Lightning

by Ed McBain

  “You can’t do that, Ollie.”

  “Who says?” Ollie said, and raised his right knee.

  “Ollie…”

  Ollie’s leg pistoned out in a flat-footed kick at the lock. The lock sprang, the door flew inward. The apartment beyond was dark.

  “Anybody home?” Ollie said, and moved into the apartment in a policeman’s crouch, fanning the air ahead of him with his pistol. “Get the light,” he said to Carella.

  Carella felt for a light switch on the wall inside the door. He found it, and snapped it upward.

  “Police!” Ollie shouted, apparently to no one. “Cover me,” he said to Carella and moved deeper in the apartment. Carella kept his pistol leveled on the area in front of Ollie. What the hell am I doing? he thought. This is illegal. Ollie snapped on the living room light. The room was empty. On one wall there was an oversized oil painting of a male runner in jersey and shorts, the number ten on the front of the jersey, the man taking long strides, legs reaching, arms pumping. It looked like a knockoff of the paintings that guy did for Playboy magazine, Carella couldn’t remember his name. There were doors on either side of the living room, both of them closed. Without a word, the detectives fanned out, Ollie taking the door on the right, Carella the one on the left. Both rooms were bedrooms and nobody was in either of them.

  “Let’s toss the joint,” Ollie said.

  “No,” Carella said.

  “Why not?”

  “We shouldn’t even be in here,” he said, and thought at once of the patient who asked his psychiatrist to give him a farewell kiss on his final visit to the office. The psychiatrist said, “Kiss you? I shouldn’t even be lying here on the couch with you.”

  “But we are in here,” Ollie said. “You can see we’re in here, can’t you?”

  “Illegally,” Carella said.

  “Steve, Steve,” Ollie said paternally, shaking his head. “Let me tell you a little fairy tale, do you like fairy tales, Steve?”

  “Ollie, do you know you’re fooling around with the Poi—”

  “Listen to my fairy tale, okay?” Ollie said. “Two honest, hardworking cops go out one night to check on a possible suspect. They get to the suspect’s apartment—which happens to be this very apartment we are now standing in—and guess what they find? They find that some burglar has already broken into the place and made a fuckin’ shambles of it. Like the good, honest, hardworking cops they are, they report the burglary to the local precinct—whatever the fuck precinct this is—and then they go on their merry way. How does that sound to you, Steve? Or don’t you like fairy tales?”

  “I love fairy tales,” Carella said. “Here’s one for you, okay? It’s called the Poison Tree, and it—”

  “Ah, yes, m’boy, the Poison Tree,” Ollie said, falling into his world-famous W. C. Fields imitation. “The Poison Tree, yes, yes, sounds vaguely familiar.”

  “The Poison Tree is about a cop who failed to follow legal guidelines before searching for an ice pick in a sewer. The cop searched around in the sewer muck, and he found this bloody ice pick, and a good suspect’s fingerprints were all over it, but the cop’s information about that ice pick had been obtained illegally, Ollie, and the DA told him it was the fruit of the poison tree, and the case got kicked out of court, and the murderer is probably using that same ice pick on a hundred other people right this minute. The Poison Tree Doctrine, Ollie. How long have you been a cop, Ollie?”

  “Ah, yes, the Poison Tree Doctrine,” Ollie said, still being W. C. Fields.

  “We are in here without a warrant,” Carella said, “we have broken down a citizen’s door, and we are in here illegally. Which means that any evidence we find in here…”

  “I see your point, m’boy,” Ollie said. “Would it disturb you overly, however, if I snooped around a bit? Without touching anything?”

  “Ollie…”

  “Because that’s what I’m gonna do,” Ollie said in his own voice, “even if it disturbs the shit out of you. We’re here to see if this guy has any connection with the murders. If he does…”

  “We’re here to find out if this guy parked his car…”

  “We already know that! That ain’t why we’re here, Steve.”

  “We’re here to talk to the man!”

  “Well, the man ain’t here, is he? Do you see the man here? So who do we talk to? The four walls?”

