Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  Olsen grinned. “Are you kidding? Twenty minutes after we hear one of these last-ditch APBs out of New York, we spot the guy in a what is that? A ’49 Studebaker? In a ’49 Studebaker one car behind us and a lane to the right? No such luck.”

  Johnson suddenly got serious. “There’s a ’49 Studebaker on the hot sheet. Light blue, I think. Or light green.” The car behind them was light green.

  “Light green all right. Plate number doesn’t match up, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Well,” Johnson said, rubbing his stubble. “We’ve got two reasons to pull the fellow over now, haven’t we?”

  Olsen nodded and hit the switch for the flasher.

  5

  Laird couldn’t stand it. He wasn’t speeding. He was driving with deliberate caution. He’d taken care to keep the Studebaker out of sight since he’d stolen it last week in downtown Newark. He had carefully switched from one stolen car to another; cars he’d planted all across the Bronx to make his trail harder to follow. He was cursed. That was all it could be. They were supposed to find this car, and all the others. But not yet. Not yet.

  He debated making a run for it. The Studebaker had a powerful engine. But so did police cars, especially the ones used by the State Police. He had to find some way to gain time.

  The pains started coming back. He made them stop. It wasn’t his fault, whatever happened now. It had been forced on him.

  David Laird went through the useless charade of pretending to be surprised to learn he was the one they wanted to speak to. He pulled the car over, parked on the shoulder.

  The police car stopped directly ahead. The passenger-side door opened, and the officer who stepped out seemed so boyish, Laird almost felt he might be able to talk his way out of this.

  Then the officer unsnapped his holster.

  Laird was ready. He unzipped the bag, removed the gun, yanked off the silencer, and tucked the weapon under him. He rolled down the window.

  The policeman walked to the car. “What’s the trouble, Officer?” Laird wanted to know.

  “May I see your license and registration, please?”

  “Surely. I have it right here.” Laird took the gun from under him and shot Olsen twice. The policeman fell against the car, then spun crazily as Laird put the car in reverse and pressed the accelerator. When he had enough room to clear the police car, he shifted gears, and the Studebaker shot southward like a rocket.

  Even as he passed, he saw the other officer draw his revolver and try to shoot him. When he gave up on that, he’d radio for help and go see to his friend. Or maybe he’d forget to radio for help.

  It wouldn’t matter. Within the next two miles David Laird would vanish from the face of the earth.

  6

  Johnson’s reactions were sheer instinct. He ran to his partner. Olsen was bleeding but conscious.

  “I’m fine,” Olsen said. “Go get him.”

  “Are you all right?” Johnson asked. “I’ve called an ambulance.”

  “I’m fine,” Olsen said again, “but I’ll feel a hell of a lot better if you catch that bastard!”

  “Right,” Johnson said. “You just wait for the ambulance.”

  “I’ve got two fucking bullets in me, I swear I won’t go anywhere. Move, goddammit!”

  Johnson moved. Ignition. Lights. Siren. Hit the gas. The bastard would be caught, or Johnson would be very angry.

  There was no way, Johnson reflected, that the Studebaker could get off the turnpike—by now his radio call would have brought men to every exit gate between here and whatever point a roadblock could be set up. The man in white would have troopers in front of him and more stationed anywhere he tried to get off the road. And he had Bob Johnson, in person, driving right up his ass.

  The police car flew past trees and oil refineries. Signs went by too fast for Johnson to read more than a few words, but there was a rest area coming up. Johnson laughed. He’d give somebody a rest.

  There it was now, the long, looping driveway that led to the combination diner-gas station building designed to save people the trouble of leaving the highway to eat or fill up. Or go to the bathroom, for that matter.

  The Studebaker was just entering the drive. Johnson couldn’t believe it. This guy shoots a cop, then stops off to take a leak? Johnson touched his gun in anticipation, then veered right to chase the suspect.

