Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  But the strangler might not have the special ability every smoke-eater is forced to acquire as a matter of course—the ability to get along on a thimbleful of air for a half a minute beyond the ordinary limit of lung endurance. Pedley would have to make the most of that.

  He kicked, threshed, rolled. The man at his back followed every maneuver.

  Pedley used knees and feet. The hands clamped more firmly around his throat.

  One foot touched cold tile. The side of the pool. He made a convulsive effort, twisted on his side. The man rolled with him.

  Pedley didn’t have much left. He put it all into one backward lunge. His head butted back against the man’s chin, banged the other’s skull against the side of the pool with bone-cracking force. The fingers at his throat loosened—

  The marshal sucked in some water as he drifted up to the surface. He was too exhausted to do more than dog paddle, gasping and gulping until the mist cleared from his eyes.

  He swam slowly to the edge of the pool, caught at the ladder.

  There was no one else in the plunge room.

  He climbed out as fast as he could make it, ran along the side of the pool, saw the white form magnified by the water against the green tile of the bottom.

  He ought to leave the murdering son of a bitch with that thread of pink trailing up through the water from the bald head.

  But he dived in, swam under, locked a forearm beneath the unconscious man’s chin. It took several periods of hauling and dragging to get the heavy body out of the pool, onto the tiling.

  He rolled the bald man over on his stomach, held him up, let the water drain out of his lungs. Then he straddled the barrel-like torso, began the forward-pressure on the shoulder blades, the rhythmic back-way and the Schaefer count.

  He never knew how long it took. But his arms were numb and his knees without feeling when the man began to breathe steadily.

  “It’s not the recommended position for recuperation, you potbellied bastard,” he said close to the man’s ear. “But you’re going to have your wrists tied behind your back.”

  He used the belt of his robe for the purpose. Then he slipped the rubber keyband from the bald man’s neck, padded through the steamy hall in straw slippers and bathrobe until he found a lock the key fitted.

  The first thing he saw on the bed was a wig. A toupee of shiny black hair, neatly parted.

  “Staro!” His eyes lighted up. “It’s about time somebody took your scalp!”

  Chapter Twenty

  “YOU’D KILL ME!”

  “BARNEY? I’M UP at the Bosphorus. With a cute little customer, name of Staro… Yair, reason we had difficulty digging up the lowdown on him is that his name is Lasti—L as in lethargy, A as in arms of Morpheus, S as in sleep… Yair, Astaro Lasti—Staro for short… He and I are about to split a tea for two over at Combination Thirty-six… That’s right… and we’d feel lonesome without company. Would you so nicely as to bring MacCarthy over there?… But right away… and listen, if the commissioner gets itches in his britches, you don’t know where I am, what I’m doing, or when I’m going to show.”

  He hung up the phone, went back to the poolside, where a gnarled-oak individual was rubbing horse liniment on the prostrate man’s bald pate.

  “Thanks for holding the horse’s head, Johnnie.”

  “It stopped the bleeding, Ben.” The proprietor of the Bosphorus was apologetic. “But the guy doesn’t seem grateful. Confidentially, he says it stings.”

  “Doc,” grunted Staro. “Get me—to a doc.”

  “You’re more likely to need the services of an undertaker before I’m through with you.” Pedley rapped Staro’s fingers with the barrel of his gun. “Rise and shine.”

  Staro stumbled unsteadily to his feet.

  “Can’tchtake a little roughhouse, without getting sore?”

  Pedley shoved him toward the dressing-room. “Slap that wig on and get dressed. Don’t waste time looking for your bill-clip or your keys or such. I’ve got ’em.”

  Staro made one more try, as he was putting on the gaudy shepherd’s-plaid trousers with the exaggerated pleats.

  “Maybe you hadda little right to a peeve, pally. I useta play a lot of water polo an’ sometimes I forget myself, splashing around inna pool.”

  “I know how it is.” Pedley observed the orange and cerise tie with wonder. “I’m about to forget myself, too, in a few minutes.”

