Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  “I thought that, myself. Why cut Gaydel in on it?”

  “Especially when she’s just married a marine who’d feed Chuck to the goldfish if he thought the producer was still fooling around.”

  “Wes says Kim Wasson will verify his story, soon as she can talk. Says the arranger met Leila through Chuck when he was running a one-tube station down in Baltimore four or five years ago.”

  “Baltimore, again. Makes the third time. Adds up.” Pedley took out the snapshot of Leila and Ned. “I found this stuck in the lining of Lownes’s wallet. Looked as if he’d been hanging onto it a long time. Must have been a reason. And this was snapped in Baltimore.”

  “Clairvoyance? Or do you have inside information?”

  “Only town I know where half the houses have the same kind of low front steps. White marble. They don’t really eat off ’em, but they keep ’em scrubbed clean enough to.”

  Ollie ruffled the pages of the magazines on the long binder-stick. “Take a little of that. Add a dash of this”—she pointed to an item in an issue of Show, dated March 26, 1940:

  PROGRAM MANAGER HAILS SINGING FIND

  Chaney J. ‘Chuck’ Gaydel, who provides entertainment for local thousands over WBIZ predicts a sensational success for his new songbird Leila Lownes who is being starred in a noontime program at 12:15 daily: Songs You Remember to Love. Miss Lownes is also appearing at the Academy for the balance of the week. This is her first appearance on a radio program of her own.

  Pedley read it carefully. “That could be the tip-off, toots.” He caught Ollie by the arm. “If we stay in here much longer, they’ll be asking us to sign a lease. Leave us hence.”

  She didn’t ask where they were heading. Not until he’d parked on Broome Street and they were entering the rattletrap old building did she comment at all.

  “I’m completely in the dark, Ben. Apparently you see a gleam of light.”

  “One candle power. A mile away. In a tunnel.”

  They went upstairs, past a row of benches at which men in laboratory dusters were sitting, eyes glued to the dual eyepieces of comparison microscopes. One of the men crooked a finger in Pedley’s direction.

  “I have the analysis on those granules when you want ’em, Marshal.”

  “Haven’t located any to check against them yet, Sol. But the boys’ll come up with something from the cleaners, don’t worry.”

  Ollie poked a finger toward a twisted shape of aluminum wire.

  “What do you expect to find out from a coat hanger, Ben?”

  “Came from the dressing-room, Ollie. Buckled in the heat. Shows the temperature went above twelve hundred. Wood doesn’t burn that hot. Proof there actually was naphtha in the bottle.”

  He stopped at the door of a long, hall-like room where two men were working with a spectrograph. One of the technicians pointed to a segment of charred wood, a piece Shaner had cut out of the dressing-table. The “alligatorings,” which checked the burned surface into cracked, irregular squares, had been cut through to show the depth and extent of the char.

  “Comes to about eighteen minutes, close as we can average it, Marshal.”

  “Thanks, Johnny.” To Olive he explained, “Length of time the blaze had been going. Figured from the time the wood started to burn until spray cooled the surface enough to crack it, like that. Fixes the hour the fire was set. Some wise-boy for the defense is sure to challenge an offhand opinion, unless we can back it up with data.” They walked through into a photographic studio, with more elaborate equipment than any Olive had ever seen. A sergeant in an undershirt greeted Pedley boisterously.

  “I must of heard Shaner wrong, Marshal. I thought he told me those pages of script had been burned in a grate fire.”

  “They were, Matt.”

  “If you say so. But they could have as well been ignited by spontaneous combustion.” The sergeant flushed, glancing at Olive. “Beg your pardon, miss. If that’s your handwriting—?”

  “It isn’t.” She laughed reassuringly. “I just came along for the riot.”

  Pedley said, “Maybe it’s too torrid for her to see. She’s a young thing and should not shock her mother.”

  “We-ell.” The sergeant rubbed his hands. “They’re hotter’n a cookstove at threshing time but there’s nothing to hurt a girl who’s free, white, and been around.” He indicated chairs facing a small, silvered screen mounted on the wall at one end of the room. “We haven’t had time to make negatives of the lot, but if those we have so far are a fair sample—” He whistled much as Barney had, in the cigar store.

