Bones Don't Lie Page 11

  “I didn’t say it was Miss North,” Ray objected.

  U. G. Flint eyed him shrewdly. “A young man’s heart frequently overrules his head when a pretty girl is involved.”

  “What do you mean, sir?” Ray was conscious that color was rising in his pale cheeks, a dead give-away in spite of his resolution not to betray the girl’s confidence.

  “Use your head,” the General said severely. “Why do you suppose the girl was at the laboratory that night?”

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  “The reason is fairly obvious. But never mind about that now. Go on with your story.”

  Ray told how he had not put much stock in the warning, but after his encounter with Bixler had decided to keep an eye on Tracy. He related his discovery of the checker-work laboratory and the brass box in the furnace flue.

  The General sat in silence for several moments. “Let me get this straight,” he said finally. “I’m not a steel man, as I told you, Locke. I’m not sure I quite understand this business of the underground room.”

  “It isn’t exactly underground,” Ray explained. “It’s really on the ground floor of the Open Hearth plant. Modern plants are built on what is called the two-level type. The furnaces themselves are on the second floor. Behind them and underneath, are these so-called checker-works. The idea is to lead the hot gases of combustion through the brickwork and heat the masonry to a very high temperature. Then the incoming gas and air are routed through the hot checkers and thus preheated. It prevents a great deal of heat from being wasted.”

  U. G. Flint nodded. “I understand now. It’s simply the regenerative principle used in many other kinds of industrial furnaces.”

  “That’s right, sir.”

  “What,” the General asked, “do you make of the laboratory equipment in that place?”

  Ray said, “It looks as if the old chambers have been fitted up for some sort of research—probably a study of the gases of combustion. That would explain the connection with the active checker-work adjoining.”

  The General nodded. “Exactly. And I’m inclined to think we meet up again with Keene’s ‘key to the locke’…spelled with an e. In other words—Nitrogen. Those plant layouts of Rjukan and Notodden open up broad vistas.”

  “What could they have to do with it?”

  “Maybe everything. Rjukan and Notodden were both plants which operated twenty years or more on the Birkeland-Eyde method for fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. That’s an electric arc method long since outmoded. Ten or fifteen years ago both plants were converted to the more economical Haber process.”

  Ray said, “I still don’t see the connection.”

  “You ought to know more about them than I do,” the General said accusingly. “You’ve had a first class technical education. My schooling wasn’t handed to me on a silver platter. I had to get out and root for mine—the hard way. I know very little about steel, but I did quite a bit of work for my people during the war in connection with the nitrogen industry.”

  Ray’s curiosity got the better of him. “If you’re not a steel man, sir, what…”

  A slow grin spread over the General’s broad features. “Technically I’m supposed to be a banker. Actually, I’m the fellow who always has the dirty work dropped into his lap.”

  Ray didn’t get it, but be let it go at that. He didn’t want the General to think he was trying to pry into things which were none of his concern.

  Flint went on, speaking slowly and patiently. “You must remember that until comparatively recent years, the chief source of manufactured nitrogen was ammonium sulphate from the by-product coke ovens, meaning principally from the steel industry. Of course, I’m speaking of artificially produced nitrogen and not of the vast natural deposits of sodium nitrate shipped to this country from Chile.”

  Ray said, “I knew about that at one time, but I’ll have to admit I’m a bit hazy on the whole subject of nitrogen now.”

  “Since the first World War,” the General went on, “the world supply of nitrogen comes almost entirely from fixation of atmospheric nitrogen. The first process developed was this Birkeland-Eyde method. Then came the cyanamide process and lastly the Haber process. I’m sure you can now see the significance of the drawings you found in this checker-work affair.”

  “No, sir,” Ray admitted. “I still don’t get it at all.”

  “Then, young man, you must have little conception of the vital importance of the nitrogen industry.” The General spoke severely. “You probably don’t realize it, but the current history of the world has been shaped to a considerable extent by the problem of nitrogen supply. Modern war could not be waged without an abundant supply of nitrogen.”

