Ben eased himself down onto the sofa and waited. Outside the front window, the air was graying steadily, and the cool breeze that wafted through it seemed already heavy with the coming rain. From time to time, he could hear the casual talk of various people as they passed by the house, but they seemed very far away. Only the front room was near at hand, and he let his eyes drift around it like a languidly weaving smoke. There was a small portrait of Jesus on the Cross on one wall, and an enormous calendar advertising The Alabama Bank and Trust Company on the other. In between, there was only the blank wooden wall, its uneven slats rising unsteadily toward a huge square beam. An enormous old coal stove sat in the center of the room on a base of tightly placed red bricks. Its black funnel rose like a crooked finger to the roof and then passed on through a circular hole in the sheeted tin. Thick gobs of whitish caulking sealed the space between the flue and the roof, and some of it had cracked with the heat, peeling away in slender strips which now fluttered slightly in the summer breeze.
The adjoining room looked much the same, and Ben could see its bare walls clearly from his place on the sofa. An iron bed rested against the far wall, flanked on either side by two overturned apple crates. A small plastic ashtray sat on top of one of the crates, a kerosene lamp on the other. The wall behind it was bare, except for a magazine page which had been taped to it, a blurry color poster of a Negro singer, complete with ruffled shirt and light-blue tuxedo, his hands wrapped passionately around a microphone as he crooned into it.
‘That’s Doreen’s room,’ Esther said as she handed Ben a cup of coffee. ‘You want to see it?’
‘Yes.’
He followed her into the room and allowed his eyes to sweep it. Despite its bare essentials, it was undoubtedly the room of a young girl. A small metal shelf held a few old dolls, a game of Chinese Checkers and a tiny plastic record player.
‘She liked Smokey Robinson,’ Esther said as she nodded toward the poster. ‘She liked them all. Elvis. Little Richard. I think she wrote them letters.’ She shook her head. ‘From the way she acted, you’d of thought she could hear them.’
Ben’s eyes snapped over to her. ‘What?’
‘Oh my,’ Esther said softly. ‘You couldn’t have known, could you? Doreen was deaf. She was born that way. She never heard a thing in her whole life.’
Suddenly he saw her face again, oddly gray on the dark ground, and more isolated at the moment of her death than it would ever be possible for him to imagine.
‘I just didn’t think about anybody not knowing that about Doreen,’ Esther explained.
Ben walked over to a small cigar box which rested on a scarred wooden stool beside her bed. ‘What’s in here?’
‘Open it.’
It was filled with costume jewelry, strings of plastic pearls, snap beads, a few rhinestone necklaces and a single ivory cameo.
‘This was her mother’s,’ Esther said as she picked up the cameo. ‘My sister gave it to her before she died.’ She returned it to the box. ‘You said something about a ring.’
‘A large one was found in the pocket of her dress,’ Ben said. ‘But it didn’t look like any of this, and it was way too big for Doreen.’ He closed the lid. ‘It was way too big for almost anybody.’ He walked to the small square window that looked out onto the muddy alleyway behind the house. A skinny yellow dog, its rib cage clearly visible beneath its hide, was hungrily sniffing its way down the shallow ditch that ran beside it. Not far ahead of it, the rusty frame of an old car, its tires torn off, its windows shattered, rested in a weedy lot. A large spotted cat watched the dog anxiously from the car’s dented hood, then leaped into the brush and disappeared.
‘She was almost too old for toys,’ Esther said as her eyes moved over the little metal shelf.
Ben continued to stare out the window. Rows of dilapidated shacks lined the unpaved roads, and the mounting clouds seemed to draw a dark curtain over them, as if to shield them from his eyes.
FOURTEEN
The first thunder could be heard rolling in from the north by the time Ben made it back to headquarters. Dozens of squad cars surrounded the area, and police barricades seemed to sprout up at every corner. Lines of young Negroes were being funneled into the underground garage, while still others were being moved to the large parking lot which spread out, flat and gray, behind City Hall.
Ben parked across the street, then walked up the stairs and into the building. He could see Luther sitting nervously in the Chief’s outer office. He looked as if he had been summoned to his own execution, and Ben hurried up the stairs to the detective bullpen before he could be spotted.