Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Thirty-Two Behind This Orgy of Arson

“Ollie.” Pedley set down his cup of thick Turkish coffee. “There’s something I want to ask you.”

“Why, Ben, dear!” She leaned eagerly across the Aleppo’s rather soiled tablecloth. “Just — ask me.” Her eyes were dreamy.

He put his hand over hers. “Will you be my — secretary?”

She sighed and closed her eyes. “I shall remember this moment all the rest of my days. The answer is ‘Yes,’ Benjamin. ‘Yes’ — with all my heart. When shall it be?”

“Immejut. I don’t want to call Barney myself, because by now a certain highly placed gentleman may have left orders for my clerk to notify me by telephone that I’m no longer on the job officially—”

“Oh, Ben! He wouldn’t do that! I know he wouldn’t!”

“He might have to, Ollie. And in case he does, I wouldn’t want to put Barnus on the spot. So if you’d buzz him for me—”

“What do you want to know?”

“Ask him if he’s heard from Shaner. I couldn’t get Ed up at the Riveredge. Leila must have left her apartment. I’d like to know where the hell she’s gone!”

Ollie edged past a circle of card-playing Armenians into the malodorous phone booth. Presently she emerged.

“Last minute bulletin from the front. Relayed through our local correspondent, B. Molloy. Miss Lownes and Mister Gaydel left the Riveredge at approximately three-forty-five.”

Pedley looked at his watch. “More’n an hour ago.”

“They took Gaydel’s car to South Ferry. Parked near the dock used by the Statue of Liberty boat.”

“Sight-seeing? In this kind of weather? Must be the gypsy in them.” Pedley tapped his coffee cup. “If you can flag that waiter, ask him to put a head on this.” He went to the booth, used three nickels, and a moderate number of unprintables.

At the public relations man’s office in the Graybar Building, a receptionist remembered vaguely that Mister Ross had come in an hour or so ago; didn’t think he was in now, though; finally consented to investigate; went away from the phone and returned a nickel later to announce that Terry had left his office almost immediately. She thought he’d mentioned some lawyer — Emerson or Amesbury or something like that.

Another nickel produced from Miss Bernard the information that Amery had gone to meet Ross, that the duo were Staten Island bound via ferry.

The ferry! Right beside the Statue of Liberty dockage! “What’s so interesting over on Staten Island all of a sudden, Miss Bernard?”

“Why — the show—”

“The radio show? Doesn’t it go on at the Broadcast Building?”

“Usually.” She was astonished he didn’t know. “Except when they go out of town on trips or take it to one of the hospitals for wounded vets. They can’t very well bring the soldiers in to the studio.”

“Miss Lownes going to be in the show, after all?”

“She wasn’t,” the girl explained. “With Hal Kelsey out for keeps and Leila out, too, Mister Gaydel thought it wasn’t worth while putting the show on at all. But Mister Ross decided it wouldn’t be fair to all those wounded men to disappoint them so he convinced Leila she should go ahead with it, in spite of her own feelings. So she’s going to.”

“What hospital?”

“Harbor View Memorial, Mister Pedley.”

“When’s the show supposed to go on?”

“Six o’clock, I think.”

Pedley hung up the phone softly, went back to the table, laid two dollar bills on the tablecloth.

“So long, my sweet.”

“You’re a laggard escort, to leave me in this low dive.”

“I have to take a quick trip across the Bay. Those excursionists weren’t after souvenirs. They were Staten Island bound to put on the Winn show for the vets at Harbor View Hospital. I smell trouble.”

“Aren’t you going out of your way to look for it?” She got up hastily, hurried out to the street with him.

“You ought to know, if anyone does, Ollie. In this business, if you don’t look for it, trouble comes right up and smacks you in the face when you aren’t looking. Hey, you’re not coming with me.” He climbed behind the wheel of the borrowed sedan, switched on the short wave.

“I wouldn’t miss it for all the nylons in Macy’s—”

“… get to Mitch… to Mitch. Have her meet me at the Battery in nothing flat… that’s right. That is all.” He switched off the set. “I’ll run you down, but that’s the end of the line.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, darling. I’ve never been seasick in my life.”

He took the shortest distance between two points; his siren could be heard ten blocks ahead; and that was a good thing because he swooped down toward Whitehall like a dive bomber riding in for the kill.

Ollie sat relaxed, her shoulder touching his, while the sedan tore around trolley cars on the wrong side and knifed through paralyzed traffic.

“Why are you running a temperature, Ben dear?”

“Thing’s made to order for a firebug’s fiesta, Ollie. Worst fires are always in crowds. Worst crowd-fires are where people can’t get out quickly for one reason or another. Hospitals, especially. More hospitals are touched off by incendiaries than any other single kind of building.”

“Why?”

“More people likely to get hurt. More of ’em scared. So — more excitement. Psychiatrists say a lot of arsonists get a sexual kick out of that kind of emotional hypo.”

The John Purroy Mitchel was steaming into Pier One at top speed, a bone of foam in her teeth, a veil of spray over her blunt nose. The big red-and-black fireboat, with its threatening armament of brass nozzles on their gunlike mounts, rubbed its guardrail against the stringpiece only a few seconds after Pedley and the girl rolled out on the dock, piled out of the sedan.

The firemen didn’t bother with hawsers around the bollards. Pedley hustled Ollie over the bulwarks, hollered up to the pilothouse, “Saint George’s, Dan. And cut the corners on those spar buoys!”

They were rolling fearsomely down the ship channel off the tip of Governor’s Island, with the Mitchel taking heavy spray over her quarter as she butted into the cross-chop, before Ollie asked the question that had been bothering her.

“You really believe Leila’s behind this orgy of arson, Ben?”

“Sure, she’s behind it.” He put down the captain’s binoculars; there was no sign of smoke from the cluster of low, white buildings on the hill rising over Saint George’s, but with a wind like this he couldn’t have seen it, anyway. “You saw the Memoirs of a Kilocycle Courtesan.”

“They may not have meant the same thing to a woman they’d mean to a man. She’s been hurt; she’s confused; her morals are those of an alley cat in April. But those pages out of the life of a lovelorn lady don’t tell me she’s a murderess and a firebug. I can’t imagine the girl who’d put those things on paper slashing a man’s throat and leaving his body in the snow in Central Park. What would be her motive?”

Pedley kept his eyes on the nearing piers of the island. “Oh, the motive’s been clear enough, all the way through, Ollie.”

“Blackmail?”

“That’s the method, Ollie. Not the motive. The motive is the half a million Luscious Leila might earn the next twelve months. And the same, or more, the year after that. And so on, ad infinitum. That’s a hell of a lot of jack, even after you deduct taxes.”