Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  He recognized Pedley with a lifting of iron-gray brows. “Hello—”

  “How you feel?”

  “Lousy.” Amery didn’t trouble to smile. “But they say I’ll be all right in two or three days if I lie still and don’t try to talk too much.”

  “You can talk to me.”

  “Afraid I can’t tell you much.” The lawyer’s eyes studied him.

  “You’re Miss Lownes’s counsel. You’ll know about her business affairs.”

  The attorney struggled to sit up. “She’s not—”

  “Relax. She’s home. Be all right in a couple days, same like you. I just want to ask some questions about the business setup with her brother.”

  “You think they might have a bearing on the fire?”

  “Most arson does have a money angle. Nine out of ten incendiary cases are for insurance.” Pedley sat on the arm of a tapestried chair, swung one leg idly. “Ned Lownes carry any insurance?”

  Amery shook his head slowly. “Not that I know of. Not enough to make a fuss about, certainly. He’d have been a bad risk.”

  “Miss Lownes didn’t have her brother insured—with herself as beneficiary?”

  “Certainly not.” The lawyer’s expression said the very idea was distasteful. “You seem pretty sure the fire was set.”

  “Positive. First thing we have to do, to find who set it, is determine whether he was a pyromaniac or a firebug.”

  “Don’t they operate much the same?”

  The corners of the marshal’s lips came down; he moved his head from right to left, back again. “Pyro’s a pathological misfit who sets a blaze because of an irresistible impulse. Firebug does it for a reason. Usually a dollar-and-cents reason. Sometimes to cover up another crime.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of motive.” The telltale wheeze came into Amery’s speech. “I meant their methods.”

  “Methods differ, too. Your pyro always works alone. He’s afraid to tell anyone what he’s done; generally he doesn’t know what he’s going to do long enough in advance to get an accomplice. But the firebug has to work with somebody, or for somebody, if he’s going to make any money at it.”

  Amery smiled thinly. “Unless he sets fire to his own property.”

  “Of course. There’s another difference, more important. From my angle. Most pyros don’t have any system about the way they start their fires. They just cook up a scheme on the spur of the moment, when the fever hits them. But your professional usually has some pet gimmick he’s doped out to delay the starting of the blaze until he can get far enough away to establish an alibi. Maybe the setup varies a little from job to job, but the system is the same.” Pedley licked the burn on the back of his hand. “There was a gimmick in the dressing-room at the Brockhurst.”

  “Ah—!” Amery sighed; some of the apprehension seemed to go out of the frosty eyes. “Something you can trace to a known criminal—because of the similarity in the modus operandi?”

  “No. New one on me.” The marshal didn’t elaborate. “But I expect I’ll run into it again, or something like it. Might be in a few days, maybe a few months. If the person who torched the theater did it for dough, he won’t be likely to turn another trick until the money he got for that job is spent. On the other hand, if it was done to cover up a crime—say, murder—” He paused; the lawyer was staring up at the ceiling—“then he might strike again in a hurry.”

  “Obviously,” Amery said gloomily, “you have somebody in mind.”

  “We have some leads. Whenever a bug uses apparatus to get a delayed-fuse effect, the apparatus is evidence. Given enough evidence, we can put the party in a cell. Doesn’t mean we can’t use help. In the way of tips.”

  “Sorry I can’t oblige you, Marshal. I haven’t a notion.”

  “You were there when it happened!”

  “I wouldn’t be here, otherwise.” Amery closed his eyes.

  “You saw this Ned Lownes come in the theater, schwocked to the gills, and start ribbing his sister—”

  “Oh, that.” The lawyer lifted a hand in deprecation. “That had been going on for weeks. Ned was sore at Leila—because of Gaydel.”

  “The producer?”

  “Chuck Gaydel. Yes.”

  “Was this agency lad playing knees with her, or something?”

  “Sleeping with her?” Amery grimaced; the movement of his facial muscles hurt the burn along his jaw. “I wouldn’t be surprised. Leila’s rather—oh—indiscriminate, that way. But that wasn’t what caused the trouble.”

  “What was?”

  “Ned resented Gaydel’s running the show; telling Leila what to sing, how to sing it, and so on. Left nothing for Ned except a back seat, you see.”

  “They’d had disagreements about it? The producer and her brother?”

  “Oh, yes. But Ned didn’t dare to blow off at Gaydel. He did that once; Chuck sent him to the dentist for repairs.”

  Pedley moved to the bed. “They didn’t patch it up?”

  “Well—I guess they did. But after that, Ned took his spleen out on Leila. That’s what was behind that nasty business on the stage, this afternoon.”

  “A smart prosecutor,” the marshal said, “could make out a prima-facie case against this Gaydel, all right. He’d had a run-in with deceased, previously. He knew his way around the theater and the dressing-rooms. He could have rigged up this apparatus I told you about. And he was one of the last persons to see Lownes alive. But”—he leaned over the end of the cot—“all that leaves your client in a very bad light. If Gaydel fixed it so her brother’d get burned to death, she’d have to have known about it! Because she was there; she came downstairs with Gaydel after—”

  “Stop!” Amery sat bolt upright, coughing. “By God, I won’t have you using my words to—to crucify Leila!” Little blue veins stood out on his forehead like fine lines in marble. “You keep your hands away from her, or—” a spasm doubled him up. Perspiration on the thin face made it leaden. The lawyer choked, fell over on his side in a paroxysm.

  A nurse rushed in—glaring at Pedley—snatched at an ampoule.

  “Get out of here! You must be crazy, stirring up my patient at a time like this!”

  “Your patient—” Pedley went toward the door—“isn’t the only one who’s stirred up. Or the only one who’s been hurt. He’ll be up and around in a day or so. I’m going to see a guy who won’t be.” He turned. “Tell Mister Amery I’ll be seeing him.”

  Chapter Six

  ENOUGH TO KILL TWO

  ON THE WAY ACROSS TOWN to the somber stone building on East Twenty-sixth, one question repeated itself in the marshal’s mind like a groove-worn record: Why had Leila been the only one to try to save Ned Lownes? Admit the man was a no-good heel. Still, in emergencies, people thought of saving life without regard to the merits of the person in danger.

  Of course, if Terry Ross and Paul Amery and Hal Kelsey and Chuck Gaydel had all assumed that Lownes was already dead when he’d been lugged upstairs, that would explain their lack of ordinary human decency. But it would also imply a conspiracy to cover up his death by the fire. Which in turn must have involved Leila—yet the girl obviously knew her brother was alive or she wouldn’t have attempted his rescue. It didn’t add up.

  He was still turning it over in his mind when he walked into the morgue.

  “If you come calling on that Lownes feller, he’s still upstairs, Marshal.” The dour-faced attendant acknowledged Pedley’s arrival with a limp salute.

  “Didn’t expect they’d be through with him, Mike. Where’s the inventory?”

  “Right in here. I got a nice warm lower reserved for him.” Mike chuckled at the ancient jest as he opened the door to the cold room.

  The things that had been in Lownes’s clothing were spread out on a soapstone slab alongside his suit, shoes, shirt, tie, underclothing. Pedley scanned the miscellany swiftly; long acquaintance with the clammy chill and its depressing accompaniment of iodoform and formaldehyde hadn’t overcome his natural re
pugnance.

  A platinum cigarette case with four Pall Malls; pearl-handled combination corkscrew and bottle-cap opener; leather Keytainer with six keys—four tumbler type, one suitcase size, and one flat which might be for a safe-deposit locker; two handkerchiefs, both silk with hand-embroidered initial; a gold wrist watch with the crystal cracked and the hands stopped at 3:26, a fact of no particular importance in Pedley’s experience; a windproof lighter, English, sterling silver, no flint in it; 87 cents in change—and a fat sharkskin wallet.

  Mike poked a wrinkled finger at the last item.

  “If I didn’t know positive they’d checked it, upstairs, I might have helped myself to a leaf of that lettuce. A stew bum like him couldn’t have come by that much, honest.”

