Bones Don't Lie Page 10

  Bixler’s phony apprehension gave place to a scowl. “Don’t be givin’ out loose talk,” be advised. “You’re drunk maybe, fella. We don’t like guys to be drinkin’ on company time!”

  Red rage was stiffening Ray’s shaky nerves. “You can’t get away with it, Bixler,” he said. “I think you’re the man who tried to drop a chunk of steel on me at the Open Hearth day before yesterday. What’s the big idea?”

  Bixler’s massive jaw thrust out belligerently. “The idea is this, bud: you ain’t wanted around this here steel works! If you got any sense at all you’ll git out. Git out an’ stay out!”

  Ray stood as if rooted while he watched Bixler disappear into the yard beyond the rail mill. His mind was whirling confusion. Jackie North must be right, after all. But it simply didn’t make sense.

  As he walked back slowly to the testing lab, Ray was thinking of Leonard Tracy and of his father, Belden Locke. The two men had been business friends for many years. Just before the wreck which brought death to his father, Ray believed there had even been some kind of business venture in which his father and Tracy were jointly engaged, but he knew nothing of the details.

  About his father’s finances, Ray knew little except that there had always seemed to be plenty of money.

  However, when he had been released from prison, Ray found little remaining of his father’s estate. Belden Locke’s bank accounts had been closed out only a few months before the wreck of the Comet. The cash had gone, apparently, over the counter in personal drafts to Ray’s father. In addition, Ray had found statements from various brokerage firms, revealing that Belden Locke’s securities had been turned into cash, as well. But the cash was gone.

  Ray hadn’t the faintest idea what his father had done with the money. It was just one more inexplicable item in a jumble which overwhelmed him with its seeming hopelessness.

  He punched out of the plant at quitting time, grabbed a bite to eat, and came back along the dingy Ironton street past the steel company’s Administration Building. It was not yet dark, but the lamps were on in Tracy’s office and Ray could see the dapper executive through the window, seated at his circular desk, busy with papers.

  Ray walked along the street slowly, turned and came back past Tracy’s window. He kept that up for more than an hour. Finally, as he loitered outside the executive office, peering in at Tracy, a stentorian bellow came from the plant entrance gate Number One a short distance away.

  “Hey, you!”

  Ray turned. One of the uniformed plant police was walking toward him.

  “I been watching you,” the man said. “You been hanging around too long. Now go on, beat it! Don’t let me see you around here again tonight.”

  Ray didn’t argue. He swung on his heel, crossed the street. He passed long rows of dingy, unpainted frame buildings, every third one a barroom. For two blocks he felt the suspicious eyes of the plant guard on his back.

  Half a dozen blocks away was another entrance to the Ironton Works. Ray crossed the street again, went to the gate house, took a card at random from those on the board beside the timekeeper’s window. He held it near the time clock, pressed down on the lever. The bell rang.

  Ray put the unstamped card back onto the rack. The gateman took a cursory glance at Ray’s identification badge as he went on into the plant.

  The building nearest the executive offices was a small two-story structure, headquarters for the plant’s narrow-gauge railroad system. Offices were upstairs; the bottom portion of the building was divided into locker rooms with washing facilities for the workmen.

  Ray stood just inside the locker room door where he could see the Administration Building. His chances of accomplishing anything this evening were very slim. He was quite aware of that. Tracy might have left the office already, while Ray was making the circuitous trip to avoid the cop at Number One Gate. Most likely, when Tracy did leave, he would simply get his car from the parking space behind the offices and drive away. While a man like Tracy would not count his working hours, still he did not work all the time.

  Daylight faded rapidly now. Lights blossomed in the windows of the dreary buildings beyond the high fence surrounding the steel works. Ray waited patiently.

  Nearly an hour later, when he was just about to give up in disgust, a tall, slender figure emerged from the side door of the Administration Building and headed for Gate Number One. An overhead light gave Ray a fleeting glimpse of Tracy’s handsome, regular features.

