A Streak of Light

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  An escape hatch opened. Shapiro closed it.

  “No,” he said. “I’ll go up there, I think. One of the cruisers can give me a lift. Suppose you stop by and see Mrs. Claye. Maybe she’s moved back to Eleventh Street by now. Ask her—oh, whether she’s seen Mr. Mead this morning. And whatever else you think of. And then you might see if young Perryman has got home yet. And where he’s been since he left us. O.K.?”

  Tony said, “Sure.

  Sampson’s Park Avenue apartment was, from the address, somewhere in the mid-Eighties. Richardson made the arrangements. Shapiro got into the patrol car designated, with two uniformed men in the seat in front of him, and the car rolled toward Fourth Avenue and its journey north. Its absence would leave a gap in the precinct patrol, but the gap would be only temporary. And perhaps no emergency would arise in its absence. Which was, of course, unlikely.

  11

  The Park Avenue Address was a tall apartment building on the northeast corner of Eighty-second Street. The Sampson apartment was on the eighteenth floor. A Negro maid in a white uniform answered Shapiro’s ring. She would see if Mrs. Sampson was at home. And who should she say was calling?

  Shapiro told her. She looked startled. She would see. If the lieutenant wanted to come in?

  Shapiro went into a large entry hall, which was actually part of a much larger living room. The afternoon sun poured into the living room through a window which constituted most of a wall—a south wall, evidently. It was a very expensive living room, part, obviously, of a very expensive apartment. At a guess, it had cost the Sampsons a hundred thousand dollars. No, more likely a hundred and fifty, assuming it was a cooperative apartment building. Nathan Shapiro could only guess as to what the carrying charges were. Even the vaguest of guesses made him wince. Being managing editor of the New York Sentinel apparently had been a well-rewarded occupation.

  He waited, standing, without going into the bright living room. In spite of the blazing sun, it was comfortably cool in the apartment. He waited some time before a small woman with rippled yellow hair came into the living room. She was younger than he had expected. She had a pretty, rounded face on which life seemed to have left no marks. The face might have been painted on, in watercolor.

  The maid followed her into the living room.

  As she stepped into the living room, the yellow-haired young woman, who was wearing a dark green robe, put her right hand over her eyes. She said, “What a dreadful glare. Susie! Draw the drapes, Susie. How many times do I have to tell you? Everything will get all faded.”

  Her accent was Southern, her voice high, a little nasal. It was also aggrieved. The maid said, “Yes’m, Mrs. Sampson,” and pulled curtains across the big window. The heavy curtains, which Mrs. Sampson thought of as “drapes,” darkened the room somewhat.

  “And turn on the lamps,” said Mrs. Sampson. “Do I have to tell you everything?”

  The maid said, “Yes’m, Mrs. Sampson,” and touched a switch. Three lamps brightened in the room. Only then did the petite woman appear to become conscious of Nathan Shapiro. She looked at him, and he moved farther into the room.

  “You wanted to see me?” Emily Louise Sampson said. Undoubtedly Tony Cook had been right. She was “Emmy Lou.” The way she spoke proved it. So, Nathan thought, did her manner. “Susie says you’re a policeman of some kind. Of course, they do get things mixed up. You don’t look much like a policeman, do you? Policemen wear uniforms.”

  “Not all of them,” Shapiro said. “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you, Mrs. Sampson. About your husband. Very bad news, I’m afraid.”

  She opened blue eyes very wide. They remained rather small blue eyes. She put her right hand up to cover her lips. Her mouth, also, was small. It was, however, very exactly contoured.

  “My husband couldn’t have done anything the police would be interested in,” she said. “He couldn’t have. It wouldn’t be at all like him. He couldn’t be mixed up with the police. You must be wrong, you know. Just dreadfully wrong. Mr. Sampson isn’t at all the kind of man to get mixed up with the police. What did she say your name was?”

  Shapiro told her his name. She said, “Oh,” as if much had been explained. Shapiro looked down at her.

  “Perhaps you’d better sit down, Mrs. Sampson,” he said.

