Corpse on the Grill

Chapter Two Snowball in Hell

The portable suction fan which the emergency squad had hooked up in the adjoining building by now had cleared the basement of the deadly white fumes. But the acrid bite of ammonia still gnawed at their nostrils.

“For God’s sake, what happened?” the restaurateur wheezed. “Pipes bust?”

“No. Somebody used a hammer on one of the compression valves. Opened it up so it couldn’t be shut. Nice idea. Like to have that slug stripped naked in a roomful of ammonia for about ten minutes.”

“Je-zu. Who’d do a thing like that!”

“That’s what I got to find out.” Pedley stalked to the tremendous cold room, occupying the far end of the basement. The heavy glassed-in door was closed tightly, but one of the glass sides of the big ice-box had been shattered by the force of the hose. The floor of the refrigerator was piled with tubs of butter, cloth-wrapped hams, buckets of lard. A few racks of lamb, some loins of pork and one quarter of beef hung on meat hooks. The Marshal stepped through the aperture in the smashed glass.

“Boys broke in here to find that ammonia leak, Biddonay. They found something else.” Pedley pointed to a piece of meat which was almost concealed by the beef carcass. It was gray-fleshed and smooth-skinned, with raw, red stumps where the legs and arms had been hacked off. The torso was impaled on a steel hook just above the breast-bone. Blood had congealed in a purple-black clot across the open wound that had been a neck.

“Almighty!” breathed the cafe owner. “That... was a... a man! Ah—” he made a strangling noise, looked away.

“Nothing to put on the front page of the papers. No.” Pedley swung the grisly object on its hook. A chunk of flesh had been cut from the back of the corpse, about three inches above the waist; the white cartilage of the ribs had been bared. “What you make of this?”

Biddonay groaned; his face puckered up as if he was suffering from toothache. “Somebody... cut a piece of meat right out of that thing!” He leaned against the wall and covered his face with his hands.

“Looks like a butcher had gone after a piece of sirloin.” Pedley’s mouth tasted as if he’d been chewing old pennies. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Air’s bad.” He led the cafe man out; Biddonay sagged heavily against him, stumbled drunkenly.

“What on God’s earth,” the restaurant owner mumbled thickly, “would anyone do a thing like that! Even a crazy man wouldn’t...”

“Not likely.” The Marshal swept his flashlight around the cellar. “In all the years I’ve been doing the detecting for the Fire Department, I’ve never run across a blaze set by a lunatic. Children, yes. Dimwits, sure. And pyromaniacs might be cracked, according to these psychoanalysts, but in court, they’re just plain criminals. Anyhow, no pyro ever set a fire to hide a corpse.”

Biddonay mopped sweat off his moon-face with the inside of his sleeve. “That... thing... wasn’t in the cold box at nine o’clock tonight. I was down here with my wholesaler; he dropped in for dinner.”

“What time’d you leave the cafe?”

“ ’Bout one. We close one-thirty.”

Pedley grunted. He stalked back upstairs, the fat man moaning along behind.

In the kitchen Pedley paused in front of the wide brick grill. “Cook over charcoal, eh?”

“For steaks an’ chops, yeah. The range is for roasts and bakework.” Biddonay wet his lips and swallowed hard.

The Marshal put his flash on the water-soaked and blackened mess in the fire pit. Charcoal gave a terrific heat, Pedley realized; it would crisp any flesh to a black and brittle ash in a few minutes. Even bone would be consumed to a warped and twisted bit of char. But those things on top of the drenched coals still held the shape and semblance of human bones. The Marshal picked them out, laid them on the stainless steel surface beside the grill.

“Somebody,” he said grimly, “has been having himself a cannibal barbecue.”

Biddonay shivered, bent over the blackened objects on the dresser. “Legs an’ arms, huh?”

“I’d say so.” Pedley fumbled in the wet, gritty mess of the fire pit. “But no skull.”

“Holy mother!!” The restaurant man got sick to his stomach.

“Well, the guy must have had a head. Where is it?” Pedley climbed up on the iron grating, peered behind the bricked-up grill. There was nothing there that could have been a human head. But the boarding of the wall directly behind the fire-box was an ebony cinder. This was where the fire had started, then; someone had left too hot a fire in the grill — probably left the electric bellows turned on to give an extra intense heat in order to reduce the bones to ash. The brick wall at the rear of the grill had become red-hot; the sheathing had ignited and the flames had gone up inside the walls to the higher stories. The Marshal clambered down.

“Who’d have access to this joint after closing, Biddonay?”

“We don’t permit anybody back here in the kitchen except the chefs and the waiters.”

“Well, you had a key to the front door, didn’t you? And this partner you mentioned a minute ago?”

“Herb Krass? Sure. We both got keys. But I was in bed and Herb went home around midnight...”

“Which one of your employees is supposed to lock up after the rest’ve gone?”

Pedley snapped, irritably.

“When me or Herb ain’t here, Pete Donnelly closes up. He’s cashier. ’Course, he’s got a key, too.”

“Where’s a phone? Give this Donnelly a bell. Tell him I want to see him down here right away.”

