A Streak of Light Read online

  Simms hung up. He looked at Shapiro. “Roy Sampson,” he said. “The managing editor.”

  “Yes, I know,” Shapiro said. “And he wanted to know whether I’m Jewish. Next time he asks you, tell him yes, Mr. Simms. And that I’m the son of a rabbi, if he wants to know. You know we do what, Mr. Simms—as you told Mr. Sampson?”

  “Oh,” Simms said. “Nothing important, Lieutenant. Roy reminded me we get a good deal of hate mail about Claye. Left-wing nuts. That sort of thing.”

  “Threatening letters?”

  “Some of them. Mostly just squawks. Nothing like what we got when I wrote an editorial article suggesting that perhaps some sort of gun registration might be conceivably useful if people went on killing presidents, or trying to. The gun boys swamped us on that, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro didn’t doubt the “gun boys” had. The rifle association regards the words “registration” and “confiscation” as synonymous. Or seeks to persuade members of Congress that they are. With, from Nathan Shapiro’s point of view, unfortunate success. Policemen, like others, prefer to live.

  Did Mr. Simms know whether any of the hate letters against Claye were around?

  Simms doubted it. A few of the milder and more argumentative ones had been printed on the editorial page in the “Readers Speak” column. Most of them had gone into waste-baskets. “We get a good deal of mail from people who don’t agree with us,” Simms said. “We print a few of them. The Sentinel is an impartial, objective reporter of the world’s events, Lieutenant.”

  Shapiro said, “Sure,” with no inflection in his voice.

  Simms smiled. There was, Shapiro thought, inflection in his smile. He said, “In the established tradition of journalism, end quote.” There was a certain dryness in his soft, modulated voice.

  “One thing is,” Shapiro said, “how did these left-wing terrorists know Mr. Claye would be in his office here in the middle of the night? I gather that wasn’t usual.”

  “No,” Simms said. “Unprecedented is perhaps the word. Or, as a correspondent of ours in London once cabled, ‘heretofore unprecedented.’ I’ve no idea, Lieutenant. No reason I can think of why he would have been. Or how anybody could know he was going to be. Unless—”

  “Yes,” Shapiro said. “Unless he had an arrangement to meet somebody here.”

  Simms agreed that there was that. Shapiro thanked Simms for his time and stood up and turned again toward the door. It opened before he could reach it.

  The man who came into Simms’s office was tall—taller even than Shapiro himself. He wore a dark blue suit and a white shirt and a dark blue necktie. He was very thin under the suit. He had white hair, which was not as abundant as it probably once had been. His long, thin face was almost colorless, and a commanding nose jutted from it. He came into the office, Shapiro felt, as if he owned it. And Peter Simms stood up behind his desk.

  Simms said, “Good morning, sir.”

  The white-haired man did not appear to hear this. He looked at Shapiro. He said, “Who’s this, Simms?” He had a cold voice.

  “He’s a police officer, Mr. Perryman,” Simms said. “A lieutenant from the Homicide Squad. A Lieutenant Shapiro.”

  “A lieutenant, eh?” Perryman said. “Shapiro, eh? Where’s the inspector, Shapiro? O’Malley, isn’t it?”

  “Probably at headquarters,” Shapiro told him. “The squad does the spadework, Mr. Perryman. Anything we find but is passed on to the chief, of course.”

  “Yeah? And what do you expect to spade up here, Shapiro? And where’s your superior officer? Out rounding up the goddamn commies who did this, I hope.”

  “Captain Callahan is in the building,” Shapiro said. “He’s in command of the precinct detectives. Checking things out with some of his men. There are quite a few of us here, Mr. Perryman.”

  “Messing around with it,” Perryman said. “Nobody here killed Claye. One of those goddamn radicals. Commie, obviously. Sticks out a mile. You can see that, can’t you—and this Callahan? If you can’t, the commissioner will. He owes me that much—at least that much. Law-and-order man, that’s what Pierce is. Crack down on these murdering commies, Pierce will.”

  “We all try to crack down on murderers,” Shapiro said.

