Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  The someone was singing. Pedley didn’t recognize the tune or the language—probably something the lieutenant had picked up over in the Islands. There was no mistaking the voice.

  Against the starboard side of the 38-footer stood a short, homemade ladder. Pedley went up it quietly, pushed aside the canvas windbreak which served as vestibule door, stepped softly onto the deck.

  The deckhouse was empty and dark. What illumination there was came from the forward companionway. Pedley made no noise opening the deckhouse door—or closing it. The draft an open door could make in weather like this would be fairly noticeable.

  The smell of bacon came up the companionway, along with the liquid melody of the South Seas.

  Pedley went below.

  Conover didn’t hear him. He stood with his back to the companionway, forking strips of golden brown onto a plate.

  “Morning, Lieutenant.”

  The younger man dropped fork and frying pan, whirled on the balls of his feet, ducked into a semicrouch, reached for the back of his neck, recognized the marshal, froze.

  “Used to a collar sheath?” Pedley came down to the galley, leaned against the door to the motor compartment. “Got a knife cached back there? Or was that just habit? Takes a while to forget a routine that’s been hammered into you. Took me five years to forget I didn’t have to jump down a brass pole every time I heard a gong ring somewhere.”

  Conover straightened up, brought his hand away from the neckband of his sweater.

  “And I was expecting you to drop in on me, too.” He grinned, dourly. “I didn’t hear a thing. You must have had one of those commando courses.”

  “You were making too much noise yourself.” Pedley looked around. A good serviceable cruiser; nothing fancy but nothing lacking. White paint instead of varnish work; an iron shipmate in place of the usual compressed gas cookstove.

  But the dish rack was grimy; there were no signs of food anywhere except what the lieutenant had on the stove. No coffee. No butter. A new loaf of bread with only two slices gone.

  It didn’t look as though the Voyageur had been lived on much, now he came to analyze it. No ash trays around. No clothes hanging up.

  “Do your own cooking here, most of the time, Conover?”

  The lieutenant drained a piece of bacon, dropped it onto the plate. “What’s it to you?”

  “I’m interested in cooking. It’s my line, you might say. For instance, you’ve got too much draft through your stove. Guess you haven’t had time to adjust it. Takes a few days.”

  “What if I haven’t been holing up here right along?”

  “You said you were living out here. I didn’t think you were.”

  “What did you think?”

  “That you were—staying in town.”

  Conover shoved the frying pan to the side lids. “I suppose you know where, too!”

  “The Riveredge, for first choice.”

  The lieutenant’s left shoulder dropped, his left arm went back pugnaciously. Then he laughed. “I ought to toss you out on your can, for that.”

  “I don’t toss easy, Lieutenant. I don’t say you couldn’t do it. But you’d be apt to get banged up. And for what? To protect the fair lady’s name? You aren’t so wet behind the ears you think you’re the first male who’s had breakfast with the dame!”

  “All right now! That’s it!” Conover stepped forward with his left foot, bent his head a little; the movement had the effect of sinking his chin behind his left shoulder.

  Pedley didn’t alter his own position, though he recognized the professional slugger’s stance.

  “You shouldn’t expect to stake out a Keep-Off-the-Grass notice on a seductive sal like Leila.”

  “I’m going to beat the living bejeesis out of you. No one can talk that way about my wife!”

  Pedley lifted his hand in the traffic cop’s gesture. “What’s this about the bonds of holy matrimony?”

  “Goddamn your soul!” The lieutenant trembled. “I gave her my word of honor I wouldn’t tell anyone—and here you chivvy it out of me. Well, it’s a fact. We’re married. Been married, over a month.”

  “I’d never doubt the word of an officer and a gentleman. But why’s Leila want to keep it under cover?”

  “She doesn’t, any longer.”

  “Um. Brother Ned was the flea in the ointment?”

  “Who else?”

  “Put it in words of one syllable.”

  “Ned claimed it would hurt her at this stage of her development. He wanted to get her next option taken up or a new contract signed or whatever.”

