Where There’s Smoke

Chapter Eight In a Medium Swivet

IT WAS DARK and wet and cold. He ached so it was torture to attempt movement. When he did attempt it, he found he couldn’t.

It took him a while to realize that his right arm was strapped to his side with surgeon’s tape, his feet bound together and his mouth plastered shut with the same adhesive.

He was propped up awkwardly in a bathtub, his left wrist locked to the end faucet with his own handcuffs. Someone had intended him to stay put.

If he could just get a leverage with his feet, twist around so the fingers of his left hand could reach the tape binding his right arm—

After a while he gave it up.

This must be Lownes’s bathroom. His assailant wouldn’t have run the risk of lugging him out of the suite. And the man hadn’t meant to kill him; there’d have been plenty of opportunity for that while Pedley lay unconscious. A possible exception occurred to him — maybe the slugger was coming back to attend to unfinished business.

Maybe he was back already — somebody was moving around in the next room. Still, it might be that floor-maid the marshal had been looking for—

It was a sweating effort to lift his feet off the tub, bang his heels on the porcelain. Probably the person in the next room wouldn’t pay any attention to what sounded like a steam-pounding in the pipes, anyway—

The knob rattled, the door was kicked open, light flooded in. For an instant, Pedley could only make out an ominous silhouette in the doorway. The ominous part was in the man’s right hand — an automatic, outlined against the bright light.

The man in the doorway murmured surprised profanity. He came into the bathroom a step. Then he threw back his head and laughed, raucously.

Pedley knew that harsh guffaw — and the man who belched it out so heartily. Practically the last person in the world the marshal expected — or wanted — to see was Sime Dublin. Captain Simon Dublin, of the Eighteen Karat Squad.

Sime was as smooth as greased glass — and as difficult to see through. The resentment which Pedley held against him had nothing to do with the apocryphal feud between the Police and Fire departments. Empowered with special and secret authority direct from the Police Commissioner’s office, Sime’s ways were dark, if not actually devious. He never said just what he meant or did just what he said he was going to. Pedley’s manner was brusque and direct. Naturally, they grated on each other’s nerves. For Dublin to find the marshal in this predicament was gall and wormwood of the bitterest.

The switch on the wall clicked. Dublin came to the tub, squatted on his heels with his dark blue jowls close to Pedley’s face.

“Ought to take your clothes off before you get in the tub, Benny.” The bright black eyes traveled from the tape over the marshal’s mouth down to the handcuffs.

Pedley mumbled under the adhesive. The line of scar tissue on his right cheekbone whitened.

“Oh — so you’re ready to talk.” Dublin used the police phrase with amusement, ripped the tape from the marshal’s mouth with a careless hand.

“Key to cuffs — fob pocket.” It hurt Pedley’s lips to say even that much.

Dublin went to work on the tape around the right arm; took his time about it.

“Unlock those cuffs!” Pedley spat out a little blood; the tape had taken some of the skin with it.

“Telling me how to run my business?” Dublin complained. “This stuff is stuck to your belt. How can I get to your panty pocket?”

Pedley wrenched his arm free, flexed his fingers, fumbled at the pocket under his belt. “Save the cracks. I just had one.” He got the key around to the handcuffs with difficulty.

The captain of the Special Headquarters Squad let Pedley wrestle the tape loose from his ankles. But when the marshal got his knees under him, Dublin gave him a hand, yanked him upright with a jerk that nearly dislocated the marshal’s shoulder.

“Who played you for a mummy, Ben?”

“At a guess, the same person who left Ned Lownes to fry in his own fat. Maybe you have the party in custody, already?”

“All in good time, my impetuous fire-eater. You can dismiss him from your thoughts. This one isn’t down your alley.”

Pedley sat on the edge of the tub, massaged his wrists. “Who says it isn’t?”

“Medexam’s office. They report enough poison in Lownes’s system to kill two marines.”

“He didn’t check out from denatured alky,” Pedley said. “He was an arson victim.”

“The fire wouldn’t have finished him if it hadn’t been for the blind staggers.”

“You ever go in to the dee-aye with one of those ‘if’ cases, Sime?”

“I’ll go in with this one.” Dublin smiled charmingly. “I’ve just been talking to him about it.”

“Keep on fidoodling around if you want to. I’m going to get an arson indictment.”

“You can get nice odds it’ll turn out to be a presentment for homicide. It you want to make a little side bet, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could find a few bucks that claim the fire was started by Lownes himself. Accidentally, of course.”

Pedley went to the washbasin, sopped cold water on his head. “Who’s putting the pressure on, Sime?”

“Pressure?” Dublin cocked an impish eye. “Perish forbid. ‘I seen my duty and I done it.’”

Pedley sopped a wet cloth against the lump over his right temple. “You’ll be a big help, I can see that. Impounding evidence for Homicide. Tying up witnesses when we want them for examination.”

“Why don’t you step out of it, Ben? What you looking for? A citation?”

The marshal leaned forward, tapped the captain’s top vest buttons with the back of his fingers. “I’m looking for a firebug, Sime. Anybody gets in my way is liable to wind up saying ‘hello’ to a surgeon. Eighteen Karat shooflys not excluded. Pass the word along to the Prosecutor’s office if it’ll make you feel better.”

“Benjamin! Such a way to talk! To one who has just delivered you from durance vile!”

“Do as much for you someday, I hope.” Pedley went into the living-room, recovered his hat and overcoat from the corner where his attacker had tossed them, strode out.

He stopped at the desk to ask about the maid. The suave deskman was still on duty. He was duly impressed by authority; very sorry he couldn’t be of assistance. The floor-maid was off duty. Wouldn’t come on until seven tomorrow. He didn’t have her address, no. Or any phone number where she could be reached. Doubtless the agency which supplied the Elegante with help would be able to give that information.

