Lightning

by Ed McBain

  “Good,” he said.

  “My brother brought it back from France,” she said.

  “What does he do?”

  “He imports fish,” she said. “Don’t laugh.”

  “What kind of fish?”

  “Salmon. Irish salmon, mostly. Very expensive stuff. Something like thirty-eight dollars a pound.”

  “Whoo,” Hawes said. “So how come France?”

  “What? Oh. A side trip. Mixing business with pleasure.”

  “I’ve never been to France,” Hawes said, somewhat wistfully.

  “Neither have I,” Annie said.

  “Popeye got to go to France, though.”

  “Popeye?”

  “The French Connection. Did you see that movie? Not the one where he goes to France, that was lousy. The first one.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty authentic, I thought.”

  “Yeah, standing around in the cold, and everything. That really happened to Carella, you know.”

  “Who’s Carella?”

  “Guy I’m working these homicides with, good cop.”

  “What really happened to him?”

  “They made him an addict. On a case he was working. They turned him on to heroin. Like with Popeye in the second French Connection movie. Only it happened to Carella before there even was that movie. I mean, really happened to him, never mind fiction.”

  “Is he okay now?”

  “Oh, sure. Well, he was hooked, but not for very long, and besides they did it to him, you know, it wasn’t a voluntary thing.”

  “So he kicked it.”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Some fun, huh? Being a cop?”

  “A million laughs,” Hawes said. “How’d you happen to get into it?”

  “I thought it would be exciting,” Annie said. “I guess it is. Don’t you think it is?”

  “I guess so,” Hawes said.

  “I was fresh out of college…”

  “You still look like a college girl.”

  “Well, thank you.”

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Thirty-four,” Annie said immediately.

  He liked that about lady cops. No bullshit. Ask a question, you got a straight answer.

  “Been on the job long?”

  “Eight years.”

  “You used to work out of Robbery, right?” Hawes said.

  “Yeah. Well, I was on the Stakeout Squad before that. Right after I got the gold shield. Then Robbery, and now Rape. How about you?”

  “I’ve been with the Eight-Seven for more years than I can count,” Hawes said. “Before that, I was with the Three-Oh, a silk-stocking precinct, are you familiar with it?”

  “Yes,” Annie said, and nodded, and sipped at her cognac.

  “I’ve learned a lot uptown,” he said.

  “I’ll bet you have,” Annie said.

  They were silent for a moment. He wanted to ask her where she’d gone to college, what she’d majored in, whether she’d had any qualms about working with the Stakeout Squad, whose prime purpose—before it was disbanded—was to sit in the back of stores that had been previously held up, waiting to ambush any robber who came back a second time. The Stakeout Squad had blown away forty-four armed robbers before the Commissioner decided the operation was something the Department shouldn’t be too terribly proud of. Hawes wondered if she’d shot anyone while she was working with Stakeout. He had a lot of questions he still wanted to ask her. He felt he was getting to know her a little better, but there were still a lot of questions to ask. Instead, though, suddenly feeling totally relaxed and secure, he didn’t ask a question at all. As if he had known her forever, he said only, “It gets to you after a while. The job.”

  She looked at him for what seemed like a long time before she answered.

  “Yes,” she said simply. “It gets to you.”

  They kept looking at each other.

  Hawes nodded.

  “Well,” he said, and glanced at his watch. “If your day was anything like mine…”

  “Rough one,” she said, and nodded.

  “So,” he said, and rose awkwardly. “Thanks for the cognac, your brother’s got good taste.”

  “Thanks for the dinner,” she said.

  She did not rise. She kept sitting right where she was, looking up at him, her legs tucked under her.

  “Let’s do it again sometime,” he said.

  “I’d love to.”

  “In fact…I’ve got the day off tomorrow,” he said. “Maybe we could…”

  “I don’t have to be in till four,” she said.

  “Maybe…well, I don’t know. What would you like to do?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Marty,” she said, and smiled. “What would you like to do?”

  “I love that movie,” he said.

  “I do, too.”

  “I saw it on television again last week.”

  “So did I.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I saw it last week.”

  “Late at night, right?”

  “About two in the morning.”

  “How about that?” he said. “Both of us watching the same movie at opposite ends of the city.”

  “What a pity,” she said.

  Their eyes met.

  “Well,” he said, “let me call you in the morning, okay? I’ll try to figure out something we can…”

  “Let’s not be dopes,” Annie said.

  Eileen Burke was in Kling’s bed.

  They had known each other intimately for the better part of eight months now, but the sex tonight had been as steamy and as improvisational as it had been the first time. When at last they expired on the separate little deaths of literary reknown, and after they exchanged the obligatory assurances that it had been as good for him as it had been for her and vice versa, and after Eileen had gone to the bathroom to pee, and after Kling had crossed the room naked to open the window to the sounds of the night traffic below, they lay back against the pillows, entwined in each other’s arms, Eileen’s hand resting idly on Kling’s chest, his own hand gently cradling her breast.

  It was a little while before Eileen told him what was troubling her.

  “I’ve been thinking about the job,” she said.

