A Streak of Light Read online

  A Streak of Light

  A Nathan Shapiro Mystery

  Richard Lockridge

  For Hildy

  1

  Cleo yapped at the bedroom door. Her yapping was peremptory. Humans are sluggards, lie-abeds. She yapped again. Nathan Shapiro said, “All right, dog. We hear you.” Cleo didn’t believe him. She scratched at the door. Shapiro said, “All right,” and twisted his long, lean body out of the comfort of his bed. He looked at the watch on his wrist. Ten after seven. On a—yes—relatively bright early-September morning. Not autumn yet, but coming on toward it. Two months ago, Cleo would have yapped her alarm at a little after six.

  “I guess it’s morning,” Rose Shapiro said from her bed. Her voice was muffled with sleep. “Perhaps a cat would have been a better idea.”

  This was entirely clear to Nathan, or as clear as could be expected at seven ten in the morning. Cats do not have to be walked. On the other hand, their litter boxes have to be changed. Nathan said, “Yes, Doctor,” and went into the bathroom. When he came out, Rose was sitting up in bed and stretching. Nathan said, “Good morning, Doctor,” to Rose Shapiro, newly Ph.D. And, with her doctorate, newly principal of Clayton High School in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, a sizable subway ride from Brooklyn.

  It is Rose’s belief, now and then mentioned, that they ought to bus teachers.

  Hearing movement and voices, Cleo scratched the door again. She did not yap. It is difficult to yap with the leash in your mouth. But a dog must be ready, even if humans may be laggard.

  Shapiro put on enough clothes for the street and, he hoped, for a Friday morning in early September. He did not put on his gun, which was a minor infraction of the rules and regulations of the New York Police Department. He opened the bedroom door, and the little Scottie bounced up against him. He snapped the lead onto her collar, and she guided him to the apartment door. Humans have a limited sense of direction. She thumped down the stairs, and Shapiro thumped after her, with notably less enthusiasm. Unlike Cleo, Nathan is not at his best in the early morning.

  The morning sun was slanting on the Brooklyn street. A few people were also slanting on it. There was a slight crispness in the air, and the air could be breathed. It felt a little of fall. The feeling was, of course, illusory. The fresh winds of autumn, which sweep New York City clean, were still weeks away. Last night’s thundershower hadn’t brought them. It would be October before they roused the city from its muggy summer sloth.

  Cleo led Shapiro for several blocks, from curb to curb. Finally she found one to her liking. She yapped approval of herself. Shapiro set the direction this time, and it was toward home. Cleo scampered up the stairs to the second-floor apartment. Surely, by now, even humans would realize it was time for breakfast.

  Rose was in the kitchen. Cleo, unleashed, joined her in an excited rush. “Not under both my feet,” Rose said. “I’m getting it, dog. Nathan?”

  Shapiro said, “Yes, Doctor?” The Ph.D. was still new enough to amuse them both a little. Nathan had mentioned the oddity of sleeping with a doctor of philosophy. (In English Literature of the Eighteenth Century.) He had not found the oddity inhibiting.

  “They want you to call in,” Rose said. “But wait till I bring your coffee.”

  Nathan did not need to wonder about the “They.” He was dialing when Rose came in with coffee. He took the cup and put it down on the telephone stand. He got, “Homicide, Manhattan South, Detective Sanders.”

  “Shapiro,” Nathan said.

  “Good morning, sir,” Sanders said. “The captain called in. Said to call you. There’s been a killing at the Sentinel office. Somebody important, sounds like. Editor or something. Hasn’t come through here yet. Called the captain at home, apparently. You and Cook. I got Tony, and he’s on his way down. Captain Weigand said to have a cruiser pick you up, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro said, “O.K., Sanders,” and hung up and sat regarding the telephone and drinking coffee.

  Somebody killed at a newspaper office; at the office of the only full-size afternoon newspaper remaining in the city of New York. And another world in which Shapiro would find himself entirely alien. Religious revivalists, advertising men, the world of book publishing. Trust Bill Weigand to find an assignment for Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro in an area about which Shapiro knew nothing. Hell, he didn’t even read the Sentinel. The Chronicle, yes. Everybody had to read the Chronicle. Not to find out what had happened. TV took care of that. To relate what happened during one day to what had happened the day before, the year before. And to try to make sense of the composite. Which, on the whole, didn’t seem often to add to sense.

