Bones Don't Lie Read online

  One of the axles on the Comet’s locomotive had snapped, falling to the track, throwing the train off the rails and across the right of way squarely into the path of an eastbound express which had completed the disaster by plowing into the derailed Pullmans three minutes later.

  The railroad had been prompt to disclaim negligence. The broken axle was one of a shipment from the Ironton Works of American-Consolidated Steel. It had been duly inspected by a supposedly competent railroad inspector—Ray Locke.

  After the damage had been done, metallurgical tests showed that the axle had been dangerously defective when put into service. For use as locomotive axles, the steel, deficient in vanadium, high in both sulphur and phosphorus content, was virtually rotten. Tension tests fell twenty thousand pounds per square inch below the point required by railroad specifications.

  Negligence on the part of the inspector was clearly indicated. Ordinarily, Ray would have lost his job with the railroad, suffered a black mark against his reputation, and that would have been all. As it happened, two old wooden sleepers filled with troops had been smashed to matchwood in the wreck. Seventy-two soldiers were dead and nearly as many civilians. The wreck had immediate political repercussions. And a short time later, while Ray was still in the hospital, letters had been discovered among Glenn Cannon’s papers by government investigators: letters in which Glenn Cannon, as the steel company’s Chief Inspector, allegedly agreed to pay Ray for the acceptance of steel known to fall far short of requirements.

  After that, the case took on a criminal aspect. Ray was convicted on three counts: of accepting a bribe, of willful neglect of duty, and of involuntary manslaughter. His sentences, to run concurrently, had been three to five years.

  Deep grooves were cut into Rays forehead as he got up and stalked out of the plate mill. He remembered the tests on that particular shipment of axles as clearly as if he had just made them. They should have been clear in his mind; he’d had a year to think about them.

  The chemical analysis had been quite okay at the time. And the tension test had developed a yield point at seventy thousand pounds per square inch and a tensile strength of one hundred and ten thousand.

  The minimum called for in the specifications had been fifty-eight thousand and ninety thousand respectively.

  The discrepancy was baffling to Ray. Many were the nights he had spent lying sleeplessly in his cell conjuring up, and then rejecting, one explanation after another. His whole plan of life, now that he was on parole, centered upon discovering the method of falsifying tests, and in so doing, exposing the criminal who had blasted his career.

  Ray quickened his steps to reach the entrance of the Open Hearth. It was a place of vast gloom and blinding brilliance, direct from the pages of Dante; a place of cinders, of showering golden sparks and of grinding labor, with Satan’s assistants dressed in grimy overalls.

  Flaming gases hissed through tortuous underground chambers. Mechanical monsters clanged their way to add their ingredients to a Devil’s brew of white hot metal. Rivers of liquid steel and glowing slag burst forth periodically in a man-made, man-controlled Inferno.

  This was the Open Hearth, not so spectacular as the Bessemer with its thirty-foot plumes of volcanic flame, but spectacular nonetheless, and a more practical, modern and proven method of making steel. Ray Locke had always liked the Open Hearth.

  A green man would have been started shoveling dolomite—raw dolomite and burnt dolomite—or cleaning up slag splashes, cinders and other debris around the furnaces. He’d have been given some job where he probably would not be killed his first day on the job.

  Knowing Ray’s familiarity with the steel-making technique, Quirk had him place the spout for a furnace about to be tapped, dig the mud and fireclay stopper from the furnace tap-hole, and dip test specimens of molten metal from the glowing bath with a small hand ladle. The duties were actually those of a second helper.

  It was gratifying to Ray how quickly he recalled skills not used for a long time; how, even before the end of that first shift, he was stepping nonchalantly across the first thin trickle of liquid metal in the spout as it started to flow down into the giant ladle below the furnace platform. He could still tell accurately from the star-shaped sparks o the initial test specimen, broken and held against an emery wheel, that the melt was too high in carbon and needed addition of feed ore before the heat should be tapped.

