Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  7

  About that same time Nofsinger was reaching for a ringing telephone in a pay booth in Grand Central Station. He pushed the last inch and a half of his hot dog into his mouth, chewed hastily, swallowed, picked up the phone and said hello all before the phone had a chance to ring twice.

  “Nofsinger?”

  “Yes, boss?”

  “Progress?” He sure is a terse bastard, Nofsinger reflected.

  “All instructions carried out. I stopped tailing the Laird woman, like you said. Then I went to Boston, took care of the mail ...” Nofsinger hoped his puzzled irritation didn’t show in his voice. He’d worked very hard to get that death threat to Mantle to sound authentic. The boss had been very explicit about it. Nofsinger wondered, though, what the hell he was trying to accomplish by it. If the boss actually wanted Mantle killed, it was no skin off Nofsinger’s ass, but why tip them off?

  “Are you absolutely sure it has been received? There has been nothing in the newspapers here,” Kennedy said.

  “They generally try to keep these things quiet. If they publicize it, other nuts can get ideas. But one of the tabloid sports columnists picked it up; it was in yesterday’s paper—you know, when they start getting rain-outs around the country, they’ve got to fill up the space with something.”

  “All right, Nofsinger. Have you finished the devices?”

  “Yeah. I just put them in a locker here in the station. I was just about to mail you the key.”

  “No. Get a copy made for yourself first.” That was no problem. It was supposed to be against the law as well as impossible to duplicate keys to coin lockers, but Nofsinger knew a clever locksmith who loved money.

  “Okay,” the fat man said. “Might take a couple of days.”

  “I know. Don’t mail it to Kansas City. Send it special delivery care of the Ozone Hotel in Boston.” He gave the address.

  “That’s in the nigger section!” Nofsinger blurted.

  “I know where it is. Just send it there. Wait for further instructions. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, boss, sorry,” Nofsinger said.

  “Good-bye.”

  In a darkened room in a quiet apartment in the “nigger section” of Kansas City, Missouri, Gennarro Kennedy placed the telephone back on the hook.

  He was, he reflected, once again tired of Nofsinger. As soon as this operation was over, he would be attended to.

  Kennedy was tired in general, he realized. He had trouble getting interested in any project past the killing of Mantle and Garrett. Even the tracking of David Laird. Perhaps he’d just take the money he’d accumulated and leave Mrs. Klimber after Garrett was dead. Let her take care of herself. Kennedy smiled. That would be an amusing spectacle.

  Otherwise, things were going well. Nofsinger couldn’t hide his scorn over the sending of that note. Kennedy smiled. The note was nothing. It was supposed to be routine; it was supposed to be taken with less than terror; it was supposed to lead to strictly routine precautions. Most important, it was supposed to, and would, focus attention exclusively on Boston, Massachusetts, as the site of danger. The Boston police would go through the motions, and nothing would happen, except that grown men would play a boys’ game. Then they all would congratulate themselves on their resourcefulness and courage, and the Yankees would head home.

  With their guard down. There would be opportunities. There had to be opportunities. Things were being arranged even now so that Gennarro Kennedy would be on the scene when the best chance presented itself.

  This time it would work. The failings of his recent plans, Kennedy had come to see, had been caused by his planning them too finely. He had come to treat life too much like a game of chess; to try to see too many moves ahead for pieces that carried will, if no great intelligence. This time, though, he would simply create a situation favorable to his desired outcome and manipulate events directly and immediately.

  And lethally.

  8

  David Laird coughed, a tiny spasm of his respiratory system. Currents of pain buzzed through his head like strokes of an electric saw. The pain was never gone these days. It waxed and waned but never disappeared, and it flared into agony at the slightest jar. It was going to kill him, and soon.

  There was medicine he could take to ease the pain, but he didn’t dare. The medicine slowed him down and addled his brain.

  If he didn’t know it would hurt so much, he would have laughed. As if his brain weren’t addled already. As if, in allowing Jenny to know he was following her, in trying to see her at all, he hadn’t made the cruelest blunder possible.

