A Streak of Light

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Mr. Claye was always in good spirits, in spite of everything. During the last week or so of his life, although really she had not seen much of him, he had seemed in even better spirits than usual. Perhaps because he had had great hopes for Governor Reagan. “He thought Reagan was the hope of the country.”

  Shapiro saw what she meant and was sure that Mr. Claye had been a very patriotic man. Would she go so far as to say that recently her husband had seemed elated, set up about something? The possible salvation of the country from its downward plunge? (Which had, of course, started with Franklin Roosevelt.)

  Elated was perhaps too strong a term. He had seemed— well, more hopeful than he usually was. About things in general, perhaps. And he had, she thought, been pleased with his recent columns. “He wasn’t always. Sometimes he felt he wasn’t hitting hard enough. Wasn’t really getting his point across. He got that way sometimes. A little that way. But I think Mr. Perryman said something recently that—well, reassured him. He didn’t tell me that, of course. But I felt that something like that had happened. My husband and I were really very close, Lieutenant. We didn’t need to spell things out to each other.”

  Shapiro said he completely understood, and that he was very sorry to have had to bother her so much at a time like this.

  She said she appreciated that and, if there was nothing else, she thought she would go and lie down a while.

  Shapiro said, “Yes, do that, Mrs. Claye. We’ll try not to bother you again.”

  He hung up.

  13

  Roger Claye had had no premonition of violent death. He had been, in recent days, in good spirits, if elated was too strong a word. Russel Perryman, owner and publisher, had recently said something to him which increased his usually sanguine mood. (Except, of course, about the nation’s “drift.” Away from the principles advocated by Ronald Reagan and, presumably, George Wallace.)

  Which, of course, got them nowhere. Nothing much did; Shapiro’s day, like Mrs. Claye’s, had been “trying.” The mind gets fagged out at the end of such a day. Perhaps things would come clearer on another day. Shapiro rather doubted it, but there was always a chance. All right, an outside chance. All chances in an alien land are outside chances.

  Perhaps tomorrow, Russel Perryman, publisher and owner, would recover sufficiently to tell them who had shot him from the dimness of an elevator car he had been about to walk into. Perhaps tomorrow they would merely have to find somebody, and assure him he had a right to remain silent and put handcuffs on him—and try to persuade him not to remain silent.

  Nathan Shapiro pushed his chair back from his desk and started to stand up. He said, “I guess, Tony, we may as well call it—” and the telephone bell interrupted him. He said “Shapiro” into it and sat down again. He motioned to Tony Cook, and Cook sat down. Shapiro said, “Go ahead, Strom,” to Detective Wilfred Strom, of Homicide South, who had spent an extremely dull afternoon in a corner of the small private room allotted Russel Perryman in the intensive care unit at St. Vincent’s Hospital. A uniformed patrolman had spent an equally boring afternoon outside the door of Perryman’s room. But the uniformed man had been able to smoke, if he wanted to smoke, as long as he made sure that nobody but nurses and doctors went into the room.

  “He said what?” Shapiro said to Detective Strom. “About football!”

  Perryman had partly regained consciousness, partly and briefly. He had muttered something and Strom, allowed to lean over the bed and listen, had made out a little of the muttering. And, yes, Perryman had seemed to be muttering about football. He had, Strom thought, said “team,” and said it several times. Once, as nearly as Strom could make out, he had said, “My team,” and again, “Not on it,” and something that sounded like “Dragging feet.”

  “It was pretty hard to make out what he was trying to say, Lieutenant,” Strom said. “He could just whisper, and even that came out sort of—well, mushy. The nurse was listening, too, and couldn’t get it any clearer than I could. Only she thought that once he said something like ‘quarterback,’ which was what made me think of football. Only it didn’t sound much like that to me. Anyway, then he closed his eyes and seemed to go back to sleep and the nurse made me go back to the corner I’d been sitting in.”

  “That’s all, Strom?”

  “I know it’s not much, Lieutenant. Not anything, I guess. But the captain told me anything, anything at all, I was to call in.”

  “Yes, Strom,” Shapiro said. “Anything at all. You getting any idea how they think he’s making out?”