  “We talk to a magistrate about getting a search warrant. That’s the proper—”

  “No, we talk to the man’s appointment calendar to see where he is tonight, and then we go find the man, and we talk to him personally.”

  “And when a judge—”

  “A judge ain’t gonna know we talked to the man’s appointment calendar, is he? I already told you, Steve, when we got here we walked in on a 10-21, and that’s what I’m gonna call in before we walk out of here. In the meantime, I’m gonna look through the man’s desk and see if he kept an appointment calendar.”

  Carella watched as Ollie walked to the desk across the room and opened the top drawer.

  “See?” Ollie said. “Easy. The man is making it easy for us.”

  He turned from the desk, and showed Carella an appointment calendar.

  Now what we do,” Ollie said, “is open the calendar to October…like this.”

  He opened the calendar.

  “And we look for October twentieth, which is today’s date… Well, well, take a look at this, Steve. This is a very talkative calendar, the man has here.”

  Carella looked.

  For October sixth, the night Marcia Schaffer was killed, Lytell had written her name into his calendar, and beneath that the name of her school, Ramsey University. For October thirteenth, he had written in “Nancy Annunziato” and then “Marino’s.” For last night, he had put down Darcy Welles’s name and “Marino’s” again.

  “You seeing all this?” Ollie asked.

  “I’m seeing it.”

  “You see what he’s got written down for tonight?”

  For tonight, Lytell had written the name “Luella Scott” and—

  “Six to five, she’s a nigger,” Ollie said.

  —and the word “Folger” which could only stand for Folger University, up in Riverhead.

  Ollie closed the appointment calendar.

  “Should take us half an hour to get there, twenty minutes if we hit the hammer,” he said. “Let me call in this burglary we discovered, and then let’s get the fuck out of here—before he breaks her neck, too.”

  It was always Arthur Brown’s luck to catch Diamondback.

  Anytime he had to go anyplace outside the precinct, he seemed to catch Diamondback. He figured it was departmental policy. Send all your black cops up to black Diamondback whenever they had to leave the confines of the Eight-Seven.

  It was difficult for a black cop up here in Diamondback. A lot of the black people up here, they weren’t exactly on the side of law and order, and when they saw a black cop coming around they figured he was a traitor to the cause. Brown didn’t know what cause. He guessed that all the honest cab drivers, clergymen, salesclerks, letter carriers, stenographers, secretaries and other hardworking people up here also wondered what cause the pimps, pushers, prostitutes, numbers runners, burglars, armed robbers, and petty thieves felt a cop like Arthur Brown was betraying. The only cause he respected was the one that told you to be the best possible person you could be in a world gone rotten. Diamondback was the world as rotten as it could ever get. He wouldn’t live up here in Diamondback even if he was some guy cleaning out toilets for a living—which was what he sometimes felt he actually did for a living.

  He had noticed over the years that not too many black lawyers, doctors, engineers, or architects lived up here in Diamondback—not in this part of Diamondback, anyway. If any black who’d made it decided to live in Diamondback at all, it was in the fringe area known as Sweetloaf. If Arthur Brown had to live in Diamondback, he guessed he would want to live in Sweetloaf. The only trouble with Sweet
loaf was that the population there was entirely black. Brown felt there was something very wrong about the population of anyplace being entirely anything. Except maybe the population of China. But even that troubled him a little. How did those people over there in China manage to get through a day without seeing anybody who had blond hair and blue eyes? Didn’t it get boring just seeing everybody walking around with black hair and brown eyes? Brown was glad he didn’t live in China. He was also glad he didn’t live in Diamondback. But here he was again, ten minutes to 11:00 and smack in the heart of Diamondback, talking to a man who owned a Cadillac Seville with the license plate WU3200.

  Both he and Hawes had known the minute the MVB came back with an address in Diamondback that this probably wasn’t their man. The waiter at Marino’s had described the guy with Darcy Welles as white. There were some white people living up here, Brown guessed, but they were few and far between. So the odds were at least a hundred to one that the guy who answered the door for them would be black (which he was) and the odds on a black man up here driving a brand new Cadillac Seville were at least a thousand to one that he was either dealing dope or hustling broads.

