His partner cursed in corroboration; they clumped on down. Chief Fire Marshal Pedley went up.
He left the stairs, moved slowly down the corridor of the fourth floor. The boards became suddenly springy beneath his feet. He went down on hands and knees, distributing his weight.
It was slow work, crisscrossing the corridors from door to door, creeping over jagged shards of glass, slivers of metal. The drenched woodwork was still blistering. The planking grew spongier underneath him. He kept on, hacking lightly at the inside and outside of each door with his emergency axe. All the chips showed a greater depth of char on the corridor side than on the room side, until he reached room 441.
The blackened fragments from that door showed the roomside burned much more deeply than the exterior. He started in the room. There was a sound like a ripping canvas; the floor sagged, tilted away from him.
He spreadeagled — as he would have on ice too thin to support him — inched on.
His fingers touched fibrous jelly interlaced with coiled wire; what was left of the mattress. Two-thirds of the way across the bed, the drenched pulpiness became greasy residue, where the mattress-filling had burned away. This was where the blaze had started...
With infinite caution, he worked his way around the room. The front legs of the bureau had burned first, tipping the glass top and what had been on it, forward onto the floor. Woman’s things. Hairpins. A long nail file. The fused back of what had been a silver hairbrush. A compact.
The beam of his flashlight glinted on a thin, round neck of glass. The remnants of a liquor bottle. Beside it, flat pieces. An ash-tray that had cracked in two, folded over on itself as if made of cardboard. Between the two segments was the sopping stub of a cigarette — unburnt — the paper-stained tobacco yellow. He fished it out of its place of protection with a pair of tweezers as if he were extracting the fangs of a cobra.
Below in the street, gongs clanged as pumpers and combinations rolled back to their stations. Pedley remained for long minutes in room 441, wriggling across the insecure floor, putting shoe-eyelets into envelopes, scooping up ashes with a spatula, scowling...
By the time he had descended to the lobby, only the big quad and the hook-and-ladders remained in the street; their long fingers pointed accusingly up at glassless windows. Hosemen were uncoupling. Police were forcing the fire lines back toward the avenue. The bloodshot eyes of ambulances glared at shiney black rubber and crisp white jackets moving among the rows of tarpaulin-covers stretched along the curbs...
Inside the lobby, firemen, policemen and a few individuals in civilian clothes milled about wearily. One of the latter, a blocky man with a raw hamburg complexion, signaled to the Marshal across the wreckage of the room clerk’s desk:
“Those babies’re raising hell, Ben. They want out of here, bad. That manager’s ready to blow his fuse. Says he’s going straight to the Commish...”
“Tell him to go to hell. This fire was set. He’s partly responsible. Before we get through with him, he’ll wish he was lying out there on the sidewalk with the others.” Pedley’s voice was a gritty file on rough metal. “I’ll take ’em in the manager’s office. One at a time. That floor patrol, first.”
The Deputy Marshal pushed a heavyset, white-haired man into the manager’s office. The man’s puffy face was shiny with sweat; his eyes dull with shock. The absence of his left eyebrow and part of his hair on the left side gave him a lopsided appearance. The port sleeve of his light blue uniform had been slashed off at the elbow; his wrist and hand were encased in a bandage.
“Doc says this gent has to hustle to Polyclinic for treatment,” the deputy explained. “He hung out one them seventh floor windows twenty minutes before they got the big ladder up to him. That’s a second-degree burn on his duke. He got a bellyful of fumes, too.”
“Don’t fret about him, Ed.” Pedley wasn’t impressed. “Plenty of others aren’t getting to the hospital, either.”
“Yeah. Name’s Lester Harris. Here four years. Okay record.” The deputy went out, closed the door behind him.
“You phoned the alarm, Harris?”
The patrolman nodded glumly. “I’m up on the ninth, see? I smell this smoke. So I beat it for the hand extinguisher down the end of the hall. When I get down there I see smoke’s comin’ from the stair door. Comin’ up from eight. So I run down there an’—”
“What time was this?” Pedley cut in.
“Only a couple minutes before I phone in. Don’t know exactly. I just punch my clock on nine when I get that whiff of smoke. When I get down to eight I still can’t tell where it’s coming from. I figure it ain’t safe to delay any longer. So I push in 802 — that’s a vacant they’re repapering — and grab the phone.”
“Been making your regular tour up to that time?”
“Yes sir.”
“Where’d you start?”
“From the mezz.”
“When?”
“Midnight. Maybe a little after. Clock’ll show.”
“The alarm hit the Telegraph Bureau at 1:07. How long’s it take you to cover a floor?”
“Suppose to be around five minutes. They allow an hour for me to cover ten floors.”
“Why’d it take you sixty-seven minutes to inspect eight, then?”
“Crysake!” Harris coughed. “I don’t generally gallop up them stairs. An’ I took out for a personal. On six, that was.”
“Didn’t notice anything out of the way on any of the lower floors when you came through?”
The floor patrol’s glance flickered for a split second.
“No sir.”
“Know the party in 441?”
Harris repeated the number with a rising inflection.
Pedley consulted a card. “Register says it was occupied by a Mrs. Doris Munson, Danbury, Connecticut.”
“She’s a permanent.” Harris fumbled at his bandage, showed his teeth in a grimace. “Works here. On the switchboard. Day side.”
“Know anything about her?”
“A blonde. A nifty. Thirty or so.” He rubbed his bald eyebrow. “Why? What’s she got to do with it?”
“Fire started in her room.”
The floor patrol’s eyes grew round. “Holy cats!”
“Smoking in bed, looked like.” Pedley’s face told nothing. “Was she much of a boozer?”
“Not that I hear of. But—” Harris didn’t finish whatever it was he had been going to say.
“But what?”
“Nothing.”
The Marshal took two quick steps, wound his fingers in the cloth of Harris’s uniform coat at the second button, jerked the shorter man up on tiptoe. “This blaze put twenty people in the morgue! Twice that many in the hospital!” He put his face close to the other’s, growling: “If you know one damn thing about how it started, spit it out! Fast! Or you’ll have a long time to wish you had!!”
“I don’t know,” Harris looked as if he was about to sneeze, “if I do know anything...”
“Let me decide.” Pedley released him.
“This Mrs. Munson. She’s kind of... uh... friendly... with Check Wayner...”
“Who’s Wayner?”
“Bell captain. Night side.”
“Keep pouring.”
“He goes up to her room once in a while. He ain’t suppose to; it’s strictly against house rules. I don’t know if anybody else knows it. But I seen him coming out of 441 a couple times when he didn’t know I was around. He was in there tonight.”
“You see him go in?”
“No, sir. I hear him. When I’m comin’ along the corridor on four. They’re havin’ some kind of argument.”
Pedley eyed him stonily. “So you listened at the door.”
“I’m suppose to see nobody roams around in rooms where they don’t belong,” the patrolman protested. “Mrs. Munson was a single.”