  “And don’t have much luck, do you, Shapiro? Our goddamn Supreme Court sees to that. Simms!”

  Peter Simms was still standing behind his desk. He said, “Sir?”

  “Want an editorial for the next edition. Tragic event, great loss to the nation. That sort of thing. Example of the breakdown of law and order. You’ll know what to say. And no beating around the bush, Simms. Lay it on them, is what I mean. Understood, Simms?”

  “Yes, sir. You want me to write it, Mr. Perryman? Not Mr. Wainwright?”

  “You, Simms. Old Wainwright’s slowing down. You know that as well as I do. Not the man he used to be. You’ve got it clear, Simms? Lead the page and set two columns. And no pussyfooting. You understand? And I’ll want to see it before it goes in. Get that?”

  Simms said, “Yes, Mr. Perryman. I’ll get right on it. Have to junk some stuff to get it in. Rather long article about college professors who oppose the free enterprise system.”

  “Junk it if you have to,” Russel Perryman said, and went out of the office. Even from the rear, Shapiro thought, he looked the owner and publisher of the New York Sentinel. No wonder he had come into Simms’s office as if he owned it. He did.

  Simms said “Whew!” and sat down behind his desk. He swiveled in his chair and drew a typewriter table up so that he faced a somewhat battered Underwood. He fed paper into the machine, then leaned back in his chair and stared at it.

  “A very authoritative man, Mr. Perryman,” Shapiro said.

  Simms said, “Uh,” and leaned forward and began to pound the typewriter.

  Shapiro went out to look for Callahan and, of course, Detective Cook.

  3

  Shapiro found Callahan and Cook in the wide hallway outside the office which had been Roger Claye’s. Callahan was talking to a man who was making notes on folded sheets of copy paper.

  “Yes,” Callahan told the man, “we have found fingerprints. Including Mr. Claye’s, of course. And a good many others. Not very recent, for the most part. Some may be.”

  “You don’t know whose they are, Captain?”

  “They’ll be classified and checked out, in the usual way, Mr. Notson. In Washington, if necessary.”

  “Among the prints of known subversives? That the FBI has?”

  “Prints of everybody on file, of course. Ours here at headquarters. The armed forces in Washington. The FBI and the CIA. Everybody who has files of fingerprints. It takes a little while, of course.”

  “The bullet, Captain?”

  “We don’t know yet. Probably small-caliber, from what the officers saw before the body was taken to the morgue. The autopsy findings won’t come through until this afternoon.”

  “And the bullet—just one, from what we get—will be compared with—”

  “When we find something to compare it with,” Callahan said. “Yes, apparently just one slug, Mr. Notson. This is Mr. Notson. One of the reporters. This is Lieutenant Shapiro, Mr. Notson. From Homicide.”

  “Jim Notson, Lieutenant. I’m doing a rewrite for the Night. Anything you can tell us?”

  “Nothing the captain hasn’t already told you,” Shapiro said. “We’ll give you more when we have more. For now, you’ll have to go on what you have.”

  “Or can dig up, Lieutenant.”

  “Or can dig up, of course. And if you do dig up anything, we’ll want to know about it.”

  James Notson, Sentinel reporter, said, “Sure,” and went down the corridor to the city room.

  “Trouble is, Nate,” Callahan said, “you’re pretty much asking them to get underfoot.”

  “They would anyway,” Shapiro said. “And the boys from the Post and the News and the Chronicle and from all the networks. Sure they’ll get underfoot. No way of stopping them. Or
the services.”

  “Or the local TV news boys,” Tony Cook said. “And— hell—everybody.”

  Shapiro nodded his agreement. He was going to turn up in the middle of a big one. Big and confusing and not at all his line of country. Thanks to Bill Weigand, who could never understand the limitations of Lieutenant Nathan Shapiro. Just because I’m lucky sometimes, Nathan Shapiro thought.

  “What do we know about security here, Captain?” he asked. “Night security?”

  “Doesn’t seem to be much,” Callahan said. “Oh, a night watchman. Who covers all six floors and rings in every hour or so. Watching out for fires, mostly.”

