A Streak of Light

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  Tony did not want another beer. He would try not to keep David Perryman from his date. (Or me from mine, he thought.)

  “Aside from his ideas you object to,” he said, “Claye seemed a pleasant enough man, I take it. Older, of course. But—well, a man who might still be getting around. Might, say, have had a dinner date last night? And perhaps for the whole evening? Until he went down to the Sentinel Building?”

  “You mean with a girl? A woman? How would I know?”

  “You wouldn’t. But you did know him. So you’ve more to guess on than we have.”

  “Hell, I wasn’t interested in his sex life. Got enough to think about with my own. Seems damn important to kids the age I was then. And we’d assume men Claye’s age have—well, lost interest. I realize, now, that he may not have. But, listen, man, I hardly knew him. My old man and the Clayes would be having cocktails. Sometimes I’d have a Coke or something and then get out. The way Dad wanted it. The way I did too.”

  “Yes,” Tony said, “older people can be boring. I remember that much.”

  “Times I met them were mostly in the summer,” Perryman said. “Falls and winters I was in prep school. Where Dad went. Kent. Kent and then Harvard. Business school at Harvard. I just managed to scrape through. Had my way, I’d have gone to Columbia. School of Journalism. But Dad had his way. He usually does.”

  Tony said, “Mmm.” Having met Russel Perryman once, and briefly, he didn’t doubt Perryman usually had his way. “This idea you’re a radical,” Tony said, “a leftist. Any idea how it got started, Mr. Perryman?”

  David Perryman grinned at that.

  “Could be,” he said, “I shot my mouth off a few times. Could be I still do. Also, it probably got around I’m a member of Common Cause. The American Civil Liberties Union, even. Enough, down at the office, to make me a liberal. What they call a ‘so-called’ liberal. Way Boss Sampson looks at things, that makes me a commie. Way Dad looks at things too, I guess. The Reverend Martin Luther King was a flaming revolutionary, way they look at it. As well as being a nigger, way Sampson looks at it. And—”

  The telephone rang, interrupting him. He said, “Sorry. Probably that crazy girl,” and went into the narrow corridor to answer the telephone.

  Tony finished what little remained of his beer. He listened.

  “Yeah, this is David Perryman,” he heard, and then, “What!” There was a longer pause, then, “Saint Vincent’s? Sure I will.” There was a briefer pause. “Yes, he is. Sure, I’ll tell him.”

  David Perryman came back into the living room. His face had changed. It had had a cheerful expression up to then. Now it didn’t.

  “My father’s been shot,” he said. “Down at the office. They don’t know how bad it is, yet. He’s at Saint Vincent’s. In surgery, they say. I’m going over there and—and wait, I suppose. And if you happened to be here, I was to tell you. And that a Lieutenant Something-or-other was down there. At the office, that is.”

  “Shapiro,” Tony said. “Get along to the hospital. Probably you will have to wait. I’m sorry, Mr. Perryman.”

  David Perryman was putting on the jacket he had taken off as he had sat down to his beer when Tony Cook went out of the apartment. He was lucky in getting a cab on Seventh Avenue. And, lucky too, of course, that Seventh is one way downtown.

  7

  Again there were police patrol cars against the curb in front of the Sentinel Building. Again the detective squad was there. It wouldn’t be Captain Callahan this time. Callahan worked the eight-to-four. Callahan would be home, or on his way there.

  There were two uniformed patrolmen in front of the elevators. Tony Cook showed his badge. “Up on the sixth floor is where they are,” the patrolman told him. “Only one of the elevators is working. They’re holding the other one up at the sixth.”

  Tony waited for the working elevator to come down. Nobody got out of it. He got in and pressed the button numbered 6. The car didn’t stop on the way up.

  There were a good many men on the sixth floor when Cook got out of the elevator. There was one uniformed man. The rest were in civilian clothes and had their gold shields pinned to their jackets. Tony pinned his own on and looked for Nathan Shapiro. After a minute or two, Shapiro came out of Perryman’s office. He said, “Hi,” and pointed to the other elevator, which had its door open. A photographer was leaning into the car and taking a picture of its inside. He moved away, and Tony looked in.

