Lightning

1

Detective Richard Genero did not like to go out on night calls. The truth of the matter was that the nighttime city scared him. There were all sorts of things that could happen to a person in this city once the sun went down. Even if the person happened to be a cop, things could happen to him. He knew plenty of cops who’d had things happen to them at night. Somehow, the things that happened to cops happened to them more often at night than during the day. That was one of the sacred precepts he had learned about police work, and he had formulated a rule about it and the rule was Never go out at night, an impossible rule to observe if you didn’t want your fellow police officers to think you were chickenshit.

Once, when Genero was still a patrolman, he was walking his beat one cold December night when he saw a light burning in a basement and, like a good cop, went down to investigate. He found a dead kid with a blue face and a rope around his neck. That was one of the things that had happened to him at night. Another time — well, that wasn’t even nighttime, that was during the day; things could happen to cops even during the daytime. He’d been walking his beat, it was raining, he remembered, and he’d seen somebody running away from a bus stop, and when he’d picked up the bag the person had left behind on the sidewalk, it had a human hand in it! A person’s hand! Cut off at the wrist and left on the sidewalk in an airlines bag! Boy, the things that could happen to cops, day or night. The way Genero figured it, you weren’t safe in this city no matter what time you went out in it.

He felt only a little safer with Carella by his side.

The two men had gone out at night because they were doing a follow-up on a crib burglary, and the victim worked as a night watchman at a construction site. It had taken Genero a long time to learn that a crib burglar wasn’t somebody who went around stealing beds that babies slept in. A crib, in a burglar’s vocabulary, was an apartment. A crib burglar was somebody who burglarized apartments, and that was usually done during the daytime, when most apartments were empty; the last thing a burglar wanted or needed was to walk in on some old lady who’d start screaming her head off. That was why burglars who went into office buildings went in at night, when everybody had gone home from work already, and usually they went in after the cleaning lady was finished, too. That was a safe rule for smart burglars to follow: Always go in when nobody’s there.

The burglar in this particular case had gone into the apartment at 2:00 in the afternoon and was confidently unplugging the television set in the living room when all of a sudden a guy in his pajamas walked in from the bedroom and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” The guy turned out to be a night watchman who worked at night and slept during the day, and the burglar ran like hell. Carella and Genero were here at the construction site tonight to show the watchman some mug shots, even though a safe rule for smart cops to follow was Never go out at night, even if you went with Carella. Carella wasn’t Superman. He wasn’t even Batman.

Carella was either a little over or a little under six feet tall, Genero wasn’t so good at estimating heights. He guessed Carella weighed about 180 pounds, but he wasn’t so good at weights, either. Carella had brown eyes, slanty like a Chink’s, and he walked like a baseball player. His hair was only slightly lighter than his eyes, and he never wore a hat. Genero had been out with him in the worst rainstorms, and there was Carella marching around bareheaded, as if he didn’t know you could catch a cold that way. Genero liked being partnered with Carella because he figured Carella was a man you could count on if something was about to happen. The very thought of something about to happen made Genero nervous, but he didn’t think anything was going to happen tonight because it was already 3:00 a.m. when they finished showing the mug shots to the burglary victim, and he figured they’d head back to the squadroom, have a cup of coffee and some donuts, do some paperwork, and wait for the day shift to come in at a quarter to 8:00.

The night was almost balmy for October.

Genero came out of the construction site ahead of Carella because he thought he’d heard some rats scampering around when they were skirting the edge of the excavation, and if there was one thing he hated worse than spiders, it was rats. Especially at night. Even on a mild October night like this one. He breathed deeply of the autumn air, glad to be out of the fenced-in area with its great mounds of earth and its open gaping holes and steel girders lying around everywhere so a man could trip over them and break his head and get eaten by rats in the dark.

The construction site occupied one side of the entire street, and the other side was all abandoned buildings. In this neighborhood, a landlord got tired of paying taxes, he simply abandoned the building. The abandoned row of empty tenements faced the construction site, looking like soot-stained ghosts in the light of the moon. They gave Genero the creeps. He was willing to bet there were thousands of rats in those abandoned buildings, staring out at him from windows as black as eyeless sockets. He took a package of cigarettes from his jacket pocket — it was mild enough to be going around without an overcoat — and was starting to light one when he happened to look up the street.

