Too Many Bodies

Chapter Five Fire Down Below!

In spite of Sedalia’s grim prophecy, I went to bed without worrying about any attempts the murderer might make that night. My ease of mind was entirely due to our specially constructed doors, of course, and not because I disagreed with Sedalia that he might make another attempt to kill her. With their inside bolts thrown even I could not have gotten through those doors from outside, and I doubted that our killer was a more accomplished picklock than I.

It never even occurred to me the killer would be insane enough to try to burn down the hotel.

The most infernal clangor I ever heard brought me out of a sound sleep. It sounded like ten thousand alarm clocks going off at once, and it took me from bed and out into the hall in my pajamas.

By the time I had switched on a light in the hall I realized the sound was coming from the elevator lobby and I also realized it was the fire alarm for our floor. Ducking back into my room, I got on my robe and slippers and returned to the hall just as Sedalia burst from her apartment pulling a robe over her nightgown.

“It’s the fire alarm,” I said before she could speak, and started toward the front door.

“Wait, Hank!” she called sharply.

It is frightening to be on the tenth floor of a hotel when a fire alarm goes off, and my face must have been pale when I stopped and turned, for Sedalia gave me the same sort of reassuring smile mothers give children frightened by thunder. The smile embarrassed me and I attempted nonchalance by feeling in my robe pocket for a cigarette, I offered her one, but she shook her head.

“Let’s not go off half-cocked, Hank,” Sedalia said. “There may be a killer sitting out there with a loaded gun. What time is it?”

I glanced at my wrist watch. “Three o’clock.”

“Phone the switchboard and find out if there’s really a fire before you start unlocking any doors.”

I nodded, and to show how unperturbed I was, returned to my bedroom for my lighter and lit my cigarette before going to the phone. Then I laid the lighted cigarette on my bedside ash tray and returned to the hall carrying the lighter in my hand. I was reaching for the phone when it rang. I dropped the lighter, picked it up again and answered the phone.

“This is the switchboard,” said a feminine voice. “There is a small fire in the hotel, but nothing to get excited about. Please listen carefully and don’t get excited.”

I said, “I’m not excited.”

“The management wishes all personnel to leave the hotel in as orderly a manner as possible. There is little danger that the fire will reach your apartment, but we don’t wish to take any chances. Please leave by the fire escape instead of using your elevator.”

“If there is no danger, I think we’ll stay right here,” I said.

The woman’s voice sharpened. “I’ll have to ask you to get out of the building at once. The management cannot be responsible—”

“Where is the fire?” I interrupted.

“Right below you. But there is nothing to get excited about—”

I said, “We’ll stay here and hope you can put it out.”

Suddenly her voice lost control. “You old fool! The whole ninth floor is in flames! Either get out of there or burn!”

The line went dead and I slowly replaced the receiver.

“We have to get out,” I told Sedalia, and added hopefully, “Our killer wouldn’t burn up a hundred people just to get at you, would he?”

She was stooping over and feeling the floor. “Feel this, Hank.”

I bent and followed her example. The floor felt slightly warm.

I said, “I haven’t smelled any smoke yet. Maybe they’ll get it under control.”

At that moment a wisp of smoke drifted from my bedroom. Both of us rushed to the door at once. I got there first, saw the cigarette I had laid down had fallen from the tray and the doiley of my bedside stand was smoldering. Carrying it into my bathroom, I threw it in the drain.

“We’ve got enough trouble without you starting additional fires,” Sedalia snarled at me.

Going to my open bedroom window, I pushed it farther open and leaned out to look down at the floor below. I could see no sign of fire, but at that moment sirens began to sound in the distance.

Drawing my head back in, I said, “I’m going to phone the switchboard once more before we rush out to get shot by a murderer.”

When I returned to the phone the same woman I had talked to before answered immediately.

“Yes?” she said, and then the phone went dead. At the same instant the alarm in the outer lobby stopped clanging.

Attempting to keep my voice steady, I said, “Apparently the wiring is going out. Maybe we had better do something before the lights go.”

“If we only knew which door the killer was watching,” Sedalia said.