  Johnnie said, “If you want any help with him in the car—”

  “No thanks, Johnnie. He’ll go out like a lamb.”

  Before they went down to the car, Pedley locked one cuff of the bracelets around Staro’s right wrist.

  “Stick your mitt in your coat pocket and keep it there, fink.”

  At the borrowed sedan, he ordered the bodyguard to sit by the right-hand door.

  “Bend over. Put your right hand under your knees. Now the left one, same way.” The other cuff clicked shut on the man’s left wrist.

  “I can’t even sit up,” Staro complained.

  “You’re lucky you’re able to breathe.”

  Combination Company Thirty-six was still playing housemaid to the apparatus when Pedley unlocked Staro and marched him in from the street.

  Some of the men were doing “committee-work”—cleaning the brass, buffing enamel. A couple were reloading dried hose in horseshoe loops.

  This was one of the crack outfits—a combination engine and hook-and-ladder company with one of the best records of quick “stops” in the whole department. It was also the successor to Pedley’s old hook-and-ladder outfit—he knew the building as most people know their homes, and some of the old-timers as well as the average man knows his own family. They wouldn’t interfere with what he had in mind; they wouldn’t let any prowling patrolman cut in on the deal, either.

  “Hi, Marshal.” A pair at a checkerboard saluted.

  “Hi. How’s the tournament?” He kept Staro moving toward the back room.

  “Mitch loses two straight after he has a King advantage. The yap’s trying to play according to that ‘How to Be a Champion’ book—but he can’t remember the moves when he’s at the board.”

  “Try playing with quarters instead of pieces. Makes you more careful. I want the back room for a while. Oke?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “If we make a racket in there, it’s just because I’m showing my sidekick some jujitsu holds.”

  The back office was a small room with bare brick walls, one window, a radiator, a brass standpipe with a Siamese coupling, a row of shelving on which were mounted helmets and trumpets of the three-horse-hitch era, a wall map of the fire district, the signal box, the assignment board, a green steel desk, and three straight-backed chairs.

  Pedley jammed Staro down into one of the chairs. His aim wasn’t too good; the heavy man let out a yip.

  “Lay off! You ain’t gonna third me!”

  Pedley closed the door. “Look, Staro. Ordinarily I don’t believe in banging a rat around. You get a squeak out of him but it doesn’t stand up in court. This is different.”

  The bodyguard didn’t try to conceal his fear, as the marshal went on. “I’m not going to give you the works because you did your best to drown me, though I wouldn’t want you to think I’m forgetting that. But I’m not going to stick to the letter of the ordinances with a murdering slob who’s been running around town starting bonfires to burn up people.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do—”

  “Hold it. I know you’re not the boy-behind-the-scenes. You aren’t big enough. You couldn’t make that kind of crime pay enough. But you probably rigged up those fires. And I suppose you were told to fix my wagon because Mister Behind-the-Scenes thought I was blood-hounding around too much and might be lucky enough to come up with the answers. Now, I’m going to find out who he is. It’s strictly up to you how I do it.”

  Staro licked the knuckles Pedley had rapped with the gun.

  “You can talk now and I’ll take you
down to the Prosecutor’s office to make an affidavit. You might even arrange it to cop a plea on account of turning state’s evidence. It’s been done.”

  “I don’t know anything about the fires, so you can put me under the light all you wanna. I won’t be able to tell you nothing.”

  “Suit yourself, Staro. By the time you get ready to squawk, the surgeons will have their hands full putting you back together.”

  Barney arrived with a canvas bag about as big as himself. He barely glanced at the man in the chair.

  “Where you want MacCarthy, boss?”

  “Set him in that chair, Barnabus.”

  The fireman untied a heavy cord at the top of the bag, pulled out a life-size dummy made of sailcloth, with leather joints at knees, hips, shoulders, and elbows. The thing was weighted to approximate that of an average man; its flat canvas face was crudely painted with horror-stricken eyes and open mouth.

  “Borrow a doughnut from the boys, Barney.” Pedley propped MacCarthy up so the dummy faced Staro.

