“Why — the show—”
“The radio show? Doesn’t it go on at the Broadcast Building?”
“Usually.” She was astonished he didn’t know. “Except when they go out of town on trips or take it to one of the hospitals for wounded vets. They can’t very well bring the soldiers in to the studio.”
“Miss Lownes going to be in the show, after all?”
“She wasn’t,” the girl explained. “With Hal Kelsey out for keeps and Leila out, too, Mister Gaydel thought it wasn’t worth while putting the show on at all. But Mister Ross decided it wouldn’t be fair to all those wounded men to disappoint them so he convinced Leila she should go ahead with it, in spite of her own feelings. So she’s going to.”
“What hospital?”
“Harbor View Memorial, Mister Pedley.”
“When’s the show supposed to go on?”
“Six o’clock, I think.”
Pedley hung up the phone softly, went back to the table, laid two dollar bills on the tablecloth.
“So long, my sweet.”
“You’re a laggard escort, to leave me in this low dive.”
“I have to take a quick trip across the Bay. Those excursionists weren’t after souvenirs. They were Staten Island bound to put on the Winn show for the vets at Harbor View Hospital. I smell trouble.”
“Aren’t you going out of your way to look for it?” She got up hastily, hurried out to the street with him.
“You ought to know, if anyone does, Ollie. In this business, if you don’t look for it, trouble comes right up and smacks you in the face when you aren’t looking. Hey, you’re not coming with me.” He climbed behind the wheel of the borrowed sedan, switched on the short wave.
“I wouldn’t miss it for all the nylons in Macy’s—”
“… get to Mitch… to Mitch. Have her meet me at the Battery in nothing flat… that’s right. That is all.” He switched off the set. “I’ll run you down, but that’s the end of the line.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, darling. I’ve never been seasick in my life.”
He took the shortest distance between two points; his siren could be heard ten blocks ahead; and that was a good thing because he swooped down toward Whitehall like a dive bomber riding in for the kill.
Ollie sat relaxed, her shoulder touching his, while the sedan tore around trolley cars on the wrong side and knifed through paralyzed traffic.
“Why are you running a temperature, Ben dear?”
“Thing’s made to order for a firebug’s fiesta, Ollie. Worst fires are always in crowds. Worst crowd-fires are where people can’t get out quickly for one reason or another. Hospitals, especially. More hospitals are touched off by incendiaries than any other single kind of building.”
“Why?”
“More people likely to get hurt. More of ’em scared. So — more excitement. Psychiatrists say a lot of arsonists get a sexual kick out of that kind of emotional hypo.”
The John Purroy Mitchel was steaming into Pier One at top speed, a bone of foam in her teeth, a veil of spray over her blunt nose. The big red-and-black fireboat, with its threatening armament of brass nozzles on their gunlike mounts, rubbed its guardrail against the stringpiece only a few seconds after Pedley and the girl rolled out on the dock, piled out of the sedan.
The firemen didn’t bother with hawsers around the bollards. Pedley hustled Ollie over the bulwarks, hollered up to the pilothouse, “Saint George’s, Dan. And cut the corners on those spar buoys!”
They were rolling fearsomely down the ship channel off the tip of Governor’s Island, with the Mitchel taking heavy spray over her quarter as she butted into the cross-chop, before Ollie asked the question that had been bothering her.
“You really believe Leila’s behind this orgy of arson, Ben?”
“Sure, she’s behind it.” He put down the captain’s binoculars; there was no sign of smoke from the cluster of low, white buildings on the hill rising over Saint George’s, but with a wind like this he couldn’t have seen it, anyway. “You saw the Memoirs of a Kilocycle Courtesan.”
“They may not have meant the same thing to a woman they’d mean to a man. She’s been hurt; she’s confused; her morals are those of an alley cat in April. But those pages out of the life of a lovelorn lady don’t tell me she’s a murderess and a firebug. I can’t imagine the girl who’d put those things on paper slashing a man’s throat and leaving his body in the snow in Central Park. What would be her motive?”
Pedley kept his eyes on the nearing piers of the island. “Oh, the motive’s been clear enough, all the way through, Ollie.”
“Blackmail?”
“That’s the method, Ollie. Not the motive. The motive is the half a million Luscious Leila might earn the next twelve months. And the same, or more, the year after that. And so on, ad infinitum. That’s a hell of a lot of jack, even after you deduct taxes.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“Fire! Fire!!!!”
The M.P. at the door of the recreation hall tapped a gloved finger against his lips in warning. “We’re on the air,” he murmured. “Sit in back.”
Music blared at them when they went in.
“Goodness!” Ollie whispered in astonishment at the row after row of quiet, intent men in their maroon coveralls, with their arms in splints, or their legs in casts — a good many in wheel chairs. “There must be hundreds.”
“Place holds close to a thousand.” Pedley walked swiftly down a side aisle, toward the apron of the shallow stage at the far end of the hall.
Wes Toleman was at the microphone, his face tilted up like that of a child awaiting a kiss. He waved toward the wings. Leila came out. The roar of cheers, whistles, and wolf-calls drowned out the handclapping, the pounding of canes and crutches on the floor. They followed her every movement as she swayed gracefully to the mike, raising her hand in smiling salute. The great hall became quiet except for the singing surge of the strings.
Pedley saw Shaner squatting on the floor at the end of the first row; jerked an imperative thumb at him.
The brasses softened; the rhythm section brought up the beat. Cliff Etting flicked his white wand at Leila. She threw her head back to flex her throat muscles, pushed the bronze helmet of hair back from her head, began to sing:
She had a marvelous sense of rhythm, Pedley realized. And she was one of those entertainers who somehow manage that magical rapport with an orchestra that makes every musician work with her, for her. The piano was just loud enough so she couldn’t go wrong in pitch, the strings came in with exactly the right staccato, the bull fiddle delayed smoothly on the afterbeat.
Wounded men strained forward in their seats; tension disappeared from haggard faces, lips hung loose, a thousand pairs of eyes devoured her. She had that same magical effect on all audiences — the hall was surcharged with the intensity of her appeal.
She’s something more than a blues singer with a freak larynx that makes her voice husky over the mike, the marshal told himself. She may not be a coloratura but she’s something better, to these vets.
He thought of the way Walt Whitman had put it; it fitted this girl up there on the big stage as nothing else could:
All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments… It is not the violins and the cornets, it is not the oboe nor the beating drums… It is nearer and farther than they…
She’s what they haven’t had, he reminded himself — What a lot of them may never have again, except through her. With that figure, those warm lips and friendly eyes, these men wouldn’t care what she’d been or done — not while that voice brought back the memories and held the promise.