  “They don’t seem to know, sir. The nurse who was there seemed to think it was encouraging he came out of it at all. Said now it seemed more like sleep than coma. But then she got one of the doctors and then, they shooed me out. They don’t much like my being in the room at all, you know. I’m outside now. It just happened.”

  “Go back in when they’ll let you, Strom. I’ll try to get you a relief in an hour or so. Anybody tried to get in to see Mr. Perryman?”

  “Not really. His son’s standing by. Out in the waiting room. And a man named Wainwright—something like that— came around to see Perryman, but they said no visitors and he went away again. I got that from the man outside—the precinct man.”

  “This Mr. Wainwright. He wasn’t insistent on getting in? Didn’t make any pitch about it?”

  “Not from what I heard. Just said he understood and when Perryman came out of it to tell him Wainwright had called. The doctor’s just come out, Lieutenant, and Evelyn, she’s the nurse, is motioning I can go back in.”

  Shapiro told him to go back in, and again promised him relief as soon as possible. He hung up and told Tony Cook what Strom had reported. Tony said it seemed like a hell of a time for Perryman to be worrying about football.

  “Everybody, from the President down, seems to be talking in football terms nowadays,” Shapiro said. “About ‘members of my team.’ That sort of thing. I wonder if Perryman was—”

  He did not finish, but merely looked at Tony Cook.

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “So do I, I guess. Maybe Perryman didn’t really mean quarterback.”

  Shapiro nodded his head.

  “And it could be,” Shapiro said, “Perryman thought he was talking to somebody. Repeating what he had said to somebody. Or, could be, going over in his mind—sort of rehearsing—what he was going to say to somebody. Could have been that, couldn’t it, Tony?”

  Tony agreed that it could have been that. Nathan regarded the wall beyond Tony Cook, and what he saw there seemed to distress him. But it also seemed to Tony that Shapiro’s distress was—well, more concentrated. It was an expression he had seen before, often seen before, on Shapiro’s long, sad face. It had meant before that Nathan Shapiro was beginning to see, or to hope he was beginning to see, a shape to things. Which might mean they were nearing the end of it.

  Which also probably meant that Tony would have to telephone Rachel Farmer and tell her it wouldn’t be seven o’clock but some time after that. If at all. Well, he was a cop by choice. And if he weren’t a cop, he probably wouldn’t have met Rachel at all. She had, after all, been a suspect when he had first met her and had seemed angular, as well as tall. One lived and learned.

  Nathan Shapiro used the telephone. He dialed for an outside line. Then he dialed on it. Tony could hear the crackle of an answer, and the answer was in a female voice.

  “Yes, dear, I’m afraid so,” Shapiro said. “Yes again. Yes, as usual. Yes, Rose, as soon as I possibly can. I’m sorry too. Unless it’s too urgent, I’ll walk her when I get home. When I can, dear.”

  He hung up. He also stood up. Tony was already on his feet. Tony said, “Where?”

  “The hospital,” Shapiro said, and his tone added, “Of course.” It wasn’t that clear to Tony Cook, but he said, “O.K., sir.”

  “To have a word with the kid,” Nathan said, explaining things fully. “See if you can get us a car, huh?”

  Tony got them a squad car. The car, with Tony driving
, took them across and downtown to St. Vincent’s hospital. An elevator took them up to the floor of the intensive care unit. They walked past a door marked, “Intensive Care. No Visitors.” There was a small waiting room a little way down the corridor. David Perryman was alone in it. He was smoking a cigarette, and there was an almost empty paper cup of coffee on the floor beside his chair. He was wearing a dark blue sports shirt, open at the neck, and a lighter blue sports jacket. He stood up when they went into the room and looked at them. There was anxiety in his young face.

  “All right, son,” Shapiro said. “No bad news. Actually, your father regained consciousness for a few minutes a while back. Encouraged his doctors, I understand. My name is Shapiro, by the way. Detective Cook you’ve met. There are just a couple of things we’d like to clear up.”

  Young Perryman said, “Sure,” and sat down again. He took a final drag at his cigarette and stubbed it out. Shapiro pulled a chair nearer and sat on it. It was not a very comfortable chair; St. Vincent’s did not encourage their visitors to linger unduly.