  The bill compartment was full; there wasn’t anything as small as a twenty in the lot. Pedley riffled through the thick sheaf; his eyes widened. Century notes—and thousands. More of the latter.

  “Lot of cash for a rummy to be toting, for a fact.”

  “He could’ve filled a swimming pool with twenty-year-old brandy an’ gone under feelin’ no pain whatsoever, Marshal.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have any sorrows to drown, Mike.” He thumbed through the contents of the card pockets.

  Membership card in the “White Rats,” old-timers’ vaudeville club; paid-up dues in the Theatrical Agents’ Association; bills from a tailor, unpaid; bills from a liquor store, three cases of bonded stuff, ditto; receipt from the Hotel Elegante for rent on Suite 48-49; note signed Dolly asking for a loan until her company started rehearsals; corner of a menu-card with a Harlem phone number scribbled in pencil; request from a theater manager in Lexington, Kentucky, inquiring if an old chum couldn’t be put up at the top of the list for one of Leila’s personal appearances; a dozen cards from bond salesmen, shirtmakers, magazine feature writers, yacht brokers.

  One of the cards was stuck to the lining. He had to turn the wallet inside out to get it loose. It wasn’t a card, but a photograph. One of those inch-square snaps on glossy paper.

  It showed Ned and a girl who was clearly Leila the Luscious six or eight years ago. They were both in costume, Ned as a gallant of the nineties, with beaver and Prince Albert; Leila in one of those flouncy Floradora getups. They stood smiling at each other on the shallow front stoop of a brick house with a short flight of narrow, white marble steps. There was nothing on the back of the print to identify the scene, except a date: June, 1939.

  The photo went into a cellophane envelope which Pedley put back in his pocket. The wallet and the rest of the contents went back on the stone slab.

  “Tag this collection for the Prosecutor’s office, Michael me bhoy.” Pedley took the Keytainer. “And if that buddy of yours from the Journal blows in, tip him off there’s no sensational story here. Nothing but a plot to blow up the Times Square subway with an atom bomb.” He went upstairs.

  He traversed nearly the length of the autopsy room before any of the white-gowned group around the table under the operating lamp paid any attention to him. Then a grizzled surgeon backed away from the table, stripping off rubber gloves.

  “What happened to this poor devil, Ben?”

  “He got himself incinerated, Harry. You didn’t have to carve him up to find that out. What about that cut over his eye?”

  “It didn’t come from our old friend, the blunt instrument.” The surgeon scrubbed busily at a washbowl. “You can discount it, anyway. He was in bad shape before that.”

  “Been hitting the hooch?”

  “Plenty of alcohol in his tissues. But it wasn’t precisely what you’d call potable.”

  “No?”

  “Isopropyl. Denatured. Rubbing fluid.”

  “Not for internal use?”

  “Definitely not. He must have taken half a pint of it.”

  “What’s a lethal dose?”

  “Depends. On age, condition, resistance. This man,” the surgeon’s head inclined toward the group clustered under the powerful lamp, “took enough to kill two normal adults.”

  “He was still alive when somebody tried to burn up the corpus.”

  “He wouldn’t have lived long, fire or no fire. He must have been practically paralyzed.”

  “Not so much he couldn’t crawl under a couch to get away from the flames.”

  “How could he see where he was crawling?”

  “Come again—?”

  “First effect of isopropyl is to knock out the optic nerve. An hour after he’d taken the dose, he couldn’t have seen his hand—or anyone else’s hand, for that matter—in front of his face.”

  “Now that—” Pedley rubbed his chin slowly—“might explain one hell of a lot. Could he have taken this massaging fluid without knowing it, Harry?”

  The surgeon shrugged. “You couldn’t. I couldn’t. But a heavy drinker of this type—if he’d been imbibing a good deal beforehand, and if the denatured stuff was mixed with bonded whisky, for instance—he might not have noticed much beyond the sensation of being kicked in the pit of the stomach.”

  “Um. If someone had him hog-drunk, he could have been fed the stuff in a ryeball?”

  “Does such a supposition clear things up?”

  “Like a cyclone. Let me have the report soon’s you can, hah?”

