Lightning

by Ed McBain

  “Yes?”

  “All right to come in a minute?” Kling said.

  “What for?” Sagel asked.

  In the apartment behind him, they could see a woman—presumably the one who’d answered their knock at the door, and presumably Sagel’s wife—wearing a robe and turning the dial on a television set that had the volume down very low. She had curlers in her hair. That’s why Meyer figured she was Sagel’s wife and not his girlfriend.

  “We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Kling said, “if that’s all right with you.”

  “What about?” Sagel said. He was standing in the doorway, looking either like a fire hydrant or an outraged Englishman defending the entrance to his sacrosanct castle.

  “About where you were last night,” Meyer said.

  “What?” Sagel said.

  “We’d all be a lot more comfortable if we could come in,” Kling said.

  “Well…I guess so,” Sagel said, and stepped aside.

  The moment the detectives were in the apartment, Sagel’s wife turned on her heel, went through a door opening off the living room, and closed the door behind her. Modesty, Meyer thought.

  “Well…uh…Why don’t you sit down?” Sagel said.

  The detectives sat side by side on a sofa facing the television screen. On the screen, two people were negotiating a drug deal. Kling guessed one of them was an undercover narc. On television, if you saw any two people exchanging money for cocaine, one of them had to be an undercover narc. He wondered suddenly if Eileen had been serious about asking for transfer to the Narcotics Squad. He also wondered what she was doing right this minute. What he’d planned for tonight, what he’d planned to ask her to do when he phoned her—

  “…you park it at a garage on South Columbia?” Meyer was saying. “Between Garden and Jefferson—closer to Jefferson, actually?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Sagel said, looking puzzled.

  “That’s where you parked your car last night?” Meyer said. “A Chevy Citation with the license plate—what’s the number, Bert?”

  Kling looked at his notebook.

  “38L4721,” he said.

  “That’s the number…I guess,” Sagel said. “I mean, who the hell can remember his license plate number? That sounds like it, though. I guess.”

  “And you parked your car at this garage at eight o’clock, is that right?” Meyer said.

  “Around eight, yes.”

  “Where’d you go after you parked the car, Mr. Sagel?”

  “To my office.”

  “You went to your office at eight o’clock at night?” Kling asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Why’d you do that?” Meyer asked.

  “‘Cause I forgot my work.”

  “Your work?”

  “I’m an accountant. I left my work at the office—by accident. The stuff I was supposed to work on last night. I do a lot of work at home. We have a computer at the office, but I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t trust it. So what I usually do is I take the printouts home and I check them against my own figures, the figures I made by hand, you know what I mean? That way, I’m sure.”

  “So…as I understand this,” Meyer said, “you parked the car at eight o’clock…”

  “That’s right.”

  “And went up to your office to get the work you’d left behind…”

  “That’s right.”

  “Mr. Sagel, did you go back to the garage at ten o’clock? To reclaim your car?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Sagel, why did it take you two hours to pick up your work?”

  “It didn’t. I stopped for a drink. There’s a restaurant near my building, the building where my office is, and it’s got a nice bar. So I stopped in there for a drink before I went to get the car.”

  “What restaurant was that?” Kling asked.

  “A place called Marino’s,” Sagel said.

  “You were in Marino’s last night?” Meyer asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “I musta got there around eight-fifteen, and I guess I stayed an hour or so. Had a few drinks, you know? Sitting at the bar. Bullshitting with the bartender. You know how it is when you’re sitting at a bar.”

  “What time did you leave Marino’s, Mr. Sagel?”

  “I told you. Nine-fifteen, nine-thirty, in there.”

  “And you got to the garage at ten.”

  “Yeah, about ten o’clock, it must’ve been.”

  “What took you so long to get to the garage?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I was walking around, looking in the store windows. I walked up to Jefferson and looked in the store windows. It was such a nice night, you know.”

  “When you were at the garage picking up your car…”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you happen to notice a girl wearing a red dress?”