  “We have to consider all possibilities,” Shapiro said. “Your father’ll probably be all right, they tell us. But if he shouldn’t recover, I suppose you inherit his estate? Including the Sentinel?”

  “I suppose so,” David Perryman said. “I don’t know of anybody else, now that Mother’s dead. I’ve never thought about it much. Father’s always seemed—well, I’ve never thought about his dying.”

  “Probably he’ll be all right,” Shapiro said. “Laid up for a while, of course. Not be able to be very active in running the paper. In that case, you’d have to take over, I suppose?”

  “No. Oh, they’d check with me, I suppose. Keep me filled in, you know. But Mr. Wainwright would be in charge. He and Sampson, I guess. And Mr. Burns, of course.”

  “Not Sampson,” Shapiro told him. “I take it you haven’t heard. Mr. Sampson is dead. Somebody shot him. Early this afternoon.”

  Perryman said, “Jeeze!” There appeared to be complete surprise in the expletive. Then he said, “What the hell is going on, Mr. Shapiro?”

  “Lieutenant,” Shapiro said. “We’re trying to find out.”

  “When did this happen?” Perryman said. “To Mr. Sampson, I mean.”

  “Around two this afternoon. A little before or after. In Washington Square.”

  “I was at the hospital then,” Perryman said. “Or on my way there. As I told Detective Cook this”—he looked at Tony —“it was just this afternoon, wasn’t it? Did you check on it?”

  “We checked,” Shapiro said. “If the worst comes to the worst, Mr. Perryman—if your father doesn’t make it—what’ll you do about the Sentinel? Sell it?”

  “I don’t know, really. To be honest, it might be hard to find a buyer. It’s—well, not so profitable as it used to be. Everybody knows that, I guess. Some of the big advertisers have —well, got sore at us for some reason. Others have just sort of drifted away.”

  “Any idea why this has happened? This drifting away, I mean?”

  “It’s a bad time for afternoon papers in this town. Anybody will tell you that. Used to be, oh, half a dozen. Now just two, the Post and us. And the Post has had to change a lot, since the days Curtis owned it. A long ways before my time, that was. People moving to the suburbs, I guess. And the big stores moving there after them. Take Wanamaker’s, for instance. Used to buy the whole back page of the New York Sun every day, when there was a New York Sun. And, come to that, a New York Wanamaker’s.”

  “Just a change in the times, Mr. Perryman? A shift in population? What they call a flight from the inner city?”

  “What Dad thinks. Says he thinks, anyway.”

  “Nothing about the paper itself? Its policies, say?”

  David Perryman hesitated. He hesitated long enough to light another cigarette. Then he said, “Well,” drawing it out. “Mr. Wainwright thinks that enters into it,” he said then. “Not that he doesn’t agree with the policy. I think he does. But he thinks we’re too violent. Too one-sided. Not really a newspaper any more. Just—well, he says, a propaganda sheet. Once he said the Sentinel was becoming a house organ, and that nobody trusted it any more. He’s pretty extreme about it, but I think maybe he’s right—partly right, I mean.”

  “You’ve talked to Mr. Wainwright about this? About the way he feels?”

  “Some. The last year or so we’ve got sort of friendly. Considering how old he is, I mean. I’ve even had dinner with him over at the hotel he’s lived in since his wife died. I don’t know why he wants to be friendly with me. I must seem like a kid to him. A small boy, almost. Hell, Mr. Wainwright must be damned near eighty.”

  There was a kind of disbelief in his voice when he spoke of Wainwright’s being near eighty. Eighty was, his tone said, an unthinkable age.

  “He talked to you as if you were a kid?”

  “Funny thing is, it didn’t feel that way. More like one man to another. Maybe one newspaperman to another. He’s kind of hipped on newspapers. On being a newspaperman.”

  “You’re not, I take it?”

  “Not the way Mr. Wainwright is. Oh, it sort of grows on you. There’s something about writing a hot story for an edition. Rushing it along, if you know what I mean. And getting a good story to write, maybe the lead story sometimes. It’s, well, pretty exciting. And feeling you’re getting pretty good at it. All right at it, anyway. That you’re really learning your trade. Exciting, I guess you’d say. Probably sounds pretty silly to you, Lieutenant.”

