Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  “Last dressing-room on the right.”

  The same one where Leila had had her close call. “What happened to his face?”

  “He was under one of them lounging sofas, Marshal. Stuffing caught fire and dropped through on him.”

  “He crawled under the chaise?”

  “Way it looked. He must of blown his top. When he couldn’t open the door.”

  “It was stuck. Yair.”

  “He could of bust it down if he hadn’t gone panicky, Marshal. One good belt with a chair would have let him out.”

  “You’d think so.”

  He stood up, looked at the sky. The ugly glow was gone from the underside of the low-hanging clouds; the smoke drifting upward had little heat beneath it to give it wings. The boys had the blaze in hand.

  The pumpers were uncoupling. Soot-smudged men were taking up—handling the ice-sheathed canvas as cautiously as if they were juggling butcher knives. Gongs clanged the recall for hook-and-ladders. Motors roared. Police whistles shrilled. Sirens began their warning wail.

  The musicians had drifted away. The crowds at the fire line were already thinning. Hose trucks and combinations were rolling out from the curb, sliding away into the early dusk with bloodshot eyes.

  The battalion chief sloshed to Pedley’s side. “Press wants a statement on how she started.”

  Pedley scowled at the thing under the tarpaulin. “Something to do with the wiring, I’d say.”

  “Guy from one of the tabs seems to have an idea there was a pyro in the picture.”

  “He can print it. But not from me. He can say the marshal thinks it was something to do with the wiring.”

  “Check. It could have been worse, with this wind. We were lucky.”

  “This guy wasn’t.” Pedley bent over the body. His finger touched something that resembled a melted rubber band running from the dead man’s left eye to the point of his jaw. It was still sticky. Blood. From a cut on the eyebrow, there. Maybe Lownes had hurt himself in a frenzied attempt to get out of the dressing-room. Then again, maybe not—

  A voice over the marshal’s shoulder observed, “Not much doubt what happened to him, Ben.”

  “Hi, Doc. Might be some.”

  “Oh! One of those things?”

  “You tell me.” Pedley regarded the assistant medical examiner out of the corners of his eyes. “Fella was up in a dressing-room when a bottle full of something ignites. Door isn’t locked. Later on, when heat buckled the frame, it stuck. But at the time the blaze started, this bird could have opened it with his pinky.”

  “The stuff in the bottle might have exploded and knocked him out.”

  “He came to in a hell of a hurry, then. Because he tried to get away from the flames by crawling under a chaise.” He pointed to the charred trickle of blood. “Curious to know how he got that.”

  “We’ll give him the complete treatment.”

  “Might help to know if he was schwocked. Whether that smack on the eye could have put out his lights. Anything else you happen to run across.”

  The policeman propelled Terry Ross across the sidewalk. “I s’pose it’s the same old horse this lad gives out, Marshal. But I thought I oughta letcha know.”

  “What’s his complaint?”

  “Says every minute you keep him out of circulation costs him heavy dough. Same old mahaha about suing the city for fifty thousand damages and so on and forth.”

  Veins stood out on the publicity man’s forehead. “If you think I’m going to let you shove me around while I’m losing—”

  “You’re not letting me. I have to find out how this blaze started. If it’s costive to you, that’s tough. It cost Lownes, too.”

  “All the more reason I’ve got to get to Leila. Get it through your skull—she’s big business. Ned was her manager. With him gone, there are lots of decisions to be made. Somebody’s going to pay, if you keep me from making ’em.”

  “They’ll have to wait until after the autopsy.”

  “On Ned?”

  “Have to make sure how he died. The fire that killed him was set. And you were the first one to say so.”

  “I told you I was just shooting off my face.”

  “You did. One of the things I want to know is why you were.”

  “I was—upset.”

  “Not enough to go in there after the girl.”

  “I’d have been in there before Paul, only I was turning in the alarm.”

  “Were you, now? You spotted the fire, first?”

