Bones Don't Lie Page 2

  The upstairs of the building was devoted exclusively to a large, completely equipped, chemical laboratory.

  Ray walked in through an outer room edged with bins where broken test specimens awaited return to the scrap pile and ultimately the furnaces. In the middle of the floor stood a heavy, wooden table, scarred like a butchers chopping block.

  At the table a man with shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows and a pipe clenched in his teeth was busy with a ball-peen hammer and a box of steel dies putting numbers on small iron blocks. At first glance the man had a startling resemblance to an exhumed corpse.

  Skeleton thinness was not responsible for the impression. The man was average-sized and not at all emaciated. It was the bony structure of his head which first caught the eye, that and the earthy brownness of his coloring.

  The head was large at the top with very prominent cheekbones over which the skin drew tightly. It tapered to a weak receding chin. The taut skin and sunken cheeks made the configuration of the entire skull strikingly evident.

  The earthy color started with the skin, which was a muddy hue vastly different from the healthy bronze which comes from clean outdoor living. The man’s hair was brown, too, and commencing to thin. His small mustache was such a light shade of brown as to be almost invisible. Even the frayed and shabby business suit he wore had faded from its original shade of brown to a claylike hue.

  He glanced up casually as Ray entered, looked back at his work, then suddenly dropped the hammer as delayed recognition reached his brain.

  “Am I seeing ghosts, or is it really Ray Locke?”

  He took the pipe from his mouth and advanced with hand extended. His eyes behind rimless glasses were friendly.

  “In the flesh!” Ray said. “Just thought I’d come in and say hello, Ben, to you and all the laboratory folks. Didn’t want to shock you too much if you happened to bump into me around the plant.”

  Benjamin Gaylord was sizing up Ray’s coarse pants and denim shirt. “Don’t tell me you’re working at Ironton? Say, that’s splendid! It is a surprise because…well, I thought…”

  He stopped and an expression of embarrassment spread over his death’s head features.

  “Yeah. I know.” Ray let it go at that. “Are all the old gang still around?”

  “Some of them. Ashley is still Engineer of Tests. And Clara Dunne is Chief Chemist. Walter Keene is still in the chemical lab. You remember Walter, don’t you?

  Ray nodded.

  “Most of the others you knew have left. A lot of them were in the service.” Gaylord hesitated, then added, “I’m Chief Inspector, now. Maybe you knew that?”

  Ray wondered if Gaylord expected congratulations on his promotion. He didn’t begrudge the man advancement. Someone had to fill Glenn Cannon’s old job.

  But Ray couldn’t bring himself to utter the customary platitudes. Not when he knew that death and heartbreak and two shattered careers, his own and Cannon’s, had been responsible for Gaylord’s step up the ladder.

  “So I heard!” he said quietly. “I suppose it’s all right for me to go upstairs?”

  Gaylord said, “Sure. They’ll be glad to see you.” He jerked his head toward the hammer and the stamps. “I’ve got to get these specimens ready. I’ll be seeing you later.”

  Christopher Ashley was not in his own office. Ray found him on the second floor, in the tiny cubicle belonging to the Chief Chemist, near the head of the stairs. The Engineer of Tests was looking through a stack of reports on the Chief Chemist’s desk. His small, neat, pointed beard and absent-minded, brown eyes gave him the appearance of a college professor.

  “We’ve got to take care of those carbon-vanadium forgings for the New Haven, today,” Ashley began, as he heard Ray’s feet on the stairs and swiveled in his chair. “Let’s make sure…”

  He broke off when he saw Ray. That he recognized him was evident. His mild, scholarly face assumed a grim expression. “Thought I was talking to Gaylord. What are you doing around here, Locke?”

  Ray ignored the coolness. He smiled. “I’m working over at the Open Hearth. Dropped in to see if I’d been entirely forgotten.”

  “How could any of us forget you?” Ashley asked pointedly. He swiveled to the papers again, his back to Ray.

  Ray couldn’t blame Ashley for the lack of cordiality. In Ashley’s book, Ray was a man convicted of petty chicanery that had cost human lives—many lives. As responsible head of the Test Department, Ashley had come in for plenty of criticism himself.