  There was blood on the floor. A good deal of it. He looked at Shapiro. There was blood on both knees of Shapiro’s trousers. There was a dab of it on the skirt of his jacket. The blood on the elevator floor was dry, now. So was that on Shapiro’s clothes.

  “Still in surgery, last we heard,” Shapiro said. “So, apparently, still alive. Must have missed the aorta, or just grazed it. Come in here a minute and I’ll fill you in.”

  He led the way into a small office which adjoined Perryman’s large corner one. Shapiro sat on a typist’s chair behind a desk, and Tony took the other chair in the small room.

  “Way it was,” Shapiro said, “I was going up to see him. On the chance he knew Claye better than anyone else around here seems to have. When the elevator came down, he was in it. Flat on the floor and bleeding—well, I guess some people would say, like a stuck pig.”

  The Police Academy teaches New York policemen the rudiments of first aid. Nathan Shapiro had more than the rudiments. What he did not have was any equipment. Neither did anybody in the second-floor city room, to which Shapiro ran for help and a telephone. He did get a couple of towels from desk drawers, and he got the police communications center. In about fifteen minutes, which was good time, considering, he got an ambulance from St. Vincent’s. He had turned the prostrate man faceup, by then, and was applying pressure to the hole in the right side of his chest. When he could see the face, he saw that the injured man was Russel Perryman, owner and publisher.

  “The top light was off,” Shapiro told Cook. “Hadn’t just burned out, as I thought it might have. Been turned off. Made sense to turn it off, of course.”

  Tony merely waited.

  “When I got up here,” Shapiro said, “there were half a dozen women weaving around. Looking at the elevators and— well, sort of chirping. Everybody who has an office here has a secretary, of course. The guy from the supermarket chain, the company lawyer, God knows who-all. All the executives, apparently, had gone for the day. Around five, it was by then. Maybe a few minutes after. The lawyer’s secretary—Olsen, her name is—was on the telephone. Said she was trying to get the police. They’d all heard the shot, but nobody knew anything else. Except that the elevator had gone down.”

  “Mr. Perryman was supposed to be in it,” a neat and blond young woman had told Shapiro. “I’m Mary Picket, Mr. Perryman’s secretary. I brought the elevator up for him, you know. He hates waiting for elevators. Then—well, then I don’t know what happened.”

  “You pressed the button to bring the elevator up, Miss Picket? When was that?”

  “About five, like always. Mr. Perryman buzzed me, just the way he usually does about then. So I went out and punched the button. Sometimes it takes forever, almost, for it to come up. And, like I said, he hates to stand there waiting for it.”

  It hadn’t taken forever this time. It had taken only a few minutes.

  “So, when it came up and the door opened, I pressed the hold button and went to tell Mr. Perryman it was there.”

  “The hold button, Miss Picket?”

  “It’s just under the up and down signal buttons. Mr. Perryman had it put in especially, I think. So that once the elevator got to the sixth it would stay here until he was ready to use it. Otherwise, anybody could bring it down whenever they wanted, you know. And leave him waiting.”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Make it more convenient for him, of course.” And a good deal less convenient for those on lower floors, for whom it might also be quitting time. Of course, Perryman owned the building.

  “How about th
e emergency stop button inside the elevator?” Nate asked Miss Picket. “Couldn’t you just as well have used that to keep the elevator here for Mr. Perryman?”

  Miss Picket smiled just perceptibly. “Well—there’s a story that one of his secretaries before me pushed the emergency alarm button in there by mistake and it rang all over the building—they do, you know—and Mr. Perryman was so annoyed that he had this special hold button put on the wall.”

  “I see,” Shapiro said. “So, the elevator door opened,” he said, “and you went to tell Mr. Perryman. After you had set the hold button. When the door opened, Miss Picket, was the ceiling light on in the car?”

  “Why,” she said, “it must have been, mustn’t it? I mean, it always is.”

  “You didn’t notice whether it was. Just—well, assumed it was on as always?”

  “I guess so. As soon as the door opened and I’d set it on hold, I went to tell him.”

