Night Extra

3

The Ridgeland was a new hotel in center-city that catered to people with expensive tastes and important connections. Karsh lived here and Terrell wondered how he stood it, both financially and esthetically. The tariff was outrageously high, but Karsh enjoyed extravagance; he liked to feel that he was spending his money brilliantly and pointlessly. He saved nothing, sneered at market tips, and could drop twice Terrell’s monthly check in one bet at the track.

The management of the Ridgeland treated him like solvent royalty. They had knocked together two suites to give him a four room apartment on the twentieth floor, and had installed a bar, kitchenette, a barbecue pit for the balcony, and practically wall-to-wall television. All of this seemed to amuse Karsh. He had only to glance around to reassure himself that he wasn’t spending his money sensibly.

Esthetically, Karsh’s tolerance for the Ridgeland and its clients bewildered Terrell. He was a mark for every shill, tipster and peddler who hung out in the place. Now, as Terrell paused in the entrance to the dining room, he saw that Karsh had already been attacked by supplicants — a syndicate salesman, a gambler and two press agents had joined him at his regular corner table. They weren’t bad sorts, Terrell knew, just greedy — slavering for a bite at the still-fat carcass of Mike Karsh.

George, the headwaiter, led him across the dance floor, and Karsh grinned when he stopped beside the table. “Find a seat, Sam. Our quiet little dinner has turned into a convention.” Karsh wore a dark gray suit of beautiful cut, a white linen shirt and a neatly figured blue silk tie. He looked very distinguished and slightly drunk; his thick gray hair and deeply tanned features were elegantly handsome, but his smile was lopsided and weary. The humor in his face was touched with cynicism; his expression, though blurred with liquor, was that of a man who was truly puzzled by the whole idea of laughter.

Terrell sat down beside him, and George, the headwaiter, said, “You want to order yet, Mr. Karsh? Or do you intend to keep us in suspense?”

“Go water your whiskey,” Karsh said. “I’ll whistle when we’re ready.”

“Like a dog yet he whistles for me.” The trademark. of the Ridgeland and its clients was the reflexive wisecrack, the smiling and gratuitous insult. George shrugged elaborately and grinned at Karsh. “What’s the matter? Ulcers?”

“It used to be singing waiters,” Karsh said. “Now they talk. Run along and pad my account, George. I said I’ll whistle.”

George bowed crisply and went away smiling.

“He’ll go on smiling for years,” Terrell said. “Then he’ll cut somebody’s throat for asking for a glass of water.”

“Sing me a song of social significance, eh? You know everybody, don’t you?” Karsh said. “Myers, Carruthers—” He stared at the press agents and shook his head. “I don’t know them. Probably spies, travelling under a Martian passport.”

A red-headed girl had sat down beside Terrell and Karsh nodded to her. “Sam, this is Bill. She was named Bill by her press agent, not her mother.”

The red-head pouted cutely at Terrell. “Now don’t put that in your column, Mr. Terrell.”

“All right, I won’t,” Terrell said.

One of the press agents leaned over and touched his arm. “I won’t box with you, Sam. We’re building this girl up for Video Studios. Look, Karsh has said some cute things about her, as a matter of fact. They wouldn’t look bad in print — and they’re straight from the boss’s mouth.”

“I’ll get Mike to tell me about her,” Terrell said. “When we’re alone.”

Karsh smiled around the table. “Sam and I are working tonight. Would you all excuse us?”

“We could get another table,” Terrell said. “No point in rushing them.”

They stood quickly, smiled a good-bye at Karsh, and then moved off in a protective group toward the lobby, having paid nothing for their drinks but a small bit of self-respect.

“A grand bunch,” Karsh said, with a solemn shake of his head. “From my old regiment. They called me The Old Man. Follow me to hell and back.” He watched them as they went up the steps to the lobby. “Goddamn tasteless creeps.”

“Let’s order dinner. You can take it out on George.”

Karsh glanced at him. “You don’t like the Wildean shafts we break, eh. Well, it passes for conversation. If we didn’t insult each other we’d have to talk to each other. Let’s have something to drink, and talk about your story. We can eat any time.”

He was in character now, Terrell saw, a shrewd, intelligent man fascinated by his work. The other roles were forced on him out of boredom; the ruthless cynic, the patronizing seigneur, the bitter iconoclast, all of these were charades played for his own diversion.

