The press agent winced as if in pain. “Are you kidding! She risks her neck to save her rum-dum brother an’ nearly gets killed. So the brave fire-laddies dope out she’s responsible for the fire! Stop boyscouting! I got to go to the hospital with Leila!”
“You might have to go to a hospital.” Pedley was brusque. “But it’ll be for resisting an officer.”
“You’re putting me under arrest?”
“We’re not going to play pachisi with you.”
Ross bristled. “You can’t hold me. Not unless you charge me with—”
“I can hold you. With or without a charge.” Pedley squatted beside the dead man.
“I won’t stand for any superstupid fireman—”
“Shuddup.” The cop shook Ross until the gargoyle face was purple. “He ain’t a fireman. He’s the Fire Marshal.”
“I don’t give a good goddam if he’s Big Chief Pazookus in person. He can’t run me in like any stray vagrant—” The publicity man wrestled to get free as the gong clanged tentatively and the ambulance wedged slowly through the crowd milling against the fire line. “I got friends down at City Hall, myself. I’ll show him some trouble.”
The cop was bored. “Big an’ little shots been tryin’ to do that for years, to my knowledge. The marshal’s still sherlocking for the department. Behave or I’ll bat your bridgework in.”
With his free hand, Ross fished in his overcoat pocket, came up with a cigarette. He stuck it between his lips, reached mechanically for his lighter. Then he glanced up at the giant toadstool of smoke sprouting over the theater, put the lighter away without using it.
Pedley turned to the rescue man who had brought out Lownes’s body.
“Where’d you find him?”
“Last dressing-room on the right.”
The same one where Leila had had her close call. “What happened to his face?”
“He was under one of them lounging sofas, Marshal. Stuffing caught fire and dropped through on him.”
“He crawled under the chaise?”
“Way it looked. He must of blown his top. When he couldn’t open the door.”
“It was stuck. Yair.”
“He could of bust it down if he hadn’t gone panicky, Marshal. One good belt with a chair would have let him out.”
“You’d think so.”
He stood up, looked at the sky. The ugly glow was gone from the underside of the low-hanging clouds; the smoke drifting upward had little heat beneath it to give it wings. The boys had the blaze in hand.
The pumpers were uncoupling. Soot-smudged men were taking up — handling the ice-sheathed canvas as cautiously as if they were juggling butcher knives. Gongs clanged the recall for hook-and-ladders. Motors roared. Police whistles shrilled. Sirens began their warning wail.
The musicians had drifted away. The crowds at the fire line were already thinning. Hose trucks and combinations were rolling out from the curb, sliding away into the early dusk with bloodshot eyes.
The battalion chief sloshed to Pedley’s side. “Press wants a statement on how she started.”
Pedley scowled at the thing under the tarpaulin. “Something to do with the wiring, I’d say.”
“Guy from one of the tabs seems to have an idea there was a pyro in the picture.”
“He can print it. But not from me. He can say the marshal thinks it was something to do with the wiring.”
“Check. It could have been worse, with this wind. We were lucky.”
“This guy wasn’t.” Pedley bent over the body. His finger touched something that resembled a melted rubber band running from the dead man’s left eye to the point of his jaw. It was still sticky. Blood. From a cut on the eyebrow, there. Maybe Lownes had hurt himself in a frenzied attempt to get out of the dressing-room. Then again, maybe not—
A voice over the marshal’s shoulder observed, “Not much doubt what happened to him, Ben.”
“Hi, Doc. Might be some.”
“Oh! One of those things?”
“You tell me.” Pedley regarded the assistant medical examiner out of the corners of his eyes. “Fella was up in a dressing-room when a bottle full of something ignites. Door isn’t locked. Later on, when heat buckled the frame, it stuck. But at the time the blaze started, this bird could have opened it with his pinky.”
“The stuff in the bottle might have exploded and knocked him out.”
“He came to in a hell of a hurry, then. Because he tried to get away from the flames by crawling under a chaise.” He pointed to the charred trickle of blood. “Curious to know how he got that.”
“We’ll give him the complete treatment.”
“Might help to know if he was schwocked. Whether that smack on the eye could have put out his lights. Anything else you happen to run across.”
The policeman propelled Terry Ross across the sidewalk. “I s’pose it’s the same old horse this lad gives out, Marshal. But I thought I oughta letcha know.”
“What’s his complaint?”
“Says every minute you keep him out of circulation costs him heavy dough. Same old mahaha about suing the city for fifty thousand damages and so on and forth.”
Veins stood out on the publicity man’s forehead. “If you think I’m going to let you shove me around while I’m losing—”
“You’re not letting me. I have to find out how this blaze started. If it’s costive to you, that’s tough. It cost Lownes, too.”
“All the more reason I’ve got to get to Leila. Get it through your skull — she’s big business. Ned was her manager. With him gone, there are lots of decisions to be made. Somebody’s going to pay, if you keep me from making ’em.”
“They’ll have to wait until after the autopsy.”
“On Ned?”
“Have to make sure how he died. The fire that killed him was set. And you were the first one to say so.”
“I told you I was just shooting off my face.”
“You did. One of the things I want to know is why you were.”
“I was — upset.”
“Not enough to go in there after the girl.”
“I’d have been in there before Paul, only I was turning in the alarm.”
“Were you, now? You spotted the fire, first?”
“Don’t be putting words in my mouth. I’d been over to the Astor for the house doc. Comin’ back, when I get to the alley, I see smoke and hear someone holler ‘Fire!’ So I beat it to the corner for a cop.” Ross kept his eyes away from the ambulance in which they were loading Lownes. “’Course you never find a cop when you need one. So I pulled the box myself.”
“Then ran back here?”
“Yeah. By then the boys in the band were stampeding out like crazy and this fat-pratt,” Ross angled his head toward the patrolman, “was there. So when I start in after Leila, he stops me.”
The cop twirled his stick. “Now I come to think of it, I don’t guess you was so anxious to go in, at that.”
Pedley held up a palm. “How’d you know the Lownes girl and her brother were still inside, Ross?”
“How would I know? I look for Leila. I don’t see her. One of the network boys yells she’s run up to her dressing-room to help li’l brother.”
“Why’d he need help?”
“He was out on his feet. Hadn’t drawn a sober breath for weeks.”
“That why you went for the doc?”
Ross hesitated. “Yeah. I’d hate to see a dog burn to death. But you don’t hear me saying I’m sorry for Ned Lownes.”
“I don’t. No. I heard you say he was a bum and might have set the fire himself.”
Under the ruddy glare from the insurance patrol’s head lamps, Ross looked like a worried kewpie. “If this thing wasn’t accidental—”