Night Extra

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?”