Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Thirty-One Strip Tease on Paper

The offices of Show, the News-magazine of the Entertainment World, were a bedlam of clacking typewriters, jangling telephones, feverish conversation. Nobody gave Pedley a second glance.

He found Ollie in the file room with an office boy in enthusiastic attendance. She grinned at the marshal, screwing up one eye to avoid the smoke of her own cigarette.

“Hello, darling. This is worse than delving into the tomb of King Tut.”

“What you expect to unearth, Ollie?”

“Something to verify my reticent cavalier’s suspicions.”

“How’d you make out with Wesley, the Wonder-Man?”

She glanced roguishly at the office boy. “You couldn’t classify his technique as neolithic. I escaped the fate worse’n death.”

“So did I. Barely.”

She was solicitous about the bump on his forehead. “Did the insidious Leila try to stun you and drag you home to her cave?”

“She succeeded.”

“Why, Ben!” She clasped her hands over her heart. “Must all my pangs of passion go unrequited because of this Other Woman?”

The office boy said, “Aw! You’re kiddin’—”

He left them together in the file room.

“What’d you learn, Ollie?”

“Deep in his cups — after the fourth claret lemonade — he confided to me that he knew what’s in the Florentine case.”

“But. he’d sworn on a Gideon Bible never to reveal his knowledge?”

“It’s full of love letters.”

“Oh! ‘My own cutie-pie, with remembrances of the last time we were together — underlined — from her own Matey-Watey.’”

“Have you been reading them?”

“Not yet. I have hopes. Does Wesley know who they were from?”

Ollie stood up and stretched languorously. “My escort was vague on that point. My intuition tells me there may be a couple from little Wessie, himself.”

“That babe’s worse than a grass fire for catching everything around her.”

“He didn’t admit any such peccadilloes. All he’d opine for sure is, there’ll be a lot of melting missives signed ‘your ever-lovin’ Chuck.’”

“Is she blackmailing her radio producer?”

“Wesley says she’s been working with Gaydel. To get brother Ned out of the way. So she and Chuck can split the profits of the program.”

Pedley looked blankly at her for a long moment. Then finally he sighed.

“Close — but no seegar. Doesn’t quite ring the bell, Ollie. Might account for several points. But there are a few that don’t jibe.”

“I thought that, myself. Why cut Gaydel in on it?”

“Especially when she’s just married a marine who’d feed Chuck to the goldfish if he thought the producer was still fooling around.”

“Wes says Kim Wasson will verify his story, soon as she can talk. Says the arranger met Leila through Chuck when he was running a one-tube station down in Baltimore four or five years ago.”

“Baltimore, again. Makes the third time. Adds up.” Pedley took out the snapshot of Leila and Ned. “I found this stuck in the lining of Lownes’s wallet. Looked as if he’d been hanging onto it a long time. Must have been a reason. And this was snapped in Baltimore.”

“Clairvoyance? Or do you have inside information?”

“Only town I know where half the houses have the same kind of low front steps. White marble. They don’t really eat off ’em, but they keep ’em scrubbed clean enough to.”

Ollie ruffled the pages of the magazines on the long binder-stick. “Take a little of that. Add a dash of this” — she pointed to an item in an issue of Show, dated March 26, 1940:

Chaney J. ‘Chuck’ Gaydel, who provides entertainment for local thousands over WBIZ predicts a sensational success for his new songbird Leila Lownes who is being starred in a noontime program at 12:15 daily: Songs You Remember to Love. Miss Lownes is also appearing at the Academy for the balance of the week. This is her first appearance on a radio program of her own.

Pedley read it carefully. “That could be the tip-off, toots.” He caught Ollie by the arm. “If we stay in here much longer, they’ll be asking us to sign a lease. Leave us hence.”

She didn’t ask where they were heading. Not until he’d parked on Broome Street and they were entering the rattletrap old building did she comment at all.

“I’m completely in the dark, Ben. Apparently you see a gleam of light.”

“One candle power. A mile away. In a tunnel.”

They went upstairs, past a row of benches at which men in laboratory dusters were sitting, eyes glued to the dual eyepieces of comparison microscopes. One of the men crooked a finger in Pedley’s direction.

“I have the analysis on those granules when you want ’em, Marshal.”