  “Whatever it is, you’ve got to eat breakfast,” Rose said. “I’ve put the eggs on the coffee table. You’ve got to eat.”

  Nathan went to the sofa by the coffee table and sat on it and looked at scrambled eggs and triangles of toast. Rose brought his coffee cup and refilled it.

  “While they’re hot,” Rose told him. “Warm, anyway.”

  Shapiro ate scrambled eggs and a few bites of toast. Rose joined him on the sofa. Her egg was soft-boiled.

  “Somebody’s been killed at the Sentinel,” he told her. “The newspaper.”

  “Yes, dear,” Rose Shapiro said. “I know the Sentinel is a newspaper. It has been for years. A hundred years or thereabouts, at a guess. Judging by its policies, which are pretty antique.”

  Shapiro shook a cigarette from a half-filled pack and was told he hadn’t finished his eggs. He took a token bite. He nibbled at toast. Duty performed, he lighted his cigarette. He said, “You read the Sentinel, Rose?”

  “Not much, these days. I used to. Oh, years ago. When it was, you might say, in its prime. Perhaps when I was.”

  He turned toward her and smiled and shook his head. “Consider it said,” Nathan Shapiro told his wife.

  She raised dark eyebrows at him. He merely looked at her, still smiling, still shaking his head.

  “Oh, all right,” Rose said. “It’s foolish to fish in the morning. About the Sentinel—”

  “And unnecessary, dear,” Nathan said. “I thought last night would have—” He did not finish. He shook a cigarette loose and held the pack toward her. She took the cigarette and the flame of the lighter he held out for her.

  “They know who’s been killed at the paper, Nathan?”

  “Sanders doesn’t. Thinks it’s somebody important. Like an editor or something. I suppose Bill knows. They’re having a precinct cruiser pick me up.”

  “Then you’d better get dressed. And your good suit is back from the cleaners, remember. Although for the Sentinel I suppose it ought to be a morning coat. And striped trousers.”

  “Like that?”

  “Very dignified, I’d think. Maybe fuddy-duddy. But I merely glance at it now and then. It thinks the income tax is ruining the country. And that social security is part of the Communist conspiracy.”

  “Really, Rose?”

  “Oh, not quite, I suppose. Something along those lines. You’d better get dressed, dear.”

  Shapiro got dressed. Since it was clear he was venturing among Republicans, he did put on the suit just back from the cleaners. It was a gray suit, and there were creases in the trousers. The creases differentiated it from the suit he had worn while walking Cleo. He strapped on the shoulder holster with the gun in it. He buttoned his jacket over the gun. The jacket hung loose on his long, spare frame. It did cover the gun. He did not suppose he would have to shoot his way into the offices of the New York Sentinel. Regulations required the sidearm.

  He was back in the living room, where Rose was finishing a cigarette and sipping coffee, in time to assure a fractured voice on the lobby-to-apartment telephone that he was on his way down.

  �
�Be careful, Nathan,” Rose said, after he had kissed her. “Try to be home for dinner.”

  She did not sound optimistic about the last. Nathan said, “Sure,” but there was no special confidence in his voice. As he opened the apartment door, Cleo arrived from the kitchen, leash in mouth. A foot gently persuaded her. She dropped the leash and made a small sound which was a little like a sob. Nathan told her he was sorry and went down the stairs.

  The police car at the curb had two uniformed patrolmen in it. As Shapiro crossed the sidewalk, the one in the passenger seat got out and stood, more or less, at attention. He said, “Lieutenant Shapiro?” and, with that confirmed, “Good morning, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro got in beside the driver, and the other patrolman got into the back of the car, where there were no inner handles on either door.

  “Manhattan, they say,” the driver said. “Newspaper building, they say. Sentinel Building. Broadway, block below Canal. That right, Lieutenant?”

  “Whatever they told you,” Shapiro said.

  “Funny place for a newspaper,” the driver said, and started the car toward Manhattan.