Carella was just coming through the gate in the fence behind him.

What Genero thought he saw was a person hanging from a lamppost.

The person was attached to the end of a long thick rope.

The person hung twisting gently on the still October air.

The match burned Genero’s fingers. He dropped it just as Carella saw the body at the end of the rope. Genero wanted to run. He did not like to be the one to discover dead bodies, or even parts of dead bodies; Genero had a large aversion to corpses. He blinked his eyes because he’d never seen a body hanging like this one except in Western movies, and he figured if he blinked it might go away. Even the boy in the basement hadn’t been hanging like this one, hadn’t been hanging at all when you got right down to it, had just been sort of leaning forward on the cot, the rope around his neck, the end of it tied to the barred basement window. When Genero opened his eyes again, Carella was running toward the lamppost, and the body was still hanging there, dangling there on the air, twisting, as if a posse had found a rustler and strung him up on the spot.

Only this wasn’t Utah.

This was the big bad city.

“What the hell is this?” Monroe said. “The Wild West?”

He was looking up at the hanging body. His partner was looking up too, shading his eyes against the glow of the sodium vapor bulb at the end of the lamppost’s arm. They had put sodium vapor bulbs in this part of the city only last month, on the theory that bright lights prevented crime. So here was a body hanging from a lamppost.

“This is the French Revolution,” Monoghan said, “is what it is.”

“The French Revolution was they cut off your head,” Monroe said.

“They also hung you,” Monoghan said.

The two men, despite the unusual fall weather, were both wearing overcoats. The overcoats were black. It was de rigeur for Homicide cops in this city to wear black. It was a custom. It was not a custom for Homicide cops to wear pearl gray fedoras, but both Monoghan and Monroe were wearing them, the snap brims neatly turned down. Genero was pleased to see that they were wearing hats. His mother had told him to always wear a hat, even on the hottest days, especially on the hottest days because then you wouldn’t get sunstroke. Today hadn’t been particularly hot, just unusually mild for October, but Genero was wearing a hat, anyway. You could never be too careful.

“You get lynchings up here, huh?” Monoghan said to Carella.

“Yeah, we get all kinds of shit up here,” Carella said.

He was looking up at the dead body slowly twisting on the end of the rope. As always, but only for the briefest tick of an instant, he felt a sharp dagger of pain behind his eyes. The waste, he thought.

“You get the French Revolution up here,” Monoghan said.

“You get the Wild West up here,” Monroe said.

They both stood in the street, their hands in their coat pockets, looking up at the dead body.

“Nice white panties,” Monoghan said, looking up under her skirt.

One of the dead girl’s shoes had fallen to the pavement. A purple French-heeled shoe, the color of her blouse. Her skirt was the color of wheat, the color of her hair. Her panties, as Monroe had already observed, were white. She hung dangling above the detectives, slowly twisting at the end of the rope, a purple shoe on one foot.

“Looks how old, would you say?” Monoghan asked.

“Hard to tell from here,” Monroe said.

“Let’s cut her down,” Monoghan said.

“No,” Carella said. “Not till the M.E. gets here.”

“And the P.U.,” Genero said.

He was referring to the Photographic Unit. The men stood under the lamppost, looking up at the dead girl. A crowd had gathered. It was now 3:15 in the morning, but a crowd had gathered from nowhere, filtering in from the side streets onto this deserted street with its abandoned buildings and its construction site. Any hour of the day or night, there were people awake in this city. Genero thought it was a conspiracy, everybody being awake day or night. The four patrolmen, who’d responded in two separate r.m.p. cars when Carella called in the 10–29, were busily erecting barricades and trying to keep the crowd back. Somebody in the crowd thought it wasn’t a real girl hanging there. He commented that it was a dummy or something. They were probably shooting a movie or something. A television show. They were always shooting movies or television shows in this city. It was a very photogenic city. The girl kept twisting at the end of the rope.

“How do you hang somebody on a city street,” Monroe said, “without nobody seeing you?”

Carella was wondering the same thing.

“Maybe she hung herself,” Monoghan said.

“So then where’s the ladder or whatever?” Monroe said.

