Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  12

  Captain Murphy was waiting in Garrett’s office. He was reading Garrett’s copy of the Sporting News and humming something dramatic, from an opera, no doubt.

  Garrett was more surprised that he had actually recognized the music than he was at the captain’s presence. Somehow he’d been expecting him, or if not the captain himself, than Detective Martin or some other cop.

  “That’s the music from Flash Gordon,” Garrett said. “I saw all twelve episodes at the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester when I was a kid.”

  Murphy looked disgusted. “That,” he growled, “is the ‘Ride of the Valkerie,’ by Vogner.”

  “Who?”

  “Wagner. Only pronounced Vogner. You’re a barbarian, Garrett. Ah, screw it. How are you doing?”

  Garrett made a face. “Not bad. How are you, Captain?”

  “Tired, Garrett. Tired. I was up in your home territory today.”

  “Port Chester?”

  “Rye,” Murphy replied. “Couple kids found a body on the beach. Stuffed between the rocks of the breakwater like a beer can.”

  “Why did they call you out on a Westchester homicide?” Garrett asked, though he thought he could probably guess the answer.

  “Because some Rye cops read the papers, and they remember what they read. So when they got this guy identified—from fingerprints, by the way; sea gulls had made hamburger of his face—they figured they ought to call me.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Ever hear of a guy named David Laird? ... Garrett, what’s wrong?”

  Garrett didn’t want to know what his face looked like just then, what combination of surprise and guilt. Instead he said, “Somebody found David Laird’s body? Today? He’s supposed—I mean, I thought he killed himself three, four years ago. Didn’t he?”

  Murphy grunted, pushed back his hat, and looked surprised. “He’s dead as far as I know. What in hell gave you the idea it was his body?”

  Garrett shook his head as though to dismiss the whole business.

  “You do know who he is, then,” Murphy demanded. Garrett could hardly deny it.

  “Good,” the captain went on. “The body was his dentist’s.”

  Garrett let out a slow breath. Things were starting to come together now. He remembered, he hoped irrelevantly, that that was how the A-bomb worked, two big chunks of uranium coming together. When that happened, you hung a sign on the door that said Gone Fission. With an effort Garrett dismissed the image from his mind. “Bristow,” he said.

  Murphy raised his eyebrows. “You know a lot about Laird, don’t you? Even his dentist’s name.”

  “It was a big story at the time, you know, and I was sort of a Columbia alumnus. So of course I followed it. One of Simmons’s early triumphs.”

  “Yeah. I know all about Dr. Edward Bristow. I got it all rehashed for me this afternoon. God knows what good it’s going to do anybody. I even know he wasn’t actually even a dentist—”

  “Periodontist,” Garrett volunteered and was immediately sorry.

  “A gum doctor,” Murphy countered. “I even saw some pictures of him the way he was before the birds got at him. You’d never figure him for a Communist—crew cut and big smile he had—but you never know, I guess.

  “Anyway, he and this David Laird were great friends, belonged to all the liberal organizations—ban the bomb, world government, that kind of thing. Used to go to demonstrations and stuff—they got arrested once; that’s where Bristow’s fingerprints came from—no big deal, lots of good citizens do that kind of thing. Then Simmons came along with his committee, investigating some of the organizations the two of them belonged to.”

  “And there was Bristow,” Garrett added, “sitting in the witness chair, telling the congressman how they were constantly in touch with Joe Stalin and how they were going to take over the country. Laird, especially. Of course, Dr. Bristow had seen the error of his ways and was telling all about his former comrades to make up for the damage he had done to his country. Laird and lots of other witnesses came on to refute Bristow, but the public and the papers seemed to think he was telling the truth.”

  “Whereas you,” Murphy said, “think he was merely throwing his friends to the wolves to keep from having a bite taken out of his own ass.”

  “Don’t you?”

  The captain shrugged. “I won’t say it’s not possible. One of the Rye cops was resurrecting some old rumors to the effect that Bristow was queer for little boys and that Simmons used that as leverage to fix the testimony.”

