Where There's Smoke

by Stewart Sterling

  They bumped into a side table, knocked it over, fell on top of it.

  Shaner found them wrestling around on the floor.

  “You don’t need this extinguisher personally, do you, coach?”

  “Close the damper—in the chimney.” The marshal’s face was crimson. “Shoot against—back of fireplace. Want to save—papers that are burned. Don’t mess up—the burned leaves.”

  When Leila heard the hissing of the extinguisher, she quieted down.

  Pedley stood up, pulled her to her feet, held onto one of her wrists.

  “You like to play rough, we’ll play rough,” he growled.

  “Why do you want to pry into a girl’s diary?”

  “You lied to me about how you got it and what was in it. I’ll take six, two and even right now it’s not a diary.”

  “It is so.” She smoothed down her dress as well as she could with one hand.

  “I’m not concerned with what’s written on those pages. It’s why they made somebody kill your brother and try to do the same thing to your arranger. If you feel like adding Hal Kelsey to the total, I won’t contradict you.”

  She stopped trying to pull away; leaned close to him, gazing up under lowered lashes.

  “Send that other man away,” she whispered, “and I’ll tell you, honestly, why I don’t want anyone to read the—diary.”

  “You have no secrets from Shaner, anyway. He’s been delving into your private life for nearly twenty-four hours. Speak freely—”

  “I will not!” She leaned against him. “I won’t talk about it in front of him!”

  “Don’t believe that safety-in-numbers gag? All right, Shaner—”

  “I been in the department fifteen years, skipper—this is the fastest ‘stop’ I ever made. She’s out cold. The fire, I mean.”

  “Fine. Hop out to the kitchen. Get the biggest pan you can find; a roaster’d be the nuts—if it has a top on it.”

  “I’m way ahead of you.” Shaner couldn’t forebear an appraisal of Leila with her dress pulled down over one bare shoulder, her hair disarranged, her cheeks flushed.

  Pedley called after him, “Bring a flapjack turner. Be one in the drawer somewhere.” He nodded at the singer. “Go into your number.”

  “Well—” She had to make one more dramatic gesture, darting a glance from one side to the other as if to be certain there was no one within earshot. “I’m married to Lieutenant Conover!”

  “What is this? Confessions of a Young Bride?”

  “Mm, hm.” She didn’t seem a bit reluctant. “Not the ordinary kind.”

  Shaner bustled back with an aluminum roaster and a long nickeled spatula. “This’ll do it. Just the burned papers, coach?”

  “Yair. You can leave the andirons.”

  Leila wouldn’t continue until the deputy had finished transferring the bits of charred paper to the roasting pan.

  “Ashes to ashes, coach. Some of the pieces crumbled. But I saved most of ’em.”

  “Handle with care, from here in. Take ’em down to Broome Street. Tell the sarge I want every last word he can get out of ’em.”

  “Can I wrap myself in the arms of morphium, after that?”

  “Hit the hay hard’s you please. But don’t bust up those pages.”

  Shaner carried the roaster away like a proud father holding his first baby, closed the door behind him. Leila wrenched her wrist free from the marshal’s relaxed grip. “If that’s the way you’re going to treat my confidence, I won’t tell you anything.”

  “You’d still be smart to tell all. It’ll be up to me to say who sees what the lab-boys find on those pages.”

  She strode back and forth in front of the fireplace, struggling to reach a decision.

  “Dammit! I guess I’ll have to trust you.”

  “You’re making slow headway.”

  “I was married before. But nobody knows that.”

  “Not even Conover?”

  “No. My first husband left me. I never knew where he went. I don’t know where he is now—or if he’s still alive.”

  “Divorce?”

  “Yes. I got one of those Mexican things. I don’t know whether it’s legal or not. I don’t know if I’m actually married to Bill, or if I’m a bigamist—or what.”

  He shook his head, morosely. “No soap.”

  “You don’t believe me?”

  “Nothing in what you’ve told me to cause this procession of arson and murder. Maybe some of your fairy tale is true. Might be all true, far’s it goes. Doesn’t go far enough. Isn’t important enough. What’s the rest of it?”