  Kling had been thinking about the job, too. Kling had been thinking that the hangings up there in the Eight-Seven were the work of the Deaf Man.

  “I’m not talking about this particular job,” Eileen said. “This business of masquerading as Mary Hollings.”

  “The rape victim, right,” Kling said.

  “I mean the job itself.”

  “Being a cop, you mean?”

  “Being a particular kind of cop,” Eileen said.

  It has to be the Deaf Man, Kling was thinking. It fit with the Deaf Man’s m.o. They hadn’t heard from the Deaf Man in a long time, but this sure looked like the Deaf Man. Why else would anybody have bothered to make identification of the victims so easy for them?

  “A decoy, I mean,” Eileen said.

  Kling was thinking back to the first time the Deaf Man had put in an appearance. That had been the most difficult time for the Eight-Seven because they hadn’t known then what they were up against. All they’d known was that somebody was trying to force a man—what had his name been, anyway? Meyer had caught the initial squeal, a guy who’d grown up with his father, came to the squadroom to tell him—what the hell had his name been? Haskins? Baskin?

  “I’m beginning to think it’s demeaning,” Eileen said.

  “What is?” Kling asked.

  “Being a decoy. I mean, aside from the fact that it smells a lot like entrapment…”

  “Well, it’s not exactly entrapment,” Kling said.

  “I know it isn’t, but it feels like it is,” Eileen said. “I mean, I’m out there hoping some guy will rape me, isn’t that what it is?”

  “Well, not rape you, actually.”

  “Try to rape me, okay?”

  �
�So you can stop him from raping somebody else,” Kling said.

  “Well, yeah, that,” Eileen said.

  Raskin, Kling remembered. His name was David Raskin. And somebody had been trying to get him to vacate a loft on Culver Avenue, crumby little loft Raskin used for storing dresses, guy was in the dress business, right, David Raskin. First he started getting calls threatening to kill him if he didn’t move out of the loft. Then the guy heckling him on the phone—they hadn’t known it was the Deaf Man at the time—began sending him stationery he hadn’t ordered, and then a catering service delivered folding chairs and enough food to feed the Russian army, and then an ad appeared in the two morning dailies advertising for redheads to model dresses, and that was when they tipped to what was going on: someone was referring them to Conan Doyle’s The RedHeaded League, and the someone had signed himself L. Sordo, which was Spanish for the Deaf Man, and he was trying to help them dope out in advance what he was planning to do.

  Only he hadn’t been trying to help them at all. He was using them the way he’d been using Raskin, misdirecting them into believing he was planning to hit the bank under Raskin’s loft, when he had another bank in mind all along. Playing with them. Making them feel foolish and incompetent. Leading them a merry chase while he masterminded his break-in, probably laughing to himself all along.

  Carella had got himself shot that first time the Deaf Man made himself known to the 87th Precinct.

  If the Deaf Man was now responsible for the two hangings…

  “It makes me feel like some kind of sex object,” Eileen said.

  “You are some kind of sex object,” Kling said, and playfully tweaked her nipple.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  And while she went on to tell him that she wouldn’t have been picked for this particular line of police work if she wasn’t a woman, which in itself was demeaning because nobody on the force would dream of putting a male cop in drag to lure a rapist—had he really been listening, Kling might have protested that male cops had been used on such jobs—and which was entirely against the whole psychology of the rapist, anyway. A rapist wasn’t interested in tits and ass, he wasn’t interested in a show of leg or thigh, he was interested in satisfying his own particular rage, which had nothing whatever to do with sex or lust. But the sexist meatheads in the department put her on the street to parade like a hooker in the hope she would trap—yes, trap—some lunatic out there into dragging her in the bushes where she’d stick her gun in his mouth; it was all degrading and it made her feel slimy at night when she took off her clothes, made her feel like scrubbing herself three times over to get the filth of the job off her. What the hell was a lady like Annie Rawles doing on the Rape Squad when she’d already blown away two guys when she was with Robbery, what was that if not taking the sexist view that a woman cop was suited only for a certain kind of police work while a man cop had his choice of whatever the hell job he wanted?

  “What job do you want?” Kling asked.

  “I may ask for a transfer to Narcotics,” she said.

  “Same thing,” he said. “Only then you’ll be a decoy for pushers.”

  “It’s not the same,” Eileen said.

  But Kling was still thinking about the Deaf Man.

  He had blown up half the city.

  That was the first time.

  He had set both incendiary and explosive bombs all over the city, to divert the police, to cause panic and confusion while he went about the business of robbing a bank. Not a thought in his head of the havoc he was wreaking or of the lives lost because of his clever little escapade.

  That had been the first time.

  Carella tended to block out that first time because that was the time he’d been shot. He did not like to think about getting shot. He’d been shot once before then, by a pusher in Grover Park, and he hadn’t enjoyed that particular fireworks display, either. So whenever he thought about the Deaf Man, as he was doing tonight, he tended to remember only the second and third times the Deaf Man had come around to plague them. It seemed incredible to him that there had been only three times. The Deaf Man, in his mind and in the minds of most of the detectives on the squad, was a legend, and legends were without origin, legends were omnipresent, legends were eternal. The very thought that the Deaf Man might already be back yet another time sent a small shiver of apprehension up Carella’s spine. Whenever the Deaf Man arrived—and surely these hangings bore his unique stamp—the men of the Eight-Seven began behaving like Keystone Kops in a silent black-and-white film. Carella did not enjoy feeling like a dope, but the Deaf Man made all of them feel stupid.

