Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Thirty Getting Somewhere — Maybe

The great, somber room on the fourth floor of Police Headquarters was in darkness, except for the seven 200-watt bulbs focused on the little stage at the far end. The hands of the clock at the side of the room formed the right angle of nine o’clock. In the semigloom, hundreds of men shuffled their feet, shifted in the hard chairs, made a low hum of mutterings.

They watched the man who swaggered to the center of the 25-foot platform, directly beneath the hot brilliance of the light, their eyes taking in every detail. His gait, the way he carried his head, the size of his hands. His height was shown against the scale painted on the wall close behind him.

Fifteen feet away from him, almost in a line with the first row of seats, the interrogator, an assistant chief inspector, sat on a dais in front of a bookkeeper’s slant-top desk on which stood a shaded light and a microphone. Beside him, the plain-clothes man who had made the arrest. The interrogator read from a card in front of him; the voice of the public-address system struck Pedley’s ears with a curious impression of hollowness.

“You’re William S. Conover?”

The man under the light said, “Yes.” His voice was thick, as if he had been drinking.

“American?”

“Sure.”

“Formerly Lieutenant, United States Marine Corps?”

“Yes.”

“Honorable discharge. Medals; hospitalization record. Address?”

“Motorboat Voyageur, Sheepshead Bay.”

“Age?”

“Twenty-four.”

“Born?”

“Minneapolis.”

“Unemployed.” The police interrogator referred to the card. “No previous record of arrest. Picked up outside Bickford’s, Grand Central, one-forty-five ayem this morning, Detective First Class Reiss, Shield Number seven-four-two-one. Weapon, paratrooper’s knife. How’d your coat get slashed like that, Conover?”

“Ripped it myself, accidentally.”

“Didn’t get into a fight with anybody?”

“No.” Bill’s manner defied contradiction.

“Had enough fighting for a while?”

“Yes.”

He’s playing it canny, Pedley decided. Doesn’t know what the police know, so he won’t admit anything that might involve Leila.

The interrogator continued. “What’d you been doing before the officer arrested you, Conover?”

“Drinking.”

“Where?”

“Around.”

“You’re charged with resisting arrest and intent to do great bodily harm, by deliberately wrecking a sedan belonging to the Fire Marshal of the City of New York. You admit these charges?”

“Hell, no. I didn’t personally put ice on that road.”

A ripple of laughter went through the seats stretching back into the darkness.

Sime Dublin dug his elbows into Pedley’s ribs.

“Y’see, Benny boy? We draw the same blanks from all your complaints. You know what Lasti says, now he’s out of your reach?”

“What?”

“Claims he never went after you in that pool at all, as alleged on the blotter. Swears you trailed him to the Turkish bath, tried to get him to make damaging statements about some of Lownes’s friends and he refused to do it.”

“Johnnie Watson, who runs the Bosphorus, can disprove the first. I checked in before Staro did.” Pedley watched Bill swagger off the stage and a wizened old man take his place with a furtive leer at the accustomed surroundings of the lineup. “Far’s the second goes, Staro’s right as your gun hand, Cap.”

“He states that when he failed to come across with the derogatory remarks you requested, you clipped him, threw him in the drink, half-drowned him — and then took him to some fire station and put him over the hurdles.”

“An addled composite of fact and fiction.”

“Your word against his.”

“I’m willing to rest my case on that.”

“You great big roughnecks in the Fire Department ought to restrain yourselves, Benjamin.”

“And let you guys have all the fun?” Pedley growled. “Now this kid Conover who was just up there — he’s a hotheaded hero trying to protect the girl he’s crazy about. I’m not going to press the charge against him — unless further unforeseen developments develop. But that Staro — he’s a cobra with a record a mile long.”

“Still and all, that hardly gives you carte blanche to maul him around.”

“How’d it be if you took the mote out of your own eye, Sime?”

“Tsk, tsk.” Dublin clucked mournfully. “Think what a parlous state of affairs would ensue if we left matters in the hands of gents who make such a to-do about solving the case of Who Set the Fire in the Wastepaper Basket!”

“We wouldn’t have reported Kelsey a suicide, anyway.” The marshal’s tone was combative; his head ached, his eyes ached, he couldn’t enumerate the places where he had a pain — or where Dublin gave him one. “Not without checking to make sure there were fingerprints on the razor. Identification Bureau reports there weren’t any.”

“The people who found him lying there might have obliterated the prints.” Dublin was on the defensive.

“Are you going to tell that to the crime experts on the dailies? What a belly laugh that’ll give the city desks.” Pedley looked at his watch. Nearly ten. The day was no younger than it had been; he was still in need of a double-barreled breakfast — and there was still a firebug on the loose. “It would’ve been a nice trick for Kelsey to slash his own throat and then wipe the handle clean. But he wasn’t that good at sleight of hand. He was murdered. You know he was. Only reason you’re not willing to admit it is because City Hall is knocking itself out, trying to throw a blanket on this whole business. They can’t smother it, Sime. Neither can you. It’s too hot for you to handle.”