  Ray said, “You mean because nitrogen is the foundation of the explosives industry?”

  “Right. Nearly all modern high explosives are nitrogen compounds. Few persons know how close the Germans came to winning World War I just on that account.”

  Obviously he wanted to go ahead and talk about it. Ray said, politely, “How was that, sir?”

  “At that time the Allies were dependent upon Chilean nitrate for their nitric acid requirements, which meant they were eight thousand miles from their source of supply. When German squadrons began to menace Chilean coastal waters, the Allies suddenly realized the danger of being dependent upon a remote source for such a vital material. The development of an adequate manufactured supply dates from that time. Our people began to rush work on the atmospheric fixation plant at Muscle Shoals. The Chilean supply was not endangered again during that war, however.”

  “You believe the Germans lost the war because their own supply of nitrogen was insufficient?”

  “No. Germany had a plentiful supply, thanks to Professor Fritz Haber who discovered a method of making by-product ammonia from coal. They didn’t dare go to war until they did have. It would have been suicidal. There might have been no nitric acid for munitions and no fertilizer for German fields. In my opinion the war was delayed for that reason, until German nitrate plants had achieved sufficient production to assume the risk. Yes, if it hadn’t been for Professor Haber, the history of the last thirty years might be vastly different.”

  Ray waited, but the General had apparently finished his lecture. Ray moved restlessly on the yellow leather lounge. “An interesting bit of history,” he ventured finally. “But where does it tie in with the Ironton Works of American-Consolidated Steel today?”

  U. G. Flint got to his feet and began to pace the sitting room with measured strides. “If I knew that,” he admitted, “I think I’d know everything necessary to wind up this investigation. Can’t you see the fascinating range of possibilities, Locke?”

  Ray nodded. “I get your point now. Something in connection with nitrogen is going on around Ironton.”

  “Something big,” the General amended. “A lot bigger than surface indications. We’ve got to find out what.”

  “But how can we do that?”

  “First by continuing our patient spade work, next, by stirring our lazy brain cells.” Flint stopped in front of Ray, feet apart as if bracing himself. “I’m going to have a personal look at that place under the Open Hearth. As I remarked before, I’m greatly intrigued with the possible new avenues of investigation suggested by those drawings of nitrogen plants.”

  “There’s another thing I think you should know about, sir.” Ray told of his visit to the public library and his discovery that Ashley had not been there the night before. “What do you think about that, Mr. Flint?”

  “No thinking is necessary,” the General declared. “Obviously the man lied.”

  “That means…”

  “It means Ashley lied—nothing else. It proves Ashley was not downtown when he said he was, but that time was four or five hours prior to Walter Keene’s death. Ashley could have been home in bed, as he said he was, at two o’clock in
the morning.”

  Ray asked, “What do you wish me to do now, Mr. Flint?”

  “Keep on as you have. You’ve been a real help.”

  Ray grimaced. “Okay. Unless I happen to get knocked off by my pal Bixler.”

  “You’ll have to look after yourself. Keep your eyes open.”

  “That,” Ray promised, “is something I very definitely intend to do. Bixler won’t get another crack at me.”

  On the way down to the street in the red plush elevator, Ray consulted his dice again. He was sorry he did, for again they turned up the persistent one and two spots.

  Chapter Ten

  Ray was pulling tensile tests for Gaylord with the big Norton machine when Leonard Tracy walked into the testing lab next morning. The General Superintendent wore a new, light tan suit of tropical worsted. In his lapel was a pink rosebud. Standing so the ugly burn on his throat and right jaw was not visible to Ray, Tracy looked very much the Beau Brummel.

  “How’s the new job going?” he asked cordially. “How’re you making out, Ray?”

  Ray grinned. “Only one employee has a better job!”

  Tracy frowned faintly. “One employee?”

