Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  The hook-and-ladder men would have raised their short ladders, helped the tenants to get out. Some of them would have gone up to the roof to ventilate the building. Normally, with a fire starting in the basement or one of the lower floors, the hot gases and smoke mushroomed right up there under the roof. That’s why most people who lost their lives in tenement fires died on the top floors. The fire would spread out horizontally unless a skylight or a bulkhead were opened up to give a draft and clear out the smoke so the pipemen could work their way up from floor to floor, putting the fire out ahead of them as they climbed.

  That was the way it was supposed to be done, but sometimes conditions were such that you couldn’t go by the book. Pedley could see that this was one of the times. None of the windows on the lower floors had been smashed in; those in the upper apartments were all opened. This blaze must have started on the top floor—and it seemed to be spreading down!

  Rubber-coated men sloshed in and out of the darkened doorway, carrying axes, Quinlan force bars, wrenches, flashlights. Pedley started in past them. A hose-company lieutenant put a hand on the marshal’s sleeve.

  “Can’t get up, Ben.”

  “Stairs going?”

  “Whatever it was, blew all to hell and gone. Spilled out into the well, ran down a flight or so. Flames chimneyed right up. Treads are gone.”

  From the street came a megaphoned roar pitched so as to be heard over the maelstrom:

  “Don’t—jump!”

  Pedley jammed his flash up against the row of letter boxes. There it was: K. Wasson 502!

  He dodged out to the street. The portable searchlight from the emergency truck was shooting a solid beam of brilliance up through the swirling flakes, spotlighting the end window on the top floor.

  Only her head was visible above the sill. But in spite of the smoke and the snow, Pedley could make out the arranger’s face clearly.

  Beneath her, short ladders were in place up against the building; on them hosemen were passing up loops of canvas into the lower floors. The sidewalk was ridged with ice-jagged drifts. Not even the small net would fit into the cramped space on the pavement below her window. If she jumped—that was it!

  Kim’s shoulders appeared above the sill. One of her hands came out, clutched at the ledge.

  From surrounding windows, from the fire lines below, surged a shout:

  “Wait!—Wait!—Don’t jump!—Don’t jump!”

  The 85-foot spring ladder inched upward toward her. Kim climbed onto the sill, crouched there. She still wore the vermilion suit; one side of it was black, now.

  A whoof of flame puffed out of the smashed window at her back; for a second it seemed as if the girl herself were aflame. But the orange flare was replaced by a gush of smoke.

  The crowd quieted. A ladderman was already halfway up the towering extension, climbing fast.

  The tip of the ladder moved toward the sill. A burst of blazing embers cascaded from the room behind her, scattered around her, on her. She screamed, recoiled. The involuntary movement put her off balance. She toppled, her arms flailing wildly.

  The ladder touched the sill. The ladderman locked his knee over a rung, leaned out, pinned her against the wall.

  For a long agonizing moment she seemed to be sliding out of the fireman’s grasp. But he braced himself, shifted his grip slowly. Then for a split second she dangled over the sidewalk 50 feet below—was swung over to the ladder.

  The crashing roar of the crowd was like the breaking of a dam.

  Smoke enveloped the ladder, obscured the rescuer from the marshal’s view.

  The fireman reappeared a dozen rungs lower. The girl was limp over his shoulder; her arms dangled loosely, like a rag doll’s.

  The interns were waiting when helping hands lifted her from the ladderman’s shoulders. Pedley was there, too. He needed no more than a single glance at the singed hair, the ugly sheen on the back of her neck and the side of her face. Third-degree burns. Shock. Possibly lung burn. Not much chance—

  “What do you think, Doc? Will a hypo bring her around? Long enough for me to ask her a question?”

  The student physician shook his head. “She wouldn’t be able to talk, even if she came out of it.”

  “She won’t pull through?”

  “No telling.” The intern lifted her into the ambulance. “Plasma. Sulfa. Put her in the freezer. I’ve seen these new methods bring ’em right up out of the coffin.”

  “Put a listener with her, will you? I’ll be over, soon’s I’m through here.”

