Lightning

by Ed McBain

  The girl collapsed against him.

  He looked swiftly ahead on the path, and then picked her up in his arms and turned toward the park entrance.

  A man was standing in the opening flanked by the shattered light globes. Illumination from the lamppost up the street cast his angled shadow between the two stone pillars.

  The man took one look and ran like hell.

  Detective First/Grade Oliver Weeks said, “Well, well.”

  It was very rare that you saw a white person up here. The white people up here in Diamondback were either cops or mailmen or garbage collectors or somebody come uptown to get his ashes hauled by a hooker. It was also rare to see a white person up here who was also a white woman. The neighborhood had a lot of what Ollie called “high yeller girls,” but they weren’t white, of course. If you had the teensiest drop of black blood in you, you weren’t white, not the way Ollie Weeks figured it, anyway. So it was rare to see a white girl up here at 8:00 on a Thursday morning, and it was even more rare to see her hanging from a lamppost. The Homicide dicks thought it was rare, too. They were all commenting how rare it was when the man from the Medical Examiner’s Office arrived.

  The ME told them it wasn’t so rare at all, the girl hanging from the lamppost. He asked them didn’t they read the newspapers or watch television? Didn’t they know two other girls had been found in similarly compromising situations within the past two weeks, hanging up there on lampposts where everybody could look up under their dresses? The assembled crowd of policemen all looked up under the dead girl’s dress. She was wearing red panties under her red dress.

  “Still,” Ollie said, “it’s rare up here in the Eight-Three you find anybody dead but a nigger.”

  One of the patrolmen setting up the barricades and the Crime Scene signs was black. He made no comment about Ollie’s derogatory remark because Ollie outranked him in spades (the patrolman actually thought this, without recognizing the Freudian association) and besides Fat Ollie Weeks didn’t know that the word “nigger” was derogatory. If Fat Ollie Weeks had been Secretary of the Interior, the now-famous line would have read, “I got a nigger, a broad, two kikes, and a crip.” That was simply the way Fat Ollie Weeks talked. He meant no harm. He was always telling people he meant no harm, that was just the way he talked. “Some of my best friends are niggers,” Fat Ollie Weeks was fond of proclaiming. In fact, Ollie thought the best detective on the 83rd—other than himself, of course—was a nigger. He was always telling anyone who’d listen that Parsons was one of the best fuckin’ nigger cops in this city.

  When they cut the girl down some ten minutes later, the detectives and the ME gathered around her as if they were in a floating crap game.

  “Did a nice number on her beforehand, didn’t he?” one of the Homicide dicks said. His name was Matson.

  “Knocked half her teeth out,” the other one said. His name was Manson. This was a bad name for a cop, and he was always getting ribbed about it.

  “Broke her nose, looks like.”

  “Not to mention her neck,” the ME said. “Whose case is this?”

  “Mine,” Ollie said. “Lucky me.”

  “Your cause of death is fracture of the cervical vertebrae.”

  “That blood on her dress?” Matson asked.

  “No, it’s gravy,” Ollie said. “What the fuck you think it is?”

  “Where?” Manson asked.

  “Across the tits,” Matson said.

  “Nice little Jennifers,” Manson said.

  “I never heard that expression before,” Matson said.

  “Jennifers? It’s a common expression.”

  “I never heard it in my life. Jennifers? That’s supposed to be tits, Jennifers?”

  “Where I grew up, everybody called them Jennifers,” Manson said, offended.

  “Where the fuck was that?” Ollie said.

  “Calm’s Point,” Manson said.

  “Figures,” Matson said, and shook his head.

  “You might want to cross-check on the other two,” the ME suggested.

  “She’s got two more?” Manson said, attempting a bit of humor after the put-down following his use of the word “Jennifers” that when he was growing up was a common word used to define tits, even big tits—well, no, those were Jemimas.

  “The other two victims,” the ME said.

  “You guys want this?” the black patrolman said, walking over.