  For a moment Ray stood looking at the big man’s broad back and stooped shoulders. He wished he could he sure in his own mind about Ashley. On the surface it seemed impossible that such a studious man, one apparently devoted whole-heartedly to technical metallurgical problems, could be mixed up in the kind of skullduggery which had made twisted wreckage of The Prairie Comet. On the other hand, it would he strange if such things could go on in the department without knowledge of the boss.

  A woman was standing with her back to Ray as he walked into the chemical laboratory. She was wearing a white twill laboratory coat which concealed her stocky figure and clothing, but he recognized Clara Dunne from the odd, white streak in her blond hair at the nape of the neck. They used to kid Clara about that streak, Ray remembered. The white hairs, she always stoutly insisted, were a birthmark.

  “When you’ve finished the titration,” Clara was calling to someone behind a laboratory bench that cut off Ray’s range of vision, “add one cc of 0.1 per cent K3Fe (CN)6 solution. Be very careful when you put in the ferrous sulphate. As soon as the green color appears, let me know and I’ll show you what to do next.”

  Ray stepped through the door. “Hello, Clara,” he said.

  She turned. She wasn’t exactly a girl. Ray had wondered about Clara Dunne’s real age. She was one of those women who retain their good looks until beyond middle age, though Clara certainly had a long way to go yet before she reached her halfway milepost.

  Ten years ago she must have been a real beauty. Her features were still regular and well-formed. But there was a trifle too much fleshiness now. It showed in her cheeks and in the curve of her throat. It would have been quite noticeable in her still strong, muscular figure if she had not been wearing the loose laboratory coat. As someone had once irreverently remarked, Clara Dunne was built like a wrestler.

  “Hello, Mr. Locke,” she said.

  Just like that. No surprise, no questions such as the others had asked. She might have seen him in the laboratory only last week, or yesterday.

  That was typical of Clara, Ray reflected. Her calm, cool efficiency was what had made her head of the Ironton chemical laboratory a long time ago, with men twice her age working under her direction.

  “You’re looking the same as ever, Clara,” he began. “I see…”

  A small, runty man came around the end of the nearest laboratory bench. He fastened his sharp, beady eyes on Ray.

  “Well, well, well!” he remarked unpleasantly. “If it isn’t the prodigal son! Who turned you loose on an unsuspecting community? I thought you were safely out of the way for a long time yet.”

  Ray had never cared much for Walter Keene. In fact he had never come much in contact with the laboratory assistant. Keene was simply one of the people in the background. Perhaps, Ray reminded himself, it might be one of those unimportant background people who had played a major part in the tragedy of the defective axle. That’s what he had come back to Ironton to find out.

  He gave no sign of the resentment Keene’s biting remarks had caused. He forced a smile.

  “I’m back,” he said evenly, “but not exactly like the prodigal son. No one has bothered to kill the fatted calf for me.”

  “Why should they?” Keene asked. Then, “Is Glenn Cannon out of jail, too?”

  Ray said, “I haven’t seen Glenn.” He was fighting an overwhelming desire to smash Walt
er Keene in the mouth.

  “No, I guess you wouldn’t have seen him at that. Not where you’ve been.”

  Ray decided to ignore the man. His glance traveled the big room with its glass shelves loaded with reagent bottles, its complicated glassware and tubing, and its pale, glowing Bunsen flames.

  “Lots of new faces,” he remarked to Clara. “Mostly girls, I see.”

  There had been no women employees in the lab except Clara a year ago.

  “We lost a lot of people during the war,” she said. “Lucky to have kept a few 4-Fs like Walter.”

  The reminder irritated Keene. He took it out on Ray.

  “I understand the Army didn’t take convicts, either,” he said bitterly. “What classification did the draft board give you, Locke?”

  Rays fist clenched; he took an involuntary step forward.

  “Too much is enough,” he told Keene icily. “If you’re trying to start something, squirt, you’ve done it.

  Clara Dunne stepped between the two men. “Get back to your titration, Walter,” she ordered.

