Five O'Clock Lightning

by William L. DeAndrea

  4

  Garrett got the address from the day manager at the Samuel Tilden rest area of the New Jersey Turnpike, the scene of David Laird’s miracle of three weeks (only three weeks?) ago. Now he was driving north in the rented Buick. Up the shore, past the oil tanks. To one little cottage on the beach. He stopped the car and got out, shaking his head. He should have been afraid—the man, after all, was a convictable killer—but Garrett just couldn’t believe he was in any danger.

  Garrett touched the small bandage on his forehead, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door.

  The whole cottage seemed to jump in surprise. Garrett could hear scratching and rustling within. The occupant wasn’t used to callers.

  A voice rasped from inside. “Go away!”

  Garrett knocked again. Now the voice wanted to know who was there. “Russ Garrett,” Garrett said. Then he couldn’t resist adding, “It would only be wise to open the door.”

  And about five seconds later the door was opened, and Garrett saw the puckered, ruined face of the dishwasher, the man he knew as Joey Hart, blinking in the sunlight.

  “Mr. Garrett.” It was stated as a fact. No emotion.

  “Yes,” Garrett told him. “It’s about time we had a talk. Should I call you Joey, or Professor, or Mr. Laird, or just David?”

  5

  He was to call him David. Gravely the man waved Garrett into the room and closed the door tight behind them. It was dark inside; it might have been nighttime.

  “I hope you don’t mind the shades being drawn,” David Laird said. “The light hurts my eyes.”

  “No,” Garrett said. “I don’t mind.” Garrett’s eyes adjusted quickly. He looked across the room to see “Joey” putting something in his mouth. False teeth, he thought, only more elaborate, heavier. It had to be something like that, of course. Garrett should have known.

  Garrett had the only chair; his host sat on the edge of the thin cot. And his face was totally different. This man was now David Laird.

  “Thank you for waiting,” Laird said. “I speak better with the appliances in, though it’s more comfortable without them.”

  “Excellent disguise, too,” Garrett said.

  Laird nodded. There seemed to be a sad, painful slowness to everything he did. “Oh, yes,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to kill Simmons without it.”

  Despite the fact that the voice was rough, Garrett found the man incredibly congenial, under the circumstances. He’d expected a shouting match. Or something.

  “So you’ve found me,” Laird said. “I expected it would happen, but not quite so soon.”

  “I got lucky,” Garrett told him.

  “How did you figure it out? I thought my performance as ‘Joey’ was quite good. Joey is circus slang for a clown, you know. Did I give myself away at any time when I was talking to you?”

  “No, not at all. Not even when I showed up there with your wife. You just got angry and sloughed us off.”

  “That was difficult. You can’t imagine what torture it was to see Jenny again. That time she came to the restaurant by herself—well, I’d been in the New York area for some time, and I’d managed to control my desire to see her. But after she came to the restaurant, I couldn’t help myself. I began to follow her. In this face. I think I wanted her to see me. Unconsciously. I think perhaps I hoped she could find some way we could be together again ...”

  Garrett nodded. That was the time Jenny had been “aware” of her husband’s presence. She’d looked into the kitchen. Unconsciously, she’d undoubtedly recognized his posture, or his walk, or something else that said David. Maybe even what was left of his voice.

  “You see, I’m trying to be honest with you, Mr. Garrett—”

  “Russ. If you’re David, I’m Russ.”

  “Russ, then. I hope you’ll be as honest with me. Please tell me how you found me.”

  Garrett put his hands on his knees, leaning forward in the wooden chair. “I cut a man’s throat this morning. Laid his jaw open to the bone.”

  Laird didn’t turn a hair. Either he had gotten used to violence or he knew the details from radio reports. “I see,” he said.

  “It made me think of Bristow.”

  “My old friend.”

  Garrett nodded. “It made me think of him and of the way he died. It made me think of faces.” Garrett scratched at the corner of the bandage.

  “It’s going to be hard to explain this, because it didn’t come to me in any sequence. It hit me all at once, like ...” Garrett tried to think of a different word, but couldn’t. “Like lightning.”

  Laird nodded sagely. Like a professor, Garrett thought. “I understand,” Laird told him. “That was how my plan came to me in the first place.”

  Garrett resisted the impulse to ask him what time of day that had been.

  “It made me think of faces. Now, you killed Bristow first, and he looked like practice. He was punched the way the hot-dog vendor, Vitiello, was punched. He was shot twice, like Rex Simmons and like the Jersey cop.”

  “I shouldn’t have shot the policeman,” Laird said. “I panicked. I wish I could tell him how sorry I am. I’m glad to hear he’s recovering.”

