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.
SEVEN
During the night, police barricades had been set up at the entrance of the underground garage at headquarters, and several uniformed patrolmen now stood determinedly behind them, nightsticks already drawn, and with their eves squinting menacingly as Ben pulled to a halt.
‘Looks like you boys are getting ready for a rough day,’ Ben said as one of the patrolmen approached his car.
‘We’ve been told to expect anything,’ the patrolman replied. ‘Do you have business here?’
Ben took out his identification.
‘Fine, Sergeant,’ the patrolman said instantly. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.’ He looked over at the line of patrolmen who stood silently behind the barricade. ‘Open up,’ he called loudly. ‘Sergeant Wellman passing through.’
The other patrolmen pulled back one of the long saw-horse barricades and Ben drove past them, nosing his car downward into the garage. On either side, men were lined up in marching formation, their commanders taking them through the paces of a military drill. At the southern corner of the garage, metal tables had been set up like a subterranean field headquarters, complete with telephones, typewriters, and, at the far end of the table, a cardboard box filled with an assortment of what looked like civilian handguns: thirty-eights, forty-fives, a few puny twenty-twos, and snuggled among them like a nest of sleeping vipers, a. 357 Magnum, a P. 38, and a few other high-powered pistols.
Sammy McCorkindale sat behind the box, routinely cataloging the serial numbers of one pistol at a time.
Ben picked up an old German Luger, shifted it slowly from one hand to the other, then threw open the cartridge clip. It was fully loaded. He shoved the clip back into position, then laid it down on the table in front of McCorkindale.
‘What the hell is this all about?’ he asked.
McCorkindale looked up slowly. ‘What does it look like?’
‘It looks like a lot a firepower,’ Ben said. ‘But what are you doing with it?’
McCorkindale returned to his ledger. ‘Chief wants all confiscated weapons to be put in working order,’ he said casually.
‘Why?’
‘Case we need them, I guess,’ McCorkindale said.
‘Need them for what?’
‘To arm the deputies.’
‘What deputies?’
‘The ones the Chief’s going to swear in if we need them.’
‘You mean civilian deputies?’
‘That’s right,’ McCorkindale said idly. He pulled a forty-five automatic from the box and began to write down its serial number.
Ben glanced to the left. A group of civilian office workers was busily unloading wooden crates filled with tear-gas canisters from a police van with Mississippi license plates and a large Confederate flag festooned across its rear double doors.
‘Looks to me like they’re expecting the shit to hit the fan,’ McCorkindale said. He looked up from the ledger and grinned. ‘They’re even going to put my fat ass on the line.’
Ben drew his eyes back over to McCorkindale. ‘How long’s it been since you fired a gun, Sammy?’
‘You mean my service revolver? You mean in the line of duty? I ain’t never fired it, Ben.’
Ben shook his head irritably, then picked up the Magnum. ‘You think these so-called deputies will know how to use a thing like this?’
McCorkindale smiled cagily. ‘Well, I figure if things really get out of hand, they’ll learn pretty quick,’ he said. ‘And I figure that’s what the boys in the front office are thinking, too.’
Ben placed the Magnum back down on the table. ‘They’ll shoot their own toes off, or they’ll shoot each other, or they’ll shoot one of us, Sammy, and that’s what’s going to happen.’ He looked down at the Magnum, then back up at McCorkindale. ‘You just don’t hand somebody a gun like that and then tell them to go on out and make up the rest.’
‘I’m not saying I agree with it,’ McCorkindale said, almost in a whine, ‘but we can’t just let the whole town go up in smoke.’
Ben’s eyes drifted over to the right, past a line of cement columns to where the Chief’s white tank rested near the garage entrance. Black Cat 13 was parked only a few feet away, and next to it, one of the bright red station wagons the Fire Department used to whisk the Chief from one blaze to another across the city.
‘I mean, I’m just an ordinary dogface in the depart meat, Ben,’ McCorkindale continued. ‘They don’t come to me for the big decisions.’
Ben returned his eyes to McCorkindale. He smiled softly. ‘Sometimes I wish they did, Sammy,’ he said quietly. ‘Sometimes I sure do wish they did.’
Upstairs on the first floor, Ben found the lobby crowded with what looked like a completely new contingent of Alabama highway patrolmen. They wore flat-gray uniforms, Sam Browne holsters and the sort of rounded black hats that Gifford, Ben’s former partner, had called ‘Wyatt Earps.’ Ben didn’t recognize any of them, and after a moment he realized that they must have been brought in from the distant rural counties which surrounded Birmingham. They had the look of country boys who were uneasy in the city, and who had spent most of their lives pulling over the occasional teenage speed-demon on some unpaved backwoods road. It was the sort of half-frightened, half-baffled look that he remembered from the war when a batch of reinforcements would suddenly show up, fresh-faced boys who’d been trained for thirty days, then handed an M-1, shipped to the Pacific, spewed out onto a rocky island and told to kick the hell out of a dug-in, battle-hardened army of suicidal Japanese.
For a moment, Ben simply stood to the side and watched them, trying to figure out what use they could possibly be on the streets of Birmingham, or why they had suddenly appeared in such large numbers, unless it was to make the very idea of resistance to them unthinkable.
He was still considering it all when Luther walked up and leaned against the wall beside him.
‘King’s scheduled for a speech at the Sixteenth Baptist Church late this afternoon,’ he said matter-of-factly. ‘I want you to be there.’
Ben nodded.
‘And before that, I want you to follow along with the march down Fourth Avenue,’ Luther added. ‘It starts in about an hour, and we’re hoping there won’t be any trouble, but we want all hands on deck anyway.’ He hurriedly handed Ben a white slip of paper. ‘; This tells you where to be and when to be there. Now as far as King’s speech is concerned, I want you to take down everything he says. If he so much as burps, I want it in your notebook, you understand?’