Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  Down on the field Mickey Mantle walked out of the Yankee dugout, swinging two bats. The crowd let Casey know it approved. Mantle was pinch-hitting for Reynolds. Reynolds was an excellent hitter for a pitcher, but Mantle could put the home team ahead with one swing of the bat.

  Mantle had to wait while Philadelphia made a pitching change. The Athletics brought in Alex Kelner, their best reliever. Kelner was a lefty; Mantle would be batting right-handed against him.

  Kelner was ready; Mantle stepped into the batter’s box. The noise grew.

  In the press box Russ Garrett opened the door of the scorer’s booth so he could hear Mel Allen’s play by play better.

  “... bottom of the eighth, Yankees trail by two runs. The Bombers are hoping for a little of the old five o’clock lightning, with Mickey Mantle at the plate ...”

  Garrett looked at his watch. Five o’clock lightning was sportswriters’ shorthand for the way the Yankees would storm back to win with late-inning rallies capped by dramatic home runs. The five o’clock part, though, was usually poetic license. Most games started at two in the afternoon, so the lightning, if it came, usually struck around four thirty or so.

  The game today had been a slow one. It was four forty-seven by Garrett’s watch. Close enough, he figured.

  He watched Mantle take a prodigious swing at a Kelner curveball and miss.

  Back in Section 21 the kid finally had his hot dog. The vendor left him and turned to the Honorable Rex Harwood Simmons.

  13

  David Laird said, “Hello, Congressman. Do you remember me?” He raised his head, letting Simmons see his face. His smiling face.

  Simmons moved his lips.

  “I can see you do,” Laird told him. “Don’t say anything: just listen.” He lifted a white rag he had draped over his hand and arm and showed the congressman his gun. He replaced the rag.

  Simmons was too confused to follow instructions. “Wha—what are you doing here?”

  Oh, this is wonderful, Laird thought; better than I expected.

  The crowd was screaming now with every pitch. Mickey Mantle took a change-up low for a ball.

  “Put that gun awa-awa-away.” Good God, he was stammering! He’d never done it before in his life. Tad was the stammerer, he wasn’t. “Put that gun away,” he said again. Much better. “You can’t—all these people—nobody could—”

  “They’re watching the game. They’re cheering. They don’t see us now; don’t even hear us. Look around you.”

  Simmons did. Laird waited while his predicament sank in. Two men, literally having to scream to be heard by each other, invisible. They could have turned into beef cows and no one would notice, unless they happened to be blocking someone’s view,

  “You’re surrounded by thousands of people, Congressman,” Laird shouted. “But you’re all alone. Just the way I was. Anyone who does see us will think you’re buying a frankfurter. No one can help you. Just as no one could help me.”

  Simmons had trouble breathing. This couldn’t be happening. He wouldn’t let it. The noise was incredible: it filled his whole mind. Besides, it was impossible, because, dammit, Laird was—

  He screamed it at his tormentor. “You’re dead!”

  Mantle got a fastball, waist high. He strode into it and whipped the bat forward. There was a loud crack, and the ball took off like a jet plane.

  The congressman’s scream was lost in the roar of the crowd, but David Laird had read his lips. Laird had been hoping Simmons would say that, that he would be trite and traditional to the very end. This made it a perfect day.

  “No, Congressman,” he replied as the excitement around him grew. “Not me.”

  With a quick push Laird knocked the bewildered Simmons back to his seat. Then he placed the muzzle of the gun, still draped in the rag, against Simmons’s neck, just where the muscular throat joined the shoulders. He squeezed the trigger.

  That ought to do it, Laird thought. Lots of important organs in that bullet’s path. Lungs. Heart. Stomach. Intestine. Maybe even the liver or a kidney, with luck. Still, you never knew. He moved the muzzle a few inches, reset the automatic’s mechanism, and fired again.

  A short way around the curve of the stadium, Mel Allen went into his patented home run call. “... going, going, that ball is ... gone! Into the upper deck, in left field. A Ballantine Blast for Mickey Mantle ... Rizzuto scores ... Here comes Charlie Keller around to score ... and here comes Mantle. How about that! The Yankees take a five-four lead ...”