  “No, I didn’t see any girl in a red dress.”

  “Tall girl in a red dress. Five-eight or-nine…”

  “Five-eight ain’t tall,” Sagel said. “I’m five-eight, and that ain’t tall.”

  “Black hair and blue eyes?”

  “No, I didn’t see nobody like that at the garage.”

  “Or in the restaurant. Did you happen to see her in the restaurant?”

  “I didn’t look in the restaurant. I told you, I was sitting at the bar.”

  “Mr. Sagel,” Meyer said, “do you know anyone named Darcy Welles?”

  “Oh, I get it,” Sagel said.

  “What do you get, Mr. Sagel?”

  “That’s what this is about. Okay, I get it. The girl somebody hung from a lamppost last night, okay, I get it.”

  “How do you know about that?” Meyer said.

  “Are you kidding? It’s in all the papers. Also, it was on television tonight, just now as a matter of fact, the Eleven O’Clock News. I was in my pajamas watching the news when you guys knocked on the door. It was all about this Darcy Welles girl hanging from a lamppost like the other two. You got to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to know about those girls hanging from lampposts. Helen!” he shouted suddenly. “Come in here a minute, will you? This is rich, you guys thinking I had something to do with it.”

  They did not, in fact, think he had anything to do with it.

  There is a ring to the truth, and it shatters the night like a hammer striking a gong.

  But they listened nonetheless while Helen Sagel told them that her husband had left the apartment at about twenty after 7:00 last night, just after they’d finished dinner, because he’d forgotten his work at the office and he wanted to do some checking of the figures on the computer printouts, and he’d got back at about 10:30, a quarter to 11:00, something like that, and he smelled as if he’d had a few drinks. He had worked on his figures until midnight and then he’d come to bed where she was already asleep, but he woke her up when he turned on the light.

  “Okay?” Helen said. “Is that it? Can I go back to bed now?”

  “Yes, ma’am, thank you,” Meyer said.

  “Knocking on people’s doors in the middle of the night,” Helen muttered and left the living room again.

  “Sorry about this,” Meyer said to Sagel. “But we have to check these things out, you know.”

  “Oh, sure,” Sagel said. “I hope you catch him.”

  “We’re trying, sir, thank you,” Meyer said.

  “May I ask you a question?” Sagel said.

  “Certainly.”

  “Is that a wig you’re wearing?”

  “Well…yes, it is,” Meyer said.

  “I’ve been thinking of getting one,” Sagel said. “Not like that one, I mean a good one. A wig nobody can tell you’re wearing, you know what I mean?”

  “Uh…yes,” Meyer said.

  “Well, good night,” Kling said. “Thanks for your time, Mr. Sagel.”

  “Good night,” Meyer mumbled.

  He was silent all the way down to the street. It was wind
ier outside than it had been when they entered the building. It looked as if it might begin raining anytime now.

  “I look pretty shitty in this thing, huh?” Meyer asked.

  Kling didn’t answer for a moment.

  “Bert?” Meyer said.

  “Well…Yeah, Meyer, I guess you do,” Kling said.

  “Yeah,” Meyer said.

  He took the wig off his head, walked to the row of garbage cans outside the building, lifted the lid off one of them, and tossed the wig inside.

  “Easy come, easy go,” he said, and sighed.

  But his head felt colder without all that hair on it.

  He sure hoped it wouldn’t start raining.

  Folger Road had taken its name from Folger University, which sat at the bottom end of a wide boulevard that climbed upward to skewer one of the city’s larger business areas. Carella once tried explaining to an out-of-towner who only thought he lived in a real city that you could take someplace like downtown San Diego, for example, and easily lose it in any one of the separate areas that conglomerately formed this city—which was, of course, the only city in the world. Well, Carella had to take that back. He’d never been to London or Paris or Rome or Tokyo or any of those other bustling places that he supposed were real cities, too. But trying to explain to this guy from Muddy Boots, Iowa, that his entire city could disappear overnight in an area like the Quarter, or the Lower Platform, or even Ashley Heights—well, that had been impossible. You had to understand cities. You had to understand that a section like Folger Road, with its bright lights and its stores and its blaring traffic and its teeming humanity was the equivalent of eighteen cities like Mildew, Florida, or Broken Back, Arizona.

