Streets on Fire Read online

  STREETS ON FIRE

  ALSO BY JOHN SHANNON:

  THE CONCRETE RIVER

  THE CRACKED EARTH

  THE POISON SKY

  THE ORANGE CURTAIN

  CITY OF STRANGERS

  TERMINAL ISLAND

  DANGEROUS GAMES

  THE DARK STREETS

  THE DEVILS OF BAKERSFIELD

  PALOS VERDES BLUE

  ON THE NICKEL

  A LITTLE TOO MUCH

  CHINESE BEVERLY HILLS

  STREETS ON FIRE

  First E-published in 2013 by

  MP Publishing

  12 Strathallan Crescent, Douglas, Isle of Man IM2 4NR British Isles

  and

  398 11th St. 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94103 USA

  mppublishingusa.com

  Copyright © 2002 by John Shannon

  All rights reserved.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.

  Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  Cover designed by Alison Graihagh Crellin.

  ISBN 978-1-84982-322-7

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For the members of the Suicide Club.

  All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the street as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or ignore. I had to make one decision a thousand times: Is it now? Is now the time?

  —Chester Himes

  ONE

  Seven Degrees of Racism

  Ab Ibrahim leaned out the window of his black Carrera for a better look. The two boys were about twelve. Their fingers were interlaced atop their heads, elbows jutting, like POWs in one of those grainy photographs from Europe from way back in the black-and-white war. A big white cop had one boy’s face mashed against the graffiti-covered concrete block wall.

  Ab—for Abdullah—Ibrahim double parked beside what his white classmates in west Chicago had grown up calling a beater, while his few black friends called it a hoopty—a rusted and banged-up old Oldsmobile. He unfolded his tall frame out of the Porsche.

  He could hear the boy whimpering a little.

  “What’s the problem here?” Ab Ibrahim asked.

  “Who are you, with the mouth?” the other cop challenged, turning and resting a palm menacingly on the butt of his holstered pistol. He was skinny and wiry and his hooded eyes came to rest on Ab Ibrahim with predatory languor.

  This cracker five-oh doesn’t know who I am, Ab Ibrahim thought with surprise. “I might be the vice-mayor for all you know.”

  “Fuckin’ A roger that. We already had us a brother mayor. One is just skippy plenty. You best drive on, sir.”

  “Or I might be the nigger from your nightmares,” he added in an even tone of voice.

  “You tryin’ a head up with me?”

  Ab Ibrahim was perfectly aware that it was not a good idea for an African-American to challenge a white cop at random in Los Angeles, or anywhere else in the country for that matter. You always had a ten or twenty percent chance of things going nuclear, but sometimes life just threw you a knuckleball.

  “Please move along, sir.”

  He was an expert on knuckleballs, if anyone was, and no twelve-year-olds deserved to be treated this way. He liked to see himself sometimes as the soul and defender of South Central, unlike so many of the black stars who bought white shoes for golf and moved to Bel Air with the movie Jews or took up residence in the Baldwin Hills with the black bankers and doctors.

  “Now, sir.”

  Knuckleballs. He wished he had a baseball in his hand right then, so he could try his knuckler out on the wall just a little right of the cracker cop’s forehead, maybe two inches. Last year—his first full year out of the minors—he had won twenty-three games for the Dodgers with a knuckleball so fierce and unpredictable he loved watching his catcher Boogie Jeeter blanche every time the man finally broke down and offered him the crooked finger sign that let him throw it. His grandfather had taught him the knuckler: Cornbread Wilson, who’d won thirty games with it for the Pittsburgh Crawfords in the old Negro Leagues.

  “It’s Ab!” one of the kids cried. “Help us, bwah. We dint do nothin’.”

  The crackers still didn’t get it. The big one caught Ab Ibrahim’s eye and mashed the boy’s face a little more, just as a taunt. “Do us a favor, Slick, and shuffle on out of here. Everything is under control.”

  “That’s what you’d like to think.” He had a temper and it was starting to fray. “Po-lice brutality got an odor to it.”

  “What odor would that be now?”

  “Maybe like bad sex on a little bitty dick.”

  “Well, try this odor, Slick.” The wiry cop yanked a little tube out of his belt and started hissing it in Abdullah Ibrahim’s face.

  He screamed and then he found himself wrestled flat onto his burning face on the sidewalk, with a strong crooked arm levering up on his neck and a nasty voice heh-heh-ing in his ear.

  “How you like that odor, Mr. Buttinski?”

  The arm squeezed its chokehold another inch and the tall black man with the expensive beige suit slipped into unconsciousness. The boys peered around, dumbstruck.

  One of the boys started to cry, but the other struck a pose of high disdain. “You just got busy on the great Abdullah Ibrahim, fool. Booyah! I hope they eff yo’ dead mama when this be on the TV.”

  The two cops locked eyes and tried not to look at the unconscious man. Already they could hear the plaintive siren of their backup, the patrol sergeant, heading their way from the 77th Street Division headquarters.