  The General Superintendent cut across the open from the entrance gate, turned his back to the blast furnaces and strode rapidly in the direction of the Bessemer and the soaking pits. Keeping a safe distance behind, Ray followed.

  A string of tipping ladles on buggies drawn by a diminutive plant locomotive cast white radiance like the noonday sun as they spilled their contents into the hot metal mixer three hundred yards from the converter mill. Ray ducked out of Tracy’s line of vision behind the hulking steel shell of the first two-hundred-ton mixer.

  But Tracy did not look back. He went on past the converter building, past the long gray structure housing the soaking pits. Ray could see then that he was headed straight for the Open Hearth.

  But the General Superintendent did not turn into Quirk’s shack-like office at the end of the Open Hearth. Instead, he rounded the corner of the thousand-foot building, going along the blank side below the charging floor of the furnaces.

  There were few entrances into the Open Hearth plant from that side. No workmen were in the open space between the building and the inlet which was Ironton’s boundary. Ray knew if he attempted to dog Tracy’s footsteps into that long open stretch he would be as conspicuous as a foundry molder in overalls at a convention of steel mill executives.

  He ducked quickly into the entrance near Quirk’s cubbyhole, ran up an iron stairway to a wide floor built of steel plates. This was the charging floor of the Open Hearth, the side of the furnaces from which they were fed their enormous rations of pig iron, steel scrap, ore and other ingredients.

  As Ray came up, a “Low-type” charging machine was rolling like a juggernaut two hundred feet to his right, its massive bulk spanning rails twenty feet apart. The building wall beyond the furnace doors was broken at intervals with embrasure-like windows called ports. Ray darted quickly to the nearest and peered out. Below him and a hundred feet ahead, he could see Leonard Tracy’s shadowy form plowing steadily forward as light from the ports above him spilled down.

  Ray moved swiftly past piles of dolomite, scrap and fluorspar. The charging machine had stopped. It thrust out a massive arm, seized an oblong, cast-iron box, or buggy, on narrow gauge tracks beside Number Four furnace. The open door of the furnace winked like a white-hot eye as a man with blue glasses shouted orders. The box rotated, dumping its contents into the flaming interior.

  A quarter way along the building, Ray caught up with Tracy and paralleled the man’s course directly above him. No one on the charging floor paid the least attention to Ray. Everyone was too busy.

  Checking on Tracy through the ports, Ray went clear on to the end of the Open Hearth building. He was beginning to wonder if the General Superintendent intended to visit some other part of the plant. Then Tracy finally stopped, just short of the end furnace.

  Ray watched from above, ready to duck back out of sight if Tracy should happen to glance up. He saw the General Superintendent fumbling with something at the side of the building. Then suddenly Tracy stepped forward and disappeared. There was no entrance visible at this point. Ray was puzzled as to where the man had gone.

  Quickly he crossed the charging floor to the alley between Number Eleven and Number Twelve furnaces. He came out on the platform behind Number Eleven, twenty feet above cinder pit level. Perhaps, he thought, Tracy had gone through some opening which led directly between the furnaces to the pouring floor or cinder pit of the plant.

  But there was
no sign of the General Superintendent. Number Twelve furnace, to Ray’s left as he looked out over the pouring floor, was cold. From the looks of the rust and cinder incrustations on its buck-stays and tie rods, Ray judged it had not been in active operation for some time. Number Eleven, however, was working into the period of its lime boil. Ray could hear flaming gases hiss through its ports above its molten bath of metal.

  Back in the direction from which Ray had followed Tracy, one of the furnaces was in process of being tapped. A thick stream of glowing metal was pouring through a spout into a fifteen-foot teeming ladle, filling that whole portion of the plant with blinding brilliance.

  Ray ducked back to the window on the charging floor. Tracy had still not reappeared. Ray hesitated momentarily. Then he went down the iron stairs at the very end of the building, cut around the corner outside and approached the spot where Tracy had vanished. He moved gingerly, ready to duck instantly if Tracy should reappear.

