by Ed McBain
Q: Help them?
A: Yes. By sending them Marcia’s handbag. I took the keys out first, though. I threw away the keys to her apartment.
Q: Why did you do that?
A: To help them.
Q: Help them with what?
A: Well, just to help them.
Q: You thought throwing away her keys would help—
A: No, no, I did that so it wouldn’t be too easy for them. What I mean was I sent them the handbag. So they could identify her, you see?
Q: Why did you want to help them?
A: Well, I just did. But they seemed…excuse me, gentlemen—they seemed to be moving very slowly on it, you know? So I didn’t want to hang Nancy’s body up here again, I figured I’d try my luck with another precinct.
Q: Lieutenant Byrnes, where was the second victim found?
A: (Byrnes) In west Riverhead, sir. The 101st Precinct.
Q: Is that where you took Nancy Annunziato, Mr. Lytell?
A: I guess so. I mean, I didn’t know the number of the precinct or anything. It was in Riverhead, though, where all the burned-out buildings are. That part of Riverhead.
Q: West Riverhead.
A: I guess that’s what it’s called.
Q: Mr. Lytell, did you hang Nancy Annunziato’s body from a lamppost in West Riverhead?
A: Yes, I did.
Q: At what time was that?
A: Sometime in the middle of the night.
Q: Can you give me an approximate time?
A: Three in the morning? I guess it was around then.
Q: Lieutenant Byrnes, would you know at what time the 101st Precinct received notification of discovery?
A: (Byrnes) Steve?
A: (Carella) Detective Broughan clocked the call in at six-oh-four a.m.
A: (Lytell) I left her wallet under the lamppost.
Q: Why did you do that?
A: Help them out, you know. I was hoping maybe the cops there were a little smarter than the ones in this precinct—excuse me.
Q: Why did you want the cops to be smart?
A: Well, you know.
Q: No, I don’t. Can you explain that to me?
A: Help them out a little, you know?
Q: Why are you smiling, Mr. Lytell?
A: I don’t know.
Q: Do you realize you’re smiling?
A: I guess I’m smiling.
Q: Tell me about Darcy Welles. Did you kill her, too?
A: Yes, I did.
Q: When?
A: Wednesday night.
Q: October nineteenth?
A: I guess that was the date.
Q: Well, here’s a calendar, and here’s Wednesday night. Was it October nineteenth?
A: Yes, October nineteenth.
Q: Can you tell me about that?
A: Look, I can go on all night here, but the important thing…
Q: Yes, what’s the important thing, Mr. Lytell?
A: I killed her the same as the others, okay? Exactly the same. The restaurant, the interview…well, not exactly. I didn’t take Darcy to my apartment. I was getting scared of doing that, afraid someone might see me and—
Q: But you told us earlier that you wanted to help the cops, you wanted the cops to—
A: Well, yes. But I didn’t want my neighbors thinking I was molesting young girls or anything. So I took her to this park further uptown, the Bridge Street Park.
Q: And killed her there?
A: Yes.
Q: Again applying a full nelson?
A: Yes.
Q: And where did you take her afterward, Mr. Lytell?
A: To Diamondback. I was really scared up there, I’ve got to tell you. Everybody’s black up there, you know. But it worked out okay. I got her up on the lamppost all right.
Q: What time was this, Mr. Lytell?
A: Oh, I don’t know. Twenty to eleven, a quarter to eleven?
Q: Mr. Lytell, did you attempt to kill a girl named Luella Scott last night?
A: Yes, sir, I did. I attempted to kill her.
Q: If you had succeeded in your attempt, would you later have hanged Miss Scott as well?
A: Yes, sir, that was my plan.
Q: Why?
A: I don’t understand your question.
Q: Why did you hang these young girls, Mr. Lytell? What was the purpose of that?
A: To make them visible.
Q: Visible?
A: To attract attention to them.
Q: Why did you want attention attracted to them?
A: Well, you know.
Q: I don’t know.
A: So everybody would realize.
Q: Realize what?
A: About them.
Q: What about them?
A: That they were murdered by the same person.
Q: You.
A: Yes.
Q: You wanted everyone to know that you had murdered them?