  *

  Tall young men were playing some form of netless basketball in the street, arcing the ball high through an invisible hoop, and they yielded languidly to his car, ceding just a few more inches than he needed. Beyond them Brighton Street south of 60th was lined with extremely tall fan palms, like a photo stretched out of proportion. The trees all nodded east, away from the prevailing sea breeze, but the fronds weren’t even stirring now in the August heat inversion. Almost a hundred degrees, and it wasn’t even noon yet.

  Jack Liffey wiped a forearm across his sweaty forehead and wondered what this part of town would be called. To most Anglos it was an African African area and therefore Watts, but that showed just how little most Anglos knew about the heart of their own city. The 1965 riots had made the name Watts a synonym for ghetto a generation ago, but Watts was really only a tiny district ten miles farther to the southwest and across the Harbor Freeway. Watts wasn’t even very black anymore. The relentless wave of immigrant Latinos spreading out of east and central LA had swept over Watts long ago, leaving it mostly Spanish-speaking. Even here on Brighton the Latinos were buying in; he could see a few of the lovely old craftsman bungalows sprayed with pink stucco and their porches restructured with homemade arches.

  It was a shame, he thought, because he liked craftsman architecture, but everybody had a right to make their homes more homey. If it was the French moving in, there’d be mansard roofs and little carriage lamps.

  He found the address, and it was a well-kept craftsman with the porch off-center and a little draped napkin of manicured lawn down a shallow slope. A light-skinned girl sat on a plasti
c tractor too small for her. She was maybe eleven, with cornrowed and beaded hair, and she looked dreamily off at the powder blue sky.

  As he parked and got out, the girl watched him without any of the suspicion he expected. He guessed that a white face down here would usually mean cop or caseworker.

  “Lemme tell you, mister, they was this big revolt of the rhinestone animals,” she set off without prologue.

  “Go for it,” he said.

  “They was all ready to go on they picnic one day, the donkey and the elephant and the cocky spaniel too, and the mama just up and say no, they got to stay home and clean up they room.” She rattled on for a while as he grinned at her, pinned in place by her insistent garrulousness. This was one lonely child, he thought.

  Finally he caught her in a breather. “Is your name Davis?”

  “Ornetta Boyce,” she said. “Ban Davis live here, though.”

  “I’ll catch the rest of the story in a bit. I’ve got to talk to him.”

  She didn’t seem disappointed. She leapt off the tractor and ran into the house, calling out.

  Normally he wouldn’t be taking a job in the black community where he was at such a disadvantage, but he’d been referred by a friend, a black detective who’d decided he couldn’t take the job himself. It was the first job he’d ever had where he knew pretty much all the details in advance. All you had to do was mix sex, race, and crime to make the front page in LA for weeks.

  It had happened two months back. Amilcar Davis and Sherry Webber had been juniors at Pomona College out in Claremont when they’d disappeared together on prom night, with Amilcar’s classic 1958 Impala eventually turning up five miles from campus in one of the last surviving San Gabriel Valley orange groves. An interracial couple was ordinary enough these days, but these two had been prickly about it, running afoul of enough people to send several police jurisdictions rummaging up a dozen blind alleys.

  An old black man leaning on a walking stick appeared on the porch to invite him in. He had a magnificent white beard like an Old Testament prophet and his bushy Afro, shorter than his beard, was going white too. He looked great in it, but blacks tended to look great in anything, Jack Liffey thought, even yellow trousers and violet shirts. He wondered why that was.

  “You’re Mr. Liffey?” There was no complicated handshake. He seemed too old to be the missing boy’s father, but Jack Liffey thought the papers had said he was. “Come in, please.”

  There was an educated Southern drawl to his voice. The front room was a shock, like falling through into an alternate universe. It was all clean blond Danish modern furniture, the stuff that had been the cat’s pajamas in the fifties. There was also an outsized African mask on the wall that was striking enough to make Picasso jealous.

  “Wow,” Jack Liffey said involuntarily as he locked eyes with the mask. It took a few minutes for the old man to struggle across the threshold and catch up with him. “Is it real?”

  The man’s eyes went to the mask, as if seeing it fresh. “We got that in Guinea a long time ago, but I’m afraid real is too metaphysical for me.”

  Jack Liffey laughed, and he let his eyes drift over the big startled rectangular ebony mouth and the too-tall wood nose. He wondered what religious or social function the mask had been designed to fulfill.

  “I was the guest of an anthropologist out there,” the man explained. “You know what he called all of these things? Bois.” His voice took on a dismissive sarcasm. “Wood. It’s all made for overseas sale and buried in the dirt for a few months to age it.”

  “It’s still beautiful.”

  The girl squealed happily somewhere in the house. Beside the mask there were framed prints that he recognized as Danny Lyon photographs of the early days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: brave black girls singing in a jail cell, a haggard white woman screaming in the face of an interracial picket line, young blacks crowding into a lunch counter. One was signed and dated, For Ban, Mississippi, 1963.

  “Danny Lyon,” Jack Liffey said appreciatively.

  Bancroft Davis placed one very dark, wrinkled finger under a guarded determined young man’s face at the lunch counter. This one looked a little older than the others, with a pipe in his fist and the beginnings of a mustache. “Me. This was a SNCC sit-in at the Toddle Inn in Wavecrest, Mississippi. Not the first time I went to jail, not the last.”

