Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  Pedley said it probably would.

  The Van Doorn Arms looked down upon the sparkling blue of the Hudson and the oily swirls of Spuyten Duyvil; on a clear day you could see most of Manhattan from the Gaydel apartment. The rooms were like the view, big and pleasant.

  Mrs. Chuck was a good-looking woman with henna-dyed hair and a figure that implied dieting. She wouldn’t be any competition to Leila in a bathing suit, but she was agreeably wholesome and probably a straight-shooter. Pedley liked her.

  She was even more distressed than her husband had appeared to be.

  “I’m half out of my wits, Mister Marshall—”

  “Pedley.”

  “Of course. Mister Pedley. You’ll have to excuse me, I’m so gidgety about Chuck. If he keeps on having insomnia about the show the way he has—”

  “Keeps him on edge, hah?”

  “He’s been lying awake half the night. Getting up, prowling in the icebox, playing solitaire—to get so he can take as much as a cat nap.”

  “This been going on for some time?”

  “Well—” She hesitated. “It’s been worse the last couple of weeks. He’s so sensitive to people’s reactions. It upsets him when things don’t go along, smoothly.” She brought out three large imitation-leather books. “These are the clippings. You aren’t going through all of them—”

  “I’ll browse around in ’em for a while, if you don’t mind.”

  “Make yourself at home.”

  He had just located the press book for the year 1939 when a vision in pink and chocolate wafted into the room. She was about five—very bright and alert. The pink was a corduroy jumper-dress; the chocolate, around her mouth.

  “I’m Gwenny,” she announced.

  “Hello, Gwenny.”

  “My whole name’s Gwendolyn Elizabeth Gaydel but they call me Gwenny for short. I’m five. How old are you?”

  “Ninety, going on ninety-one, way I feel, Gwenny.” He skipped around in the yellowed Manila pages—

  Lownes Clicko at Bijou.—Dancesong Duo Held Over Another Week.—Looker Can Warble Too. Norfolk, Canton, Steubenville papers. Mostly good notices. A few N. S. G. Fifty-fifty Act, read one excerpt from a Trenton sheet. The Lownes team, brother and sister, got boos and applause in about equal proportions on their three-day stay here at the Academy. The down-thumbs were for Ned Lownes’s time-tested eccentric steps; the clap-hands for Leila’s blue-cooing. The routine of this pair could stand some brushing up.

  “What you looking for?” Gwendolyn put a sticky paw on the corner of the press book.

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be looking,” Pedley answered.

  “My mother says you’re looking for people who set fires.”

  “Did she say that?”

  “I like to set fires, mister.”

  “Well, that’s a habit lots of little boys and girls have, Gwenny. But it’s an awful bad habit.”

  “Why?”

  “It destroys things. Hurts people.” Pedley found a cutting from the Baltimore Sun:

  The Lownes & Lownes twosome, new to these boards, received a rousing welcome here yesterday. Ned L. clever with his feet and Leila doesn’t have to be clever, with what she has to show the customers. The clipping had been marked with red crayon.

  Baltimore, he said to himself. That rang a bell, didn’t it? Baltimore—

  “My daddy says sometimes fires help people instead of hurting them.” Gwendolyn was practically in his lap, now.

  “When did Daddy say that?”

  “Last night. And he said that he wouldn’t blame Leila if she’d burned the old theater down—” she was breathless—“and killed that nasty old man.”

  “I don’t expect Daddy meant it just that way, young lady.”

  “Yes, he did, too. Because he said he knew all the time Leila was going to do it sometime and the sooner it was over the better. Do you know Leila?”

  “Well,” Pedley said. “I thought I did.”

  He took the Sim paper clipping with him.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  THIRD FATALITY

  PEDLEY PHONED FROM a cigar-store booth on Two Hundred and Thirty-second Street.

  “Mister Molloy? Good evening, Mister Molloy, have you had your nightly ptomaines yet?”

  Barney said, “No, sir. I have not.”

  “High time you corrected this state of affairs.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Pedley hung up.