  Meyer was sitting at his desk, wearing his wig and typing. The wig kept slipping a little, which made him look devil-may-care. He saw a huge bulk standing outside the slatted railing that separated the squadroom from the corridor outside. For a moment, he thought it was Fat Ollie Weeks. He blinked. It was Fat Ollie Weeks. Meyer immediately felt like taking a shower. Weeks usually smelled like a cesspool, and anyone standing close to him wondered why he did not draw flies. Weeks also was a bigot. Meyer didn’t need him in the squadroom today. He didn’t need him in the squadroom ever. But here he was, as big as Buddha, at 10:00 in the morning.

  “Anybody home?” he said from the railing, and then opened the gate and walked in. Meyer was alone in the squadroom. He said nothing. He watched Ollie as he approached the desk. Little pig eyes in a round pig face. Fat belly bulging over the belt of his trousers. Wrinkled sports jacket that looked as if it had been slept in for a week. Big Fat Ollie Weeks floating toward the desk like a barrage balloon.

  “Detective Weeks,” he said, flashing his buzzer. “The Eight-Three.”

  “No kidding?” Meyer said. What the hell was this? Ollie knew him, they had worked together before.

  “I been up here before,” Ollie said.

  “Oh, really?” Meyer said.

  “Yeah, I know all the guys up here,” Ollie said. “Used to be a little bald Jewish person working up here.”

  Meyer did not mind being called “bald” (not much, he didn’t) which was what he was when he wasn’t wearing his wig, nor did he mind being called a “Jewish person,” which was also what he was, but at a bit more than six feet tall he did not think he was “little,” and anyway when Ollie put all the words together as “a little bald Jewish person,” they sounded like a slur.

  “I am that little bald Jewish person,” he said, “and cut the crap, Ollie.”

  Ollie’s little pig eyes opened wide. “Meyer?” he said. “Is that you? I’ll be damned!” He began circling the desk, studying Meyer’s hairpiece. “It’s very becoming,” he said. “You don’t look Jewish no more.”

  Meyer said nothing. I need him, he thought. I really need him.

  “I’ve been meaning to call you,” Ollie said.

  I’m glad you didn’t, Meyer thought.

  “Didn’t some guy write a book using your name in it one time?”

  “Some lady,” Meyer said.

  “Used the name Meyer Meyer for a person in her book, right?” Ollie said.

  “A character in the book,” Meyer said.

  “That’s even worse,” Ollie said. “Reason I mention it—you familiar with Hill Street Blues? It’s a television show.”

  “I’m familiar with it,” Meyer said.

  “I caught a rerun last week musta been. They had a guy on it I think they stole from me.”

  “What do you mean, stole from you?”

  “This cop. A narc cop—”

  “You’re not a narc cop, Ollie.”

  “Don’t I know what I am? But I been on narcotics cases, same as you. First time I met you guys was on a narcotics case, in fact. Some guys smuggling shit inside little wooden animals, remember? That was the first time I worked with you guys up here.”

  “I remember,” Meyer said.

  “That was before ‘Hill Street Blues’ was even a dream in anybody’s head.”

  “So what’s the point, Ollie?”

  “The point is this guy’s name was Charlie Weeks. On the show. Charlie, not Ollie. But that’s pretty close, don’t you think? Charlie and Ollie. With the same last name? Weeks? I think that’s very clos
e, Meyer.”

  “I still don’t see—”

  “This other guy—they got a Jewish person on the show, too, his name is Goldblume, one of your paisans, huh? This guy Goldblume, he’s telling the boss up there, this Furillo, that Weeks is trigger-happy…especially when the target is black. What Weeks says at one point is, ‘Freeze, niggers, or I’ll blow your heads off.’ Also, he manhandles suspects. I mean, he’s a regular shithead, this Charlie Weeks.”

  “So?”

  “So am I a shithead?” Ollie asked. “Is Ollie Weeks a shithead? Is Ollie Weeks the kind of cop who goes around mistreating suspects?”

  Meyer said nothing.

  “Is Ollie Weeks the kind of cop who has anything but respect for niggers?”

  Meyer still said nothing.

