Corpse on the Grill

Chapter Six The Man with the Key

The purr of the motor was louder now, or it seemed so to the Marshal. By the time he had managed to wrench his wrist free from the gummy tape, the pounding in his ears was thunderous, either from the motor or the thumping of his heart.

He tore at the bindings around his ankles, ripped the sticky bandage loose. He let the water splash on his upturned face a second, then shimmied up the pipe, using his feet and left hand to grip the metal, until he could turn the faucet on full force.

He got it wide open. Then he gripped the T pipe with the fingers of his right hand, got the ball of his thumb across the jet of the stream. Would it reach?

It would!

The spurt of water hissed out in a thin fan, toward the hood of the sedan. Pedley jockeyed it so the jet hit the side louvres. The sound of the stream hitting the metal of the hood was music to his ears.

But there was no certainty it would reach a vital connection, dampen the wires, get to the distributor. It might... and that was all the chance he had.

He felt himself getting noticeably weaker. It took strength to maintain his grip on that pipe; he couldn’t last much longer. The motor droned away, unconcernedly.

He altered the angle of the jet. There was a sputter, a miss. He clung to the pipe with the grim determination of a drowning man clutching a branch. Finally, when his hold was loosening and he was beginning to slip down the pipe, there was complete silence.

He’d done it! The invisible, death-dealing fumes wouldn’t come pouring out of that exhaust any longer. If there wasn’t already too much poison in the air...

He climbed up with a final effort and shut off the water. Puddles on the floor gurgled as they ran to the drain.

The Marshal left the tape on his mouth, rearranged the bindings around his feet so they wouldn’t seem to have been disarranged, at first glance. He turned over on his side, so that his right arm would be against the wall.

Then he waited. Hours it seemed...

The footsteps came slowly down, gritting on the cement floor of the garage. Pedley could just make out a vague shadow moving in silhouette against the deeper blackness.

Pedley kept his muscles limp, relaxed; simulating as nearly as possible the lifeless corpse which he should have been. The fire detective could hear the murderer’s stertorous breathing, could feel fingers probing his throat for his pulse. Then the Marshal snapped into convulsive action.

His right hand shot out, clutched the shadowy figure fiercely by the neck. At the same instant, using his steel-locked left hand as leverage, Pedley threw his legs around the man’s body in a scissors grip.

Blows rained on the Marshal’s face and neck, fingernails clawed viciously at his eyes. But he held on to the windpipe in his grasp, squeezed the murderer’s midriff punishingly with his leg-hold. It was over in less than sixty seconds. The man went limp. Pedley let the deadweight sag to the floor, crouched down beside it. He fished through the man’s pockets, found the key to the handcuffs, let himself loose. Then he ripped the tape from his mouth, jumped for the faucet, turned it on and drank from the icy cascade that poured down on him.

First, he locked the killer’s wrist to the pipe from which he, himself, had just won release. Then he dragged the unconscious figure under the shower. There was a deep groan; the man opened his eyes and stared up with a mixture of cold malignity and shocked astonishment.

“This is where we came in,” Pedley growled, “with me damn near out on my feet and you wandering around like you’d lost your best friend.”

“What’s the matter with you?” snarled the man on the floor. “I come down here, find you kayoed and wonder whether I ought to call a doctor. And you tear at me like a wildcat. What’s the idea?”

“Idea is, it’s all over, Biddonay. All except the little room where they sit you with your back to a switchboard.”

“Because I tried to save your life?”

“Because you tried to kill me, you potbellied buzzard. And tried to make it look as if your partner fixed my wagon, instead of you. How the hell did you get out of the hospital?”

“What difference does it make whether I stayed in the hospital?” The fat man walked on his knees around the water pipe the way a dog roves on a chain. “I been takin’ it, all night, now. From the fire, from that louse, Yalb. And now you. I’m the big loser in this thing—”

“I thought you were, until I got my gray matter going. You said you were all washed up. Remember?”

“Well...”

“You were. Only before the fire. Not after. You’re practically broke, way I figure it. You mentioned the take was okay at the restaurant. But you didn’t seem to be spending much dough on wine, women or such. And when I saw that row of Moody’s Manuals there in the bookcase in your office, I should have known.”

“I’ve had ’em for years,” Biddonay protested.

“You got the 1941 edition damned early, then. The guys who use Moody’s much are generally stock-market brokers or suckers who think they’re wise boys.”

“Is it a felony to own securities, now?”

“Your trouble was you didn’t own ’em. Maybe you had ’em, but you lost ’em.”

“Okay, crystal gazer. Suppose I am strapped. What of it?” Biddonay nursed his wrist, where the bracelets chafed it.