The marshal left headquarters in no pleasant frame of mind. He had two men in jail; considering the fact that both of them had tried to kill him within the last 48 hours, he might have been expected to feel pretty good about that. But he didn’t.

His own safety was important to him; no man who risks his life constantly in and around fires, or under any other circumstances of danger, takes risks lightly. But a lifetime of Fire Department training had bred into him a primary regard for the lives of others who were, in a very practical way, in his care. And their security — the sleep-sound-at-night sort of safety which the people in subways and busses and schools and hotels and rooming houses and elevator apartments took for granted — that was still threatened by the real firebug.

For it was apparent to Pedley that neither Bill Conover nor Staro Lasti was the instigator of the Brockhurst and Greenwich Village fires.

As far as Staro was concerned, there wasn’t anything to show that he’d been at the theater at all. He’d been in durance at the Tombs when Kelsey was killed. And, anyhow, he wasn’t the sort of individual who could hope to gain much by wiping out Lownes, Kim Wasson, or Kelsey. There had to be someone behind Staro—

It couldn’t be Bill Conover, either, as Pedley saw it. The lieutenant had claimed he’d been in the dressing-room when Leila and Chuck had carried Lownes up there, but if the marshal was any judge, that was simply a chivalrous attempt to take suspicion away from the girl.

What was clear enough was that Conover wasn’t the kind to adopt the devious devices which the arsonist had used. If the ex-marine had wanted to put Lownes or Kim or Kelsey out of the way, he’d have done it in hot temper or cold blood, but he wouldn’t have resorted to fire as a weapon or an alibi as an excuse that he hadn’t done it.

The firebug was still at liberty. And in all likelihood, still scared — still a potential instigator of another blaze, which might turn out more disastrously than the other two.

Who was intended to be the next victim? — that was the all-important question. Ross? Amery? Gaydel? Toleman?

They’d all been close to Leila, to Ned Lownes. All Pedley could do, until he had his hands on the bug, was to take precautions with all these people. He’d done that. There was a deputy covering each of them; Shaner was back on the job at Leila’s. The marshal had even gone so far as to warn the district commanders in each of the sections where the possible victims resided; extra apparatus would roll on the first alarm from any of the boxes Pedley had indicated.

But he couldn’t really do anything to protect people when they were moving around the city, when he didn’t have any idea of the part of town in which the firebug would strike next. This wasn’t ordinary commercial arson.

There were certain times when it paid off to plant extra deputies in the wholesale millinery district in the thirties — right after the spring buying season was over. He had found out that it was a good idea, right after Christmas, to put added men in the areas where the toy manufacturing and wholesaling companies were located. Fires in the fur and garment districts along Seventh Avenue were somehow much more frequent right after the department stores had done their winter buying and sellers had a lot of excess stock to carry over to the next season. But he couldn’t foretell disaster in the present instance; it was a matter of watching and waiting — and hurrying to get the firebug before he burned down any more buildings.

He rang Barney from a confectionery store pay booth. “All quiet along the Bowery?”

“As calm as could be expected.” Barney was being cautious. “There’s a special messenger from the commissioner’s office lurking out in the hall.”

“Do him good to wait. How’s about doing an errand for me?”

The clerk broke in, anxiously, “I wouldn’t put it past those cops on the Shoo-Fly Squad to tap these phone wires here, boss.”

“Neither would I. I’ll meet you in the five-and-ten. Across the Square. United we stand.”

“Huh? What? Oh! Charades, no less. I’m as good as there, already.”

Five minutes later Barney crossed the Plaza to the United Cigar store on the ground floor of the Woolworth Building. Pedley was there, waiting.

“Hi, Barney.”

“Morning, boss. Holy cats! Whose door’d you bump into in the dark?”

“Miss Lownes’s. We’re going to have to drag her before a committing magistrate shortly. And then yours sincerely is going to be made to look like a badly rundown heel. I spent the night in her apartment.”

The grin that spread over Barney’s face was something to behold. He let out a long, low whistle of envy. “Never a word shall pass these lips, boss.”

“Plenty of word will get around. Sime Dublin caught me there — with my pants over a chair. Lay off that lascivious leer. Her husband undressed me and put me to bed. I was unconscious until I woke up to find myself in as sweet a frame as Gainsborough’s ‘Blue Boy.’”

“She put one over on you?”

“She. And Terry Ross. And Dublin. I’m about to have heaped on me more scorn than anybody since John Wilkes Booth.”

“Maybe,” Barney said, “Ollie can help.”

“If Ollie hears of this, I hate to think what she’ll do!”

“She’s been calling you.”

“Where is she?”

“Uptown. At Show.”

“Alone?”

“With an editor or somebody. She said to tell you Mister Toleman had been most helpful. And that she thought maybe she was getting somewhere. And would you please come up and see—”