Lightning

by Ed McBain

  “What time did you get home last night, Mr. Haines?”

  “Well, it only takes ten minutes to get here. It’s only a mile down the road. Actually, a mile and three-tenths.”

  “So what time did you get home?”

  “Eight o’clock? Wasn’t it somewhere around eight, Lo?”

  “It was closer to ten,” Lois said. “I was already in bed.”

  “Yes, somewhere in there,” Haines said. “Sometime between eight and ten.”

  “It was ten minutes to ten exactly,” Lois said. “I looked at the clock when I heard you come in.”

  “So you were in the school’s newspaper office…”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “From four o’clock yesterday afternoon…”

  “Well, more like four-thirty. I’d say it was four-thirty.”

  “From four-thirty to nine-forty. You said it takes ten minutes to get here, and you got home at nine-fifty…”

  “Well, if Lois is sure about that. I thought it was closer to eight. When I got home, I mean.”

  “That’s almost five hours,” Annie said. “Takes that long to put a newspaper to bed, does it?”

  “Well, the time varies.”

  “And you say you were working with the kids all that time?”

  “Yes.”

  “The kids on the newspaper staff.”

  “Yes.”

  “May I have their names, please, Mr. Haines?”

  “What for?”

  “I’d like to talk to them.”

  “Why?”

  “I’d like to know if you really were where you say you were last night.”

  Haines looked at his wife. He turned back to Annie.

  “I…don’t see why you feel it necessary to check on my whereabouts,” he said. “I still don’t know what you’re doing here. As a matter of fact—”

  “Mr. Haines, were you in Isola last night? In the vicinity of 1840 Laramie Crescent between seven-thirty and—”

  “I told you I was—”

  “Were you, more specifically, in an alleyway—”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “—two doors down from 1840 Laramie Crescent—”

  “I was—”

  “—cutting and raping a woman you thought was Mary Hollings?”

  “I don’t know anybody named—”

  “Whom you’d previously raped on June tenth, September sixteenth, and October seventh?”

  The kitchen was silent. Haines looked at his wife.

  “I was at the school last night,” he said to her.

  “Then give me the names of the kids you were working with,” Annie said.

  “I was at the goddamn school!” Haines shouted.

  “I washed your shirt this morning,” Lois said softly. She kept staring at him. “There was blood on the cuff.” She lowered her eyes. “I had to use cold water to get the blood out.”

  One of the little girls appeared in the doorway to the kitchen.

  “Is something the matter?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  “Mr. Haines,” Annie said, “I’ll have to ask you to come with me.”

  “Is something the matter?” the little girl asked again.

  You want to know why, he said into the tape recorder, I’ll tell you why. I’ve got nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. If more people took the kind of stand I took, we wouldn’t be overrun by these goddamn groups trying to force their harebrained opinions on others. I didn’t hurt anyone by comparison. When you consider all the people they’re hurting, I’m practically a saint. Who did I hurt, can you tell me? I’m not talking about the two I had to cut, that was protective, that was self-defense in a way. But none of the others got hurt, all I did was try to show them how wrong they are about their position. How sometimes it’s essential to have an abortion. Something they can’t seem to get through their thick heads. I wanted to prove this to them decisively. I wanted them to get pregnant by a rapist. I wanted them to be forced into having abortions—would you carry a rapist’s baby? Would you give birth to a rapist’s baby? I’m sure you wouldn’t. And I was sure they wouldn’t, either, which is why I worked it out so that they’d have to get pregnant sooner or later. If I raped them often enough, they had to get pregnant. The odds were maybe sixty to forty they’d get pregnant. It was as simple as that.