  “No savvy. Wedding chimes don’t hurt the flicker stars. Some of ’em have been married and de-married three or four times. Sometimes I think they do it just to hit the front pages.”

  Conover scowled darkly. “Suggesting I wed up with Leila because she’s a celebrity?”

  “Cool down. All I meant was, it doesn’t seem a very solid reason for holding your honeymoon in a dimout. Must have been something else.”

  The lieutenant returned to his bacon. “There was. Ned had the Indian sign on Li.”

  “He was holding something over her head.”

  “That,” Conover said dryly, “is the logical supposition.”

  “Something more than photos of the female form divine.”

  “I don’t know what it was.”

  Pedley watched him pour a batter of eggs into the frying pan. “Must have been important enough to ready Lownes for a shroud. To charcoal-grill Kim Wasson within an inch of her life.”

  The fork clattered on the stove lids. The frying pan slid against the guard rail. Conover didn’t turn around, just stood stock-still, his back to the marshal.

  “Kim? When?”

  “Few hours ago. In addition to sending La Wasson to the emergency ward, the blaze put a good ladderman in the hospital and cost the City of New York fifty thousand bucks or so to put the fire out. To say nothing of another fifty the insurance companies will have to pay on the building. Adds up, you see.”

  “How do you know it was set by the same person who started the other fire?”

  Pedley held up a finger. “Your arranger pal was scared out of her scanties that someone would get to her.” He put up a second finger. “The fire was set in her three-room-and-bath down in the Village.” A third digit straightened. “Method was about the same in both cases. Made to look like an accident. Rigged up to give the firebug a chance to be long gone from those parts before the alarm went in.”

  The lieutenant turned around. His face was drawn and tense; there was the same wild light in his eyes Pedley had seen during the piano-pounding scene at Leila’s.

  “If you knew this, why’d you mush out here to check up on me?”

  “I know more than that. Among other things, that Miss Lownes, pardon, Mrs. Conover left the Riveredge about three-quarters of an hour before the fire started in Kim Wasson’s kitchenette; didn’t return until twenty minutes after the alarm went in.”

  The eggs began to smoke; Conover ignored them, clenched his left fist and began to pound the motor-room bulkhead gently.

  “She went down to Sheridan Square. Case you’re not familiar with the Village, that’s not too far from where Kim Wasson lived.” Pedley reached over, took the pan off the stove. “That isn’t all we’ve got. But it’ll do for a starter.”

  “What would you say—” Conover kept on with the tattoo against the bulkhead but his tone was almost placid—“if I told you Leila came downtown to meet me; to get me to go back to her apartment for the night?”

  “I’d say you were lying like a trooper to give your wife an out. Very natural thing to do. Very dumb.”

  “Suppose I admitted I’d been up in Li’s dressing-room when she and Chuck brought Ned up there, yesterday afternoon.”

  “Simple way to dispose of that. We’ll drop in and ask her to sign an affidavit to that effect.”

  Conover shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “Hel
l of a lot of difference it’ll make. Douse the stove. No telling when you’ll be back.”

  Indecision was stamped on Conover’s face. Should he risk a rough-and-tumble? In close quarters here, he might be able to put the marshal away.

  Pedley cast the deciding six votes. “I know. You’ve been trained to take a guy with a gun, Lieutenant. But don’t try judo on me. I’ll wing you so you won’t be much of a husband for a while.”

  They went up the companionway and down the ladder, slogged through the shipyard. Conover appeared to have given up the idea of a break.

  At the sedan, the marshal opened the door on the driver’s side.

  “Get in the saddle.”

  “You want me at the wheel?”

  “Otherwise I’d have to cuff you. Better this way.” He went around the sedan, got in the other side. “And don’t get the notion your hand is quicker than my eye.”

  Conover was a good driver. He made speed back toward the Bridge. A little too much on the icy curves.

  Pedley cautioned him, “You don’t have to bear down on that gas every second!”

  With an angry jut of his jaw, Conover jammed on the brakes.