  “No,” Shapiro said. “I can see how anyone would feel excited knowing he was getting good at something. Anyone could feel that way, I’d think. Sense of accomplishment, I suppose you’d call it. You feel that way about your work on the Sentinel?”

  “Beginning to, anyway. Get a good story nowadays, Riley lets me go on with it. While back, he’d take it away from me and give it to Fremont, or one of the others. Or not give it to me in the first place, if it looked like it might be big. The last year or so, Riley’s acted like he’s beginning to trust me. O.K.—it’s sort of encouraging. I’m not just my father’s son any more. Just an all-right member of the city staff.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “And now, perhaps, you’re beginning to feel that you’re turning into a real newspaperman. Like Mr. Wainwright, maybe.”

  “Hell, no. I’ve been on the paper two or three years. He’s been on it, I guess, maybe fifty.”

  “Was it about the time you began to feel Mr. Riley was trusting you that you began to see a good deal of Mr. Wainwright?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Did he institute this friendship, would you say?”

  “I suppose so. A cub reporter doesn’t move in on the editor of a paper. I don’t suppose, Lieutenant, you go around slapping the commissioner on the back. Saying, ‘Howdy, pal?’”

  Nathan Shapiro, who never slaps anybody on the back, smiled and said, “No, son.” Then he said, “If you have to run the paper while your father is convalescing—or if he dies—will you make any changes in the way it’s run? Give Mr. Wainwright more authority, perhaps? Change the way the news is handled in any way?”

  “I don’t know,” Perryman said. “Maybe. Gradually. What’s this all about, Lieutenant Shapiro? What’s it got to do with what you’re working on?”

  “We’re just fumbling around,” Shapiro told him. “Trying to get the whole picture. You’d have to get a new managing editor, obviously. Who’d it be, Mr. Perryman?”

  “That’s easy,” Perryman said. “Ed Riley, of course. He’s damn good. And he’s not a—”

  He stopped with that. He would not, Shapiro suspected, have used a word which would have been admiring of the late Leroy Sampson. “Bigot,” perhaps. Or “slave driver?” He did not press the point.

  “About Mr. Wainwright,” he said. “Would you give him more authority?”

  “If he wanted it,” Perryman said. “I don’t think he would. He said to me once that he was just staying around to keep an eye on thin
gs. Way he put it. As I said, he’s damn near eighty. Not that it’s affected his mind, far as I can see.”

  “Mr. Sampson thought Mr. Wainwright is wishy-washy. Way he put it. You don’t think that, I gather?”

  “Hell, no. Sampson thought anybody was that who didn’t agree with him, agree violently. Probably thought Mr. Wainwright was, like they used to say, ‘soft on communism.’ Because he didn’t scream about it all the time. Probably thought I am, too. Told Ed Riley once not to give me any stories with a political slant. Told him I couldn’t be trusted not to let my own prejudices creep in. Jesus! My prejudices. For Sampson, if you voted the Democratic ticket—except for Wallace—you were a scoundrel. Probably a traitor to boot. And he saw to it that that belief showed up in the news stories. And, for God’s sake, in the way the desk edited AP stories. If you can believe that.”

  “That’s a bad thing to do?” Shapiro said, asking out of ignorance. Tony had heard, at Perryman’s apartment yesterday, of the editing of AP stories. Apparently, to a newspaperman, a real crime.

  “Unless it’s just for length,” Perryman was saying, “it’s a violation of the franchise. We could lose ours, if they wanted to be tough about it.”

  Shapiro said he saw, which was something of an exaggeration.

  “If Mr. Wainwright should retire,” he said, “who would you put in his place, if you were running things? Mr. Simms?”

  “Probably. If he wanted it. Rumor going around, though, he’s had an offer from the Chronicle. Probably take it.”

  He stubbed out the cigarette he had just lighted.

  “I don’t get this,” David Perryman said, and there was a hint of shrillness in his voice. “First you tell me the doctors are encouraged about Dad. Then you go into all this business about what I’ll do if he dies. Were you just kidding me along at first? Is Dad really—”