  Garrett went on. “All those similarities. But then Bristow’s jaw was broken, and he was left in such a way that his face would be eaten by birds. I decided that was a prediction, too, or practice. That you were going to ruin somebody’s face. I kept dreading it and, frankly, hoping it wasn’t my face you had in mind.

  “Then looking at what I’d just done to a man, it dawned on me that maybe it wasn’t practice, like the rest. Maybe it was revenge.

  “And I thought of Joey Hart.”

  For the first time, David Laird showed anger. “He deserved it. I should have put him in those rocks while he was alive.” Laird was making fists in the thin blanket. “He was a coward, and he was a traitor, and he was going to destroy my life—he did destroy it, with those lies he told Simmons’s committee. And he was an incompetent dentist!”

  It was ludicrous, of course, but Garrett heard the passion in the words and saw the anger on David Laird’s face, and the thought of laughing never crossed his mind.

  Laird touched his jaw, the famous square jaw, restored by the plastic appliance inside his mouth.

  “Cancer,” he said. “I had pains; I went to Bristow. He never found it. Never thought about it. Just let it grow, and cleaned my teeth!”

  Laird’s eyes were wet. “He killed me, Russ. He murdered my body with his incompetence, and he destroyed my soul with his treachery. By the time I went to another doctor, after Bristow had testified, it was too late to do anything about the cancer. That was what got me started. That and ... and something else. I didn’t want to burden Jenny anymore. Ann was dead. I couldn’t take it ...”

  Laird told Garrett the story—how he’d decided against suicide in favor of revenge, and how fate put the old derelict in his way.

  “I found a place in Canada doing experimental oral surgery. I volunteered. They removed the bad part of my jaw—that had been the original site of the cancer—but by then it had spread to my throat. That’s why I talk this way. I—I don’t know where else it’s spread. I have terrible pains in my head.”

  As he spoke, he took a pill bottle from his pocket, removed a capsule, and swallowed it without water. He gave Garrett a sad smile. “I don’t know why I bother. They don’t work too well anymore.”

  Laird resumed his story. How the people in Canada had given him the appliances to wear. How he’d realized what a perfect disguise he now had. Several disguises. “Sometimes I’d wear both appliances, sometimes just the uppers—I did that when I was Thane—sometimes nothing at all. I used to dye my hair, too, but after I was done being ‘Thane,’ I soon realized it wasn’t necessary. My hair is the kind of blond that looks dark brown when it’s wet. When I was washing dishes, the steam took care of it. The rest of the time I just made sure I had plenty of hair oil.”

  Garrett already knew f
rom Kennedy how Laird had infiltrated Nofsinger’s phony Communist organization. He mentioned it; Laird supplied the remaining details.

  Garrett looked at the man. He’d expected to feel some sort of triumph around this time. He felt only sadness, and frustration.

  “That was an interesting trick,” Garrett told him. “Using their own gun to get Simmons. Sort of a trademark of yours, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Turning things around. Twisting things. Using a plan thought up by supporters of Rex Simmons to kill Simmons himself. Using your own face as the perfect disguise.

  “And your famous disappearance. The police of two states went crazy trying to figure out how you pulled that off. I waltzed around with it myself. The only explanations—that you’d walked off or driven off—had so many holes in them they could be used for nets. You even tried to help us out, didn’t you? That time you told us ‘Joey’ heard somebody go through the kitchen and out to the county road.

  “But once I suspected Joey, it was simple. Simple. Because it wasn’t your disappearance at all that caused the problem. It was your appearance.

  “You shot Simmons when you were masquerading as the hot-dog vendor, dressed in restaurant white. You were still dressed that way when the cops stopped you on the New Jersey Turnpike. And you were still dressed that way when you arrived at the rest area. All you had to do then was walk in the door and show up for work. You were supposed to be there, and you were supposed to be wearing white clothes. All the employees there wore them. That state trooper, Johnson, said he almost shot the first one he saw dressed that way. You were home free. You took out your teeth as soon as you stopped the car, hid them somewhere—”

  “I dropped them in the dishwater.”

  Garrett raised an eyebrow. “Weren’t you afraid they’d melt?”

  “They’re built so you can drink coffee while you’re wearing them. Besides, after I’d killed Simmons I could have gotten along without them.”

  “Oh,” Garrett said. “Anyway, there you were. You didn’t look the same. Nobody had reason to suspect you. You stuck your head in the steam and went to work.”