Terrell told him what he had learned from Sarnac and Eden Myles, then waited for a reaction. After a moment Karsh said, “Something’s incomplete. What’s Eden Myles getting out of it? I don’t buy the revenge angle and I certainly don’t buy her tale of a suddenly burgeoning conscience. She’s getting paid, is my guess.”

“Sarnac says no.”

“Let’s double-check,” Karsh said. “If she’ll talk for money, we can raise the ante.”

George came over yawning. “Come on, quit stalling.”

The food at the Ridgeland was superb, but Karsh ordered vegetables and soft-boiled eggs. “Wine?” George said, winking broadly. “Real French wine?”

“I’ll have scotch with the vegetables and a double scotch with the eggs,” Karsh said. “Sam?”

“Steak.”

“Ah, expense account tonight,” George said. “How do you want it? With or without?”

“Without conversation,” Terrell said, and regretted the remark instantly. Karsh laughed and raised his drink. “Very good. Knee in the groin that time.”

George’s smile slipped for just a second. “No straight men left anywhere,” he said, snapping the big menu shut. “One steak coming right up, boss.”

Terrell said to Karsh, “What do you think of Caldwell?”

“Did you meet him today?”

“No. I talked to Sarnac.”

“Caldwell is an oddball,” Karsh said wearily. “A civic reformer is a bit like a middle-aged widow with a grown family and adequate insurance. Kind of a zero. No sex life, no kids to shout at, no bills to worry about. The house in order. That’s an intolerable situation for any human being, so they start minding other people’s business. Take Caldwell for instance. Forty-eight, Ivy League school, prosperous law business. Plays squash rackets on Tuesdays at the Union Club, shoots golf in the middle eighties at Fairhill, which is a club the average guy couldn’t get into with eighteen million bucks in his hand.”

Terrell smiled. “You’re a member, aren’t you?”

“But I’m a classy guy. I tell dirty stories in the locker room in Latin. But going back to Caldwell. His life is all wrapped up in neat, well-ordered categories, and he’s approaching the male menopause right on schedule. So what can he do? Drink? That would be my choice, but that takes imagination. Hobbies? That’s the ticket. Caldwell picked cleanliness as a hobby. First he probably had his house and grounds manicured, fussed around coiling up the garden hoses and burning up the leaves. Then he looked around and to his delight saw a great big dirty city he could go to work on.” Karsh dropped his cigarette into what was left of his drink. “He’s set for life. Thousands of dirty alleys and stinking sewers and cruddy politicians to fumigate and burn. He’s lucky, a kid in a candy store, a sadist running wild in a concentration camp.”

“There’s more to it than that,” Terrell said.

“Possibly. Interest in the public weal, duty, right and wrong, morality — could be, Sam.” Karsh shrugged lightly. “But I don’t see it.”

After dinner their interlude of privacy came to an end; the gambler returned to offer Karsh a bet on the St. Francis basketball game. The odds were wrong, Terrell knew, but Karsh took the bet for a figure that made his heart beat faster. The syndicate salesman and press agents came in on the second wave.

“Where’s Bill?” Terrell asked, with no interest at all.

“Prettying up. Don’t worry, she’ll be along.”

“I really wasn’t worrying.”

The syndicate salesman had moved so close to Karsh that he was practically in his lap. “Mike, I just want a quick reaction, just a bounce. Tim O’Mara — he does that swell men’s column — well, he’s been bitten by the bulls in Spain, and he’s come up with a terrific idea. More Americans see bullfights every year, and O’Mara thinks they’d like to follow the fights when they come home. You know, gossip about the big matadors, a story on the big fights at Madrid and Pamplona, that sort of thing. He thinks there’s enough interest and material to support a weekly feature. What do you think? I told Tim I’d get your opinion.”

“A how-to column?” Karsh asked him with a straight face.

“No — more gossip and color.”

“But I like the how-to angle,” Terrell said. He could see that Karsh was masking his irritation behind a droll smile; Karsh hated blood sports.

“Yes, that’s the pitch,” Karsh said, nodding. “And we might run some companion pieces on bear baiting. And for the kids, a handicraft section — build your own thumb screw.”

“A whipping post in every back yard,” Terrell said.

“Tim didn’t intend to dwell on the gore,” the salesman said. Watching Karsh’s face he smiled quickly and nervously. “I’ll tell him to forget it.”

“Tell him also that I’m thinking of throwing his big hairy column the hell out of the paper.”

The salesman laughed shrilly. “That’ll jolt him. I’ll put it to him dead-pan.”

“Just the way I put it to you.”

The second of the press agents returned with the red-head named Bill, and the conversation swirled away like chips on a floodtide.