  Pedley asked, “What are they? Letters?”

  “No. Not exactly a diary, either.” The sergeant switched off the wall lights. “It’s more as if this jane was doing a strip tease on paper. It’s a cinch she didn’t think her stuff would ever get on the screen.”

  An illuminated square showed on the wall.

  “We magnified eight diameters. Lost a lot of it because the surface of the burned pages wasn’t flat. But what we have ought to give you a working basis. This is one of her milder moments. We’ll work up to speed, gradually.”

  On the screen appeared what looked like a crumpled white sheet with huge gray writing scrawled on it. Occasionally an entire line would fade away into illegibility but for the most part it wasn’t difficult to read:

  I’m writing this at the Lord Calberry and Chuck has just left me. We quarreled pretty much last night but finally Chuck said nothing in the world mattered to him except having me. Not even Ned, or his own wife, or anything. I couldn’t tell him so while he was here with me but I’m much more disturbed in my mind than he seems to be. Chuck is the most exciting man I’ve ever known and he leaves me pretty limp but whether I love him or not—

  The frame disappeared.

  “Wonderful what ultraviolet can do,” murmured Ollie.

  Pedley said, “I’ve had a bigger kick out of Mickey Mouse, many a time. Does it get better as it goes on?”

  “This one will keep you on the edge of your seats.” The sergeant pushed another slide into the projector. “There aren’t any dates on these pages: the way they were mixed up when Shaner brought ’em in, no telling which came first. I expect this one was written before the one you just saw.”

  The white-sheet effect wasn’t quite so pronounced now, the writing just a little less readable:

  I told Chuck about Ned tonight and it just about broke him up. He really hasn’t had much experience with troupers, so I couldn’t blame him for not knowing that a lot of brother-and-sister acts aren’t really brothers and sisters but more likely husband and wife. Chuck said he wouldn’t have started taking me out in the first place if he’d known Ned and I were married. Then I told him a sort of lie—that Ned and I haven’t actually been two-ing it for quite a while and that seemed to make him feel a little better. I guess he really is that way about me. But maybe his wife won’t look at things the way Ned—

  The frame vanished.

  Ollie let out a long breath.

  “She was Mrs. Ned Lownes!”

  “Yair.”

  “That explains everything, doesn’t it?”

  “I wish I thought so,” said Pedley.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  BEHIND THIS ORGY OF ARSON

  “OLLIE.” PEDLEY SET DOWN his cup of thick Turkish coffee. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

  “Why, Ben, dear!” She leaned eagerly across the Aleppo’s rather soiled tablecloth. “Just—ask me.” Her eyes were dreamy.

  He put his hand over hers. “Will you be my—secretary?”

  She sighed and closed her eyes. “I shall remember this moment all the rest of my days. The answer is ‘Yes,’ Benjamin. ‘Yes’—with all my heart. When shall it be?”

  “Immejut. I don’t want to call Barney myself, because by now a certain highly placed gentleman may have left orders for my clerk to notify me by telephone that I’m no longer on the job officially—”

  “Oh, Ben! He wouldn’t do that!
I know he wouldn’t!”

  “He might have to, Ollie. And in case he does, I wouldn’t want to put Barnus on the spot. So if you’d buzz him for me—”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Ask him if he’s heard from Shaner. I couldn’t get Ed up at the Riveredge. Leila must have left her apartment. I’d like to know where the hell she’s gone!”

  Ollie edged past a circle of card-playing Armenians into the malodorous phone booth. Presently she emerged.

  “Last minute bulletin from the front. Relayed through our local correspondent, B. Molloy. Miss Lownes and Mister Gaydel left the Riveredge at approximately three-forty-five.”

  Pedley looked at his watch. “More’n an hour ago.”

  “They took Gaydel’s car to South Ferry. Parked near the dock used by the Statue of Liberty boat.”