  “Don’t be putting words in my mouth. I’d been over to the Astor for the house doc. Comin’ back, when I get to the alley, I see smoke and hear someone holler ‘Fire!’ So I beat it to the corner for a cop.” Ross kept his eyes away from the ambulance in which they were loading Lownes. “’Course you never find a cop when you need one. So I pulled the box myself.”

  “Then ran back here?”

  “Yeah. By then the boys in the band were stampeding out like crazy and this fat-pratt,” Ross angled his head toward the patrolman, “was there. So when I start in after Leila, he stops me.”

  The cop twirled his stick. “Now I come to think of it, I don’t guess you was so anxious to go in, at that.”

  Pedley held up a palm. “How’d you know the Lownes girl and her brother were still inside, Ross?”

  “How would I know? I look for Leila. I don’t see her. One of the network boys yells she’s run up to her dressing-room to help li’l brother.”

  “Why’d he need help?”

  “He was out on his feet. Hadn’t drawn a sober breath for weeks.”

  “That why you went for the doc?”

  Ross hesitated. “Yeah. I’d hate to see a dog burn to death. But you don’t hear me saying I’m sorry for Ned Lownes.”

  “I don’t. No. I heard you say he was a bum and might have set the fire himself.”

  Under the ruddy glare from the insurance patrol’s head lamps, Ross looked like a worried kewpie. “If this thing wasn’t accidental—”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Then Ned must have started it.”

  “There were lots of other people around and about,” Pedley said. “Miss Lownes, for instance.”

  “Back to the asylum, Napoleon!”

  “Or this Amery guy—”

  “Dream on.”

  “Or you.”

  “Me? Me?” The press agent’s face puckered up as if he were about to sneeze. “Lord! That’s one for the book!”

  “Yair.” Pedley moved toward the sedan. “In a few minutes we’ll go downtown and write it up.”

  Chapter Three

  ASKING QUESTIONS WITH EYES

  HE GOT INTO the sedan, closed the door, cranked up the windows. Then he fiddled with the two-way until the “go-ahead” came over. He held his mouth close to the microphone:

  “Marshal to Double-you Enn Wye Eff, urgent. Locate Deputy Shaner. Tell him to fan his tail around to the Brockhurst. That’s all.” He switched off the set, climbed out of the car, went into the alley and through the stage door.

  Across the clutter of music racks, microphones, and record-playing machines on the stage, he could see light reflected off helmets moving about in the gloom. They weren’t the black helmets of firemen; the men under those red helmets were from the insurance patrol. They’d be tossing tarpaulins over the plush-backed seats that paraded back in empty rows to the darkened front lobby.

  They knew their business, that National Board of Fire Underwriters crew. More than once they’d helped Pedley to determine the three W’s of the arson-detection business. But this time the marshal was pretty sure he knew Where the blaze started and What started it. Exactly When it was started—well, that was a matter for the lab technicians to figure out. As for the fourth and ultimate W—the Who—the marshal refused to clutter up his methodical mind with guesses until he had something more to go on.

  He knew only one way to go at a thing like this. Keep asking questions. With his eyes, when he could. With his mo
uth, when he had to. If you kept on asking questions and getting answers, the right one would be among them, sooner or later.

  He paused by the fuse box in the wings before he went upstairs. The melted insulation stank like burning tires. He went on up.

  The smell of smoldering cloth was sharper on the dressing-room level, too. A little “lazy” smoke feathered up between the charred joists. The cubbyhole where he’d found Leila was a shambles of charred woodwork and smashed glass. Under the blackened skeleton of the chaise lay a litter of mushy gray—upholstery padding, the source of those knockout fumes.

  The floor sagged like wet cardboard under his weight. He kept close to the wall as he edged over to the dressing-table.

  Its plastic top had melted in places under the terrific heat, but it had held together enough to preserve the original positions of the flatiron, the remains of the bottle. That might be one of the things somebody hadn’t counted on.

  The switch of the iron was ON, all right. Nothing defective about that. And on one of the splintered shards there was enough of the partly burned label left for him to make out:

  SPOTZOUT

  p Away From Fire Or Flame

  hly Inflammable

  His nostrils distended like those of a startled horse. Naphtha! And the odor was still here! Under an imitation-ivory hand mirror he found a damp ring; a little of the cleaning fluid had trickled under the mirror when the bottle broke. By some thermal freak it hadn’t ignited.