  The crowd continued in happy bedlam all the while Mantle trotted around the bases. No one would want a frankfurter for the next minute or so.

  David Laird moved quickly. He climbed to the concourse. He stopped briefly at the broom closet. His captive seemed to be fine; that pleased him. He put down the hot-dog hamper, picked up his travel bag, stuffed the gun in with the clothes he’d worn to the stadium, and left. He ignored the angry, muffled sounds Salvatore Vitiello was making behind his gag.

  David Laird left Yankee Stadium, reclaimed the car he’d arrived in—a Nash Rambler Airflyte stolen last night especially for this occasion—and struck out across the Bronx.

  Chapter Three

  Squeeze

  1

  JOHNNY SAIN CAME ON to pitch the ninth inning for the Yankees. The disheartened A’s bowed meekly before him, ending the game with two grounders and a pop foul to Berra.

  Berra. Russ Garrett sighed. One more workout and it would be over. Tomorrow one dream would die.

  The official scorer had to total up the statistics for the game, and he asked Garrett to please get lost while he did the arithmetic.

  Garrett nodded and wandered around the press box. The guys from the morning papers—the Daily News, the Mirror, the Times, the Journal-American—were all typing away madly, trying to make deadlines for the bulldog editions of the Sunday papers. The afternoon guys were shooting the breeze—most of their papers didn’t publish Sunday, so they wouldn’t have to write anything but a weekend wrap-up for the Monday sheet.

  Garrett thought about sitting in on the bull session for a while, but he’d been written up once this season, in the Telegram, and he felt funny about talking to reporters. A person’s innermost secrets and desires sure looked funny written down for the public to gape at.

  Garrett slipped into the television booth, where Mel Allen was taking a bottle out of a little icebox and pouring his traditional postgame Ballantine, telling the folks in the audience how great it was going to taste. It sounded like a good idea to Garrett. He made a mental note to stop on the way home for a few beers.

  What a pro Allen was, Garrett thought. He could simultaneously recreate the highlights of the game from the hieroglyphics on his scorecard, wink at Garrett, point to a chair for him to sit on, and never miss a beat of the smooth, Dixie-flavored patter for the fans. And all the while the Voice of the Yankees would keep an eye on the small TV monitor on the desk before him. Every now and then Allen would toss off amusing comments about what the ground crew was doing or the antics of the pigeons who liked to stroll about the outfield grass anytime the Yankees weren’t using it, or just about anything a cameraman could spot.

  There was a honey of a shot on the monitor now. Allen looked up from his scorecard to see a picture of a stocky, middle-aged man sitting all alone in the middle of a dead forest of empty seats in the second deck. The man was slumped down in his chair, looking very drunk and very comfortable.

  “... There’s a fan who seems immune to all the excitement,” Allen ad-libbed, “and that’s something the game had plenty of. Phil Rizzuto led off the bottom of the eighth ...”

  Garrett stopped hearing him. He was concentrating on the monitor. It wasn’t that TV was the novelty to Garrett that it was to some people, either. His father had a thriving TV repair shop up in Westchester. It was the picture.

  That guy wasn’t just drunk. Something was trickling from the corner of his mouth. In the black-and-white picture it looked like motor oil or chocolat
e syrup. Besides, Garrett thought he recognized him. He just hoped he was wrong.

  Garrett bolted from the booth. He didn’t care how much noise he made. He scrambled from the press box and looked around the mezzanine. He spotted the fan, still slumped down, sitting in Section 21. Garrett ran to him.

  Garrett touched the body, and the red-haired head slipped from its balance on a shoulder and swung back and forth across the man’s chest. There were two holes, black-rimmed with centers of dark red at the place where his neck joined his left shoulder. The weight of the moving head opened and closed them like obscene mouths.

  Russell Andrew Garrett caught his breath.

  This was Simmons, Congressman Rex Simmons, and he was extremely dead—no one in Korea had ever looked as dead as this, and if Garrett wanted a beer, he’d better go get it now, because the police would keep him busy for a long time.

  2

  Siren screaming, removable light flashing, the unmarked car sped along the Grand Concourse.