  She made no move to sit down. She merely stood and looked at him. She took her fingers down from her lips. There was now, Shapiro thought, a kind of blankness in the smallish blue eyes.

  “Mr. Sampson isn’t mixed up with the police, Mrs. Sampson. Not in the way you mean. I’m very sorry to have to tell you this. But your husband is dead, Mrs. Sampson. Somebody shot him, I’m afraid.”

  There is no good way to convey such news. Emily Louise Sampson said, “Oh,” drawing it out. Then she said, “Oh, no.” She swayed a little, as if he had struck her. But when he started to reach out to steady her, she shrank back away from him. Then she did move a few feet to a deep chair. She sank into it.

  Shapiro moved closer, so that he stood in front of the chair, looking down at her. She seemed huddled in the chair. He said, again, how sorry he was to have brought such bad news. Was there somebody who could be with her? Somebody he could call? The maid, perhaps?

  At first she did not seem to have heard him. But then she shook her head. She said, “That stupid little thing? What could she do?”

  Shapiro had no answer to that.

  “I’ll be all right,” she said. “Just—oh, just give me a few minutes.”

  Shapiro said, “Of course.” He pulled a light chair up and sat facing her. Then, suddenly, she clenched her hands and began to beat with her fists on both padded arms of the chair. She closed her eyes as she did this. Shock, of course. And angry rejection of what had happened. And, possibly, theatrical demonstration of that shock? He had no special reason to think that.

  She had closed her eyes while she pounded at the chair arms. Now she opened them, and put her hands together in her lap. The dark green robe had parted a little as she sank into the chair, but it had not opened too revealingly. Nevertheless, she adjusted it. She looked at Shapiro, her eyes again widely opened. And she said, “Is there something else? Anything else?”

  “No, Mrs. Sampson. I thought perhaps you would want to know more about it. About where it happened and how it happened.”

  “Why should I?” she said. Her voice was high and strained. She sounded, if possible, even more Southern. Leroy Sampson had evidently modified his speech habits more than his wife had when they came out of Alabama.

  “Roy’s dead, isn’t he?” she said. “You say he’s dead. That somebody killed him. What more is there?”

  Natural curiosity, Shapiro thought. But perhaps it was too soon for that. He said, “I suppose that’s all, really. And— well, I’m very sorry, Mrs. Sampson. I hate to have to bring you news like this.”

  “You say you’re a policeman,” she said. “I suppose you have to do this sort of thing often. What do you call it? ‘Notify survivors.’ Isn’t that it? And always, I guess, tell them how sorry you are. And then—start asking them questions?”

  It was accurate enough. It didn’t go very deep; did not indicate any inkling of the inward wrenching such duty brought; any perception that even policemen are human. Still, accurate enough.

  “One or two questions, perhaps,” he said. “When you feel up to them, of course. Did your husband go down to the Village often, Mrs. Sampson? Greenwich Village, I mean.”

  She said, “What?” with a note of astonishment in her voice.

  Shapiro repeated his question.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Why ever should he? It’s— from what people say, almost as bad as Harlem. All kinds of crazy people down there. Radicals and nigras and that sort of trash. Why would anybody like Roy go to a place like that?”

  She was coming out of shock quite rapidly, Shapiro thought, and thought also that Tony Cook would be surprised, and possibly amused, by this description of the Manhattan neighborhood he liv
ed in—had, in fact, been born in. Of course, in recent years, the Negro population of the Village had increased. But not to that extent. The mythology about the Village had, apparently, not diminished, at least in the mind of Emily Louise Sampson.

  “I don’t know why Mr. Sampson went down to the Village,” he said. “On his way home from the office, apparently. We’re trying to find out about that. You see, Mrs. Sampson, he was killed there. On a bench in Washington Square. By somebody who was sitting beside him, we think.”

  “Somebody who was trying to hold him up,” she said. “One of those addicts who are all over the place nowadays. Or some nigger—nigra, most likely. They hate white people, you know. They’re—well, they’re animals really.”