  Barney came back with a tight, round roll of fire hose. “Hook up the standpipe, Barnus.” Pedley wrapped the dummy tightly, from neck to waist, in coil after coil of the hose, mummy fashion, carrying the hose around the back of the chair on each loop.

  “Generally use Mac to train the boys in rescue work,” he explained to Staro. “He’s not made to stand this kind of treatment. But it’ll give you a rough idea of what to expect.” The marshal opened the window, stuck the nozzle end of the hose out of it. “Let her go, Barney.”

  Barney turned the brass handwheel on the standpipe. Water rushed through the hose, swelling each coil instantly to a rough hardness that constricted the dummy’s torso so the canvas neck swelled, the arms stuck out straight at the shoulders, a ridge of stuffing swelled out between two loops that weren’t overlapping. The dummy stiffened as if in its death agony.

  “Hold your water, Barney.”

  The clerk shut off the stream at the nozzle. Charlie MacCarthy sagged, limply.

  Staro’s eyes bugged. “You can’t pull that on me. You’d kill me!”

  “Not right off.” Pedley unwrapped the dummy. “Kind of messes you up inside, of course. Ribs can’t stand much of it. Ruptures you, usually. I know one case where a guy took fifteen seconds of it before he caved.”

  Staro swallowed, morosely. “I don’t even know what you want me to tell you.”

  “Who sent you after me?”

  “Some guy who rings me on the phone. Says you were the one murdered Ned Lownes. I didn’t know you was with the Fire Department—or I’d never—”

  “How’d you know I was at the Bosphorus?”

  “This guy who calls me up says you’ll be at the Tower Building an’ all I hafta do is wait an’ pick you up.”

  “Oh! You were at the Tower Building!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wouldn’t have had a forty-five with you at the time?”

  “No.”

  “Hm. Well. You didn’t recognize this voice that told you to push the button on me?”

  “Nah! I guess he was trying to disguise it—”

  “Couldn’t you have thought up something original?” Pedley looped a coil of the hose around the bodyguard’s neck. “That old mahuska about the unknown gent on the phone who put you up to it. Lift your arms so I can wrap this around your chest.”

  Staro struggled. Pedley put his hand in the man’s face, pushed his head back.

  “No!” Staro choked. “Don’t! I’ll tell you!”

  “Do it sudden.” The hose went around the bulging midriff.

  “It was—Hal.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Hal Kelsey. He gimme five hundred in advance. I was to get another five if you go to a cemetery.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  SOMETHING UNDERHANDED ON FOOT

  “HAL KELSEY, HAH?” Pedley sat with the back of a chair between his knees, rested his elbows on the top of the back. “Did he pay you to torch the Brockhurst, too?”

  Staro fingered his throat, tenderly. “I had nothing to do with the fires whatsoever.”

  “You’ll be all set with an alibi.”

  “One you won’t be able to finagle, either. I was on East Fifty-first from two o’clock yesterday afternoon until around ten o’clock last night. Until I could get a bondsman to bail me out.”

  “The East Fifty-first Street police station?”

  “Look it up on the blotter, you doubt my word.”

  “What’d they pick you up for?”

  “D and D. It was Ned’s fault, tossing a bottle through the bar mirror like that, because they wouldn’t serve him no more in his condition. But it was my job to be fall guy so when the cops come, I says I’m responsible an’ they run me in.”

  There was nothing he could do about that, Pedley knew. Whoever had set the fire at the theater had been at the theater. If Staro had been in the lockup all that afternoon, that put him in the clear, so far as the Brockhurst was concerned.

  “Don’t congratulate yourself, my slug-ugly friend. I can still keep you making little ones out of big ones for ten to twenty. Keep a loose upper lip and tell me why Kelsey wanted me rubbed off the blackboard.”

  “Honest to God, I don’t—”

  “Now, now. Barney’s only out putting Mac in the car. He’ll be back in a minute. And the hose is still handy.”

  “It was something about that leather case—”

  “Here we go again!”