  The man in white still had 150 yards or so on the police car, and the curves in the access road caused Johnson to lose sight of his quarry. Johnson hit the gas even harder to get back in eye contact.

  He had to slam on the brakes when he did see it. The Studebaker was parked—sitting like a big, green boulder and blocking the drive just around the far side of the restaurant building.

  The police car’s tires squealed a protest. The car fishtailed, and Johnson fought the wheel to retain control. He came to a stop inches from the Studebaker.

  Johnson drew his gun, took cover behind the car door, and ordered the suspect to come out with his hands up. Some people came out of the restaurant, a man and a woman. The man saw what was happening, gave a hoarse yell, and dragged the woman back inside.

  There was no response from the Studebaker. If the gunman were still inside, he had to be hiding down behind the seat, because Johnson could see nothing of him. Johnson reached for the microphone and radioed for more help.

  It came in seconds, since reinforcements had already been on the way. Two more cars arrived. The five State Policemen deployed themselves around the Studebaker, covering Johnson, who approached the car.

  Johnson used the Studebaker itself for cover, running in a crouch to the rear bumper, than crawling alongside to the front door on the passenger side. Then he stood and aimed through the window, ready to fire.

  There was no one in the car. There was a travel bag on the seat that contained some nondescript casual clothes and a .22-caliber target pistol. But the man in white was not there.

  Johnson didn’t outrank any of the other troopers at the scene, but he gave orders anyway. “You call in, tell all units to be looking for someone on foot. You two check the parking lot—he could be hiding under a car or something. You come with me.”

  Johnson and the other trooper went inside the diner.

  Johnson was no sooner through the door than he saw a figure in restaurant white. He pointed his gun and said, “Don’t move!”

  There was a loud crash as the figure in white dropped a tray of dirty dishes. He raised his hands and, trembling, turned slowly at a command from Johnson to face him.

  Johnson swallowed. It was a kid, with glasses and pimples on his face, and an Adam’s apple as big as a walnut. Probably on a summer job.

  I almost shot him, for God’s sake, Johnson thought. I almost drilled this kid through the back of the head for shooting Olie. Johnson was disgusted with himself. This was a goddam restaurant. He’d find a lot of people wearing white.

  And he did, too. Johnson, and everybody else from the various police agencies that soon joined him, found a whole lot of people in white clothes. Twice as many, in fact, as they might normally expect to find, because the excitement came to the Samuel Tilden rest area at six P.M., when the shifts were changing.

  They found twelve waitresses and four cooks: two Negroes, one woman, and one shriveled old guy with an anchor tattooed on his hairy forearm. They found two dishwashers. The guy from the first shift weighed 350 pounds and was very upset at being kept from his big date; and the other guy had a puckered little mouth and big sad eyes. When anybody asked him a question, he would pull his head out of the cloud of soapy steam from the dishwater, brush some steam-and sweat-darkened spikes of wet brown hair from his forehead, and say in a voice that was more of a croak, “What?” When the question was repeated, he’d say, “I don’t know,” or “Maybe.” They found two busboys, both high-school kids, the one Johnson had scared half to death and a little, dark, curly-haired kid who kept insisting that his uncle was a big shot in the Teamsters, and if they laid
a hand on him, they’d regret it until their dying day. The kid seemed almost disappointed no one hit him.

  They found only one porter, a Negro, the first-shift guy. Nobody knew what had happened to the other porter for a while.

  That looked promising until they’d found him cowering in the ladies’ room (of all places). His name was Dubcek, he was a refugee from Czechoslovakia, and he had gotten the diner job with a forged work permit. He couldn’t be made to understand that the police weren’t primarily interested in him; he would answer no questions at all. “Is my right,” he kept saying. “Is America here!”

  They gave him up as a lost cause and called Immigration.

  About eight P.M. the news came in that Olsen would probably be all right.

  And about ten o’clock that night everybody knew that the whole search—which by this time involved what seemed like half the police in New Jersey, along with dogs and helicopters—was a lost cause.