  Not that his opinion was asked or that he volunteered it. Control of the furnaces rested with the first helper and the melter, and with the little, bright-eyed Quirk, who usually managed to be on the platform behind every furnace at tapping time. The wiry, Irish Super seemed always on the job. Ray wondered if, like himself, Quirk had discovered the scientific method of getting along with very little sleep.

  Ray kept his mouth shut and did as he was told. Quirk tried to ride him a bit at first, but when he saw that Ray took what he dished out with no anger or sullenness, he soon let his new helper alone.

  There was nothing wrong with Quirk, Ray decided. In spite of what the man had said to Harris, Rays contact with the actual manufacture of steel at Ironton had been very slight. There was no real reason the Open Hearth Superintendent should have it in for him, other than the feeling, understandable in any supervisory employee at Ironton, that Ray had smirched the plant’s good name.

  It was nearly midnight and Ray was down on the pouring floor, or cinder-pit, of the plant, walking below the line of furnaces on his way to Number Eight. Number Three had been tapped. The melter had ordered him to help make bottom on Number Eight.

  He was under the platform of Number Five, plodding along with his head down, thinking about what he intended to do when he got off shift, when suddenly something whizzed past his head, so close he could feel a breeze from its passing. It landed with a heavy thump in the dirt near his feet.

  He ducked involuntarily, although the danger was already past. Then he looked to see what had missed him. It was a lump of jagged, scabby steel, evidently a splash broken from some ingot during cooling.

  The fragment must have weighed every ounce of twenty pounds. Had it struck Ray on the head, he would have been lucky to escape with a simple fracture. More likely his skull would have been caved in.

  Ray’s eyes turned quickly upward. The overhang of the furnace platform was some twenty feet above the cinder-pit floor. No one was on the platform, but he did get a fleeting glimpse of something disappearing through the alley to the charging floor between Number Five and Six furnaces.

  He wasn’t even sure he had seen a man, just a glimpse of something blue. Then it was gone. It might have been a pair of clean blue overalls, but Ray’s impression was of a brighter blue than overalls.

  Juggling the steel lump in his hand, he stood staring up. Maybe there had been nothing blue on the platform after all. Maybe it had just been imagination. But the heavy, jagged fragment was not imagination.

  How, he wondered, had it fallen? Someone might have kicked it from the platform; someone not thinking of the danger to a man passing below. It is always a bad matter not to think, particularly in a spot as hazardous as the Open Hearth.

  Could the steel have been dislodged from higher up by vibration from the giant traveling crane which had just passed? That seemed a far-fetched theory. Cooling ingots do not cast off fragments which cling to the roof trusses fully seventy feet above.

  Neither explanation seemed credible to Ray. There was a third one: that someone had deliberately dropped or thrown the steel with the express purpose of hitting him, and, after throwing it and observing the near miss, had ducked from sight onto the charging floor.

  A flight of iron-treaded stairs led up to the furnaces. Ray went up them fast.

  The door of Number Five furnace was open; a man in blue glasses stood peering at the seething metal within. Hunkies were shoveling dolomite into a buggy on the narrow gauge tracks. Farther along the charging floor
a burly man in the uniform of the Iron and Steel Police stood watching the hunkies.

  No one else was in sight.

  Chapter Three

  Ray went off shift at midnight. The vast Ironton Works, roaring along full blast, night as well as daytime, was a place of dazzling lights and deep black shadows. But the light on the second floor of the testing laboratory was dim. Only one sleepy chemist should be on duty to give carbon content on test samples submitted before the tapping of an open hearth furnace, or the teeming of a converter blow.

  To spend a night alone in the deserted laboratory would be a tiresome vigil for the average man, Ray knew. Tests were only required at intervals, often hours apart. Five minutes’ work and they were done. In between, Ray figured, the chemist on duty would be dozing in a corner, drawing pay mainly for his broken night’s rest.

