There was a cement floor under his feet and a rock wall at his back; he knew he was in the basement garage of the Krass house, even before he distinguished the low purr of the motor.
So that was the idea: the locked, unventilated garage; the running motor... Easy, painless death! And there wasn’t anything to do about it, except take it. Krass’ wife had begun that attack on him because she must have suspected her husband was guilty. Once they’d started it, Pedley supposed they could think of no alternative course than to put him out of the way. And yet...
He strained at his bonds. It was hopeless. There was no way of telling how long it would take for the CO to take effect. He had heard that the only warning you got was a splitting headache; but he had that already. And he couldn’t guess how long he’d been down here.
A drop splashed down on his face. It felt cool, refreshing. He looked up. Dimly, he could make out a faucet in a T joint on the riser above his head. Water! If he could get that faucet open, there might still be the slimmest chance.
He slid his handcuffed hand up the pipe, stood on tiptoe. He could just touch the lower rim of the faucet wheel. It was rusted! It stuck! It took him an eternity to force it open enough to permit a slow trickle down on him.
Pedley shifted so the water would drip on the tape at his right side. He squirmed and wriggled with every ounce of effort he could command. At first he thought it would be useless, but gradually the adhesive began to give.
Chapter Six
The Man with the Key
The purr of the motor was louder now, or it seemed so to the Marshal. By the time he had managed to wrench his wrist free from the gummy tape, the pounding in his ears was thunderous, either from the motor or the thumping of his heart.
He tore at the bindings around his ankles, ripped the sticky bandage loose. He let the water splash on his upturned face a second, then shimmied up the pipe, using his feet and left hand to grip the metal, until he could turn the faucet on full force.
He got it wide open. Then he gripped the T pipe with the fingers of his right hand, got the ball of his thumb across the jet of the stream. Would it reach?
It would!
The spurt of water hissed out in a thin fan, toward the hood of the sedan. Pedley jockeyed it so the jet hit the side louvres. The sound of the stream hitting the metal of the hood was music to his ears.
But there was no certainty it would reach a vital connection, dampen the wires, get to the distributor. It might... and that was all the chance he had.
He felt himself getting noticeably weaker. It took strength to maintain his grip on that pipe; he couldn’t last much longer. The motor droned away, unconcernedly.
He altered the angle of the jet. There was a sputter, a miss. He clung to the pipe with the grim determination of a drowning man clutching a branch. Finally, when his hold was loosening and he was beginning to slip down the pipe, there was complete silence.
He’d done it! The invisible, death-dealing fumes wouldn’t come pouring out of that exhaust any longer. If there wasn’t already too much poison in the air...
He climbed up with a final effort and shut off the water. Puddles on the floor gurgled as they ran to the drain.
The Marshal left the tape on his mouth, rearranged the bindings around his feet so they wouldn’t seem to have been disarranged, at first glance. He turned over on his side, so that his right arm would be against the wall.
Then he waited. Hours it seemed...
The footsteps came slowly down, gritting on the cement floor of the garage. Pedley could just make out a vague shadow moving in silhouette against the deeper blackness.
Pedley kept his muscles limp, relaxed; simulating as nearly as possible the lifeless corpse which he should have been. The fire detective could hear the murderer’s stertorous breathing, could feel fingers probing his throat for his pulse. Then the Marshal snapped into convulsive action.
His right hand shot out, clutched the shadowy figure fiercely by the neck. At the same instant, using his steel-locked left hand as leverage, Pedley threw his legs around the man’s body in a scissors grip.
Blows rained on the Marshal’s face and neck, fingernails clawed viciously at his eyes. But he held on to the windpipe in his grasp, squeezed the murderer’s midriff punishingly with his leg-hold. It was over in less than sixty seconds. The man went limp. Pedley let the deadweight sag to the floor, crouched down beside it. He fished through the man’s pockets, found the key to the handcuffs, let himself loose. Then he ripped the tape from his mouth, jumped for the faucet, turned it on and drank from the icy cascade that poured down on him.
First, he locked the killer’s wrist to the pipe from which he, himself, had just won release. Then he dragged the unconscious figure under the shower. There was a deep groan; the man opened his eyes and stared up with a mixture of cold malignity and shocked astonishment.
“This is where we came in,” Pedley growled, “with me damn near out on my feet and you wandering around like you’d lost your best friend.”
“What’s the matter with you?” snarled the man on the floor. “I come down here, find you kayoed and wonder whether I ought to call a doctor. And you tear at me like a wildcat. What’s the idea?”
“Idea is, it’s all over, Biddonay. All except the little room where they sit you with your back to a switchboard.”
“Because I tried to save your life?”
“Because you tried to kill me, you potbellied buzzard. And tried to make it look as if your partner fixed my wagon, instead of you. How the hell did you get out of the hospital?”
“What difference does it make whether I stayed in the hospital?” The fat man walked on his knees around the water pipe the way a dog roves on a chain. “I been takin’ it, all night, now. From the fire, from that louse, Yalb. And now you. I’m the big loser in this thing—”
“I thought you were, until I got my gray matter going. You said you were all washed up. Remember?”
“Well...”
“You were. Only before the fire. Not after. You’re practically broke, way I figure it. You mentioned the take was okay at the restaurant. But you didn’t seem to be spending much dough on wine, women or such. And when I saw that row of Moody’s Manuals there in the bookcase in your office, I should have known.”
“I’ve had ’em for years,” Biddonay protested.
“You got the 1941 edition damned early, then. The guys who use Moody’s much are generally stock-market brokers or suckers who think they’re wise boys.”
“Is it a felony to own securities, now?”
“Your trouble was you didn’t own ’em. Maybe you had ’em, but you lost ’em.”
“Okay, crystal gazer. Suppose I am strapped. What of it?” Biddonay nursed his wrist, where the bracelets chafed it.
“Why, you might have tried to get more dough. The logical place for you to try and get it would be to gyp your partner. And if you figured you’d gone as far as you could, along that line, without being found out, you might try to get out of your fix by putting Krass out of the way.”
“I never even saw Herb,” Biddonay jeered, “after he left the place at midnight.”
“You wouldn’t have to. You could get Krass in a jam by killing that wrestler in such a way that everyone would pin the blame on your partner. That would send Krass to the burner and leave you to take over the Ice-taurant. Including any funds of Krass’s which you may have stolen, to date.”