  “That’s absolutely all there is.”

  “If that’s your story, you’re going to be badly stuck with it. Because I’m putting you under arrest. Now.”

  She backed away from him, eyes wide with fear. She wasn’t staring directly at him, but over his shoulder.

  There was no mistaking the prickle at the back of his neck, now. It wasn’t imagination.

  “Move the point of that knife down a little, Lieutenant. Or is it a razor?”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  FALLING INTO DARKNESS

  “STICK YOUR THUMBS in your ears, dicky bird.” Conover jabbed the point of the knife deeper into the marshal’s neck. “Keep your flippers up in plain sight.” The lieutenant’s right hand came around, took the gun from Pedley’s armpit holster. “Now squat. Right on the floor, where you are. Cross-legged. That’s the pose. You can clasp your hands behind your head if your arms start to drop off.”

  Pedley obeyed. No sense arguing with six inches of sharp-edged steel.

  The lieutenant swung the gun to and fro by the trigger guard. “Forgot I’d have a key to wifey’s apartment, didn’t you?”

  “Didn’t think much about it,” Pedley admitted. “I sort of thought Leila’d get word to you I’d be coming up here tonight, though.”

  “Setting a trap for me, were you?” Conover laughed. “Look whose paw is pinched now. The pig stabs the butcher.”

  “Temporary reversal of position, yair. But with ten thousand cops on the lookout for you, you won’t be able to pull stunts like that car smackup all the time. Fair to middling chance they’ll pick you up before you get out of the Riveredge.”

  Leila put her arm on the lieutenant’s sleeve. “I’m supposed to be under arrest, Bill.”

  “You won’t be, Li.” He sniffed. “What’s the matter with the chimney?”

  “He closed the damper,” she answered. “I was burning some old papers in the fireplace and he thought he could put the fire out and find out what they were.”

  Conover scowled, puzzled.

  Pedley shifted his position to ease the strain of sitting with crossed legs. “The papers have gone down to the Headquarters Lab on Broome Street. Nothing you can do about that.”

  The lieutenant held Pedley’s pistol by the barrel, swung the heavy butt in a suggestive arc.

  “There’s something I can do about you, Hard-boiled Harry.”

  “Yair. You can knock me on the head.”

  “And toss you out a window so nobody could prove you were tapped on the skull before you fell.”

  Leila cried, “Bill! Stop talking like that!”

  He said, “I don’t see any other way out of it, shugie.”

  “That’d be no way out.” Pedley put his hands down on his knees, slowly. “The police might stop hunting for a killer, now they’ve announced Kelsey committed suicide. If you bop me, nobody’s going to believe an old blueshirt fell out of a window accidentally. Only make things that much worse for the girl friend. She’s in over her head, already.”

  “We were fighting,” Conover related. “The window was open on account of all the smoke in the room. We bumped against the sill and over you went. Finis.”

  “You couldn’t get your own friends to believe it,” Pedley said.

  Conover brought the butt of the gun down hard on the table; it made the leather case bounce.

  “I can say I found you
in here annoying Li, took a belt at you, you came back at me, I crowned you in self-defense. They’d fall for that.”

  “Not after Ned and Kim and Kelsey. Not after you did what you could to break my neck in the car this morning. They might not send you to the chair, because you’re a vet who’s risked his life for his country and there might be some excuse for your being blood-goofy. But they’d slap you in an institution for quite a while. That shouldn’t appeal to a young married man.”

  The singer put her arms around Conover’s shoulders.

  “He’s right, Bill. There must be a better way.”

  “There is,” Pedley snapped irritably.

  The lieutenant looked at the top of the marshal’s head. “I doubt it. But we’re willing to listen to reason.”

  Pedley grimaced at the girl. “I’ll take that drink now, if you don’t mind.”

  Bill nodded. “Never refuse a drink to a dying man or you won’t wind up in heaven. I’ll have one, too, shugie.”