  Garrett snorted.

  “But they had to be resurrected for me, Garrett. That means they were dead, you understand? Keep them that way. Bristow left a family.”

  “So did Laird.”

  Murphy raised his brows again and looked at Garrett, then went on. “Bristow left his office Friday afternoon and wasn’t seen again, as far as anyone knows, until the body was found this afternoon.”

  There were several seconds of silence.

  “So I thought I’d come over here and tell you about it. We are supposed to be working together on this thing.”

  Garrett opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “Captain, can I ask you a stupid question?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” said Vicious Aloysius.

  Garrett’s hand stole toward his jacket pocket. “What makes you think,” Garrett said, “that Bristow’s death ties up with Congressman Simmons’s murder? I mean, he ties up with Laird, certainly, but Laird is dead.”

  Murphy leaped to his feet with a roar of rage that fluttered the letters and statistics sheets on Garrett’s desk. ‘All right, Garrett,” he roared, “that does it!”

  Garrett backed away as though he were afraid the captain would bite him.

  “I can’t believe,” Murphy roared on, “that you have the balls to sit there all coy when one of my men saw you this afternoon holding hands at the United Nations with David Laird’s widow!”

  “Now wait a minute,” Garrett began.

  “Wait, my ass. You start talking, boy, and I mean right now! Or the next thing you know you’ll be playing ball on the Sing Sing team.”

  “I was going to tell you, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t making an idiot of myself.”

  “You don’t know how close you are,” Murphy told him, “to making a statistic of yourself. He wasn’t even tailing you—just happened to pass by. Maybe I should have you followed. You better talk.”

  So Garrett took out the pictures and told the captain what he thought, and after a few minutes Captain Al (Vicious Aloysius) Murphy was calmer, but no happier.

  “No,” he said flatly. “No zombies allowed. I refuse to consider the idea that this son of a bitch is alive and killing the people who screwed him over before.”

  Garrett told him he didn’t really mean it.

  “No, goddammit, I guess I don’t. But if he is alive, Garrett, I, for one, will never forgive you.” He adjusted his hat. “Come on,” he said.

  “Where are we going?” Garrett wanted to know.

  “Bronx Homicide. I want to get a statement from you before you grow hair all over and start howling at the moon.”

  13

  Four people sat at a card table under an elaborate crystal chandelier in an otherwise-empty ballroom. Voices, when there were voices, echoed strangely off the distant walls and the high ceiling.

  Congressman-designate Telford Simmons took a wooden tile from his tray and placed it on the board. “SMITHY,” he said. “A place where a b-b-blacksmith works,” he added in case anyone had any doubts. No one seemed to, so he went ahead and added his score. “Fourteen points on a double-word score—twenty-eight.”

  Scrabble, they called it. Stupid game, a big fad a few months ago. Somebody was making a fortune off it.

  Tad was winning; that was the only consolation. The rest of it was simply beneath his dignity. Here he was, on the way home from his brother’s funeral, the new congressman from one of only a handful of Republican
districts anywhere near Kansas City, paying a courtesy call on a favored constituent, and what happens? He gets dragooned (along with Cheryl) into a game of Scrabble, for God’s sake, with a senile old woman and her colored assistant. Tad didn’t like it one bit.

  Granted, Mrs. Klimber had been a big help to his brother and stood to be just as important to Tad’s own ambitions. Granted, the old lady had to be humored. But only within reason. This would be the last time something like this would happen.

  Because Tad Simmons was in the driver’s seat now. His brother’s death gave Tad a sort of political holiness—no one had better mess with him. The governor had seen that; that was why his seat in Congress waited only approval of the full body. Hell, even the local Democrats had seen it. Alive, Tad’s brother Rex had been a nuisance to the remains of the old Tom Prendergast machine. Dead, he threatened to smash it. Tad almost smiled. Rex would have been proud of him.

