Lightning

by Ed McBain

  “How do you know that, Miss Compton?” Hawes asked.

  “She’s not dead,” Jenny said.

  “Miss Compton…”

  “I saw her last Thursday afternoon, for Christ’s sake, she can’t…”

  “She was killed sometime Thursday ni—”

  “I don’t want her to be dead,” Jenny said, and suddenly burst into tears. “Shit, why’d you have to come here?”

  She was ten feet tall, this girl, perhaps twenty-one years old, this woman, with city-bred smarts and a city-honed tongue, but she might have just been on her way to kindergarten class, the way she looked now, her right hand covering her face as she wept into it, the left hand clutching the book bag, standing a bit pigeon-toed, and sobbing uncontrollably while the detectives watched, saying nothing, feeling awkward and clumsy and far too overwhelmingly large for this little girl unashamedly crying in their presence.

  They waited.

  It was such a beautiful day.

  “Aw, shit,” Jenny said, “it isn’t true, is it?”

  “I’m sorry,” Carella said.

  “How…how…?” She sniffled and then knelt to reach into her book bag, pulling out a package of tissues, ripping one free, blowing her nose, and then dabbing at her eyes. “What happened?” she said.

  They never thought murder, unless they happened to be the ones who did the job. They always thought a car accident, or something in the subways, people were always falling under subway trains, or else an elevator shaft, there were always accidents in elevator shafts, that’s the way their minds ran when you came around telling them somebody was dead, they never thought murder. And if you told them up front that the person had been killed, if you didn’t just say the person was dead but actually specified killed, if they knew up front that a murder had been committed, they always thought gun, or knife, or poison, or bare hands, somebody beaten to death, somebody strangled to death. How did you explain that this had been a hanging? Or something made to look like a hanging? How did you explain to a twenty-one-year-old girl who was snuffling into a torn tissue that her girlfriend had been found hanging from a goddamn lamppost?

  “Fracture of the upper cervical vertebrae,” Carella said, opting for what the ME had told him earlier this morning. “Crushing of the spinal cord.”

  “Jesus!”

  He still had not told Jenny that someone had done this to her friend. She looked at him searchingly now, realizing that a pair of detectives would not be on the doorstep asking questions if this had been a simple accident, recognizing at last that someone had caused Marcia Schaffer’s death.

  “Someone killed her, is that it?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Thursday night sometime. The Medical Examiner’s estimate puts it at around seven o’clock.”

  “Jesus,” she said again.

  “You didn’t see her at all on Thursday night?” Hawes asked.

  “No.”

  “Did she mention any plans she might have had for that night?”

  “No. Where…where did this happen?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “I mean…where did you find her?”

  “Uptown.”

  “In the street? Somebody attacked her in the street?”

  Carella sighed.

  “She was hanging from a lamppost,” he said.

  “Oh, God!” Jenny said, and began sobbing again.

  Daniel McLaughlin was a rotund little man in his late fifties, wearing dark slacks and brown shoes, a very loud sports jacket, a peach-colored shirt, a tie that looked as if it had been designed by Jackson Pollock (and further abstracted by various food stains), and a dark brown summer straw hat with a narrow brim and a feather that matched the shirt. He seemed out of breath, his face mottled and perspiring, when he came up to the detectives, who were waiting for him on the front stoop. His little brown eyes checked them out briefly, and then flicked to the overflowing garbage cans stacked near the wrought iron railing that surrounded an area below pavement level. He seemed pleased to note that the garbage cans were spilling all sorts of debris onto the sidewalk.

  They had learned from Jenny that Marcia Schaffer had moved into her rent-controlled apartment at about the same time Jenny had, more than two years ago when both girls were starting at Ramsey U on athletic scholarships. Before then, Marcia had indeed lived in a small town in Kansas, not Buffalo Dung—as Jenny had earlier remarked when everything was still light and jovial and unclouded by information of violent death—but instead a place named Manhattan, which called itself The Little Apple. Carella and Hawes guessed there really was a place called Manhattan, Kansas.