“Up here in the Eight-Seven,” Monoghan said, “she coulda hung herself and somebody coulda stole the ladder later.”

“Anyway, it’s hanged,” Monroe said.

“Whattya mean it’s hanged?” Monoghan said.

“A person hangs himself, you say he got hanged. Not hung.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s common knowledge.”

“Hanged?”

“Right.”

“That don’t sound right. Hanged.”

“It’s right, though.”

“You see a guy with a big dork,” Monoghan said, “you don’t say he’s well-hanged, you say he’s well-hung.”

“That’s a different thing entirely,” Monroe said. “We’re talking here about a different thing entirely.”

“When you hang up your suit on a hanger, you don’t say I hanged up my suit,” Monoghan said. “You say I hung up my suit.”

“That’s also different,” Monroe said.

“How is it different?”

“It’s different because when you hang somebody then the person has been hanged, he has not been hung.”

Genero didn’t know which one of them was right, but he was enjoying the conversation. Carella was walking around the lamppost, hatless, looking at the sidewalk and the street. Genero was wondering what Carella expected to find. There was just the usual shit in the gutter — cigarette butts, gum wrappers, crumpled paper cups, like that. The debris of the city.

“So what do we do here?” Monoghan asked. “Stand around all night waiting for the M.E.?” He looked at his watch. “What time did you call this in, Carella?”

“Three-oh-six,” Carella said.

“And how many seconds?” Monroe asked, and Monoghan burst out laughing.

Genero looked at his watch. “Twelve minutes ago,” he said.

“So where’s the M.E.?” Monoghan said.

A man in the crowd stepped out boldly from behind the barricade when one of the patrolmen turned his back. He walked over to where the detectives were gathered in a knot under the lamppost. He had obviously been appointed spokesman for the spectators. He assumed the polite, deferential air most citizens of this city affected when they were asking information of policemen.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said to Monoghan, “but can you tell me what happened here?”

“Fuck off,” Monoghan said politely.

“Get over there behind the barricade,” Monroe said.

“Is the young lady dead?” the man said.

“No, she’s learning how to fly,” Monoghan said.

“She’s wearing a safety rope and learning how to fly,” Monroe said.

“Shell be flapping her arms any minute,” Monoghan said.

“Get back there behind the barricade and you can watch her,” Monroe said.

The man looked up at the dead girl twisting at the end of the rope. He did not think the girl was learning to fly. But he went back behind the barricade anyway, and reported to the others what he’d just been told.

“You ever get anybody hung before?” Monoghan asked Carella.

“Hanged,” Monroe said.

“Few hanging suicides,” Carella said. “Nothing like this, though.”

“A real hanging, you need a good drop,” Monroe said. “Most of your hanging suicides, they get up on a chair, put the rope around their neck, and then jump off the chair. You don’t hang that way, you suffocate. You need a good drop for a hanging.”

“Why’s that?” Genero asked. He was interested. His mother had advised him to listen carefully all the time because that was the way you learned things.

“’Cause what happens in a real hanging, the rope... the knot up there...”

“Regular hangman’s knot up there,” Monoghan said, looking up. “The drop snaps the knot up against the back of the guy’s neck, and it breaks his neck, that’s what happens. But you need a good drop, six feet or more, otherwise the rope just suffocates the guy. You get a lot of amateurs trying to hang themselves, they just choke to death. Guy wants to kill himself, he ought to learn how to do it right.”

“I had a suicide once, he stabbed himself in the heart,” Monoghan said.

“So?” Monroe said.

“I’m just saying.”

“Well, you get all kinds,” Genero said, trying to sound worldly and experienced.

“For sure, kid,” Monoghan said, solemnly agreeing with him.

“Here’s the M.E.,” Monroe said.

“About time,” Monoghan said, and looked at his watch again.

The assistant medical examiner was a man named Paul Blaney. He had been at an all-night poker game when he’d been summoned to the scene. He was angry because he’d been sitting with a full boat, kings over threes, when the phone rang. He’d insisted on playing out the hand before he’d left, and had lost the pot to four jacks. Blaney was a short man with a scraggly black mustache, eyes that looked violet in a certain light, and a bald head that looked very shiny under the sodium vapors. He greeted the men curtly, and then looked up at the hanging girl.