  The driver was a handsome Negro who’d just made detective last July. He was excited, and more nervous than he liked to show. “Ooh, mama! My first VIP murder. And Simmons, no less. Think the FBI is going to try to take the case away from us, Vish—I mean Captain?”

  The man in the passenger seat grunted. He adjusted the sun visor to cut down the glare, and when that wasn’t enough, tugged the brim of the brown fedora he always wore lower on his forehead. He grunted again.

  “If the FBI wants this case, Martin, I want you to promise me something.”

  The driver swerved to avoid a kid who’d wanted to get a closer look at the car. It figured that when the department finally broke down for a new car, it would be a brand-new Packard that attracted as much attention as an auto show all by its shiny new self. “Damn,” Martin said. “Sorry about that Boss. You wanted me to promise something?”

  The passenger growled. His name was Aloysius Murphy, and he was a captain of detectives, Bronx Homicide. He had a vast repertoire of grunts, groans, and assorted semi-human noises which he used as other people might use commas and semicolons. The noises were a large part of the reason for the nickname that was used by everyone but his wife: “Vicious.”

  He had grown resigned to the name. It was his belief that it got him in the newspapers a lot more frequently than he would have been otherwise. The Mirror, especially, liked to attribute quotes to “Captain Al ‘Vicious Aloysius’ Murphy” almost as much as they liked running Cholly Knickerbocker’s column or cheesecake pictures on page 3.

  “For one thing,” Murphy growled, “I want you to knock off that ‘Boss’ crap. This is a police department, not a goddam plantation.”

  Detective Martin grinned.

  “For another thing, I want you to promise me, if the FBI wants this goddam case, let them have it. Immediately. Don’t kick the dirt and say aw shucks. Don’t make a face. Just get out. If you don’t know the way, just follow me.”

  “They’ll make you an inspector if you solve it.”

  “Oh, sure. And they’ll put me in charge of traffic detail on Staten Island if I step on any toes to do it. Do you know who I talked to on the phone before we left the shop?”

  “The commissioner?”

  “The mayor. I guess someone woke him up and explained why this was an important case. Look out for the goddam truck.”

  “I see him,” Martin said. “Well, I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s edgy about this case.”

  Murphy snorted and let it go at that. Edgy was a pretty feeble word for it. His baby, the mayor had said. The hotshot of Bronx Homicide.

  Sure, Vicious Aloysius could deal with crooks and pimps and mob guys, and sure, he had a feel for what to look for when otherwise honest citizens were hiding something, but this wasn’t his kind of case.

  This was going to be politics, and not at the ward level, either. Communists, for God’s sake. And Commie hunters. Murphy didn’t know the left or right wing from Raymond Gram Swing. And here he was with the mayor on his back. And soon it would be the papers, and the FBI, and God knew who else.

  Hell, for all he knew at this early date, the Russians had done it. He could just see himself knocking on the door of the Kremlin, trying to get Stalin—no, Stalin was dead—trying to talk whatever the hell his name was now into giving himself up.

  Murphy sighed. His only consolation was that this was Saturday and not Sunday. Sunday afternoon was for opera—he’d either be at the Met with his wife, Alice (a rare treat on a cop’s salary), or he’d be home listening to Milton Cross and the Texaco Opera Broadcasts on WQXR or to something by Rossini on his recordings. Guglielmo Tell, maybe, the way the brass was expecting him to come on like the Lone Ranger and make an instant arrest.

  Murphy was saving five dollars a week to buy one of those new kind of Victrolas, the ones that spun slowly enough to get a whole opera on one record. LP, it was called, or hi-fi, or something like that.

  Martin broke into his reverie. “Funny you getting assigned to a murder at a ball game, isn’t it?” Murphy was a legend in the NYPD—he had no interest in any sport whatever.

  A grunt. “Damn good thing, if you ask me. Simmons was looking for Commies in sports, right? So we’ll be talking to lots of these baseball guys. At least I won’t spend my time getting autographs for my kids.”

