Tony Cook was still typing, using one machine after another. So was the reporter Notson.
Shapiro, obeying rules, went out to the corridor to have a cigarette. He had just lighted it when Leroy Sampson came out of the city room. He did not appear to see Shapiro. He was wearing a suit jacket and, a little unexpectedly, a hat. He went to the door to the staircase and through it. He looked, Nathan thought, like a man on his way home. He hadn’t, evidently, waited to approve Simms’s editorial about the conspiracy against the New York Sentinel and the newspaper’s vigorous stand for law and order. To say nothing of free enterprise.
Nathan Shapiro is inclined to favor both, but not especially as slogans. Slogans can be so easily perverted. He is also in favor of motherhood, provided it is voluntary.
10
It was a little after noon when Cook and Shapiro left the Sentinel Building. A detective from the lab had collected the original of The Enforcers’ message, marked for identification, and a large handful of copies of it. There had turned out to be twenty-two typewriters in the city room and eight more in the part of the second floor occupied by editorial writers. They did not get samples from Simms’s typewriter or from that of Jason Wainwright. The doors to both those offices were closed. They left the typewriters on the floor above— those in the sports department and the financial department— for later. (Along with those in the business office and the advertising department, and those used by the syndicate and those on the sixth floor. Newspaper plants are rife with typewriters.)
A little after noon is time for lunch for policemen who have had to get up early. Tony Cook mentioned this to Nathan Shapiro when Shapiro came out of a telephone booth on the lobby floor with the report that Russel Perryman’s condition was unchanged; that he was still unconscious and remained on the critical list.
Nathan agreed it was time for lunch. But since they would have to go uptown anyway, to check in at Homicide South, he thought they might as well stop off and have a word with David Perryman.
Tony raised eyebrows of inquiry.
“He may have a typewriter at home,” Shapiro said. “Also, if his father doesn’t make it, he’ll probably inherit the paper. We’ll have to check on that after lunch.”
They walked through Canal to the station of the IRT subway and rode up to Sheridan Square. They reached the Grove Street house just in time to meet David Perryman coming down the steps.
Perryman had a lunch date uptown, but—well, all right. If it wouldn’t take too long.
He led them into the house, and they followed him up to his apartment on the second floor. The apartment turned out, to Shapiro’s eyes, to be unexpectedly neat for the apartment of a young bachelor on a Saturday morning. Especially, Shapiro thought, for a young bachelor living in Greenwich Village. (Which was, he admitted to himself, sheer prejudice, to which Brooklynites are not immune.)
Yes, Perryman had heard that somebody had taken a shot at Boss Sampson and missed him. He had heard it on the radio news at ten o’clock. He had not heard of the threatening letter Edmond Riley had received in the morning mail. “Somebody sure has it in for us,” David said. No, he had never heard of a group calling itself “The Enforcers.” “Enforcing what?” he said, which was a question neither Shapiro nor Cook could answer.
Yes, he had a typewriter. All right, he was trying to write pieces. For the New Yorker and—O.K.—The Village Voice. And no, he hadn’t had any luck yet with either. But he knew a guy who’d sent forty-odd pieces to the New Yorker before he sold one. “And then he sold around a hundred.” Of course, that had been years back. Sure, they could use his typewriter, but what the hell for? For comparison with what? “Hell, let me guess, Lieutenant. For Christ’s sake!”
“We’re making a collection,” Shapiro told him.
Perryman’s typewriter was an electric portable and looked new. Cook, not used to portables, had trouble with the spacing, but finally got a specimen line: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog,” which has the advantage of utilizing all the letters in the English alphabet and is helpful for those learning the touch system.
Perryman went downstairs with them. It was Tony who suggested, after young Perryman had hailed a taxicab and gone off in it, that they might as well have lunch at Hugo’s, since it was nearby.