  The university itself was probably the size of a city like Lost Souls, Montana. Founded by the Catholic Church back in 1892—a bad year for Lizzie Borden—it then consisted of several massive stone buildings in an area still surrounded by open farmland. The name “Riverhead” was a bastardization of “Ryerhert,” in itself an abbreviation of “Ryerhert’s Farms.” Once upon a time, when the world was young and the Dutch were snugly settled in the city, the land adjacent to Isola was owned by a patroon named Pieter Ryerhert. Ryerhert was a farmer who at the age of sixty-eight grew tired of rising with the chickens and going to bed with the cows. As the metropolis grew, and the need for housing beyond Isola’s limited boundaries increased, Ryerhert sold or donated most of his land to the expanding city, and then moved down to Isola, where he lived the gay life of a fat, rich burgher. Ryerhert’s Farms became simply Ryerhert, but this was not a particularly easy name to pronounce. By the time World War I rolled around, and despite the fact that Ryerhert was Dutch and not German, the name really began to rankle, and petitions were circulated to change it because it sounded too Teutonic, and therefore probably had Huns running around up there cutting off the hands of Belgian babies. It became Riverhead in 1919. It was still Riverhead—but not the Riverhead it had been back then in 1892 when the Catholic Church decided it would be a good idea to start educating the people up here in the hinterlands.

  The university now occupied some twelve square acres of valuable land that, if sold at going real estate prices, would have caused the Pope to perform a ceremonial mass and a little dance through the streets of Warsaw. The entire campus was surrounded by a high stone wall that had undoubtedly kept the largely Italian-American masons in Riverhead busy for the better part of a century. Fifteen years ago, the university had begun admitting women—something the Pope had not yet seen fit to do with his clergy. At the administration building, Carella and Ollie spoke to a bleary-eyed clerk manning the Student Directory phone and learned that Luella Scott was indeed one of the women students here, and that she lived on campus in a freshman dorm named Hunnicut.

  In the car, driving toward the dorm on the campus’s wide, tree-lined roads, Ollie said, “That sounds dirty, don’t it? For a Catholic school, I mean? Hunnicut? That sounds dirty to me.”

  The dorms at Folger University were not coeducational. A freshman with her nose buried in a textbook looked up from a desk in the lobby when the detectives knocked on the locked, glass-paneled entrance door. A sign on the desk read reception. Ollie indicated that she should unlock the door. The girl shook her head. Ollie took out his wallet and opened it to his blue-and-gold detective’s shield. He held the shield up to one of the glass panels. The girl shook her head again.

  “They got better security here than we got at Police Headquarters,” he said to Carella. Then, at the top of his voice, he bellowed, “Police! Open the door!”

  The girl got up from behind the desk, and walked to the door.

  “What?” she said.

  “Police, police!” Ollie shouted. “You see the badge? Open the goddamn door!”

  “I’m not allowed to open the door,” the girl said. “And don’t curse.”

  They could barely hear her through the glass panels that separated them from the inside.

  “You see this?” Ollie shouted, and rapped the shield against the glass. “We’re cops! Open the door! Cops!” he shouted. “Police!”

  The girl leaned in close to the glass and studied the shield.

  “I’m gonna shoot that little bitch,” Ollie said to Carella. “Open the door!” he yelled.

  The girl unlocked the door.

  “Only students are allowed in,” she said primly. “We lock the doors at ten o’clock, you have to have your own key to get in after ten.”

  “Then why’re you sitting behind a desk says Reception, you’re not letting anybody in?” Ollie asked.