“Maybe he isn’t watching either,” I said without any conviction.

Sedalia’s eyes were narrowed in thought. “If he were waiting at the front door and we never opened it, he would be trapped if the elevator went out. My guess is that our murderer is now sitting on the fire escape, so let’s try the front way.”

Since almost any action seemed better than staying where we were and roasting, I accepted her reasoning without question. Before I could weaken, I ran to the front door, drew the bolt and threw it open. I was met by a haze of smoke which set me to coughing.

Behind me Sedalia muttered through a handkerchief thrust to her face, “I don’t see any flame or any killers. Get moving.”

Lacking a handkerchief, I held an edge of my robe across my face and ran toward the elevator. As usual it was on the ground floor, and as I pressed the button and watched the floor indicator slowly rise, my eyes began to smart from the smoke.

The indicator stopped halfway between seven and eight. Frenziedly I pushed the button again, but the needle did not move.

And then all the lights went off.

There was no point in waiting longer. By mutual accord we stumbled back into the apartment and I locked and bolted the door. The last was simply reflex action, for if we were unable to get out the front way, there was certainly no way for a murderer to get in.

In pitch dark we felt our way along the wall to the door of Sedalia’s apartment, groped through the front room and dining room into the kitchen and eventually arrived at the back door. Here we both paused and I could hear Sedalia’s heavy breathing, as though she had been running uphill.

“Think we can afford to wait until it gets really hot?” I asked into the darkness.

Sedalia said, “Feel the floor again.”

Stooping, I pressed my palm against the floor and found it noticeably hot. Having had no previous experience with fires, I had no idea whether this could have been caused by radiated heat from a blaze not necessarily right underneath us, or if the ceiling below was actually on fire. But I had a mental vision of the floor suddenly bursting into flame, crumbling beneath our feet and plunging us into an inferno.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said. “I’ll go first.”

I threw the bolt, started to pull open the door, and Sedalia said tensely, “Wait!”

I stood holding the door a quarter inch open.

“All right,” she said.

Not understanding what was on her mind, I pulled the door wide, letting moonlight mixed with smoke pour into the room. Then turning to look at Sedalia, I saw her poised with a kitchen chair over her shoulder, ready to hurl it through the door at the first indication of anyone awaiting us on the fire escape. But the platform outside was bare.

I started to step through the door, but Sedalia said softly, “Hold it, Hank.”

Then she peeled off her robe, draped it over the chair and tossed the chair out onto the fire escape. From the roof overhead an automatic spat bullets in a chattering roar.

I had just time to see the chair dance on the platform like a crazy thing as bullets smashed into it, then I had slammed the door and thrown home the bolt.

“Let’s stay here and roast,” I said in a quavering voice.

“You might as well get the candles again,” Sedalia said calmly.

So while Sedalia repaired to her bedroom for another robe, I located the same candles we had used approximately twenty-four hours before and made a little light in the front room. Then we sat down, Sedalia with a beer and me with a high-ball, and conversed as though neither of us had a care in the world. Sedalia sounded entirely calm, but in the dim light of the two candles I could not make out her expression very well, and perhaps she was as frightened as I. If she was, she was exceedingly frightened, for I have never experienced such panic in my life as I did during the next forty-five minutes, as we sat there talking while the floor gradually grew so hot we could feel the warmth on our feet even through a thick rug.

“Do you really think the murderer set this?” I asked.

Sedalia took a long pull on her beer. “Obviously. It would be too much of a coincidence for him to be on the roof otherwise. If we don’t burn up, we’ve definitely got him now.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He wouldn’t go to such desperate lengths unless it were not absolutely essential to remove me tonight. He’s not making these frantic attempts because he simply fears me as an opponent. The only possible reason he could be so desperate is that he can’t afford to let me talk to Jonathan Toomey. So, by the process of applied logic, if we live to talk to Toomey we’ll have the answer.”

“Then our killer is Jerome Straight?”

“I don’t know,” Sedalia said. “We’ll never know unless we get to talk to Fibrolux Plastics’ vice president.”

