Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  Garrett couldn’t bring himself to do that, but he knew if he told the cops, they could bring themselves to ask her that question without a second thought.

  Garrett finished his Coke, placed the empty bottle in the rack, and went back to bake himself in the phone booth some more.

  What the hell, Garrett thought. I’ll call. What did he have to lose? What if he didn’t know enough about the (purportedly) late Professor David Laird to approach his wife about him? Then he’d find out. And the first thing he’d do was tell the (purported) widow to expect him. He had to tell her in person. He picked up the receiver and dropped his dime in the phone.

  9

  “Let’s go out on the rocks,” the taller boy said. “The beach is too crowded.”

  That was not exactly true. There were plenty of people at the beach today and plenty more at the amusement park just behind it. But it was still only a Monday morning, and compared to the crowds that had been here yesterday, the beach was practically deserted. What the boy, whose name was Jeff, had meant was that there were too many people around who inhibited him from talking the way he wanted to, or running around as much as he wanted to, or laughing too loud. Jeff was fifteen.

  His companion was a year younger and five inches shorter. His name was Larry, and he was waiting impatiently for the “growth spurt” his mother promised him would come along any day now. He was tired of being the shortest one in his crowd; the whole business was making him into a grouch.

  “What are we gonna do out on the rocks?” he asked rhetorically. “If the lifeguard sees us, we’ll get in trouble, and besides, the breakwater is going to be covered with bird shit.” Larry pointed to a spot about halfway down its length. The air above that one spot was so thick with birds, it was hard to see how they avoided colliding. Their creaking, raucous cries could be heard even above the sound of the waves of the incoming tide.

  “We could dive off,” Jeff suggested. Jeff had seen newsreels of the diving competition from the Olympics in Helsinki last year.

  “Uh-uh,” Larry told him. “Who knows how deep the water is? We could break our necks.”

  “Chicken.”

  “Showoff.”

  “Okay, okay. We’ll jump in feet first. It’s just so damn hot here—maybe it’ll be cooler out there.”

  “What about the birds?”

  “We won’t go out as far as the birds. Come on, Larry.”

  Larry said, “Oh, all right,” and went along.

  It was cooler out on the breakwater, and the lifeguard hadn’t seen them yet. The boys talked about the upcoming school year, and they talked about girls. They both admitted (and this was a true mark of their friendship) that they watched the Mickey Mouse Club, even though they were much too old for that, to look at the girls. Jeff liked Annette, but Larry was partial to Darlene.

  “I wonder what those birds are interested in so much,” Larry said after a while. “Look how long they fly in a circle without even flapping their wings.”

  Jeff decided he was going to see what it was, bird shit or no bird shit. Larry followed.

  Whatever had attracted the birds was stuck down between the rocks. Every so often, as the boys watched, a gull would dive-bomb the spot and fly off with something. Jeff picked his way over the rough surfaces of the boulders as the birds yelled at him in resentment. He looked down.

  He saw a blob of pink and greenish white, with the rising tide just starting to lap across it. It was, Jeff realized to his astonishment, a man’s face, except a lot of it was ... the birds had ... the eyes ...

  Jeff screamed. He threw his arms across his eyes and sobbed and screamed. Larry reached him, looked at the horror amid the rocks, shuddered, and turned to his friend. “Jeff, let’s get out of here.” Jeff kept screaming.

  By now the lifeguard had noticed the boys and was blasting his whistle, ordering them to come off the rocks.

  Jeff wouldn’t uncover his eyes, wouldn’t expose them to the gulls or to a chance he might see that face again. Larry had to lead him to the beach.

  10

  Nofsinger was speculating on the cleverness of the Rockefellers as he waited for Jenny Laird and her kid to leave the eye doctor’s office on East Forty-third Street.

  It had really been a sharp move. A few years ago this area here, First Avenue in the high Thirties, low Forties, had been nothing special, a little seedy if you got right down to it.

  The only notable thing about it was that the Rockefellers happened to own it. Okay. Then the United Nations comes along, a chance for a bunch of foreigners to park on our doorstep and tell us how to run the world we’d just almost single-handedly saved the ass of. And the UN is looking for a place to stay, instead of having to rent office space like an insurance company or something.