  You want to know something? Not any one of my kids was planned. The two little girls you saw? Both accidents. The one my wife’s carrying now, an accident. She’s Catholic, she won’t use anything but the rhythm method. You think she’d know by now that the damn thing doesn’t work—a kid sixteen months after we were married, another one two years after that. You’re supposed to learn from experience, aren’t you? I kept trying to tell her. Go on the pill, get a diaphragm, let me use a rubber. No, no. Against the rules of the church, you know. The rhythm method, that’s it. Or else abstinence. Great choices, huh? Rhythm or abstinence. I’m thirty-one years old, I’ve had children since I was twenty-three, that’s terrific, isn’t it? And now another one on the way. She told me about it in February. We’re going to have another baby, darling. Terrific. Really terrific. Just what I needed was another kid. I asked her to get an abortion. You’d think I asked her to drown herself. An abortion? Are you crazy? An abortion? Abortions are legal, I told her. This isn’t the Middle Ages, I told her. You don’t have to go through with a pregnancy if the child will be a burden to you. You just don’t have to. She said the church was against abortion. She said even a lot of people who weren’t Catholics disapproved of abortion and were working hard to change the law. She said the goddamn president of the United States disapproved of abortion! I told her the president wasn’t earning twenty thousand a year, I told her the president wasn’t out there busting his ass trying to clothe and feed and house a family, I told her the president wasn’t me, Arthur Haines, who didn’t want any more children! I’m thirty-one years old, I’ll be close to fifty when this new one is just starting college. She told me too bad, we’re having another baby, so get used to the idea.

  I got used to the idea, all right. Not her idea, though. Mine. An idea I’d been thinking about for a long time. Get those goddamn women out there who are yelling no abortion, no abortion, put them in a position where they have to get an abortion, find out how they felt about it when it struck close to home. I wrote to Right to Life, trying to get a mailing list from them, but they told me I had to make my request on organization stationery, and I had to tell them how I planned to use the list. Well, I couldn’t do that. I mean, how could I do that? So I zeroed in on this local group, AIM—Against Infant Murder, how do you like that name?—and I told them I was writing a magazine article in favor of pro-life, and I wanted to contact women supporters of the movement so that I could find out their deepest feelings about the subject, all that bullshit, and they wrote back saying they could not send the mailing list to anyone who did not first contribute at least a hundred dollars in support of the organization. I figured a hundred dollars was small enough price for what I planned to do, what I knew I had to do.

  The mailing list didn’t tell me anything about their religious affiliations. They had to be Catholics, you see. I mean, if a woman was a Protestant or whatever, she could be supporting a pro-life group and using a diaphragm at the same time, do you understand what I mean. I mean, the idea was to make them pregnant. If I went out after a Baptist or whatever, a Hindu, you know what I mean, I’d be spending all my time and energy for nothing if she happened to be on the pill or had an IUD in there, it would just be a waste of time. So I followed them around— I didn’t bother with anybody who had a name like Kaplowitz or Cohen, I knew right off they were Jewish—and I found out pretty fast who was going to a Catholic church on Sunday morning and who wasn’t. I singled out the Catholics. I singled out all the Catholics who’d made contributions to AIM. The Catholics were my targets. I wanted to show them first that you could take the rhythm method and shove it, and I wanted to show them next that they were dead wro
ng when it came to abortion, if they had to get an abortion they’d go get it, all right, and in a hurry.

  It was just coincidence that the first was named Lois.

  I mean, my wife’s name happens to be Lois, but that wasn’t why I chose Lois Carmody. I mean, that was just coincidental. Lois Carmody—that just happened to be her name. She lived pretty close by, the first few times out, I didn’t want to be away from home too long, I didn’t want to have to make a hundred explanations. I mean, I refined it after a while, not everybody on the list lived a half-hour away, I had to find plausible excuses for being away, do you understand? I refined it. So I wouldn’t have trouble at home. I got enough flak as it was, believe me, but she never really knew what I was doing, my wife—she accused me of having an affair once, can you imagine? That’s pretty funny don’t you think? An affair? I mean, if you wanted to get technical, I was having a lot of affairs. Well, when she accused me that time, there weren’t as many then, this was before the summer vacation. I get July and August off, we usually go up to Maine to spend the summer months with her parents up there. I hate it, but what other kind of vacation can I afford? Anyway, this was in June when she accused me of having an affair. I didn’t do Mary and then Janet until the school term started again.

