A Streak of Light

by RICHARD LOCKRIDGE

  “This young Perryman you talked to,” Shapiro said, when they were on the street. “Get anything we can use?”

  “Doesn’t seem like a red to me,” Cook said. “He is a member of Common Cause. Enough to convince a man like Sampson he’s a commie, I suppose.”

  “No trouble finding him, I gather?”

  “Had to wait a while. Didn’t turn up at his apartment until around six.”

  “And finished work at four,” Shapiro said. “Not all that far from here to Grove Street, is it? And if his father doesn’t make it, I suppose his son inherits. Newspaper and supermarkets, probably.”

  “Yeah,” Tony Cook said, “I’ve thought of that, Nate.”

  “Hard not to,” Shapiro said. “Suppose we leave it to the night boys for now, Tony. Maybe they’ll turn up something.”

  Tony Cook was entirely ready to leave it to the four-to-midnight. And the midnight-to-eight, for that matter. Willing enough to take a cab to Gay Street.

  Nathan Shapiro took the subway to Brooklyn. It was seven forty-five by then, and Rose would have assumed he wasn’t going to make it home for dinner. And she would have food warming in the oven on the off chance.

  Tony’s cab driver knew the general location of Gay Street, which in itself was a minor miracle. It had been a day notably short on miracles. When he was in his apartment on the floor above Rachel Farmer’s, he telephoned down to her. He told her he was afraid he was going to be late.

  “You are late,” she told him. There was no special asperity in her voice. “Almost an hour late. And there’s no use telling me that, after all, you’re a cop. I know you’re a cop. One who can’t remember about telephones, apparently.”

  Tony said he was sorry. He said that he was upstairs and would come downstairs as soon as he’d had a shower.

  “I’ve got the glasses on ice,” Rachel said. “Since a quarter of seven, they’ve been on ice. Frozen in solid by now, the poor things probably are.”

  It took Tony Cook only ten minutes to shower and run an electric razor over his face and put on fresh clothes. And to snap on his shoulder holster with the offduty revolver in it. It was only a few minutes after eight when he knocked his signal on Rachel’s apartment door. Which meant that he was only a few minutes more than an hour later than the time they had planned on.

  Rachel wore a sleeveless white dress, which was appropriate to the weather. She had a short black sweater jacket lying on an arm of the sofa, which was appropriate to the season of the year, if not to the temperature. She had high-heeled white shoes on, which made her within a couple of inches of Tony’s six feet. As they now and then mentioned to each other, they made a long couple. After several years, they still measured against each other in bed. Neither of them had shrunk.

  Tony said he was sorry, and she said, “Aren’t you always?” and they moved into each other’s arms. Then Tony poured chilled Tio Pepe into Rachel’s chilled glass and measured chilled gin and a token of vermouth over ice in a mixing glass, which had also been in the refrigerator and was almost too cold to touch. They clicked glasses and sipped. Tony lighted their cigarettes.

  “Hugo’s?” Rachel said.

  If she liked. But it would be cooler at the Algonquin. “I stopped in at Hugo’s for a beer this afternoon. They’ve decided it’s fall and turned off the air conditioning. Anyway, turned it down. And the Algonquin was going by the thermometer, not by the month. Anyway, it was around noon.”

  “You find nice places to detect in,” Rachel told him. “You and Nate, I suppose. About poor Mr. Claye, the rat?”

  “Yes. A playwright at the Algonquin. A newspaperman on Grove Street.”

  “What I had for lunch,” Rachel told him, “was a corned beef on rye. Thoroughly dried out. And a paper cup of patent coffee. During a ten-minute break.”

  Rachel, in addition to being a photographer’s model and a model for painters, has been acting in segments of a TV series. She has what she calls “with” parts. The filming is being done in New York instead of in Los Angeles—or in San Francisco, where motorcars are constantly bouncing over the same street bump with a cable car in the background. Obviously, as Rachel insists, the same cable car.

  They got to the Algonquin at nine, still in time for dinner. The Algonquin has an intermission between the dinner hour, which ends at nine thirty, and the supper hour, which starts around eleven. They had their second and third drinks at a table in the Oak Room, instead of, as usual, in the lounge.