  In one small corner of Laird’s brain, emotion held out against reason. I had to see her, emotion protested. It was only an accident she noticed me at the bus stop.

  This time Laird did laugh, and to hell with the pain. Was it an accident you followed her in the first place? Was it an accident you couldn’t be content with your first glance? An accident you shadowed her in every available moment? Wearing your own face? The one every policeman in the country is looking for?

  I should have created a different face, emotion conceded.

  You should have stayed away from her entirely! None of your faces should have set eyes on her. And you know it.

  Yes, emotion said, but I have seen my children again, albeit at a distance. And my son is a fine boy.

  Laird smiled. On that emotion and reason could agree. But was the pain worth it? The risk he’d run when he’d parked on the road and watched Jenny’s house that day? He realized now that his death (the one to come) would lead to his discovery. He had, in fact, planned his actions in a way that would make that inevitable, so that history would know that the likes of Rex Simmons and Edward Bristow had been punished by someone who was entitled to mete out that punishment. How very neat. How very vain.

  But he had forgotten the innocent. He sat amazed at his ability to have done that. It was the innocent who always suffered. He himself had been innocent once. Poor Ann. Jenny and the children. And others.

  He should have died years ago, as he’d planned. Hell was worse when you were alive. And it was hell. Seeing Jenny, hearing her voice, getting close enough, at times, to touch her, knowing all the time you weren’t even worthy of her pity. That you had forfeited all that even before you ran away from her.

  No more innocent people would suffer, even if Laird had to turn himself in and disgrace his family a second time.

  David Laird felt better having made that resolve. Now it was time to act on it. With an effort he rose and forced himself to sit at the wooden table.

  A newspaper lay open in front of him. Laird had the item he was looking for practically memorized, but he blinked his eyes clear and tried it again. It remained the same.

  Mickey Mantle’s life had been threatened. That’s all the item said, really, just the bare fact and a few platitudes to the effect that baseball was just a game and it was foolish to let one’s enthusiasm go so far.

  But there had been a threat on Mickey Mantle’s life.

  David Laird, masquerading as Thane, had been given a gun and told to kill Mickey Mantle. He was supposed to have been the tool of some evil, subtle plan by the Fascist Klimber organization, the power behind Rex Harwood Simmons. Laird had, of course, turned their own plan against them.

  But the fact remained that the Klimber organization wanted Mickey Mantle dead. Laird was the only one who knew that. The authorities were probably taking it as a matter of routine.

  Which, after all, it probably was. But then again it might not be. Laird had to warn them. He did not want Mickey Mantle to die. He didn’t want anyone to die anymore.

  He had to warn them.

  With sheer force of will David Laird packed the pain in his head into one white-hot pellet and tucked it away in a corner of his skull. He rose from the table, staggered from the cottage into the rain, got into his car, and drove to the closest telephone. During the ride he thought of a way to make them take his call seriously.

  He
knew the number he had to call. When he had seen the man with Jenny, some vestigial sense of jealousy had led him to find out all he could about Russ Garrett.

  “Major League Baseball,” said the voice of an operator.

  “Russ Garrett, please.” Laird used the same whisper he had at the ball park the day he’d killed the congressman.

  “Just a moment; I’ll ring him.”

  “Hello,” Garrett said.

  “Mr. Garrett?”

  “Yes?”

  “It would only be wise,” David Laird whispered, “to take the threat against the life of Mickey Mantle seriously.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said, it would only be wise to take the threat against the life of Mickey Mantle seriously.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Good day, Mr. Garrett.” Laird hung up. He heaved a sigh. He had, he felt, done his duty. He drove home through the rain. When he got there, he didn’t bother to dry himself. He had gotten used to being wet. He pulled his chair to the window of the cottage and watched the waves crash on the New Jersey shore, thinking of nothing until it was time for him to leave.