A: No, no.
Q: Then what did you want everyone to know?
A: I don’t know what I wanted them to know, damn it!
Q: Mr. Lytell, I’m trying to understand—
A: What the hell is it you don’t understand? I’ve already told you—
Q: Yes, but hanging these girls…
A: That was the idea.
Q: What was the idea?
A: Jesus, I don’t know how to make it any plainer.
Q: You say you hanged them to attract attention to them…
A: Yes.
Q: …to make everyone realize they’d been murdered by the same person.
A: Yes.
Q: Why, Mr. Lytell?
A: Are we finished here? Because if we are—
Q: We told you earlier that you can end this whenever you want to. All you have to do is tell us you don’t want to answer any further questions.
A: I don’t mind answering questions. It’s just that you’re asking all the wrong questions.
Q: What questions would you like me to ask, Mr. Lytell?
A: How about the gold sitting there? Doesn’t that interest you at all?
Q: By the gold, are you referring to these medals Detectives Weeks and Carella found in your apartment?
A: I don’t know who found them there.
Q: But they’re yours, are they not?
A: Well, whose do you think they are?
Q: These are Olympic medals, are they not?
A: Olympic gold medals. You’re not looking at bronze there, mister.
Q: Did you win these medals, Mr. Lytell?
A: Come on, don’t be ridiculous. Were you living on Mars?
Q: Sir?
A: How old are you, anyway?
Q: I’m thirty-seven, sir.
A: So where were you fifteen years ago? You were twenty-two years old, am I right? Didn’t you watch television? Didn’t you know what the hell was going on in the world?
Q: You won these medals fifteen years ago, is that what you’re saying?
A: Listen to the guy, will you? Three gold medals, he’s acting as if it never happened!
Q: I’m not a sports fan, Mr. Lytell. Perhaps you can tell me a little more about it.
A: Sure, that’s the whole damn trouble. People forget, that’s the trouble. Three gold medals—I was on the Johnny Carson show, for Christ’s sake. Lightning Lytell, that’s how he introduced me, Lightning Lytell. That’s what they all called me. That’s what the reporters covering the games started calling me. I was on the cover of every important sports magazine in this country, I couldn’t go anyplace without people stopping me on the street, “Hey, Lightning!” “How ya doin’, Lightning?” I was famous!
We did a thing, Johnny and me, where we pretended to have a race, you know, just a short sprint across the stage, and he did that famous take of his, Johnny, his take, you know his take? ‘Cause I was halfway across the stage before he even heard the starting gun. Reaction time is very important, you know. Jesse Owens used to favor a bunch start, used to set his front block eight inches from the
line, the rear block twelve inches behind that. You have to set your blocks for what feels right for you, it’s a personal thing. Bobby Morrow—he was triple gold winner in the 1956 games—he used to set his front block twenty-one inches from the line, and his rear block back fourteen inches from that. It varies. The first guy who ran the metric short sprint in ten seconds flat—this was Armin Hary—he used to set his blocks at twenty-three and thirty-three. You have to explode out of the blocks—that’s a common expression you hear all the time in running, you explode out of the blocks. Just moving out of them fast isn’t the way you win races. You have to explode out of those blocks like a rocket coming out of a silo.
When I won the triple gold—this was fifteen years back, I was only twenty-four years old, man, I was off like lightning…well, that’s where I got the nickname. Lightning. Talk about exploding! It was lightning and thunder, boom, out of the blocks and no stopping me! Well, hell, three gold medals! The one-hundred, the two-hundred, and the relay! I was anchor in the relay. At the handoff, we were five yards behind Italy, running third in the race! Jimmy was coming in really fast, man, he was stepping, but I was ready to explode the second I got that baton! Boom! I ran that last hundred meters in eight-six! Incredible! I made up all that lost distance and won going away! Hell, I won them all in my day. You name them, I won them. High school, college, AAU, NCAA, invitationals, Olympic trials—all of them, you name them.