  According to Jenny, the owner of the building—the selfsame Daniel McLaughlin who now stood admiring the shit spilling from his garbage cans—had been trying for the past year or more to get all of his tenants out of the building so that he could divide his big old-fashioned apartments into smaller units and thereby realize greater revenues. Thus far, he’d been largely unsuccessful. Save for a little old lady who’d moved to a nursing home, the rest of his tenants flatly refused to budge from a neighborhood that had suddenly become chic, enjoying rents that were impossible to find except in the worst sections of the city, of which there were many. In an attempt to dislodge lodgers who seemed determined to stay lodged, McLaughlin had first yanked out his superintendent, and then had begun a highly creative personal management that last year had resulted in the water being turned off at odd hours, garbage going uncollected, and heat not being provided by October 15, as specified by law in this city. Today was only the eleventh of October; it remained to be seen whether this year, the heat would be turned on as decreed, although the mild weather made the question somewhat academic. Meanwhile, there was garbage all over the sidewalk.

  “You the detectives?” McLaughlin asked, coming up the steps.

  “Mr. McLaughlin?” Carella said.

  “Yeah.” He did not offer his hand. “I’ve got to tell you I don’t appreciate coming all the way up here to deliver a goddamn key.”

  “No other way to get in the apartment,” Hawes said.

  They had called him just before they’d gone to lunch in a greasy spoon around the corner, even though the neighborhood was brimming with good French restaurants. Each of them had eaten hamburgers and French fries, washed down with Cokes. During lunch, Carella had meant to ask Hawes why the Indian had bought a hat, but he was preoccupied with the thought that a cop’s normal working-day diet was nothing the great chefs of Europe would care to write home about. It was now 1:00 in the afternoon, and Daniel McLaughlin was complaining he’d had to come “all the way up here” from his office six blocks away.

  “I don’t like the idea of her being dead to begin with,” McLaughlin said. “I don’t mind having the apartment back, but suppose nobody else wants to rent it once they find out a dead girl was living in it?”

  It seemed not to occur to him that Marcia Schaffer had been very much alive while she’d lived in his precious apartment.

  “Homicide can be difficult,” Carella said.

  “Yeah,” McLaughlin agreed, missing the sarcasm. “Well, I’ve got the key, let’s go. I hope this isn’t going to take forever.”

  “Couple of hours maybe,” Hawes said. “You don’t have to stay with us. If you leave the key, we’ll see that it’s returned to you.”

  “I’ll bet,” McLaughlin said, leaving unvoiced the suspicion that every cop in this city was a thief. “I’ll take you up, come on,” he said.

  They followed him into the building.

  The truth of what Jenny Compton had told them became immediately apparent in the small entrance lobby. A lighting fixture hung loose from the ceiling; there was no light bulb in it. The locks on several of the mailboxes were broken. The glass panel on the interior door was cracked, and the doorknob hung loose from a single screw. Further corroboration of McLaughlin’s attempts to make life difficult for his intransigent tenants was manifest in th
e worn and soiled linoleum on the interior steps, the unwashed windows on each landing, the rickety bannisters and exposed electrical wiring. Carella wondered why someone in the building didn’t simply call the Ombudsman’s Office. He exchanged a glance with Hawes, who nodded bleakly.

  McLaughlin stopped outside the door to 3A, fished in his pocket for a key, unlocked the door, and then looked from one detective to the other, as if trying to measure character in a few swift glances.

  “Listen, I have some other things to take care of,” he said. “If I leave the key, will you really get it back to me?”

  “Scout’s honor,” Hawes said, deadpanned.

  “I’m at McLaughlin Realty on Bower Street,” McLaughlin said, handing him the key. “Well, I guess you know that, that’s where you called me. I want you to understand I’m not responsible for any damage you do in here, case the girl’s relatives start complaining later on.”

