Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“Well, I’ve got quite a bit more for a jury to chew on.” Pedley jiggled something on the palm of the hand that had been exploring the coat cuff. “On the way over here on the fireboat, I had one of my deputies make a few inquiries at that swanky private hospital where you stayed after the theater fire put you out of business.” He waved at the smoldering ruin of the Harbor View. “Not much like this place, your expensive sanitarium. Best of everything, there on Madison Avenue. Good nurses. That crabby old girl who was so solicitous about you — she has a good memory, too. She identified the police photograph of Staro as that of a man who’d been to see you at the hospital not half an hour after I left.”

“That is either a lie,” the lawyer gritted, “or a complete mis-identification on her part.”

“It’s something for the Grand Jury to think about,” the marshal answered. “Here’s something else.” He opened his palm, held it out so the others could see what it was.

Gaydel bent nearer to see, asked, “What the hell is it?”

“Plaster,” Pedley said. “Maybe you didn’t know plaster’s like fingerprints. Under the microscope. Yair. When you wash the lime and hairs out, you’ve got nothing but sand left. Down at the police lab they’ve got some of the sand grains from the plaster that came from the break in the wall that the firebug busted open in Leila’s dressing-room.”

Amery laughed; it was a short and involuntary sound that carried no impression of amusement.

Pedley jiggled the grains around. “The sand from the plaster they’ve got in at Broome Street assays about thirty-two black grains out of every hundred. Twenty-nine white quartz. Say twenty-five or — six brown or amber and maybe eighteen, nineteen red sandstone. Thing is, you wouldn’t find just that same sand, with the grains mixed in these same proportions, in one building out of a hundred thousand. But I’d be willing to take the short end of a long shot that these grains I just picked out of Paul Amery’s coat match that Brockhurst analysis exactly.” He looked down at them thoughtfully. “We checked a lot of suits — but we hadn’t got around to the overcoats — until today.”

The lawyer reached out quickly, as if to poke at the bits of sand in Pedley’s hand — but slapped hard at the flat of the marshal’s palm, instead.

Pedley drew back involuntarily, to protect the evidence. The movement took the gun away from the attorney’s side for an instant. He lunged, knocked the marshal off his feet.

Amery kicked at the wrist holding the gun, knocked it spinning, ran toward it. But he didn’t stop to pick up the weapon. He kept right on running.

Pedley crawled to the pistol, recovered it, propped himself on one elbow, shot Amery between the shoulder blades.

“The doctors in due consultation,” Olive announced, “find that Leila has contusions, abrasions, and assorted second- and third-degree burns. But considering what she’s been through, she’s not in bad shape.”

“She couldn’t be.” Pedley’s mind flashed back regretfully to that breakfast in her bedroom. “I hope she never is.”

“Leila Lownes is the luckiest girl alive. To be alive.” Olive was emphatic. “To have you on her side, all the way through, Ben.”

“I wasn’t,” Pedley insisted. “Unless you mean here at the windup.”

“Well — it’s one woman’s natural instinct to suspect the worst of another. So have to admit I thought she was up to shenanigans when she gave Maginn the slip and went down to the Village the night of the explosion at Kim’s place.”

“You were half-right, Ollie. She did go to Kim’s. Because she was afraid her arranger’s emotions would get the better of her and she’d spill the beans to me. But when she got to the Wasson apartment, nobody answered the bell. Staro’d probably just left, after slugging Kim and setting his time bomb. So Leila went right home to the Riveredge. Naturally she didn’t want to bring her fruitless visit up, later.”

“What about her putting one over on Ed Shaner just at the time Kelsey was getting his throat cut?”

“Oh, she went to the bank to get her Florentine box, with the diary, out of Ned’s safe-deposit drawer. She wasn’t in the Park at all — and she certainly wouldn’t have had time to put an end to a promising band leader’s career — even if she’d had the strength or the nerve. Which I doubt.”

Olive led him around the corner of the unburned end of the recreation hall.

“Here’s your man of mystery, Ben.”

The fireman in the Suit unsnapped the helmet from his fireproof garment. The headpiece hinged down. Shaner put up an asbestos paw and tried to scratch his nose, without success.

“Coach, seems every time I run across you lately, you’re down on the floor a-bundling with this luscious babe. Keeps up, you’ll have to marry the girl.”

“She’s already married, old Nick of Time.” Pedley grinned wearily. “And unless I’m wrong, she’ll stick to this husband for a while. After we bail him out. Where’d you get that hell-diver outfit?”

Shaner waggled a flipper at Olive.

“What’s the sense having the commish’s daughter around if she can’t come up with a bright idea, once upon a time?”

“I knew they had one on the fireboat,” Olive said. “I saw it on the way over. So I did some thimblerigging on the two-way with Barney — and first thing you know, here comes the Suit and there goes Shaner and here you are.”

Pedley said, “First time in years Shaner hasn’t lost the man he was after.”

“You,” Olive was reproachful, “nearly lost your firebug, Ben darling. It’ll take him six weeks to be able to stand trial.”

“Who?” Shaner demanded.

“Amery,” said Pedley. “And he’ll have more than six weeks to think it over.”

“He’ll have time to burn, coach.”

“Yair. My object most sublime,” agreed the marshal.

“No spik Ingles?” Shaner didn’t understand.

“It’s a quotation, Ed,” Olive explained. “It does seem to fit.”

“I never heard it.”

So Pedley finished it for him, staring up at the column of smoke towering up into the night sky from the gutted building: