He put his mouth close to the hrrussh of the stream. A little fresh air was discharged along with the water. Very little. Maybe enough—
The door above that thin, luminous line was shut. He clouted it with his fist. Stuck. He flicked the stream at it. The rebound drenched him; the door slammed open as if he’d smashed it with a sledge hammer.
A cauliflower of smoke blossomed from the dressing-room, blotted out everything so he wasn’t aware of the forked orange tongue until it licked at his wrist from beside the jamb. He hunched back on his heels, angled the stream up to spatter the ceiling, inched across the threshold under an icy cascade.
Across the dressing-room a garnet heart glowed dully through the haze, spat at the shower splattering down from the ceiling. Before he could get to it, the thing had cooled, lost its radiance. But he guessed what it was before his flashlight came close enough to make certain. The face of an electric flatiron, standing on end on the dressing-table.
He groped for it, felt broken glass under his fingers. The sharp-edged shards of a bottle. He leaned over to feel the switch on the handle of the iron. His knee touched something soft. She was between the dressing-table and the end of a smoldering chaise longue — a sodden heap of wet silk and warm flesh. When he got her over his shoulder, she was a dead weight.
He had to drop the nozzle before he lifted her; he had to clamp it shut before he dropped it or the twenty-pound tip would have threshed around and brained them both. But even with the rush of the water silenced, there was still a roaring inside his head.
He crawled out into the corridor with his burden. The heat became suddenly intensified, as if someone had opened a furnace door at his heels. Sparks stung his neck and face; breathing became an ordeal. His eyes streamed; he bumped into booted legs before he saw them.
A hand caught at his shoulder. The glass eyepiece of a mask came close to his face. The weight on his back lightened momentarily, but Pedley shook his head, clung to the girl’s legs. He could make it under his own power, that nozzleman was needed there in the dressing-room.
The hose companies would have their hands full getting this thing under control, now. That flatiron was like a neon sign flashing the warning word ARSON. And incendiary fires were always the worst; the arsonist would have done everything he could to help the blaze along. It was important that the torch who’d hooked up the flatiron and whatever had been in the bottle, didn’t get the advantage of having his trail covered by the flames he’d started.
The marshal crawled toward the head of the stairs. The murk became penetrable; a gush of cool air swept up at him. The boys on the roof must have managed to hack open a draft hole—
He caught hold of the pipe rail, muscled to his feet, felt his way down.
Frosty air hit his lungs like a blow. He leaned against the whitewashed brick of the alley. Rescue-squad men grabbed the girl, hurried her toward the long, gray car waiting at the street end of the alley. Pedley stalked after them, unsteadily.
There was a little group around the rear step of the ambulance. One intern was unlimbering a stretcher; the other held an ampoule under the nose of the smoke victim, who sat propped against a handhold.
The rescued man was in bad shape. There was a glistening like warm butter along the angle of his lean jaw. His lips were gray; for all the color in his face, he might have been ready for a hearse instead of the ambulance. But his eyes were open; he recognized the girl as the firemen laid her on the sidewalk near him.
“Leila!” he croaked. “She’s not—!”
“Smoke kayo. That’s all.” Even in her present bedragglement, Pedley could see why fan magazines and Sunday supplements featured her as “Luscious Leila.” Her smudged face wasn’t as glamorous as the make-up she wore on those full-color covers; the bronze hair, tousled damply over closed eyelids, made her look more like a tired child asleep after a romp in an ash heap. But there was no mistaking this girl’s appeal.
“I was afraid she’d—” The man on the ambulance step leaned over to touch her; toppled.
Pedley caught him. “Take it easy. They’ll pull your sister around, soon’s they get an inhalator on her.” He pushed the man back to a sitting position.
“Sister?” Pale eyes bulged in the ashen face. “She’s not my sister.”
“Guy said she ran back to look for her brother.”
“She did. When I heard—” he coughed up a thin trickle of smoke “—I went after her.”
“Who’re you?”
“Amery. Her lawyer.”
“Then her brother’s still up there?”
“Didn’t see Ned.” The attorney shrugged. “Wasn’t looking for him.”
“You’re the second person I’ve run into who doesn’t seem to give a damn whether Lownes’s goose is cooked or not.”
“Didn’t say I felt that way.” Amery glanced up. “All the same to me whether Ned goes to an institution, or the cemetery.”
The battalion chief tapped Pedley’s arm. “They’re bringing another one.”
Amery stared at the thing the firemen let down on the sidewalk. Blackened lips curled back against the teeth in a clown’s grimace — a man whose face looked as if minstrel make-up had cracked and peeled from his skin, whose head was covered with charred fuzz where there had been hair.
“I take it back,” Amery muttered thickly. “I wouldn’t have wanted that to happen to my worst enemy.”
“This Ned Lownes?” Pedley knelt in an icy puddle.
“Yes.” The lawyer bent over, was sick to his stomach.
“Your worst enemy, hah?”
“Merely a manner of speech. Ned — always his own worst enemy. Is it too late—?”
“For anything — except the medical examiner.” Pedley put a palm to the dead man’s chest, pressed gently. A tiny feather of smoke trailed from the blackened lips. “I’m curious to know how he got burned like that — when he was alive at the time the fire started.”
Chapter Two
One for the Box
The intern pulled Leila’s skirt down to her knees, bent over to grip the stretcher handles. A lanky individual in a leather Windbreaker slithered past, grabbing at the rear-step handhold to steady himself while he aimed his camera. The singer’s wet dress outlined her figure as if she’d been naked.
The newspaperman crouched, peered through his finder. His left arm went up with the flash reflector.
A camel’s-hair coat hurtled across the sidewalk. Terry Ross flung himself on the cameraman, brought him crashing to the gutter. The camera bounced on the curb, ricocheted off the hose wagon. The two men floundered in the hydrant leakage, were pried apart by a night stick. The cop hauled Ross to his feet, ungently. “Who give you any license to go bustin’ cameras?”
“The jerk had no right to snap her like that,” Ross panted. “Nobody has any right to take pix of her unless I say so.”
The cameraman picked up the wreckage, swearing savagely. Pedley tossed the tarpaulin over Lownes, called to the officer, “Bring Tough Stuff over here.”
The night stick prodded the publicity man across the sidewalk. “I oughta tap him, Marshal. He makes like a fugitive from a strait jacket ever since they bring the girl out.”
“Why don’t you tap the right guy!” Ross flexed his throat muscles; the patrolman’s grip was tight at the back of his collar. “I try to get in the theater to find Leila. So you crown me instead of going in after her yourself. I try to stop that bum from taking a lousy shot of her and—”
“It wouldn’t hurt your glamour-gams to show her stuff in a photograph that’d hit every front page in town,” Pedley cut in — “unless she had something to do with starting this blaze.”