  The trick, then, was simply to avoid any loud racket which might alarm the chemist. Keeping in the shadows, Ray approached the old brick building. He eased the door open cautiously, careful to avoid a squeaking hinge.

  Halfway across the outer room he stopped dead in his tracks. A light had switched on downstairs near Ashley’s office.

  Ray melted into the gloom beside the bins with their broken test pieces. His feet struck something soft and yielding. Instantly the hush of the quiet building was broken by an earsplitting uproar like the scream of a banshee, and something small and white streaked for the stairway, emitting hair-raising yowls as it fled.

  It was Oscar, the laboratory cat.

  Ray hesitated. With the night man roaming around downstairs and the squalling cat at large, another hour’s wait might be advisable, to let things quiet down again.

  Halfway back to the door Ray’s plans received their third setback. The electric bulbs in the outer room went on.

  Ray turned. The glib story he had ready on the tip of his tongue for the night chemist died on his lips. The person staring at him from the door of the physical lab was a girl—a girl in a red silk blouse, a girl with a pert oval face framed in glossy chestnut hair. Quentin Harris’ secretary, Jackie North!

  “You!” she exclaimed sharply. Her brown eyes were large with fright and the color had drained from her cheeks.

  There was a sound from the rooms at the other end of the test lab, like file drawers being pushed quickly shut. A man’s face was framed suddenly in the lighted doorway beyond the row of tall, black testing machines.

  The face belonged to a big, powerfully built man, and it wore a perfectly dead-pan expression like a movie gangster. Yet, even in the fleeting glimpse Ray caught as the man turned swiftly, the features twitched convulsively, contorting the man’s face into a hideous, leering grimace.

  Many times in the past, Ray had seen a similar nervous spasm twist that same face. There could be no mistaking it, even though he had believed the man afflicted with the facial tic to be many miles away from Ironton.

  He leaped forward, pushing Jackie North out of his way. “Cannon!” he called. “Glenn Cannon!”

  In the rear a door with a squeaky hinge opened and shut again quickly. When Ray reached the short corridor beside Christopher Ashley’s private office, the man was gone.

  He pulled the door open and looked out. Windows of the vast machine shop, a ghastly shade of blue from scores of mercury arc lights, were at his right. To the left, its earth-shaking hammers stilled for the night, the forge shop lifted its blank side wall. Of Glenn Cannon there was not the slightest trace.

  Jackie North had come back from the outer room and was standing near the scale arm of the big Norton testing machine. Even in the excitement and surprise of seeing Cannon, Ray found himself thinking of the girl’s beauty rather than the upset to his own plans.

  He hadn’t really appreciated her back in the executive offices. But here in the laboratory, at two in the morning, she gave him a queer stimulation. A stimulation half mental, half physical. He would like, he thought, to…

  Abruptly he jerked himself back to sanity. What was the matter with him? he wondered. It must be the old saying about sap rising swiftly in the young tree in early springtime.

  “And I’m the sap!” he said, unconscious that he had spoken aloud.

  Jackie North was looking at him queerly. “I didn’t think you knew it,” she said quite seriously.

  Ray said, “I didn’t know Glenn Cannon was back at Ironton.”

  “He isn’t back. Tracy practically threw Glenn out of his office.”

  A surprising note of bitterness had crept into her tone. “It isn’t everyone who has the effect on Tracy that you have.”

  Ray was astonished. “Effect? Why did Tracy throw Cannon out?”

  “Don’t ask me.” Jackie had recovered her poise in full. “Cannon came in just as you did. He wanted a job. He didn’t get it. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “What’s Glenn Cannon to you?” Ray asked sharply.

  “Nothing.”

  “How did he get inside the plant? And what’re you doing here with him?”

  “I don’t know anything about Cannon,” Jackie retorted. “And though it’s none of your business, Mr. Harris asked me to come here. He happens to be my boss.”

  “An office girl? At this hour of the night?”

  “The pot calling the kettle black,” she said, smiling acidly. “You’re here, too.”