  The car slurred, skidded in a slow semicircle at fifty.

  It hit the ditch sideways, did a lopsided somersault, and crashed into a telegraph pole with a bang that could have been heard all the way to Harlem.

  Chapter Seventeen

  IN DANGER OF MAKING THE OBITS

  PEDLEY GOT HIS ELBOWS UP in time to cover his face. The door at his side flew open. The violence of the shock threw him free of the car, into a stone wall.

  The cushion of snow helped some, but it was half a minute before he made it to his feet, hobbled to the smashed sedan. Conover wasn’t in sight.

  There were plenty of spots for cover which the lieutenant could have reached in that 30 seconds. Rows of drift-banked billboards, a hedge on the other side of the road, a couple of metal garages less than 100 yards away. In this gray light it would be useless to search; the man could move faster than the marshal could, in his present condition.

  He felt of his thigh. It wasn’t broken; might be black and blue for a year or two, but he could use it.

  That was more than he’d be able to do with the sedan. The front axle formed a V with the rear one; the steering post canted to one side; the windshield looked as if it had been run through a rock crusher.

  But the dashboard was intact; by some miracle the two-way set still seemed to work. He waited anxiously until the tubes warmed up, was relieved to hear the WNYF dispatcher’s “go-ahead.”

  Pedley put in an all-state alarm for Lieutenant William Conover, with complete description. He asked the dispatcher to call his office and relay back reports from Shaner and Barney. Then he asked the battalion chief in the nearest borough division for the loan of a car, shut off the set, and got out and walked while he waited. No sense in getting any stiffer than he was.

  Conover’s escape complicated matters a good deal, but the lieutenant hadn’t promised to clear up the principal problem, anyhow. That, Pedley informed himself bleakly, was a Florentine box about which nobody seemed to know anything, though a number of people were greatly concerned about it.

  Ned Lownes had had it; it was a fair assumption that his having it—or maybe his losing it—was responsible for his murder.

  Chuck Gaydel had been looking for it, but hadn’t found it because some mysterious visitor had evidently abstracted it prior to the producer’s visit to Ned’s hotel rooms.

  Wes Toleman hadn’t been queried on the question, but it was possible the announcer had been looking for the leather case, instead of a gold pencil, when he’d come up to the dressing-room after the fire.

  Kim Wasson had known something about Leila’s past which might be the same secret presumably as the one hidden in the missing box. She’d intimated that the knowledge might have had something to do with Ned’s death; the marshal thought it likely it had been the cause of her own.

  Hal Kelsey had claimed he had the case, and then denied it. At least he guessed the thing’s importance—and might have tried to get it, after Pedley left the Roof.

  And Terry Ross—Ross had known about the thing, but had kept the knowledge from Pedley, even under considerable pressure. He’d tried to get it from the orchestra leader, to the extent of offering a price for it. Whether Ross had been making that offer on his own or for Leila—it was necessary to know that. And since the publicity man knew the value of the leather box, it was reasonable to suppose he had a pretty good idea what was in it. Mister Ross was a man to put on the carpet and without delay.

  The car that arrived to pick him up, presently dropped him at the Olympiad Athletic Club; the probationer who had driven handed over the keys.

  “She’s yours, Marshal. The chief has a spare he can use until you return this jeep.”

  Pedley said, “Thanks much,” went into the huge lobby.

  At the desk he held a sotto voce discussion with an assistant manager who was sufficiently awed to produce a passkey.

  Upstairs the marshal unlocked the door of 67, picked up the morning newspaper tucked inside the sill, switched on the lights.

  Terry Ross pulled the sheet up over his eyes, mumbled, “Go ’way.”

  Then he did a double take, jerking the sheet down off his face, sitting up gawk-eyed. He moaned, “Are you in again?”

  “Tut, tut.” Pedley dropped into a modern chair that brought his knees up on a level with his eyes. “Didn’t actually think I’d been pulled off the case, did you?”

  Ross loosened the neckband of his red-and-white striped pajamas, propped himself up on one elbow, ran fast fingers through his mat of curly hair.