  Then the Rockefellers step in. Sure, they say, we got some land by the East River with nothing but a few old tenements and stuff on it. Here, go ahead, take it, I can use the tax deduction. And the gooks and geeks and the top-hatted cookie-pushers all say gee, thanks, and raise money to build the fancy blue glass affair Nofsinger would now be seeing if he would deign to look over his left shoulder.

  Nofsinger didn’t need to see the building to appreciate the Rockefellers’ ingenuity. Trust them to see a way to make some good old-fashioned American capitalist money out of this liberal world government crap. Because when the UN took the Rockefellers’ generous gift, and people from all over the world started coming to this particular neighborhood, the real-estate values of the whole area went through the roof. And the Rockefellers still owned most of it.

  Nofsinger chuckled. He loved people who made money out of nothing that way. He couldn’t do it himself, but he appreciated a sharp deal the way other people could appreciate a fine painting. It was almost enough to make Nofsinger glad that cable from the boss had been waiting for him when he arrived at the office. For some reason Mr. Kennedy had decided that the Laird woman should be followed, starting today, and that Nofsinger himself should do the following.

  Nofsinger was reluctant to leave the nice, air-conditioned office Klimber Enterprises had taken for him in a brand-new building on Park Avenue, but orders from Kennedy had to be followed. He’d gotten to the Laird woman’s place on the Island just in time to tail her and her son back to Manhattan. He’d watched her bring some stuff to Coronet magazine (she was a writer—Nofsinger knew that from when he’d done a job on her husband), then take her kid to the ophthalmologist or whatever he was.

  Nofsinger was fanning himself with a sweat-stained fedora when his subjects left the office. To his surprise, she headed directly across the street to the UN. Hastily Nofsinger replaced his hat and followed.

  Despite his bulk Nofsinger had the knack of not being noticed unless he wanted to be. It was easy to get close enough to catch the name of the guy she was meeting. It figured she would be meeting a guy—cute widow, still young, what the hell, right?

  “Hello, Russ,” Nofsinger heard the woman’s bright voice say. She turned to her son. “Mark, this is Mr. Garrett.”

  Russ Garrett. Okay. Now he had something besides the doctor to put in his report. Time to move on, watch them from a distance. No sense in making himself too obvious.

  11

  Mark was a good-looking, intelligent kid whose eyes managed to look clear and bright even through the lenses of his hornrims.

  “Mom says you play for the Yankees, Mr. Garrett.” The kid looked up at Garrett through narrowed eyes. There was caution in his voice that verged on suspicion.

  Garrett smiled. “No, your mother was giving me a promotion. I played for the Kansas City Blues. Sort of the junior Yankees. If a player is good enough there, he gets to go to New York.”

  “Do you really know Mickey Mantle?”

  “Good friend of mine. We played together in Kansas City.”

  Garrett could feel himself rise a notch or two in the boy’s estimation.

  “How come they call the team the Blues?” Mark asked. “If they called it the Junior
Yankees, everybody would be proud of them.”

  “Well,” Garrett said, “Kansas City is in Missouri, and Missouri is in the South—at least, it’s more like the South than it is like the North—and you couldn’t have a team called the Yankees in the South, could you?”

  Mark said he guessed not. “Do you go to the Yankee games a lot, Mr. Garrett?” Garrett told him he did. “Gee,” Mark said, “do you think I could go with you once and meet the players? I wouldn’t bother them at all, except maybe ask for their auto—”

  His mother grabbed him firmly by the shoulder. “Mark!” she scolded. “What happened to your manners?”

  She started to apologize, but Garrett grinned and waved it aside. “I might be able to arrange it, Mark. If your mother says it’s okay.”

  Mark immediately turned to his mother, but before he could ask if it was okay, she told him she’d think about it. The boy, seeing his best plan was to keep his mother happy, subsided. “Can I go look at the flags?” Mark was trying to memorize the flags of all the United Nations. There was a breeze today, although it was a hot, wet one off the East River, so this was a good day for it.