  Keene turned on his heel. A mocking grin twisted his thin, wrinkled face. “Once upon a time,” he said loudly as he walked toward his bench at the rear of the laboratory, “there was a big gun around this plant, named Cannon. But Cannon was finally fired. There was a lot of noise and quite a bad smell, too, but no one got hurt except Cannon, who was busted, and a kid inspector who wasn’t dry yet behind the ears.”

  Ray Locke’s face was red with fury. His black eyes glowed menacingly.

  “I’ll split your head open,” he threatened.

  Clara’s hand on his arm restrained his forward move. “You’d better go, now,” she told him. Her voice was calm, as always. “I won’t have any rough stuff around my laboratory.”

  As he went down the stairs, Ray could hear her reproving Walter Keene. “You’ve been asking for trouble lately. If you don’t watch yourself, you’re going to find some.”

  And he heard Keene’s insolent, jarring laugh.

  Ray set off through the plant, walking aimlessly, not going anywhere, but simply trying to relieve the upset of his mind by physical exercise.

  He hadn’t expected excessive cordiality from all his former acquaintances inside the Ironton Works. Chris Ashley’s indifference or Quirk’s slight malicious riding was about as anticipated. But sheer vindictiveness such as Walter Keene had shown was beyond the bounds of reason.

  To the left of the Test Department building was the blank side wall of the forge shop. Ray could feel the earth shake beneath his feet under the impact of the sixteen-thousand-pound steam hammers housed in the structure.

  He turned in the other direction, past the vast, five-acre machine shop, where all kinds of steel products from six-inch test specimens to giant coast defense guns were being shaped and finished.

  He went past the machine shop to the more thickly clustered mill buildings, and beyond, to the open stretch pocked with cinder dumps and piles of blooms. He crossed that, wandering past coal trestles and the towers which carried power wires, toward the docks and ore piles to the left of the blast furnaces.

  Was this an impossible task he had set himself? Ray wondered. So many people might have had a hand in the crookedness for which he had served time in the Big House. He remembered Tracy’s remark that upward of twenty thousand persons were employed in this, one of the largest steel mills in all America. The fact that a whole year had elapsed since the calamity in question was, to Ray, like the further handicap of being obliged to wear boxing gloves during his haystack needle hunt.

  Ray’s chin came up. His determination must be slight indeed if he could be discouraged at the very start by insults from a laboratory assistant he hardly knew. Too much depended upon his success for him to waver. He was fighting for his father’s dreams, for his own good name, and the regard of his fellow men.

  The task could not be quite so formidable as he pictured it. Whoever in the vast plant might have been involved in the scandal, reason dictated it could not have been accomplished without the active knowledge and assistance of someone in the Test Department.

  That narrowed the field to a mere handful of people. Not only an employee of the Test Department, but someone in a position of responsibility must be involved.

  He ticked them off mentally. Ashley? He had already considered the Engineer of Tests. In his opinion Ashley was a thoroughly honest man.

  Clara Dunne? From what sleepless nights had told him during his year in the penitentiary, the type of conniving involved would have made necessary the falsification of physical as well as chemical tests. Clara had nothing to do with the physical end of the department.

  The same applied to Clara’s assistants, like Walter Keene. The chemists would have had even less opportunity than Clara to plan and execute the whole affair. Still, it might have been done.

  By the same reasoning, the plant’s Chief Inspector had no hand in chemical tests. Glenn Cannon had been Chief Inspector at the time of the disaster. Cannon, like himself, had said he was framed.

  Briefly he considered Ben Gaylord. Gaylord’s position in the physical laboratory, at that time, had been similar to Keene’s in the chemical—a principal assistant. But he might have had better opportunity than Keene for engineering a complete falsification of the tests.

  Ray sighed. He had come to the edge of the coal docks and stood looking across the narrow inlet which marked the end of the plant at this side. The choppy water with its swift, treacherous current reminded him of Hell Gate in New York.