  Martin grinned again. “Don’t look at me: I’m a Giants fan. Now if I had a chance at Willie Mays’s autograph—”

  “Let’s just concentrate on getting the killer’s autograph. Preferably at the bottom of a confession. Because nobody’s going to get any peace until we do.”

  “Here we are,” Martin said. The siren groaned into silence, and the two policemen left the Packard and walked past a babbling crowd into the stadium. A uniformed patrolman led them to the Yankee offices.

  “The witnesses are waiting for you, Captain,” the patrolman said.

  “Good, good. How many?”

  “A few, sir. We’re looking for more—we’ve made a radio appeal. Who would you like to talk to first?”

  “Who found the body?”

  “Fellow named Garrett. Works for the baseball commissioner’s office. He seemed pretty—”

  “Yeah, I’m sure he did. Let me talk to this guy Garrett.”

  3

  The first time around with Garrett was uneventful; the police turned to other matters.

  A few of the fans heard the radio appeal and returned to the stadium; they gave descriptions of the killer. Also someone had noticed a broken lock on a broom-closet door and discovered the real hot dog vendor trussed up like a Christmas turkey.

  Captain Murphy asked Salvatore Vitiello if he could tell him what the assailant looked like.

  “Sure,” the young man told him. “I got a swell look at him,” he said and gave a description.

  “That could be you, for crying out loud,” Detective Martin said.

  Yeah, said some of the other witnesses, folks who’d been sitting in Section 21. It could be him. One or two even swore it was him, and Vitiello was starting to hint he ought to have a lawyer, but the consensus was that though the resemblance was marked, the killer was at least ten years older than the hot-dog butcher. Murphy was ready to accept that. Besides, Vitiello hadn’t smashed himself in the solar plexus and bruised himself like that, or tied himself up, either.

  So they put out an all-points bulletin, the full treatment—New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania. Murphy had Vitiello stand in front of him, then described the young man, adding ten years to his age, and said, “Go and find him.” Vitiello said he’d better stay out of sight or the cops would keep picking him up.

  Murphy smiled at him. “You’re a tenor, huh?”

  Vitiello admitted it. He and Vicious Aloysius discussed the coming season at the Met while the other witnesses fidgeted, and Tad Simmons complained in a stammering roar to Murphy’s subordinates. Murphy might have to avoid stepping on toes, but he was still in charge of the investigation, and he was going to make su
re everybody had that straight from the start.

  4

  Their names were Olsen and Johnson; some now-forgotten wit in a position of authority with the New Jersey State Police had paired them in a car seven years ago. They were, like their namesakes, a good team. Olsen was bald, with a blond fringe and a soft-skinned baby face. Johnson was swarthy and always looked like his five o’clock shadow had checked in early. Johnson always drove.

  They heard the all-points bulletin; noted it, because they were good cops; then went back to their routine duties, patrolling the New Jersey Turnpike between Elizabeth and New Brunswick.

  This time of day on a Saturday evening was busy, but nothing like Friday or Sunday at the same time, when everyone seemed to be fleeing or returning to New York en route to or from a weekend in Atlantic City or Cape May. There were a few speeders tonight, a few dangerous lane changes, but mostly things were just dull.

  They were talking about Roman Holiday, a movie both had seen recently (dragged, they protested, by their wives), and its young star, Audrey Hepburn.

  “Did you see her in Time magazine?” Olsen wanted to know.

  “Yeah. Nice eyes. But I’ll tell you one thing—they better not use her in any 3D movies.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s so skinny, nobody could tell it was supposed to be three dimensional.”

  “Partner, there’s other things than boobs.”

  “Yeah, but my wife don’t like me to see movies that show them. Now you take this Marilyn Monroe. That’s my idea of a movie star.”

  “Lecher. I’m going to see Stalag 17 this week whether Marie wants to or—hey, Johnson, look.”

  Olsen had happened to catch a glimpse of someone in the rearview mirror. For a second he’d wondered why he noticed the guy at all, but a cop developed instincts.

  Johnson looked up from the road and checked the mirror. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Blond hair, high cheekbones, square jaw ... hell, he’s even wearing a restaurant-type shirt. Olsen, my boy, can we possibly be so lucky?”