Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Six Enough To Kill Two

On the way across town to the somber stone building on East Twenty-sixth, one question repeated itself in the marshal’s mind like a groove-worn record: Why had Leila been the only one to try to save Ned Lownes? Admit the man was a no-good heel. Still, in emergencies, people thought of saving life without regard to the merits of the person in danger.

Of course, if Terry Ross and Paul Amery and Hal Kelsey and Chuck Gaydel had all assumed that Lownes was already dead when he’d been lugged upstairs, that would explain their lack of ordinary human decency. But it would also imply a conspiracy to cover up his death by the fire. Which in turn must have involved Leila — yet the girl obviously knew her brother was alive or she wouldn’t have attempted his rescue. It didn’t add up.

He was still turning it over in his mind when he walked into the morgue.

“If you come calling on that Lownes feller, he’s still upstairs, Marshal.” The dour-faced attendant acknowledged Pedley’s arrival with a limp salute.

“Didn’t expect they’d be through with him, Mike. Where’s the inventory?”

“Right in here. I got a nice warm lower reserved for him.” Mike chuckled at the ancient jest as he opened the door to the cold room.

The things that had been in Lownes’s clothing were spread out on a soapstone slab alongside his suit, shoes, shirt, tie, underclothing. Pedley scanned the miscellany swiftly; long acquaintance with the clammy chill and its depressing accompaniment of iodoform and formaldehyde hadn’t overcome his natural repugnance.

A platinum cigarette case with four Pall Malls; pearl-handled combination corkscrew and bottle-cap opener; leather Keytainer with six keys — four tumbler type, one suitcase size, and one flat which might be for a safe-deposit locker; two handkerchiefs, both silk with hand-embroidered initial; a gold wrist watch with the crystal cracked and the hands stopped at 3:26, a fact of no particular importance in Pedley’s experience; a windproof lighter, English, sterling silver, no flint in it; 87 cents in change — and a fat sharkskin wallet.

Mike poked a wrinkled finger at the last item.

“If I didn’t know positive they’d checked it, upstairs, I might have helped myself to a leaf of that lettuce. A stew bum like him couldn’t have come by that much, honest.”

The bill compartment was full; there wasn’t anything as small as a twenty in the lot. Pedley riffled through the thick sheaf; his eyes widened. Century notes — and thousands. More of the latter.

“Lot of cash for a rummy to be toting, for a fact.”

“He could’ve filled a swimming pool with twenty-year-old brandy an’ gone under feelin’ no pain whatsoever, Marshal.”

“Maybe he didn’t have any sorrows to drown, Mike.” He thumbed through the contents of the card pockets.

Membership card in the “White Rats,” old-timers’ vaudeville club; paid-up dues in the Theatrical Agents’ Association; bills from a tailor, unpaid; bills from a liquor store, three cases of bonded stuff, ditto; receipt from the Hotel Elegante for rent on Suite 48–49; note signed Dolly asking for a loan until her company started rehearsals; corner of a menu-card with a Harlem phone number scribbled in pencil; request from a theater manager in Lexington, Kentucky, inquiring if an old chum couldn’t be put up at the top of the list for one of Leila’s personal appearances; a dozen cards from bond salesmen, shirtmakers, magazine feature writers, yacht brokers.

One of the cards was stuck to the lining. He had to turn the wallet inside out to get it loose. It wasn’t a card, but a photograph. One of those inch-square snaps on glossy paper.

It showed Ned and a girl who was clearly Leila the Luscious six or eight years ago. They were both in costume, Ned as a gallant of the nineties, with beaver and Prince Albert; Leila in one of those flouncy Floradora getups. They stood smiling at each other on the shallow front stoop of a brick house with a short flight of narrow, white marble steps. There was nothing on the back of the print to identify the scene, except a date: June, 1939.

The photo went into a cellophane envelope which Pedley put back in his pocket. The wallet and the rest of the contents went back on the stone slab.