  “Bourbon, if there’s any on the shelf.” Pedley straightened out his left leg, rubbed the calf as if he had a cramp in it.

  Leila disappeared into the kitchen.

  “As man to man—” Pedley lowered his voice confidentially—“you’ve married yourself a peck of trouble.”

  “Suits me,” Conover retorted. “I’ve seen so much trouble I can’t get along without a little.”

  The marshal went on as if he hadn’t heard. “You’re bright enough to be wise to one of two things. Either she knows who this throat-slitting arsonist is—”

  The lieutenant’s face darkened. “Don’t talk behind her back.”

  “In which case,” again Pedley gave no heed to the interruption “—the thing for her to do is name him, before somebody else lands in the mortuary.”

  Leila came back with a tray, glasses full of ice, a bottle and a siphon.

  “The gentleman’s talking about you, Li.”

  “I was just saying—” Pedley stretched his other leg a little; now he was sitting on one hip, with his hands on his thighs—“that either you know the firebug or you’re a three-time killer yourself, Mrs. Conover.”

  “If I was—” she fizzed soda in the glasses—“yours would be mixed with prussic acid or something.”

  “Isopropyl alcohol, maybe. Poison’s a woman’s trick more often than a man’s. Like the stuff used in rigging up the fires—things a girl’d be likely to use. Flatiron, cleaning fluid, candy box.”

  Conover ignored the glass Leila held out to him. “Keep on, if you want to get clouted.”

  “Look at the way it stacks up in the reports down at my office, Lieutenant.” He reached up for the drink she handed to him; Conover made a threatening gesture with the gun. “Your wife was one of the few people who could have had access to Miss Wasson’s rooms around twelve o’clock at night; she left this apartment and went down to the Village about an hour before the explosion blew her arranger’s place six ways from the jack.”

  Conover balanced on the balls of his feet; his clenched left fist began to hammer against the table softly.

  “That’s enough, fireman.”

  “Enough to set her in the defendant’s dock. But there’s more. Mrs. Conover was at Columbus Circle for a while this afternoon, about the time the police estimate Kelsey had his jugular vein bisected. The Circle’s only a half-mile from the spot where the band leader’s body was discovered.” He took a swig at the bourbon.

  Leila put her hands to her breast as if it hurt her to breathe. The lieutenant crouched, moved toward Pedley with cautious, catlike steps. His mouth twisted up on one side; twitched. He held the gun like a club.

  The marshal drew one knee up under him.

  “You’ll want to sleep in a separate room with the door locked, Lieutenant. Married to a girl who gets around like that!”

  Conover sprang, the butt of the gun swinging down.

  Pedley hurled the glass, flung himself aside in a half-roll, half-dive, hit a table, sent it crashing. Lamp, tray, bottles rolled on the carpet. The lieutenant kept coming. The gun thudded against the left forearm Pedley threw up to ward it off. The arm went numb.

  The marshal knew he was no match for a bucko ten years younger and trained for in-fighting. He might have been able to hold his own for a while if he hadn’t been doing without sleep for the last 48 hours. But as it was, it didn’t look good.

  The gun landed again; only an unconscious reflex jerked Pedley’s head aside enough to take the blow on the shoulder blade. He grabbed the bourbon bottle, smashed it against a table leg, held out the jagged neck.

  It kept the lieutenant at a distance, momentarily.

  “Use some sense, Conover. Blowing your top won’t make things easier for your wife. Unless, of course, you happen to know she’s guilty—”

  Conover circled, trying for an opening. As he moved, catlike, past Leila, she grabbed at his gun arm, pulled him off balance. He whirled to shake free. Pedley hit him under the left ear with a left hook that would have dropped a grizzly.

  The lieutenant fell down on top of the lamp shade, rolled as he fell, came up fighting. Pedley gave him the knee, under the chin, as Conover rose. The lieutenant’s jaws clicked together, his head snapped back. He collapsed.

  Leila threw herself on the floor beside him. “You’ve killed him!” she wailed.

  “He’ll be all right in fifteen minutes.” The marshal bent down to recover his gun.