Hugo’s French Restaurant is on Sixth Avenue between Ninth and Tenth, a block below where Charles French Restaurant had flourished for some fifty years, had become a meeting place and a landmark and, several years ago, had gone out of business. Hugo’s, to some slight degree, has taken its place. Charles, originally owned by a Hungarian, had been considerably more French. It was a short walk from Grove Street to Hugo’s, and Cook and Nathan Shapiro walked it without conversation. It was a little before one when they reached it.
The bar was just inside the entrance, and it was well occupied. On Saturday afternoons in restaurants like Hugo’s, New Yorkers who drink, drink early. Saturday is a day of rest.
A man of medium height and muscular build pushed a barstool back and slid off it. Standing, he finished a drink. He put bills on the bar and the barman said, “Thank you, sir.” Momentarily, the muscular young man faced Cook and Shapiro. He said, “Hi again,” to Tony Cook and went past them and out into Sixth Avenue.
“Our Mr. Mead,” Tony said. “Brian. Playwright. The one who took Mrs. Claye to the theater night before last. Before she was a widow. Mead’s up early this morning. This time yesterday he—oh. Almost forgot. He and Mrs. Claye were dining together at the Algonquin last night. Seen by me and Rachel.”
“Mmm,” Shapiro said. “We’re not far from Eleventh Street, are we?” Then he said, “Two, please,” to a hostess in a sleek black dress. The hostess was also sleek, but Tony regarded her with mild disapproval. It was not until they were seated at a table for two against a wall that Tony commented. “Sure miss Charles,” Tony said. “Always had men for waiters there. Now every place is getting sort of like Schrafft’s.”
The menus were large. Tony ordered minute steak, rare, and a beer. Nathan settled for a glass of milk and a plain omelet. He thought of a glass of sherry, but rejected the thought. It was the sort of place where the sherry would be what they called “dry.” Even if the waiters were women.
Tony’s beer arrived promptly. He sipped from the glass.
“Of course,” he said. “The Claye house is more or less just around the corner.”
Shapiro nodded his agreement to the location of the Claye house.
“And the Village is still a stamping ground for people like Mead. Not as much as it used to be, when I was a kid down here. But still.”
Again, Nathan nodded agreement, his agreement including, apparently, the “still.”
Nate was not, Tony thought, in a communicative mood. Probably he was ruminating, which would mean he had a theory. Or might mean that he was not interested in Brian Mead’s rather early appearance in Greenwich Village and his quick finishing off of what Tony took to be a manhattan.
Tony drank beer. Nathan Shapiro lighted a cigarette. He usually waited for a cigarette until after he had eaten. Which didn’t mean anything.
They had to wait almost half an hour for food, which led Tony to regretful acceptance of the probability his minute steak would not be rare. Or, of course, the broil chef might have a stack of steaks to do. Only, there weren’t all that many lunchers in the restaurant. It was not really likely all of them were ordering minute steaks, leaving a cook behind a stack of them.
Food came, finally. But it was after two when they had finished their coffee. Tony had had a second beer by then, in preparation for the warmth outside. It was staying very warm for early September. But, of course, it often did. The weather was not breaking any rules; technically, it was still summer.
They had just paid their checks and were waiting for the waitress to bring back change when they heard a patrol car’s siren wailing outside. At a guess, it had turned off Sixth Avenue into Tenth Street. Perhaps some amateur bomb makers had manag
ed to blow up another town house? No—if they could hear the siren, they would have heard an explosion. A hit-and-run driver, probably. Or somebody holding up a nearby liquor store.
They had just stepped outside Hugo’s when another cruise car went fast up Sixth Avenue, its roof light flashing and its siren screeching. It turned right into Tenth Street. Then, from some distance, there was the sound of another siren. Going down Fifth, probably. And, from beyond the library which had once been a courthouse, there was the gulping sound of an ambulance. The ambulance from St. Vincent’s slowed as it came to Sixth and blared anger at other traffic before it crossed on a red light.
All hell had apparently broken loose somewhere. Tony said as much to Nathan Shapiro.