  Shapiro was tempted to say that we all are, and resisted the temptation. Instead, he said, “We don’t think it was just a holdup, Mrs. Sampson. It looks a little as if your husband was shot by someone he knew, was talking to. You don’t know anybody he might have gone to meet down there? Somebody who lives in that part of town, say?”

  “We don’t know anybody like that,” she said. “Oh, I think Mr. Perryman’s son lives down there someplace. But we don’t really know him. He works on the paper, Roy told me once. On Roy’s staff, actually. But he’s just a reporter, I think.”

  “We know about Mr. Perryman,” Shapiro said. “He does live down there, yes. Probably because it’s closer to the office. More convenient. Up here, you’re quite a way from the Sentinel office. And where young Perryman’s father lives is almost as far. The older Mr. Perryman is in the hospital now, you know. Somebody shot him, too.”

  “Roy told me about that,” she said. “He—he was very much upset, of course. Mr. Perryman is—”

  She stopped suddenly; she leaned forward in the deep chair, and clasped her hands together.

  “The way Mr. Claye was,” she said, and spoke rapidly, almost convulsively. “And now—now my husband. Is that what you think? What you’re getting at?”

  “What we’re wondering about, yes.”

  And, he thought, it had taken her some time to make, to wonder about, a rather obvious connection. Still somewhat in shock, apparently. Which was to be expected.

  “There was an earlier attempt on your husband’s life today, Mrs. Sampson. At the office. Right after he got there. By somebody, we think, who knew when he would get there. Which was always about the same time in the morning, way I get it.”

  “Always,” she said. “There’s a cabdriver who always takes him down. Calls up from the lobby every morning. An Eye—Italian, I think he is.”

  It occurred to Shapiro that Leroy Sampson had married a little beneath him, linguistically, at any rate. Eyetalian. Well, almost. Pretty daughter of what people called a redneck? Turned into a Southern belle? By her husband? Just when belles, Southern or otherwise, had become an endangered species?

  “The night Mr. Claye was killed,” Shapiro said. “Thursday night. Early Friday morning, actually. Was your husband home that night?”

  “What a strange question,” she said. “Surely you can’t think my husband had anything—”

  “No, Mrs. Sampson. Of course not. But—well, there’s an outside chance he might have seen something, heard something, perhaps that would—well, make him dangerous to whoever killed Mr. Claye.”

  “Some awful Communist,” she said. “Surely you can see that. Everybody else does. Roy did. He told me so. Not that I wouldn’t have known, anyway. Scum like that. Those dreadful people who paraded in Washington against our boys in Vietnam. When they were just let do it; when nobody stopped them.”

  Minds wander. Conversations wander too; answers wander away from questions.

  “We’re not neglecting any possibility, Mrs. Sampson,” Shapiro said, sounding to himself as if he were reading from a copybook. “It’s quite possible that radical extremists were involved. We realize that. If they were, we’ll find them.”

  “Possible, you say. Quite possible. Why, it’s obvious. Even you must see that.”

  The “even” which had only been implied before had emerged into the open. “Niggers,” of course. Probably also “kikes.”

  “We’re not forgetting that,” he told her. “About Thursday night, Mrs. Sampson. Just to keep the record clear. Your husband was here at home Thursday night? And, of course, early Friday morning?”

  She couldn’t see, couldn’t even imagine, what that had to do with the investigation. If he could call it an investigation. And, if he didn’t know it, the police commissioner and her husband were—well, had been—friends.

  “And,” she said, “Mr. Perryman is, too. Or didn’t you know that, either?”

  “Mr. Perryman mentioned it,” Shapiro said. “Commissioner Pierce probably has a good many friends. About Thursday, please. Or if that’s something you’d rather not talk about just now—I realize how you must be feeling—well, I can always come back. Or somebody else can, of course. Just to keep the record straight.”

  “Thursdays have always been Roy’s poker nights,” she said. “In the fall and winter, anyway. Since we came up here, that is. Out of where we both grew up. Out of where we really belonged, I sometimes think. But my husband would come up here.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “These poker games. They were here, Mrs. Sampson? Or did they sort of rotate around?”