“Why, you might have tried to get more dough. The logical place for you to try and get it would be to gyp your partner. And if you figured you’d gone as far as you could, along that line, without being found out, you might try to get out of your fix by putting Krass out of the way.”

“I never even saw Herb,” Biddonay jeered, “after he left the place at midnight.”

“You wouldn’t have to. You could get Krass in a jam by killing that wrestler in such a way that everyone would pin the blame on your partner. That would send Krass to the burner and leave you to take over the Ice-taurant. Including any funds of Krass’s which you may have stolen, to date.”

“You fat-headed fink!” the restaurant man yelled. “I never knew anything about this Greek wrestler!”

“Oh, sure. Sure you did. Jewett knew you did.”

“You couldn’t even get Herb to believe a frame-up like that.”

“Maybe I could, fat boy. I could point out to Krass that you’d heard him talking on the phone to that wrestler. That would have told you where your partner was supposed to meet the Gorilla and cross his palm with silver.”

“Ha!” Biddonay chuckled hoarsely. “And again ‘Ha’!”

“You like it? Here’s more. You beat it over to this hotel where they had the date. You got there before Krass did, maybe quarter of twelve or so. The Greek was there; you gave him some song and dance about Krass meeting him in your rooms above the restaurant. Right?”

Biddonay stared at him, slack-jawed. “You son of a—”

“Well, it’s close enough. Anyhow, you got Gorilla Greg to come back to your rooms. After the joint closed you got him to come down to the cafe, prob’ly on a pretext of meeting Krass then. When you got him there, you killed him, chopped him up into soup meat, put the legs and arms on the fire so it would look as if the murderer was trying to conceal his crime — though you weren’t — and then hung the torso up in the coldbox. That’s the story, isn’t it?”

The light in the garage was stronger, now, but Biddonay’s face seemed to be still gray, like the sky at false dawn.

“I suppose I cut that steak out of the wrestler’s back, too?”

“Who else, Biddonay? You heard about the threat Krass made, about serving Suzie’s husband to her on toast, if he caused too much trouble.”

“Hell! If you ain’t just been hitting the pipe and dreaming this up, whyn’t you slap me in a cell?”

“I want to get a coupla things straight first, fatso.”

“No kidding! Just ask me. Anything at all,” the prisoner sneered. “Be glad to oblige.”

“Okay. About that phone call to Pete Donnelly. I know you killed your cashier. I suppose it was because he was wise, or getting wise, to your financial finagling. You must have killed him before the apparatus got to the blaze, because you’d have to have time enough to get back to your rooms from Fifty-first Street and change out of street clothes into pajamas. Then you came down into the street, looking all worried and upset and I don’t wonder, with that evening’s work behind you.”

“You’d have to go on the witness stand and testify that I talked, in your presence, to Pete after the fire was over. And that I was with you all the time from that moment till we found poor Donnelly’s body.”

Pedley shook his head. “All I could swear to is that you called a number and talked to somebody. It might have been a Chinaman at a Chopsuey joint for all I heard. It wasn’t the cashier.”

Biddonay beat his head against the iron riser. “Listen to the lunatic! He don’t even believe his own ears.”

“Yeah. I do. When I hear something. I didn’t hear the guy on the other end of your wire, then. And I can’t prove that you dialed a different number the second time you called Donnelly. But I know you did.”

The restaurant man began to sob great gusty sobs that shook his tubby figure like jelly. “Couple of hours ago, you weren’t talking this way. You put the pinch on that rat-faced Yalb. And now—”

“Now I think just the same about Yalb as I thought then. Suzie’s brother is scared, dumb and rattled. He got sore at you for throwing off on his sister, and cut you for it. We’ll get him for that; he’ll probably still be serving time when you’re waiting for the reprieve that won’t come. But Yalb isn’t a wholesale butcher, like you.”

“Why me? Why not Krass? Why not?” the fat man shrieked. He was pouring cold sweat.

“Krass wouldn’t have used that bowling ball case to carry the Greek’s head out of the cafe, for one thing. It would have been too much of a giveaway. By the way, what’d you do to scare Herb off?”

Biddonay shook his head, without answering.

“You’d want him to take it on the lam because you’d need somebody to act as fall guy, and Krass had to get the chair if you were to come out ahead on the money end.”

The fat man broke down and blubbered piteously, pawing the air with his free hand as if he was trying to beat off a wasp.

The Marshal started for the stairs. “Say, there’s always a little silver in the lining...”

The proprietor of the Ice-taurant looked up, soddenly. He was drenched with tears and perspiration.

“You won’t have to worry about that new wardrobe, Biddonay. You wouldn’t want to spend a lot of dough on a suit they’re going to rip up the legs and arms in a few weeks.”