  “We’ll try to be careful,” Carella said.

  “Make sure you get that key back to me.”

  “We’ll see that it’s returned,” Hawes said.

  “Yeah, I hope,” McLaughlin said, and went off down the hallway, shaking his head.

  “Nice man,” Carella said.

  “Wonderful,” Hawes said, and they went into the apartment.

  As Jenny had suggested, the apartment was larger than those in many of the city’s newer buildings, the front door opening onto a sizable entrance hall that led into a spacious living room. The apartment seemed even larger than it actually was because of the sparse furnishings, exactly what one might expect of a college girl attending school on a scholarship. A sofa was against one wall, two thrift-shop easy chairs angled into it. A bank of oversized windows was on the adjoining wall, splashing October sunlight into the room. A row of potted plants rested on the floor beneath the windows. Hawes went to them and touched the soil; they seemed not to have been watered too recently.

  “You don’t think McLaughlin wanted her out of the apartment that bad, do you?” he asked.

  “Whoever pulled her up on the end of that rope had to be pretty strong,” Carella said, shaking his head.

  “Fat doesn’t mean weak,” Hawes said.

  “He look like a murderer to you?”

  “No.”

  “There’s a smell,” Carella said.

  “I know. But he’s sure trying hard to get these people out of here.”

  “We ought to make some calls, put somebody on it. I hate to see him getting away with this kind of shit.”

  “You know anybody in the mayor’s office?”

  “Maybe Rollie Chabrier does.”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  They were referring to an assistant district attorney both men had dealt with in the past. They were roaming the living room now, not looking for anything in particular, sniffing the air, more or less, the way animals in the wild will when they enter unfamiliar territory. Technically, this was not the scene of the crime; the scene of the crime was some four miles uptown, where they had discovered the body hanging from a lamppost. But the medical examiner had posited the theory that Marcia Schaffer had been killed elsewhere and only later transported to where they’d discovered her. It was within the realm of possibility that she had been killed here, in this apartment, although at first glance there seemed to be no signs of a violent struggle of any sort. Still, the unspoken question hovered in both their minds. Hawes finally voiced it.

  “Think we ought to get some technicians in here? Before we mess anything up?”

  Carella considered this.

  “I’d hate like hell to touch anything that may be evidence,” Hawes said.

  “Better call them,” Carella agreed, and went to the phone. He tented a handkerchief over his hand when he picked up the receiver. He stuck the eraser end of a pencil into the receiver holes when he dialed the Mobile Crime Unit number.

  The technicians arrived some twenty minutes later. They stood in the middle of the living room, looking around the place much as Carella and Hawes earlier had, just sniffing the air, getting used to the feel of it. Carella and Hawes hadn’t touched a thing. They hadn’t even sat on any of the chairs. They were standing almost where they’d been when Carella placed his call.

  “We the first ones in here?” one of the technicians asked. Carella remembered him as somebody named Joe. Joe Something-or-other.

  “Yes,” Carella said. “Well, we’ve been in here a half hour or so.”

  “I mean, besides us. You and us.”

  “That’s it,” Carella said.

  “Touch anything?” the other technician asked. Carella did not recognize him.

  “Just the outside knob.”

  “So you want the whole works?” the first technician asked. “Dusting? Vacuuming? The twelve ninety-five job?” He smiled at his partner.

  “Reduced from thirteen-fifty,” his partner said, returning the smile.

  “We’re not sure this is the crime scene,” Carella said.

  “So what the hell’re we doing here?” the first technician said.

  “It might be,” Hawes said.

  “Then take the two-dollar job,” the second technician suggested.

  “Quick once-over,” the first technician said. “Superficial, but thorough.” He held up a finger alongside his nose, emphasizing the point.

  “Better give ‘em some gloves,” the second technician said.

  The first technician produced a pair of white cotton gloves and handed them to Carella. “In case you decide to do any detective work,” he said, and winked at his partner. He handed another pair of gloves to Hawes. Both detectives pulled on the gloves while the technicians watched.