  Still grinning, Ray pointed to Oscar, the laboratory cat, who lay stretched full length on the table beside the test pieces. “The mouse business is booming,” he said.

  The cat did, in fact, look fat and sleek. Tracy’s face cleared. He ran his hand gently over the little animal’s soot-grimed white fur. “I’m really delighted that we could move you over here,” he told Ray warmly. “It’s so much more suitable for your training and background. It actually hurt me to put my old friend’s son into an unskilled laborer’s job.”

  “Don’t feel that way, Mr. Tracy,” Ray protested. “I was glad to get any work at all in Ironton.”

  Which of them was being hypocritical? Ray wondered. Was Tracy’s friendliness a mask for deadly intent, as Jackie North’s warning and the encounter with Bixler in the rail mill seemed to indicate? Or had Ray made an ungrateful sneak of himself by skulking at the heels of a man who had befriended him, spying upon his actions and expressing his suspicions to Ulysses G. Flint?

  “I had to start you where I did,” Tracy went on, as if trying to justify himself. “I’m just a young fellow trying to get along. I might bust myself higher than a kite if I made a bad impression on the big boys in New York.”

  That line of sales talk sounded corny, coming as it did from a sixty-thousand-a-year executive.

  “But when the General says okay”—Tracy waved his hand airily—“then okay it is!”

  Ray seized the opportunity Tracy had given him. “Please tell me just who the General is. I thought at first he was an American-Consolidated official, but he says he isn’t a steel man.”

  A smile crinkled the comers of Leonard Tracy’s mouth, the cleft of his chin deepened. “Ulysses G. Flint,” he told Ray, “is a personage. He’s a natural phenomenon and a law unto himself.”

  Ray continued to regard Tracy questioningly.

  “The General,” Tracy explained, “is confidential investigator for P. J. Gorman and Company. Some call him head of the Wall Street Gestapo!”

  “Is he a retired army man?”

  Tracy’s smile broadened. “The title is purely honorary. Everyone calls him General because of the Ulysses G.”

  “But what,” Ray asked, “is his connection with American-Consolidated?”

  “You know your economic history!” Tracy said. “American-Consolidated is one of the great combines originally formed by Gorman and Company. They still hold enormous blocks of our common stock and are probably the greatest single power on our Board, as they are on the Boards of so many of the country’s largest corporations.”

  “Mr. Flint must be a very important man, then,” Ray said thoughtfully.

  “Important! Let me tell you, Ray, there are mighty few men in America who would care to test their strength against the General…and the General’s connections.”

  “No wonder, then,” Ray said, thinking aloud, “the local police were willing to give him a free hand in the investigation of Walter Keene’s death.”

  Leonard Tracy’s smile vanished. “It seems strange to me,” he said, “that the General would tie himself down with a routine police case like the murder of a plant chemist.”

  Ray thought of what the General had told him about “his people’s” concern over falsified tests at Ironton.

  “Perhaps Mr. Flint didn’t come here just on Keene’s account,” he said.

  “I know he didn’t. He arrived the afternoon before we knew about Keene. I had a note from New York instructing me to provide the General with a private office and to hold myself in readiness to do anything he requested. There was no further explanation.” A worried frown spread across Tracy’s distinguished features. He dropped his voice to a confidential level. “I don’t know why Ulysses Flint came to Ironton, but I can guess. This is strictly off the record, Ray!”

  “Of course.”

  “I have an idea the General’s visit may have something to do with Quentin Harris. I don’t care much for Harris and New York knows it.”

  “Is that so?” Ray endeavored to convey just the right shade of respectful interest.”

  “Harris didn’t click with me from the very first,” Tracy confided. “He’s inclined to be insubordinate. Take the way he acted when I told him to arrange for you on Quirk’s payroll. I can sense his hidden unfriendliness. It’s nothing definite, you understand, but I frequently get that impression from his general attitude.”