  He drove down the West Side Express Highway without using his blinkers and he didn’t once run through a red. He crossed town at Canal, went south again, turned the ignition off around the corner from Park Row.

  At the cashier’s desk in Ptomaine Pete’s he paused. “Top of the evening, Marshal.” The hollow-cheeked proprietor ducked his head in greeting.

  “I’m not here, if anyone calls.”

  “You’re not here.” Pete made it a statement.

  “You haven’t seen me. I’m dead and I’m going to be buried in one of your back booths.”

  Pete didn’t bat an eyelid. “I’ll liquidate anybody who says diff’rent.”

  Pedley had finished his second cup of black coffee laced with bourbon before Barney limped down the long row of tables.

  The fireman was pleased with himself, apparently, for he sang beneath his breath,

  “I don’ want no whisky

  I don’ want no gin

  I jus’ want wild wimmen

  An’ sin… sin… sin.”

  “Whose dish of cream have you been lapping up, Barnabus?”

  “I’m derelict in my duty, boss.” Barney stood as straight as he could, considering his game leg, tugged at his bow tie, hiked his belt up over the paunch that was just beginning to make itself show. “I forget to bring you a highly important document.”

  “Consider yourself bawled out.”

  “The commish will be annoyed, I fear. ’Twas an order of temporary suspension, boss. Under Rule Twenty-Two of Department Regulations, such an order becomes effective when and as received. And there it is, a-laying on your desk. You ain’t received it.”

  “Pity. Doesn’t appoint any acting marshal, does it?”

  “Uh, uh. Under Civil Service, Chief of Department’s supposed to take over, isn’t he?”

  “Yair. Hunneford would be nominally in charge tomorrow morning. Only he’s at that convention in Chicago.”

  “You think maybe the commissioner thought of that?” Barney asked.

  “He might have. He’s learned the First Lesson of City Hall: people don’t care so much what their public officials do, as what they say.” Pedley filled his cup with Pete’s special extra-strong coffee. “Ollie hadn’t heard a thing about the suspension.”

  “She hadn’t?” Barney was plainly astonished. “But I thought—”

  “So did I. Just goes to show. You and I aren’t the only ones who don’t trust females. Eat hearty. It’s on the firm.”

  “I could eat the saddle off a cop’s motorcycle.” Barney ordered clam broth, chicken cacciatore, salad Ptomaine and mince pie. “There’s no word of that ex-paratrooper or whatever he is.”

  “Marine. Lieutenant. He’s a starker, Conover is. Had to be, to prowl around behind Jap lines, couple of weeks at a time. Shaner hasn’t picked him up at the Lownes apartment?”

  Barney shook his head. “Ed calls in, howsomever, with a request for you to ring him back.”

  “I’ll get around to that in a minute. What about that list of cleaners?”

  “I got everybody working on it, boss. No trouble to check Ross’s wardrobe. Or the Gaydel fella’s. Still working on Kelsey, Amery, Toleman, and Miss Lownes.”

  “It might be the clincher. But if the boys haven’t brought in Kelsey’s suits, we’re likely to be S.O.L.”

  “Why?”

  “The ork leader is numbered among the missing. Hasn’t been heard from since he left his hotel this morning.”

  “Guilty conscience?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. B
ut from what Staro said, it could be. That sweet thing, Toleman, put in his two cents’ worth—and it points to Kelsey, too. In any case, we’ll need that report from the cleaners to go into court. Anything new on the candy box?”

  “Came from Schrafft’s.”

  “That’s a great help. Hardly anybody buys candy at Schrafft’s except five or ten thousand people a day!”

  “This was one of those holly-day gift packages.”

  “Now you’re closing in! Practically nobody bought those!”

  “Give us time, boss.”

  “Hell, Barno! We can’t afford any more time. I’m not thinking about the suspension, either. That lightning-bug is going to strike again, you can bet your tail on that!”

  “Oke-nawa. They’ve got that box under the lenses, now. By morning they may be able to tell you the name of the dentist who filled the cavity that ached when the guilty party chewed on the bonbons. Say, there was another call for you. From a girl name of Bernard.”

  “Amery’s secretary. What’d she say?”

