Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  He got his gas siphon from the trunk and filled the beer bottle again and again, dousing the body and the inside of the car.

  And realized he had no matches. Laird sat down and almost wept in frustration. He couldn’t turn back. And he couldn’t just hope the car would burst into flames when he pushed it over the cliff.

  Then he had an idea. He tore a rag off what he was wearing and soaked it in gasoline. He started the car motor and revved the engine, wedging the drifter’s leg so that his foot kept pressing on the accelerator.

  Laird opened the hood and laid the gasoline-soaked rag on the radiator as the engine heated up. It was risky—Laird knew that even if it did light, he was gasoline-soaked now, too, from his work inside the car. He didn’t care. He just wanted this over with.

  Seconds went by, then minutes. Nothing. Laird got a blanket from the car and wedged it down between the radiator and the grill, giving the heat nowhere to go. After a few minutes the rag burst into flame, and seconds after that David Laird pushed his car and his whole life down the face of the cliff in flames.

  It wasn’t until days later that it began to dawn on David Laird what he had done to himself. To cut himself off from his children, and from Jenny. To leave them to face everything alone. To run out on Ann, just when—what had gotten into him?

  But even as his mind formed the question, he knew the answer.

  What had gotten into him was the fear, the constant fear, the diseased fear that the witch-hunters exploited, preyed on, and (Laird now knew) felt themselves. He had become, he realized, as brutal and inhuman as they were. Because he had yielded to the fear.

  They had made him an animal; very well, he would stalk them. He was safe; they thought he was dead. His time, while not unlimited, was ample. He could take months to find the weak spot, to make his revenge perfect.

  As he had. David Laird could almost smile just thinking about it. He remembered discussing with his classes Machiavelli’s famous quote about revenge being a dish best eaten cold. It was true. It was true.

  Laird’s pains were back, but not so bad that they kept him from thinking, from remembering. He stacked up the newspapers, turned off the light, and lay on his cot.

  He remembered the time he had spent just getting ready to start—the new documents, the surgery, the long drudgery of working at odd jobs to raise the money to buy these things. It didn’t matter. It had bought him time, and it had made him resourceful, and it had allowed him the perfect disguise.

  So he had begun. He studied Congressman Rex Harwood Simmons, and a single, badly disposed of piece of paper had put him onto Mrs. Klimber. From there it had been a trivial step to Gennarro Kennedy, the Negro whom she used to pass along her orders. Putting himself close to Kennedy (physically, that is—the time for infiltration was yet to come) yielded the merest glimpse of a photograph of a fat, jolly-looking man, but the glimpse had been enough for him to recognize the face of the man who had been the harbinger of all his troubles. The fat man had claimed to be a reporter and had first started stirring up Laird’s associates and neighbors with questions.

  That was the weak link. The fat man, who had called himself Norton, was a front for Kennedy, who was a front for Klimber, who was behind Rex Simmons. A direct line but far enough removed for Laird to move in safety. Laird returned to New York and found his man in two weeks, fronting a supposed liberal organization.

  Laird had, in fact, felt safe enough to exhibit a little bravado. He’d called himself Thane. Just to give his enemies a fighting chance.

  Which had been more than they’d given him. He began setting the trap for the congressman, using the name of Mickey Mantle as bait. It had been easy.

  “Brutally tortured,” the newspaper had said. Laird snorted. Bristow had gotten off easily. Laird’s conscience was clear, at least on that score. He still felt bad about Jenny. He missed her. Perhaps, now that his work was over, he’d get a chance to see her. Before it was too late.

  David Laird tried to rest. The pains in his head, more frequent now, were too severe to let him sleep.

  Chapter Five

  Road Trip

  1

  EXACTLY ONE WEEK LATER, on Tuesday, September first, 1953, Russ Garrett was fastening his seat belt as the TWA Constellation that carried him made its final approach to Kansas City.

  Detective Martin had the next seat, but the two men weren’t traveling together—not officially, at least. Martin was going to confer with the Kansas City police and with the local office of the FBI about their end of the increasingly futile Rex Simmons investigation.