When nearly a half hour had passed we suddenly heard a sound something like that of a huge vacuum cleaner. I was trying to classify the sound when there was a roaring immediately under our feet and the floor began to vibrate.

“The floor’s giving way!” I yelled, leaping to my feet.

“It’s just a fire hose,” Sedalia said matter-of-factly. “They’re playing a stream of water on the ceiling downstairs.”

I sank back in my chair feeling foolish, hope beginning to form in my breast that we would get out of our situation after all.

The hope materialized, for about fifteen minutes later a pounding came at the kitchen door. We went back to the kitchen together, and after satisfying ourselves that a fireman instead of the killer was on the fire escape outside by shouting back and forth through the door, I threw the bolt and let him in.

Incredibly, Inspector Stephen Home was with the fireman.

“Desk sergeant got me out of bed when a report on the fire came in,” he announced in explanation. “Knew you lived here and thought I’d want to know. You all right, Sedalia?”

“Just fine,” she said. “Have a beer, Stephen?”

The inspector shook his head, not even seeming surprised by the invitation. The fireman, an axe in one hand and a flashlight in the other, made a tour of the apartment and came back looking disappointed that he had found nothing to chop.

“You people should have gotten out,” he said. “Might as well stay now, though. The danger’s over.”

“Anyone hurt?” Sedalia asked.

“Woman sprained her ankle on a fire escape. Nobody burned, though the floor below here is pretty well gutted. Lucky the whole she-bang didn’t go up. Somebody poured gasoline all over the hall downstairs and pitched a match in it.”

He went out the way he had come.

“Our killer was on the roof a little while ago, Steve,” Sedalia said. “This was started to smoke me out apparently. He fired a number of shots and ruined the kitchen chair I threw out on the fire escape.”

“Noticed it,” he said. “Guessed something like that happened when I saw the holes in your robe. Checked the roof before I came in here, but there’s four other escapes he could have taken down.”

Suddenly, for no reason at all, an odd memory item popped from my subconscious into my conscious mind. This happens to me sometimes. I have what is known as a photographic memory, being able to reproduce in my mind vivid images of things I have seen in the past, for example whole pages of printed matter. Once the talent earned me a living on the stage, and now it is of occasional service to Sedalia.

I said, “Sedalia, what does this mean? Friday night when we were at the scene of the first murder, Gerald Rawlins pointed out his suitcase standing in the hall and remarked he had not had time to park it anywhere because he had come straight from the airport. It had a bright red baggage stub tied to its handle. But later when I searched his room, the stub was white and he also had an additional bag with a white stub.”

In the flickering candlelight Sedalia looked at me for a long time. Finally she said, “Have you been carrying that in your mind long, Hank?”

“Not consciously,” I said.

“It’s a good thing,” she told me grimly. “If you’d mentioned it right after searching Rawlins’ room, the case would have been solved right then.” She looked at the inspector. “No wonder the killer couldn’t afford to let me talk to Jonathan Toomey. Now I know what to ask Mr. Toomey.”

But she refused to tell us what she intended to ask, insisting she had no intention of accusing anyone of murder and arson until all the evidence was in. Instead she talked the inspector into having all five suspects picked up and at his office at nine in the morning, at which time she would make her long distance call to Dallas and then present the inspector with his murderer.

“The fire put my phone out of order again,” she said. “So this call will have to be at public expense.”

Whereupon she shooed the inspector out via the fire escape and we went back to bed.

When we arrived at headquarters the next morning, we found the five suspects already gathered together in the inspector’s office. Sedalia greeted them all courteously, borrowed the inspector’s phone and put in her call to the Fibrolux Plastics Corporation in Dallas. While waiting for this she asked the operator to get her the Statler Hotel.

Then she handed the phone to Inspector Home. “When you get the clerk, ask what time Gerald Rawlins registered on Friday.”

No one said anything as Home asked the question, grunted at the reply and hung up. He glanced at Gerald Rawlins.

“Desk clerk says he didn’t check in till about nine, which would be shortly after we released him after we questioned everyone at Mrs. Agatha Chambers’ home. But he phoned for the reservation from the railroad station at twelve-fifteen.”