“Or,” Nathan said, “somebody’s seen somebody on a fire escape and thinks he’s seen a burglar. But—” He let it hang on the “but” for a moment. Then he said, “May as well check it out, I suppose. Long as we’re down here.”
He went back into the restaurant. He was gone briefly.
“Man’s been shot in the Square,” he said, when he came out. “Sitting on a bench, according to the squeal. Long as we’re here.” He started to walk down Sixth, rather rapidly. Tony walked with him. Trouble with being on the squad, you didn’t get homicides one at a time. Murders overlap. They walked through Ninth to Fifth Avenue; walked past the Ninth Street entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. When they could look down Fifth toward Washington Square Park, they saw the backs of a huddle of people beyond the arch, and the fronts of patrolmen keeping them there.
They walked even faster down Fifth, across Eighth Street.
They had to push their way through the cluster of spectators, who were watching what there was to watch from a distance fixed by uniformed patrolmen. What they were watching was a police photographer taking pictures and a wheeled stretcher on a paved walk beside a row of benches with two ambulance attendants standing beside it.
The photographer’s pictures were of a body stretched out on one of the benches.
The patrolman nearest said, “Hey you!” as Shapiro and Cook wriggled out of the thickening crowd of curious. “Where you think you’re going?”
Shapiro’s badge showed him who they were and where they were going. They went on, although it was not really their business. Except that killings in the southern part of the Borough of Manhattan are. And this was a killing. If the body on the park bench had been a live body, it would have been in the ambulance, on its way to the emergency ward of St. Vincent’s Hospital. What they had was a DOA.
And what they had was Mr. Leroy Sampson, managing editor of the New York Sentinel. They had him dead, but still seeping blood, on a park bench in Washington Square Park, near the western side of the park. People were at the windows of a hotel across Washington Square West, looking down on the dead man, and on the lawmen death had brought to the Square.
Lieutenant Leonard Richardson of the precinct detective squad said “Hi” to Shapiro and Cook. He said, “Didn’t take you guys long, did it?”
“Happened to be down this way,” Shapiro told him. “Shot, was he? A man named Sampson, he was. Worked on the Sentinel.”
“Yeah,” Richardson said. “And had a press card to prove it. Along with credit cards and whatnot. And a couple of hundred in his wallet. So it wasn’t just a mugger who panicked, at a guess. Say!”
“Yes,” Shapiro said. “Part of the same problem, Lennie. Pretty unhealthy to work on the Sentinel, apparently. Case Cook and I are working on. Not very successfully, I guess. Somebody had a try at him this morning. Missed him, that time.”
“Yeah,” Richardson said. “We heard at the precinct. Too close to miss him this time, way it looks. Probably sitting right there beside him. Powder burns on his jacket. Left side. Got him right through the heart, way it looks. We’ve been waiting for the medical examiner’s man. But he’s sure as hell dead.”
Sampson certainly looked dead. He had been sitting near the middle of the bench, the way it looked, with room enough for somebody else to be sitting on it beside him, on his left. Shot, he had fallen to the right, his left foot lifting slightly, his right still dragging on the ground.
He had stopped bleeding. The dead don’t bleed. His eyes were still wide open; it seemed to Shapiro that there was still haughtiness in his eyes. Which, of course, was absurd. There is no expression in dead eyes.
“Nobody saw it happen?” Shapiro said.
“Not that we’ve found. A couple of old-timers were sitting about where those two are—” He gestured toward two elderly men thirty feet or so away on a bench. They were playing checkers. They seemed to be oblivious of what was going on thirty feet away.
“The two other guys were playing checkers too,” Richardson said. “Said they didn’t see a thing, or hear a thing. Only thing is, we had to yell at them to make them hear us. Seems both of them were deaf as posts. Gone over to the other side of the park now—where it’s quieter, I guess. No dead bodies lying around. Took their checkerboard with them. Thing is, about when it happened, there was a bunch over by the fountain, singing and playing a couple of guitars. Happens most Saturdays and Sundays. They knocked it off when the first patrol car showed up. Came over to see what had happened. We found one of them. Spotted his guitar. He says none of them saw anything or heard anything. Said, ‘What the hell, man? We were making music.’”