“Tag this collection for the Prosecutor’s office, Michael me bhoy.” Pedley took the Keytainer. “And if that buddy of yours from the Journal blows in, tip him off there’s no sensational story here. Nothing but a plot to blow up the Times Square subway with an atom bomb.” He went upstairs.

He traversed nearly the length of the autopsy room before any of the white-gowned group around the table under the operating lamp paid any attention to him. Then a grizzled surgeon backed away from the table, stripping off rubber gloves.

“What happened to this poor devil, Ben?”

“He got himself incinerated, Harry. You didn’t have to carve him up to find that out. What about that cut over his eye?”

“It didn’t come from our old friend, the blunt instrument.” The surgeon scrubbed busily at a washbowl. “You can discount it, anyway. He was in bad shape before that.”

“Been hitting the hooch?”

“Plenty of alcohol in his tissues. But it wasn’t precisely what you’d call potable.”

“No?”

“Isopropyl. Denatured. Rubbing fluid.”

“Not for internal use?”

“Definitely not. He must have taken half a pint of it.”

“What’s a lethal dose?”

“Depends. On age, condition, resistance. This man,” the surgeon’s head inclined toward the group clustered under the powerful lamp, “took enough to kill two normal adults.”

“He was still alive when somebody tried to burn up the corpus.”

“He wouldn’t have lived long, fire or no fire. He must have been practically paralyzed.”

“Not so much he couldn’t crawl under a couch to get away from the flames.”

“How could he see where he was crawling?”

“Come again—?”

“First effect of isopropyl is to knock out the optic nerve. An hour after he’d taken the dose, he couldn’t have seen his hand — or anyone else’s hand, for that matter — in front of his face.”

“Now that—” Pedley rubbed his chin slowly — “might explain one hell of a lot. Could he have taken this massaging fluid without knowing it, Harry?”

The surgeon shrugged. “You couldn’t. I couldn’t. But a heavy drinker of this type — if he’d been imbibing a good deal beforehand, and if the denatured stuff was mixed with bonded whisky, for instance — he might not have noticed much beyond the sensation of being kicked in the pit of the stomach.”

“Um. If someone had him hog-drunk, he could have been fed the stuff in a ryeball?”

“Does such a supposition clear things up?”

“Like a cyclone. Let me have the report soon’s you can, hah?”

As a matter of fact, it could simplify matters considerably, Pedley decided, as the sedan bucked a stiff wind up the East Side Highway. The firebug must have known Lownes well enough to drink with him, or at any rate to be with him when the dead man had been in his cups. That ought to narrow down the field a bit.

At the Hotel Elegante, he crossed the lobby without the customary preliminary of making inquiries of the suave dapperdan behind the desk. Neither did he use the house phone; he simply strolled to the elevator and said “Three” in a bored tone. The clerk didn’t seem interested in Pedley’s destination.

There were no other passengers. The aged gnome who operated the car didn’t even wait to see which way the marshal turned in the corridor. He went to the left, waited until the elevator had dropped, came back, went up the stairs to the fourth.

How long it had been since the Elegante had lived up to its name might be a matter for argument; it had been a fly-by-night hostelry as long as Pedley could recall.

Carney-men in town to buy “slum” for their concessions, out-of-job stock players waiting for the big part that was sure to turn up some day, freaks from the dime museums and ex-chorus girls who cashed an occasional burlesque pay check — these were the normal patrons of the place. Why would a man with $20,000 in his pockets prefer to live in a flea circus like this?

Suite 48–49 was at the west end of the musty corridor. Pedley had the Keytainer out, was about to try the most worn of the tumbler keys, when he stopped, put his ear to the door. There was someone in Lownes’s suite.

The knob turned. The door opened. Pedley didn’t wait for it to swing wide, stepped in fast. The man who was coming out bumped into him, head on. A husky blond youth with a thin clarkgable mustache. His gray eyes stared into the marshal’s for an instant of shocked incredulity.

Then he backed into the room and raised his hands up beside his shoulders. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Wait a minute, now! You’ve got me wrong! Give me a chance to explain!”