Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“I’d turn you in. And testify against you. I’d do that even if you were to get into bed with me this minute—” The buzzer cut in.

“Damn!” She hurried to the door. “The doctor.”

“Tell him to go fly a kite. I’m all right.”

Out in the living-room, someone was excited.

“I don’t care who’s with you, Leila. We’ve got to settle this thing, now.”

Terry Ross! Pedley set the tray on the floor hastily. There were low murmurings from the next room. Then Ross asked, “Don’t you think you are carrying this thing too far, sweets?”

It was a minor agony for Pedley to get out of bed; he just managed to swing his feet to the floor as Ross burst in.

“Far be it I should intrude upon an affaire du coeur, my fran’ — but Chuck Gaydel will be here in two shakes. Get up and put your clothes on, will you?”

“Oblige me by doing a scramola, yourself. I like to sing in the shower; you’d put me off key.”

“Oh, for godsake! Just imagine the firehouse gong is clanging! You leap up. You jump into your jeans and slide down the brass pole. All in a matter of seconds.” The buzzer zizzed again.

Ross smote his forehead with the flat of his hand. “So you want to ruin Leila!” He backed out of the door with a final warning hiss. “Get — dressed!”

The door closed. Pedley stripped off the pajama top, inspected his bruises in the long mirror. There was a black-and-blue mark about four inches long on his forearm. The cut where the gun butt had broken the skin on his neck had been patched up with cotton and collodion but there was a ribbon of dried blood beneath it. The worst damage was just above the bridge of his nose, where there was a lump the size of a half-walnut.

He saw the bedroom door opening, in the mirror. He turned, made a grab for the bathrobe which lay folded over the foot of the bed. Then he saw who it was.

“Purty, ain’t he?” drawled Dublin. “Real purty now an’ that’s a fact.”

“Which particular part of the woodwork,” Pedley inquired, “did you crawl from?”

“One bumps into him in the queerest places,” Dublin said over his shoulder to the living-room. “Bathtubs — and girls’ bedrooms.” He turned around again to address the marshal. “What brings you here in this indecorous state of deshabille? Or should I ask?”

“Go to hell,” said Pedley.

While he was tying his shoelaces he could hear Leila, demurely, “I hope you don’t have to make an official report of this, Captain.”

“The truth, and nothing but the truth. Of course, where a young lady’s honor is involved—” Dublin managed to be insinuating.

“I wish you wouldn’t put the worst interpretation on things,” Leila wailed. “Just because Ben’s stayed here since nine o’clock last night and you find him in my bedroom—”

Ben! She’d never called him Ben, even when she’d been putting on her most appealing bedside manner a moment ago. He was hooked! A fine-looking figure he’d cut on the witness stand, testifying against her, now!

There might be one way out of it. He strolled to the bedroom door. “It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it, Leila?”

“Why — what?” She stammered; she didn’t have the nerve to call him Ben to his face.

“Ribbing the prize bull. But you ought to stop titillating Captain Dublin’s taste for scandal. He’ll find out soon enough that Bill’s been here with us all night.”

She opened her mouth, shut it again without answering. Ross looked bewildered.

Captain Dublin gazed at the marshal in round-eyed wonder. “I didn’t know—” he put his hand in his coat pocket, drew out a white card — “that Miss Lownes was married to Houdini.” He fished for his fountain pen, ostentatiously unscrewed the cap. “But the gentleman must be Houdini.”

Pedley went back to the bedroom for his coat.

“Because,” Dublin raised his voice for the marshal’s benefit, “we’ve had him down at Center Street since two o’clock this morning. And I can’t book him unless you sign this complaint, Benny.”

The great, somber room on the fourth floor of Police Headquarters was in darkness, except for the seven 200-watt bulbs focused on the little stage at the far end. The hands of the clock at the side of the room formed the right angle of nine o’clock. In the semigloom, hundreds of men shuffled their feet, shifted in the hard chairs, made a low hum of mutterings.

They watched the man who swaggered to the center of the 25-foot platform, directly beneath the hot brilliance of the light, their eyes taking in every detail. His gait, the way he carried his head, the size of his hands. His height was shown against the scale painted on the wall close behind him.

Fifteen feet away from him, almost in a line with the first row of seats, the interrogator, an assistant chief inspector, sat on a dais in front of a bookkeeper’s slant-top desk on which stood a shaded light and a microphone. Beside him, the plain-clothes man who had made the arrest. The interrogator read from a card in front of him; the voice of the public-address system struck Pedley’s ears with a curious impression of hollowness.

“You’re William S. Conover?”

The man under the light said, “Yes.” His voice was thick, as if he had been drinking.

“American?”

“Sure.”

“Formerly Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps?”

“Yes.”

“Honorable discharge. Medals; hospitalization record. Address?”

“Motorboat Voyageur, Sheepshead Bay.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Born?”

“Minneapolis.”

“Unemployed.” The police interrogator referred to the card. “No previous record of arrest. Picked up outside Bickford’s, Grand Central, one-forty-five ayem this morning, Detective First Class Reiss, Shield Number seven-four-two-one. Weapon, paratrooper’s knife. How’d your coat get slashed like that, Conover?”

“Ripped it myself, accidentally.”

“Didn’t get into a fight with anybody?”

“No.” Bill’s manner defied contradiction.

“Had enough fighting for a while?”

“Yes.”

He’s playing it canny, Pedley decided. Doesn’t know what the police know, so he won’t admit anything that might involve Leila.

The interrogator continued. “What’d you been doing before the officer arrested you, Conover?”

“Drinking.”

“Where?”

“Around.”

“You’re charged with resisting arrest and intent to do great bodily harm, by deliberately wrecking a sedan belonging to the Fire Marshal of the City of New York. You admit these charges?”

“Hell, no. I didn’t personally put ice on that road.”

A ripple of laughter went through the seats stretching back into the darkness.

Sime Dublin dug his elbows into Pedley’s ribs.

“Y’see, Benny boy? We draw the same blanks from all your complaints. You know what Lasti says, now he’s out of your reach?”

“What?”

“Claims he never went after you in that pool at all, as alleged on the blotter. Swears you trailed him to the Turkish bath, tried to get him to make damaging statements about some of Lownes’s friends and he refused to do it.”

“Johnnie Watson, who runs the Bosphorus, can disprove the first. I checked in before Staro did.” Pedley watched Bill swagger off the stage and a wizened old man take his place with a furtive leer at the accustomed surroundings of the lineup. “Far’s the second goes, Staro’s right as your gun hand, Cap.”

“He states that when he failed to come across with the derogatory remarks you requested, you clipped him, threw him in the drink, half-drowned him — and then took him to some fire station and put him over the hurdles.”