Pedley prodded the fat man up the littered stairs. The report had been that no one except Whitey had been in the building; still, the firemen hadn’t been able to get into those upper floors until the blaze was under control. If the Fallucci girl had been up there when the fire broke out...
They followed flattened coils of hose up the steel staircase, beside piles of brick rubble and the warped skeleton of the elevator-shaft grille. Pedley’s flashlight picked out swirls of lazy smoke coiling around the blackened bones of the building. When they reached the ruins of the fourth floor, Rossman began to whimper.
A section of the floor had fallen in. Through the opening rose a thin veil of steam from a broken main. Pedley propelled the furrier past the gaping hole, past burned-out cutting tables and the twisted wreckage of sewing machine benches. Covering a row of sadly buckled racks were fuzzy layers of dust-colored ash.
“My beautiful squirrels!” The furrier groaned like a man in pain. “Sixty thousand dollars worth squirrels! Burned like a piece paper in the stove!”
Pedley stood at the opening which had been the office door. On one metal desk stood a typewriter with its keys fused into a tangled mass. The base of a telephone had melted, the receiver drooping from its hook. A once-green file-case leaned crazily against a huge, fireproof storage vault. On the vault’s closed door gilt lettering was still visible:
The Marshal moved toward a steel coat-tree. From one of its pegs hung something that looked like a sooty handbag. At the base of the costumer was a heap of gray, feathery residue.
“Hey, Rossman. Would your bookkeeper leave without her hat or coat?”
Rossman stared. “I couldn’t believe this.”
“Then she didn’t go—” Pedley broke off, listening...
From the interior of the vault came a faint, grating sound.
The furrier squeaked in horror. Pedley lunged for the knob of the vault door.
The knob was scorching hot. But he turned it, tugged at it until the door swung wide. The blast of heated air struck him like a jet of live steam.
Pedley dropped to his knees, crawled in. He smelled his hair singeing, as he got a grip on the high heels which stuck but from under the pile of fur coats.
Chapter Two
Trouble In Figures
The inside of the vault was an oven. The steel floor seared the Marshal’s hands and knees; the air pricked his lungs like red-hot needles. That any human could have lived through broiling heat like this was beyond belief — but the girl beneath those furs was alive. The convulsive twitching of those high heels, on the steel floor, had made that grating sound.
Pedley tried to drag her out, bodily. But, at his first tug, it felt as if the girl were glued to the floor of the vault. He’d have to pull that pile of coats off her; lift her up.
He hauled desperately at mink and beaver, seal and fox. She’d wrapped the coats around her; it had given her the one chance in a million to survive that frightful temperature. Furs were good insulators, the Marshal realized; he’d never known them to be used to keep heat out, before.
He was near collapse himself, when he finally got his arms beneath her, lifted her, crawled out. She was unconscious. That was a mercy; the agony of her burns would be unbearable. Rossman had such a wild look in his eyes that Pedley drew his gun.
Then the furrier wrung his hands. “Mary! Oh, mine God! I can’t stand looking” Suddenly he fainted, pitched sideways against the file and slid to the floor.
Pedley stumbled erect and weaved unsteadily to a window. He put away the gun, yanked the silver whistle from his vest pocket and lustily gave the three blasts.
Down on the sidewalk, by the light of a pencil flash, Shaner was scrawling in a note book. He gawked up in amazement.
“Amby! Rush it!” Pedley shouted, hoarsely. “Get a stretcher up here! Fast!”
The deputy cupped a hand, yelled: “Comin’ right up.” He ran toward the emergency truck.
Pedley ducked back into the office. There wasn’t anything he could do for Mary Fallucci. There wouldn’t even be much the doctors could do, except to dull her pain. If the Marshal could only rouse her out of her coma for an instant, perhaps he could find out why she’d burrowed there in the fur vault instead of using the fire stairs to escape, or why she hadn’t used the phone to summon help, when she first smelled smoke. But there wasn’t any way of bringing her to, short of a hypodermic.
Maybe he could do something with Rossman. There were things the fur man had to explain. Why had the storage vault been unlocked, anyway? What had the bookkeeper been doing which made it necessary for her to keep the vault open?
The Marshal sopped his handkerchief in a pool of water beneath the window sill. He laid the wet cloth over Rossman’s face and unbuttoned his collar. The furrier clawed at his throat, gasped for air, and then Shaner lumbered in with a blue-coat at the other end of a stretcher.
The deputy took one look at the girl, shielded his eyes with a hand, as if from a bright light. “God! Was she up here, all through that!”
Pedley jerked a thumb toward the vault. “Ran in there for some reason.” He stooped to lift her onto the stretcher. “Skin’s cooked right off her.”
The policeman muttered: “She hasn’t a prayer.”
“Crime to bring her to,” the Marshal agreed. “But the surge will have to hyp her up, if he can. Long enough for you to ask a couple questions, Shaner.”
The deputy gulped. “What questions?”
Pedley held up a finger: “Does she know how the fire started?”
“Yuh...”
A second finger: “Was there anyone here in the office with her tonight?”
“Oke.”
Three fingers: “Why’d she bury herself here in the vault?... Wait! She’s snapping out of it!”
But she wasn’t. The puffed lips merely mumbled in delirium:
“Lorena! Is that you?”
The Marshal grabbed the still groggy Rossman. “Who’s she calling?”
“Her sister. Rena. By us she’s the model.” The manufacturer crouched fearfully at the side of the stretcher. “Rena ain’t here, Mary.”
The swollen lips moved again, tortuously: “Don’t hurt Lorena... that’s all... I ask...” the figure writhed, was still.
Pedley studied the slack, discolored features. “Get her to the hospital, Shaner. Stick close when they give her the shot. She’ll only last a minute. You’ll have to get what you can. Anything may help.”
The stretcher-bearers vanished into the smoky gloom.
He put the flashlight full in Rossman’s eyes. “Now let’s have it, straight.”
The furrier shrank away from the beam. “You shouldn’t speak with me in this tone. I’m ruined already. But it don’t even make no difference, I’m so sick about Miss Fallucci.”
Pedley went to the door of the vault. The heat was bearable, now. “Why’d she run in here, when she could’ve used the fire stairs?” He reached in, dragged out one of the coats the girl had wrapped around her. It was a velvety gray squirrel; the fur came off the skins like hair from a shedding cat.
“How should I know?” Rossman croaked. “So help me, I didn’t even know the vault was open.”
“Who had the combination besides you?”
“Only Mary. You ain’t saying there was funny business!”
“The fire was set, Rossman. The watchman was murdered. Your bookkeeper was damned near roasted alive. I don’t know what you call funny business, but—”