Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  “Johnny dropped a tray! A whole tray of dirty dishes! And the police came. Everybody joked later and said I should be happy I didn’t have to wash them, but I felt sorry for Johnny—I think he has to pay for them.”

  Disappointment was practically audible, even above the noise of the kitchen.

  Captain Murphy sighed. “Was there anything else that doesn’t happen every day?”

  “No, sir,” Joey said.

  Murphy patted him on the back. “Okay, Joey, you can go back to work now. Thanks. But listen—if you remember anything else—the tiniest little thing—just tell Mr. Niffin, and he’ll get in touch with me.”

  Joey nodded.

  “And if you hear someone else has remembered someth—”

  “Excuse me, Captain,” Joey said. “Do you want to know that the back door slammed and nobody came in?”

  Murphy shot a look at Garrett. “Go on, Joey,” the captain said.

  “That’s all. The door slammed—the door that goes to the road—you know about that? That door. It slammed, but nobody came in. It was time to come to work, so I thought somebody would come in. But nobody did.”

  Garrett couldn’t stand it anymore. “Joey, did somebody go out?”

  The dishwasher scratched his head. “I thought of that, but it couldn’t be.”

  “Why not?”

  “Everybody was still here—all the day people, they were still here. I saw them all, later. So nobody went out the back door.”

  “Nobody who works here, maybe. But couldn’t there have been somebody else? Somebody dressed in white, like you are, but who doesn’t work here? Couldn’t somebody like that have gone out and slammed the door?” My God, Garrett thought, I’m starting to sound like him.

  Joey shook his head. “Only people who work here are allowed to use that door.”

  Captain Murphy made a noise in his throat. “Thank you, Joey. But tell me, why didn’t you tell this to the police on Saturday?”

  “They didn’t ask me.”

  “Didn’t the police talk to you?” Behind Joey, where the captain could see him, Johnson was nodding his head emphatically.

  “They talked to me.”

  “But they didn’t ask you—”

  “They asked me about what I saw. They never said anything about anything I heard.”

  4

  Garrett swatted at the buzzing noises that zipped around him in the purple-gray twilight and wondered what it was that had possessed him to come out here.

  Here was a small house on a quiet but weedy inlet of Long Island Sound. Lovely to look at, Garrett thought, especially with moonlight shining off the water. He could live without the mosquitoes, though.

  He was coming to pay a visit to Jenny Laird. Captain Murphy didn’t know he was going; Garrett had gotten the address from one of the police reports. He didn’t want to tell Murphy, because the captain would have wanted to know why, and Garrett didn’t know that himself.

  Someone was singing in the house, a soft, wordless lullaby. It sounded like Ann’s voice. Exactly. Garrett wondered (not for the first time) if he really wanted to go through with this.

  He was on the front porch before he’d finished wondering; as long as he was there, he figured he might as well knock on the door.

  The singing stopped. Garrett heard whispering and rustling inside the house. He found himself hoping that Jenny Laird wouldn’t look like her cousin—that might have been too much to take.

  When the door opened, he saw that she didn’t. Jenny Laird was a petite strawberry blonde, and (as far as Garrett could make out from the light that spilled from the house) she had green eyes. Ann had been taller, and dark.

  Still, there were similarities—the shape of the jaw, the clear smooth skin dusted with freckles, and the hot, dancing lights anger brought to the eyes.

  Because Jenny Laird was very angry. If her eyes didn’t prove it, the shotgun she had aimed at Garrett’s face did.

  “Get away from my house!” Her voice was something between a whisper and a snarl.

  Garrett gulped. “Look, there’s no need—”

  “Keep your voice down!”

  “There’s no need for the shotgun,” Garrett began again, almost whispering himself this time. “I just want to talk to you.”

  “About that stupid hate list? I’ve already spoken to the police. I don’t know who killed Rex Simmons, and I don’t know why any of you should expect me to care. Now get out of here.”