  “Right.”

  Pedley consulted with the deputy chief who was listening to a walkie-talkie cuddled against his shoulder. “How’s it look, Fred?”

  “Quick burner, Ben. Top floors are gone. We can save the lower ones.”

  “I’m going up.”

  “You can’t, man. That side wall’s weakening!”

  “All the more reason. I have to get my peek before she goes.”

  “No reason to expect any funny business, is there?”

  “Yair. Ties in with the Brockhurst thing, this afternoon.” Pedley swapped his overcoat for a stiff rubber one. “Girl your boys brought down will be one of the witnesses, if she lives.”

  “All these beams are gone up there on the top floor, Ben. Wall’s buckling some already.”

  “If she lets go, there goes my evidence, too.” Pedley hooked one leg onto the spring ladder. “Any more up there?”

  “Only other fifth-floor tenant’s a printer. Works nights.” The deputy chief had to shout; Pedley was ten rungs above the truck platform.

  Spray froze on him as it fell from the streams arching overhead. The rungs were sheathed in ice. Smoke blew into his eyes; he might as well have been climbing with his eyes bandaged.

  The wind buffeted him, swayed the ladder ominously. He had to pause every few rungs.

  There couldn’t be much doubt this place had been fire-bugged by the same person who’d touched off the theater. That would seem to eliminate several prospects. Terry Ross, for one.

  The publicity man had been under Shaner’s more or less watchful eye all evening. Unless the device for starting this fire had been arranged prior to the Brockhurst blaze, Ross was out.

  Amery, too. The lawyer was in no condition to get out of bed. In any event he couldn’t have got out of that private hospital without being seen.

  The setup put Hal Kelsey pretty well in the clear, too—or didn’t it? Still, there were a few others who hadn’t been under surveillance—

  He made the shift from ladder to sill in the teeth of a shower of spray, clambered over the sill onto a mound of reeking laths, glowing pressed-board, mortar, smoldering furniture. Water gurgled and sloshed along the floor. Glass and plaster crunched beneath his boots.

  He moved cautiously. In here the beat of the pumps and the hum of the motors were scarcely audible; in their place was the roar of rushing water as bar-rigid streams forced their way through the windows beside him; the hiss of cold water hitting blazing wood and hot metal.

  This had been the bedroom. The explosion hadn’t occurred in here or the inflammable wouldn’t have trickled down the stair well.

  He picked his way past a heap of rubbish that had been a boudoir chair, keeping close to the wall where the joists would be less likely to have burned through. The partition into the next room had completely burned away, leaving only a few charred joists.

  Pedley could look through into a gutted room filled with enamel that had once been white. The kitchen. By the twisted wreckage of the gas stove, the blast had been there. Maybe there’d been a leak in the feeder pipe; the pilot light would have done the rest.

  He crawled over the litter, sniffing. Gas, all right. But not cooking gas. What had gasoline been doing in Kim Wasson’s kitchenette?

  A cardboard box, the blackened remnant still there, had been wedged down onto the top of the gas stove. It had been a round box, the size that would hold about five pounds of chocolates.

  He pried
it loose from the hot metal. The imprint of the metal guard which had covered one of the burners was deep in the crisped bottom of the box. Meant the cardboard had been wet. And filled with something heavy enough to press the soaked fibers down onto the burner-guard sufficiently to leave an imprint.

  He looked around for the lid, saw something that sent him leaping back toward the partition.

  The brickwork of the rear wall bulged out, slowly, away from him—the way a sleeping animal breathes. After a moment of deliberation, the swelling increased.

  The bricks opened up as if a child had poked his foot through a pile of blocks.

  The floor beneath his feet slanted and fell away.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “SHE HASN’T A PRAYER.”

  HE FLUNG HIMSELF as flat on the floor as he could, with the linoleum beneath him sliding away at a 50-degree angle. He felt as if he were dropping through to the basement; but he didn’t hit hard, merely slid up against a pile of something soggy that had been an ottoman.