  “It wasn’t supposed to be that way, you know. I had no idea I would be stopped by the police so soon, chased by them. My original plan had been simply to have the chain of stolen cars I’d been using end there, at the restaurant. They’d assume I’d switched to a car of my own and driven on. They might have even continued to check down the road and not come into the restaurant at all. But even if they did come in, I wasn’t worried. In there I was just ... Joey.”

  Just Joey, Garrett thought. But he’d set off a chain of misery and violence that had left people dead and maimed across half the country. Had made a killer of Garrett himself.

  Then something occurred to him. “How did you get home that night?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “After work. How did you get home from the rest area? You certainly didn’t drive the stolen car you’d come there in.”

  “Of course not. I simply left through the back door and walked home on the country roads. I often did that when I couldn’t get a ride to the nearest turn-off with one of the other employees.”

  “Long walk,” Garrett said.

  “My pains don’t let me sleep much. Sometimes the walking helps.”

  “I see.” Garrett looked around the shabby little room. At the ragged man sitting in the darkness; this man who’d come back from the dead for revenge. Tried to hate him, but couldn’t.

  “Any regrets?” Garrett asked.

  Laird thought it over. “As I said before, I’m sorry I shot the policeman. And I’m sorry your friends were hurt, though that was really the fault of the Simmons faction. And I am deeply, deeply sorry for hurting Jenny and the children again. I hope you will tell them that.”

  6

  The sun outside had climbed above the shade rollers, and now two bright strips of light lay on the floor like mammoth glowworms.

  Garrett sighed. “What the hell am I going to do with you, David?”

  There was surprise in the rasping voice. “I—I don’t know. I must admit I was surprised when you arrived without the police.”

  “I haven’t told the police.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m in love with your wife. I don’t want her to be hurt anymore, either.”

  “I see,” Laird said. Again he touched the diseased jaw. “Because she reminds you of her cousin?”

  “No! Not anymore. Because she reminds me of herself, which is pretty damned terrific. You have three great kids, too.”

  Laird looked down at his hands. “I know. I don’t deserve any of them. Russ ...”

  “Yes?”

  “You took Ann’s death badly, didn’t you.”

  “You must know I did.”

  “It wasn’t your child. It was mine. We ... we had a short affair. When things were darkest for me. Ann was merely being kind.”

  Garrett was angry. “What the hell difference does that make now? I still loved her, and she’s still dead.”

  “She loved you, too. She would never have tried to abort your child. That was the ‘something else’ I had alluded to before that got me started this way. It ate at me worse than the cancer. I ...”

  “It’s over with now,” Garrett told him harshly. In a way it made sense. It explained, as nothing else did, why Ann had left him. She was ashamed. Poor Annie. “And it still doesn’t answer the question of what I’m going to do.” A voice inside him kept saying, what’s the goddam use, anyway?

  Laird’s face showed a look of infinite weariness. “I’m dying, Russ,” he said. “It’s a matter of weeks now.”

  “I have to talk to the police again tomorrow. Under oath.”

  “I see.” He closed his eyes and lay back on the bed. “If I could only stop the pains in my head, maybe I could think of something.” He took the bottle of pills from his pocket and held it in front of his eyes. “These things are worthless to me when I take them one at a time. I wonder, if I took all of them at once, whether the pain would finally go away.”

  Garrett rubbed his eyes. There it was—he’d talked the man into killing himself. For Jenny’s sake, he kept telling himself. For Mark, and the twins. He didn’t like it. He started out wanting to play baseball and wound up playing God.

  He got up to go.

  David Laird sat up. “Wait! What are you going to do?”

  “Tomorrow I’m going to tell the police how it came to me in a dream that David Laird and Joey Hart are the same person. And I’m going to try to get them to keep it quiet. For Jenny’s sake.”

  Laird looked at him intensely. It was strange, but Garrett got the impression Laird was worried about him, and that he understood. God, he hoped so.

  “And today?” Laird asked him.

  “I’m going to go to your wife and hold her hand, and tell her everything is going to be all right. I’m going to write letters to law schools and get applications. I’m going to get in touch with Mickey Mantle, and the Yankee ticket office.”

  “I don’t understand,” Laird said.

  “A promise I made,” Garrett told him. “I’ve got to make arrangements to take a kid to a ball game.”

  “I see,” David Laird said. He closed his eyes, then opened them again. “Take care of her, Russ.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Garrett said. A ball player—even an ex-ball player—was expected to do his best.

  The two men looked at each other for a long moment. Then Garrett opened the door and stepped blinking into the bright September sunshine.

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  “Tennessee Waltz” by Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King © 1948 by Acuff-Rose Publications Inc. Renewed 1975. All rights reserved. Used by permission of the publisher.

  copyright © 1982 by William L. DeAndrea

  cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4532-9027-9

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