Stewart Sterling
Corpse on the Grill
Chapter One
Medals for Corpses
The Fire Marshal groped his way through the labyrinth of round tables on which were stacked a forest of upturned chairs. His electric torch penetrated only a few feet into the swirling fog of thick, cream-colored smoke. His feet slipped from under him; with an effort he managed to catch his balance.
The beam of his flashlight, turned down, disclosed a sheet of ice rutted with the marks of many skates. The marshal had known they put on a skating floor show here, but hadn’t been sure it was real ice or the imitation stuff that didn’t require freezing. He mumbled a curse through his smoke mask; this discovery didn’t make him feel any easier!
From the floor above him came the hoarse thunder of lancing streams from high-pressure nozzles; from the wintry street outside came a fury of noise — throbbing pumpers, motors shrieking sirens and the excited clamor of people being hustled out of their beds in the tenements to the west. But here, in the tremendous dining-room of this Broadway cafe, was neither flame nor the crackling of fire — only a soundless menace lurking in those oily wreaths of smoke.
His foot bumped a pulsing serpent of canvas. Marshal Pedley stooped, followed the hose with his hand until it snaked suddenly down a flight of stairs into darkness. A blast of icy air swept up the staircase and the smoke suddenly cleared. In its place a fine mist of cottony white floated lazily upward. Ben Pedley shifted his gas-mask, listened. The hiss of rushing water from the nozzle somewhere below was deep and steady, not the fierce, rushing roar of a bar-rigid stream played on wall or ceiling. He turned, ran back to the street.
A rubber-coated man in a black helmet was kneeling in a pool of water and broken glass, wrenching at a hose coupling.
The Marshal called sharply: “Hey, Eighty-six! Where’s Wilmot?”
The man lifted smoke-reddened eyes. “Down cellar, Marshal... refrigerating plant... boys having... little trouble.” He grunted with each turn of his wrench.
“I’ll say they’re having trouble. Got any extra waders on your wagon?”
“Nope.” The fireman moved away through the coiling clouds of smoke. “Only had two pair. Boys thought they might get a taste of that damned ammonia, so they took ’em.”
Pedley scowled at the apparatus down the block. The police emergency truck would be parked there, but the men on that squad would be busy getting the women and kids out of the tenements.
There might be an extra pair of hip-length rubber boots on one of the other hose company trucks — but there might not be — and now, when seconds might mean life or death for those men down in that ominously quiet basement, Pedley didn’t dare risk it. Still, he had seen the effects of ammonia fumes too often to think he could descend into that white inferno with nothing but wool and cotton on the lower part of his own body.
Across the street was a garage; Pedley sprinted for it. A shirt-sleeved man outside the office gaped up at the mushroom of sooty black blossoming from the top of the four-story restaurant building. Pedley yelled at the top of his lungs.
“Grease! Quick! Heavy grease! Snap it up!”
The man pointed to a pyramid of red and green cans. “Help y’self.”
“Open ’em up! Fast!” Pedley slid out of his coat, then slipped off his pants and shirt. He dug his fingers into the can the goggling garageman held out. Rapidly he smeared the buttery substance over his entire body. Grease might do the trick, if it was thick enough; if the heat of his body or the fire itself didn’t melt it too quickly. He got back into his clothes and dived back across the street, yelling to the engineer on the big sixteen cylinder pumper:
“Hey, Ninety-one! Round up a couple from the Emergency Squad; hustle ’em inside here, first floor!”
“Okay, Marshal.”
“And get an ambulance here by the door!” Pedley plunged into the cafe. Instantly the blanket of smoke cut off the sounds of the street, giving him an uncanny sensation of being all alone in the burning building. He cursed beneath his mask; maybe he was alone at that!
The cottony vapor was a little higher up the stairs now; the marshal jabbed his big electric torch at it; the light was reflected as from a whitewashed wall. There wouldn’t be much seeing through that! But he could still follow that hose downstairs. Wilmot and his men would be near the nozzle.
Half-blinded by the luminous mist, Pedley tripped over a pile of debris — brick, timbers, broken planking. He knew then how the firemen had been trapped. Those high pressure lines, throwing better than a ton of water a minute, had poured enough dead weight up into the upper floors to weaken the structure; a retaining wall had given away and four good men and one of the best Deputy Battalion Chiefs in the department were probably pinned here under a four foot area of corrosive fumes!
He struggled desperately with the tumbled wreckage; found the first fireman face down with his hands around his groin. Pedley used his axe like a man gone berserk, tugged the unconscious victim loose, staggered back to the staircase.
A huge mountain of a man in one of the emergency squad all-purpose helmets came down toward him ponderously, poking the beam of a powerful battery lamp ahead of him. Pedley got close to him, lifted his mask an inch; shouted: “Wall down on the right. Four more men there.” The big cop nodded his helmeted head his waders vanished in the steaming vapor. The Marshal lugged his burden as far as the door, turned the fireman over to a white-coated interne, slogged back to the fume-filled cellar.
Three back-straining, heart-breaking trips he made, while the giant from the emergency squad was making two. In the end they had all five firemen up on the pavement. There were more doctors there now; one of them gave Pedley first-aid for ammonia burns.
“Take a good slug of vinegar water every five minutes for a while, Marshal.” The surgeon doused him with a neutralizing liquid. “Thing like this is damn dangerous. You ought to get over to the hospital for a going-over.”
“Yeah. Sure, Doc. I’ll take care of it.” The Marshal looked over at Deputy Battalion Chief Wilmot, who was trying to hoist himself up on his elbows, gasping and waving feebly at Pedley. He said, “Got a job here to look after first.” He reached Wilmot.
“Ben,” coughed the battalion chief, weakly, “There’s a body... down there.”
“Another one of your boys?”
“No... no. A dead body. It was dead... when we... found it.”
“Hell, you can’t be sure,” Pedley growled. “That’s up to the doctors. I’ll—” he started for the smoke-clouded door.
“Wait, Ben. This one’s dead, all right.”
“Where is it?”
“In that big ice box. Reason I know it’s dead, Ben... the damned thing didn’t have any head!” Wilmot coughed up a thin trickle of smoke. “Or any legs or arms!”
The recall sounded; reserve apparatus clanged brassily away to their stations; the hose companies began taking up. A faint smudge, drifting up out of the gutted building through the cold night air was reddened by light spilled over street and sidewalks from hook and ladder headlights. Pedley slumped on the curb; an interne finished swabbing out the Marshal’s eyes with acid solution. The moisture streaming down the big man’s weathered cheeks was not tears, but might have been. He kept his head averted from the three figures lying motionless under rubber blankets beside the smouldering structure.
Wilmot and one other member of Company 86 had been rushed to the hospital; with breaks, they’d live. But those three were ready for the undertaker and a post-humus citation for bravery in line of duty. Three good men gone to their graves, Pedley thought bitterly, because some nameless maniac had used arson to hide a murder. For, murder it must be if Deputy Chief Wilmot was in his right mind.