  Then a ten-ton truck smacked him in the small of the back, knocked the wind out of him, pinned him face down against the smoking upholstery.

  He fought for breath in air clogged with brick dust, fiercely hot from steam. The pipes had been torn loose somewhere close to him. He’d better get elsewhere in a rush unless he wanted to be parboiled.

  He stuffed the crown of his hat between his teeth so the wet felt would filter out some of the heat.

  He couldn’t move forward. It seemed to him that it took hours to twist and wriggle backward so his shoulders were beneath the beam that held him fast. After that it was a matter of straining every last ounce he could summon into heaving the heavy timber up a fraction of an inch at a time, until he could squirm out from under.

  Snow beat in at him as he rolled free. A yard away was the edge of nothing. Beyond and beneath were lights from the next block.

  He backed away, crawled through a jumble of smashed furniture, splintered wood, piping, wires. Luminous lines of blue raced in waves across the floor ahead of him, crisscrossing in his path.

  There was no way to tell where the doorways or the walls had been; he reached a stair landing before he knew what it was. He went down slowly, a step at a time, listening for the splatter of water in order to duck the force of a stream, if the boys were shooting in here.

  At the second-floor landing a white-helmeted figure glittering with ice shoved a flashlight in the marshal’s face, barked hoarsely, seized him in a bear hug. “Godsake, Fred! You don’t have to bust—”

  “Thought we were going to have to send lilies, sure, that time. You all right?”

  “Sure, except you’re busting this box I’ve been hanging onto.”

  The deputy chief turned his flash on the bit of charred cardboard. “What is it?”

  “Ancient Navaho firemaking apparatus. Candy box filled with ethyl. Set on top of the gas stove.”

  “Delayed-action bomb?”

  “Yair. Take a while for the gas to soak through that glazed cardboard enough to make it soft so it would sag open at the seams, let the gas spill out.”

  “I’ll be a son!”

  “Give somebody time to get quite a ways away from here before enough vapor collected for the pilot light to ignite it. Only thing—the ingenious bastard who thought this up evidently expected there’d be enough of a fire to burn up the box here.”

  The deputy chief swore with accomplished fluency. When he had relieved his feelings he added, “Wouldn’t think the girl would have gone to all that trouble to blow up her own place.”

  “No. You wouldn’t. I don’t. I think the party who arranged this delayed-action doodad wanted the girl to burn up, too.”

  “You know who it is?”

  “I know quite a bit about him, Fred. He’s an amateur, improvises as he goes along. He’s well-fixed with dough, because when he had the chance he wouldn’t touch a roll that would choke a hippo. He’s in or close to show business.” Pedley started down to the street. “Also, he cuts a lot of ice around City Hall.”

  He left the deputy chief puzzled, shaking his head. Down on the street, he spoke to a police surgeon working over a fireman on the sidewalk.

  “Broke his hip,” explained the doctor. “Slipped on the stairs.”

  “Any other casualties?”

  “Couple smoke-chokers. You look as if you could stand a little jelly on that ear, yourself, Marshal.”

  “I’ll let ’em treat it at Saint Vincent’s.” He put the remnant of the candy box in a white-enameled photographer’s tray, tied the lid on, stuck it on the ledge back of the seat in his sedan.

  At the hospital he parked by the EMERGENCY platform, went along a corridor smelling of ether and antiseptic. The night matron led him to a corner of the women’s ward.

  “She hasn’t been conscious a second. They keep her going with adrenaline.”

  “I know. She hasn’t a prayer.” He stood at the cotside, watching the doctors work over her.

  Where the bandages didn’t hide it, Kim’s face was putty-gray. Her lips were gray; there was a metallic sheen around her mouth and nose.

  One of the medical men spoke without looking up. “Only a question of time.”

  “Yair. Has she talked?”

  “Mumbled a little. Delirium, of course. Nothing the nurse could take down.” The doctor nodded toward a probationer standing by the condition chart with a notebook.

  “I’m going to phone. Be in the booth, down the hall. Call me if you see any chance of an in extremis.”