  The only cloud in Tad Simmons’s blue sky was the investigation of his brother’s death. That had damn well better turn out right—it had damn well better be a Communist who’d done the foul deed instead of, say, a jealous husband. There could be plenty of those around, too. Of course, Cheryl had pretty much distracted Rex from that sort of thing, especially over the last year or so, but Tad still worried. It was the not knowing that got to him. Why the hell hadn’t Garrett reported to him yet? It had been two whole days. Hadn’t the cops found anything?

  But someone was talking to him. “Excuse me, Mrs. Klimber?” he said. “I was, ah, planning my next move.”

  “No wonder you’re beating us so badly, Telford,” the old woman said. “I was just saying that you made quite a score with one little letter.”

  Tad nodded and growled. The game went on.

  Cheryl Tilton would have taken more notice of her employer’s discomfiture, and enjoyed it more, if she hadn’t been so fascinated by Mrs. Klimber. Cheryl took great pride in herself as a woman—it offended her to think Zenith Klimber fell into the same category.

  Cheryl found her intolerable. Her build was so broad it reminded Cheryl of the front third of a hippopotamus. She had the wide mouth and the broad nose of a hippo, too, and her smile, which was frequent, showed huge, white, symmetrical teeth, manufactured, no doubt, by some dentist who wanted to complete the picture.

  Mrs. Klimber constantly ate chocolate-covered cherries, the kind with liqueur centers. She consumed about a box an hour. Everyone thinks the old woman’s crazy ideas come from senility, Cheryl reflected. Maybe she was just continually looped on cherry liqueur.

  None of which would have been so bad if she didn’t keep talking about her son all the time. Her Late Son. Even now as Mrs. Klimber was pushing a chocolate-covered cherry into her maw and reaching out her massive hand to make her word (BOOTY), she commenced a story about Her Late Son and how quick he had been to learn to walk.

  It seemed to Cheryl that the old. woman always directed these stories to her exclusively, as though the old monster were trying to make some kind of perverted match between Cheryl and Her Late Son.

  Mrs. Klimber had even given Cheryl a set of keys to the mansion Her Late Son and his intended bride had planned to move into when he came home from the Philippines. Of course, he had never come home, and the intended bride had eventually married someone else and moved to Oregon. And if you ever wanted to see real insanity in Mrs. Klimber—shouting, and crying, and hippopotamus-size fury—all you had to do was remind her of what Her Late Son’s beloved had done.

  The mansion was across the river, in Kansas, in Mission Hills, where practically all the area’s wealthiest (except Mrs. Klimber) lived. Out of curiosity Cheryl had gone there once and had a look around. On the outside it could have been the twin of the building she was now in—an enormous mound of Victorian gingerbread. Inside, though, it was as modern and stark as this one was traditional and elegant. Cheryl had learned that Mrs. Klimber had furnished it all herself. Cheryl didn’t even want to think about what that might mean.

  It was Gennarro Kennedy’s turn. Building off the T in BOOTY, Kennedy made the word THANE.

  “Gennarro,” Mrs. Klimber chided, “I’m sure you could have made a much better move than that. You’ve only eight points with that word. Go ahead, take it back and try again. We’ll all let you, won’t we?” She was very fond of Gennarro. He was so helpful. And he’d been in the army with Her Late Son.

  That was another thing about Mrs. Klimber that made Cheryl’s spine crawl. That wheedling, conniving, coquettish little-girl voice coming from that grotesque body.

  It didn’t seem to bother the Negro. “Thank you, Mrs. Klimber,” he said, “but it pleases me to make that word.” Then he smiled and gestured to Cheryl that it was her turn.

  Gennarro Kennedy was very pleased with the word he’d made. He was glad the opportunity had come up. THANE—a Scottish nobleman. Something like a Laird. Something, unless he missed his guess, quite like a Laird.

  He’d speculated on the words Sunday, instructed Nofsinger this morning to begin surveillance of David Laird’s widow. If Nofsinger hadn’t been so ignorant, he might have made the connection himself months ago, when a man calling himself Thane became the most likely candidate to become an assassin.