  “I’m not a policeman—”

  “And another thing. You come up here knocking on my door in the dead of night—just like Gestapo or the NKVD and the rest, and you expect me to—”

  “I’m not a policeman,” Garrett said. He was starting to get irritated. “And it’s only a quarter after eight. Now would you please—ahh, to hell with it.” He took a quick step forward and pulled the shotgun from her grasp. Even before he finished doing it, he knew what a stupid move it had been, but he got lucky.

  Garrett broke the gun and took out the shells. “Jesus,” he breathed. “Pumpkin balls. Mrs. Laird, are you insane?” Garrett could feel sweat breaking out in his forehead over what he’d almost put himself in for. A single lump of lead the size of a walnut powered from each barrel. They could make a puree of a man’s body.

  He shook the cartridges under the woman’s nose. “Do you know what these things can do? You don’t want to know. If you want to kill somebody, kill him. I mean, I’ve had five bullets hit me, but these—

  “And why the hell am I whispering?”

  He looked at the woman. There were no more angry flashes in her eyes. Now she was frightened and more than a little guilty.

  “My children are asleep,” said Jenny Laird.

  “Oh. Then you wouldn’t have wanted to awaken them with any loud noises, would you?”

  “I just want to be left alone.”

  “Yeah.” Garrett nodded. “I could do with some of that myself.” He handed her back the shotgun. “I’m leaving now. I’m taking your ammunition with me. If you’ve got any more of these things, for God’s sake, get rid of them. Use bird shot. Or have the gun shop make up rock-salt shells for you. That’ll keep out intruders. Good night.”

  Garrett turned and headed down the stoop, figuring he could get to his car and be out of range before this crazy woman could reload. Jenny Laird spoke before he reached the bottom.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He looked back over his shoulder at her. She was smiling. Her smile was very nice; she didn’t seem crazy at all.

  “Really, I am sorry, Mr. ...”

  “Garrett. Russell Garrett.”

  The smile was replaced by a puzzled frown. Jenny Laird tilted her head. “Oh,” she said. “You were Ann’s ...”

  “Yeah. I was. I wanted to talk to you.”

  “About my cousin?”

  “Mostly.”

  “Then I really am sorry, Mr. Garrett. Won’t you come in and talk to me now?”

  5

  “Stop apologizing,” Garrett said. He could talk more normally now; the book-lined study Jenny Laird had brought him to was away from the children’s rooms. “I don’t blame you for being upset. The police have been giving me pains, too. The shotgun is a little extreme, that’s all.”

  He decided to change the subject. “What sort of articles do you write?” The room was her office, she’d said. She had to work at home to take care of the children.

  She waved a hand. “Oh, all sorts of things. Book reviews, history. There are a lot of magazines. I even write about swimming sometimes—I was quite a swimmer in college. I met David—my husband—at a swimming meet. I still do whenever I can—swim, I mean. Can’t swim in this swamp, unfortunately. Still, I’ve gotten in the habit of keeping my hair short, so I ...”

  She just stopped talking, as though she had a switch that closed her mouth when she started to babble. An embarrassed silence followed, but it only lasted a second, because a baby started to cry in the other room.

/>   “Excuse me,” Jenny Laird said and bounced from her chair. Before she had left the room, another voice joined in. Garrett was impressed to hear the two-year-old twins crying in perfect harmony. Patti Page would have been proud of them.

  Garrett pulled at his tie, took a sip of coffee (she didn’t have anything cold to drink), wiped his forehead with a napkin, and wished he’d never come out here. Not only was he hot, tired, and miserable, but neither he nor his hostess could get the conversation around to what he was supposed to be there to talk about.

  He’d found out some things about Jenny Laird. She was thirty years old, from Indianapolis, originally. She’d met and married David Laird eleven years ago, when she was a sophomore at Barnard. She had a son, Mark, who was ten years old, and the twin girls, Dorothy and Alice, who were two. Her husband died a little less than eighteen months ago. Under suspicion of being a Communist.

