Stewart Sterling - Where There’s Smoke

“Certainly not. Why? You talk as if somebody did kill him. The boys in the band said he was burned to death.”

“He was.” Pedley wondered why the announcer’s Winesap cheeks were suddenly polished with sweat. “Before we get through, we’re liable to find somebody else got singed, too.”

Toleman wasn’t quite sure he understood; apparently he didn’t care to hang around and discuss it. “If you do find the pencil, I’d appreciate it if you called me. At International Broadcasting.” He backed away, bumped into a beefy-shouldered individual who had come along the corridor without making any noise.

The newcomer didn’t apologize or step aside; he merely scratched the back of his head in such a way that the brim of his hat tilted down farther over his eyes.

Toleman murmured, “Excuse me, I have to get back to the studio.”

The blocky man looked at Pedley. The marshal nodded. “All right, Shaner.”

The deputy moved aside languidly, let the announcer pass. Shaner stared at the departing sports jacket. “Something, skipper?”

“Little Lord Fauntleroy claims he lost a neversharp, thought this would be a good place to find it.”

“Did he wander up here without a flashlight?”

“He seemed to know his way around in the dark.”

“Don’t sound kosher to me.”

“No. I don’t know what he was after. But it wasn’t a pencil.”

Shaner surveyed the dressing-room with mild curiosity. The casual manner and lethargic features of the marshal’s ace deputy had trapped many an arsonist into the assumption that Ed Shaner was just a big, dumb ox. Frequently they had opportunity to reconsider that judgment over a long period of years, at the State’s expense. The respect Pedley had for Shaner’s photographic memory, sleepy shrewdness, and imperturbable courage was evidenced by the Pier Six manner of speech they customarily employed with each other.

The deputy cocked an inquisitive eye at the wreckage of the couch. “What’s the score here, coach?”

“One down. Two to go — to the emergency ward.”

“Bugbite?”

“Cagey bastard of a bug.” Pedley pointed to the array on the dressing-table. “Iron plugged in to overheat. Bottle laid against the iron. When the bottle cracked, naphtha exploded and spattered on the lathing.”

“Lot of trouble to go to, when a live butt dropped on the couch would have done the trick just as well.”

“It wouldn’t. The bugger who rigged this up wanted to be elsewhere when the fire started.”

“Another Alibi Ike, huh? Any leads?”

“This stuff. Shoot it down to the lab. The iron. What’s left of the bottle. Table. Some of the lathing. These chunks of plaster.”

Shaner sighed. “Don’t tell me this shebang was bonfired for the insurance!”

“All I can tell you is a bird by the name of Lownes got cooked to a cinder, half an hour ago.”

“Lownes? Would he be any relation to Luscious Leila?”

“Brother. She was up here, too. Got herself a dose of nitrous fumes.”

“Why didn’t Lownes get out when the blaze started? Was he a cripple? Or shouldn’t he have been mingling among sane folk?”

“He ought to have been in a sober-up sanny, at that. He was non compos alcoholosis.”

“Hm.” Shaner peered gloomily at the arrangement on the dressing-table. “I have never seen a stewberry who could set up a gimmick like that.”

“No. He wasn’t the bug. Couple other candidates.”

“The Rover Boy who just left?”

“Mayhap. Or a publicity flack, name of Terry Ross. A sawed-off specimen who looks like a forty-year-old kewp. Cop’s holding him for me out front. He’s your meat.”

“How would you wish to have him served?”

“All the trimmings. I’m taking him downtown and putting him through the wringer, first. Then I’ll turn him loose.”

“How long do I haunt him?”

“Until I give you the cease and desist. I want to know who he sees, who he calls up, who he drinks with, who he sleeps with.”

The deputy jingled silver in his pocket, suggestively. “I will likely need extra expense money, maestro. These publicity experts circulate among the most exclusive premises.”

“Don’t fret about it.” Pedley side-stepped cautiously across the sagging floor. “Ross won’t feel like visiting any more hot spots tonight.”

Pedley herded his prisoner past doors marked Division of Fire Department Apparatus, Bureau of Combustibles, Bureau of Fire Extinguishment, Division of Places of Public Assembly, past rows of shiny oak desks and banks of green metal files, until he reached ground-glass paneling on which the faded black letters were scarcely legible:

Bureau of Fire Investigation

Chief Fire Marshal

At a desk beside the door, a paunchy, bald-headed individual in a black shirt was absorbed in a Racing Form; he took his feet off the blotter and the pipe out of his mouth.

“Overtime again, boss?”

“Yair. Any calls, Barney?”

“Only from my bookie.”

“Those hijackers still cashing your checks?”

“Yuh. That crystal ball I been using to dope ’em out; it comes up an eight ball.”

Pedley shooed Ross into the private office. “This gent and I are having a bit of a huddle. See nobody gets off side until I blow the whistle.”

“Okeechobee, boss.” Barney contemplated Ross with the curious detachment of a nurse watching a patient being wheeled into the operating room.

While Pedley was stripping off his raglan, tossing it over a chair, he eyed a typed form on the green blotter pad on his desk. Under the printed heading Daily Record of Alarms, he read the notations which had been listed following the Brockhurst Theater entry:

Not too much to worry about, there. Neither an overheated chimney in an old-law tenement nor blazing fat in a one-story taxpayer occupied by a lunchroom, was a serious problem for the Bureau of Fire Investigation. The false alarm was something for the police, though nothing would be heard of it. Chances were the defective wiring in the Long Island City loft building was the result of carelessness and not premeditation. Not like this Brockhurst business—

Still, they all had to be checked. How could they expect him to do a decent job of investigating that loft-building fire, for instance, with less than 50 deputy marshals for the whole city? He didn’t have enough help to do his job right. Even running himself ragged, day and night, wouldn’t do it.

Every ten minutes, around the clock, Barney would add a new notation to this list. Forty-odd thousand of ’em a year. Even if a third did turn out to be false alarms, nobody could look into thirty thousand fires a year with the small force at Pedley’s command. It was tough. Only half a hundred men, to back up the ten thousand blueshirts, to keep the biggest city in the world arson-free, to watch over the six thousand miles of streets, the eight hundred miles of waterfront, the three thousand square miles where seven million people lived and worked and played and slept. Twenty-five billion dollars’ worth of property to guard — and still the department couldn’t get enough out of the politicians over there at City Hall to more than half do the job. Pedley was pretty bitter about it.

He looked up at the colored fire map covering the wall opposite his desk. The worst troublespots were supposed to be indicated there. The red spots marked bakeries where defective ovens might constitute a menace, candy factories with kettles that overheated, warehouses storing excelsior and paper which any stray spark might touch off, printing plants cluttered with benzine-soaked waste, cleaning establishments, hardware stores whose shelves would be loaded with paint and varnishes, fur shops where they kept containers of wood alcohol too near open flames—