Firing Line td-41

by Warren Murphy

  "His name was Solly."

  "Solly what?" asked Remo.

  "He didn't say," said Witherspool. "A young white guy. Solly. Maybe twenty-eight years old. He had a partner."

  "Who was the partner?"

  "I didn't see him, but I heard about him."

  "What'd you hear?"

  "He's a kid. Like fourteen years old. Solly calls him Sparky and says the kid is a magician at starting fires."

  "Where'd you meet this Solly?"

  "He contacted me. I put the word out that I was looking for a torch."

  "And he contacted you?"

  "Right."

  "Is he from Newark?" Remo asked.

  "I don't think so. I met him in the lounge of the Roberts Hotel."

  "Was he staying there?" Remo asked.

  "I don't know." Witherspool looked again at Remo, who glared at him.

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  "Wait," said Witherspool. "He signed for the bar check. He put it on his room. He musta been staying there."

  "Thanks, Reverend," Remo said. He pushed himself off the ledge. Slowly, with his back to the bricks of the stack, he began to walk down the smooth side of the chimney. "Vaya con Dios" he said.

  "Hey, wait."

  Remo stopped. He was ten feet below Witherspool, standing stuck against the side of the chimney as if he were a housefly on a wall.

  "What?" Remo asked.

  "You can't leave me here."

  "Why not?"

  "It's not . . . it's not . . . it's not humane."

  "That's the biz, sweetheart," Remo said.

  He started down again. He had gone another fifteen feet when he stopped and called up to Witherspool.

  "Pull yourself up and sit on the ledge. Somebody'11 notice you eventually," he said.

  "Thanks," said Witherspool. "For nothing. How is this gonna look? A man of the cloth on top of a smokestack?"

  "You can always tell them the devil made you do it," Remo said. He moved again down the side of the stack, almost running, seeming to be able to dig his heels into the small cracks between the bricks and using them as if they were broad steps. When he reached the bottom, he turned and waved up at Witherspool, who sat with his ample butt on the brick ledge, trying to keep his rear end from being ignited by the flaming exhaust gases.

  As Witherspool watched, Remo walked over to

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  his car, got inside, and drove off, back onto the New Jersey Turnpike. He had two stops to make.

  The manager carefully explained to Remo that, yes, he knew it was important but, no, he was very sorry, he could not let Remo look at another guest's bill because, well, just because it was against hotel policy and simply could not be done.

  Then he sat down in his chair, unable to move, as Remo began to look through all the bills at the Roberts Hotel.

  He found one for Solly Solomon. It was the only name that was close.

  "This Solly Solomon," Remo asked the manager. "What did he look like?"

  The manager tried to work his mouth but could not speak.

  "Oh," said Remo. He leaned over from the file cabinet and touched a spot on the manager's neck. He could speak now, even though he could still not move.

  "Young guy, maybe thirty, medium height, dark hair."

  "He travel with a kid?" Remo asked.

  "Yeah. Skinny little kid. Maybe thirteen. Kept lighting matches and dropping them in wastepaper baskets. I think he was retarded."

  Remo nodded.

  He took all the charge bills from Solly Solomon, put them in a manila envelope, and walked toward the door.

  "Hey, wait," the manager said.

  "Yes?"

  "I can't move. You can't leave me like this."

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  Remo shook his head. "It'll wear off in fifteen minutes. Relax and enjoy it. You'll feel great when it's over."

  Out front, Remo walked to the first yellow cab waiting in line. He leaned in the open window on the passenger's side.

  "You go out of town?" he asked the driver.

  "If the price is right."

  "Rye, New York."

  "Too far," the driver said.

  "A hundred dollars."

  'The price is right," the driver said.

  Remo handed him the manila envelope. "This has to be placed in the hands of a Doctor Harold Smith at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. You got it?"

  "Got it: Must be important."

  "Not really."

  "Where's my hundred?"