  “I work the night shift,” he informed her curtly, listening to the footsteps coming down the stairs.

  The runty, sharp-featured Walter Keene appeared. Just at his back was Clara Dunne. She was not wearing her laboratory coat.

  Keene’s mouth twisted in an unpleasant smile. “Miss Dunne, we’d better put new locks on all the doors while Mr. Locke is anywhere within ten miles of the lab. He might try to have more rotten steel built into trains.”

  Ray’s jaws clamped tight. “I warned you this afternoon, Keene. Keep on with that kind of talk and I’m going to meet you outside the plant one of these days and take you apart.”

  Clara Dunne said, “What have you people been doing to poor Oscar? He came upstairs as if he’d been shot out of a gun. He’s hiding under one of the reagent shelves and won’t come out.”

  “It was dark when I walked in,” Ray told her, trying to match her own quiet tone. “I stepped on his tail, I’m afraid. I didn’t expect to find you here tonight.”

  “And I certainly didn’t expect to see you,” she countered. “You must be up to your old tricks. I remember how you used to sleep around in odd corners and then be up all hours of the night.”

  “I’m on nights at the Open Hearth now,” he explained, neglecting to add that his shift had ended more than an hour before. “I was just coming in to check on the last melt in Number Three furnace.”

  “There aren’t any hours on this job anymore,” Clara complained. “If there were more than twenty-four hours in a day, I’d work that much longer.” She turned to Keene. “Walter, you get the report on the test he wants.”

  Ray started to follow Keene up the stairs, but she stopped him. “I think maybe you’d better let him bring it down. I don’t want to be picking up pieces from the floor of my laboratory.”

  When Keene returned a few moments later, Ray left. As he passed the lighted windows of the machine shop, he saw Ben Gaylord. The Chief Inspector was in a huddle near a lathe with two other men. One was a thin, consumptive-looking machinist in a greasy work cap. The other was a big, burly giant with a thick neck and unshaven cheeks grimed with soot. The three were carefully examining a test specimen which the machinist had just removed from his lathe.

  Ray Locke grinned mirthlessly to himself. At two o’clock in the morning the place was swarming with people. Almost everyone connected with the Test Department, except Ashley himself, was not more than a stone’s throw away. A fine night he had chosen for snooping around the test laboratory.

  Words, floating out through
the open window, stopped him as he was about to pass along.

  “This looks okay!” the Chief Inspector was saying as he handed the test piece back to the machinist.

  “How about them Gulf Southeastern axles?” the huge man inquired anxiously.

  The word “axles” halted Ray and caused him to listen intently from his vantage point outside.

  “We’ll save the inspector some time on that job, too,” Gaylord declared. “You’d better make the hollow borings on those axles tomorrow, Al.” And as he turned away, he added to the machinist, “We’ll send you some cores from heat 557831 in the morning, Pete.”

  Locke stood rooted to the spot, immobilized by the excitement burning through him. For Gaylord’s words, innocent enough in themselves, provided the first gleam of light on the question that had caused Ray so many sleepless hours. He felt certain now, as certain as one could of a theory, as yet untested, that he had the key piece to the puzzle.

  * * * *

  Like hot saws in the rail mill, the loud snores of other men who had worked the night shift ripped through the flimsy walls of the rooming house. But Ray did not sleep. With an extension cord and a dime-store socket, he rigged the one naked electric bulb from its ceiling cord, making it into a reading light over the sagging Morris chair beside the room’s one and only window.

  The window admitted air conditioned with odors of garbage, gas leaks and stale beer from the taproom next door. Liberally mingled was the all-pervading Ironton atmosphere of smoke fumes from mills and furnaces.

  At nine in the morning Ray was turning the pages of his well-thumbed Carnegie Steel handbook, The Making, Shaping and Treatment of Steel. So little daylight filtered through his back window that he still had the bulb burning. He reached up to switch it off. The chemical reactions inside a blast furnace were beginning to grow wearisome. A rest was in order.