  Chapter Seven

  Hot Corner

  1

  EVERYBODY WAS A LITTLE on edge in anticipation of Monday’s Labor Day doubleheader. The Yankees, waiting out a second day of rain in Philadelphia, were nervous because they hadn’t won a game since last Thursday, when they’d beaten the Browns in St. Louis, 9 to 1. They lost to the Browns 5 to 3 on Friday. Mickey Mantle, though he did his best to ignore it and concentrate on baseball, was upset to think somebody would want to kill him. Mickey’d never hurt anybody—there sure were some crazy people in the world. It was hard to believe just how many until you got to be famous. Then you were up on a hill, where all the people who didn’t like not being up there, too, could see you real good. He wanted to get to Boston and get it over with.

  The Boston police were wary, because even though that threat had probably been the work of a crank, you could never tell, could you? And that’s all that had to happen, one of the Yankees’ stars to get taken care of in Boston. It would be bad for the city, bad for the cops. Bad for the Red Sox, who were also worried. Tom Yawkey, owner of the Sox, had told the cops to do whatever they had to to make sure things didn’t get out of hand. As a result, a whole lot of Boston police would mingle with the Labor Day crowd, armed and ready and warned not to get so involved in the action on the field they forgot to watch the people.

  Back in New York Captain Al (Vicious Aloysius) Murphy had a couple of reasons to be nervous. For one thing, they were bringing Martin back to New York today. Murphy was even going to miss the Sunday afternoon opera broadcast to meet him. Martin was showing good progress and was going to be okay, but Murphy was still nervous about moving him. For another thing, he hoped the Boston cops would pay attention to the teletype message he’d sent without thinking he was trying to horn in. He’d warned them to take a special look at all the Fenway Park vendors (he’d had to look up the name of the ball field) to make sure they were who they were supposed to be. He assumed Garrett would remind them. Garrett was the third reason he was nervous. Here Murphy was trying his damnedest to keep that stupid kid in one piece, and now he had to go to Boston chasing after the ghost of David Laird. Murphy had included a request for the cops up there to keep an eye on him, but he doubted it would help.

  Hal Keating, who was sitting in a fisherman’s restaurant on the pier eating lobster with Russ Garrett, was worried that by leaving the state of Missouri, he was throwing away his chance to bring the St. Louis Browns to Kansas City. Still, some things couldn’t be helped, and Keating’s curiosity was one of them—a legacy from his OSS days, he guessed. Garrett had opened one king-size can of worms and found a tangle that might never be smoothed out. He liked Mantle and he liked Garrett, and Hal had come to save them any grief he could. Hal was there to help.

  Gennarro Kennedy, sitting on the edge of his bed in a dingy hotel room in Roxbury, fingering the Grand Central Station locker key he’d just received, was worried, too, though he wouldn’t have put it that way. Kennedy would have said he was eager; trained and ready for his upcoming tasks, whatever they might turn out to be. He kept looking at his watch, counting off the minutes until he had to meet the Yankees’ train. He’d follow them to the door of the hotel, but not inside.

  2

  Russ Garrett was about the only one who wasn’t worried. He was past that. He’d been uneasy and bewildered so long, he’d finally gone numb. He could still think and all that, but his emotions refused to exercise themselves without extreme provocation.

  He’d been that way since Friday, when he got the mysterious call. He told Murphy about it; Murphy said okay, thanks. “A crank can write a letter, another crank can write about it in a newspaper, and a third one can read it and make a phone call.” And even if it weren’t a crank, the captain pointed out, what could he do about it? “Don’t get excited,” Murphy advised.

  Then Garrett called Jenny Laird, because something the caller said had stuck in his memory. He recited the phone call to Jenny, and she confirmed it. “It would only be wise” was one of David Laird’s pet phrases. He used it all the time; in his lectures to classes, in his writing, even in casual conversation. Garrett himself had heard Laird use it on TV, when he testified before Simmons’s committee.

  A little while before that news would have excited him. Now he followed Murphy’s advice. Garrett was sure it was David Laird who’d spoken to him, but he doubted he could convince anyone who mattered. If Garrett had heard it on TV, millions could have heard it. Garrett wished he’d had the time to ask the voice about the dead dentist and why he’d been left to have his face eaten by the sea gulls.