  Conover opened his eyes. The gun came up from the floor, hit Pedley on the bridge of the nose.

  A million flash bulbs went off in his head; then he was falling into darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  PEDLEY IS HOOKED

  SOMEWHERE A CLOCK chimed eight. Pedley tried opening his eyes, but it was too much exertion. He lay there trying to reason it out.

  The clock must be wrong. It had been close to nine when he got here; therefore, it couldn’t be eight now. There’d been that angry exchange with Conover and the fight; then he’d probably been lying here on the floor—he turned his head.

  Somebody’d put a pillow under his head. A nice soft pillow. He moved his fingers. Nobody would put sheets on the carpet.

  He wrenched his eyes open. He was in bed, all right. A four-poster. Leila’s!

  The Venetian blinds kept out most of the sunlight, but there was enough for him to see his clothes hanging over a chair.

  He closed his eyes again. Somebody had undressed him, put collodion over the cut on his neck, tucked him in with an extra comforter. He recoiled at the thought of how he’d feel when he got up from this soft mattress.

  He was wearing pajamas. Blazer-striped things in blue and white. Probably the lieutenant’s.

  He sat up and groaned.

  The bedroom door opened. Leila looked in.

  “Praise be. I was dreadfully worried that I ought to have called the doctor earlier. He’ll be here any minute now.”

  “I don’t need a doc.” He groaned again. “What I need is a headstone.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve any broken bones.” She came in the room, to the bedside, put her hand on his forehead.

  “Ouch! Easy on that welt.”

  “I’m so-o-o sorry.” She sat on the edge of the bed. She wore a long-skirted morning coat of something soft and white, with loose-flowing sleeves—and a different perfume. “I’ll bring you some coffee before the doctor comes, if you like.”

  “That’d be great. Where’s the lieutenant?”

  “Oh, he’s gone.”

  She went out, with no further explanation. He debated whether to attempt dressing before she returned with the coffee, decided against it.

  The coffee was in a silver service; there were cigarettes in a silver goblet; the morning paper was folded neatly at the edge of the tray.

  “Everything but the morning mail,” he said. “In time to make the eight-twenty. Thanks.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “I’ve felt better. How’s the other Kilkenny cat?
”

  “Bill can’t use his wrist very well. He thinks there may be a green fracture.”

  “That won’t slow him down any more than a mosquito bite. He’s going to kill somebody, one of these days.” Pedley blew on the hot coffee. “I thought he was going to punctuate me. Why didn’t he?”

  “Because I told him you saved my life.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Terry told me.” She stood in front of the door mirror, primping her hair. “I didn’t know, the first time you were here. I wouldn’t have been so snooty, if I had.”

  “Think nothing of it. Part of our service to regular customers. Conover must have been disappointed at not finishing what he started.”

  “It’s hard to tell how Bill feels. I’m a little afraid of him, myself, sometimes.”

  “Ah! He’s as transparent as a kid on a pantry chair. He thinks you’re the glow-worm.”

  “So do you—don’t you?” Her mouth and eyes were wistfully unhappy.

  “He can’t dope out any way to help you except the direct action method. Problem: I’m a menace to your safety and his happiness. Solution: eliminate me. Primitive way of thinking. All those marines were taught to be primitive—or else.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You’re the one to answer it.” He emptied the coffeepot. “Not easy to lie here and look at you and remind myself that appearances are deceptive as hell. That you were in the dressing-room and in the Village and on Central Park West at or about the time of the crimes. That, as far as I know, you’re the only person who was at all three places.”

  She sat on the bed again, leaned over with what might have been anxiety—or something else.

  He’d have had to be beat up much worse than he was, Pedley realized, not to be affected by her. He’d run across a few girls of this sort before—the kind who considered sex something to be shared casually whenever its sharing was agreeable or profitable or useful. That was the way this girl used it, had always used it, apparently. As something which could be depended on to help her over the tough spots in the road.

  Leila knew he wanted her now; she was using the certainty of it for all it was worth. She rested a hand carelessly on his knee, “Suppose I were—the glow-worm?”