Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“What is this? Confessions of a Young Bride?”

“Mm, hm.” She didn’t seem a bit reluctant. “Not the ordinary kind.”

Shaner bustled back with an aluminum roaster and a long nickeled spatula. “This’ll do it. Just the burned papers, coach?”

“Yair. You can leave the andirons.”

Leila wouldn’t continue until the deputy had finished transferring the bits of charred paper to the roasting pan.

“Ashes to ashes, coach. Some of the pieces crumbled. But I saved most of ’em.”

“Handle with care, from here in. Take ’em down to Broome Street. Tell the sarge I want every last word he can get out of ’em.”

“Can I wrap myself in the arms of morphium, after that?”

“Hit the hay hard’s you please. But don’t bust up those pages.”

Shaner carried the roaster away like a proud father holding his first baby, closed the door behind him. Leila wrenched her wrist free from the marshal’s relaxed grip. “If that’s the way you’re going to treat my confidence, I won’t tell you anything.”

“You’d still be smart to tell all. It’ll be up to me to say who sees what the lab-boys find on those pages.”

She strode back and forth in front of the fireplace, struggling to reach a decision.

“Dammit! I guess I’ll have to trust you.”

“You’re making slow headway.”

“I was married before. But nobody knows that.”

“Not even Conover?”

“No. My first husband left me. I never knew where he went. I don’t know where he is now — or if he’s still alive.”

“Divorce?”

“Yes. I got one of those Mexican things. I don’t know whether it’s legal or not. I don’t know if I’m actually married to Bill, or if I’m a bigamist — or what.”

He shook his head, morosely. “No soap.”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Nothing in what you’ve told me to cause this procession of arson and murder. Maybe some of your fairy tale is true. Might be all true, far’s it goes. Doesn’t go far enough. Isn’t important enough. What’s the rest of it?”

“That’s absolutely all there is.”

“If that’s your story, you’re going to be badly stuck with it. Because I’m putting you under arrest. Now.”

She backed away from him, eyes wide with fear. She wasn’t staring directly at him, but over his shoulder.

There was no mistaking the prickle at the back of his neck, now. It wasn’t imagination.

“Move the point of that knife down a little, Lieutenant. Or is it a razor?”

“Stick your thumbs in your ears, dicky bird.” Conover jabbed the point of the knife deeper into the marshal’s neck. “Keep your flippers up in plain sight.” The lieutenant’s right hand came around, took the gun from Pedley’s armpit holster. “Now squat. Right on the floor, where you are. Cross-legged. That’s the pose. You can clasp your hands behind your head if your arms start to drop off.”

Pedley obeyed. No sense arguing with six inches of sharp-edged steel.

The lieutenant swung the gun to and fro by the trigger guard. “Forgot I’d have a key to wifey’s apartment, didn’t you?”

“Didn’t think much about it,” Pedley admitted. “I sort of thought Leila’d get word to you I’d be coming up here tonight, though.”

“Setting a trap for me, were you?” Conover laughed. “Look whose paw is pinched now. The pig stabs the butcher.”

“Temporary reversal of position, yair. But with ten thousand cops on the lookout for you, you won’t be able to pull stunts like that car smackup all the time. Fair to middling chance they’ll pick you up before you get out of the Riveredge.”

Leila put her arm on the lieutenant’s sleeve. “I’m supposed to be under arrest, Bill.”

“You won’t be, Li.” He sniffed. “What’s the matter with the chimney?”

“He closed the damper,” she answered. “I was burning some old papers in the fireplace and he thought he could put the fire out and find out what they were.”

Conover scowled, puzzled.

Pedley shifted his position to ease the strain of sitting with crossed legs. “The papers have gone down to the Headquarters Lab on Broome Street. Nothing you can do about that.”

The lieutenant held Pedley’s pistol by the barrel, swung the heavy butt in a suggestive arc.

“There’s something I can do about you, Hard-boiled Harry.”

“Yair. You can knock me on the head.”

“And toss you out a window so nobody could prove you were tapped on the skull before you fell.”

Leila cried, “Bill! Stop talking like that!”

He said, “I don’t see any other way out of it, shugie.”

“That’d be no way out.” Pedley put his hands down on his knees, slowly. “The police might stop hunting for a killer, now they’ve announced Kelsey committed suicide. If you bop me, nobody’s going to believe an old blueshirt fell out of a window accidentally. Only make things that much worse for the girl friend. She’s in over her head, already.”

“We were fighting,” Conover related. “The window was open on account of all the smoke in the room. We bumped against the sill and over you went. Finis.”

“You couldn’t get your own friends to believe it,” Pedley said.

Conover brought the butt of the gun down hard on the table; it made the leather case bounce.

“I can say I found you in here annoying Li, took a belt at you, you came back at me, I crowned you in self-defense. They’d fall for that.”

“Not after Ned and Kim and Kelsey. Not after you did what you could to break my neck in the car this morning. They might not send you to the chair, because you’re a vet who’s risked his life for his country and there might be some excuse for your being blood-goofy. But they’d slap you in an institution for quite a while. That shouldn’t appeal to a young married man.”

The singer put her arms around Conover’s shoulders.

“He’s right, Bill. There must be a better way.”

“There is,” Pedley snapped irritably.

The lieutenant looked at the top of the marshal’s head. “I doubt it. But we’re willing to listen to reason.”

Pedley grimaced at the girl. “I’ll take that drink now, if you don’t mind.”

Bill nodded. “Never refuse a drink to a dying man or you won’t wind up in heaven. I’ll have one, too, shugie.”

“Bourbon, if there’s any on the shelf.” Pedley straightened out his left leg, rubbed the calf as if he had a cramp in it.

Leila disappeared into the kitchen.

“As man to man—” Pedley lowered his voice confidentially — “you’ve married yourself a peck of trouble.”

“Suits me,” Conover retorted. “I’ve seen so much trouble I can’t get along without a little.”

The marshal went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You’re bright enough to be wise to one of two things. Either she knows who this throat-slitting arsonist is—”

The lieutenant’s face darkened. “Don’t talk behind her back.”

“In which case,” again Pedley gave no heed to the interruption “—the thing for her to do is name him, before somebody else lands in the mortuary.”

Leila came back with a tray, glasses full of ice, a bottle and a siphon.

“The gentleman’s talking about you, Li.”

“I was just saying—” Pedley stretched his other leg a little; now he was sitting on one hip, with his hands on his thighs — “that either you know the firebug or you’re a three-time killer yourself, Mrs. Conover.”

“If I was—” she fizzed soda in the glasses — “yours would be mixed with prussic acid or something.”

“Isopropyl alcohol, maybe. Poison’s a woman’s trick more often than a man’s. Like the stuff used in rigging up the fires — things a girl’d be likely to use. Flatiron, cleaning fluid, candy box.”