  “Yes, Mark, go look at the flags. Mr. Garrett and I will be on that bench.”

  They took a seat. “Your call was a pleasant surprise,” Jenny Laird said.

  Jenny Laird smiled at herself as she remembered how she’d tried to sound calm on the phone while changing two diapers at the same time (the twins did everything together). Then how she’d lied and said it was the day she had planned for a trip to Manhattan anyway, and called Mrs. Perkins to see if she could watch the twins and the doctor to change Mark’s appointment.

  She’d taken extra care with her appearance, too. She was wearing her nicest daytime dress, the navy blue one with the nautical collar. She had a white straw hat, sort of an H.M.S. Pinafore kind of thing, white shoes, and nice white gloves—lord, she hadn’t worn gloves since before ... she hadn’t worn them in a long time. Lipstick and round red earrings (they set off her hair nicely) gave the ensemble a touch of color. A dash of powder, and she was ready to go.

  It occurred to Jenny Laird to wonder why she was going through all this schoolgirl nonsense to meet a man she had seen for the first time last night, at the other end of her shotgun. She couldn’t think of an answer. She only knew she wanted to make a good impression today on Mr. Russell Garrett, and that desire felt good. It had been so long since she’d cared this much about anything. She’d been all seized up inside, like a typewriter with all its keys jammed together. Maybe with Rex Harwood Simmons dead, she could stop being The Woman Who Wasn’t Ashamed of Her Husband and just let herself be herself for a change.

  She smiled and asked Garrett if he’d been waiting long.

  “Not too long,” Garrett replied. “I got here early and took the tour.” He looked over at Mark, who was studying the flag of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

  “How did you like it? Isn’t this a wonderful place? Inspiring, I mean, in a practical sort of way. A permanent headquarters devoted to peace. I—” Jenny noticed that Garrett wasn’t responding. He was, in fact, looking at his shoes.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  Garrett looked up and gestured at the General Assembly Hall, the completed part of the complex. “Look at that thing. If they wanted a headquarters devoted to world peace, why the hell did they build a place that looks like the roof is about to cave in?”

  “Gloomy today, aren’t you?” Jenny said. Garrett didn’t respond. She tried again. “What were they talking about in there today? Is it World War Three or something?”

  Garrett took a deep breath. “Not today, at least. I don’t know. Something France should be doing in Morocco or something like that.”

  “Oh.”

  Two more minutes of silence. The Circle Line ferry cruised by. Some African diplomats passed them. They seemed to be enjoying the weather. Jenny could feel her gloves getting damper by the second. She took them off.

  At last she said, “God damn it!” A couple of people turned around to look at her, but Jenny didn’t notice. “Russ Garrett, what is the matter with you?”

  Garrett made a sour face and reached into his jacket pocket. “I want you to take a look at this, Jenny,” he said.

  She took the folded piece of grayish paper from him and opened it. It was a photostat of a sketch of a man’s face.

  “So?” Jenny said. She didn’t know what he was up to, but she knew she didn’t like it.

  “Look familiar?”

  “Should it?”

  “Look again.”

  Jenny looked. “Is this supposed to be David?” She was getting impatient with all this. “Is that it? Because that’s the only reason I can think of that you’d expect me to recognize this thing. Is this supposed to be my husband?”

  Garrett’s eyes looked deeply into hers—Jenny could see he was as unhappy about this as she was. She wanted to look away but decided not to. Foolish or not, this was something important.

  “It’s supposed to be,” Garrett said, “a composite sketch drawn from witnesses’ descriptions of the man who shot Congressman Rex Harwood Simmons to death Saturday afternoon.”

  “What are you getting at?” Jenny was surprised to hear her voice so calm. She did not feel calm.

  “Jenny, could this be a picture of your husband?”

  Jenny couldn’t stand it. She looked down at the white gloves she was holding and felt soiled, betrayed. He was no better than the police. He was worse. He was doing this out of—of curiosity. He had used his relationship with poor, dead Ann; he had even used her son to win her confidence. Then to put her through this! She was sick. She almost wished she had her shotgun.

