Pedley nodded, waited.
“Oke. The kid’s had a long climb to get to the top of the billing. It’s my job to keep her there. The job comes first.”
“You’re going to have to hump yourself, when it breaks in the morning editions that I’ve had to pin a rap on her.”
“You don’t think I’m going to sit back and watch while you bull your way around my china shop! I’ll take this to people who can tell you where to head in!”
“You do that. File a complaint. File a dozen. See what they get you besides a subpoena for the Grand Jury.”
“I’ve got strings over there!” The publicity man pointed out the window toward City Hall. “And Leila’s got drag with topshots who can break you and your commissioner, too. I’m telling you, put the smear on her and we’ll make it hotter than the hinges of hell—”
“Hop to it.” Pedley got up, flung open the door. “Tell your pals this was planned arson and planned murder and that I’m going to get the planner just as sure’s God made little apples!”
Chapter Five
Stirring Up a Patient
The door of the down car slammed behind Ross. Barney scratched his chin.
“Another influential gent who’s going to give out with pla-a-nty troub’?”
“Queer thing is, he’s one boy who might put it over.” Pedley frowned.
“Who is he?” Barney unpeeled a stick of charcoal gum, slid it into his mouth. “Illegitimate son of a ward heeler?”
“Never speak disrespectfully of a public relations counsel. Brother Ross might get you a nokay notice in the gossip columns.”
Barney grinned; evidently there was, between him and the marshal, none of the stiffness which might have been found in a similar situation between a police inspector and his office clerk. The risks men took together in the Fire Department broke down such rigid relationships as existed in the Army; the top brass among the fire fighters shared the daily dangers equally with the youngest black-shirted probationer laying spaghetti or ventilating a roof.
A blaze-beater had to have the same confidence in his commander as an infantry soldier in the artillery officers who sent the creeping barrage rolling ahead of his path through barbwire and mine fields. When one wrongly directed stroke of an ax could send a wall crashing in the wrong direction; when one misdirected stream might cut off a man’s retreat by driving flames across a door, or weaken a sagging floor — under such pressure of circumstance — a trust based on mutual respect for nerve and coolness of judgment was essential.
But there was one difference between the doughboy and his counterpart in black helmet and rubber coat — the fireman knew his superior officer would be exposing himself to the same danger at the same time. Nobody wearing the Maltese cross — not even the Chief of Department-issued orders from the rear.
The days of political appointments to high place in the department had given way to the era of civil service tests and promotion-on-the-record. Practically every blue-shirt on the city payroll had come up the hard way, gone through the same hard-boiled course of sprouts. Both Barney and his boss had spent long weeks learning how to use the tools of their trade in the Recruit School at Sixty-seventh and Lexington, later at the Company School, and still later, at the Fire College in Long Island City. As graduates of the same institutions — where they’d both learned when to use an L-nozzle or a spinner; how to handle a scaling-ladder so the safety belt wouldn’t slow you down; how to hook your heel into the rung of a ladder and get a knee lock so you’d have both hands free to handle a hose without the danger of being dragged down with the ladder if it should topple; how to jump into a net without breaking a leg and how to carry a hysterical woman on your back down an extension ladder when the wind was trying to blow you both to the street, forty feet below — as competent alumni of the best schools of their kind in the world, Barney and his boss automatically assumed the kind of intimacy which exists between those who have spent undergraduate years on greener and less dangerous campuses.
Barney knew that this peculiarly close relationship entitled him to no special consideration for his disability; he got none from his superior. Since that morning nine years ago when a waterlogged warehouse, burst open by the swelling force of a thousand tons of water on baled cotton, had collapsed and left Barney under the wreckage of steel beams and concrete slabs, the former pipe-man had asked no favors on account of his infirmity.
Perhaps the fact that the warehouse had been torched by a professional firebug who had subsequently been sent to Sing Sing by Pedley for the rest of his natural life added something to Barney’s silent admiration for this weather-reddened marshal. Barney was well aware that Ben concealed, behind his façade of caustic wisecracks, a grimness which was the direct result of knowing a lot of his best and closest friends had gone to their deaths in fires that had been set.
Possibly the circumstance of their having worked together on hundreds of cases — sometimes for days on end without rest or sleep — had made Barney more than normally alert to the marshal’s uncommunicated worries. He recognized such an uneasiness now.
“You figure this Ross character has any real weight to throw around, boss?”
“Depends.” Pedley shrugged into his raglan again. “On what kind of weight you mean. He works for Leila Lownes.”
“Oh, oh! The Thing with that Swing.” The fireman limped across the floor in what was intended to be a rhumba step.
“Ross passes out the flimsies for her.”
“Whatta job — considering some of the flimsies they photograph that fluffy in! Does the crumb take money for that?”
“He represents money. Coin big enough to buy most anything it wants. Except,” he moved toward the elevator, “protection from the B.F.I.”
“When they come around with the writs and the summonses,” Barney called after him, “where’ll I tell ’em to seek you out?”
“I’m going to the hospital. Then to the morgue.”
Barney stared.
“To see the Lownes girl’s lawyer. Paul Amery. Senior member of Amery and Cadawalder. Said gent got a bellyful of smoke trying to lug the Luscious Leila out of her dressing-room.”
“Is he going to check out?”
“No. Then I’m going to Twenty-sixth Street to have a look at what’s left of Ned Lownes.” Pedley thumbed the elevator button. “Say. Get hold of Ollie for me, hah?”
The rhythmic clamping of the clerk’s jaw stopped abruptly. “Oh-h-h! Gonna be one of those cases.” He nodded sagely. “Okey-dory. I’ll get Ollie.”
The private room in the very private Madison Avenue hospital smelled strongly of ammonium carbonate and chloroform when the marshal came in and looked down at the waxy features of the man on the bed.
There was a bandage across the lawyer’s jaw; another around his neck. But there was color in the lips that had been gray; the face was now coldly distinguished rather than merely thin. The eyes that had been dull were clear and sharply blue, but there was still something of shock and fear in them.
It had taken more than a few inhalations of smoke to throw a scare into this man, the marshal realized. That Amery could afford a private room like this — that, in fact, he could get into this exclusive ultra-hospital at all — was evidence of the attorney’s high position in the legal world. Even flat on his back on the narrow white bed, he managed to give an impression of dignity. Yet he was afraid of something—
He recognized Pedley with a lifting of iron-gray brows. “Hello—”
“How you feel?”
“Lousy.” Amery didn’t trouble to smile. “But they say I’ll be all right in two or three days if I lie still and don’t try to talk too much.”