Terrell hated to leave. Karsh struck him at the moment as a blind Sampson or a senile Lear — a badgered wreck, surrounded by fools and sharpsters and drunks. The press agent was telling a wide-eyed Bill about the last scene of Alice in Wonderland. “It’s probably the greatest piece of writing in the world,” he said in a soft, belligerent voice. “Every man should read that once in his lifetime to a little girl — and not while he’s drunk, mind you. If it doesn’t cut right through to his heart you can scratch him for a no-good sonofabitch. Talk about loyalty tests! I can tell about a guy by listening to him read the part that goes—” He took the girl’s hand and stared at the ceiling. “Well, in so many words, she’s lying there and a twig falls on her, a leaf, I guess, and she wakes up and starts talking to her mother — sister, rather.”

“It’s lovely,” Bill said.

“Lewis Carroll on bullfights,” Karsh said, waving for a round of drinks. “That’s what I’d like to see in the goddamn paper.”

Terrell stood and caught Karsh’s eye. “I’m running along, Mike. Thanks for dinner.”

“Don’t mention it, boy.” Karsh smiled up at him and patted his arm. “Keep pitching. You’re on something good.”

Terrell went outside feeling very sorry for Karsh. He seemed to make sense only at work. There he operated with brilliant precision, keeping every department of the paper under meticulous supervision. But the rest of his life was chaos. His marriage had ended in divorce several years ago and he had been bled white by his wife’s lawyers. He had taken a mistress which had added to his problems without ameliorating his loneliness. He had never been close to his children — a son and daughter — and saw very little of them now; the girl had married and moved to the west coast, and the son was a smooth and expensive youngster who dropped in at the office occasionally to discuss his financial needs.

Terrell knew most of this by intimation; Karsh had never talked to him about his personal problems. But no wonder he was cynical, Terrell thought, as he cabbed back through the darkness to the office. He wished he could help Karsh in some way. But how? Tell him to relax, cut down on cigarettes? Terrell still had a copy boy’s hero-worship for Karsh, and walking out on him tonight made him feel like a heel.

At ten-thirty the Call-Bulletin’s lobby was dark, and Terrell had to rap on the heavy plate glass doors to raise a watchman. This was the slow, graveyard stretch; the next edition, the Night Extra, wouldn’t go in until one o’clock in the morning. And it wasn’t an important edition, just a re-write of the day’s news and the front page brushed up with wire copy.

The skeleton crew was sitting at the long city desk with coffee before them and cigarettes burning away in the ashtrays at their elbows. The rest of the floor was dark; there was no one working in the sports or women’s page sections, and the big lights above the clock drew a circle of brightness around the men at the city desk and police speaker.

Bill Mooney, an old city hall reporter, was in charge of this shift, and he nodded to Terrell and said, “Want some coffee, Sam? Prince here made it. It’s what they hired him for, I guess.”

Prince was a healthy looking young man with dark hair, excellent clothes and a degree in journalism from the University of Iowa. Mooney did not mind his good looks or good clothes, but he was in no hurry to forgive him for the degree in journalism. “I’ll get you a cup, Mr. Terrell,” Prince said.

“Never mind. I’ll pass.”

“It’s good coffee,” Prince said.

“Informed by college wit and sophistication,” Mooney said.

Ollie Wheeler, Terrell saw, was sitting just outside the cone of light that fell on the city desk. He wore an overcoat, and had his feet propped up on a waste basket.

“Company man,” Terrell said. “Can’t get enough of the place.”

“And how about you?”

“I’ve got work to do.”

“You’re lucky,” Wheeler said, taking a pint bottle of whiskey from the inside pocket of his overcoat. “I got bored at home. Opulent indulgence is the father of satiety. My boarding house is too heady for steady consumption. So I came down to listen to police calls with Mooney. It’s like the dissonant theme in a symphony, it makes the ear long for the tonic. An hour with Mooney and I’ll be glad to get back to my room.”

Terrell knew that Wheeler had to be jolted out of this mood. A word of sympathy would reduce him to tears. “Christ, you’re like all the old hacks around here,” he said. “Sneering at the corn in the paper, the first robin stories, and pictures of lost kids with a cop’s hat on their curly heads. All tasteless and sloppy. You’re going to quit and write bitter novels. But a day away from the shop and you’re homesick.”

“God, I’ve heard everything,” Wheeler said, bringing his feet down with a crash. “Of all the censorious and self-righteous bilge I’ve ever heard — that takes the cake, Sam.”

