Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Fourteen Curious Firemaking Apparatus

The Greenwich Village Street was a welter of noise. Women shrieked. Men yelled incoherently. Teen-age girls, wrapped in blankets, giggled hysterically. Half-clad children scampered screaming from frantic parents.

Policemen bellowed at young boys pressing against the fire lines — at the crowds milling out of near-by houses into driving snow tinted claret from the headlamps. The thunder of the pumpers reverberated across the icy rubble. Water lanced up hoarsely toward the roof of Twelve-ten.

The top of the building was glowing like a brazier seen from beneath. Against the dark line of the cornice, orange flashes illuminated black, oily coils spewing up from below.

The gusts whirled smoke down into the street, blotting out the bedlam, momentarily. A sprinkling of sparks was whipped by the wind from the windows on the top floor; intermittent showers of brick chips and broken glass rattled down on the red hoods of the apparatus.

Below that radiance on the fifth floor, the apartment house was dark, save for firefly flashes of lanterns moving behind the windows of the lower floors. But every window in the adjoining buildings was lighted. Heads were silhouetted against squares of soft yellow, all up and down the block.

Short ladders were in place across the sidewalk. In the middle of the street, Hook Eighty’s giant extension ladder was being cranked up toward the top floor.

To the morbidly excited or frightened people on the streets, this was a scene of inexplicable and ominous confusion. But like one of those old slapstick films in which the automobile ran backward and the hat that had been knocked off the fat man’s head magically rose from the ground to perch again upon his bald pate, the picture unwound itself backward to Pedley.

Without being conscious of it, his mind retraced in an instant what must have happened before he reached the spot.

The engine company had raced in, gated their hoses to the hydrants. The hosemen had unreeled their lines, started one in the front door at the street level, another up an extension ladder which the first truck company would have slapped up against the building within a few seconds after its arrival. A third line would have been laid in through the alley and up back of the building on the fire escape.

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.