Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“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

At the Seventy-second Street entrance to the Park, a policeman with 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.

“Who says it’s suicide?”

The captain put on the patient attitude of one explaining things to a persistent boy. “Look, Marshal. This isn’t a three-alarm matter. It comes under the head of homicide. That’s my business. If you’ll just mind yours and leave the police angles alone—”

“Keep your pants on, Cap. I’d just like to get a picture of what happened.”

“That’s what my men are doing. Taking casts of his last steps, when he walked off the road and decided to end it all. There aren’t any other footprints around. He was all by himself.”

“You’d say he walked into the Park and pulled out the razor and slashed himself?”

“That’s what the facts say, Marshal.”

“Yair? Tell me why there isn’t more snow on his shoulders.”

The other detectives stopped working to glance at the dark blue cloth of Kelsey’s overcoat.

“It was snowing when he died. He’s covered with it, head to foot. But there’s no more snow on his shoulders, or on his hat, for that matter—” Pedley pointed — “than there is on his pants or socks.”

None of the detectives made any comment, but the two who had been working on the moulage exchanged glances, pursed their lips, and nodded.

Pedley went on. “So he hadn’t been walking. Or there’d have been an extra coating on his overcoat. He must have come here in a car. And since there isn’t any car here — somebody must have driven it away.”

The captain of detectives smiled disagreeably. “He probably caught a cab, drove in here, paid the hackie off, waited until the taxi drove away, and then cut his throat. We thought of that.”

“Sure you did.” The marshal’s features were expressionless. “All you have to do now is find the cabman who drove him here. If he did come in a cab.”

“Suppose he didn’t!” The captain became truculent. “Somebody else could have driven him here, let him out.”

“Kind of funny place to leave a man — when another hundred yards would have put him out on a shoveled sidewalk, instead of in here where he’d have to wade around up to his ankles!”

“Maybe you’d prefer to take over this investigation all by yourself!”

“Lord, no. I’m up to my ears in it now,” Pedley said. “I’d like to see anything he might have had on him, if it doesn’t raise your blood pressure too much.”

The district commander tossed the tarpaulin back in place, strode to the nearest police car, opened the door, switched on the dome light.

Neatly arranged on a newspaper covering the floor in front of the rear seat was the kind of assortment Pedley had seen so many times at the morgue and in muster rooms after prisoners had been searched.

Billfold, coins, cigarette case, knife, matches, handkerchiefs, fountain pen. The only item which interested the marshal was a yellow page torn from a classified telephone directory.

He studied it carefully — and a faraway, reflective look came into his eyes.

“Want to make a little bet, Cap?”

“What about?”

“One’ll get you ten that you don’t find any cab driver who let Kelsey out here. And that before you get through, you do find this was plain, ordinary murder.”

It was seven-thirty when Pedley raced across the Queensborough, not yet eight when he pounded on the knocker of the great stone chateau overlooking the Sound.

A tiny rectangle opened in the upper part of the massive door; eyes he couldn’t see looked him over.

“Whom do you want?”

“Paul Amery.”

“He’s retired, sir.”

“Wake him up.”

“Quite impossible, sir. I must ask you to leave—”

“Wake him up. Tell him Ben Pedley wants to see him. Or I’ll have the Great Neck Fire Department run a couple of ladders up to his window and get in that way!”

The door opened. An emaciated individual in a black frock coat, a wing collar, and a black cravat, frowned severely. “We can’t have all this rumpus, with Mister Amery in such ill health, sir!”

“Skip the argument. Take my name to him—”

A small, dark man with mild brown eyes behind gleaming pince-nez, hurried down the big staircase at the opposite end of the hall.

“What’s wrong, Nesbitt?”

“This gentleman insists—”

Pedley cut him short. “You a physician?”

“Doctor Rae. I must say you’ve chosen a poor time—”

“What kind of shape is Amery in, now?”