case, then move on to some detail of the other. Slowly, his exhaustion began to overtake him, coax him back into the house. He walked into the living room, his head bent forward slightly as he headed back toward the bedroom.