  “You are insane. My husband is dead.” She gave the young man beside her a look of bewilderment and fear.

  Garrett looked at the sky. “God, I hate this,” he said, then held her eyes again. “Jenny, how can you be sure of that? I have a friend who works for the AP, and this morning after I called you, I got to look at the files. The stories all said your husband’s body was burned beyond recognition in his car at the bottom of a cliff up in the Catskills. That he mailed you a letter telling you he was sorry.”

  Jenny felt her hands forming claws, checked herself and made fists instead. “I know all this, damn you, I lived through it! Why are you raking it all up?”

  “The picture you gave me last night, Jenny,” Garrett said. He removed the photo from a pocket, held it close to the police drawing. “He looks just like him, Jenny.”

  “He does not!”

  “He looks enough like your husband for me to have spotted the resemblance in a picture I hardly noticed he was in. Okay; you were his wife, and you knew him better than anybody—you can see the differences where other people see only the resemblances. But it’s too close. The resemblance is too goddam close to ignore.” Garrett pulled at a cheek, twisting his handsome face into an ugliness Jenny found more appropriate to his actions. He went on. “Look, Jenny, you have to help me on this. I need you to—”

  Jenny laughed, a loud, wild, slightly hysterical noise. “You want me to help you! You mean you can actually sit here and tell me you want me to help you? You must be crazy. Mark!” Jenny stood and started looking around for her son.

  Garrett grabbed her wrist, not gently, and pulled her back down to the bench. “Shut up and listen, goddammit!” Garrett was shaking and talking through clenched teeth. It was the first time she’d seen him angry, and she was surprised to learn how frightening his anger was.

  She rubbed her wrist and listened.

  Garrett had stopped shaking, but his voice still ripped small, ragged holes in the humid summer air. “Your husband’s life was ruined by Rex Simmons and his stupid witch-hunts. Simmons was shot to death by a man whom all witnesses describe as your husband’s double. And when I check into the circumstances of your husband’s suicide, the only thing that says it’s really him that’s dead is the note he sent. Whatever was l
eft in the car was burned beyond recognition.”

  Hot tears scalded Jenny’s eyes, but she wouldn’t wipe them away. She couldn’t move. She was frozen by the horror of the situation and the loathing she felt for the man beside her.

  “Look, Jenny,” Garrett said. His voice was gentle now. He was trying to reason with her. God, she hated him. “That could have been anybody in that car. Your husband may have been alive all this time, planning revenge.” Garrett took a breath. “Is he, Jenny?”

  “You make me sick,” Jenny Laird said.

  “I’m trying to help you. I don’t care if you believe that or not, but it’s true. Because the police are going to wonder the same things. And they’re going to find out. And if they decide he is alive, I have this awful feeling they’re going to assume you’ve known about it all along. And I’m in the middle of this, in trouble myself. And I can’t do anything to help either of us until I know exactly how things stand.”

  He took her wrist again, tenderly this time. “Please tell me, Jenny.”

  She pulled her hand away as though she knew Garrett not only had but was some sort of loathsome disease.

  “Liar!” she screamed so loudly that even Nofsinger could hear her. The fat man had been watching the whole business from a safe distance. Some sort of lovers’ tiff, no doubt. He listened; the woman might say something useful while she was still being loud.

  “You disgust me, all of you!” she said. “It’s not enough you hounded him to death; you can’t leave him alone even after his ashes are scattered!” She looked like she was getting warmed up for a long, loud speech, and Nofsinger was afraid she would draw a crowd. He’d have to make himself scarce. It was easy to see what had happened. The boyfriend, this Garrett guy, had found out she was a Commie. Commies always cried and cut up rough when things went against them.

  Nothing to worry about this time, though. The Laird babe took her kid and stalked off, leaving this Garrett looking miserable. It was Nofsinger’s cue to follow. All probably a load of horseshit, anyway. As he closed in on his quarry, Nofsinger heard the kid asking when Mr. Garrett was going to take him to the ball game, and kids usually had pretty good instincts about that sort of thing.