  Barney pulled a Racing Form out of his pocket, studied hieroglyphics penciled in the top margin. “I thought maybe you’d wish me to be accurate in this matter, so I took it down in shorthand.”

  “I’ll get around to calling you ‘Friday,’ presently.”

  “She said, ‘Mister Amery wishes to inform Mister Pedley that the insurance policies on Mister Lownes will amount to two thousand five hundred dollars, that he died intestate as far as can be determined, that the estate will probate a little less than forty thousand after repayment of funds which are the property of Lownes Enterprises, Inc., that stock in that corporation is of no par value and was owned by Mister Lownes, five hundred shares, Miss Lownes, four hundred ninety shares, Terence Ross, ten shares. Mister Amery will be at home this evening if Mister Pedley wishes to call him.’ Boy, whatta mouthful. What’s intestate?”

  “Means died without leaving any will. A stew-bum like Lownes would have done that.”

  “Who gets the dough, then?”

  “His sister, I expect. She’ll also get those shares in the corporation—which is herself. That might be an angle.”

  “You don’t think she would’ve bumped off her own brother?”

  Pedley took his time about answering. “I wouldn’t exclude it as a possibility. She had a lot to gain—and she may have thought that even if she was found out, a jury would refuse to convict her on account of the way Lownes had treated her.”

  “But, boss! That would mean she’s the one who blew up the Wasson kid’s apartment, too.”

  “We can’t write that off, either. But one thing sure, Barney. We’ll be two of the most unpopular people in town if we have to bring this home to an ‘idol of the air-waves.’”

  “You can’t believe she did it!” Barney held knife and fork poised halfway to his mouth. “Two fires. Two murders. To say nothing of putting this Staro up to nearly giving you a case of permanent pneumatism. I couldn’t believe it.”

  Pedley added more whisky to the coffee. “She had motive and opportunity to do the Brockhurst job; she had opportunity and a possible motive for touching off the Horatio Street one. And she seems to have most of the crew who work with her covering up for her.”

  “Ah! If all this assorted arson was to keep what’s in the leather case out of the public purview, why’d she have set the fires before she had the gimmick? Why wouldn’t she wait? This way, the police might turn it in or some smart-jacks newsman might lay hands on it—spilling the beans to hell and gone.”

  Pedley regarded him quizzically. “Every once in a while I get the cockeyed notion that the bureau would do better if you were in my number elevens and I was in yours. This is one of those moments, Mister Molloy. The query you’ve just propounded has been buzzing around in my head for several hours. I don’t know the answer. The book says a detective should never admit he doesn’t know which end is up. But I don’t know.”

  Barney reddened. “I was just shooting off the cuff, boss. But there are still a few other prospects for the defendant’s chair, not so?”

  “Sure. Several. Toleman. Kelsey. Conover. Which reminds me—” He put his napkin on the table, headed for the phone booth.

  Shaner mumbled incoherently at his end of the telephone line.

  “Peanuts, skipper.”

  “What?”

  “Mouthful—peanuts. I’ve had no sustenance all afternoon. Excuse, pliz.”

  “Seen the lieutenant?”

  “Nary glimpse.”

  “What about the babe upstairs? She still sulking in her tent?”

  “She’s there now. But—”

  “Has she been out?”

  “For about half an hour.”

  “Where?”

  “Lemme tell you about that, coach—”

  “You let her get away from you, you bird-brained—”

  “I got her back again. She comes home to roost after I momentarily and with good and sufficient reason, allowed her to escape my keen scrutiny.”

  “Get to it.”

  “About four-forty-five Miss L. comes out of the apartment building and starts over toward Sutton Place. With me right behind her. She isn’t wearing any hat or coat so I know she can’t be intending to go far in this kind of weather. She has a long envelope; she heads for the mailbox at the corner of Fifty-seventh and the Place. You know.”

  “I know what a mailbox looks like.”

  “Well, she moseys up to the box, looks around quicklike as if she wishes no one to catch her in the act. I’m half a block behind her and across the street—so naturally I duck into a doorway. Then I bethink myself of your trick about letters mailed by suspects and I figure I’d be smart to copy your procedure.”

