An enormously stout man with a round face that was white with misery shuffled past the police lines. He wore shabby slippers, striped pajamas and florid bathrobe. He pointed at the blanketed figures.
“They... dead?”
Pedley nodded.
“Dreadful!” The fat man stared miserably up at the smashed windows, the smoke-stained brick. His eyes came to rest on the neon sign which the hose-streams had miraculously left intact. The tubing, under the bloodshot eyes of the fire engines, glowed faintly:
He turned sadly to the marshal. “Wipes me out. Yeah. I’m Bill Biddonay.”
“Own this joint?”
“Most of it. With this,” he gestured, wearily, “I’m washed up. But God’s sake,” he pulled his bathrobe tighter, “I can start again. Those poor guys—” his voice was harsh — “they don’t get another chance.”
Pedley got to his feet, painfully. “D’you live over the cafe?”
“Sure. Third floor. Fixed up a couple rooms there. I don’t guess there’s much of my stuff left. I was asleep when I heard the engines roll up.”
The Marshal eyed him, coldly. “Covered by insurance, weren’t you?”
Biddonay shrugged. “We weren’t. Banks were. Ought to get nearly enough to pay off our notes. Herb Krass or I won’t get a lousy dime. Besides, it’d take us a month to get going again, somewheres else. Then the season’d be shot. Hell with it. I’m okay; plenty of people be glad to back me again if I want to start. It’s these men losing their lives that matters.”
“That’s the way to look at it,” Pedley agreed. “Bad enough to lose men as the result of carelessness. But when the fire was set—”
“Huh!”
“Yeah.” Pedley went toward the building. “C’mere. Want to show you something.”
Biddonay followed, snuffing and puffing, through the dining-room. They crossed the ice covered dance floor past the orchestra dais, on down the stairs to the basement.
Chapter Two
Snowball in Hell
The portable suction fan which the emergency squad had hooked up in the adjoining building by now had cleared the basement of the deadly white fumes. But the acrid bite of ammonia still gnawed at their nostrils.
“For God’s sake, what happened?” the restaurateur wheezed. “Pipes bust?”
“No. Somebody used a hammer on one of the compression valves. Opened it up so it couldn’t be shut. Nice idea. Like to have that slug stripped naked in a roomful of ammonia for about ten minutes.”
“Je-zu. Who’d do a thing like that!”
“That’s what I got to find out.” Pedley stalked to the tremendous cold room, occupying the far end of the basement. The heavy glassed-in door was closed tightly, but one of the glass sides of the big ice-box had been shattered by the force of the hose. The floor of the refrigerator was piled with tubs of butter, cloth-wrapped hams, buckets of lard. A few racks of lamb, some loins of pork and one quarter of beef hung on meat hooks. The Marshal stepped through the aperture in the smashed glass.
“Boys broke in here to find that ammonia leak, Biddonay. They found something else.” Pedley pointed to a piece of meat which was almost concealed by the beef carcass. It was gray-fleshed and smooth-skinned, with raw, red stumps where the legs and arms had been hacked off. The torso was impaled on a steel hook just above the breast-bone. Blood had congealed in a purple-black clot across the open wound that had been a neck.
“Almighty!” breathed the cafe owner. “That... was a... a man! Ah—” he made a strangling noise, looked away.
“Nothing to put on the front page of the papers. No.” Pedley swung the grisly object on its hook. A chunk of flesh had been cut from the back of the corpse, about three inches above the waist; the white cartilage of the ribs had been bared. “What you make of this?”
Biddonay groaned; his face puckered up as if he was suffering from toothache. “Somebody... cut a piece of meat right out of that thing!” He leaned against the wall and covered his face with his hands.
“Looks like a butcher had gone after a piece of sirloin.” Pedley’s mouth tasted as if he’d been chewing old pennies. “Come on, let’s get out of here. Air’s bad.” He led the cafe man out; Biddonay sagged heavily against him, stumbled drunkenly.
“What on God’s earth,” the restaurant owner mumbled thickly, “would anyone do a thing like that! Even a crazy man wouldn’t...”
“Not likely.” The Marshal swept his flashlight around the cellar. “In all the years I’ve been doing the detecting for the Fire Department, I’ve never run across a blaze set by a lunatic. Children, yes. Dimwits, sure. And pyromaniacs might be cracked, according to these psychoanalysts, but in court, they’re just plain criminals. Anyhow, no pyro ever set a fire to hide a corpse.”
Biddonay mopped sweat off his moon-face with the inside of his sleeve. “That... thing... wasn’t in the cold box at nine o’clock tonight. I was down here with my wholesaler; he dropped in for dinner.”
“What time’d you leave the cafe?”
“ ’Bout one. We close one-thirty.”
Pedley grunted. He stalked back upstairs, the fat man moaning along behind.
In the kitchen Pedley paused in front of the wide brick grill. “Cook over charcoal, eh?”
“For steaks an’ chops, yeah. The range is for roasts and bakework.” Biddonay wet his lips and swallowed hard.
The Marshal put his flash on the water-soaked and blackened mess in the fire pit. Charcoal gave a terrific heat, Pedley realized; it would crisp any flesh to a black and brittle ash in a few minutes. Even bone would be consumed to a warped and twisted bit of char. But those things on top of the drenched coals still held the shape and semblance of human bones. The Marshal picked them out, laid them on the stainless steel surface beside the grill.
“Somebody,” he said grimly, “has been having himself a cannibal barbecue.”
Biddonay shivered, bent over the blackened objects on the dresser. “Legs an’ arms, huh?”
“I’d say so.” Pedley fumbled in the wet, gritty mess of the fire pit. “But no skull.”
“Holy mother!!” The restaurant man got sick to his stomach.
“Well, the guy must have had a head. Where is it?” Pedley climbed up on the iron grating, peered behind the bricked-up grill. There was nothing there that could have been a human head. But the boarding of the wall directly behind the fire-box was an ebony cinder. This was where the fire had started, then; someone had left too hot a fire in the grill — probably left the electric bellows turned on to give an extra intense heat in order to reduce the bones to ash. The brick wall at the rear of the grill had become red-hot; the sheathing had ignited and the flames had gone up inside the walls to the higher stories. The Marshal clambered down.
“Who’d have access to this joint after closing, Biddonay?”
“We don’t permit anybody back here in the kitchen except the chefs and the waiters.”
“Well, you had a key to the front door, didn’t you? And this partner you mentioned a minute ago?”
“Herb Krass? Sure. We both got keys. But I was in bed and Herb went home around midnight...”
“Which one of your employees is supposed to lock up after the rest’ve gone?”
Pedley snapped, irritably.
“When me or Herb ain’t here, Pete Donnelly closes up. He’s cashier. ’Course, he’s got a key, too.”