  “A lot of them used to be downtown,” Shapiro told the patrolman, who was obviously too young to know about that, or even that there had once been a lot of them. Shapiro himself was just old enough to have seen most of New York’s newspapers wither and vanish.

  The driver took the Manhattan Bridge. He made the mistake of continuing west on Canal Street, which was already traffic-jammed. What, Shapiro vaguely wondered, had ever happened to the notion of making Canal a depressed—or elevated—throughway bisecting Manhattan Island?

  They inched through to Broadway. The Sentinel Building was a block downtown. It was a brick building, six stories tall. It looked to be a very old building. Rose’s guess of a hundred years seemed plausible. A large clock, with “The New York Sentinel” in Old English letters on a plaque above it, stuck out from the brick facade. The clock, by Nathan’s watch, was forty-two minutes slow.

  The building occupied the block. On the downtown cross street, half a dozen trucks waited along the curb. Waiting to be loaded with newspapers? Shapiro wondered. But the Sentinel was an afternoon paper; it was not yet nine o’clock in the morning. The first of what Shapiro assumed would be numerous bewilderments. Did Captain William Weigand, commanding, Homicide, Manhattan South, arrange these things by intention?

  The driver pulled the Brooklyn patrol car in behind two others, parked against the Broadway curb behind a black, unmarked sedan with only numbers on its license plate to reveal its identity as a car from the precinct detective squad.

  The driver of the Brooklyn car said, “Need us anymore, Lieutenant?” Shapiro said he didn’t and crossed the sidewalk to the entrance of the old brick building. He went through a revolving door under a wide sign with “The New York Sentinel” spelled out on it in somewhat tarnished metal letters, which were also in the Old English shape. He swirled out of the door into a big lobby, with two elevators on the far side of it. On his left were two large doors with frosted glass panels. On one of them was lettered “The New York Sentinel” and, below that announcement, “Business Office.” The last was in modern lettering.

  At the right side of the lobby there was a single door. There was an electric sign over it. The sign read “MacFarland’s Pharmacy.”

  There was a uniformed patrolman in front of the elevators, neither of which appeared to be at ground level. Shapiro identified himself to the patrolman, who said, “Yes, Lieutenant. Second floor. Stairs right over there, sir.”

  He pointed to a door at one side of the elevators. Shapiro opened the door and climbed a flight of stairs—a rather long flight. Ceilings had been higher when the old building was put up. He came out into a wide corridor. He faced an arrow on the wall pointing to “Enquiries.” But, just left of the top of the stairway, there was a wide opening in the wall, wide enough for double doors but with no doors in it. Typewriters were rattling beyond the opening. Also a voice, rather raised, and sounding impatient, came out into the corridor. The impatient word was “Copy!”

  Shapiro went from the corridor into a big room with some twenty desks, about half of them occupied, arranged in rows. Men were typing at most of the occupied desks; a woman was at one of them. She was talking on a telephone and penciling notes on rather gray paper as she talked and listened. A man at one of the desks had earphones on and was typing what he heard through them. As Shapiro stepped into the big room, the man with the earphones tore the sheet out of his typewriter and said “Copy!” loudly and in an aggrieved voice. A boy of about sixteen went to him and took the sheet of paper held out and carried it a few steps to the middle of the room, to a semicircular table, with six men sitting around its rim. A seventh man sat, solitaire, in the hollow of the semicircle. One of the men on the rim wore an eyeshade. It was he who got the sheet from the typewriter of the man with the earphones.

  A tall, youngish man came across the room from the direction of a desk under a window in the room’s distant corner and from a gray-haired man sitting there reading a newspaper. The tall man said, “Morning, sir,” to Nathan Shapiro. Shapiro said, “Morning, Tony,” to Detective (1st gr.) Anthony Cook.

  “Got here a while ago,” Tony said. “They tell you who got killed, Nate?”

  Shapiro shook his head. “The captain just had a car pick me up,” he said. “Nobody’s filled me in. S.O.S. didn’t know.” Detective Sanders’s full name is Samuel Oscar Sanders.

  “The voice of God,” Tony Cook said. “That’s who got killed. The voice of President McKinley, anyway. The man to the right of God, they’ve called him. Roger Claye.” He stopped and looked at Shapiro, who felt he was supposed to jump. Instead, he merely raised his eyebrows.

  “The columnist,” Tony Cook said. “Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Syndicated all over the country. Still thinks Nixon was a great man, betrayed by little Democrats. And the elite Eastern establishment and the liberal media. Says it three times a week. And that there’s a conservative swell throughout the country. And—you mean you’ve never read him, Nate?”

  “I don’t read the Sentinel much, Tony.”

  “He’s all over the country,” Tony said. “The Midwestern papers think he preaches the gospel. Rachel reads him. Says it stimulates the adrenalin. When it doesn’t make her throw up.”

  “Well,” Shapiro said, “I’m just a nonpolitical cop. How is Rachel, by the way?”

  Rachel was fine. Had been last night, anyway. And how was Rose?

  Rose was a doctor of philosophy, as of two days ago. She was also fine.

  “This man Claye,” Shapiro said. “Killed here at the office?”

  “Not here in the city room,” Tony said. “Didn’t show up here often, way I get it. In his own office other end of this floor. Didn’t show up there much either, apparently. Mostly sent his columns in by messenger. Usually in the afternoons, they tell me.”

  Shapiro said, “Mmm.” He said, “So this is the city room. I’d have thought it would be more—” He paused.

  “Yeah,” Tony said. “I saw the revival of Front Page too, Nate. Maybe things were like that, long time ago. In Chicago. Hiding escaped murderers in rolltop desks. Yelling all over the place. Quieter now. Was a good while back, too.”

  Nathan Shapiro raised his eyebrows again.

  “Oh,” Tony Cook said, “way back when I was about fifteen, I—”

  Simultaneous loud cries of “Copy!” from several desks interrupted him. A youth of around sixteen hurried to one of the callers; a girl of about the same age went to another.

  “—worked one summer as a copyboy,” Tony Cook said. “Had a notion of being a newspaperman. The summer cured me. All the reporters beefing about their salaries. Talking about getting out of the racket and into advertising. So I decided to be a cop, way Dad was. Even that long ago, the city room I worked in wasn’t a bedlam. Nobody was much rushing around in a frenzy. Pretty much the way it is here right now. And what they call the Home Editio
n closes in about”—he looked at his watch—“twenty-five minutes,” he said.

  “Also,” Tony added, “I never found any bodies, way a kid on the lobster did this morning. Shock to the boy. Lost his breakfast.”

  “Claye’s body?” Shapiro said. “On the what, Tony?”

  “Only body we have,” Tony Cook said. “Lobster trick. What they call it. Afternoon papers start around three in the morning. Three or four copyreaders and a slot man, except they call him an assistant city editor, come in then and send overnight copy out to the composing room. And a couple of reporters come in and rewrite stories from the morning papers. All stuff for the inside pages, of course. Play reviews, music reviews, that sort of thing. Movie reviews. And, part of the time, Claye’s column. Usually, it gets down in time for the afternoon desk to handle. And Sampson to look it over, he tells me.”

  “Sampson?”

  “Managing editor. Guy over there in the corner, reading this morning’s Chronicle. Runs the news side. Alabama native, from what I hear. Deep South somewhere, anyway. Reads Claye’s column in advance to see that no liberal tinge shows up. What Rachel told me once, anyway.”

  “Rachel, Tony?”

  “Used to know a man who worked here. Music critic, assistant music critic. Something like that. Sampson fired him. The Sentinel was cutting down on music coverage about then. Because there wasn’t enough advertising to make it worthwhile. Also, most of the people who read music reviews were—”

  He stopped abruptly.

  “The precinct boys went along through there,” Tony said. “Where they found the body.” He was pointing to an opening in the middle of the wall at their left. “And they’ve taken the early-trick assistant city editor to an office over there to talk to him. Maybe we ought to see what they’ve come up with, huh?”

  Nathan Shapiro agreed they might as well. He was mildly amused at Tony Cook’s unexpected lapse into flagrant tact. It is, of course, quite true that many Jews are deeply responsive to music. And that they write a large percentage of it.