William P. McGivern
Night Extra
1
The Call-Bulletin’s first deadline was at nine o’clock in the morning and by eight fifty-five everyone in the long brightly lighted city room was working under the insistent pressure of time. Reporters and rewritemen paused every now and then to check the clock above the city desk, pacing themselves by the steady sweep of the illuminated second hand.
Sam Terrell didn’t look up from the typewriter when the phone rang; he finished the item for his column, then lifted the receiver.
The voice in his ear said, “I’ve got something for Terrell. Is he around?”
“This is Terrell.”
“Answer your own phone, eh? Keeping the common touch?”
“Who’s this?”
“It doesn’t matter, Sam. What matters is I got something for you on Caldwell, our lily-white reform candidate.” The tipster’s voice was husky, and his inflection was heavily ironic. Terrell’s interest picked up; with elections two weeks off, almost anything on Caldwell had a priority value.
The edition was only seconds away from deadline now; a bell rang warningly and rewritemen began shouting for copy boys. The atmosphere of noisy confusion was deceptive; beneath that the. work went on with routine skill and precision.
“Okay, let’s have it,” Terrell said, holding the receiver tightly against his ear.
Ollie Wheeler, whose desk was beside Terrell’s, chose that moment to say, “Sam, a bank wouldn’t lend this paper a nickel. It’s nothing but organized hysteria. Look, we’re on deadline and they’ve got a head-on collision with both cars travelling in the same direction. Neatest trick of the week, eh?”
Terrell covered his phone and stared at the old man. “For God’s sake, shut up!” he said. Terrell was tall and nervous, and when he was working he usually looked mad; now his cheeks were flushed and his eyes were sharp with irritation. “Can’t you knock it off for a second?”
Ollie said, “Judah Priest, temperament yet,” and turned angrily back to his newspaper.
Terrell said into the phone, “I’m sorry, but this connection is bad. Could I call you back?”
“I’m at a drugstore, so calling back wouldn’t tell you much. Be content with the tip, Sam. Don’t worry about me. Now: you know Eden Myles?”
Terrell did, slightly; she was a singer, the friend of a minor hoodlum named Frankie Chance. “I know the lady,” he said.
“Lady?” The tipster made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Okay, have it your way. Well, she’s been huddling with Richard Caldwell for the last month or so. Five or six times, all on the quiet. But somebody saw her easing into his hotel suite. Somebody always does. You run this down and you got a story.”
Terrell reached for his cigarettes, feeling a pleasurable excitement growing in him. “Anybody else know about this?”
“Just you and me, sweetheart.”
“I’d like to buy you a drink,” Terrell said. “Thank you formally.”
“Never mind. I’m off the sauce anyway. Good luck, Sam.”
“Wait a minute,” Terrell said, but the phone was dead. He jiggled the hook automatically, then put the receiver down. Rich Caldwell and Eden Myles — it was an incongruous combination. Caldwell was the high-minded idealist, called to politics by duty and conscience. And Eden Myles was a smalltime tramp. Singer, hostess, model, all of it small time. Even Frankie Chance was small time.
“Ollie,” Terrell said. “Ollie, what do you think of Rich Caldwell?”
“You have a moment for the peasants, eh?” Wheeler was hurt, Terrell saw; the old man was staring straight ahead, giving him the benefit of a hard, severe profile. Terrell wondered how to coax him into good humor. Wheeler was a souvenir of the paper’s more vigorous days, a cynical old man who drank too much and was in debt to half the men in the building. Mike Karsh, the Call-Bulletin’s managing editor, kept him working out of a perverse and inconsistent sentimentality. Ollie took one or two stories a day, a local fire or a service club luncheon, and spent the rest of his time picking out examples of bad writing and sloppy reporting from the paper’s news columns. Williams, the city editor, had shifted his desk into the comparative tranquility of Terrell’s corner. This kept him out of everyone’s hair but Terrell’s.
“I’m sorry I popped off,” Terrell said. “But my connection was bad.”
“The column’s the important thing,” Ollie said. “Don’t let such trifles as courtesy or good manners ever come first. Remember that. You’re young but in time you’ll be like everyone else on this rag — one of Mike Karsh’s journalistic thugs, literary bully boys, ready for—”
“Say, that’s good,” Terrell said, with a perfectly straight face. “Literary bully boys!” He repeated the phrase in a soft, respectful voice. “Using typewriters instead of machine guns, you could say. How do you toss off gems like that, Ollie?”
“Go to hell, you sarcastic sonofabitch.” Ollie grinned at him, a frail old man with gray hair and sharp aristocratic features. “What was the call that got you excited?”
“Someone trying to peddle a story on Caldwell. What do you think of him, Ollie? Seriously.”
“Seriously? That’s damn near impossible.”
“What’s funny about him?”
“He’s a reformer. He’s given up a highly profitable law practice to run for mayor of this benighted town. And he’s got about as much political savvy as a sophisticated girl scout. The machine will eat him alive and not even spit back the bones. Is that funny enough?” Wheeler grinned but his eyes were melancholy. “Or do you want bladder comedians, yet?”
“Supposing he wins?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’ve covered his rallies,” Terrell said. “He draws a crowd.”
“College kids. They can’t vote. Seriously, Sam, it can’t happen. Men like Ike Cellars, Mayor Ticknor — do you think they’ll let this piece of cake fall into somebody else’s fingers?”
“You’re a cynic.”
“I have a capacity to see what’s under my nose. If that’s being cynical, fine.”
Terrell leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. Eden Myles and Rich Caldwell... The pressure had eased now that the first edition was in. Reporters and editors drifted down the long room toward the lavatory or water coolers. Only one or two typewriters pecked with a virtuous sound against the comparative silence. Copy boys went from desk to desk taking orders for coffee, bacon and egg sandwiches, cigarettes and aspirin. The tension would start building again in half an hour or so, as stories and pictures for the next edition, the Postscript, were phoned and wired into the city room. In the welcome silence Terrell smoked his cigarette in peace. From his corner he had a view of the rewrite section, the copy wheel, and Mike Karsh’s huge, glass-walled office, which dominated both arms of the L-shaped city room. He was still thinking about Eden Myles and Rich Caldwell, and he knew he was after something good. He didn’t bother to analyze or question his intuitions; he just accepted them as facts. They stemmed from his experience as a reporter, his awareness of the significant differences and alliances within the framework of men who ran the city. One set of shiftings and regroupings might leave him cold, another would alert him instantly. And he was alerted by the combination of Eden Myles and Rich Caldwell. Because Eden Myles had been Frankie Chance’s girl friend. And because Frankie Chance worked for Ike Cellars...
Terrell walked down the room and took a chair at the city desk. Williams nodded to him and said, “How’s the pundit business?”
“Haven’t sold a pundit all week. Must be the seasonal lag.” Three other men were seated at the long rectangular desk: Nelly, a youngster with brush-cut hair, Poole, Williams’ top assistant editor, and Frank Tuckerman, a huge and gentle man who dispatched the paper’s legmen and radio cars. Now he was hunched close to the police speaker at the end of the desk, his ear automatically selecting significant data from the welter of reports, orders, and code numbers that spluttered endlessly through the air. A fire in the Northeast was developing into something important; the battalion chief had called for an ambulance, and the gas company was ordering out its emergency equipment to handle a leakage in the adjoining building. Williams caught the last order and glanced at Tuckerman. “Where is it?”