  He rang his office. “You don’t have to dig up anymore dope on the Wasson kid, Barney. She’s through.”

  “Holy cats! The Horatio Street blaze?”

  “That’s right. Same bug who sparked the theater. Same technique.”

  “Son of a bitch!”

  “He got her because she’d been talking to me.”

  “Speaking of which, boss, Shaner’s been calling in every ten minutes to get hold of you.”

  “What’s his complaint?”

  “The Lownes babe. She got away from Maginn.”

  Pedley swore with conciseness; added, “Where is she now?”

  “Well, she’s back at the Riveredge, boss. But Mag lost track of her for a while and it took Shaner a little time to retrail her.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Took a hack to Twenty-third and Madison, then switched to another that let her out at Christopher and Seventh.”

  The matron tapped on the glass of the booth door. “She’s going—”

  “Said anything?”

  “Tryin’ to—”

  Kim’s eyes were still closed, but her swollen lips moved torturedly.

  The probationer whispered, “While you were out, she said ‘Three minutes—’ and something about a curtain. I couldn’t catch it.”

  “Three minutes to curtain time,” Pedley said. “She’s not calling it far wrong.” He bent over.

  Kim’s slack lips twitched. “… ill.”

  He could just make it out the second time. “… Bill.” Then the thin lips were still.

  The doctor sighed. “Did all we could for her, Marshal.”

  “Not quite. Not yet.”

  The physician frowned uncertainly.

  Pedley motioned. “See you a minute?”

  He and the medical man went out in the hall for a brief consultation. The doctor began by shaking his head; ended by nodding dubiously.

  “I can’t guarantee anything, Marshal. But I’ll do what I can.”

  “That’ll be enough.”

  “How about yourself? You look as if you ought to pile up in one of our private wards.”

  “If you feel like putting some tannic salve on this ear, I won’t say no.”

  While the jelly was being applied, the doctor made one more attempt. “What you really need is about fourteen hours of good, sound sleep.”

  “The raveled sleeve could stand a little knitting. Tell you—a couple of Benzedrine might pi
ck me up. How about such?”

  He took his own medicine in a quart of the blackest coffee the Sheridan Square Wagon could serve up, scanned the morning papers while he ate.

  There was plenty about the theater fire. None of it was new, except some slants on Ned Lownes:

  One of Broadway’s most popular citizens… Greatest eccentric dancer of his time… Leading theatrical manager…

  Pedley detected the fine hand of Terence Ross in the phrasings.

  And there was one line that made the marshal smile wryly over his coffee cup:

  Miss Lownes, the incomparable Leila of stage, screen, and radio, is prostrated at her East River residence over the untimely death of her brother. He wondered how she’d feel about Kim Wasson.

  There hadn’t been any brotherly love lost between Leila and her brother. But Kim had been close to the singer, had been a friend of Bill’s.

  Conover had been pretty cheerful about Ned’s passing. What happened to the Wasson girl might affect him differently. Still, the lieutenant had seen a lot of killing, close up, and not so long ago—maybe death didn’t disturb him very much.

  In that case, it might be a good idea to take precautions. But quick—

  Chapter Sixteen

  VERY NATURAL, VERY DUMB

  THE SNOW WAS FALLING faster at Sheepshead Bay, and it was deeper. The wind sliced in off the Channel like a ripsaw. False dawn was just beginning to gray the east. It was bitter cold.

  The rows of canvas-shrouded hulls on the ways were piled yard-high with sugar-frosting. A few wore no winter covers, but it was hard to distinguish them from the others. Only a few had a sheathing of thin boards; of these but two were reasonably free of the caked covering.

  One bore the name Judy C. in heavy letters across her transom. The marshal passed her up; Conover might not be the kind of waterman who insisted on naming his craft after his girl, but he’d hardly own a boat bearing the name of another.

  Smoke plumed up from the Charley Noble of the second choice, anyway. Now that he plowed nearer along the hard-packed path through the shipyard, Pedley saw that the portholes of the Voyageur emitted faint light. There was someone aboard.