  There were few people in the Oak Room. Two of those still in the dining room were Mrs. Roger Claye and Brian Mead. They were at a corner table in the rear of the long room, not at one of those Robert reserves for people he would like to have noticed. Or, of course, for those who would like to be noticed.

  Tony noticed the couple at the rather secluded table. He did not exactly stare at them, but for a moment he turned a little toward them.

  “Friends of yours?” Rachel asked him.

  “Just people who keep popping up a little,” Tony said. “The woman is Mrs. Roger Claye.”

  “The widow Claye,” Rachel said, and herself turned to look at Faith Claye and Brian Mead. “Looks from here as if she’d deserved better. And doesn’t look too downhearted, does she? As a widow is supposed to. Already in public with another man. Tut, tut.”

  The waiter brought them food. Tony devoted himself to his plate. It was mildly interesting that Faith Claye and Brian Mead were again having dinner together, as they had the night before. It was worth making a note of, and Tony made a note of it in his mind. But he also noted that Rachel kept glancing at the couple at the corner table. He looked at her, and raised his eyebrows.

  “It’s only that I keep feeling I’ve met her somewhere,” Rachel said.

  “She lives on West Eleventh,” Tony said. “You probably just passed her on the street.”

  “Probably,” Rachel said. “Although I wouldn’t think she’s all that memorable. To a woman, anyway. And I pass hundreds of people on the street. Thousands, really. Without ever really seeing them.”

  “We all do,” Tony said, and they ate their dinners. They were drinking their coffee when Faith and Mead walked by their table on the way out. They proved that people can walk by other people without really seeing them. Both of them had met Tony Cook within hours. Neither of them seemed wary of detectives.

  Terry got Tony and Rachel a cab after a few minutes. Terry didn’t remember, when Tony asked him, anything special about the night before, except it was raining like hell and a lot of people had expected him to invent taxicabs. No, he didn’t know Mrs. Roger Claye by sight. He had no idea whether she had been one of those who wanted him to conjure a cab out of rain-swept streets. Yes, sure he knew Mr. Mead; Mr. Mead lived there. No, he didn’t remember him from the night before.

  A taxi answered the shrill note of Terry’s whistle. The driver knew where Gay Street was. Down in the East Village. Tony explained to him that he didn’t know where Gay Street was and that it was west of Fifth Avenue, on which they were bound south. The driver said, “Sure, Mac. Like I said.”

  Rachel was quiet as they rode downtown. They had just turned into Ninth Street when she said, “It was at a party somewhere, I think. Down here somewhere, except that it feels like they were uptowners.”

  8

  It was not until they were in bed, quiet again and with her head on his shoulder, that Rachel Farmer went on with that. Her voice was a little sleepy in his ear.

  “It was at a party Arnie took me to,” she said. “Not my kind of party and it was years ago. It wasn’t really his kind of party either. Arnold Rather, dear. I’ve told you about him.” She had told him about Arnold Rather. Possibly not all about him, of course. Tony didn’t even wonder much. The present was enough; the present was fine. There was no point in rummaging in the past. In either of their pasts, come to that. Tony, himself a little sleepy now, wondered how Arnie Rather came into anything. He said, “Yes, dear. At a party years ago. What at a party, child?”
/>
  “I met Mrs. Claye,” Rachel said. “Maybe not really met her. It was rather a big party. Arnie was doing a number. Two numbers, I think. He took me along. I don’t think anything really came of Arnie’s numbers in the end.”

  Whereupon, Rachel appeared to go to sleep. Drowsiness was understandable. It had been an active evening since dinner, as their evenings tend to be.

  But something stirred in Tony Cook’s mind. The stirring brought him fully awake. Arnold Rather? Doing numbers at a party. But wasn’t Rather the one—?

  “Arnold Rather,” Tony said. “Wasn’t he the guy who worked on the Sentinel once? Assistant music editor or something?”

  Rachel awakened reluctantly. She said, “Maybe I did. Why? Oh, the Sentinel!”

  “Yes,” Tony said. “The place where people get shot.”

  “Arnie’s a composer, really,” Rachel said. “Mostly there’s really a lot of money in writing music, or almost none at all. He’s on the West Coast now, somebody told me. I haven’t seen him for years. I never saw him very much, Tony. You’re not going to be—?”

