Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

The Suit pointed the applicator at him and Leila. The almost unbearable relief temporarily increased the fierce aching in his eyes, his face. Leila stirred, moaned.

When the hospital patrol got in, Pedley made them take the girl. He could make it under his own steam. By the time he did, a group had gathered around the doctors who were wrapping Leila’s bare limbs in blankets.

They stood in the shelter of the boiler room, shivering; overhead a monstrous mushroom of smoke towered up into the sky. Chuck and Amery and Wes Toleman were in the group; Pedley looked for Ross, but the publicity man wasn’t around.

Chuck said, “Calls don’t come any closer than that, Marshal.”

“You can quote me on that.” Pedley dug his fingers into the snow, rubbed the cold crystals on his lips. “But this was the last call.”

Amery bent down to put one of Leila’s shoes that had fallen off, on her stretcher. “I hope to God it is! This is the third—”

“—and last time, yair. I started out on the wrong track, thinking of one firebug. When I found anyone who had an alibi — a real, honest-to-Superior-Court alibi — I checked him off as not suspect. Bad error. Took me a while to dope out there had to be two arson experts, two killers. They were working together, naturally. And one was topman, of course. He hired the second man to do the dirty work he couldn’t get around to do.”

“Staro,” breathed Toleman.

Pedley nodded. “The strong-arm boy was the second man, sure. He bopped me over the head at Lownes’s hotel room because he thought I’d found Leila’s caseful of dynamite. He trailed me around after he found out I was marshal, saw me talking to Kim Wasson, frightened the sense out of her by bogying at her through a drugstore window. When he found he couldn’t shut her up any other way, he trailed her or took her to her apartment down in the Village, slugged her hard enough to knock her senseless for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he found an empty candy box in her apartment, filled it with some gas he had in his car, and set the box on the stove. Boom! — she’s in the critical ward!”

“She’s dead,” Gaydel retorted. “I went down to the hospital to see her and finally they admitted she was dead.”

“You found that out, did you?” Pedley was surprised. “All right. She died the morning of the fire but I had the hospital people keep it quiet so the firebug might still think she’d talk. Maybe — just maybe — that’s why this blaze here was set. Because the bug is afraid somebody might corroborate Kim’s story.”

Amery said, “But Staro couldn’t have set this blaze. He’s in the Tombs.”

“That’s right. This piece of old Portuguese handiwork—” Pedley waved at the soaking ruins of the recreation hall — “was another of those remote control things. Set up by the topman sometime earlier today. Wouldn’t have been difficult for a man connected with Leila’s show to get permission to go into the rec hall to check on arrangements for the show; not too difficult to get hold of one of the fire extinguishers when nobody was looking, take it into a dressing-room, empty it and refill it with gasoline he’d brought with him. But Staro did his share. He mistook your office for a shooting gallery, Amery. He wasn’t aiming at you, though. Hour or so later, he tried to drown me in a Turkish bath pool. He was trying for me, both times.”

Chuck looked at the marshal sideways, as if doubting his sanity. “Do you always find out these things post mortem? Hal Kelsey might have been alive now, if you’d been quicker—”

“I might have saved his life if I’d figured out this topman in time,” Pedley agreed. “He met Kelsey, probably near Lownes’s bank in Columbus Circle, drove around in the Park with him for a while. When the headman found out Kelsey knew quite a lot and guessed quite a lot more — Kelsey got put out with a slit windpipe. May be a little difficult to bring that one home to the murderer; lot of evidence may have been overlooked at the time. But there’ll be enough else to start him marching along that last mile.”

“Ned?” Toleman tucked his hands under his armpits, shivered.

“For a starter, yair. The killer was drinking in the Telebar with Lownes and Kelsey; he managed to slip a half-pint of denatured alcohol into Ned’s ryeballs. When the drunk got to the theater and was carried up to the dressing-room, he couldn’t get away from the naphtha that set the place on fire. That one was figured out to a hair; the topman had his arrangements all made so he didn’t even have to go up to the dressing-room to touch off the blaze. All he did was loosen the fuse plug to Leila’s dressing-room until Leila went up. Then he tightened it so the current would begin to heat up the flatiron that cracked the naphtha bottle that set fire to the house that—”

“If you knew all this—” Amery was skeptical — “why didn’t you arrest this whoever-he-is and prevent today’s—”

“Wasn’t sure until this afternoon,” said the marshal. “Topman was in this to get the cut Lownes had been getting on his sister’s fat income. By using the same blackmail scheme Ned had been using. So it was a certainty the Number One Boy wouldn’t have wanted to do anything that would have put her in danger. Still, he did. Why? Because he hadn’t counted on Leila’s being on the show out here today. He didn’t know Leila was going to change her mind and put on the performance, anyway. Ross knew that because he convinced her she ought to do it. Gaydel knew it, too.”

Amery scowled. “I didn’t know it.”

“That’s what I meant.” Pedley reached inside his coat. “Let me show you the clincher in the case, Amery.”

The lawyer frowned contemptuously at the gun. “You can’t bluff an attorney, Marshal. And you certainly can’t believe I had anything to do with the theater fire — when I nearly lost my life in it.”

With his free hand Pedley caught hold of the lawyer’s coat; fumbled at the cuff of the sleeve. “Same situation you ran into here, today. You didn’t mean for Leila to get hurt. Wouldn’t be any point to Lownes’s demise, if the money-making part of the Lownes & Lownes combination should be put out of action.” He picked something out of the cuff of Amery’s coat, examined it while he held the gun in the lawyer’s ribs.

“When Leila ran back to the dressing-room, to save Lownes, you had to chase after her to protect your investment, so to speak. ’Course you didn’t intend to pass out, yourself. But that turned out to be a break; nobody likes to suspect the hero who’s risked his life to save a girl.”

Toleman goggled. “But Mister Amery wasn’t at the Telebar with Ned. Not when I was there.”

“Okay.” Pedley fished around in the attorney’s coat cuff some more; Amery tried to pull his arm away but the marshal shoved on the muzzle of the gun a little and the lawyer subsided. “He was there with Ned before you got there. Or after you left.”

Amery said tightly, “Perhaps you’ll be able to explain to the Prosecutor’s office how I managed to murder my friend Kelsey when I was at home under the care of a doctor!”

“No.” Pedley let go of the man’s sleeve. “I can’t tell him that. But I can suggest several explanations. Your doctor might have been lying, though I don’t think so. You might not have taken the sleeping pills at all; you could have got out of your own home quietly and walked to the bus line, gone in town and taken your car out of a garage — I wouldn’t be surprised if a check on your garage would show you’d had the car out last night.”

“You couldn’t find twelve men stupid enough to accept that sort of imbecile supposition!” The muscles in Amery’s jaws twitched with rage.