  “Reception ends at ten o’clock,” the girl said.

  “What is this?” Ollie said. “Saturday Night Live?”

  “Saturday nights, we lock the doors at midnight,” the girl said.

  “So what’re you doing sitting down here if you ain’t recepting anybody?” Ollie said.

  “I was on Reception,” the girl said, “but I went off at ten. I was doing my homework. My roommate keeps the radio on all the time.”

  “Pretend for a minute you’re still on Reception,” Ollie said. “You know a girl named Luella Scott?”

  “Yes?” the girl said.

  “Where is she?”

  “Third floor, room 62,” the girl said. “But she isn’t here just now.”

  “Where is she?” Carella asked.

  “She went to the library.”

  “When?”

  “She left here at about nine.”

  “Where’s the library? On campus here?”

  “Yes, of course on campus,” the girl said.

  “Where?”

  “Two dorms down, past Baxter, cross the quadrangle, two more dorms till you come to a small sort of cloister and the library’s just past that.”

  “Was she alone?” Ollie asked.

  “What?”

  “When she left here. Was she alone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on,” Ollie said.

  “Me?” the girl said, but the detectives were already outside and running up the path.

  She’d been easy to identify. One of the three black girls on the team. The other two were seniors, he knew what they looked like from newspaper stories he’d researched in the public library. Luella Scott was the new one. Skinny little kid, looked as if she’d be gasping for breath after only a few steps, but oh she was fast, ran like the wind, fast, fast. Smart, too. Entered college this fall when she was only seventeen. He liked that, her being seventeen. The newspapers would really go to town on a seventeen-year-old girl.

  All that coverage today.

  He was almost home free.

  This one should do it.

  Luella Scott should do it.

  From where he stood beneath the old maple tree, its yellowing leaves rattling in the fresh wind, he could see the lighted windows of the library building, but he could not spot Luella anyplace inside. There was only one entrance to the library, and she’d gone in there at a little after 9:00, he’d followed
her over from her dorm, not much security on this campus except for the high stone walls, you’d think they’d be more careful with such a large female student body and rapists running loose all over the city. Went in at a little past 9:00, couldn’t have come out anyplace else because there wasn’t anyplace else to come out of. Had to come out right here, where he was waiting.

  He looked at his watch.

  Almost 11:30.

  What was taking her so long?

  Well, she probably studied a lot. You don’t get into college at seventeen unless you’re a hard worker. You could be smart as hell, but if you didn’t crack those books, it didn’t matter. Smart girl, Luella Scott, but he wished she’d hurry it up in there. He also wished she would be the last one. He hoped this time would do the trick. He didn’t want to walk in and give himself up, they’d think he was crazy or something. Sure, mister, you killed four girls, terrific, mister, go watch some more television, okay?

  Break this one in half, he wasn’t careful. Skinny little thing.

  Hoist her up over the lamppost arm, should be easy. Couldn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds, this one. Where’d she find the stamina to run the way she did? God, she was fast!

  He looked up at the sky.

  He hoped it wouldn’t start raining.

  Still, rain had its benefits. Not too many people out on the street when it was raining, get the job done without any interference. That guy last night when he was carrying Darcy out of the park. He’d thought that would do it, the old fart seeing him. Hoped he’d go to the police when he read about it in this morning’s paper—Hey, guess what, I saw this guy carrying a dead girl out of Bridge Street Park last night, I’ll bet he was the guy who hung that girl from a lamppost! Cops probably wouldn’t have believed him even if he did go in to report what he’d seen. Sure, mister, go back to the park and sleep it off, okay? Or maybe he had gone in, told them what he’d seen, and the cops were playing it cool, telling the newspapers they had no leads when all the while they were closing in on him. He hoped so. He hoped they’d finally get off their asses and catch him. He couldn’t wait to read the newspapers when they finally caught him. Oh, wow!

  The Road Runner Killer.

  Change that name soon enough, you could bet on that.