“So what am I supposed to do?” he said. “Climb up the lamppost?”

“I told you we shoulda cut her down,” Monoghan said.

“We’d better wait for the lab boys,” Carella said.

“What for?”

“They’ll want to look at the rope.”

“You ever get a case where there was fingerprints on a rope?” Monoghan said.

“No, but...”

“So let’s cut her down.”

Blaney looked uncertain. He glanced up at the dead girl. He looked at Carella.

“They may know what kind of knot it is,” Carella said.

“It’s a hangman’s knot,” Monoghan said. “Anybody can see it’s a hangman’s knot. Don’t you ever go to the movies? Don’t you ever watch television?”

“I meant the one around the post. The one tied around the post. The other end of the rope.”

Blaney looked at his watch.

“I was playing poker,” he said to no one.

The Mobile Crime Unit arrived some ten minutes later. By that time, there were three more radio motor patrol cars at the scene, and the ambulance had arrived from Mercy General. The crowd had swelled behind the barricades. Everybody was waiting for them to cut the dead girl down. They wanted to see if she was really dead or if this was a movie they were shooting here. None of the people in the crowd had ever seen a person hanging from a lamppost before. Most of them had never seen a person hanging anywhere before. The girl just kept hanging there, it sure looked as if she was real, and it also looked as if she was dead. The boys from the PU took pictures of the hanging girl and the area around the lamppost and the rope tied and knotted around the post. The lab technicians held a brief consultation with Carella, and it was thought advisable to preserve the knot as it was tied, rather than untying it to lower the girl; they would want to look over the knot more carefully at the lab. It was decided that they would cut the girl down, after all.

Monoghan walked around nodding righteously, his hands in his pockets; it was what he’d suggested all along. The Emergency Service truck had arrived by then, and a sergeant unhooked a ladder from the side of the truck and asked one of the lab technicians where he wanted the rope cut, and the technician indicated a place about midway between the hangman’s knot behind the girl’s neck and the knot where the rope had been fastened to the post. The Emergency Service cops spread a safety net under the hanging girl, and the sergeant went up the ladder and cut the rope with a bolt cutter.

The girl dropped into the net.

A cheer went up from the crowd behind the barricades.

Blaney examined the girl, pronounced her dead, and ventured the opinion that the cause of death — pending autopsy — was fracture of the cervical vertebrae.

It was a little after 4:00 A.M. when the ambulance carried her off to the morgue.

The first time was always easiest.

There was an element of complete surprise involved, none of these women ever thought anything like this would happen to them, even here in this city where surely they knew it was a common occurrence. All he had to do was ambush them, show them the knife, and they turned to jelly.

The other times were difficult, very difficult.

A lot of patience was involved.

Some of them wouldn’t even budge from their apartments after the first time, so terrified were they of what had happened to them, so fearful that it might happen again. After a few weeks, though sometimes a month, they’d come outside again, usually accompanied by a husband or a boyfriend, and never at night, they were still afraid of going out at night. You had to be patient.

And you had to check the calendar.

Eventually, after that first time, they got over the trauma, and they ventured out into the nighttime city alone again, and he was waiting, of course, he was waiting for them, and the surprise was even more total this time, lightning couldn’t strike twice, could it? Ah, but it could. And it did. And the second time, if they recognized him, and some of them did, they usually pleaded that he not do it to them again, they who would impose their will on everyone if they had their way, begging him not to impose his will on them, the irony of it. None of them knew he was watching the calendar, or that his attacks were precisely timed.

After the second time, they became trembling wrecks. Some of them moved to other neighborhoods, or left the city entirely. Others went on long vacations. Still others jumped out of their shoes if an automobile horn sounded three blocks away. They began to think of themselves as helpless victims of something inexplicably evil that had chosen them as targets out of all the women in this city. One of them hired a bodyguard. But the others — well, you get over things, you go on with your life. You spend a few hours out of your apartment in the daytime, never wandering too far from home, and eventually you extend your time outdoors and you expand the range of your excursions, and before long you were back to what you supposed was normal, though you were still fearful of the night, and always accompanied by friends or relatives after dark. Until, eventually, you began to think you were safe again, it was all behind you, and the first few times you went out alone at night and nothing happened to you, you figured it was all a thing of the past, it had happened twice, yes, but it could never in a million years happen again. But what you did not know was that he was watching the calendar, and it would happen again because he was very patient, he had all the time in the world.