  “They were just friendly games, Lieutenant Shapiro. You make them sound—”

  Another tangent, another to be blocked off. Shapiro said he realized the poker games were just friendly games, just ways to, once a week, pass evenings. Perhaps he had phrased it badly. The poker players usually met in the Sampson apartment?

  “Not since a few years ago,” she said. “They used to. But then Roy decided that wasn’t fair to me. Men here until all hours. And all the extra work for me. Seeing that they had sandwiches and drinks and things like that. Being a hostess, really. Roy decided three or four years ago not to go on putting me through it. He—he’s always been considerate that way, you know.”

  There was hesitancy in the last statement. When she spoke again, her shrill voice was much lower, almost uncertain. “He was always so good to me,” she said. “So careful to see I didn’t tire myself out.”

  Shapiro was sure Mr. Sampson had been a most considerate husband. His tone—he hoped—implied that any man would be of so charming a wife. And after the poker sessions were no longer held in the apartment, they were held somewhere else? At the apartment, or house, or some other man in the group?

  “No. They moved them down to the office. There’s a big conference room down there—part of the advertising department, I think it is. I’ve never been there, of course. But that’s where I think they go to play. For really quite small stakes. ‘Nominal,’ he always called them. And only for friends, of course. And not in summer, when so many of us are out of town so much. Or even living in the country, like the Clayes.”

  Shapiro had not supposed that Leroy Sampson and his associates on the New York Sentinel were running a professional gambling establishment, in violation of the laws of the State of New York. His “Of course,” to Mrs. Sampson was therefore entirely convincing. Did Mrs. Sampson happen to know who else attended these Thursday night poker sessions? Just as a matter of routine. “They want us to get everything down, you know. Even things which can’t possibly matter.”

  She didn’t really know. Mr. Claye was one of them, she thought. Had been for the last year or two. And the advertising manager, whose name she couldn’t, for the life of her, remember. Wait a minute. Evans, wasn’t it? And Mr. Burns. He was the business manager, she thought.

  It came to five, which was enough for a game. Yes, she thought those were the regulars. Sometimes, she had a feeling, a man named Simms, who was “something on the paper.” She thought her husband once had mentioned Mr. Simms. Something about Simms having taken “all of us for a cleaning.”

  That was all the names she could think of. And did it really matter?

  “Probably not.” And he
did appreciate her cooperation, at such a bad time; for her such a sad time. Did she happen to remember whether Mr. Perryman was ever a member of the Thursday night group? She didn’t think so; her husband hadn’t, that she could remember, mentioned Mr. Perryman as a Thursday night poker player. And Mr. Wainwright? “He’s the editor of the Sentinel, you know, Mrs. Sampson.”

  “A very old man,” she said. “Should have retired years ago, my husband thought. Yes, I think he was here once or twice when they had the game here. Several years ago, that would have been. I don’t know whether he ever played after they moved downtown, where a restaurant could bring them in sandwiches and drinks and things like that.”

  She had spoken of the games going on until all hours, from which he assumed that Mr. Sampson had often got home late from the poker sessions. Had he, did she remember, been late the previous Friday morning? Yesterday morning?

  She hadn’t, really, any idea. She herself had gone to bed a little after eleven. Her husband could have got home almost any time after that. He would have been very careful not to awaken her. He was always very careful about that. And, of course, his room was quite a ways from hers. “The other end of the apartment, almost.”

  She had been very helpful, Shapiro told her, and probably they would not have to bother her again. Except for some formalities, which her attorney could very well handle. And would she be all right alone?

  “Oh,” she said, “I’ve got folks down home. They’ll come up, of course, when I call them. I won’t be alone. I have family.”

  There was a slight emphasis on the I. It was a little as if she alone were so supplied. Shapiro let himself out of the big, glossy apartment.

  Managing editors of New York City newspapers were paid handsomely, even when the papers were not particularly profitable.

  Or perhaps, of course, Emmy Lou’s ancestors had not been red-necks at all. Perhaps they had been wealthy planters, a few generations back possessed of numerous slaves. Perhaps the apartment was her inheritance.

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