Where There’s Smoke

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.