The third time — one of them had fought him as if her very life depended on not being violated again. He had cut that one. Cut her on the face, and her screaming had stopped, and she had submitted to him, whimpering and bleeding. The third time — one of them had promised him extravagant sums of money if only he’d leave her alone. He had done to her what he wished to do, and then had come after her a week later, into her apartment this time, he knew she lived alone, and had done it to her a fourth time, she was the one he’d caught a total of four times. It became almost impossible to carry out the plan after the third time because by then they knew they weren’t being chosen as random victims, they knew that somebody was after them specifically, and that if it had happened three times it could happen four or five or a dozen times, there was no stopping him from doing whatever he wanted whenever he chose.

All he had to do was keep patient.

Keep watching the calendar.

Keep ticking off the dates.

Only once had he been entirely successful the first time out.

He’d followed her afterward. He knew where she went. He knew he’d succeeded. He’d left her alone after that, except for watching her, and he knew for certain later that she’d been forced to do exactly what he’d planned for her to do all along, and there was such a sweet rush of triumph when he saw her again a month later, watching from a distance, and knew that his plan was viable and sound, and that it could succeed again and again.

The woman tonight was named Mary Hollings.

He had raped her twice.

He had raped her the first time in June. June tenth, to be exact, a Friday night, he had marked the date on his calendar. She’d been out late shopping, and she was carrying a department store shopping bag full of wrapped boxes when he yanked her off the sidewalk and into the alleyway. He’d shown her the knife, held it to her throat, and she’d submitted without a sound, the wrapped boxes lying scattered on the pavement beside the torn shopping bag. She was one of the few who refused to be cowed by the first experience. She was out on the street again, alone, at night, a week later. Cautious, yes, she was not a fool. But fighting her fear with a show of bravado, squarely facing what had happened, refusing to be dominated by it, determined to live her life as she had before he’d entered it.

He raped her again on the sixteenth day of September, a Friday like the first time. He’d marked that on his calendar as well. He raped her not six blocks from where he’d assaulted her the first time. She’d gone to a movie with a girlfriend, the early show. The movie had let out at nine-thirty, a quarter to ten. She had walked her girlfriend home, and was starting up the street toward the bright lights on the Stem, when he grabbed her. Again, she had not made a sound. But this time, she was terrified. This time, she was shaking all over when he slashed her panties with the knife and did it to her.

September sixteenth was three weeks ago.

He’d watched her whenever he could during the past three weeks. Noticed she never went anyplace alone during the daytime unless there were huge crowds around. Never went out at all during the night unless she was with a man, sometimes two men. He could tell, just from observing her, that she was still jumpy, even with escorts to protect her, looked around all the time, crossed the street if a man approached them from another direction, very cautious, very careful, determined that this wouldn’t happen to her again.

Last Saturday, he’d followed her downtown to Police Headquarters. He suspected she went there to give further details on what had happened to her twice already. He followed her when she left there, and was surprised when she walked into a gun shop, and showed the man inside a piece of paper, and then began looking over pistols he began producing from under the counter. She had gone to Police Headquarters for a gun permit! She was buying a gun! He smiled when she concluded the purchase. He knew she’d soon be on the street again, at night again, alone again, a gun in her handbag this time, thinking she was safe from him.

But he was wrong.

This past week, she hadn’t budged from the apartment. The nighttime city had truly subjugated her, she would not dare to go out into it alone, even with an escort, even with a gun in her handbag. She was taking no chances. The calendar was ticking. The week was flying by and October seventh was coming up very fast. He knew that to get her again he would have to go into her apartment, the way he had done with the only one he’d caught four times.

Today was the seventh of October, the seventh had finally arrived; a good time, even if it was barely the seventh, only a quarter to five in the morning. Today would be her third outing. Once or twice more after that, and he’d have her, unless she decided to move to Outer Mongolia.

Today, he would get her in her own bed.