Chapter Four
PLANNED ARSON, PLANNED MURDER
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—
Those purple blotches warned of special hazards: stores of powdered charcoal and sulphur in wholesale drug companies, carboys of searing acid in metal-working plants, ammonia-cooled freezer systems in cold-storage warehouses, firework factories, toy plants full of explosive celluloid trimmings, dynamite stored in construction company tool houses—
That map was all right for the battalion chiefs and the company captains—but it didn’t mark the worst dangers. There weren’t any colored spots to show the location of firebugs, of pyromaniacs!
“Listen, mister.” Ross’s voice was sharp with annoyance. “I can’t futz around here all night. I got some rights as a citizen.”
“Phone there.” Pedley peeled off his wet coat and vest. “Ring your legal eagle. Ask if a habeas will do you any good, long’s I want to hold you.”
“You know damn well I can’t phone him. I don’t even know where they took him.”
“Paul Amery your lawyer, too?”
“Certainly. If I knew what hospital—”
“Don’t bother with it. He’ll only tell you I’ve the same right to commit you a judge has.” Pedley took off his pants, stood in front of the radiator in his shorts. “What was Amery doing at the theater, anyway?”
“We were going to check over the new contract, after rehearsal.”
“What contract?” The marshal hung up the wet trousers, took a blue serge pair from a hanger.
“Leila’s. Five thousand clams a week for fifty-two weeks, noncancellable. For Winn’s, the Coffee of Connoisseurs. I suppose you think that’s a lot of hubba-hubba.”
“Quarter of a million bucks? Sounds like a mortgage on the mint.”
“That’s not counting the extras.” Ross rubbed the back of his neck, resentfully. “Recordings, personal appearances, endorsements, television, plus the shifting pictures.”
“You get a cut on those fancy figures?”
“I get a straight salary. Less taxes, alimony, and what I lay out for beer and skittles to the so-called fourth estate.”
“Brother Ned was the ten-percenter?”
“Supposed to be. Only he was cutting the take about fifty-fifty, if you ask me.”
“I do. How’d he get away with that?” Pedley sat down at the battered desk, swung around in the swivel chair so he could look down at the white lacework of snow on City Hall Plaza, at the salt-and-pepper streaks of the churned-up streets.
“The creep must’ve known where the body was hidden,” Ross answered. “Only way to explain her standing for the stuff he pulled this afternoon.”
“Do I have to jerk it out of you with forceps?”
The publicity man squinted as if the light were too bright. “He bust in, whiskyed to the gills, just when the boys are going good behind her. Ned looks like something the Salvation Army refuses to collect: dirty, no shave, no press. He walks right up, grabs the mike away from her, and makes with the four-letter stuff. Leila tries to shush him, but Ned starts riding her. ‘Same ol’ brush-off. Can’t be bothered with Neddie, now. Forgotten how Neddie bothered about you when we were beggin’ for split weeksh on Orpheum time.”
“Doesn’t sound brotherly, exactly. But it doesn’t sound like a reason to barbecue the man.”
“Wait’ll you hear. From the control room, Chuck—he’s the agency producer—does his best to break it up by hollering on the talk-back for everybody to take ten. So while the boys in the band are easing out for Cokes and smokes, Paul Amery and I tear up on the stage where Kelsey’s giving Ned the bum’s rush.”
“Kelsey’s your orchestra leader?”
Ross shook his head, pityingly. “You don’t follow the beat much, do you? Hal Kelsey’s the King of Sweet. Anyway, he’s feeding Ned some highly original line about not killing the golden goose to spite his face, and Ned’s bawling about how he built Leila up and he can tear her down any time he wants. Hal makes a grab for him. Leila jumps between them. Ned swings. Not at Hal. At her.”
“He socked her?”
“Smack on the kisser!” There was a harsh edge to Ross’s voice now. “Knocked her down. Cut her lip.”
Pedley swung around to look at him. “Who socked him?”
“I did. Wish I’d broken his ugly jaw. No such luck. I started the punch away down in the Third Precinct but he was going away from it. He bounced off the piano and wound up in the drums.”
“Then you couldn’t bring him to—so you went out to get a doc for him?”
“I’d have let the crut lay there until his eyes dropped out. Paul thought we ought to load him in a cab, take him to his hotel. But Le
ila made Chuck help her lug him up to her dressing-room—and sent me for the doc.”