  Then Garrett thought about the handsome, open face of Mickey Mantle, and about the way Bristow’s injuries had matched those of Simmons and the hot-dog vendor, and felt a little sick. Not excited, just sick.

  Garrett had to go to Boston. Saturday had been devoted to arranging things so that he could. The first thing he did was check Jenny and her kids into a nice little hotel on the East Side of Manhattan, then have a chat with the house detective about keeping an especially good watch over them. Next he went home to pack and tell his parents he would be gone a few days. They hadn’t been home when he’d gotten there—they were visiting a neighbor who was in the hospital after having nearly electrocuted himself trying to fix his own TV set. Garrett’s father had chortled and said it served him right.

  Finally Garrett had to deal with Murphy. He wasn’t sure how he did it, but he managed to get out of town before the captain could put him in protective custody. That night he drove his Kaiser up the Post Road to Boston, getting to the hotel about midnight. He had a little talk with the house detective there, too.

  Sunday morning Hal Keating had showed up. Garrett was glad to have him.

  Garrett pulled a big, white hunk of meat from the lobster’s left claw. “What’s new in Kansas City?” he asked.

  “Everything’s up to date,” Keating said.

  Garrett said, “I’m just trying to take my mind off here and now for five minutes, Hal, okay?”

  “No such luck, Russ. Nothing is going on in Kansas City right now to take your mind off this business. Hell, even your girl friend left town. Went to Washington to get the office in shape for her new boss.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “She called me before she left. She wanted to know how to get in touch with you. I guess she figured Washington is a whole lot closer to New York than Kansas City is.”

  “That’s not even funny, Hal. What did you tell her?”

  “I told her to try the commissioner’s office. I could hardly keep that much a secret. I didn’t know you wanted to avoid her.”

  “I don’t know if I do, either.” Garrett sighed and pushed himself back from the table. “Boy, I’m full. Hal, I swear you know every good restaurant in the country.”

  “Just the American League cit
ies. What do we do now?”

  “Go back to the hotel and have a little talk with Mickey, I suppose. The Yankees ought to be in by now.”

  3

  Gennarro Kennedy watched the New York Yankees leave the train station and get into cabs to go to their hotel. Mickey Mantle was easy to identify: tall and strong and golden haired. He did not look, Kennedy thought, like someone who was in fear for his life. Mantle was laughing and joking with his teammates.

  Kennedy tried to decide the best way to kill him. An open attack was out, at least while he was in Boston. Kennedy reminded himself that he didn’t want to deal with Mantle in Boston, and had no intention of doing so.

  Besides, the circumstances weren’t right. Mantle would seldom be alone, even in his hotel room—the ball players were all doubled up. And Mantle wouldn’t be easy to take on. He was as big and strong as Kennedy himself, and younger. Kennedy had a gun, but he didn’t think he’d use it. A gun would attract too much attention in those situations where he’d be most likely to employ it.

  One idea appeared to have possibilities. The Yankees were scheduled to return to New York by train Monday night. It would be a simple matter to be at the station then, posing as a redcap. If he could get hold of Mantle’s luggage, he could plant one of Nofsinger’s devices in it. Nofsinger was standing by in New York to bring them to him for just such a contingency. Mantle would return to New York, open his suitcase ...

  Kennedy killed the idea just as it began to stretch its wings. What if Mantle didn’t do his own unpacking? Not that Kennedy minded killing a supernumerary or two. But an accident like that would only make people more cautious and matters more difficult. Besides, as far as he could see, the ball players traveled light and handled their own baggage—it would be hard to plant the device.

  Kennedy sighed. He’d be on the train to New York. An opportunity would present itself, either then or during the next few days. Mantle couldn’t be protected forever, and wouldn’t be, back in New York. The note had seen to that. Still, Kennedy mused, there was something appealing in the notion of tipping them off but accomplishing his task nevertheless. More artistic. A more fitting memorial for poor little Lindy.