  She’d been through hell since. A distant relative of her husband’s had tried to get custody of her children—was still trying, in fact. She had to publish her articles under false names. She was justifiably anxious about unannounced visitors. Garrett was beginning to understand the armament. It didn’t have any practical value—she wouldn’t be able to take care of her kids if she were in jail—but it was a nice, symbolic doomsday gesture: “If things go wrong, I can always blow something up.”

  That was a strategy Garrett could sympathize with. All through his adolescence, a baseball career had meant that to him—I can always forget real life and go play baseball. That was exactly what he had done, come to think of it. He made a noise in his throat as he suddenly remembered that he had missed his make-or-break session with the stairs today. His hold on baseball seemed to be slipping rapidly away.

  He wondered what he could do for his next doomsday gesture. Maybe join the Foreign Legion.

  Jenny Laird rejoined him, wearing a tired smile. “I’m sorry about the interruption,” she told him. “They’re such angels—when they’re asleep.”

  “Twins must be a lot of work.”

  Jenny’s smile got a little less tired. “A whole lot. My son is a big help, especially when I’m working. It’s not really fair to him, but Mark never complains.”

  “I’d like to meet him sometime.”

  “He’ll be sorry he slept through your visit. Especially when he finds out you know Mickey Mantle.”

  Garrett said nothing. They’d talked about his baseball career, but not the reasons for it. And Garrett, stupidly, was jealous of Mantle. He discovered that he wanted boys to look up to him. Or maybe just Jenny Laird’s boy.

  “Would you like to see the twins?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  Garrett got to his feet and followed his hostess to a bedroom where the twins slept in an oversize crib. Dorothy, Garrett was told, was the one with the thumb stuck in her soft little mouth. Her mother gently removed it. Little Alice gurgled and kicked her legs in her sleep. The soft lamplight in the room picked out highlights in the babies’ hair, which was the same shade as their mother’s.

  Garrett felt a sharp pang of sympathy for David Laird. It was a sin, he thought, for a man to be deprived of seeing his children at times like this ...

  Garrett left the room. Blindly, as if he were running for his life.

  Jenny caught up with him in the living room. He was fighting tears. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He rubbed his eyes and laughed. “No.” He laughed again. “I’m sorry about this.”

  “There’s no need—” she began.

  “Yes, there is. Listen, Jenny—is it okay to call you Jenny?”

  “Of course. I’ll call you Russ.”

  “Good. Listen, I don’t know how much you know about your cousin and me, but I wasn’t the one who left. It’s important for you to believe this. She moved out on me. I never knew she was pregnant until I heard she was dead. By then I had dropped out of school. I was in Arizona, trying out with the Yankees. But if I’d known ... I’d never have let it happen.”

  “You would have wanted her to have the baby.”

  “I would have married her. I wanted to all along.”

  Jenny shook her head. She looked very wise. “Annie knew that. That’s why she never introduced you to David and me. That’s why she left you. That’s why she decided not to have the baby.”

  Garrett said he didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Ann and I were very close, Russ, despite the fact that I was six years older than she was. We were more like best friends than cousins.

  “I don’t have to tell you how stubborn she was, how independent. How devoted she was to liberal causes. How she was going to fix the world.”

  “No,” Garrett said. “You don’t. We used to argue a lot about politics. Ann was all heart, without a practical thought in her head.”

  “But the point is, she was so committed to this sort of work, nothing would stop her from doing it.”

  “I wouldn’t have stopped her, for God’s sake,” Garrett insisted.

  “You would have, though, without doing a thing. You were going to go to law school. She said you were going to be a great man, a real success, a boon to society. But Ann could see what was happening. The movie blacklists, the Hiss trial. McCarthy and Simmons and the rest were going to further and further extremes to get headlines.

  “Then someone came around asking her questions about my husband. She knew no one was ever ‘cleared’ in that kind of investigation without a wholesale betrayal of his convictions, and David wasn’t the kind of man who’d do that. Ann was the same way. And she’d been active in many of the same organizations David was. When Ed Bristow testified, she knew trouble was coming for all of us. And there she was, living with a man who was not her husband, who didn’t believe in the same things she believed in.”