  Remo handed him a fresh hundred-dollar bill. While the driver inspected it, Remo looked at the nameplate over the taxi meter. When the driver looked back at Remo, Remo said, "Now, Irving, I know your name and your cab number. If that isn't delivered, I'm going to make your life Interesting."

  The driver looked at Remo with disdain. His right hand moved instinctively across the seat, toward a stillson wrench he kept there in full view.

  "How interesting?" he asked mockingly.

  Remo reached both hands in the window and picked up the wrench.

  "This interesting," he said. He bent the wrench in both hands. The thick iron handle snapped in half. He dropped both halves on the seat.

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  Irving looked at the wrench, at Remo, and at the wrench again.

  He dropped the cab in gear.

  "Rye, New York, here I come."

  "Doctor Harold W. Smith, Folcroft Sanitarium," Remo said.

  "I got it." As an afterthought, Irving said, "It's Sunday. Will he be there?"

  "He'll be there," Remo said.

  He waited at curbside and watched the cab drive off. Then he walked down to city police headquarters. He stood across the street from the building for a long time. It had not changed since he had walked a police beat in this city and gone in and out of the building several times a day. It had not changed, but Remo had. Where once it had just been an old building with wide steps, now it was different to Remo. He could sense the wear of the steps; he knew how much pressure it would take to crack the stone. He could look at the old brick walls and know within a pound how much force it would take to chip the mortar out from between the blocks. He had remembered a heavy wooden door, but now he saw a wooden door and knew immediately how hard he would have to hit the lock with the heel of his hand to make the door snap open.

  He was different. The town had not changed; he had. People said you couldn't go home again, but that wasn't true. You could go home again; it's just that when you got there, you realized it was not your home and never really had been. A man carried his home with him, inside his head, in his knowledge of who he was and what he was.

  Remo thought these things and then asked him-

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  self, but what are you? And before he allowed himself to answer, he walked across the street and into police headquarters.

  Patrolman Calicano was working the police property desk. He was a fixture, implanted in the job by a politically connected uncle, and doing it just well enough that he would be too much trouble to transfer or fire.

  Remo stood in front of his desk.

  Calicano looked up. For a moment, he seemed to recognize Remo, then looked back down unconcernedly at his papers.

  "What can I do for you?" he said.

  Remo tossed an FBI identification card bearing the name of Richard Quigley onto the desk.

  "FBI," Remo said.

  Calicano inspected the card, checked to see that the photo matched Remo's face, then handed the card back.

  "FBI, huh? Maybe that's where I seen you. You look kind of familiar."

  "Probably," Remo agreed.

  "What can I do for you?" /

  'That fire yesterday. I want to see that medal that was found."

  Calicano nodded. He rose heavily from his chair and lumbered to a large wall of pigeonhole boxes. He took a long manila envelope from one of them.

  "What's the FBI interested in a fire for?" he asked. •

  Remo shrugged. "Something to do with taxes. That it?"

>   Calicano opened the manila envelope, which was perforated with holes and tied in the back with red string.

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  "Yeah." From the envelope, he took a sheet of paper and a smaller white envelope.

  "Have to sign here first," he said.

  Remo took a pen and as he started to sign his signature, he couldn't remember the name that was on his FBI identification card. Richard. Richard something. He finally wrote Richard Williams.

  Without a glance at it, Calicano put the sheet on the desk and opened the white envelope. He dropped the golden medal out on his hand. He handed it to Remo. Remo took the medal in his right hand and the white envelope in his left.

  He looked at the medal. He made a show of bouncing it on his palm. He held it up to the light as if inspecting it for microscopic scratches, then nodded, and as Calicano watched, appeared to drop it back into the white envelope, licked the flap of the envelope, and sealed it tight. He handed it back to the policeman.

  "Okay," he said. "That's all I need."

  He turned away. Calicano dropped the white envelope back into the large manila envelope, then picked up the white sheet Remo had signed.

  He looked at it, then called out, "Hey, Williams."

  Remo stopped and turned. "Yeah?"