  Garrett, on the other hand, was supposed to be using the trip to K.C. to check on employment opportunities with American Association ball teams for his veterans. And he probably would do some of that.

  But his real reason was to talk to Hal Keating. Hal used to work for the Yankees. He was the scout who had originally signed Garrett to a pro baseball contract. Now he was a Kansas City businessman, exploring the possibility of bringing major-league ball there. Hal had a Silver Star for OSS work during World War II, and he combined common sense with an open mind. He was a good friend.

  Garrett wanted to see Hal Keating to discuss the possibility that he, Garrett, was losing his mind. He also figured he would play out at least one scene of the farce that had him spying on the police for Tad Simmons. All he’d be able to tell the new congressman was “no progress.” Garrett was not about to go to Simmons with his David Laird idea. He’d been laughed at about that enough already.

  Well, Garrett thought, maybe “no progress” wasn’t entirely fair. Things had happened during the past week. The New York Yankees had traveled to Detroit, Cleveland, and Chicago, winning four games and losing three. The rest of the road trip would take them to St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Boston before they returned home.

  During the past week Garrett had discovered Detective Martin’s first name to be Cornelius. They continued to use last names.

  The Westchester Medical Examiner’s office had finally finished the report on the remains of Bristow, Edward P. The hardest part had been sorting out the damage that had been done by the birds, the tides, and the rocks from that inflicted by the killer. They decided that the bruises about the abdomen—the small, black ones—had been the result of deliberate blows. The two bullet holes at the base of the left side of the neck were obviously the killer’s work, while the sea gulls and wave action were equally obviously the cause of the lighter bruises and the missing flesh. Bristow’s fractured jaw was up for grabs, with the killer a slight favorite.

  The FBI (though they hadn’t taken the case away from the NYPD, much to Captain Murphy’s disappointment) had been conducting their own investigations, and while they wouldn’t come out and say they were positive no known Communist group or individual had killed Congressman Rex Harwood Simmons, they would stake J. Edgar Hoover’s mother on the conclusion that Moscow hadn’t ordered them to do it. All the law-enforcement people Garrett knew were inclined to believe this. As Captain Murphy had put it, “When Hoover lets the Russians off the hook, they’ve got to be innocent. Hell, the FBI’s still trying to pin the Bonus Army Riots on them.”

  Still, there was some evidence linking the shootings to a liberal (or worse) organization. Some time ago, about the beginning of July, in fact, a man who gave his name as Norton had walked into a Greenwich Village precinct house and reported his .22-caliber target pistol as stolen. He’d given the serial number, and it was the same gun that had shot Congressman Simmons and Officer Olsen of the New Jersey State Police. Further investigation had indicated that this Norton (who police said was middle-aged and heavyset) was the same Norton who was chairman of the People’s League for Social Justice, a leftist group. Norton had not been found since the routine investigation had turned up the connection. The police were still looking.

  Garrett’s ears felt the pressure as the plane descended. He swallowed, then swallowed again. The way, he thought, he’d been swallowing his opinions all week.


  If only the ballistics people had been able to prove Bristow had been shot with the same gun as the other two, Murphy would have had to take Garrett’s theory seriously. Unfortunately, the bullets they’d dug out of the periodontist, though obviously .22s, were too beat up from contact with ribs and hipbones to be of any use as evidence.

  Jenny Laird, on the other hand, had been taking Garrett very seriously. She’d taken him so seriously, in fact, that she refused to have anything whatever to do with him. His letters brought no replies; his phone calls were clicked off before he could finish saying hello. Except once. Jenny hadn’t been home, and her son, Mark, had answered the phone. Garrett had identified himself, and Mark had proceeded to ream Garrett out for making his Mom cry. “I thought you were supposed to be nice,” the boy had said, contempt oozing from his voice. “You can forget about your old baseball game.” Then the kid had hung up on him.

  That had happened yesterday morning. Garrett, by now, was happy for a chance to get out of town.