“Sure.” Biddonay looked away. “But Pete ain’t the kind of lad to harm a flea, much less chop up a guy.”

The Marshal followed to the office, a little water-soaked, soot-stained cubbyhole off the corridor leading to dressing-rooms for the entertainers. There were a couple of ash-smeared desks, swivel chairs, a black iron safe piled high with old and soggy Racing Forms; a glass-front bookcase filled with a row of Moody’s Manuals, some small silver cups, a few paper-covered Spalding pamphlets on bowling and two round, black leather cases for carrying bowling balls. Biddonay sagged into one of the padded chairs, dragged a phone across the desk toward him, dialed.

“Pete? Hello, Pete? This’s Bill... yeah... all hell’s bust loose. We hadda fire, Pete... The whole shebang’s burned down... just now... They only put it out a few minutes ago. And that ain’t all. There’s a—” the cafe owner glanced up at Pedley’s outstretched palms.

Pedley said, “Shush on the killing, Biddonay.”

The fat man nodded, unhappily. “Listen, Pete. There’s a guy from the Fire Department down here with me now. He wants you should get down here right away... I don’t know what for; I suppose he wants to ask you some questions. Hurry it up, now, Pete.” He hung up, as a blue-uniformed man in the regulation cap of the Fire Department came into the office and saluted Pedley.

“E. T. Jewett, fireman, first class. Company Eighty-six. Inspection duty, sir.” The man’s narrow, tight-lipped face was tense with worry.

“These premises on your beat, Jewett?”

“Yes, sir.” The fireman rubbed his chin, uneasily. “I checked the floorshow here, tonight. About eleven-thirty, wasn’t it, Mr. Biddonay?”

The cafe man sighed. “Guess it was. Seems a year ago.”

Pedley took out a notebook. “What time’d your tour end, Jewett? Twelve?”

“Yes, sir. Everything was okay here, then. How’d she start, do you know, sir?”

“Overheated wall behind the charcoal grill. Hike out and tell that cop to ring his station. We’ll need the medical examiner, homicide boys, and one of the lads from the Bureau of Identification. Then come back down cellar.”

Jewett’s eyes opened wide. He saluted again and hurried away.

The Marshal said curtly: “Let’s go down to your private morgue, Biddonay. See if we can put the finger on that corpse.”

The fat man labored to his feet, mumbling something about not wanting to set eyes on the damned thing, much less a finger. They went downstairs, into the nose-tingling ammoniacal vapor. They searched the rest of the refrigerator first, for the missing head. They had found nothing when Jewett rejoined them. The fireman expelled his breath in a long whistle of repugnance.

“Somebody had a screwy sense of humor, huh?” he said. “To hang that thing in here like a chunk of mutton? He was a big guy, wasn’t he!”

“Big,” Pedley answered, “and powerful as a bull. Look at those shoulders. Don’t see chest muscles like that very often.”

Biddonay pointed to a number of garnet-colored scars on the back of the torso, about the level of the shoulder-blades. “What were those marks?”

Pedley’s mind went back through the years to a body that had been fished out of the ashes of a great conflagration; the cadaver had been marked in the same peculiar way. And that body had been identified.

“Mat scars,” he suggested. “They might be scars from a canvas-covered mat. Sort a wrestler gets from having his shoulders scraped by some two hundred and fifty pounder on top of him.”

“A wrestler!” Jewett frowned. “Say, Mr. Biddonay—”

“I don’t know any wrestlers,” the cafe man muttered, hastily.

“That big black-haired guy who comes in two, three times a week and tries to date Snowball Sue,” Jewett cried. “Looks like an ape who needs a shave.”

Biddonay shut his eyes, shook his head. “I don’t notice every customer in the Ice-taurant. I couldn’t remember ’em all—”

Pedley went close to him, grabbed the fat man by the back of the neck, pushed his face within an inch of the gruesome thing on the steel hook. “Don’t hold out on me, mister! Not when there’s murder and arson involved and three of my department buddies are sleeping on a slab! You talk! You talk straight and quick — or I’ll put you where you’ll be glad to have even this bloody hunk for company!”

Biddonay stammered. “It’s only I don’t want to give you a wrong steer. I’m not certain—”

“Who’s this wrestler Jewett described?”

The cafe man shuddered. “An ugly lummox they call Gorilla Greg. I don’t know who he is. I don’t know anything about him except that Sue kids him and calls him Gorilla.”

“Who’s this Sue?”

“Our snowball dancer,” Biddonay moaned.

“You know,” Jewett put in, “she comes out after them chorines do their strip tease on skates; she ain’t wearing a stitch except she’s holding this big snowball, and of course while she skates around the snowball begins to melt—”

“Shut up,” barked Pedley. “What’s her name?”

Biddonay looked at the floor. “Name is Sue d’Hiver. She’s a swell kid. She wouldn’t harm a flea.”

“Where’s she live?”

“Over on the East Side somewheres. The address’d be up in the cashier’s ledger.”

The Marshal got his arm, shoved him toward the stairs. “Let’s get it, fella. I might want a word with this mouse.”