  "I thought your name was Quigley. On your ID," the patrolman said.

  Remo nodded. "An old card," he explained. He walked away, leaving the policeman scratching his head and wondering why that Williams, that name and that face, seemed familiar somehow. Like somebody he knew once. But the baseball game was coming on, and Calicano turned on the set and forgot Williams and the medal. Until that night, when he woke in bed, his face contorted like a man

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  who'd seen a ghost. He sat quietly for a moment, listening to his heart beating in his temple, then told himself he was being foolish, that Remo Williams had died many years ago, and promised himself that he would go easy on the linguine with white clam sauce because it always affected him this way.

  He lay back and went to sleep with a smile on his face.

  to

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  CHAPTER SIX

  Dr. Smith handed the golden medal to Chiun. The two men stood facing each other across Smith's desk, and though the CURE director was not inordinately tall, he was a full foot taller than the aged Oriental.

  "Recognize this?" Smith asked. Chiun fondled the medal, then quickly slipped it into one of the folds of his voluminous yellow daytime robe.

  "It is the symbol of Sinanju," he said. "Remo said that you gave it to Ruby," Smith said.

  "Ah, yes. Remo. And where is he now?" Chiun said.

  "That medal was found in a fire. Ruby's dead," said Smith.

  "Yes," said Chiun, his face impassive, his voice bland and without emotion.

  Smith had seen and heard the look and voice hundreds of times, but still they made him uncomfortable. He knew that he was considered emotionless by the few people who knew him. But Chiun, when he chose to be, could be colder and harder than Smith ever dreamed of being. The CURE di-

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  rector was also suspicious of Chiun's apparent inability to understand CURE and what it did. He was sure that Chiun understood a lot more than he appeared to.

  "I think Remo is trying to find the people who were responsible for the fire," Smith said.

  "And were people responsible for it?" Chiun asked.

  Smith nodded. "It was arson. Remo sent me some information on someone who might have been involved. When we put it through the computers, it turned out that the man involved was the man whose property was first to burn in this string of fires. Solly Martin. We obtained a picture of him from his family, and now Remo has it."

  Chiun nodded. Smith felt uncomfortable standing up, but Chiun made him feel awkward about sitting down unless Chiun sat first.

  "These fires? They were set for a fee?" Chiun asked.

  "Yes, Master," said Smith. "This Martin and a young boy . . . they have been working their way across the country, setting fires for hire." He was surprised to see concern show itself across Chiun's wrinkled face.

  "A young boy?"

  "We know very little about him, except that he is thirteen or fourteen years old. Why he should be involved with Martin, we don't know. He's not a relative. We've checked that out."

  "These fires," Chiun asked. "Are they started in the conventional way?"

  Smith looked at Chiun with narrowed eyes. The vertical frown lines over his nose deepened.

  "Well, actually, no," he said. "They are unusual because they start without . . ."

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  "Tinder," Chiun supplied. "And fuel."

  Smith nodded. "Why?" he asked. "Is this important?"

  "It is important to me," Chiun said. "Where is Remo?"

  "I don't know. There's been a string of fires in cities headed west. I gave the list to Remo. He's probably following it. Do you want it?"

  Chiun shook his head. "All American cities sound alike to me. New something or some Indian or some saint. I will find Remo on my own."

  He walked from the office. As Smith watched him go, he sank into his chair. He wished he had been able to find out why the fact that a child was involved in the arson cases was important.

  Chiun paused in the hallway outside Smith's office. He withdrew the gold Sinanju medal from his robes and looked at it with a smile. He flipped it up and down in his hand a few times, as if weighing it, then put it back into his robes.

  Then he walked away quickly. This time he was not smiling.

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  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Remo sat in the front seat of his car, folding his map, but every time he folded it, the panel he wanted to look at kept coming up on the inside.

  The next stop would be St. Louis. He was sure of it. The fires had been following a pattern, from White Plains to Newark, then city by city, small city by small city, first down the Atlantic coast, and then westward across the country. He looked up and saw a road sign that read 40 miles to St. Louis.