  He found an iron door set in the masonry. The padlock which had secured it was open, hanging in the staple. Ray thought he could hear faint sounds of someone moving around just inside the door.

  Hastily he retreated again to the vantage point of the port above. Twenty minutes later Leonard Tracy reappeared. Ray heard the snick of the padlock as the General Superintendent snapped it shut. He waited until Tracy had been gone five minutes, then he picked up a sledge from the side of Number Eleven furnace and went back down.

  He broke the padlock with one good blow of the sledge. The iron door led into the checker-work chambers beneath the charging floor in front of the inactive Number Twelve furnace. A tunnel-like arch of masonry loomed blackly in front of Ray.

  He fumbled in his pockets, found a paper book of matches. It was the second time today his father’s matches had come in handy. Only one match remained. Ray struck it and then, forgetting that the match book had his initial printed on the cover, he cast it aside.

  The spurting flame showed him the last thing he had expected to find—an electric switch. The regenerative chambers had been wired for lighting.

  He flipped the switch. He was in the gas chamber, thirty-one feet long, eight wide and some eighteen feet from the firebrick floor to the extremity of the roof arch. When an open hearth furnace is in operation, the gas chamber, as well as the air chamber which extends beside it separated by a firebrick wall, is crossed and recrossed by white walls and layers of firebrick tile which form a checker-work grid for the purpose of storing heat from the products of combustion and imparting it to cold gas and air entering the furnace. This chamber where Ray found himself had been dismantled, ripped free of its checker-work.

  What had once been a roaring inferno of flame and glowing masonry, was now nothing more than a long brick room. When Ray investigated, he found openings cut through the masonry to connect with the adjoining air chamber and the maze of flues and ports which had been the furnace regenerators.

  There were other things in the former checker-work chambers which interested Ray, too: the bench, like those in the Test Department’s chemical laboratory, which stood at the far end of the room, nearest the inactive furnace; the firebrick-lined circular opening in the wall extending in the direction of Number Eleven furnace next door; the cast iron wheel, like that of a large valve, embedded in the masonry wall just above and to the side of the flue-like opening.

  Experimentally, Ray gave the wheel a half turn. The first result was a hissing noise, then suddenly a bright cylinder of fire lanced through the wall opening with a roar like the flame from a blow-torch. The flue connected, evidently, with the actively operating checker-work beneath Number Eleven furnace, adjoining. Ray hastily twisted the valve shut again.

  He glanced over all the apparatus on the laboratory bench. There were queer arrangements of glass and metal tubing, with heavy iron fittings seemingly designed to connect with the flue through which the flame had come. Ray could not determine their purpose. He noted that not only was the room wired for lighting, but heavy cables and a transformer indicated that considerable current was available for the many coils, rheostats and other electrical equipment also arranged along the work bench.

  In the air chamber connecting, Ray found an ordinary office desk. There were papers on the desk which he flipped through rapidly. There was nothing which meant very much to him. Notes on various plans for fixation of atmospheric nitrogen were followed by those on the old Birkeland-Eyde process, the cyanamide process discovered by Frank and Caro, and on the modern Haber process. There were also detailed layouts of the fixation plants at Notodden and at Rjukan in Norway.

  If Ray’s eyes had not been sharp, his senses stimulated by discovery of the checker-work laboratory, he would certainly have missed his last and most interesting find of all. He was actually turning to leave when a point of light from the brickwork at the top of the air chamber caught his attention.

  The luminous spot was a reflection of the electric bulb from a polished metal surface. Ray reached it by putting the desk chair on top of the desk and then climbing up.

  Stuck up into one of the fanlike flues leading to the inactive furnace above, a brass box had been pushed almost entirely out of sight.

  It was a heavy box, with a complicated and elaborate design of Chinese dragons worked into the yellow metal. The box had been battered, twisted out of shape as if by repeated blows with a sledge. The intricate puzzle lock which had once secured the contents was shattered beyond repair.