  “And he went out right away?”

  “Yes. After he’d said good night, of course. And I had one letter to finish. For him to sign tomorrow, you know. And then—well, then there was this strange sort of popping noise. Not loud, really. Just sort of a pop. Out in the corridor.”

  They were in Miss Picket’s small office. The door was open. The office was half the width of the building from the two elevators. A small-caliber revolver doesn’t make a very large bang, of course. And Miss Picket was, no doubt, concentrating on her typing.

  It was one of the other girls—Helen Casby, who said she was Mr. Johnson’s secretary—who had gone to check on the sound of the shot. Her office was nearer the elevators. Just across the corridor from them, in fact. The elevator was, from the indicator, already on the way down. But there was a “funny smell” in the corridor. “Sort of as if somebody had been shooting off firecrackers.”

  A fired revolver leaves an odor behind it; a revolver, almost certainly, since there was no ejected cartridge case in the blood on the floor of the elevator car. After the unconscious, still bleeding Russel Perryman had been removed by the ambulance attendants, Shapiro had looked.

  “The lab boys are still going over it,” Shapiro told Tony Cook. “Doubt if they’ll find anything.”

  “Somebody just standing in the elevator,” Tony said, “with the light off? Waiting for Perryman to come in and be shot? Knew it would be Perryman who came in, Nate?”

  “Way it looks, doesn’t it? On the way down, the car stopped at the third floor. I was waiting for it on the second.”

  “Stopped for somebody to get out,” Tony said.

  “Sure as hell nobody got in,” Nathan said.

  “Got out with blood on his shoes, probably,” Tony said. “And ran downstairs and on his way.”

  “Probably,” Shapiro said. “Unless the third’s where he works, of course. Financial and sports departments, as I remember.”

  “And the photographers,” Tony said.

  Nathan agreed that the photographers were also on the third floor. “The lab boys are down there now,” he said. “Looking for bloody stains.”

  “The good old bloody footprints,” Tony said. “Only maybe our guy was careful not to step in it.”

  “Could be. Probably was. I avoided it. Got blood on my trousers when I was down beside him, trying to stop the bleeding. Also, there are no footprints in the blood on the floor of the elevator. Guess we’d better go down to the third and ask around.”

  They went down to the third floor in the functioning elevator. They did not have to wait long for it. By close to seven in the evening, the building had emptied.

  Not quite, it turned out, on the third floor. There were two men in the sports department, which was rather like the city room, only smaller. One of the men was reading copy; the other was at a typewriter.

  “Something I can do for you?” the man reading copy asked. He was a heavy man, probably in his fifties. He had lost most of his hair. Shapiro told him who they were.

  “Philip Carson,” the heavy man told them. “And the genius over there is Andy Baruch. Only we call him Barney, of course. No relation, however, are you, Barney?”

  Baruch said something that sounded like “Urk” and went on typing.

  “Were you here around five o’clock this evening, Mr. Carson?” Shapiro said.

  He sure as hell had been. “But not around one this morning,” Carson said. “So I don’t know anything about it, do I? Ten thirty in the morning until whenever the geniuses get their overnights in, so I can correct their spelling. And put their leads into English.”

  Baruch stopped typing and ripped a sheet of paper from the typewriter. He got up and shuffled several sheets together. He took them to Carson at the copydesk.

  “Read all about it,” he said. “You’ll find it’s in English, supposing you can read English. It says the Mets aren’t going anywhere this year. And listen, pal, don’t you think that ‘genius’ line is wearing sort of thin? He left four-five years ago and, far’s I know, hasn’t turned out to be Shakespeare yet. O.K.?”

  Carson grinned up at him. He said, “O.K., Barney. On your way.”

  Baruch moved toward the open door of the sports office.

  “Before you go, Mr. Baruch,” Shapiro said, “did you see anybody getting out of the elevator on this floor a little after five this evening? Anybody you knew?”

  “I wasn’t here,” Baruch said. “Got here around five thirty or so. The Mets took eleven innings to lose today. Right, Phil?”