  Tony kissed her an answer to that. He said, “He did work on the Sentinel, child? Several years ago? In their music department?”

  “For about a year. He did a column on new recordings, and second-string concerts and things like that. It was only for about a year.”

  “But he did get to know people on the paper,” Tony said. “Ever talk to you about them?”

  “A little. After he got fired. Because the music department wasn’t bringing in enough advertising. What they told him, anyway. Said that all Simpson cared about was the financial page. Stock quotations and things like that. And blasting away at—the way he put it—‘anybody whose mind wasn’t still in the stone age.’ Of course, Arnie was really hipped on music then. Probably he still is. And he is—was then, anyway—pretty much a left-winger.”

  “Simpson?” Tony said. “Or could it have been Sampson? He’s managing editor there now.”

  “Simpson-Sampson,” Rachel said. “Yes, he was an editor. Managing editor sounds right. Anyway, Arnie didn’t like him much. Said he was a typical red-neck. In a white collar. He was the one who junked the music department, and Arnie with it. Explains why Arnie felt the way he did, I suppose.”

  “Well,” Tony said, “Mr. Sampson does seem like a rather—arbitrary man. I only talked to him a few minutes this morning. He doesn’t seem to be very popular with the staff.”

  “He certainly wasn’t with Arnie. But then, a lot of people weren’t, when I knew him. He used to go on a lot about Nixon.”

  Tony said, “Yes, I’d suppose he would. Lots of people did, of course. I did myself. And how right we were, as it turned out.”

  Rachel said, “Mmm,” in the cadence of one who is about to go back to sleep. But Tony was wide enough awake by now.

  “It was Sampson who moved in on the music department,” he said. “Because it wasn’t paying its way?”

  “And because only Jews wanted to read about music,” Rachel said. “He said something like that to Arnie. Arnie’s mother is Jewish, you know.”

  Tony hadn’t known. He wouldn’t have cared if he had. He didn’t care much about Arnold Rather, come to that. But he was interested in people at the New York Sentinel.

  “It was Sampson who made the decision about music coverage,” he said. “Not the editor of the paper? A man named Wainwright?”

  “Could be Arnie was wrong,” Rachel said. “The way he thought it was. He did mention a man named Wainwright once or twice. Seemed to like him better than anybody else he ran into at the paper. Said he hadn’t had much to do with him, but that he seemed like a good guy in a bad spot. Said this Wainwright man seemed to be a legend down there. A fading legend, Arnie said he seemed to be. Listen, Tony, is this a time for a chat? Or for you to go upstairs and go to sleep? Or?”

  The “Or” seemed to present an alternative, and one for which Tony Cook was ready. It was some little, but exciting, time before he swung out of Rachel’s wide bed, and put on clothes enough to go up to his own apartment in. (An apartment in Gay Street, just above Rachel Farmer’s, was certainly more convenient.)

  He had shirt and trousers on when his mind reverted to something of possible importance.

  “This party Rather took you to,” he said. “Was it a sort of audition party? For possible backers of a production in the theater?”

  “You do harp, darling,” Rachel said. “A girl needs her sleep. Yes, I think that’s what it was. For a revue or something. But I don’t think it ever came off.”

  “A party down here in the Village?” Tony said. “In a house on Eleventh Street, could it have been?”

  She said a sleepy “Huh?” Then she said, “Yes, I think it could have been Eleventh Street. Or maybe Twelfth. Why don’t you go upstairs and go to bed, Tony?”

  Tony went upstairs and went to bed. He wondered who had been at the party at the Claye house, but he had pressed Rachel far enough. There can be issues in a man’s life even more important than catching a murderer.

  As he slipped toward sleep, Tony thought, a little dimly, of the other things he might have asked Rachel. Had Roger Claye been her host—and Arnold Rather’s host, of course—at this party in West Eleventh Street—and had she met him? And had Rather, a man of leftist leanings, also met him? Had Brian Mead, sportswriter or ex-sportswriter and rising young playwright, been at the party? If Claye had been at the party, the auditioning party, at his own house, had Rather met him, and had sparks flown?

  All trivial questions, probably, and Rachel would be asleep by now. It had somehow got to be after midnight; he was due in the squad room at eight.