  “What I’m thinking of doing,” Ollie said, “is suing the company makes ‘Hill Street Blues.’ For putting a cop on television has a name sounds exactly like mine and who’s a prejudiced person goes around shooting niggers and roughing up guys he’s interrogating. That kind of shit can give a real cop a bad name, never mind they call him Charlie Weeks on their fuckin’ TV show.”

  “I think you have a case,” Meyer said flatly.

  “Did you sue that time?”

  “Rollie advised me against it. Rollie Chabrier. In the DA’s Office.”

  “Yeah, I know him,” Ollie said. “He told you not to, huh?”

  “He said I should be flattered.”

  “Yeah, well, I ain’t so fuckin’ flattered,” Ollie said. “There’s such a thing as goin’ too far, am I right or am I right? Matter of fact, I been meanin’ to talk to Carella up here, ‘cause I think he’s got a case, too.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Well, don’t Furillo sound a lot like Carella to you? I mean, how many wop names are there in this world that got three vowels and four condiments in them, and two of those condiments happen to be the same in both names? Two l‘s, Meyer! Carella and Furillo, those names sound a whole lot alike to me, like Charlie Weeks and Ollie Weeks. Does Carella wear a vest all the time?”

  “Only when he’s expecting a shootout,” Meyer said.

  “No, I mean a regular vest, like from a suit, a suit vest. ‘Cause this guy Carillo…Furillo, I mean…he’s always wearing a vest. I think Carella oughta look into it.”

  “Wearing a vest, you mean?”

  “No, the similarity of the names, I mean. You think those guys out there ever heard of us?”

  “What guys?”

  “The ones out in California who are putting together that TV show and winning all the Emmys. You think they ever heard of Steve Carella and Ollie Weeks?”

  “Probably not,” Meyer said.

  “I mean, we ain’t exactly famous, either one of us,” Ollie said, “but we been around a long time, man. A long fuckin’ time. To me, it ain’t a coincidence.”

  “So sue them,” Meyer said.

  “Prolly cost me a fortune,” Ollie said. “Anyway, Steve and me’ll still be here long after that fuckin’ show turns to cornflakes.”

  “Cornflakes?”

  “Yeah, in the can. The celluloid, the film. Long after it crumbles into cornflakes.”

  “So is that why you came up here?” Meyer said. “To ask me—”

  “No, that’s just somethin’ been botherin’ me a long time. The way ‘Hill Street Blues’ looks like us, Meyer. Even their fuckin’ imaginary city looks like this one, don’t it? I mean, shit, Meyer, we’re real cops, ain’t we?”

  “I would say we’re real cops, yes,” Meyer said.

  “So those guys are only make-believe, am I right or am I right? Using names that sound like real fuckin’ cops in a real fuckin’ city. It ain’t fair, Meyer.”

  “Where is it written that it has to be fair?” Meyer said.

  “Sometimes you sound like a fuckin’ rabbi, you know that?” Ollie said.

  Meyer sighed heavily.

  “Why did you come up here?” he asked. “If you don’t plan to sue—”

  “I got a stiff hanging on a lamppost this morning. Found this at the scene,” Ollie said, and tossed a tape cassette onto Meyer’s desk.

  From where Annie Rawles sat at her desk, she could see most of the lower part of the island that was Isola. The sky outside was blue and clear, causing the buildings towering into it to appear knife-edged. She wondered how much longer the good weather would last. This was already the twentieth of the month, usually a time when November’s imminent presence was at least suggested.

  The Rape Squad’s offices were on the sixth floor of the new Headquarters Building downtown, a glass and steel structure that dominated the skyline and dwarfed the lower buildings that housed the city’s municipal, judicial, and financial institutions. Before the new building went up—God, she couldn’t remember how many years ago, and she wondered why everyone still referred to it as “new”—the Rape Squad had been based in one of the city’s oldest precincts, a ramshackle structure midtown, near the overhead ramp of the River Highway. Rape victims were reluctant to report the crime of rape to the police, anyway; they suspected, correctly in many cases, that the police would give them as difficult a time as the rapist had. One look at the decrepit old building on Decatur Street had dissuaded many a victim from entering to discuss the crime further with specialists trained to deal with it. The new Headquarters Building did much to calm such fears. It had the orderly, sterile look of a hospital, and it made victims feel they were telling their stories to medical people rather than to cops, who they felt—again correctly—belonged to a paramilitary organization. Annie was grateful for the new offices in the new building; they made her job easier.