  He thought it a supreme irony of his life that the man who was the nemesis of the 87th Precinct advertised himself as being deaf—if, in fact, he was—while at the same time the single most important person in his life, his wife Teddy, was truly deaf. Nor could she speak. Not with a voice, at any rate. She spoke volumes otherwise, with her hands, with her expressive face, with her eyes. And she “heard” every word her husband uttered, her eyes fastened to his lips when he spoke or to his hands when he signed to her in the language she had taught him early on in their marriage.

  Teddy was talking to him now.

  They had just made love.

  The first words she said to him were, “I love you.”

  She used the informal sign, a blend of the letters “i,” “1,” and “y,” her right hand held close to her breast, the little finger, index finger and thumb extended, the remaining two fingers folded down toward her palm. He answered with the more formal sign for “I love you”: first touching the tip of his index finger to the center of his chest; then clenching both fists in the “a” hand sign, crossing his arms below the wrists, and placing his hands on his chest; and finally pointing at her with his index finger—a simple “I” plus “love” plus “you.”

  They kissed again.

  She sighed.

  And then she began telling him about her day.

  He had known for quite some time now that she was interested in finding a job. Fanny had been with them since the twins were born, and she ran the house efficiently. The twins—Mark and April—were now eleven years old, and in school much of the day. Teddy was bored with playing tennis or lunching with the “girls.” She signed “girl” by making the “a” hand sign with her right fist, and dragging the tip of her thumb down her cheek along the jawline; to make the word plural, she rapidly indicated several different locations, pointing with her extended forefinger. More than one girl. Girls. But her eyes and the expression on her face made it clear that she was using the word derogatively; she did not consider herself a “girl,” and she certainly didn’t consider herself one of the “girls.”

  Carella, listening to this—he was in fact listening, even though he was watching—thought about the second time the Deaf Man had come into the precinct’s busy life. Again, it had been Meyer who’d initially been contacted, purely by chance since he was the one who’d answered the ringing telephone. The Deaf Man himself was on the other end of the line, promising to kill the Parks Commissioner if he did not receive five thousand dollars before noon. The Parks Commissioner was shot dead the following night.

  Well, I went to this real estate agency on Cumberland Avenue this morning, Teddy was saying with her hands and her eyes and her face. I’d written them a letter answering an ad in the newspaper, telling them what my experience had been before we got married and before I became a mother—

  (Carella remembered. He had met Theodora Franklin while investigating a burglary at a small firm on the fringe of the precinct territory. She had been working there addressing envelopes. He had taken one look at the brown-eyed, black-haired beauty sitting behind the typewriter, and had known instantly that this was the woman with whom he wished to share the rest of his life.) —and they wrote back setting up an appointment for an interview. So I got all dolled up this morning, and went over there.

  To express the slang expression “dolled up,” she first sig
ned “x,” stroking the curled index finger of the hand sign on the tip of her nose, twice. To indicate “doll” was in the past tense, she immediately made the sign for “finished.” For “up” she made the same sign anyone who was not a deaf-mute might have made: She simply moved her extended index finger upward. Dolled up. Carella got the message, and visualized her in a smart suit and heels, taking the bus to Cumberland Avenue, some two miles from the house.

  And now her hands and her eyes and her mobile face spewed forth a torrent of language. Surprise of all surprises, she told him, the lady is a deaf-mute. The lady cannot hear, the lady cannot speak, the lady—however intelligent her letter may have sounded, however bright and perky she may appear in person—possesses neither tongue nor ear, the lady simply will not do! This despite the fact that the ad called only for someone to type and file. This despite the fact that I was reading that fat bastard’s lips and understanding every single word he said—which wasn’t easy since he was chewing on a cigar—this despite the fact that I can still type sixty words a minute after all these years, ah, the hell with it. Steve, he thought I was dumb (she tapped the knuckles of the “a” hand sign against her forehead, indicating someone stupid), the obvious mate to deaf, right? (she touched first her mouth and then her ear with her extended index finger), like ham and eggs, right? Deaf and dumb, right? Shit, she said signing the word alphabetically for emphasis, S-H-I-T!

  He took her in his arms.

  He was about to comfort her, about to tell her that there were ignorant people in this world who were incapable of judging a person’s worth by anything but the most obvious external evidence, when suddenly she was signing again. He read her hands and the anger in her eyes.

  I’m not quitting, she said. I’ll get a goddamn job.

  She rolled into him, and he felt her small determined nod against his shoulder. Reaching behind him toward the night table, he snapped off the bedside light. He could hear her breathing in the darkness beside him. He knew she would lie awake for a long time, planning her next move. He thought suddenly of the Deaf Man again. Was he lying awake out there someplace, planning his next move? Another girl hanging from a lamppost? Another young runner knocked down in her prime? But why?