  “I believed in her, goddammit.” Garrett was furious.

  “Ann knew that, Russ.” The woman’s voice was soft, crooning, almost as it had been when she sang her lullaby. “And she didn’t want you to have to choose between your future and her.”

  Garrett didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Ann was going to be his future. “That’s what we used to fight about,” he said. “She was so determined to help people that she never asked how she could. She was going to help the poor by taking money away from the rich, but she never saw that poor people don’t want to abolish wealth, they just want enough to get by on while they hope for a decent shot at someday being rich themselves. And it was the same in this case, wasn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “She was going to save me whether I wanted it or not. And she was going to rid me of the embarrassment of fathering a bastard, whether I wanted her to or not. And she got herself killed by some butcher without even telling ... even ...”

  Garrett couldn’t go on.

  “Russ,” Jenny said. “Russ.” She walked over to him and took his hand. “You told me before there was something I had to believe. There’s something you have to believe, too.”

  Garrett looked at her.

  “Ann really suffered over her decision. She wouldn’t even talk to me about it, though I begged her to. I don’t know if it would have made any difference; but—oh, to hell with it. The thing is, she loved you, Russ. That’s why she did it.”

  “I know,” Garrett said, “but the fact remains that she ran away with her problem instead of sharing it with me. Or anybody.”

  Jenny rubbed the back of her red-gold hair. “Everybody runs away at some time or another. Don’t you think so, Russ?”

  Garrett didn’t answer; Jenny seemed to take it for assent. They were silent for a long time. Finally Garrett said, “You wouldn’t happen to have a picture of Annie by any chance, would you? I—I didn’t take any with me when I left town.”

  “I think I do,” Jenny said. Her voice was soft. She rose and left the room, returning in a few minutes with an oversize snapshot, the kind you’d take with one of those old accordion cameras.
It had been taken at the beach, Oakland Beach in Rye, up in Garrett’s home territory, judging by the landscape. Jenny explained that she and her husband had lived there.

  There were three figures in the picture. The light-haired woman was obviously Jenny Laird—Garrett noted academically how nicely his hostess’s swimsuit showed her trim, healthy figure. The man next to her had to be her late husband.

  The third figure was Ann, and after that first glance, it was her face that took all his attention. He allowed himself, for the first time since she’d left him, to forget about the hurt and the anger she’d caused, and he simply missed her. And it was almost more than he could stand.

  “Jenny, I’d like to take this with me. I’ll have a copy made and bring it back to you.”

  “All right, Russ. Please be careful with it, though. It’s very precious to me. It was my birthday.” She gave a sad little laugh. “It was the last time the three of us were together and not scared.”

  Garrett promised to be careful. Jenny showed him to the door and took both his hands in both of hers. “I’m glad you came here, Russ. ... That’s something I haven’t said to a visitor in a long time.”

  Garrett said he guessed he was glad he’d come, too. And maybe, he told himself, I even mean it.

  6

  The white girl’s name was Lindy, and she seemed taller than she was because she was so thin. Her skin was pale and translucent; her hair was almost white. She didn’t have a brain in her head, Gennarro Kennedy reflected, but she was rather pretty at times. For instance, when she was in the throes of passion, as she was now.

  Kennedy looked down at the enrapt face and smiled. He’d acquired Lindy quite by accident. Kennedy had once needed, for a project he’d been working on, the cooperation of Chicago Ned, who ran various illegal activities in the Negro community in Kansas City. The negotiations were far more difficult than Kennedy had anticipated, and it didn’t take long for him to determine why—Chicago Ned was a bigot. Chicago Ned, despite his own hard-won success, had been unable to believe a Negro could command respect unless he carried the same visible trappings of power Ned himself did—a big gun; a thick roll of money; a white mistress.