  The man with the sandy blond hair, high cheekbones, and square jaw was simply not to be found. Johnson was very very angry.

  7

  Bells chimed. Russ Garrett groaned and buried his nose in his pillow. Port Chester was a nice town; the gateway to New England. Twenty-five thousand or so people lived in the village, a good mix of nationalities and races. There were factories, fields, swamps, and shoreline—the town had a pretty little harbor on Long Island Sound. Garrett had grown up there; and he’d gone back to let his boyhood surroundings wash the war and a woman from his memory.

  But Port Chester was no place to try to sleep late on a Sunday morning. Not only did all the local churches have bells, but they all had slightly erratic clocks, so that clanging from one church or another filled a long ten minutes before and after the turn of each hour.

  Our Lady of Mercy’s bells faded out, to be replaced by those of the nearby North Baptist Church. Garrett sighed and gave up. He never should have left town—both his parents were sleeping peacefully down the hall. They hadn’t had a chance to get unused to the sound of the bells.

  Garrett heard his parents snoring musically as he padded past the door to their bedroom on the way to the toilet. Garrett hadn’t gotten home until after midnight, but his parents were waiting up for him. They’d heard the news on the radio and taken it hard.

  Sam Garrett, Russ’s father, had been in his basement workshop, cursing silently at the guts of a big RCA table model TV. He’d asked his son if he was all right. Russ assured him he was.

  “That’s good. Goddamn Commies.”

  “They don’t know that yet, Dad,” Russ said softly.

  “Who else would kill Congressman Simmons, will you tell me that?”

  Russ said nothing, handed his father a Phillips screwdriver when the elder Garrett pointed to it.

  “We lost a great American today. A real American.”

  Garrett suppressed a sigh. They’d talked about this before. “Dad—”

  “Goddammit, Russ, I didn’t drag my ass all over Europe in 1918 so some Commies could give it to the Russians. And my son leaves a gallon of blood and his baseball career in Korea for what? For ‘peace talks!’ You ask your pal, Hal Keating. He was in intelligence in World War II, right? He’ll tell you. See if he don’t. This country is in big trouble, and Simmons was one of the few guys in government who was doing something about it and getting results. And now they got him. Don’t touch that, you’ll get your ass blown through a wall. That’s the high-voltage section—I took the cage off to test.”

  His son jerked his hand away from the innards of the set. “Sorry,” he said. Russ used to be able to help his father in the shop, but no more. The technology had sped by him while he was in the hospital.

  “Not as sorry as you would have been if I let you touch it,” his father said. Both men laughed. Sam Garrett ran his hand over his wavy gray hair, embarrassed at what he was about to say. “I’m glad you’re okay, son,” he said. “I heard the cop say on the news that you were a good witness. I hope you help them catch the son of a bitch who did this.”

  “I’ll have more than one chance,” Russ said. His father asked him what he meant.

  “Something the commissioner asked me to do.” The younger man’s mouth opened in a wide yawn. “Tired,” he said.

  “The police commissioner?” his father wanted to know.

  Russ shook his head while he yawned again. “Mr. Frick. I’ll tell you about it in the morning, okay, Dad?”

  His father looked at him. Russ Garrett got the impression his father was looking into some kind of magic mirror, reliving something he saw in his son’s face. Russ wished he knew what it was. At the same time the younger man saw in the lines of his father’s face something of what it must be like to feel vaguely betrayed by all the things you’d believed in and all the people you’d trusted.

  “Sure, son,” the old man said. “I won’t be far behind you. Just want to finish up this pig.” He pointed at the set. “Say good night to your mother. She’s been waiting up for you, too.”

  “Okay, Dad. Good night.”

  Garrett’s mother had held him and said she was glad he was safe and that she was afraid the Commies would be after him.

  “All I did was find the body,” he protested.

  “Maybe they won’t believe it,” his mother said. “You just be careful.”