“Where was Amery while this was going on?”
“Phoning. Leila asked him to call Ned’s hotel to see if we could get hold of Staro.”
The marshal’s eyebrows asked the question.
“Staro’s the strong-arm Ned kept as combination bodyguard and wet nurse. He was supposed to bum around with Lownes, wherever he went. Once in a while, when Ned went off the deep end, he’d give his pal the slip. I guess that’s the way it was this afternoon.”
“So Miss Lownes and this Chuck whatever-his-name-is—”
“Gaydel. Best producer who ever turned clambake into fanfare.”
“Uh, huh. So they were the only ones who went up to the dressing-room with her brother?”
“’Sright.”
“See Gaydel after you left for the medico?”
“Only on the street, afterward. He told me he’d come down from the dressing-room a few minutes before Leila and then she’d run back up for Ned when the fireworks began.”
“Kind of puts it up to your talent, doesn’t it?”
“Why?”
“She who gets slapped. Looks like she’d have more reason to want him out of the way than anyone else.”
“Nuts! Call the roll of those who wished him harm, and lo—T. Ross’s name would lead the rest.”
“Her dressing-room. And she was the one to suggest taking her brother up there.”
“Tell me one good reason why Ned couldn’t have touched the fire off himself.”
“Person who sets a fire has to time it right. Man who was gaga couldn’t have cut it that fine.”
Ross bent over the desk, planted his fists on it. “If Leila’d wanted to snap the switch on Ned, she’d had a million chances when nobody would know anything about it. And if she’d had any idea of hurting him, would she have knocked herself out, trying to rescue him?”
“Your interest in the Luscious Leila.” Pedley was bland. “I expect that’s purely professional, hah?”
“What else would it be?”
“From what I saw of the babe—and I saw quite a bit of her—I couldn’t blame you if it was personal.”
Ross put on a prop smile. It curled up the corners of his lips but left the scowl around his eyes. “A massive intellect, that’s what it is! A great big High-Q!”
“The way you carried on when the amby took her away—that seemed a trifle ripe for a mere press agent.”
The smile froze on the other’s face—then he relaxed. “The old needle. Got under my skin there for a minute. That’s what you counted on, wasn’t it? Okay. Say my interest in Leila isn’t all business. You know what business comes before.”
Pedley nodded, waited.
“Oke. The kid’s had a long climb to get to the top of the billing. It’s my job to keep her there. The job comes first.”
“You’re going to have to hump yourself, when it breaks in the morning editions that I’ve had to pin a rap on her.”
“You don’t think I’m going to sit back and watch while you bull your way around my china shop! I’ll take this to people who can tell you where to head in!”
“You do that. File a complaint. File a dozen. See what they get you besides a subpoena for the Grand Jury.”
“I’ve got strings over there!” The publicity man pointed out the window toward City Hall. “And Leila’s got drag with topshots who can break you and your commissioner, too. I’m telling you, put the smear on her and we’ll make it hotter than the hinges of hell—”
“Hop to it.” Pedley got up, flung open the door. “Tell your pals this was planned arson and planned murder and that I’m going to get the planner just as sure’s God made little apples!”
Chapter Five
STIRRING UP A PATIENT
THE DOOR OF THE DOWN CAR slammed behind Ross. Barney scratched his chin.
“Another influential gent who’s going to give out with pla-a-nty troub’?”
“Queer thing is, he’s one boy who might put it over.” Pedley frowned.
“Who is he?” Barney unpeeled a stick of charcoal gum, slid it into his mouth. “Illegitimate son of a ward heeler?”
“Never speak disrespectfully of a public relations counsel. Brother Ross might get you a nokay notice in the gossip columns.”
Barney grinned; evidently there was, between him and the marshal, none of the stiffness which might have been found in a similar situation between a police inspector and his office clerk. The risks men took together in the Fire Department broke down such rigid relationships as existed in the Army; the top brass among the fire fighters shared the daily dangers equally with the youngest black-shirted probationer laying spaghetti or ventilating a roof.
A blaze-beater had to have the same confidence in his commander as an infantry soldier in the artillery officers who sent the creeping barrage rolling ahead of his path through barbwire and mine fields. When one wrongly directed stroke of an ax could send a wall crashing in the wrong direction; when one misdirected stream might cut off a man’s retreat by driving flames across a door, or weaken a sagging floor—under such pressure of circumstance—a trust based on mutual respect for nerve and coolness of judgment was essential.