Sure, he had got the names of some witnesses. Only they were nonwitnesses, or said they were.
About a quarter of two, it had happened. A squeal had come through to precinct at one fifty-four. From somebody who said he had been walking through the park and seen a man lying on a bench and that the man he saw “didn’t look right.”
“What he told communications, anyway, Nate. Didn’t give his name, apparently. They sent a squad car to have a look-see and flashed us. We’d not much more than got here when you two showed up. What we’ve got is mostly what the men in the patrol cars got. I’ve got a couple of the boys over at the hotel, on the chance somebody happened to be looking out a window. And Angelo Cartini’s trying to find some more of the singing group. Think there’d be somebody who saw something, wouldn’t you?”
“Probably there was,” Shapiro said. “Somebody who’s not sticking his neck out.”
People are inclined to avoid involvement. This inclination, which is not confined to New Yorkers, has sometimes resulted in needless deaths. Not, evidently, this time. Leroy Sampson had been dead before anyone’s arrival. And where was the assistant medical examiner?
A black sedan, rolling under the arch, answered that. A mortuary van from Bellevue followed it. Neither vehicle was in a special hurry. Their client would wait.
The ambulance men from St. Vincent’s put their stretcher, empty, back into their ambulance. One of them flipped a salute toward Lieutenant Richardson. The ambulance pulled away; the sedan pulled in where it had been, and a smallish man with red hair got briskly out of it. He said, “Afternoon, Lennie. So you’ve got a deader.” His speech was as brisk as his movement out of the car had been. He carried the black bag of his trade.
Richardson said, “Yes, Doctor, looks like it.”
Dr. Timothy Maloney, assistant medical examiner, County and State of New York, bent over what remained of a man who had been so arrogantly alive an hour or so before. He did not touch the body. He said, “Sure as hell does. Bullet through the heart, at a guess. Aorta, anyway. You finished with it?”
They had finished with it. “All right, boys,” Dr. Maloney said to two men who had got out of the van, carrying a rolled canvas stretcher. “All yours.”
They took the body of the late Leroy Sampson off the park bench and carried it to the van, limp on the spread-out stretcher. They did put a cloth over the face.
“Let you know soon as we’ve taken it apart,” Maloney said. “And send the slug along. Still in it, way it looks. Stays damned hot for September, doesn’t it?”
Richardson agreed it stayed damned hot for September. Dr. Maloney drove off
in the small sedan. He drove as briskly as he had moved and spoken. The van followed the car. The van lumbered. “He wouldn’t have approved being hustled off like that,” Tony Cook said. “From what we saw of him, anyway. People should have been standing at attention. Somebody should have been sounding Taps.”
“Yes,” Shapiro said, “and maybe we should have given him protection. Offered it, anyway.”
“He wouldn’t have taken it,” Tony said. “He was a cocksure son of a bitch.”
Nathan Shapiro merely nodded his agreement. But murdering a son of a bitch remains murder; remains the business of the Homicide Squad, Manhattan South.
“This Enforcer gang?” Tony said.
Nathan Shapiro merely shrugged an answer, which was at the same time a question. Then he said, “Or he saw something, Tony. Could be he was down at the paper yesterday morning. Maybe early yesterday morning. Maybe he saw something then. Maybe he was seen seeing something.” He turned to Richardson. “His wife been notified, Lennie?” he said.
“Not that I know of,” Richardson said. “What the hell? It just happened. We can call from the squad room, if you know where he lived. Or you can, if you want to.”
Nathan Shapiro didn’t want to. He never wants to. But often it’s part of the job.
“Where’d he live, Tony?” Shapiro said.
Tony had the address of the late Leroy Sampson in his notebook, together with his telephone number. “And his wife’s named Emily Louise, Nate. Probably called her Emmy Lou. Want I should give her a ring?”
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