Pedley didn’t press the matter. No point inquiring about some unknown and undescribable individual who might have been loitering outside Suite 48–49 an hour or so ago.

It was snowing softly when he reached the street. In another hour the rusty brown of the traffic lanes would be covered by a clean, white blanket. There was a parallel there somewhere, he mused; it wouldn’t take long to cover up certain other dirty traces, the way things were going.

The electric clock on the mantel over the old, black marble fireplace said five minutes past ten when he unlocked the door of his suite at the Metropole. And one of the three phones was ringing. He picked up the receiver.

“Mister Pedley!” The hotel operator sighed with relief. “There’s been a party trying to get you for the last half-hour!”

Pedley tucked the receiver between his shoulder and ear so his hands would be free to open the flat, brown-paper package that lay on the side table.

“Should I be concerned?” He knew that if the call had been urgent, it would have come in on one of the other phones, those with pink number cards tucked under the plastic discs and no exchanges typed thereon except OFFICIAL 270.

“Well — it was that Regent number.” The operator pouted, audibly.

“Oh! Makes different. Get it for me, will you?” He ripped the wrapping off the package — an album of phonograph records on the cover of which was a picture of a cannon spouting fire, and lettering; Dmitri Shostakovich — The Seventh Symphony—

“Hello?” The voice in his ear was music of a more intimate kind.

“Ollie—!”

“Ah, you rounder. From what disreputable dive are you calling?”

“Just got back to the Metropole. Can you come over?”

“Mmmm?” The girl at the other end tasted the invitation, tentatively. “Do I hear lust raising its lovely head?”

“Could be. Also, less agreeable matters.”

“Barney said you were in a swivet.”

“A medium swivet. Can you ditch your date and give me a hand?”

She laughed. “I have no other dates but you, darling. I’ll be over before you can recite the Bureau of Combustibles Code.”

After she hung up, he called room service, ordered ice and setups. Then he took the first record out of the album, went to the only modern piece of furniture in the suite, a big radio-phonograph that had cost him as much as a car. He put the platter on the felt turntable with the air of a woman trying on a new hat.

When the opening chords of the Philharmonic began to fill the musty corners of the big living-room, he went into the bedroom and changed his clothes.

He’d taken these second-floor rooms for living-quarters nearly ten years ago with the one proviso that he might play his recordings any hour of the day or night. That wouldn’t have been possible in one of the newer, up-to-date hotels with their thinner walls and low ceilings.

But the Metropole had been built nearly fifty years ago, when its Twenty-third Street location, between Seventh and Eighth, put it right in the middle of the then fashionable midtown district. The solid masonry and high-vaulted construction smothered sounds that otherwise might have disturbed neighboring tenants. Also, the second-floor situation was convenient for a man who sometimes had to dash out in the middle of the night without waiting for a sleepy elevator boy.

Little of the furniture in the suite had been changed during the marshal’s tenure; he had become so accustomed to the McKinley-period pieces he’d have felt uncomfortable in more up-to-date surroundings. But the rooms had nevertheless acquired considerable evidence of the individual who occupied them.

Over the mantel was a standard department signal box with the gong removed and a wooden block placed where the tapping arm would hit it. On the walls were framed photographs which were, of themselves, a kind of progressive record of Benjamin R. Pedley in the Fire Department.

A snapshot enlargement of him as a probationer in his first helmet — a posed group in front of old Hook-and-Ladder Twenty with Pedley sitting at the rear steering wheel of the big truck, and the rest of the company on the running board; a yellowed cut and accompanying clipping from the Tribune, showing the chief pinning a medal on the chest of a very self-conscious hook-and-ladder lieutenant; a flashlight picture of a beefsteak party given by his division officers on the occasion of his promotion to battalion chief; an inscribed photograph of the then-mayor congratulating Pedley on his appointment as Chief Fire Marshal. And a score of others, taken at banquets, clambakes, at the scenes of conflagrations — usually ten or a dozen in the group, friends who had drunk with him, argued with him, battled with him, risked their lives with him.

And against the east wall, a row of green metal file cabinets which had grown heavier and increased in number from year to year. The names typed on the white cards labeling the drawers might not have been familiar to Barney or Shaner or most of the others who had visited these rooms. There were none of the names of the criminals Pedley had sought, arrested, sent to prison. The top drawer was marked BACH, BEETHOVEN, BRAHMS, and the second, DEBUSSY, DVORAK, FOSTER. Into those files had gone no small part of the Pedley expenditures; out of them had come a good share of the limited number of pleasant hours he had been able to grab from the endless pile of unfinished cases that came to his desk downtown.

His feeling for what Shaner called “dress-suit music” was one of the reasons for Pedley’s feelings about the girl whom he had just phoned. Not especially the fact that she recognized a good string section when she heard one — and preferred Prokofieff to the “Hit Parade”; it was more than that, deeper than that. When he was with Ollie, he had the same sense of inner peace as when listening to Stokowski conducting a Mendelssohn concerto — a complete absence of the tension which had come to be the normal atmosphere in which he moved.

There was a knock; he went to the door.

The girl who came in was tall and willowy, perhaps twenty-two or-three years old. She wore a mink coat that would have roused comment at a furriers’ convention, but she didn’t need the coat to attract attention. Her face said she was sensitively intelligent. Her sloe eyes were subtle invitation, her movements a suggestive challenge. The combined impression was that of a girl who has just worked her way through college by doing a strip tease in a chorus line.

“I’ll have to do something about those elevator boys,” she said briskly. “I can tell by the way they look at me when I say ‘Two’ that they’re beginning to Think Things!”