  He threw the map out the window into the roadway and stomped on the gas pedal.

  In St. Louis, he had no idea where to look to find an arsonist. Did they have hiring halls, like longshoremen? Because he could think of nothing better, he registered at a hotel, then stopped to buy a newspaper, and a headline at the bottom of the page caught his eye.

  HOW THE ARSONIST MADE ME A BETTER PERSON ByJoeyGeraghty

  Down at Purchlde's Saloon, where my friend Wallace T. McGinty sits for so long that people try to stick spigots in his ear, he was telling me that there

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  are some things that people won't do, even for money. He proved this to me by explaining that he would never think of running a busload of blind nuns off the road into a ditch.

  "This is a fact," he said.

  I said that he would not know a fact if it bit him in his payment book from Household' Finance. Looking around me in Purchkie's Saloon, I said I knew that you could get anybody to do anything, except perhaps to breed wisely.

  For some reason, Wallace T. McGinty took this personally. He said we would ask the next person through the door, his opinion would decide, and the loser would buy a drink. Since even a fifty-fifty chance to get Wallace T. McGinty to buy his first drink since Harry S. Truman made the world safe for democracy by incinerating Japanese was a bargain, I agreed.

  The first person through the door was Arnold the Matchless, who hangs out in Purchkie's when he is not practicing his profession of turning unsuccessful businesses into urban renewal sites through the application of gasoline and flame.

  Arnold got his name. when, on his very first job as an arsonist, he forgot to bring matches. He tried to ignite the fire with an electric extension cord and wound up getting a shock that put him in the hospital first and in the state pen second. He remembers the matches now.

  "You are asking me," he said, "if there are some things that people will not do for money."

  "That is correct," said W
allace T. McGinty.

  "Of course there are," said Arnold the Matchless.

  "Buy the drink," Wallace T. McGinty told me.

  "Wait a minute," I said. "What, for instance, would you not do for money?" I asked Arnold. "Have you ever turned down a job, any job, for cash? I challenge you to say yes."

  "Yes," said Arnold, and proceeded to tell me about a mutual friend of ours who was once in the business of horses but whose problem was that he was becoming too famous, especially to the police of the gambling squad when they were not busy taking bribes.

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  So this mutual friend was arrested for the seventh time and he was going to spend the rest of his life making little ones out of big ones, and he came to Arnold the Matchless with a proposition, because, he said, Arnold was the only one who could save him. He had Ulis wonderful theory that nothing could happen to him if his records were lost. He was referring to his arrest record.

  "How can I help you?" said Arnold. "For a thousand dollars," said our mutual friend. "What do I have to do?" said Arnold. "Burn my records," said our mutual friend. "Where are they?" said Arnold. "In police headquarters," said our mutual friend. "Wait a minute," said Arnold. "Let me get this laughably straight. For a thousand bucks you want me to go burn down police headquarters."

  "That is correct," said our mutual friend. "You can pick a time when there are not many cops on duty. This will reduce the death toll."

  Arnold looked at me and then at my friend, Wallace T. McGinty. "And there you are," he said. "This is a thing I will not do for money, this burning down of police headquarters."

  There seeming to be no alternative, I bought Wallace T. McGinty a drink and threw one in for Arnold, top, thereby setting a pattern for the day from which they do not like to deviate.

  Arnold the Matchless is like Dracula. He works only at night, and as the sun set over Purchkie's Saloon, he lurched toward the door, his belly filled with my booze, for which I had better be reimbursed.

  At the door, he stopped and smiled, blinding me with his only tooth.

  "That is why you are never going to be a success in your chosen profession," he said. "Why is why?" I asked.

  "Because you don't ask the right questions," said Arnold.

  "What question did I ask wrong?" I said. "You asked me if I would take money to burn down police headquarters."

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  "Right," I said. "And you said you wouldn't." "Correct," said Arnold. He turned back to the