  As a matter of fact, it could simplify matters considerably, Pedley decided, as the sedan bucked a stiff wind up the East Side Highway. The firebug must have known Lownes well enough to drink with him, or at any rate to be with him when the dead man had been in his cups. That ought to narrow down the field a bit.

  At the Hotel Elegante, he crossed the lobby without the customary preliminary of making inquiries of the suave dapperdan behind the desk. Neither did he use the house phone; he simply strolled to the elevator and said “Three” in a bored tone. The clerk didn’t seem interested in Pedley’s destination.

  There were no other passengers. The aged gnome who operated the car didn’t even wait to see which way the marshal turned in the corridor. He went to the left, waited until the elevator had dropped, came back, went up the stairs to the fourth.

  How long it had been since the Elegante had lived up to its name might be a matter for argument; it had been a fly-by-night hostelry as long as Pedley could recall.

  Carney-men in town to buy “slum” for their concessions, out-of-job stock players waiting for the big part that was sure to turn up some day, freaks from the dime museums and ex-chorus girls who cashed an occasional burlesque pay check—these were the normal patrons of the place. Why would a man with $20,000 in his pockets prefer to live in a flea circus like this?

  Suite 48-49 was at the west end of the musty corridor. Pedley had the Keytainer out, was about to try the most worn of the tumbler keys, when he stopped, put his ear to the door. There was someone in Lownes’s suite.

  The knob turned. The door opened. Pedley didn’t wait for it to swing wide, stepped in fast. The man who was coming out bumped into him, head on. A husky blond youth with a thin clarkgable mustache. His gray eyes stared into the marshal’s for an instant of shocked incredulity.

  Then he backed into the room and raised his hands up beside his shoulders. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Wait a minute, now! You’ve got me wrong! Give me a chance to explain!”

  Chapter Seven

  FLORENTINE LEATHER CASE

  PEDLEY GRABBED HIM by the shoulder, spun him around, patted his hip pockets, felt under his armpits. The youth kept his hands up; the engraving on the gold band of his wrist watch was as good as an identification badge: To Chuck—L.L.

  “Put your flippers down.” Pedley closed the door. “Park.” He pointed to an overstuffed chair beside a pedestal on which leered an obscene Japanese wood-statue.

  The producer sat down carefully; he seemed to be more surprised than afraid.

  “Who’d you expect to be waiting for you out in the hall, Gaydel?”

  “Aren’t you a house detective?”

  “Don’t give me that.” P
edley’s eyes roved around the living-room of the suite. The dead man’s taste had run to florid oil paintings of the buckeye or calendar school, mostly of the female form. “This flop-joint couldn’t afford a house man.”

  “I didn’t know—” Gaydel did his best to be convincing.

  “All right. Why were you scared he’d come in blasting?”

  “I don’t suppose I have any real right to be in here. It would be natural for him to assume I’d been ransacking the place.” Gaydel pointed to the open drawers of an ornate desk which stood between the twin windows. Papers, letters, account books lay in a jumble in the drawers; someone had evidently given the desk a going-over.

  “That’s not your handiwork?”

  “No. The suite was a mess when I came in. You can ask the maid. She let me in with her passkey.”

  Pedley moved to the bedroom door. A typhoon couldn’t have left the sleeping quarters in worse confusion. Bureau drawers pulled out and piled beside the bed, their contents scattered over bed and floor; closet open and empty, with suits, shoes, and hats flung helter-skelter over chairs and a studio couch; the bedclothes piled in a heap in front of the bathroom; mattress slashed open and its stuffing littered over the carpet.

  “Going to tell me Ned Lownes was always an untidy tramp?”

  “Of course not. Somebody beat me to it, that’s all.”

  “Spit it out. What were you after?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Pedley went over to him, bent down, put a fist under the producer’s chin, tilted his face up. “You’re not horsing around with a keyhole peeper, mister. You’re talking to the Bureau of Fire Investigation. Better not double-talk.”

  “I don’t know. That’s the truth.”

  “How’d you expect to find it, then?”

  “Oh.” Gaydel tried to evade the fist, without success. “I know what it looks like.”