  “I’m impressed. I was a sophomore in college, but I wasn’t brave enough to go to Mississippi Summer.”

  “I wasn’t brave enough either,” Bancroft Davis said. “I was a sharecropper’s boy, already thirty years old and trying hard to emulate all those confident college boys down from the North like Bob Moses, scared out of my wits. You do what you have to, and later you wonder how in the Lord’s name you did it.”

  A woman who looked even older than the man wheeled herself into the living room in a sparkling chrome wheelchair.

  “My wife, Genesee Thigpen. This is the man Ivan sent. Jack Liffey.”

  “Pleased to meet you.” Her grip was strong, despite a stringy weak look to her arms. “You’re studying my husband’s trophy gallery.”

  “The newspapers said he’d been a CORE leader here in LA, but they didn’t say anything about SNCC.”

  A gentle smile passed between them. “They probably didn’t mention the Communist Party, either,” she said. “That was my bailiwick. Ban and I met at Ann Arbor. We had just formed the Du Bois Club and I was secretary. I arranged a speaking visit for this big rough denim-wearing hero from the civil rights war who blew into town like a typhoon.”

  “Denim-wearing indeed. I figure the Levi Company still owes us a big commission. Please sit down, Mr. Liffey.”

  Jack Liffey settled into a black leather Eames chair and decided not to fight the “mister” at this point.

  “When we went out on that campus speaking tour that fall, the college students we saw all wore slacks and tweed sport coats. Have you ever looked at photographs of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley, Mr. Liffey? That was 1964, and they all look like Minnesota Lutherans on the way to Sunday meeting in their sport coats and skinny ties. We wore jeans down South so we wouldn’t stand out, and we continued to wear them in the North as a badge of our struggle. Within two years every student in America was wearing jeans and boots—one of the big unheralded results of the civil rights movement.”

  It took him a long time to bend and sit on the sofa, and then he rested both palms on his walking stick and looked up with a grave, enough-chit-chat expression.

  “Ivan Monk told us he was committed to another job that he could not get away from, and that you would be better for this investigation in any case. You’re good at finding missing kids, he said. And you’ll be better off where the trail begins out in Claremont. Amilcar always said the colleges there only have about a dozen black students, most of them exchange students from Africa.”

  “It’s probably a little better than that,” Jack Liffey said. “There’s six colleges in the town. I already know the TV news version of their disappearance. What don’t I know?”

  “Did the TV mention they’d had a run-in at a blues club with a motorcycle gang from Fontana?”

  “Endlessly. Interracial couple harassed by skinhead bikers. The TV fed on that for a week, but it didn’t seem to go anywhere. The fact that you’re hiring a detective probably means you don’t think the police did their job very enthusiastically.”

  “On the contrary, Mr. Liffey,” Genesee Thigpen put in. “There’s a man there in Claremont, Lt. Calderón, who kept us well informed. We know they tried, even the FBI tried for a few weeks, but the locals don’t have the resources or persistence of a big city police force.”

  “It’s been two months now. What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t think they just eloped,” the woman said, with a hard edge. “That’s what some of the police concluded. From the beginning, everybody except Calderón publicly discounted any thought that their disappearance had anything to
do with race.”

  “Mr. Liffey,” the man said, “at Claremont you will meet people who almost universally think they are not racist. It’s not quite the same thing as not being racist.”

  “Yes, sir, I believe I know that.”

  The little girl came barreling through the room with a whoop and hurled herself onto the old woman, who rocked back and looked like she’d have a hard time looking after an energetic child.

  “What is it, Ornetta?”

  “I just wanna be with you.”

  Genesee Thigpen brushed a soothing hand over the girl’s head and shoulders, and the child quieted.

  “I’m not free of it myself,” Jack Liffey said. They all knew what it was, except perhaps the girl.

  They went quiet for a moment. It wasn’t a topic anyone in America dealt with very well, and he figured he’d better meet it head on.

  “Let me tell you one reason I know my own failings, before you decide whether to hire me. Several years ago I was working in aerospace out in El Segundo and I was a bit more interested in science than I am now. One evening I was watching a Nova program on particle physics. I was talking to my daughter at the same time, so the TV only had part of my attention. Then all of a sudden my eye caught a black face talking about neutrinos, and I had to look immediately at the type at the bottom of the screen-you know, telling who he was. You see what I mean? I’d just sat through a dozen talking heads without giving who they were a second thought because they were white or Asian, but a black face? Unconsciously I had to check his credentials right off.”

  Bancroft Davis smiled. “Mr. Liffey, there are a lot of people around here who’d say nothing in this country has changed, whites are all the same no matter what they tell you, and conditions haven’t gotten a bit better since slavery. Some of the militant kids say things like that. I’d like to take those kids on a tour of Mississippi in 1947. I believe there are seven identifiable degrees of racism, and being snubbed is always better than being lynched. According to Ivan, you’re not so bad, and that’s good enough for us right now. You’re hired if you want the job.”