You know what it means to be a winner? You know what it means to be the best at what you do? Do you have any concept of what that means? Do you know anything at all about the sheer exuberance of running to win? When you get out there, you not only want to beat the other guy, you want to murder him, do you know what I mean? You want to run him right into the ground, you want him to collapse behind you and start vomiting up his guts, you want him to know he has met his match, man, and he has succumbed, he has lost! You get out there, you’re behind that starting line there, and the world funnels down to just the track, the whole world becomes that turf or cinder and you’re already streaking down it like lightning in your mind, you’re already hitting the string even though the race hasn’t started yet. And you do your little dance in your shoes, your shoes tickle the cinder or the turf, tap-tap-tap, and you hear the starter’s whistle, and you keep doing your little jig, sucking in great big gulps of oxygen, and everything inside you is boiling up, ready to boil over, ready to explode when you hear that call to the marks, crouching into the blocks, waiting for the gun—and the gold.
But they forget, don’t they? They forget what you did, what you were. All those commercials I made—God, the money was pouring in—everybody wanted Lightning Lytell to endorse his product. Shit, I was signed by William Morris, have you ever heard of William Morris? They’re a talent agency in New York and LA, they’ve got offices all over the world, they were going to make me a movie star! Damn well on the way to doing it, too, all those commercials, you couldn’t turn on your television set without seeing me on the screen holding up a product, Lightning Lytell—“You think I’m fast? Wait’ll you see how fast this razor shaves you”—all of it, everything from orange juice to vitamin capsules, I was all over the screen, I was a household word, Lightning Lytell. But then it…you know…it falls apart somehow. You stop getting offers, they told me it was overexposure, they told me people were getting too used to seeing my face on the screen. And suddenly you’re not a movie star, you’re not even a television pitchman, you’re just Henry Lewis Lytell again, and nobody knows who the hell you are.
They forget.
You…want to remind them, you know what I mean?
You want to remind them.
Q: Is that why you committed these murders, Mr. Lytell? To remind them?
A: No, no.
Q: Is that why you hanged these young women? To create a sensation that would—
A: No, no. Hey, no.
Q: —remind people you were still around?
A: I’m the fastest human being on earth!
Q: Is that why?
A: The fastest human being.
The detectives were all staring at him now. Lytell was looking at the three gold medals on Lieutenant Byrnes’s desk. Assistant District Attorney Jenkins picked up one of the medals, held it on the palm of his hand and stared at it thoughtfully. When he looked up at Lytell again, Lytell seemed lost in reverie, listening perhaps to the distant sound of a starting gun, the roar of a stadium crowd as he thundered down the track.
“Is there anything you’d like to add to this?” Jenkins asked.
Lytell shook his head.
“Anything you’d like to change or delete?”
Lytell shook his head again.
Jenkins looked at the stenographer.
“That’s it then,” he said.
At 11:00 that morning, Eileen called Annie Rawles to ask her how she thought she should proceed that night. Should she stay home, or should she go out? It was still raining; the rain might dissuade their man. It was Annie’s opinion that he wouldn’t try coming into the apartment again. He undoubtedly knew the last rape had been reported to the police, and he couldn’t risk the possibility that the apartment was staked out. Annie thought he would try to hit Eileen on the street if he could, and only try the apartment as a last resort.
“So you want me to go out, huh?” Eileen asked. “In the rain.”
“Supposed to get worse tonight,” Annie said. “So far, it’s trickled off to a nice steady drizzle.”
“What’s so nice about a steady drizzle?” Eileen asked.
“Better than lightning and thunder, no?”
“Is that what we’re supposed to get?”
“According to the forecast.”
“I’m afraid of lightning,” Eileen said.
“Wear rubber-soled shoes.”
“Sure. Where do you think I should go? Another movie? I went to a movie Wednesday night.”
“How about a disco?”
“Not Mary’s style.”
“He may think that’s odd, two movies in the same week. Why don’t you go out for an early dinner? If he’s as eager to get to you as we think he is, he may make his move as soon as it’s dark.”
“Ever try getting raped on a full stomach?” Eileen said.
Annie laughed.
“Get back to me later, okay?” she said. “Let me know what you plan.”
“I will,” Eileen said.
“That it?”
“One other thing. What’s AIM?”
“This is a riddle, right?”