  “She was probably posting the check for the gas bill, that’s all.”

  “It looked to me like an important missive. So, anyway, I wait till she comes back past the door where I am tying my shoelace. It seems plain she is intending to return straightway to the Riveredge. Which will give a minute to scribble a few words to the postman on a blotter which I happen to have in my pocket, asking him to make note of the address of the letter which he will find underneath the blotter and have the post office notify the Bureau of Fire Investigation.”

  “While you’re doing all this, the little lady gives you the slip!”

  “She crosses me up. That going out with no coat or hat; that was evidently done with malice aforethought. Because when I get back to the Riveredge, the elevator man says she’s not returned.”

  “Remind me to assign you to a wheel-chair suspect, next time.”

  “She’s only gone half an hour before she comes breezing back, skipper.”

  “She could have bonfired the Grand Central in that time.”

  “It won’t happen again, I guarantee positively.”

  “Forgetsis. You’re not the only one in the bureau who hasn’t been able to keep track of a dame. Let me talk to your PBX chum—Hello, charming, put me through to Miss Lownes’s apartment, will you?… Miss Lownes… this is the Fire Marshal.”

  “Oh, hello, Mister Pedley.” Her voice had no traces of alarm or concern in it.

  “Going to be home around nine?”

  “If you’re coming to see me, I’ll be home.” She sounded like a bobby-soxer accepting an invitation from her favorite boy friend.

  “Around nine, then. ’By.”

  He walked back to the table in deep thought, came out of it only when Barney jabbed the newspaper under his nose.

  “The newsboy came in while you were in the booth, so I grabbed a copy. To see if they print anything about your suspension. But look!”

  Pedley felt a cold prickle at the back of his neck as he read it:

  BAND LEADER SUICIDE

  ————

  Hal Kelsey Slashes

  Throat in Park

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  PLAIN, ORDINARY MURDER

  AT THE SEVENTY-SECOND STREET entrance to the Park, a policeman wi
th a traffic-wheel patch on the sleeve of his overcoat stood in the middle of the southbound lane, blocking the road and waving traffic east and west. Twenty yards behind him and not more than ten feet from the sidewalk of Central Park West, two police sedans had been parked. A little group of plain-clothes men clustered around something covered with a snow-coated tarpaulin. A couple of feet away a dark felt hat showed under a thin covering of white.

  Two men were down on their knees making moulage casts of shoeprints in the show. A photographer arranged his tripod so the heavy police camera could point down at the tarpaulin at a close, steep angle. One man wrote in a notebook, looking up every now and then at the barrel-chested, cigar-chewing district detective-captain who was supervising the on-the-spot investigation.

  The men from Homicide glanced up as the head lamps of Pedley’s car swung around from the crosstown lane and spilled twin shafts of burgundy over the parkway’s ermine.

  The marshal slid his borrowed car to a stop on the opposite side of the road from the group, got out and joined them.

  “Somebody ring a box in, Marshal?” the captain wanted to know. “This isn’t down your alley.”

  “Hell it isn’t!” Pedley glanced at the trampling of footprints around the tarpaulin. “There’s a lug down in the Tombs who’s been trying to tell me this dead man,” he pointed a toe at the thing under the canvas, “was the one who set the Brockhurst Theater on fire.”

  “You can wrap that one up and stick it in the ‘closed’ file, then. This guy didn’t wait to be apprehended. He took the short cut.”

  “Sure it’s Kelsey?” the marshal inquired.

  The captain stooped, lifted the tarpaulin.

  It was the band leader, all right. The dead man lay on his stomach with his head turned to one side. There was a small, irregular blotch of dark red on the snow beneath his chin. The fingers of his left hand were also splotched with blood. The right hand lay flung out on the snow at his side; the fingers were tightly clenched. A foot beyond them, the ebony handle of an old-fashioned straight-bladed razor projected from the snow. The blade itself was buried; whether there was blood on it, Pedley couldn’t see. But he noticed something else that made him narrow his eyes and hold back the captain’s arm when the plain-clothes man would have recovered the body.