“That ties it up,” Sedalia said. “We won’t even have to wait for Jonathan Toomey’s verification.” As the inspector reached for the phone she added quickly, “But don’t cancel the call. We’ll need the evidence. While waiting I’ll tell you how Mr. Gerald Rawlins performed these murders and why.”

Everyone turned to look at Gerald Rawlins, whose face had turned deathly pale, but who managed a cynical smile. He made no comment, simply staring defiantly at Sedalia as though daring her to go on. Sedalia obliged him.

“Rawlins managed to distort the picture of what really happened a bit,” she said. “But it was not really clever planning. It was merely incredible luck. What actually happened, of course, was not that Gerald phoned his aunt to disclose the hundred thousand dollar shortage, but Adrian Thorpe phoned her. Gerald was on a train at the time, en route to the family meeting. In spite of Gerald having fixed the books to make it look as though Thorpe was the embezzler, Mrs. Chambers knew her nephew well enough to put the blame where it belonged. Consequently, when Gerald arrived at his aunt’s house, he was met by a denunciation and Mrs. Chambers informed him he was not only permanently going to be cut out of her will, but a member of the district attorney’s office would be present at the meeting that might to take him into custody.”

She turned to Alvin Christopher. “That’s why you were invited, Mr. Christopher.”

“Wait a minute,” Inspector Home said. “If Rawlins came in by train, how did his name get on the airline passenger list?”

“That was the incredible luck. Either he had originally planned to go by plane, made a reservation and later decided to go by train and turned his reservation over to Adrian Thorpe to use, or perhaps Thorpe had asked Gerald to buy him a plane ticket and Gerald absent-mindedly made the reservation in his own name. Whichever it was, there is no doubt that it was Thorpe who rode the plane on a reservation made in Gerald Rawlins’ name, and Gerald came in by train.

“The phone call from the station making a reservation at the Sheridan for Adrian Thorpe was made by Gerald, of course. At the time Gerald didn’t know he was going to commit a murder in less than an hour, and was merely doing Thorpe a favor. No doubt Thorpe had asked him to make him a reservation, knowing he would have little time between the time his plane was due in and the time of the meeting. Another example of Gerald’s incredible luck was that the desk clerk at the Sheridan later assumed it was Thorpe himself who phoned for the reservation.

“Mrs. Chambers was killed in blind rage, without premeditation, but after committing the crime, Gerald did his best to wriggle out of it. Remembering the plane reservation was in his name, he tried a desperate plan. He bought a hunting knife, registering it in Thorpe’s name, then went to the Sheridan, waited until Thorpe was alone in his room, walked in and killed him. It was a simple matter to get Thorpe’s airline stub from his pocket, substitute his own train stub and remove the baggage stubs from Thorpe’s suitcases so that he could later attach them to his own. But in his first panic after killing his aunt, apparently he left his suitcase in the hall, where it remained all the time the police were investigating. Unfortunately, for Gerald, it still contained the red railroad baggage stub, and Hank noticed this.

“The handbag which disappeared from Thorpe’s room of course contained the evidence of Gerald’s embezzlement. No doubt the auditors will be able to put it together again, now they know what to look for.

“Finally, the reason Gerald had to get me out of the way was that he knew I intended to talk to Jonathan Toomey. On a routine police report by telegraph, where the police are chary with words in order to save the taxpayers expense, there was an excellent chance the only information coming from Dallas would be a verification that the audit showed Thorpe guilty of embezzlement. Certainly it would not have mentioned anything about the modes of transportation used by Thorpe and Rawlins. But Gerald knew if I personally talked to Toomey by phone, it would inevitably come out that Thorpe had flown. For it was Thorpe Mr. Toomey turned the auditors’ report over to, not Gerald. At the time Gerald was halfway between here and Dallas on a train.”

Sedalia took a deep breath. “Got anything to add?” she asked Gerald Rawlins.

“Yes,” he said in a tight voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t swing those fire tongs a little harder.”

At that moment the inspector’s desk phone rang.

“Here’s your Dallas call,” he said, handing it to Sedalia.