  Out on the water, a barge bringing fresh heaps of coal for the maws of the insatiable furnaces, maneuvered toward its berth at the dock. Beyond the barge, at the far side of the channel, the light structural cobwebs of an electric power substation were silhouetted against the sky beside the rusty stacks of obsolete blast furnaces, once operated by the Ironton Works, but now long since abandoned.

  Ray turned. He’d wandered nearly two miles through the long plant. He should get back somewhere near the Open Hearth.

  He avoided the test laboratory on his return trip and took a route past the splice-bar mill. The smell of hot metal as it came from the shears and turned slowly on the big wheel through an oil quenching bath was pungent in his nostrils. Ray remembered with a pang how in better days he had inspected splice-bars by the carload for the railroad.

  He lingered a moment in the looping mill, watching the leather-gloved men in front of the rolls catch fiery serpents of round bar steel with tongs, whirling the glowing loops around their heads and inserting the end into the other level of the rolls.

  With a little shudder he remembered the time he had seen a green workman miss his aim with the end of the bar. How the escaped loop, contracting around the man, had burned him in half with the ease of a hot knife cutting butter.

  Ray was glad Leonard Tracy had not put him to work in the looping mill, one of the most dangerous jobs in a dangerous industry.

  From the end of the plate mill, Ray could see the Pen Hearth building. He consulted his watch. Three-fifteen. He could take his half-hour nap before reporting to work. It wasn’t quite time for sleeping, but he’d already decided that his usual schedule must be modified in part. This was a good chance to experiment.

  The reheating furnaces were at the other end of the long mill structure. Where Ray stood, finished plates were piled in great stacks, hundreds of tons in weight. Ray picked a pile against the side of the corrugated iron wall. A hard bed, but it was not the first time he’d snatched a nap in some equally unlikely place.

  He was settling himself on the topmost plate, when a peculiar splotch attracted his attention. He rubbed the tips of his fingers over the hard steel surface tentatively. It was slightly oily. He got to his feet again to take a better look.

  The oily spot was almost nine feet long, wider at both ends than in the middle, like a distorted
hourglass. In the center of the splotch was a four-inch dusting of whitish powder.

  Ray knew then what had caused the mark. He’d seen similar things in the days when he used to inspect plates for “pits” and “snakes” and other defects.

  Some workman had eaten lunch while sitting on this plate. There had been a chicken leg in the lunch box and the man had left the meatless bone on the plate. Other plates had been piled on top. Under such terrific pressure, grease from the bone had been squeezed out to form a grease spot in the exact shape of a monstrous chicken bone.

  Ray went to sleep almost instantly. But, contrary to usual habit, his sleep was neither complete nor restful. Perhaps this was because his previous nap was only four hours past instead of the usual six. Or maybe this excitement of seeing old familiar sights and faces was responsible, making him live again unpleasant memories.

  It was a dream, yet the actual record of what he had lived in the past. The clank and grind of the plate rolls, five hundred feet from him in the mill, became the roar of The Prairie Comet, westward bound with Ray Locke asleep in Bedroom B. Whistle blasts from the boss rollers platform, signaling that the rolling of a certain size plate had been completed, became the Comet’s locomotive, shrilling for a crossing.

  His nightmare terror, building to a known and heart-chilling climax, was synchronized exactly with the clang of plates deposited from a traveling crane upon a pile fifty feet distant.

  That crash, to Ray Locke, was satanic din from the stricken Comet. He heard again the rending of steel cars, the shriek of escaping steam, the swift-rising screams of the mangled and dying. It was as if a giant’s fist had hammered down, to sweep the train from its rails into a mass of twisted wreckage.

  There was a hoarse cry in Ray’s throat as he suddenly bolted upright from the hard plates. He was still half asleep, half awake. Vivid in his mind, as if he were seeing it again, was his father’s dead face when Belden Locke’s body was cut with an acetylene torch from the tangle of steel which had been Bedroom A.

  There was sweat on Ray’s forehead. He had wished more than once that he and not his father had been the occupant of the bedroom nearer the end of the telescoped car. For after three weeks in the hospital, Ray had emerged to find responsibility for the wreck laid squarely on his own doorstep.