  He looked out the window of the plane and watched the big propeller shimmering in the sunlight. Through the shimmer he could see Kansas City—the home, he reminded himself not quite bitterly, of his greatest baseball triumphs.

  2

  Unlike LaGuardia Airport, which was safely tucked away in suburban Queens, or the new Idlewild, which was so far removed from Manhattan it might as well be out in the country, Kansas City’s airport was smack in the middle of the city itself. You could land, walk away from the airport, and find yourself in the heart of town in minutes.

  Detective Martin had shown some qualms about the plane’s swooping down past the city’s tallest buildings. “Might as well use Broadway for a damn landing strip,” he’d said. He was upset that Garrett hadn’t warned him.

  Hal Keating met them at the airport. He was a tall, thin man with a florid face, gray hair, and bushy black eyebrows that swept exuberantly out from his head like crow’s wings. His voice was a musical baritone and, even dressed casually in a seersucker jacket, dark blue sport shirt, and white slacks, he seemed to carry with him an almost formal elegance.

  Keating introduced himself to Detective Martin, pumping the Negro’s hand so vigorously that some people passing through the airport stopped to look.

  Martin looked around and grinned. “You could be breaking a social taboo or two, Mr. Keating. People are giving you the old hairy eyeball.”

  “Fuck ’em,” Keating said, loudly and heartily. “When I know you better, I’ll kiss you.” The three men laughed.

  Keating turned to Garrett and embraced him. “Rags, my boy, it’s great to see you! How are the old legs?”

  Garrett hadn’t warned him. “Hanging by a thread, Hal. But at least I’ve still got them.”

  Keating punched him on the arm. “Don’t give me that crap. You think I don’t have my spies out? I know you’re working out at the stadium, trying to get back to play again.”

  “And?” Garrett was no longer grinning.

  “And? And stick to it, you touchy bastard!”

  “I thought you were going to tell me how crazy I am, like everybody else.”

  Keating paused in the middle of lighting a long black cigar. “I figure,” he said around puffs, “you already know how crazy you are. The odds are against you—so what? The odds are against anything. The only way to change the odds is to go out and work your ass off to make things come out the way you want. Now let’s get your bags and head on out to the hotel.” Garrett and Martin had booked rooms at the La Salle, the same hotel Garrett used to stay at when he was with the Blues. It was more nostalgia than anything else; he could have stayed at a better hotel, like the one where Hal was staying, but since this was a baseball errand, he decided to bunk at the place the ball players favored.

  Martin protested that he should go and check in with the local police first, but Keating offered to drive him there after he checked in, so they decided to do it that way.

  Outside the air-conditioned lobby, the temperature was 101 degrees. Garrett remarked that the contrast was like walking into a brick wall.

  “You get used to it,” Keating told him. “What the hell, Rags, you used to play ball in weather like this, remember? Of course, it’s my hometown, and I don’t mind it—”

  As they crossed the street, a hot, heavy wind swept down on them from the north. Detective Martin made a face. “What in the name of God is that smell?” he demanded.

  Garrett laughed. “I’m sorry, Martin. Something else I should have warned you about. Remember how I said Kansas City offers the best prime rib you’ll ever taste?”

  “The airport’s not the only thing convenient to the center of town,” Keating explained. “A cow’ll come in on a barge or a train in the morning, be on somebody’s plate by tonight. Stockyards don’t smell pretty, but by God, with the slaughterhouse working twenty-four hours a day, we get some fresh meat.”

  Martin was still wincing. “How can you stand to put food in your mouth with that smell in your nose?”

  “You only notice it when the wind is right.” They got in the car—Keating drove a new Cadillac. “You’ve got to impress people when you’re trying to buy a ball club. Besides, I keep running back and forth to St. Louis so much, trying to talk Veeck into selling me the Browns, I want something that won’t give me a pain in the ass from just sitting in it.”

  After they’d dropped Martin at police headquarters, Keating said he felt like driving so he’d get Garrett reacquainted with some of the sights in town.

