“You’re a pretty shrewd operator, Kelsey.”
“Trying to con me?”
“Just laying some cards on the table. You want to get hold of the Winn radio show, now Lownes has departed these precincts. I don’t know whether you can do that or not. It’s no skin off my seat, either way. Unless you’re the firebug I’m after.”
“You’re about to proposition me. I can tell—”
“That was the general idea. You might save me some trouble — I might make things easier for you.”
“How?”
“There’s a little matter of a leather case.”
“What about it?”
“I want it.”
“You won’t get it from me. I haven’t got it.”
“You told Ross different.”
“To keep him from mucking up my plans, that’s all.” Kelsey smiled cunningly. “Ross doesn’t know where the gadget is; he says somebody stole it from Ned’s hotel room. I don’t know what’s in it, but I know it’s dynamite of some kind. So I put two and two together and get a notion. If neither Terry nor Leila knows where the thing is, maybe Ned hid it where nobody can find it. All I have to do is admit I have it — and the old black magic works just the same as if I had the gimmick right in my locker. But if you’re going to tell everybody I haven’t got it — you’ll wash me up good.”
“I’ve a single-track mind. I’m after a firebrand. Where’d you breeze to this afternoon after the flame broke out?”
“International Broadcasting. To make arrangements for another rehearsal studio.”
“The show must go on? Your star won’t be able to—”
“You’ll be surprised—” Kelsey’s eyes were very bright; the color high in his cheeks — “how little the Lownes vocals will be missed. There’ll even be those who’ll contend it’s a better show without her.”
“You’ve kind of a single-track mind, yourself.” Pedley took the chair away from the door. “I just hope for your sake you haven’t been trying to outfox the Fire Department.” He went out into the hall. “Don’t arrange for any Havana vacation until you hear from me.”
From a phone booth beside the checkroom, he phoned his office.
“Anything on the Wasson chick, Barney?”
“Sure have, boss! Listen—”
“What’s her address?”
“Twelve-ten Horatio! The damnedest thing—”
“Apartment house?”
“If you’d lemme tell you!” Barney was excited.
“What’s eating you?”
“A still alarm come in from there just a few minutes ago!”
Pedley snarled at the transmitter. “From where?!”
“Twelve-ten Horatio, boss. There was an explosion of some kind.”
Barney was talking to a dead line.
Chapter Fourteen
Curious Firemaking Apparatus
The Greenwich Village Street was a welter of noise. Women shrieked. Men yelled incoherently. Teen-age girls, wrapped in blankets, giggled hysterically. Half-clad children scampered screaming from frantic parents.
Policemen bellowed at young boys pressing against the fire lines — at the crowds milling out of near-by houses into driving snow tinted claret from the headlamps. The thunder of the pumpers reverberated across the icy rubble. Water lanced up hoarsely toward the roof of Twelve-ten.
The top of the building was glowing like a brazier seen from beneath. Against the dark line of the cornice, orange flashes illuminated black, oily coils spewing up from below.
The gusts whirled smoke down into the street, blotting out the bedlam, momentarily. A sprinkling of sparks was whipped by the wind from the windows on the top floor; intermittent showers of brick chips and broken glass rattled down on the red hoods of the apparatus.
Below that radiance on the fifth floor, the apartment house was dark, save for firefly flashes of lanterns moving behind the windows of the lower floors. But every window in the adjoining buildings was lighted. Heads were silhouetted against squares of soft yellow, all up and down the block.
Short ladders were in place across the sidewalk. In the middle of the street, Hook Eighty’s giant extension ladder was being cranked up toward the top floor.
To the morbidly excited or frightened people on the streets, this was a scene of inexplicable and ominous confusion. But like one of those old slapstick films in which the automobile ran backward and the hat that had been knocked off the fat man’s head magically rose from the ground to perch again upon his bald pate, the picture unwound itself backward to Pedley.
Without being conscious of it, his mind retraced in an instant what must have happened before he reached the spot.
The engine company had raced in, gated their hoses to the hydrants. The hosemen had unreeled their lines, started one in the front door at the street level, another up an extension ladder which the first truck company would have slapped up against the building within a few seconds after its arrival. A third line would have been laid in through the alley and up back of the building on the fire escape.
The hook-and-ladder men would have raised their short ladders, helped the tenants to get out. Some of them would have gone up to the roof to ventilate the building. Normally, with a fire starting in the basement or one of the lower floors, the hot gases and smoke mushroomed right up there under the roof. That’s why most people who lost their lives in tenement fires died on the top floors. The fire would spread out horizontally unless a skylight or a bulkhead were opened up to give a draft and clear out the smoke so the pipemen could work their way up from floor to floor, putting the fire out ahead of them as they climbed.
That was the way it was supposed to be done, but sometimes conditions were such that you couldn’t go by the book. Pedley could see that this was one of the times. None of the windows on the lower floors had been smashed in; those in the upper apartments were all opened. This blaze must have started on the top floor — and it seemed to be spreading down!
Rubber-coated men sloshed in and out of the darkened doorway, carrying axes, Quinlan force bars, wrenches, flashlights. Pedley started in past them. A hose-company lieutenant put a hand on the marshal’s sleeve.
“Can’t get up, Ben.”
“Stairs going?”
“Whatever it was, blew all to hell and gone. Spilled out into the well, ran down a flight or so. Flames chimneyed right up. Treads are gone.”
From the street came a megaphoned roar pitched so as to be heard over the maelstrom:
“Don’t — jump!”
Pedley jammed his flash up against the row of letter boxes. There it was: K. Wasson 502!
He dodged out to the street. The portable searchlight from the emergency truck was shooting a solid beam of brilliance up through the swirling flakes, spotlighting the end window on the top floor.
Only her head was visible above the sill. But in spite of the smoke and the snow, Pedley could make out the arranger’s face clearly.
Beneath her, short ladders were in place up against the building; on them hosemen were passing up loops of canvas into the lower floors. The sidewalk was ridged with ice-jagged drifts. Not even the small net would fit into the cramped space on the pavement below her window. If she jumped — that was it!
Kim’s shoulders appeared above the sill. One of her hands came out, clutched at the ledge.
From surrounding windows, from the fire lines below, surged a shout:
“Wait! — Wait! — Don’t jump! — Don’t jump!”
The 85-foot spring ladder inched upward toward her. Kim climbed onto the sill, crouched there. She still wore the vermilion suit; one side of it was black, now.