  Usually, Tony has only to set an alarm clock in his mind. This night he also set the alarm clock on a table not too near his bed; not so near he would not have to get out of bed to shut it off. People can shut alarm clocks off in their sleep, if it is easy to reach clocks.

  Tony Cook slept. Briefly, he dreamed about someone named Arnold Rather. The dream Rather was very ugly. He had large, ugly hands. He was also cross-eyed. Tony slammed a door on the dream Rather. The door hit Rather on his long, ugly nose. Tony’s sleep became contented.

  It was, however, unmercifully brief. His mental alarm clock and the material one went off more or less at the same time, which was seven o’clock. Tony growled at the real alarm clock as he got out of bed to shut it off. He showered while the coffee water came to a boil. He poured almost boiling water on the all-Colombian coffee in the Chemex. After two cups of it and a cigarette, he felt up to soft-boiling an egg and toasting a slice of bread. The telephone rang as he was buttering the toast.

  Huh? The Sentinel office instead of the squad room? As soon as he could make it? And the lieutenant was on his way there?

  O.K. He was on his way.

  He did allow himself the egg and part of the slice of toast. And another cup of coffee. On his way downstairs, he did not allow himself the signal tapping on Rachel’s apartment door. With any luck, she would still be asleep. Not, he trusted, dreaming of a man as ugly as Arnold Rather.

  He had to wait only about thirty seconds for a downtown subway train at the Sheridan Square-West Fourth Street station. He was at the Sentinel Building at a quarter after eight. A patrol car was just arriving as he went into the building. But there had been one before it. Two uniformed patrolmen were in front of the elevators, one of which had an Out of Order sign dangling in front of it.

  “Upstairs,” one of the patrolmen said, after Tony showed his ID card. “Second floor.”

  Tony pinned his gold shield on as he went up the flight of stairs.

  There were several men in the corridor outside the city room. They were looking down a side corridor at another uniformed policeman. This one was a sergeant, whom Tony knew slightly, but not enough to remember his name. Martinelli? Something like that. The sergeant was standing outside a door, and when Tony got to the door he saw it was marked “Men.”

  “Morning,” the sergeant
said. “Cook, isn’t it? Sergeant Rossi. Old Slip station. They’re inside.” Well, thought Tony, I wasn’t too far off. Headed in the general direction, anyway. Martini and Rossi. He went into the men’s room. Lieutenant Daley of the precinct squad was there.

  “Right at the end of the shift the squeal comes in,” Daley said. “Wouldn’t you know? Five minutes and I’d have been on my way. And not all that rush, it turns out. Clean miss, or damn near. What gives with these guys, anyway?”

  It was the way things broke sometimes. Squeals come in at inconvenient times. And what did give with these guys today, Lieutenant?

  “Attempted murder,” Daley told Cook. “Around here, a man can’t even pee in peace. Without getting shot at, I mean.”

  The men’s room was fairly large. There were half a dozen urinals in a line, nearest the door. Beyond them, deeper in the room, there were four stalls. Against the wall opposite, there were four washbasins. A detective was scrambling around on the floor. He was under one of the washbasins. He came out and stood up. He said, “Got it!” on a note of triumph and held out to Daley a small piece of battered metal.

  It was, Tony saw, what remained of a slug from a smallcaliber gun, probably either revolver or automatic pistol. At a guess, a .22 or .25. And it was nothing to be triumphant about. It was distorted, flattened by its impact against something hard. Harder, obviously, than a man.

  Yes. Of course. A large chip had been knocked from one of the wings of the urinal nearest the door. The slug had bounced away to lie under one of the washbasins.

  “Saw what was coming and ducked, way we get it,” Daley said. “Lucky bastard.”

  “Very,” Tony said. “And just who was it, Lieutenant?”

  “Guy named Sampson. Some kind of editor or something. Wait a minute.” He took a notebook out of a pocket and looked at it. “Leroy Sampson,” he said. “Managing editor, way I’ve got it here. Went on into what they call the city room. Where he’s got his desk, I suppose. Not a very talkative guy. Said, ‘All right. He missed. And I’ve got a paper to get out.’ So—he’s up to you guys. Damn shooting gallery around here, and you’re welcome to it.”