  I nailed one of them the first time out.

  She isn’t on your list of names, I guess you were just looking for repeaters, huh? I mean, women who were raped more than once. It’s amazing how you got to me. Really amazing! You people must work very hard. Anyway, I got this woman—her name was Joanna Little, she’s on the mailing list, but not on the list you read to me—I got her for the first time, the only time as it turned out, in March, she was one of the early ones. I was planning on getting her again—it doesn’t work unless you watch the calendar and get to them on a regular basis—but next thing I knew, I was following her around and she’s on the street big as a house! I caught her the first time out! That can happen, you know. And then I know she had an abortion because I followed her to the clinic one Saturday, and goodbye belly, all gone. I’d done what I wanted to do, do you see? It worked. I’d made her pregnant and forced her to have an abortion. Big Catholic! Big pro-life supporter! Got rid of that baby the way she would an old pair of socks. I went out to get drunk that night. Came home stinking drunk, Lois took a fit, well, the hell with Lois, popping out babies as if she’s an assembly line. But that was just luck, getting Joanna the first time around. I knew that was just luck.

  What you have to do, you see, is you make out this calendar, and you keep careful track of each time you get them. I mean, you lay it all out in advance. You have to get them according to the cycle, you see. Listen, I know all about the rhythm method, I’m an expert on the rhythm method. A women’s menstrual cycle—I don’t care if it’s twenty-eight days or thirty days or whatever—the woman usually starts ovulating on the twelfth day of her cycle. Those are the crucial days, the twelfth, the thirteenth, and the fourteenth day. You can expand that a bit, you can say the eleventh day to the fifteenth day, or even the sixteenth day in some cases. But I figured the eleventh to the fifteenth were the outer limits. The egg lasts about twelve hours, and the sperm about twenty-four—though some doctors say the sperm can last as long as seventy-two. Still, if you didn’t want to take any chances, you had to figure the best time was the eleventh to the fifteenth day of their menstrual cycles. That was when they had the best chance of getting pregnant—when they were ovulating, you see.

  Well, I couldn’t just go up to these women and ask them when they had their last period, could I? I mean, that was out of the question. These were strangers, I didn’t know them. It wasn’t the same as with a wife or a girlfriend, where you’re living with them and sleeping with them, and you know when they’re about to get their period, it wasn’t the same thing at all. These were total strangers, do you understand? So I had to figure out for myself when they’d be ripe, and what I did—well, look at the calendar.

  Let’s take—well, let’s take August, for example, which is an easy one because the first happened to fall on a Monday. I was away in August, I was up in Maine. I’m only using this as an example. But…well here. In August, the first is a Monday. Let’s also say, to make it simple, that this also happens to be the first day of this particular woman’s menstrual cycle. Okay, I rape her that Monday night. The next Monday night is the eighth, which is the eighth day of her cycle, I’m making this easy for you so you can follow it. The Monday after that is the fifteenth. See? I caught her on the fifteenth day, which is one of the days she’s ovulating. Good. In a case like that, I wouldn’t even have to try getting her a fourth or fifth time. But if you carry it out on the calendar, I mean, it has to work out that sooner or later you’ll catch her.

  In August, for example, the twenty-second would have been the twenty-second day of her cycle. The next Monday is the twenty-ninth, which with some women could be the start of a new cycle, it varies. So let’s say the cycle starts all over again on Monday, August twenty-ninth. If we move into September… Well, here the next Monday is the fifth. This, now is the eighth day of her cycle. The next Monday is the twelfth, which happens to be the fifteenth day of her cycle, so there we are again—bingo! I figured it was foolproof. I mean, if you got them on a carefully thought-out schedule, they had to get pregnant sooner or later. And unless they wanted to be carrying a rapist’s baby, they also had to get an abortion.

  It was as simple as that.