  “Sight-seeing? In this kind of weather? Must be the gypsy in them.” Pedley tapped his coffee cup. “If you can flag that waiter, ask him to put a head on this.” He went to the booth, used three nickels, and a moderate number of unprintables.

  At the public relations man’s office in the Graybar Building, a receptionist remembered vaguely that Mister Ross had come in an hour or so ago; didn’t think he was in now, though; finally consented to investigate; went away from the phone and returned a nickel later to announce that Terry had left his office almost immediately. She thought he’d mentioned some lawyer—Emerson or Amesbury or something like that.

  Another nickel produced from Miss Bernard the information that Amery had gone to meet Ross, that the duo were Staten Island bound via ferry.

  The ferry! Right beside the Statue of Liberty dockage! “What’s so interesting over on Staten Island all of a sudden, Miss Bernard?”

  “Why—the show—”

  “The radio show? Doesn’t it go on at the Broadcast Building?”

  “Usually.” She was astonished he didn’t know. “Except when they go out of town on trips or take it to one of the hospitals for wounded vets. They can’t very well bring the soldiers in to the studio.”

  “Miss Lownes going to be in the show, after all?”

  “She wasn’t,” the girl explained. “With Hal Kelsey out for keeps and Leila out, too, Mister Gaydel thought it wasn’t worth while putting the show on at all. But Mister Ross decided it wouldn’t be fair to all those wounded men to disappoint them so he convinced Leila she should go ahead with it, in spite of her own feelings. So she’s going to.”

  “What hospital?”

  “Harbor View Memorial, Mister Pedley.”

  “When’s the show supposed to go on?”

  “Six o’clock, I think.”

  Pedley hung up the phone softly, went back to the table, laid two dollar bills on the tablecloth.

  “So long, my sweet.”

  “You’re a laggard escort, to leave me in this low dive.”

  “I have to take a quick trip across the Bay. Those excursionists weren’t after souvenirs. They were Staten Island bound to put on the Winn show for the vets at Harbor View Hospital. I smell trouble.”

  “Aren’t you going out of your way to look for it?” She got up hastily, hurried out to the street with him.

  “You ought to know, if anyone does, Ollie. In this business, if you don’t look for it, trouble comes right up and smacks you in the face when you aren’t looking. Hey, you’re not coming with me.” He climbed behind the wheel of the borrowed sedan, switched on the short wave.

  “I wouldn’t miss it for all the nylons in Macy’s—”

  “… get to Mitch… to Mitch. Have her meet me at the Battery in nothing flat… that’s right. That is all.” He switched off the set. “I’ll run you down, but that’s the end of the line.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, darling. I’ve never been seasick in my life.”

  He took the shortest distance between two points; his siren could be heard ten blocks ahead; and that was a good thing because he swooped down toward Whitehall like a dive bomber riding in for the kill.

  Ollie sat relaxed, her shoulder touching his, while the sedan tore around trolley cars on the wrong side and knifed through paralyzed traffic.

  “Why are you running a temperature, Ben dear?”

  “Thing’s made to order for a firebug’s fiesta, Ollie. Worst fires are always in crowds. Worst crowd-fires are where people can’t get out quickly for one reason or another. Hospitals, especially. More hospitals are touched off by incendiaries than any other single kind of building.”

  “Why?”

  “More people likely to get hurt. More of ’em scared. So—more excitement. Psychiatrists say a lot of arsonists get a sexual kick out of that kind of emotional hypo.”

  The John Purroy Mitchel was steaming into Pier One at top speed, a bone of foam in her teeth, a veil of spray over her blunt nose. The big red-and-black fireboat, with its threatening armament of brass nozzles on their gunlike mounts, rubbed its guardrail against the stringpiece only a few seconds after Pedley and the girl rolled out on the dock, piled out of the sedan.

  The firemen didn’t bother with hawsers around the bollards. Pedley hustled Ollie over the bulwarks, hollered up to the pilothouse, “Saint George’s, Dan. And cut the corners on those spar buoys!”