  But, Kennedy had to admit, that was not entirely fair. If Dr. Bristow, who was an important figure from the Laird case, hadn’t been missing, Kennedy, too, might have failed to make the Thane-Laird association. But he had made the connection, and acted on it, and it had already borne fruit. The Laird woman was involved in this case. He’d had a report from Nofsinger that she’d met that very afternoon—not with a boyfriend, as Nofsinger had originally supposed—but with the man who’d found Rex Simmons’s body, who was also a friend of Mickey Mantle’s. Who was also, according to the report Kennedy’s agents had assembled, assisting the police. And who was also, Kennedy knew, supposed to be Tad Simmons’s tame information source.

  Kennedy smiled. It would be interesting to see the young Simmons’s reaction to that piece of news; Kennedy would have to tell him, but not just yet.

  Things were just getting interesting. Kennedy had assessments to make before he acted. It was a challenge, and he loved it. Even now, as he plotted a new word for the Scrabble board, he was making plans for the next round of the bigger game.

  14

  David Laird sat at the table in the cottage that was located between the ocean and the oil refinery and read the newspapers. He hadn’t bought the newspapers—he didn’t want anyone to see him reading or buying something to read.

  Instead, he took the newspapers from gutters or garbage cans he passed on his way. Sometimes the newspapers were stained with other garbage that made them smell, but David Laird didn’t notice, any more than he noticed the perpetual stench of the refinery.

  There were some interesting stories in today’s papers.

  Bristow’s body had been found; two boys had found it. Good. Laird had been afraid that it might have come loose and washed out to sea. That would have been safer, of course, to have Bristow just disappear, as the drifter had disappeared, without a trace. But Laird was glad the body had been found. “Brutally tortured before being shot,” the paper said. Laird laughed.

  It was that drifter, that nameless old man, really, who had put David Laird on the road he still traveled, the one that was now nearing its end.

  That’s trite, he thought. I used to take points off essays for phrases like that.

  Besides, it’s a lie, Laird thought. The old drunkard was a prop, the merest accident of fate, a cipher that suddenly became important in an equation on a different part of the page.

  It had happened at precisely the right moment. Laird’s book contracts had been canceled; his public reputation was destroyed; his best friend had betrayed him; he was about to go to jail because of that betrayal; he had done something that could hurt Jenny terribly; and he had just learned he was a sick, sick man.

  Laird could see himself now, the way he was then, filled with hatred and despai
r, sitting at his desk in the home Jenny had since had to sell. Composing suicide notes. But it had been all too much to face, even in a suicide note. He had needed air. He decided to go for a drive. He reached a decision on that drive. Somehow they would pay. Everyone, but especially Bristow and the Honorable Rex Harwood Simmons—a coward and a maniac, who had combined to destroy his life.

  Violence was not yet part of Laird’s plan. He didn’t even have a plan. He’d think about one as soon as he stopped driving, he’d decided, then discovered he couldn’t wait to stop driving. He stopped his car outside an all-night diner, intending to buy a cup of coffee.

  That’s where the drifter came in. The man loomed out of a doorway and asked for a nickel. There were scabs on his face, and he smelled like something a distillery had flushed into a sewer. With impatience and disgust Laird pushed him away.

  The drifter staggered backward and fell, and never got up. It wasn’t that he had fallen especially hard or hit his head or anything like that. It was just that somewhere between the shove and the landing, the drunkard’s abused body had ceased to function anymore.

  Laird didn’t realize it at first. He’d apologized to the corpse, offered him a dollar, tried to help him to his feet.

  Then awareness seeped in, and David Laird felt a flash of fear—they’d be after him for murder now. But that was followed by a much stronger surge of inspiration. He would die. The drifter would vanish—no one would look for him—and David Laird would be free.

  He did everything in the white heat of that moment. He had an old envelope in his glove compartment and a three-cent stamp in his wallet. He tore a page from his journal and wrote a “suicide” note to Jenny, which he immediately mailed.

  He stuffed the dead man into the car and drove upstate to a dangerous mountain road, stopping along the way to pick up a discarded beer bottle. He stripped the corpse and switched his clothes for the drifter’s bug-infested rags.