Стюарт Стерлинг - Collection of Stories

“I will,” Pedley said. “She might come to and talk a little before she signs off.”

Broodman shivered.

There were more reporters than firemen in the lobby when the Marshal left the office; more photographers than internes, in the street. The crowd had thinned; the fire lines were permitting traffic on the opposite sidewalk. Pedley spoke to a haggard man in a white helmet:

“How about Maxie?”

“Died on the way over, Ben.” The Battalion Chief spat. “Rest his soul. He was a good man.”

“He was.” Pedley nodded, walked to the red sedan. Maxie Rhine had been in the old Engine Eleven Company with him when they were probationers. They had rolled to many a bad blaze together; once Maxie had waded through the acid-loaded water of a drug warehouse cellar to drag Pedley out from under the I-beam that had pinned him. Now Maxie had taken a gust of flame from a back draft up on the tenth floor of this firetrap and they’d be sounding the four 5’s for him in the morning. And there were three other wearers of the Maltese Cross who’d never answer the gong again, though Pedley hadn’t known them as well as he had Maxie. There’d be those who’d miss every one of them...

At the hospital the doctor confirmed what Pedley had learned on the phone. Doris Munson had been seriously burned about the breast and throat; was suffering from shock and smoke inhalation; barring pneumonia setting in, she’d recover. The matron said it was all right for the Marshal to talk to her, long’s he didn’t excite her. He said he’d try not to.

The girl on the cot in Ward C couldn’t have been identified as a blonde; there wasn’t enough of her hair left. She looked up at Pedley out of bandages swathing her like a mummy.

“First thing I remember,” she mumbled, “was someone at the window yelling ‘Water!’ ”

“Had you been smoking in bed?”

A negative shake of the head.

“Were you feeling pretty good — you know — hit the cork quite a bit — before you turned in?”

Another negative. “I only had three little drinks,” she added with an effort. “I was feeling terrible. I’d just found out something that would have sobered me, if I’d drunk a gallon.”

He told her what Broodman had said. “Is that true?”

Doris nodded, her eyes widening with horror. “Oh! Arnie thinks I... started the fire!”

“You could have.”

She struggled to sit up. He put a hand on her forehead, forced her back on the pillow.

“Maybe I did!” she whispered. “If I did, I hope I don’t live. I couldn’t bear to know I’d... caused all that!”

“Take a sleeping pill to get you to sleep?” He knew there must have been something to make her doubt her own actions.

“I took... six.”

“Yeah.” Not enough to kill her. Enough to scare Broodman if he’d learned about it. “You wash your face before you went to bed?”

“What?”

“Wash your face? Or use cleansing cream?”

“No.” she was puzzled. “Why...?”

The nurse came in. “Phone for you, Marshal.”

He took it out in the corridor.

“Ed, Skipper. I been keeping an eye on Wayner, like you suggested.”

“So...”

“He didn’t head for the hospital at all.”

“Know he didn’t. Where is he?”

“Seven fifty West Twenty-eighth. Rooming house. No savvy if he lives here or not. Name isn’t on the mail box. That don’t necessarily mean anything at a fleabag like this.”

“Where you calling from?”

“Candy store. Across the street.”

“Stay there till I get down.”

He didn’t bother to go back to the ward. The red sedan made it in four minutes, with the blinkers but without the siren.

Shaner stopped devouring a chocolate bar long enough to say: “Must be in one of the back rooms, Ben. None of the fronts have lighted up since he went in.”

“He could be rooming with somebody,” Pedley said.

“Or he could be calling on somebody. Better let me go in with you.”

“You go back, sit on Broodman’s neck. I want him handy when the grand jury meets, in the morning.” Pedley went across the street, into a hall that smelled of cabbage and pork and carbolic. In the front of a black tin mailbox was a cardboard with a dozen names printed on it; a couple of them had been crossed out. Harry Lester, C-6, hadn’t been crossed out; the Marshal thought it was close enough to Les Harris to be worth casing.

He went up a staircase, where the paint flaked off the walls like skin off sunburned shoulders; he made no particular effort to be silent about it.

On the third floor, lights showed under two of the doors — none under 6. He walked on up to the top floor, opened the door of the common bathroom, closed it. Then he took off his shoes, went down one flight in his stocking feet.

He listened at 6-C long enough to make sure somebody was opening a window inside, quietly, in the dark. Pedley set his shoes down carefully, took out his flashlight. He tried the knob, turned it noiselessly. The door wasn’t locked.

He pushed it open suddenly — swung his flashlight in an arc covering as large a segment of the room as possible.

A washstand. A bed, rumpled up. The toe of a shoe just behind and beyond the open edge of the door. Pedley reached around the jamb for the switch. The movement took his head and shoulders into the doorway for an instant.

Long enough for a gun butt to smash down across the crease of his hat...

The room was still dark, but dull red flashes pulsated before the Marshal’s eyes. It was some seconds before he realized they came from a neon sign high on a building on the next block. The ruddy reflection from a polished shoe-tip was the thing that made him recognize it.

He reached out, touched the shoe. There was a foot in it; the foot didn’t move when he felt it. Pedley pulled himself up by the bedpost, found the light switch, snapped it.

The foot in the shoe belonged to Les Harris, who lay on his back with a small scarlet worm wriggling down from a dark spot in his right temple. There was a purplish lump an inch above his right eye. The body was still warm. An automatic lay on the grass matting of the floor about eight inches away from the dead man’s head.

The Marshal looked at his watch. 4:52. He hadn’t been out more than ten minutes or so.

He felt in the pockets of the floor patrol’s uniform. Nothing but a fistful of silver coins and a couple of keys. No bills of any denomination. But on the chair beside the bed was a strange collection.

Six wristwatches; two men’s, the others the tiny diamond doodads women go for. Four rings; one wedding, two solitaires, a pinky set with what looked like real rubies. A black opal brooch. A gold comb. A platinum cigarette case with the initials K. T. M.

Pedley stripped a pillow-slip off the bed, tilted the chair so the jewelry slid gently into the white sack. He lifted the gun by sticking a pencil in the muzzle, deposited it on the loose end of the pillow-slip, wrapped the surplus fabric around the weapon.

He retrieved his shoes, put them on. When he left 6-C, he took the key from the inside of the door, locked the room.

“Every arsonist has a twisted mind.” The Marshal stared coldly across the manager’s desk at Broodman. “I don’t mean pyros, either; they’re psycho cases, anyhow. But every firebug is so snarled up in his mental processes that he figures a fire has to be set by some tricky method... and it always backfires on him.” He opened a flat metal case, like a child’s paint box. “This one used a cigarette, hoping it would look as if Mrs. Munson had fallen asleep smoking and set the bed on fire. But he forgot the lipstick.”

Broodman leaned forward to peer at the brown-stained stub. “I don’t see—”