  Willy Bartlett was hustling broads.

  They spent exactly five minutes with him while he told them he was downtown last night dropping off a “girlfriend” of his, and they knew they were wasting even those five minutes because he was the wrong color to begin with.

  Then again, Brown thought, maybe every black man in this city is the wrong color to begin with.

  Eileen Burke couldn’t sleep.

  It was 11:00, and she had already set Mary’s alarm for 9:00 a.m., which meant that if she could manage to get to sleep without thinking of all sorts of things, she would get ten hours sleep before the alarm went off. That was a lot of sleep. Whenever she was in Bert’s bed, or vice versa, she averaged six hours a night—if she was lucky. Tonight, she was in Mary’s bed, and she couldn’t sleep, and she guessed it was because she had so many things to think about. One of those things was Bert out there knocking on a door that maybe had a killer behind it. Another thing was the possibility that the rapist would come knocking on her door— Mary’s door—tomorrow night sometime. Neither of the thoughts were conducive to sleep.

  It was too bad Bert had to go out tonight. Whatever he’d planned for them to do on the telephone, Eileen was positive it would have put her in a good mood for sleeping afterward. If tomorrow night really came down the way Annie expected it would, then Eileen would need a good night’s sleep tonight. The trouble was, thinking about tomorrow night made it very difficult to fall asleep tonight. Eileen kept wondering if Annie had got those dates right. Or if any of that four-week, three-week, and so-on jazz made any sense at all. What I should do, she thought, is get up and look at the calendar again. Instead of lying here worrying about whether tomorrow night’s really going to be the night at all.

  She snapped on the light beside the bed, threw the covers back, and swung her legs down to the floor. It was very cold in the apartment—that was October for you. Nice one day, freeze your ass off the next. She put on her robe and then worked her way around the piles of dirty laundry on the floor (I’ll wash all these on Saturday morning, she thought), went to the bedroom door and reached beyond it for the living room light switch.

  At the desk, she turned on the small lamp, and opened the top drawer, hoping to find a calendar that was larger and easier to read than the one at the front of Mary’s checkbook—the big one, as Mary had called it. She found nothing but a little plastic calendar with a dry cleaner’s name and phone number on it, the kind you tuck into a wallet. Besides, it was last year’s calendar. She opened the bottom drawer on the right-hand side of the desk, fished out the checkbook again, and turned to the front of it.

  The notes she had made while talking to Annie were still on the desk. She began ticking off the dates on the calendar, counting off the weeks. Well, Annie seemed to be right. Even allowing for the summer hiatus (how come no rapes in July and August, she wondered?) the pattern seemed clear. Tomorrow was Friday the twenty-first, and if their man acted as they expected he would, Mary Hollings was due for another visit. Out of curiosity, Eileen began leafing through the checkbook, locating the stubs for the checks Mary had written on the days she’d been raped.

  June 10. Heavy activity, lots of bills to pay, all those shopping excursions Mary makes every day. Department stores all over the city, telephone company, electric company—Eileen counted ten checks written on that day alone. She flipped forward to September 16.

  Equally heavy there, this lady sure ran up bills, those alimony checks had to be pretty hefty. A check made out to Reynolds Realty, Inc. (little late last month, huh, Mary? Your rent’s due on the fifteenth), another to a play subscription series at a theater down in the Quarter, another to an organization called AIM (marked contribution), a stub for a check written to Albert Cleaners (the people who’d provided her with last year’s pocketsize calendar), another stub for a check made out to Citizens Savings Bank (marked renewal—safety deposit box), a check to American Express, another to Visa, and that was it.

  What the hell is AIM? Eileen wondered. Sounds like an organization supporting a citizen’s right to bear arms. Ready, aim, fire. Was Mary a gun nut? Terrific. Support your local gun group and make life easier for all the cheap thieves in the world. AIM. Association of International Murderers? Allied Independent Maniacs? Am I Macho?

  Eileen shrugged.

  On October 7, Mary had written only six checks, two of them to department stores in the city (naturally), one to the Bowler Art Museum (again marked contribution), another to Raucher TV-Radio Repair, one for $5.75 made payable to Lombino’s Best Pizza (had she sent out for a pizza that night? And paid the delivery boy with a check?), and the last for a whopping $1,650 made payable to someone named Howard Moscowitz. The stub was marked legal fees.

  So what’s AIM? Eileen thought.

  She hated mysteries.

  She flipped back to the beginning of the checkbook. Maybe Mary had made a previous donation to AIM. And maybe she had written on the stub its full and doubtlessly honorable name. Amalgamated Indolent Masochists perhaps? Or Academy of Islamic Mosques? Or how about Avoid Intolerant Males? Or Are Iguanas Mammals?

  Mary had made three contributions to AIM during the past year. A hundred dollars in January. Fifty dollars in March. And a final fifty dollars on September 16, the second time she’d been raped. Undoubtedly in response to quarterly solicitations. There was no clue on the stubs as to what the acronym (if indeed it was one) stood for. Each was marked simply AIM—contribution.

  Eileen yawned.

  This was better than counting sheep.

  The Isola telephone directory was resting on the desk alongside the phone. She pulled it to her, flipped it open to the A listings, and began running her finger down the page:

  A-I Bookshops, Inc…

  A-I Systems…

  AIC Investigations…

  AID Photo…

  AIG, Ltd….

  AIHL Dental Labs…

  AIM…

  There it is, she thought, and copied the information on a sheet of paper:

  AIM

  832 Hall Avenue 388-7400

  Right here in the city, she thought. Maybe I ought to ask Annie to check on it. Three contributions to the same outfit. Might be important.

  She yawned again.

  She turned off the desk lamp, turned off the living room light, and went back into the bedroom. She put her robe at the foot of the bed, got under the covers, and lay thinking for a moment. AIM. Sleep, she thought. Go to sleep. Come on, Morpheus, where are you? AIM. Anyone Inviting Morpheus? The ayes have it. She reached up to turn off the bedside lamp.

  The clock read ten minutes past 11:00.

  The owner of the Chevy Citation with the license plate number 38L4721 lived in Majesta. It took Meyer and Kling forty minutes to get there from the squadroom. Kling looked at his watch as they were parking the car outside the hou
sing development in which Frederick Sagel lived. Twelve minutes past 11:00. It was seventeen minutes past 11:00 by the time they knocked on his third-floor apartment. A woman’s voice yelled, “Who’s there?” She sounded alarmed. In this city, a knock on the door at anytime past 10:00—when you were supposed to know where your children were—could be considered ominous.

  “Police,” Meyer said. He was weary; it had been a long day. He did not want to be out here knocking on anybody’s door, especially if a murderer happened to be behind it.

  “Who?” the woman asked incredulously.

  “Police,” Meyer repeated.

  “Well…Just a minute, okay?” she said. Kling put his ear to the door. He heard the woman say, in a sort of stage whisper, “Freddie, it’s the cops,” and then a man—presumably Freddie, who was also presumably Frederick Sagel—said, “What?”

  “The cops, the cops,” the woman said impatiently.

  “Well, Jesus, let me put something on,” Sagel said.

  “He’s getting dressed,” Kling said to Meyer.

  “Um,” Meyer said.

  Sagel—if this was Sagel—was wearing a robe over pajamas when he opened the door. He was about twenty-five years old, Meyer guessed, a plump little man standing some five-feet-seven or eight inches tall, with a bald head and dark brown eyes. Meyer pitied him the bald head; he himself was wearing his toupee. But one look at him—Sagel or not—told both detectives that he was not the man who’d been described by the waiter at Marino’s. The man who’d been with Darcy Welles on the night of her murder was—according to the waiter—in his forties, about five-feet-ten-inches tall, with brown hair and brown eyes. Nonetheless, on the off chance that the waiter had been mistaken, they went through the routine.

  “Frederick Sagel?” Meyer asked.