“Haven’t located any to check against them yet, Sol. But the boys’ll come up with something from the cleaners, don’t worry.”

Ollie poked a finger toward a twisted shape of aluminum wire.

“What do you expect to find out from a coat hanger, Ben?”

“Came from the dressing-room, Ollie. Buckled in the heat. Shows the temperature went above twelve hundred. Wood doesn’t burn that hot. Proof there actually was naphtha in the bottle.”

He stopped at the door of a long, hall-like room where two men were working with a spectrograph. One of the technicians pointed to a segment of charred wood, a piece Shaner had cut out of the dressing-table. The “alligatorings,” which checked the burned surface into cracked, irregular squares, had been cut through to show the depth and extent of the char.

“Comes to about eighteen minutes, close as we can average it, Marshal.”

“Thanks, Johnny.” To Olive he explained, “Length of time the blaze had been going. Figured from the time the wood started to burn until spray cooled the surface enough to crack it, like that. Fixes the hour the fire was set. Some wise-boy for the defense is sure to challenge an offhand opinion, unless we can back it up with data.” They walked through into a photographic studio, with more elaborate equipment than any Olive had ever seen. A sergeant in an undershirt greeted Pedley boisterously.

“I must of heard Shaner wrong, Marshal. I thought he told me those pages of script had been burned in a grate fire.”

“They were, Matt.”

“If you say so. But they could have as well been ignited by spontaneous combustion.” The sergeant flushed, glancing at Olive. “Beg your pardon, miss. If that’s your handwriting—?”

“It isn’t.” She laughed reassuringly. “I just came along for the riot.”

Pedley said, “Maybe it’s too torrid for her to see. She’s a young thing and should not shock her mother.”

“We-ell.” The sergeant rubbed his hands. “They’re hotter’n a cookstove at threshing time but there’s nothing to hurt a girl who’s free, white, and been around.” He indicated chairs facing a small, silvered screen mounted on the wall at one end of the room. “We haven’t had time to make negatives of the lot, but if those we have so far are a fair sample—” He whistled much as Barney had, in the cigar store.

Pedley asked, “What are they? Letters?”

“No. Not exactly a diary, either.” The sergeant switched off the wall lights. “It’s more as if this jane was doing a strip tease on paper. It’s a cinch she didn’t think her stuff would ever get on the screen.”

An illuminated square showed on the wall.

“We magnified eight diameters. Lost a lot of it because the surface of the burned pages wasn’t flat. But what we have ought to give you a working basis. This is one of her milder moments. We’ll work up to speed, gradually.”

On the screen appeared what looked like a crumpled white sheet with huge gray writing scrawled on it. Occasionally an entire line would fade away into illegibility but for the most part it wasn’t difficult to read:

I’m writing this at the Lord Calberry and Chuck has just left me. We quarreled pretty much last night but finally Chuck said nothing in the world mattered to him except having me. Not even Ned, or his own wife, or anything. I couldn’t tell him so while he was here with me but I’m much more disturbed in my mind than he seems to be. Chuck is the most exciting man I’ve ever known and he leaves me pretty limp but whether I love him or not—

The frame disappeared.

“Wonderful what ultraviolet can do,” murmured Ollie.

Pedley said, “I’ve had a bigger kick out of Mickey Mouse, many a time. Does it get better as it goes on?”

“This one will keep you on the edge of your seats.” The sergeant pushed another slide into the projector. “There aren’t any dates on these pages: the way they were mixed up when Shaner brought ’em in, no telling which came first. I expect this one was written before the one you just saw.”

The white-sheet effect wasn’t quite so pronounced now, the writing just a little less readable:

I told Chuck about Ned tonight and it just about broke him up. He really hasn’t had much experience with troupers, so I couldn’t blame him for not knowing that a lot of brother-and-sister acts aren’t really brothers and sisters but more likely husband and wife. Chuck said he wouldn’t have started taking me out in the first place if he’d known Ned and I were married. Then I told him a sort of lie — that Ned and I haven’t actually been two-ing it for quite a while and that seemed to make him feel a little better. I guess he really is that way about me. But maybe his wife won’t look at things the way Ned—

The frame vanished.

Ollie let out a long breath.

“She was Mrs. Ned Lownes!”

“Yair.”

“That explains everything, doesn’t it?”

“I wish I thought so,” said Pedley.