  So did the computer.

  She had told Eileen Burke that she was running a computer cross-check in an attempt to discover whether the same man had serially raped more women than the three victims about whom they were already positive. She had also told her that they were working up a cross-check on the victims themselves, trying to zero in on any similarities that may have attracted the rapist to them.

  For the first cross-check, she had asked the computer operator—a man improbably name Binky Bowles—to go back to the beginning of the year, even though the first of the already positive victims had reported the offense only last April, six months back. The files on every reported rape, anywhere in the city, were already in the computer. Binky had only to press the appropriate keys to retrieve the name of any woman reporting a second, third, fourth or even fifth occurrence after the original one. Much to Annie’s surprise, there had been thirteen serial rape victims this year.

  The first of these was a woman named Lois Carmody, who’d reported the initial assault to the 112th Precinct in Majesta on March 7. Her name came up three more times, each time for the same precinct in Majesta. The most recent serial victim—a woman named Janet Reilly—had been raped for the second time only last week, four days after Mary Hollings had reported her rape to the 87th Precinct. Both of the Reilly rapes had been committed in Riverhead. Their man—if indeed the same man was responsible for the serial rapes of thirteen women—had been very busy. He had also chosen his victims seemingly at random in each of the five sections that made up the greater city; Annie ruled out location as a unifying factor.

  Binky’s job got a bit more difficult after that.

  Retrieving the files on each of the thirteen women, he isolated the descriptions they’d given of the man who’d assaulted them, and further broke down those descriptions as to race, age, height, weight, color of hair, color of eyes, visible scars or tattoos, and weapon used (if any) during the commission of the crime. Annie debated asking him to feed in descriptions of the clothing each assailant had been wearing, but decided this would be irrelevant. Clothing could easily change with the seasons; the earliest of the reported serial rapes went back to March. Binky asked the computer to spew out the victims’ names in the order of the dates on which each had reported the first rape. The breakdown that came from the dot-matri
x printer looked like this:

  Annie automatically eliminated any victim who had been serially raped by obviously different men—a black man and a white man, for example, or any two men of widely divergent descriptions—chalking these off as coincidental occurrences in a city populated with mad dogs. She was able to cull out four of the possible thirteen victims in this way, and held in abeyance a decision on Angela Ferrari, who’d been raped four times, but who’d described her last assailant as someone different from the others, whom she’d described identically. This left eight strong candidates and a relatively strong ninth.

  Each of the nine women had described the multiple rapist as white. Each had reported that he had brown hair and blue eyes, no visible scars or tattoos, and had used a switchblade knife as a weapon.

  Three of the women had said the rapist was five-feet ten-inches tall.

  Four of them had said he was an even six feet tall.

  Two had said he was six-feet two-inches tall.

  The descriptions from the various women indicated that the rapist weighed somewhere between 180 and 200 pounds, with the majority—five women—saying he weighed 180.

  As for his age, he had been variously described as twenty-eight by one of the women, somewhere between twenty-five and thirty by another, thirty by three of the women, thirty-two by two of them, and somewhere between thirty and thirty-five by the remaining two.

  It seemed to Annie that she was reasonably safe in assuming their man was white, thirty years old, six feet tall, and weighing 180 pounds. There seemed no doubt that he had brown hair, blue eyes, and no visible scars or tattoos. There was also no doubt that he was carrying a switchblade knife—or that he had used it on at least one occasion, the third time he’d raped Blanca Diaz. She left Binky to the onerous task of checking through the computerized Known Rapist files, hoping he’d come up with a man or men who answered the composite description and whose m.o. included threats with a switchblade knife.

  At her desk now, she went through the initial DD reports and subsequent profiles on the victims themselves, searching for any similarity or similarities that may have singled them out as victims. She prepared her notes on a scratch sheet, and then worked them up in the form of a chart, again listing the women’s names in order of first reported rape.