Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Thirty-Five Discoveries Post Mortem

He had plenty of light to scratch the name on the back of his watch. He lay across Leila’s body with the shoulder-padding of his coat over his mouth so it filtered out the worst of the sparks and a little of the heat which made every breath a brief agony.

They wouldn’t get to them; that was impossible, now. But they’d find the watch. Barney, at least, would have sense enough to search for some message left in the moment of extremity.

The pain seemed to be numbing him; the back of his neck even felt cool. Mirage of the nerves; it must be. They said you felt no thirst at the very end when you died in the desert, looking for water.

The coolness spread. He put one hand up at the back of his head. His hair was wet. He rolled on one side. The glow from the fire was dimmer. The air seemed full of mist. It was mist. The fog nozzle!

Picking its way carefully over burning planks and red-glowing beams, came a fantastic figure that might have been spawned by Frankenstein. The Suit!

No wool-clad, rubber-shod fireman could have walked into that inferno. But the Suit! — Pedley would back the Suit against hell-fire any time, from here in.

That asbestos-coated grizzly bear with the diving helmet headpiece and the square of gleaming glass for the eves, held in its mittened paws a thin, twelve-foot applicator, an extension nozzle-tip bent at right angles to the length. From the nozzle came a mist of fine, drizzling spray that cut down flame, blacked out embers and sent a cloud of steam boiling up from the floor. Pedley felt an invisible screen drop between him and that withering blast of heat.

The Suit pointed the applicator at him and Leila. The almost unbearable relief temporarily increased the fierce aching in his eyes, his face. Leila stirred, moaned.

When the hospital patrol got in, Pedley made them take the girl. He could make it under his own steam. By the time he did, a group had gathered around the doctors who were wrapping Leila’s bare limbs in blankets.

They stood in the shelter of the boiler room, shivering; overhead a monstrous mushroom of smoke towered up into the sky. Chuck and Amery and Wes Toleman were in the group; Pedley looked for Ross, but the publicity man wasn’t around.

Chuck said, “Calls don’t come any closer than that, Marshal.”

“You can quote me on that.” Pedley dug his fingers into the snow, rubbed the cold crystals on his lips. “But this was the last call.”

Amery bent down to put one of Leila’s shoes that had fallen off, on her stretcher. “I hope to God it is! This is the third—”

“—and last time, yair. I started out on the wrong track, thinking of one firebug. When I found anyone who had an alibi — a real, honest-to-Superior-Court alibi — I checked him off as not suspect. Bad error. Took me a while to dope out there had to be two arson experts, two killers. They were working together, naturally. And one was topman, of course. He hired the second man to do the dirty work he couldn’t get around to do.”

“Staro,” breathed Toleman.

Pedley nodded. “The strong-arm boy was the second man, sure. He bopped me over the head at Lownes’s hotel room because he thought I’d found Leila’s caseful of dynamite. He trailed me around after he found out I was marshal, saw me talking to Kim Wasson, frightened the sense out of her by bogying at her through a drugstore window. When he found he couldn’t shut her up any other way, he trailed her or took her to her apartment down in the Village, slugged her hard enough to knock her senseless for ten or fifteen minutes. Then he found an empty candy box in her apartment, filled it with some gas he had in his car, and set the box on the stove. Boom! — she’s in the critical ward!”

“She’s dead,” Gaydel retorted. “I went down to the hospital to see her and finally they admitted she was dead.”

“You found that out, did you?” Pedley was surprised. “All right. She died the morning of the fire but I had the hospital people keep it quiet so the firebug might still think she’d talk. Maybe — just maybe — that’s why this blaze here was set. Because the bug is afraid somebody might corroborate Kim’s story.”

Amery said, “But Staro couldn’t have set this blaze. He’s in the Tombs.”

“That’s right. This piece of old Portuguese handiwork—” Pedley waved at the soaking ruins of the recreation hall — “was another of those remote control things. Set up by the topman sometime earlier today. Wouldn’t have been difficult for a man connected with Leila’s show to get permission to go into the rec hall to check on arrangements for the show; not too difficult to get hold of one of the fire extinguishers when nobody was looking, take it into a dressing-room, empty it and refill it with gasoline he’d brought with him. But Staro did his share. He mistook your office for a shooting gallery, Amery. He wasn’t aiming at you, though. Hour or so later, he tried to drown me in a Turkish bath pool. He was trying for me, both times.”

Chuck looked at the marshal sideways, as if doubting his sanity. “Do you always find out these things post mortem? Hal Kelsey might have been alive now, if you’d been quicker—”

“I might have saved his life if I’d figured out this topman in time,” Pedley agreed. “He met Kelsey, probably near Lownes’s bank in Columbus Circle, drove around in the Park with him for a while. When the headman found out Kelsey knew quite a lot and guessed quite a lot more — Kelsey got put out with a slit windpipe. May be a little difficult to bring that one home to the murderer; lot of evidence may have been overlooked at the time. But there’ll be enough else to start him marching along that last mile.”

“Ned?” Toleman tucked his hands under his armpits, shivered.

“For a starter, yair. The killer was drinking in the Telebar with Lownes and Kelsey; he managed to slip a half-pint of denatured alcohol into Ned’s ryeballs. When the drunk got to the theater and was carried up to the dressing-room, he couldn’t get away from the naphtha that set the place on fire. That one was figured out to a hair; the topman had his arrangements all made so he didn’t even have to go up to the dressing-room to touch off the blaze. All he did was loosen the fuse plug to Leila’s dressing-room until Leila went up. Then he tightened it so the current would begin to heat up the flatiron that cracked the naphtha bottle that set fire to the house that—”

“If you knew all this—” Amery was skeptical — “why didn’t you arrest this whoever-he-is and prevent today’s—”

“Wasn’t sure until this afternoon,” said the marshal. “Topman was in this to get the cut Lownes had been getting on his sister’s fat income. By using the same blackmail scheme Ned had been using. So it was a certainty the Number One Boy wouldn’t have wanted to do anything that would have put her in danger. Still, he did. Why? Because he hadn’t counted on Leila’s being on the show out here today. He didn’t know Leila was going to change her mind and put on the performance, anyway. Ross knew that because he convinced her she ought to do it. Gaydel knew it, too.”

Amery scowled. “I didn’t know it.”

“That’s what I meant.” Pedley reached inside his coat. “Let me show you the clincher in the case, Amery.”