But there was one difference between the doughboy and his counterpart in black helmet and rubber coat—the fireman knew his superior officer would be exposing himself to the same danger at the same time. Nobody wearing the Maltese cross—not even the Chief of Department-issued orders from the rear.
The days of political appointments to high place in the department had given way to the era of civil service tests and promotion-on-the-record. Practically every blue-shirt on the city payroll had come up the hard way, gone through the same hard-boiled course of sprouts. Both Barney and his boss had spent long weeks learning how to use the tools of their trade in the Recruit School at Sixty-seventh and Lexington, later at the Company School, and still later, at the Fire College in Long Island City. As graduates of the same institutions—where they’d both learned when to use an L-nozzle or a spinner; how to handle a scaling-ladder so the safety belt wouldn’t slow you down; how to hook your heel into the rung of a ladder and get a knee lock so you’d have both hands free to handle a hose without the danger of being dragged down with the ladder if it should topple; how to jump into a net without breaking a leg and how to carry a hysterical woman on your back down an extension ladder when the wind was trying to blow you both to the street, forty feet below—as competent alumni of the best schools of their kind in the world, Barney and his boss automatically assumed the kind of intimacy which exists between those who have spent undergraduate years on greener and less dangerous campuses.
Barney knew that this peculiarly close relationship entitled him to no special consideration for his disability; he got none from his superior. Since that morning nine years ago when a waterlogged warehouse, burst open by the swelling force of a thousand tons of water on baled cotton, had collapsed and left Barney under the wreckage of steel beams and concrete slabs, the former pipe-man had asked no favors on account of his infirmity.
Perhaps the fact that the warehouse had been torched by a professional firebug who had subsequently been sent to Sing Sing by Pedley for the rest of his natural life added something to Barney’s silent admiration for this weather-reddened marshal. Barney was well aware that Ben concealed, behind his façade of caustic wisecracks, a grimness which was the direct result of knowing a lot of his best and closest friends had gone to their deaths in fires that had been set.
Possibly the circumstance of their having worked together on hundreds of cases—sometimes for days on end without rest or sleep—had made Barney more than normally alert to the marshal’s uncommunicated worries. He recognized such an uneasiness now.
“You figure this Ross character has any real weight to throw around, boss?”
“Depends.” Pedley shrugged into his raglan again. “On what kind of weight you mean. He works for Leila
Lownes.”
“Oh, oh! The Thing with that Swing.” The fireman limped across the floor in what was intended to be a rhumba step.
“Ross passes out the flimsies for her.”
“Whatta job—considering some of the flimsies they photograph that fluffy in! Does the crumb take money for that?”
“He represents money. Coin big enough to buy most anything it wants. Except,” he moved toward the elevator, “protection from the B.F.I.”
“When they come around with the writs and the summonses,” Barney called after him, “where’ll I tell ’em to seek you out?”
“I’m going to the hospital. Then to the morgue.”
Barney stared.
“To see the Lownes girl’s lawyer. Paul Amery. Senior member of Amery and Cadawalder. Said gent got a bellyful of smoke trying to lug the Luscious Leila out of her dressing-room.”
“Is he going to check out?”
“No. Then I’m going to Twenty-sixth Street to have a look at what’s left of Ned Lownes.” Pedley thumbed the elevator button. “Say. Get hold of Ollie for me, hah?”
The rhythmic clamping of the clerk’s jaw stopped abruptly. “Oh-h-h! Gonna be one of those cases.” He nodded sagely. “Okey-dory. I’ll get Ollie.”
The private room in the very private Madison Avenue hospital smelled strongly of ammonium carbonate and chloroform when the marshal came in and looked down at the waxy features of the man on the bed.
There was a bandage across the lawyer’s jaw; another around his neck. But there was color in the lips that had been gray; the face was now coldly distinguished rather than merely thin. The eyes that had been dull were clear and sharply blue, but there was still something of shock and fear in them.
It had taken more than a few inhalations of smoke to throw a scare into this man, the marshal realized. That Amery could afford a private room like this—that, in fact, he could get into this exclusive ultra-hospital at all—was evidence of the attorney’s high position in the legal world. Even flat on his back on the narrow white bed, he managed to give an impression of dignity. Yet he was afraid of something—
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