  The box lid also had been split into three segments. Ray pulled them aside. The inside of the box was bare, completely devoid of secrets.

  Suddenly Ray remembered the brass fragment he had picked from the dirt floor of the forge shop. He fished it from his pocket.

  The delicate lines he had previously noticed without understanding formed part of a dragon’s tail, coiling around the box.

  The bit of metal fitted precisely into the broken corner.

  Chapter Nine

  Three-quarters of an hour later, acutely conscious of his stained work clothes, Ray came through the swank lobby of the George Washington Hotel and was whisked upward in a red plush elevator to the seventeenth floor.

  The General met him at the door of Suite 17-D. He seemed even more immaculate than before in the dinner clothes he was now wearing. A contrast in black and white, his starched white shirtfront pointed up the blackness of his hair and mustache.

  He waved Ray to a seat on a yellow leather lounge in the large, pleasant sitting room.

  “Cigar?” he offered, passing a full box.

  Ray shook his head. “Thanks, but I don’t use them.”

  “Useless habit,” the General agreed. He selected one for himself, then stretched comfortably in a yellow brocaded chair with his feet propped on the matching ottoman. He seemed in a most expansive mood.

  “You asked me,” Ray began tentatively, “to report anything new around Ironton.”

  “I meant exactly what I said.”

  “Well, I’ve had several experiences since yesterday,” Ray admitted. “It’ll quite likely cost me my job if I tell you about them.”

  “It’s more likely to cost you your neck if you don’t,” the General reminded Ray conversationally.

  “Very true, truer in fact than you realize. It almost cost me my neck this morning.”

  The General looked up sharply, quickened interest in his strong, deep voice. “So? Tell me about it, Locke.” Ray told of his encounter with Bixler on the rail mill catwalk and of his narrow escape from a particularly gruesome death.

  U. G. Flint studied Ray thoughtfully. “This is an entirely unexpected angle, Locke. What dealings have you had with this man Bixler prior to your present employment at Ironton?”

  “None at all, sir. I never heard of Bixler until he brought me with him to the lab yesterday morning.”

  “Hmmm. The man must have had some reason for his action—unless he�
��s a psychopathic case.”

  Ray said, “I have an idea about the reason, but that’s what puts me up a tree. I’m likely either to lose my job or make you think I’m an idiot. In addition, there’s the probability that I’m acting in a disloyal manner toward someone who’s been my friend.”

  A curious gleam shone deep in the General’s eyes. “Come on, Locke,” he said impatiently. “Stop beating around the bush! Do I have to swear to an affidavit that I intend to protect your confidence? Isn’t the fact that I arranged with the Open Hearth people to confirm your excuse for being at the laboratory the night of Keene’s death sufficient proof of my sincerity?”

  So it was the General who had been responsible for sidetracking Lambert and the police! Ray felt suddenly ashamed of his hesitation at confiding in the man. Yet he couldn’t avoid the feeling that he might be acting unfairly toward Leonard Tracy.

  “I was warned yesterday,” he said slowly, “that Mr. Tracy had instructed Bixler to see to it that I met with an accident around the plant.”

  “Tracy?” The General’s tone did not show the surprise Ray had anticipated. “And who gave you this warning?”

  “I hope you won’t insist upon my answering that, sir. I’d only get—get someone else into trouble. It’s simply that this person informed me of a telephone conversation between Mr. Tracy and Bixler in which Tracy suggested that accidents are not unusual around steel plants, and that I might have an accident. I’ve already had two narrow escapes.”

  The General’s face was blank and expressionless, but there was a flicker of amusement in the deep black eyes. “I see! Well, I won’t insist that you call your informant by name, Locke. Conversations overheard in Tracy’s office lead to only one conclusion. If he wishes true privacy, Tracy should have the door between his office and Harris’ walled up. Miss North doesn’t seem to miss very much going on.”