“Candy store. Across the street.”
“Stay there till I get down.”
He didn’t bother to go back to the ward. The red sedan made it in four minutes, with the blinkers but without the siren.
Shaner stopped devouring a chocolate bar long enough to say: “Must be in one of the back rooms, Ben. None of the fronts have lighted up since he went in.”
“He could be rooming with somebody,” Pedley said.
“Or he could be calling on somebody. Better let me go in with you.”
“You go back, sit on Broodman’s neck. I want him handy when the grand jury meets, in the morning.” Pedley went across the street, into a hall that smelled of cabbage and pork and carbolic. In the front of a black tin mailbox was a cardboard with a dozen names printed on it; a couple of them had been crossed out. Harry Lester, C-6, hadn’t been crossed out; the Marshal thought it was close enough to Les Harris to be worth casing.
He went up a staircase, where the paint flaked off the walls like skin off sunburned shoulders; he made no particular effort to be silent about it.
On the third floor, lights showed under two of the doors — none under 6. He walked on up to the top floor, opened the door of the common bathroom, closed it. Then he took off his shoes, went down one flight in his stocking feet.
He listened at 6-C long enough to make sure somebody was opening a window inside, quietly, in the dark. Pedley set his shoes down carefully, took out his flashlight. He tried the knob, turned it noiselessly. The door wasn’t locked.
He pushed it open suddenly — swung his flashlight in an arc covering as large a segment of the room as possible.
A washstand. A bed, rumpled up. The toe of a shoe just behind and beyond the open edge of the door. Pedley reached around the jamb for the switch. The movement took his head and shoulders into the doorway for an instant.
Long enough for a gun butt to smash down across the crease of his hat...
The room was still dark, but dull red flashes pulsated before the Marshal’s eyes. It was some seconds before he realized they came from a neon sign high on a building on the next block. The ruddy reflection from a polished shoe-tip was the thing that made him recognize it.
He reached out, touched the shoe. There was a foot in it; the foot didn’t move when he felt it. Pedley pulled himself up by the bedpost, found the light switch, snapped it.
The foot in the shoe belonged to Les Harris, who lay on his back with a small scarlet worm wriggling down from a dark spot in his right temple. There was a purplish lump an inch above his right eye. The body was still warm. An automatic lay on the grass matting of the floor about eight inches away from the dead man’s head.
The Marshal looked at his watch. 4:52. He hadn’t been out more than ten minutes or so.
He felt in the pockets of the floor patrol’s uniform. Nothing but a fistful of silver coins and a couple of keys. No bills of any denomination. But on the chair beside the bed was a strange collection.
Six wristwatches; two men’s, the others the tiny diamond doodads women go for. Four rings; one wedding, two solitaires, a pinky set with what looked like real rubies. A black opal brooch. A gold comb. A platinum cigarette case with the initials K. T. M.
Pedley stripped a pillow-slip off the bed, tilted the chair so the jewelry slid gently into the white sack. He lifted the gun by sticking a pencil in the muzzle, deposited it on the loose end of the pillow-slip, wrapped the surplus fabric around the weapon.
He retrieved his shoes, put them on. When he left 6-C, he took the key from the inside of the door, locked the room.
“Every arsonist has a twisted mind.” The Marshal stared coldly across the manager’s desk at Broodman. “I don’t mean pyros, either; they’re psycho cases, anyhow. But every firebug is so snarled up in his mental processes that he figures a fire has to be set by some tricky method... and it always backfires on him.” He opened a flat metal case, like a child’s paint box. “This one used a cigarette, hoping it would look as if Mrs. Munson had fallen asleep smoking and set the bed on fire. But he forgot the lipstick.”
Broodman leaned forward to peer at the brown-stained stub. “I don’t see—”
“There isn’t any. Would have been if Mrs. Munson had been smoking it — no matter how water-soaked it had gotten. She used lipstick, of course; she hadn’t wiped it off.”
The hotel man sighed. “She didn’t start it, then.”
“No. She was hurt enough to do it, maybe. But her mind didn’t run to endangering other people’s lives — only her own. She took an overdose of luminol. Not enough to kill her. But enough to keep her from waking up until the blaze had a better start than the firebug ever intended it should have.”
“Who—?”
“He opened the door with a master key, after Mrs. Munson had gone to sleep — say twenty minutes to one. After he made sure she wasn’t awake — he probably assumed she was drunk — he tiptoed in, took the lighted cigarette out of his mouth, laid it on the edge of the ash-tray that was on her bed-table, put the ash-tray and cigarette on the bed so the burning stub would fall off and ignite the mattress. He thought Mrs. Munson would wake up after the mattress started to smolder and filled the room with smoke. She didn’t; the sleeping pills prevented her from waking up until the flames from the burning blankets began to sear her.”
“What was the idea.... if he didn’t mean to burn down the building?”
“To cause a panic. Get people running around the corridors in their nightgowns and pajamas, half scared to death. With the corridors filled with smoke, the apparatus rolling in with bells clanging and everybody screaming “Fire!!” — it was easy for the bug to go through the guests’ rooms on the pretext of routing them out and starting them for the elevators and the stairs.”
“Why!”
Pedley slid the contents of the pillowcase out on the desktop. “So he could loot their rooms; their clothing. Most people don’t lock up their money or jewels when they go to bed. They leave their money in their purses and wallets — their rings and watches on the bureau. With a hotel employee yelling at them to get out of their rooms in a hurry — with those sirens and the smoke stampeding them — not many would take time to go for their valuables before they rushed out into the hall.”
“Wayner!”
“There’s another screwy thing about firebugs,” the Marshal shook his head. “They always have an alibi. In twenty years I haven’t run across one who hasn’t claimed he was somewhere else when the fire was set — who didn’t try to prove he couldn’t possibly have been around when the fuse was lit. Now your bell-captain didn’t have any alibi at all — any more than you did.”
“That damned Harris!”
“Sure. He kept impressing me that his patrol clock would show by the times he punched it, on each floor, that he couldn’t have been down on the fourth at the time the place was torched.”
“But why—?”
“Your fault, partly. You gave him his notice today. He didn’t know where to get another job, probably. By the room he was living in, I’d say he didn’t have much money saved up. He saw a way to get even with you for firing him and to get his hands on a lot of valuables, at the same time. Only the thing got out of hand; he didn’t know it until it was so late he got cut off, up on the eighth — and nearly lost his own life before the boys brought him down.”
“They should have left him up there,” Broodman said grimly. “Did you get him?”
“Somebody did.” Pedley stirred the heap of jewelry with his finger. “He’s dead. It was supposed to look like suicide. He was shot with his own gun. But he’d been slugged before he was lit up.”
“Ah...!” Broodman waited.
“One of my deputies trailed Wayner over to Harris’s rooming house, called me and I went down there. When I went in the room, somebody was hiding there. I didn’t see him; he crowned me with a gun-butt and got away while I was out cold. My deputy trailed your bell-captain back here to the hotel, collared him and found a big roll of bills on him. Nearly a thousand bucks. Wayner’d slugged Harris, taken the money which couldn’t be traced and left the jewelry because it would be risky to pawn it.”