  The first sight was Keating’s own factory, to the south of the city. He made parts for radar. “Actually, it’s my partner’s invention—some kind of circuit. I had the army contracts from my OSS days. Rags, my boy, I’m cleaning up. The Klimber Company keeps offering to buy us out, but to hell with them. Maybe after I get the ball club—”

  “How are your odds on that?”

  “I don’t know,” Keating admitted. “Veeck wants to keep the club and move it himself, but the owners won’t let him. They still hate him for that publicity stunt when he sent that midget up to bat. So he’s gonna have to sell it, either to me or to these guys in Baltimore. Maybe Mrs. Klimber. I hear she’s after it, too. But it would be unnatural for a woman to own a ball club. And it would be stupid to put a team in Baltimore—the Washington Senators or them would be out of business in ten years. So who knows?”

  Garrett said something encouraging and went back to looking out the windows. In the two years he’d been away, the town had grown. One of the things Garrett liked most about Kansas City was its general air of confidence and enthusiasm. Rodgers and Hammerstein were dead wrong in the eyes of the locals. There was a general attitude that the city’s best days were ahead of it. With a million people living in the city and the surrounding area, K.C. was nothing like a small town—except, Garrett told himself, to a blasé New Yorker. Still, there was that small-town air of civic pride and boosterism Garrett found refreshing.

  “Sinclair Lewis,” he murmured, “was a horse’s ass.”

  “What?” Keating asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” Garrett said. “I see a lot of air force uniforms around town.”

  “Yeah, hadn’t you heard? The Central Air Defense Command has put a big combat group here. That’s to distract the Russians’ attention and make them attack us instead of Chicago. Still, it’s good for business—the General Motors plant is making Thunderstreaks for them to fly at the same time they’re turning out Pontiacs for them to drive.”

  Keating was garrulous, Garrett quiet. They took the whole tour. Kit Carson’s house; Union Station, that great marble monument to the railroad empire building. Garrett wondered if the bullet holes from Pretty Boy Floyd’s Kansas City Massacre in 1933 remained in the marble. Keating assured him they did.

  They drove in silence for a while. Finally Keating said, “All right, kid. Ready to tell me what’s on your mind?”

  Garrett sighed and said he supposed so, and they went back to the older man’s hotel to t
alk it over.

  3

  “... and that’s it,” Garrett concluded. “What do you think?”

  Hal Keating rubbed an eyebrow and puffed at his cigar. One thing he thought for sure, his young pal Garrett had gotten himself into one hell of a mess.

  Keating liked Garrett, liked him as a ball player ever since he’d first scouted him back in high school (Hal had been living in the New York area then), and liked him as a person for just as long. Garrett had always shown the makings of a good man. Guts, honesty, a disinclination to believe too much bullshit.

  But now look at him. Keating stabbed his cigar in the direction of a chair. “Sit,” he commanded. “You make me nervous walking around like that.”

  Garrett sat.

  Keating leaned back against the pillows of his hotel bed. “You want to know what I think? Okay, I’ll tell you. Now, this David Laird. I have to admit the autopsy on Bristow was suggestive. Punched in the solar plexus, like the hot-dog vendor. Shot twice in the neck with a twenty-two like Rex Simmons himself. It looks almost like a dress rehearsal for the Simmons kill.”

  “Just what I thought. The witnesses’ descriptions fit him perfectly. And who else had a grudge against Bristow and Simmons?”

  “David Laird’s wife.”

  Garrett started to say something, swallowed it, rubbed the back of his head, got up, and began to pace again. “No,” he said after he’d paced fifteen yards or so. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe so,” Keating replied, “but the cops are going to find it a whole lot less ridiculous than the idea of somebody they’re already perfectly satisfied is dead coming back to kill off his enemies. If you weren’t so muddled trying to keep ahead of your last lie to the cops, you’d realize that if they had one tiny shred of evidence she hired the muscle to do this stuff, she’d be in a cell so fast it would make your eyes water.”