  They were rolling fearsomely down the ship channel off the tip of Governor’s Island, with the Mitchel taking heavy spray over her quarter as she butted into the cross-chop, before Ollie asked the question that had been bothering her.

  “You really believe Leila’s behind this orgy of arson, Ben?”

  “Sure, she’s behind it.” He put down the captain’s binoculars; there was no sign of smoke from the cluster of low, white buildings on the hill rising over Saint George’s, but with a wind like this he couldn’t have seen it, anyway. “You saw the Memoirs of a Kilocycle Courtesan.”

  “They may not have meant the same thing to a woman they’d mean to a man. She’s been hurt; she’s confused; her morals are those of an alley cat in April. But those pages out of the life of a lovelorn lady don’t tell me she’s a murderess and a firebug. I can’t imagine the girl who’d put those things on paper slashing a man’s throat and leaving his body in the snow in Central Park. What would be her motive?”

  Pedley kept his eyes on the nearing piers of the island. “Oh, the motive’s been clear enough, all the way through, Ollie.”

  “Blackmail?”

  “That’s the method, Ollie. Not the motive. The motive is the half a million Luscious Leila might earn the next twelve months. And the same, or more, the year after that. And so on, ad infinitum. That’s a hell of a lot of jack, even after you deduct taxes.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  “FIRE! FIRE!!!!”

  THE M.P. AT THE DOOR of the recreation hall tapped a gloved finger against his lips in warning. “We’re on the air,” he murmured. “Sit in back.”

  Music blared at them when they went in.

  “Goodness!” Ollie whispered in astonishment at the row after row of quiet, intent men in their maroon coveralls, with their arms in splints, or their legs in casts—a good many in wheel chairs. “There must be hundreds.”

  “Place holds close to a thousand.” Pedley walked swiftly down a side aisle, toward the apron of the shallow stage at the far end of the hall.

  Wes Toleman was at the microphone, his face tilted up like that of a child awaiting a kiss. He waved toward the wings. Leila came out. The roar of cheers, whistles, and wolf-calls drowned out the handclapping, the pounding of canes and crutches on the floor. They followed her every movement as she swayed gracefully to the mike, raising her hand in smiling salute. The great hall became quiet except for the singing surge of the strings.

  Pedley saw Shaner squatting on the floor at the end of the first row; jerked an imperative thumb at him.

  The brasses softened; the rhythm section brought up the beat. Cliff Etting flicked his white wand at Leila. She threw her head back to flex her throat muscles, pushed the bronze helmet of hair back from her head, b
egan to sing:

  “Through… the black of night

  I got to go… where you are…”

  She had a marvelous sense of rhythm, Pedley realized. And she was one of those entertainers who somehow manage that magical rapport with an orchestra that makes every musician work with her, for her. The piano was just loud enough so she couldn’t go wrong in pitch, the strings came in with exactly the right staccato, the bull fiddle delayed smoothly on the afterbeat.

  Wounded men strained forward in their seats; tension disappeared from haggard faces, lips hung loose, a thousand pairs of eyes devoured her. She had that same magical effect on all audiences—the hall was surcharged with the intensity of her appeal.

  She’s something more than a blues singer with a freak larynx that makes her voice husky over the mike, the marshal told himself. She may not be a coloratura but she’s something better, to these vets.

  He thought of the way Walt Whitman had put it; it fitted this girl up there on the big stage as nothing else could:

  All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments… It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums… It is nearer and farther than they…

  She’s what they haven’t had, he reminded himself—What a lot of them may never have again, except through her. With that figure, those warm lips and friendly eyes, these men wouldn’t care what she’d been or done—not while that voice brought back the memories and held the promise.

  Shaner whispered close to his ear, “She ain’t been out of my sight longer than to change her clothes, skipper. Everything’s strictly under control.”

  “I hope to God you know what you’re talking about. Who’s in there?” He indicated the makeshift control room, improvised out of wallboard and Plastiglas at one side of the stage; at the angle Pedley was standing, he couldn’t see anything of the booth but a glare.