  “May I have the first dance?” the second technician said, and then they went downstairs to the van, to get all the paraphernalia they would need for tossing the apartment.

  On a fireplace mantel on the wall opposite the sofa, Carella and Hawes studied the several trophies attesting to Marcia Schaffer’s running ability—a silver cup, a silver plate, several medals, all earned while she was on her high school’s track team. The engraved inscription on the silver plate recorded the fact that she had broken the Kansas track record three years earlier. There was a framed picture of a man and a woman, presumably her parents, reminding Carella that he had not yet called Manhattan, Kansas. That would have to come later. He did not relish having to make that call.

  The technicians were back. The one Carella thought was named Joe said, “You’re not fucking anything up, are you?”

  The second technician put his gear down on the floor. “This a homicide or what?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Carella said.

  “The stiff been printed already? Case we find any wild latents?”

  “She’s been printed,” Carella said.

  “Any signs of forcible entry?”

  “None that we saw.”

  “Can we skip the windowsills then?”

  “Whatever you think,” Carella said.

  “What the hell are we looking for, anyway?”

  “Traces of anybody else who might’ve been in here.”

  “That could be the whole fuckin’ city,” the first technician said, and shook his head. But they got to work nonetheless. The second technician was even whistling as he started dusting the mantelpiece for fingerprints.

  An open doorframe, no door in it, led to the only bedroom in the apartment, large and airy, with a high ceiling and the same oversized windows overlooking the street. There was a bed against one wall, an unpainted dresser opposite it, an unpainted desk angled into a corner. There were Ramsey University pennants on one of the walls, together with framed photographs of Marcia Schaffer in track costume, looking healthy and radiant and bursting with life. One of the pictures showed her with her blond hair blowing on the wind behind her, arms and legs pumping, mouth open and sucking in air as she broke the tape at a finish line. A gray team jacket—with the school’s name lettered across the back of it in purple, and the word
track appliqued under the school’s seal on the front—was draped over the chair near the desk. There were open books on the desktop. There was a sheet of paper in the typewriter. Carella glanced at it. Marcia Schaffer had been working on a paper for an anthropology class. Man stands alone, he thought, because man alone stands. Marcia Schaffer would never stand again, no less run. The runner had been knocked down in her twenty-first year of life.

  In the bedroom closet, they found a sparse assortment of clothing—several dresses and skirts, sweaters on hangers, a ski parka, a raincoat, blue jeans, tailored slacks, a gray warm-up suit with the university’s name and seal on it. Together, they went through coat pockets and jacket pockets, the pockets of all the jeans and slacks. Nothing. They shook out loafers and high-heeled shoes, track shoes and sneakers. Nothing. They opened a valise on the closet shelf. It was empty. They crossed the room to the dresser, and methodically went through the clothes in the drawers there. Bras and panties, slips and more sweaters, blouses and pantyhose, knee socks and sweat socks. In a corner of the top drawer, they found a dispenser for birth control pills.

  They went back into the living room where the technicians were working, and went through all the desk drawers, searching in vain for an appointment calendar. They found a small leather-bound book listing names, addresses, and telephone numbers, presumably of friends and relatives. Marcia Schaffer seemed to have known quite a few people in the city, but most of them were women, and neither Carella nor Hawes believed that a woman would have had the strength to hoist Marcia’s deadweight body up onto a lamppost some twenty-five feet above the ground. In the S section of the book, Carella found a listing for Schaffer, no surnames following it, no address, simply a telephone number with a 913 area code preceding it. He was willing to bet this was the area code for Manhattan, Kansas. He would have to call her parents. Soon. He would have to tell them their golden girl was dead.

  He sighed heavily.

  “Something?” Hawes asked. He was rummaging in the wastebasket alongside the desk, studying scraps of crumpled paper.

  “No, no,” Carella said.