Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“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.”

“Maybe we can work up to it, gradually. What’d it look like?”

“I’m not sure I have any right to tell you that much.”

Pedley’s fist opened. His hand dropped a couple of inches. His fingers gripped the knot of Gaydel’s necktie. He jerked hard. The producer came up to his feet, gasping.

“I’m not going to play twenty questions with you. I’m after a torch who set fire to a theater and burned a guy to death. I can’t wait for any feeble-minded flathead who thinks it’s smart to play foxy while—”

“Set fire!” Gaydel whispered. “Are you sure?”

“My business to be sure.” Pedley let him go.

“The papers said — defective wiring.”

“Defective human.”

“Ned?”

“Would I be after a dead man?”

“Then — who?”

“You could be elected.”

There was nothing phony about the shocked incredulity on Gaydel’s face now. He shook his head from side to side, unable to answer.

“You were hot-panting around after this Leila babe!” Pedley made the accusation as if he’d welcome contradiction. If he could jolt this man off his mental balance, irritate him into retorting before he had time to reflect, maybe the producer would say something he didn’t mean to. “Ned Lownes was sore at you. For bedding around with his sister.”

“Ned didn’t know anything about — Leila and me. He — he wouldn’t have cared, anyway.” Gaydel tugged nervously at the knot of his necktie.

“You weren’t on the best of terms, put it that way. And you were in that dressing-room where the fire started.”

“Yes, but—”

“You helped carry Lownes up there. But it never occurred to you to go up and bring him down.”

“No, because—”

“I find you rummaging around in Lownes’s things with some screwy explanation about hunting for something you don’t know anything about.”

“I told you I knew what it looked like. It’s a brown leather case. Italian tooled leather, I believe. About five by seven inches, couple of inches thick.”

“What’s so important about it?”

“That’s what I don’t know.”

“Then why were you going to all this trouble?”

“Leila asked me to. It’s hers.”

“You mean she says it is.”

“Yes.” Gaydel stiffened, as if he resented the implication. “She said Ned — took it from her.”

“No idea what’s in it?”

“None.”

“When’d she ask you to perform this burglary?”

“About an hour ago. I called up the hospital to see how she was. They told me she’d been discharged and taken home. When I phoned her at the apartment, she said she was pretty fair but she’d feel better if I could find this leather case.”

“Must be worth heavy dough.”

“You’re on the wrong track there. Ned handled all her funds, anyway. She wouldn’t care if he’d had a little more or less. Besides, I never knew her to be concerned about money, one way or the other.”

“Most people are. When they claim they aren’t.”

“Not Leila. She can make all she wants to, any time she wants to. Make it a lot easier without Ned around, too.”

“You another one who thought Lownes was a total loss?”

“Horsing around with a different fur coat every night? Hitting the cork like a dipso? Slobbering away her money in creep joints? Why, he was a drag and a drawback as far as Leila and the show were concerned. But I don’t think he could help himself. Compulsion neurosis.”

“What?”

“I told him a hundred times he ought to be psyched.”

“What was his quirk?”

“Inferiority. With overtones of sadism.”

Pedley eyed him narrowly; the producer wasn’t kidding. “Highbrow excuse for being nasty, that’s all.”

“Oh, no. Not at all. Ned used to be the headliner in their brother-and-sister act on the five-a-day. Eccentric dancer. Tops at it, too, if you believe his clippings. Then Leila gets a break on radio. The act busts up. Vaudeville is dead. Hoofers don’t get across on the kilocycles. But Leila goes big. Ned stays with her — only not as partner. Just manager. All the time Leila is getting up in the bucks. Pretty soon she’s as well known as Kate Smith or Bob Hope. Everybody forgets about Ned. He’s nobody except Leila Lownes’s brother. Naturally it gripes him. After a while the gripe gets ingrown. It becomes a complex. He reacts by being ugly to her.”

“You figure that all out by yourself?”

Gaydel scowled. “It makes sense.”

“Apply your gray matter to what happened at the Brockhurst this afternoon and see where you wind up.”

“I haven’t the faintest — about how the fire started.”

“You were up in the dressing-room all the time Miss Lownes was there with her brother?”

“No. After he snapped out of it and began calling Leila six kinds of a bitch, she decided we wouldn’t wait to locate Ned’s private watchdog, a guy named Staro. She asked me to go bring her car, drive it to the end of the alley, and come back to help her get him away from the theater.”

“So she was up there alone with him for a while.”

“I couldn’t say.” Gaydel didn’t like the direction the questions were taking.

“You don’t know anything. What you came over here to find. Or who was here ahead of you. Or why you practically jumped out of your socket when I walked in on you.”

Gaydel said, “There’s nothing mysterious about it.”

“Not much. No. If one of Lownes’s friends found you in here with the place turned upside down, it wouldn’t be too hard for him to draw the conclusion you’d pushed the button on brother Edward. Then you might get yours — without benefit of jury.”

“That’s silly. When I came in here, I wasn’t even aware Ned had been murdered. If I had known, of course, I’d never have come near the suite.” He edged toward the door. “Apparently I can’t be of any help to you in your investigation. So if it’s all the same—”

“As you were.” Pedley sauntered up to him, patted his pockets, shoved a hand inside the producer’s coat, drew a thin sheaf of blue papers from the inside pocket. “What have we here?”