  “If you feel that way about your own assistant, why don’t you get rid of him?” Ray asked boldly.

  Tracy’s gray-green eyes were shrewd and suddenly wary. “It isn’t quite that easy. You see, Harris was sent here, put in a very important position by New York. They told me they had a lot of confidence in his ability.

  “As a matter of fact, Quentin Harris is a plugger and he gets the job done. It wouldn’t be good organization politics to complain about him to the boys in New York. They’re very quick to pick up impressions. I wouldn’t want them to get any wrong ideas about my own cooperation. Sometime I’m going to have a chance to get my ideas about him across in a subtle way. A thing like that has to be handled delicately.”

  Ray said, “I can see your point.”

  “Organization politics is important,” Tracy said. “Some men never seem to realize just how important, and then they wonder why they’ve missed the boat. Organization politics has a large part to play in the career of almost every man…above a certain level.” The General Superintendent straightened his shoulders. “Well, I’ve got to get along, Ray. Want to have a talk with Clara Dunne this morning about the Keene affair. I’ve just begun to get a vague idea that maybe Harris had a hand in the mess.” Sudden sparks flashed deep in Tracy’s eyes. “Maybe,” he added slyly, “this whole mess may prove Harris’ finish.”

  He turned toward the stairs. The red scar with its puckered white edges was now visible. In spite of himself, Ray felt a sudden revulsion.

  After Tracy had gone, Ray turned back to his work. For more than an hour he broke test specimens in the Norton machine. He was finishing the last batch when Tracy came back downstairs.

  This time the General Superintendent did not come through the physical lab but went out the side door near Ashley’s office. Ray noticed, as the man strode briefly across his line of vision, that Tracy’s mouth was set in a grim line and there was an angry light in his eyes.

  * * * *

  During lunch hour, Ray went to the plate mill, searching out a quiet corner for his half hour nap.

  Again he chose the end where the finished plates were piled. At the other end of the long mill building, the recuperative furnaces were winking as glowing slabs moved from them to the roughing rolls. The middle of the structure was a bedlam of
roaring machinery, all busily engaged in squeezing thick slabs into thin plate steel.

  Fiery sheets of the heavy metal whisked back and forth in seemingly interminable passes through the massive rolls. Whistle signals shrilled. Shears, like gigantic guillotine blades, slashed through hot plates as a knife would slice a loaf of bread.

  An overhead crane was shuttling about as usual, at the end of the building where Ray stood, engaged in its endless task of piling and re-piling the cold finished plates.

  He stood for a moment watching it. The wire rope cables drooped to the dirt floor of the mill as workmen secured chains around the edges of the plates to be moved, then drew taut again as each tremendous burden was raised and carried across the width of the mill.

  Ray thought of the times when he had inspected plates for the railroad, how he had looked at the top surface, for “snakes” and “pits” and other defects. Then the plate had been raised by the crane, banging suspended on claw-like books from the overhead crane, for him to inspect the under surface.

  He’d had an understanding about that with his boss in the railroad’s Department of Tests.

  “I’ll go over the tops of all plates thoroughly,” he’d said, “but I won’t go under them. If that isn’t satisfactory, I’m not the man you want on this job.”

  It wasn’t strictly according to the rules, but it had been satisfactory. Only one plate needed to slip and fall. Old mill hands can tell what happens when a plate does fall on a man.

  Ray selected a small pile of plates near the side of the building. He was just getting ready to curl up when he saw the crane come over again.

  “You fellows going to move this stack?” he called to the straw boss in charge of the work gang.

  The man grinned. “You’re okay, pal. We ain’t gonna touch that there iron a while.”

  Ray settled himself on the smooth, cold surface. He went to sleep quickly, a deep, dreamless slumber this time, undisturbed by the crash and clatter around him.

  His reduced rest schedule eliminated all danger of insomnia. But habit kept an alarm clock wound and set in Ray’s subconscious, to wake him at exactly the right moment.