  “Nearer a quarter of six,” Carson said. “Stopped for a quick one, I shouldn’t wonder. What’s this about somebody getting out of the elevator around five? Any reason somebody shouldn’t?”

  Shapiro said, “Thanks, Mr. Baruch,” and, to Philip Carson, “Every reason why somebody should, Mr. Carson. Somebody who’d just shot Mr. Perryman.”

  Carson said, “Jee-sus Christ! Somebody shot the old boy?”

  Shapiro nodded his head. Carson said he’d be damned and that it was a hell of a thing. Then he said, “Is the old boy dead?”

  “In surgery, last we heard,” Shapiro said. “Could be in intensive care by now, if he’s lucky.”

  “That bad?” Carson said.

  Shapiro said it seemed to be.

  “Somebody’s turning this goddamn place into a shooting gallery,” Carson said.

  Nathan Shapiro said it did sort of look that way and, “The elevator, Mr. Carson? Around five o’clock?”

  “I was reading copy, not watching elevators,” Carson said. “Sitting right here reading Brent’s overnight on the Yanks. Not their year either, seems like.”

  Where Carson was sitting, he had his back to the open door, and hence to the elevator corridor. Yes, in answer to Shapiro’s question, right there. Oh, around four he had knocked off long enough to go down to the lobby for a cup of coffee. Back in half an hour, at a guess. Put the page together for the sports final. Then went back to reading overnights. The copy’d gone along to the composing room, as usual. And now, as soon as he read Baruch’s copy on the Mets, he was going to knock it off for the day and go home.

  He sure as hell hadn’t been watching the elevators at any time. They wouldn’t have been much in use anyway. The “financial wizards” ducked out around four thirty, usually.

  Shapiro and Cook stood up. They had turned toward the door, and Carson had picked up his thick pencil, when Tony thought of something. Just on the outside chance.

  “This genius you and Mr. Baruch were talking about,” he said. “The one who left four or five years ago and hasn’t turned out to be a Shakespeare yet. Wouldn’t have been a man named Mead, would it?”

  “Brian Mead,” Carson said. “He has turned out to be a playwright. Couple of hits on Broadway right now. Five years ago, somebody took an option on a play of his. Play about a tennis player. What he covered for us, mostly. Nowadays we use the services for tennis. And for baseball when the teams are on the road, come to that. We’ve been pulling in our horns, last few years. Not the way things used to be. Th
e old boy’s losing money, probably, but he’s a stubborn old bastard. And people are still buying groceries.”

  Shapiro and Cook sat down again.

  “This Mr. Mead,” Shapiro said. “He work here very long, Mr. Carson?”

  “Year or so,” Carson said. “What’s about Mead? Covered tennis for us for a while. Some football. Didn’t know too much about football, but he got by. Got this option money and took off. Always wanted to write plays while he was on the staff here. Talked about it quite a lot. What’s about him for you guys?”

  “Probably nothing,” Shapiro said. “A lot of the things they want us to check out aren’t really about much of anything. Mead was here long enough to know his way around, I’d take it?”

  “Around what? He was a savvy enough guy.”

  “Around the building, I guess,” Shapiro said.

  “You mean, could he find the men’s room, Lieutenant?”

  “Something like that. He could generally find his way around the building?”

  Philip Carson supposed so. There was nothing particularly complicated about the Sentinel Building. He still couldn’t make out what Shapiro was shooting at.

  “Probably nothing,” Shapiro said, and stood up again. Cook stood up with him. This time they went out of the sports department. Shapiro found a telephone.

  Russel Perryman had survived surgery. He was now in intensive care. A small-caliber bullet had pierced his right lung. He was unconscious and in critical condition. He might make it; with a reasonable amount of luck, he probably would make it. It would be several days, at best, before he could be asked any questions.

  “Odd coincidence about Mead,” Tony said, as they waited for the elevator. “Of course, a good many writers start off on newspapers. As sportswriters, even. Take Broun. Take Pegler, for that matter.”

  Shapiro agreed that it was an odd coincidence about Mead, and supposed that a good many people went on from newspapers to other kinds of writing. He was glad to take Broun. Pegler was another matter. One has to draw the line somewhere.