  I was doing this to show these people how wrong they are.

  To show them that they cannot simply impose their will upon others.

  To drive home to them the fact that this is a democracy, and in a democracy there is freedom of choice for one and for all.

  Annie read the transcript typed from Haines’s confession.

  She read it yet another time.

  Haines thought the right was wrong.

  The right thought it was right.

  Annie thought they were both wrong.

  She sometimes wondered what would happen if people just left other people alone.

  The wind and the rain had stopped.

  In Grover Park, across the street from the 87th Precinct, the trees were bare, the ground covered with lifeless leaves.

  “Well,” Meyer said, “at least the rain’s stopped.”

  They were all thinking that winter was on the way.

  The feelings were mixed in the squadroom that Saturday afternoon. They all knew what had happened to Eileen Burke. They further knew that Annie Rawles had collared the rapist. But they didn’t know what Kling was feeling, or how carefully they might have to tiptoe around him when the matter of Eileen’s rape finally came out into the open. He was at the hospital just now. He’d been there early this morning, and he was there again now, and so there was yet time to explore and consider what their approach might be. You didn’t simply go up to somebody whose girl had been raped, and say, “Hi, Bert, rain seems to have stopped, I hear Eileen got raped.” There were ways of handling this, they were sure, but they still hadn’t figured out how to deal with it.

  Until Fat Ollie Weeks called.

  “Hey, Steve-a-rino, how you doin’?” he said into the phone.

  “Pretty good,” Carella said. “How about you?”

  “Oh, fine, fine, usual horseshit up here,” Ollie said. “I got to tell you buddy, I’m seriously thinking of transferring to the Eight-Seven. I really like working with you guys.”

  Carella said nothing.

  “Did you see the papers today?” Ollie asked.

  “No,” Carella said.

  “Full of our Road Runner nut,” Ollie said. “All the headlines yelling ‘Lightning Strikes Twice.’ I guess he got what he wanted, huh? He’s famous all over again.”

  “If that’s fame,” Carella said.

  “Yeah, well, who knows with these nuts?” Ollie said, and then added, quite casually, “I hear Kling’s girl got herself fucked last night.”

  There was a silence as vast as Si
beria on the line.

  At last, Carella said, “Ollie, don’t ever say that again.”

  “What?” Ollie said.

  “What you just said. Don’t ever let those words pass your lips again, Ollie, do you hear me? Don’t repeat them to anyone in the world. Not even to your mother. Is that—?”

  “My mother’s dead,” Ollie said.

  “Is that clear?” Carella said.

  “What’s the big deal?” Ollie said.

  “The big deal is she’s one of ours,” Carella said.

  “So she’s a cop, big deal. What’s that…?”

  “No, Ollie,” Carella said. “She’s one of ours. Have you got that, Ollie?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I got it, relax, willya? My lips are sealed.”

  “I hope so,” Carella said.

  “Boy, you’re some grump today,” Ollie said. “Give me a call when you’re in a better mood, okay?”

  “Sure,” Carella said.

  “Ciao, paisan,” Ollie said, and hung up.

  Carella gently replaced the receiver on the cradle.

  He was thinking that if Kling was hurting, they were all hurting. It was really as simple as that.

  “Best thing about Lightning,” Hawes said, “is he wasn’t the Deaf Man.”

  “I was afraid it might be him, too,” Meyer said.

  “Me, too,” Carella said.

  “Seemed like the man’s style,” Brown said.

  “Anybody want coffee?” Meyer asked.

  “Bad enough as it was,” Hawes said.

  “Coulda been worse,” Brown said.

  “Coulda really been the Deaf Man,” Carella said.

  Miscolo came down the hall from the Clerical Office, pushed his way through the slatted rail divider, and walked directly to Carella’s desk.

  “Just the man we want to see,” Meyer said. “You got any coffee brewing in the Clerical Office?”

  “I thought you didn’t like my coffee,” Miscolo said.

  “We love your coffee,” Brown said.