  “Nobody in the lobby, checking people in and out?”

  “Building superintendent says not. Man named Folsom, he is. Says there used to be, couple of years ago, but he was told to fire him. Costing too much money, he thinks. And the elevators are shut down at seven in the evening. Start up again around nine in the morning. Way to save energy, Folsom says. What they told him, anyway. Very strong on saving energy, the Sentinel is. While back there, they had WIN painted every day in what they call an ear. Weather report in one ear and WIN in the other. You remember the WIN gimmick, Nate?”

  Shapiro remembered the WIN gimmick, so triumphantly launched and so quickly submerged early in the Ford administration.

  “So anybody who comes in at night has to walk up the stairs?” he said.

  “Staff’s supposed to anyway, they tell me. Editorial staff, that is. Everybody who works on the second floor, anyway. Editorial people and the composing-room people. The pressmen have their own entrance to the pressroom. It’s in the basement.”

  “So anybody can just walk in and go up the stairs and wherever he wants to go. And if he wants to kill Claye, just find Claye’s office and pull a trigger?”

  “What it adds up to, Nate. Just have to find Claye’s office and find Claye in it.”

  “Which,” Shapiro said, “it appears he wasn’t often.”

  “Way it looks, Nate. We don’t know much about him, do we? Except he’s dead.”

  “That, and that he was ‘renowned.’ Says so in the paper. See that, Captain?”

  Captain Callahan had seen that. He had also seen, under a flash after the main account of Roger Claye’s murder, an account of his life.

  “Seems he was a great guy,” Callahan said. “‘A moving force for sanity in American life.’ Also, ‘A life-long advocate of fiscal responsibility at the federal level.’”

  Nathan Shapiro had not got that far into Roger Claye’s obituary notice. It had looked like being rather long. He mentioned this estimate to Callahan.

  “Well,” Callahan said, “he was their great man, Nate. Their fair-haired boy, apparently. Naturally, they’d be generous with their space.”

  “Yes. And maybe with their evaluation,” Shapiro said. “Maybe there’ll turn out to be a few things about him they don’t stress. Something that might give us a hint as to why he got killed. The victim’s past sometimes does that, you know.”

  “Sure. Like he was mixed up with the Mafia. Or had a police record that the Sentinel’s forgetting to mention. I’d better be getting back to the station house. Get some of the boys digging around. On this and, God knows, a dozen other things. With more coming in every minute. So?”

  Nathan said, “Sure,” and that he and Cook would see what else they could dig up. Here and at Claye’s town house, if anybody had turned up at the town house. In the Village, wasn’t it?

  Callahan gave him the address, which was on West Eleventh Street, between Fifth Avenue and Sixth. And Callahan would be getting along for now. Then he got along, collecting detectives from the precinct squad to take with him, leaving uniformed patrolmen as symbols of police activity.

  “There’ll be clippings on Claye in the morgue,” Cook said. “The newspaper morgue, I mean. And there’s always Who’s Who. Could be there’s a copy at the city desk. Want I should—”

  Shapiro did. Tony Cook went off toward the city room. Shapiro went into Claye’s former office, although anything there would already have been scrutinized and fingerprinted. And, God knew, photographed.

  The office was small and uncluttered. It held a desk and a typewriter on a stand. It had one small window, with an air shaft beyond it. There was a high-backed chair behind the desk, on which there was nothing except, propped between heavy glass bookstops, a dictionary and a copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, revised edition. And there were bloodstains on the desk top and on the chair behind it. On the straight wooden chair that was set facing the desk on the visitor’s side, there were traces of the powder the lab men had used.

  The office looked somehow forsaken, as if nobody had ever sat in the high-backed desk chair, or tossed paper into the now empty wastebasket. Of course, the lab boys had emptied the wastebasket.

  Shapiro leaned down and looked at the typewriter ribbon. It appeared to be an almost new ribbon, against which few keys had been struck. If Claye had come to his office to write his Friday column, it had been a very short column. Or written longhand, for later copying?