Terrell took Wheeler’s pint and poured a drink into an empty coffee container. “Don’t mind if I do,” he said. “You know, Ollie, you don’t really like to drink. It’s just something you’ve seen reporters in movies doing.”

“While they tell the managing editor to tear up the front page,” Wheeler said, grinning.

“They’re always stopping the presses, replating page one — it’s a wonder they ever get a paper out.”

Mooney said to Prince, “Keep your eye on the radio for a while and don’t let anything slip by. Fires are indicated by the ringing of a bell and a strong smell of wood smoke. I’m going to the john.”

When he had disappeared into the shadows, Terrell said to Prince, “Quiet night?”

“Everything is quiet but him,” Prince said, smiling ruefully after Mooney.

“That’s part of the uniform,” Terrell said. “Old reporters wear cynical masks to hide the fact that they’re bastards at heart. Don’t let it worry you.”

The police speaker sounded. The announcer’s flat voice directed the street sergeant from the Sixteenth District to an address on Manor Lane. A few seconds later he directed an ambulance to the same address.

Prince said, “But it’s rugged being treated like a stuttering cretin around here.”

Terrell held up his hand. “Just a second.”

Wheeler got to his feet and walked over to the city desk, a little frown on his lean old face. He pushed his hat on his forehead and bent forward to put his ear beside the police speaker. “Did he say two-twenty-four Manor Lane?”

“I believe so,” said Terrell.

In the silence that followed Prince said, “Mooney thinks it’s indecent that I didn’t start as a copy boy. He’s got the idea that college...”

“For God’s sake keep quiet,” Wheeler said. “They’ve sent an ambulance out to two-twenty-four Manor Lane. That’s where Richard Caldwell lives.”

“Go get Mooney,” Terrell said to Prince. “Ollie, you better give the Sixteenth a ring and see if they can tell us anything yet.” He picked up a telephone directory, then remembered that the house on Manor Lane belonged to one of Caldwell’s friends who was now in Europe. Caldwell lived in the suburbs and used the town house when late speeches or meetings kept him in the city. He stayed there with his chauffeur, an elderly man who had been with him for years.

“Ollie, what’s the name of Caldwell’s friend — the one who owns the house on Manor Lane?”

“Just a second,” Ollie waved for silence; he was connected with the Sixteenth. “Sarge, this is Ollie Wheeler at the Call-Bulletin. Say, what’s happening? We just heard you send an ambulance over to Rich Caldwell’s house. Wait, hold on — just a hint, Sarge, for old time’s sake. Christ, we’ve all got our jobs to do! Don’t put me in the middle. Sure, I’ll hang on.” He covered the phone with his hand and looked up at Terrell. “Scared little bastard. But it sounds big, Sam. What did you want? Oh yeah. Sims is the name of the guy who owns the house on Manor Lane. J. Bellamy Sims.”

“That’s it.” Terrell flipped through the directory, found the number and dialled it quickly. The ringing sounded in his ears like the far-away drone of a bee. Then the connection was made, and a voice said cautiously, “Hello?”

“Who’s this?” Terrell said. “I want to talk with Rich Caldwell.”

“You can’t—” There was silence on the line. Then: “Who is this?”

“This is Sam Terrell. Call-Bulletin. Where’s Caldwell?”

“Look, I can’t talk to you. You got to see the detectives.”

“Wait!” Terrell yelled the word. “Is this a cop?”

“This is Paddy Coglan from the Sixteenth.”

“Don’t hang up! Don’t. Are you all alone there? Just give me a lead, Paddy. What is it?”

“I was coming down the Lane when I saw a guy run out of Caldwell’s front door.” Coglan’s voice was low and tense. “I chased him and lost him. So I came back to Caldwell’s. The door was open, lights on in the front room. He’s—” Coglan drew a sharp breath. “The Captain’s here, Sam. Better get over.” The connection was broken.

Terrell put the phone down and glanced at Ollie Wheeler who was still talking to the house sergeant at the Sixteenth. “Thanks, thanks a lot, Sarge,” he said, getting to his feet. “Sure, sure. Thanks.” He hung up and looked at Terrell. “Mooney had better call Karsh, and get some rewrite men and photographers on the way in. We’ll really tear up the front page tonight. There’s a dead girl over at Caldwell’s. And Caldwell is dead drunk.”

“Who’s the girl? Eden Myles?”

“Head of the class, Sam. Eden Myles it is. Or was, Caldwell just strangled her.”