  “I will.” His mother wanted to cook him something, but Garrett told her the cops had sent out for sandwiches, and what he mostly needed was sleep. “You, too,” he scolded her. “You know what the doctor told you.”

  Garrett wiped some steam from the bathroom mirror (it was another hot, humid day) and reflected that what he still mostly needed was sleep. Fat chance. Not when he had that meeting with the cops at ten o’clock. He was a liaison—no, official liaison between the police and the Commissioner of Baseball for the investigation. “Ordinarily, Garrett,” Mr. Frick had said on the phone last night, “I’d let our security people handle this, but I’m letting you do it because you have known the congressman, especially in his connection with the Game, and because you were on the scene.” The commissioner went on to tell him that the whole thing had been Captain Murphy’s idea.

  Garrett neglected to thank either Mr. Frick or Vicious Aloysius (he’d heard a patrolman refer to the captain that way—it was one of the few laughs in an otherwise dismal evening) for the honor. It did explain, in a way, why Captain Murphy had kept Garrett around through all the interviews with the other witnesses.

  Garrett winced as he applied styptic pencil to his various facial cuts. He always made a mess of himself if he shaved while he was tired. He took a quick hot shower, dried off, dressed, went downstairs, fixed himself an English muffin and a glass of orange juice (from a carton, not this newfangled concentrated frozen stuff), ate, and left the house.

  Two steps down the green-painted wooden steps, he turned around, went back in, penciled a note to his parents, and left again, this time with a clear conscience. From early childhood his parents had trained him to let them know what he was up to so they wouldn’t be worried.

  Of course, Mom would be worried anyway when she found out her little boy wasn’t going to be able to put this rotten business behind him. His father, on the other hand, would be proud his son was doing his bit to make America safe for Americans.

  Garrett started his car, pulled out of the driveway of the family home, drove to the Boston Post Road, and took US 1 through its various names in various towns all the way to the Bronx.

  Garrett leaned back into his seat and concentrated on not stamping his left foot against the floor in search of a nonexistent clutch. Garrett had taken some of his accumulated back pay and helped Kaiser Motors finance its sixty-two-million-dollar expansion program by buying a brand-new green Kaiser with Hydra-Matic drive.

  His parents had undoubtedly found his note by now. He wondered if he’d been right about the way they’d take it.

  One thing was sure—Russ Garrett’s parents had reacted a lot more visibly to the death
of Congressman Simmons than the congressman’s brother and secretary had. The brother, Telford (though Garrett remembered him from Kansas City as “Tad”), had come in with his nose very high. The cops had found him and the woman sitting around downstairs in a box seat, waiting for the congressman to return.

  He’d demanded that the captain tell him what was going on. When he heard his brother had been shot, Telford Simmons had started to blurt something, like “I told him,” or something like that, but he caught himself. Afterward he never came close to blurting anything. He’d answered a few questions, but refused to answer (or claimed he couldn’t answer) a whole lot more, including who it was his brother had been meeting or just why he was meeting him. Captain Murphy had growled and grunted, but he’d eventually let it slide for the time being. Garrett noted that the cop at Murphy’s side seemed astonished at that particular development.

  Telford went on to say a few words of his own, though. He demanded that the killer of his brother be caught. He demanded to be led to a phone, because the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the Governor of the State of Missouri had to be notified at once. He demanded police protection for himself and Miss Tilton.

  Garrett had very nearly been moved to volunteer for guard duty, but only if it involved Miss Tilton. Just thinking about her made Garrett’s blood start to bubble. He rolled the window of the Kaiser down a little farther—it was hot enough already.

  Miss Cheryl Tilton was the most attractive woman, in an irritating sort of way, he’d ever set eyes on. She was gorgeous; dark and slim like Phyllis Kirk, only a little rounder in strategic places. She had an air, though, or maybe it was more of an attitude, that seemed to say she had men figured out; that she’d never been surprised and never expected to be, and even if she were, she knew already it would be by something she wasn’t going to like. Garrett felt a strong desire to wipe that look off her face.