  Well, bottles of naphtha were frequently found in the vicinity of flatirons. And it was possible to imagine an absent-minded imbecile so far forgetting himself as to put a bottle marked Highly Inflammable next to a pressing iron. Just possible—

  Too, people occasionally did plug in electrical appliances and forget about them until the heating elements became red hot. Pedley had even heard of fools who didn’t bother to look at switches to see if they were ON or OFF before plugging in. That such a congenital cretin could have been in this dressing-room wasn’t what he’d call a probability. Still, call it that—

  But for two such implausibilities to coincide! That, he couldn’t buy.

  Something gritty crunched underfoot. He bent down, felt bits of plaster. They were wet, but not soggy like the chunks that had dropped from the walls and ceiling because of the bondings having been weakened by the water. These bits had been protected from the direct force of the stream by something. They must have been beneath the girl’s body when she collapsed, here beside the dressing-table.

  He examined the wall. There was a break in the plaster, three or four inches long, a couple of inches deep. It couldn’t have been made by a fireman’s ax; there were sharp cuts at the upper edge, showing where the stuff had been chipped away with a narrow blade.

  The break was close beside the dressing-table, and at its level. It was an amateur’s job. An experienced arsonist would have started the blaze on the floor, instead of halfway up the wall. The naphtha would have gone to work on the exposed lathing just the same, and the updraft would have been much greater. Still, it had worked; the reason the boys had had so much trouble was that the flames had been eating away inside this rear wall.

  Floor boards creaked behind him. Without turning, Pedley said, “Watch it. You’re walking on nothing but wet paper.”

  A vaguely familiar voice answered, “I guess I’ll stay out here.”

  Pedley swung his flash around. The beam came to rest on a pair of gray suede shoetops. The light traveled up: knife-edged mauve gabardines, checkered sports jacket, Scotch tartan muffler, a round, boyish, red-apple face. “Who the hell are you?”

  The pleasant features assumed a pained expression. “Wes Toleman.” He said it as if he expected it to be self-explanatory.

  “Anybody give you permission to come up here?”

  “I just told one of the firemen I’d lost something valuable; he didn’t try to stop me.”

  “Lost it up here? When?”

  “I didn’t exactly lose it. I loaned my gold pencil to Leila to make corrections on her script—and they told me she’d been taken to the hospital, so I supposed she left it up here somewhere.”

  “You one of the orchestra boys?”

  The shoulders of the tweed jacket straightened. “I’m the network announcer.”

  “Oh.” That was why Pedley recognized the voice. “You weren’t around when the fire started?”

  “I went out to the drugstore. The engines came while I was having a cup of coffee. But I didn’t know it was the theater burning.”

  Pedley held the cone of light steadily on Toleman’s face. This announcer was worried about a pencil, but didn’t appear to be concerned about the sooty water dripping down on his clothes!

  “I haven’t seen any gold gadgets around here. Maybe the Lownes girl had it on her when they took her away in the ambulance.”

  Toleman didn’t register surprise—or concern. “I expect it’s silly to bother about a pencil at a time like this. But it was a present. I’d like to get it back.” He poked ineffectually in the wreckage by the door.

  “You don’t seem to mind that a guy was just broiled alive in here.”

  “It’s a lousy way to go. But Ned’s better off where he is now. Wherever he is.”

  “Guy was popular, wasn’t he! I haven’t found anybody who has a good word to say about him.”

  “You’ll look a while before you do. Anybody in show business can name you a dozen people who’d have liked to fix the stem-winding son of a bitch. On account of the way he treated Leila.”

  “How’d he treat her?”

  “I’ve—uh—heard he hurt her.”

  “Physically?”

  “That. And other ways. Humiliated her.” The candid blue eyes became wary.

  “You just heard this? You wouldn’t be one of the dozen you mentioned?”

  “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.”