  If there had been anything revealing in this small office, it had been removed by the lab men. And anything possibly significant would show up at Homicide South. Along with the autopsy report and information from ballistics.

  So. Shapiro left Claye’s office, closing the door behind him. It did not, he noted, have a snap lock.

  Tony Cook came along the corridor, carrying a thick book with folded paper marking a place in it.

  “Yeah,” Cook said. “He made it. Not that it’s all that damn hard to make, from what I hear. This music critic Rachel knows, the one used to work here, signed a contract with a lecture agent, and all at once Who’s Who tapped him.”

  They went into an empty small office two doors from the one Roger Claye had died in and equally without signs of recent use. At the desk, Shapiro opened Who’s Who in America at the page Cook had marked with folded copy paper. He read:

  Claye, Roger Arnold, political columnist; b. Des Moines, Iowa, August 3, 1920; s. Ernest and Emily (Foster) C.; A.B. cum laude, Iowa University, 1940; m. Gertrude Finney, June 21, 1941 (dec. May 1947); m. 2d, Faith Bradford, April 14, 1962. Public relations, Des Moines Chamber of Commerce, 1940-41; public relations staff National Association of Manufacturers, 1942-56; political columnist, New York Sentinel, 1962; syndicated 1964–. Mem. U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Rotary, John Birch Society. Author: The Engulfing Wave, 1958; Our Endangered Liberties, 1962. Home: Bedford Hills NY 10507.

  “West Eleventh Street not mentioned,” Tony Cook said, when Shapiro had finished reading. “I think that means Bedford Hills is their legal residence—not that it matters, probably.”

  Shapiro said, “Mmm,” and reread Roger Arnold Claye’s biography. A considerable employment hole in it, he thought. What had Claye been doing between 1956 and 1962? Working on a newspaper? Or merely writing books about engulfing waves and threats to liberty?

  Married twice, the first time when he was twenty-one. To one Gertrude Finney, presumably his age or younger and deceased, apparently, while still young. Claye had been in his forties when he married again. Gertrude had died, presumably, of natural causes. (It’s part of my trade to wonder about that, Shapiro thought. Most people do die of natural causes. No reason to think Gertrude Finney Claye had not. No conceivable reason to grope into the distant past for a possible motive for retaliation. Many people die young, for many reasons.)

  Faith Bradford the second wife. Faith had once been a name not infrequently bestowed on female infants. (So had “Hope” and, for that matter, “Charity.”) Not often used nowadays, so far as Nathan Shapiro knew. Bradford? It had a faintly New England feel about it. One thought, vaguely, of Cabots and Lowells. An old rhyme about them? One talked only with the other and the other only with God. Cabots with Lowells, or the other way around? Rose would know; it was the kind of thing on the tip of her mind.

  Mine wanders, Shapiro thought. There was no special reason to
wonder whether Bradfords had been on speaking terms with either ancient and celebrated family.

  Of course, to let the mind wander further, the Bradfords might be an old New England family; it might be a family of high social and, perhaps, financial standing. A good family for an earnest young man from Iowa to marry into. So married, an aspiring man might well take time out to write books, without too much wondering how they would sell.

  Member of the John Birch Society. And making no bones about it. As some, understandably to Nathan, did. Of the Klan, too?

  “He left holes in it,” Shapiro said. “Probably not important. Probably his wife can fill them in when we get around to her. Wonder if she’s got home from wherever she’s been? Wherever she was at four this morning, that is.”

  “Or,” Tony said, “just not answering her telephone. Some people don’t. Or up at this home of theirs in Bedford Hills. Captain Callahan’s got the Eleventh Street house staked out.”

  Shapiro said, “Mmm.”

  “There’ll be clippings about him in the morgue,” Tony Cook said. “Want I should?”

  Shapiro said, “Yes, Tony,” and Cook went off to find the Sentinel’s morgue. He was gone about five minutes. He came back shaking his head. “Clips on Claye checked out,” he said, “by James Notson. The reporter was talking to Callahan. Bringing the obit up to date. Maybe the managing editor can fill us in with what you want. Although probably he’s busy as hell. This man Simms?”