  “What you want, waking me up in the middle of the night?”

  “The eight-o’clock just blew. Let us then be up and doing.” He tossed the newspaper onto the bed. “All the news that’s print to fit. Story on page one. Third column.”

  Ross grabbed the paper; the gargoyle features became a caricature of consternation.

  “It says”—he had difficulty speaking—“Kim’s on the critical list. Is she going to—?”

  “Live? Long enough to tell us what she knows, I imagine. Get up. Put your clothes on. Unless you want to go downtown looking like a barber pole.”

  “Downtown?”

  “Pokey. The sneezer. The clink. May not have all the comforts of this cozy little establishment, but the board is free.”

  Ross rolled out of bed. “I’ll give you any odds you care to name that you can’t arrest me and keep me in jail twelve hours.”

  “When you’re working for the City, you learn not to take bets, fella. Sometimes they turn out to be bribes. Anyhow, I’m not going to arrest you, skutch. I’m going to detain you. As a material witness. You shouldn’t beef. It’s for your own protection.”

  “I had some of your protection last night. My stomach’s still sore.”

  “You think you can take care of yourself. That’s what Kim Wasson thought. I’m here to tell you; all of you people who’re in the know on this Lownes business are in danger of making the obit column. Unless—you spill what you know.”

  Ross went into the shower. “I told you what I know.”

  “In a pig’s eye! You were hep to her boy friend, Lieutenant Conover. I don’t recall you mentioned him.” Pedley reached for the phone. “Room service, please… Two pots of coffee, to sixty-seven. Better make it three. Mister Ross, yes.” He hung up, grinned at the dripping face the publicity man poked around the bathroom door. “Thing that really rubs me wrong, you failed to report on the bone of contention you and Kelsey are battling over. The radio show.”

  “What have those things to do with the fire—fires?”

  Pedley gazed down at the caterpillars of traffic crawling southward out of Central Park. “I’m not one of these geniuses who can lean back with a pipeful of hashish and dream up the answers. But Lownes was incinerated because he had some peculiar hold on his sister. You s
aid yourself he knew where the body was hidden. His sword of Damocles seems to have been that leather case, or what’s in it.”

  Ross interrupted his shaving to say, “Photos. Indiscreet, from what Leila says. Possibly worse than that.”

  “That’s the bunkola. Only thing that would hurt her to any extent is something that could be published. If there were pictures and they were indelicate, they couldn’t be published. Conclusion; something besides glossy prints in the Florentine case.”

  “How do you dope out these things?”

  “With mirrors. Take another trip through the looking glass with me. I see an arsonist who faces a fifteen-thousand-volt hotfoot up at Sing Sing. He’s so afraid of it, he touches off a second blaze to keep Kim Wasson from telling what she knows. And, sure as hellfire, he’s not going to stop there. He might as well be electrocuted for a sheep as a lamb. Which is the same as a death warrant for anyone else who may be able to point the finger his way. Including especially you.”

  The waiter came. Pedley signed the check with Ross’s name, laid a half dollar on the tray, helped himself to a cup.

  Ross came out in batik shorts and a burgundy shirt with collar points that reached halfway to his belt. “Why me? I’m simply a guy trying to make a clean dollar. I keep my nose strictly out of affairs which don’t concern me.”

  “You’re working for La Lownes. Even if you’re not wise to whatever it is in her past that needs hiding, you’re more’n likely to know the party who’s willing to burn down the town to prevent her secret from being made public.”

  “I never heard a breath of scandal about her.”

  “Wouldn’t be scandal. You’d know how to cover that. Or tone it down. Or even build it up, make capital of it. My weegee board says it has to be something more serious than a breach of promise. Say, something illegal.”

  “Not for all the dough in Morgan’s. I’d have had wind of anything like that, positively.”

  “You see? Just claiming you’d know puts you in a position where you’d do well to consider the merits of the steel, or indestructible, casket as compared to ordinary, or soft, pine. Climb into your pants.”