  “You could gimme the squeeze with that hose all day an’ that’s all I know about it.”

  Pedley reached out, cuffed the bodyguard on the side of his head so the toupee fell over one of Staro’s eyes. “You worked for Lownes. You were with him when he was under the influence, which was most of the time. You know where the case is—”

  The man cringed, readjusting his wig. “I know where he kept it.”

  “Sing.”

  “In his safe.”

  “I didn’t see any in his suite.”

  “At the office.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Ambrose Building.”

  “You have a key to the office?”

  “You got it. It was in my pocket.”

  “Yair. Know the combination to the safe?”

  “Nobody knew it but Ned.” The answer came just a bit too readily.

  “He wouldn’t trust you with it, I can believe that. But you’d be around when he was schwocked and had trouble opening it. You know the numbers, all right.”

  Staro shook his head.

  Pedley picked up a loop of hose. “This is where you came in.”

  Before the canvas touched him, Staro yelled, “Right nineteen, left two, right eight.”

  “Must be one of those old tin cans the Wells Fargo people threw out in ninety-six. Okay. Put your foot in the road. After we get there, if you claim somebody’s switched the combination, I’m likely to shove the hose right down your throat and give you the full blast.”

  The signal box rapped out a brassy bing-bing-bing-bing, as Staro shuffled out of the office ahead of Pedley. Neither the boys at the checker table or the ancient Dalmatian snoozing under the hook-and-ladder paid any attention to it; Thirty-six only rolled on boxes in the 800 to 900 group.

  One of the firemen called, “Want to sit in for a while, Marshal?”

  “Not this afternoon. I have a couple of jumps to make, in line of duty.”

  The offices of Lownes Enterprises, Incorporated, were something unusual for Tin Pan Alley. The furnishings were dignified Victorian; there were old hunting prints on the walls; not a piano in sight. Not even a casting couch.

  The safe stood in the corner of Ned’s private office. It was a Mosely, circa 1910, painted black and gold; nineteen, two, and eight opened it on the first twirl. There were ledgers and papers and blue bundles of legal documents; in the cash compartment, a small stack of ones and fives with a little silver. But no leather case.

  “I thought it was too good to be
true,” said Pedley. “He wouldn’t have kept it here.”

  “I saw it in there,” Staro insisted.

  “How long ago?”

  “Maybe a month or a little more. It was the day she was in here fighting with him.”

  “Leila? What about?”

  “This Conover she’s been honeying up to. She’s goof about the guy. Ned gives her the razz, gets the case out of the safe an’ waves it in her face. ‘The lieutenant wouldn’t be so cuckoo about you, if he knew what was in this,’ he says. ‘An’ I’ll show it to him, if I have to, to keep you in line.’”

  Pedley swung the safe door shut, twirled the knob. Somebody else was trying to get into the office. A blurred figure showed through the ground glass of the outer office door.

  A key made noises in the lock.

  “Face the wall,” Pedley whispered to Staro. “Don’t turn around. Unless you want to know how it feels to get hit with a thirty-eight!”

  The hall door opened. Sime Dublin’s voice said, “You keep the key. I’ll keep the warrant, superintendent.”

  Pedley strolled out.

  “And when he got there, the cupboard was bare—”

  The captain of the Special Headquarters Squad raised both hands in mock disgust.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve been balling things up again, Benny boy!”

  “If you’re after that leather case, it’s numbered among the missing, Cap. But I have something to repay you for your trouble. A slight token of my regard for you.”

  “I can bear up without any expressions of your fond affection.” Dublin squinted suspiciously.

  “Notwithstanding—come on out, polo player.”

  Staro backed away from the wall, grudgingly, into the captain’s line of vision.

  Pedley inclined his head toward the bodyguard. “Meet the gentleman your teletype’s been chattering about—Staro Lasti.”

  Dublin scrutinized the toupee carefully.

  “The Police Department’s been co-operating to locate this man, Benny. Now you have your dukes on him, he’s your pigeon.”