Bones Don't Lie Page 4

  Just at that moment the door was flung open without warning. A man in the uniform of the company police strode unceremoniously into the room, a huge, burly man whose protruding jaw and cauliflower ear made him look like an ex-prize fighter.

  Ray suddenly recalled the policeman he had seen on the platform behind Number Five furnace the night before. This looked like the same man.

  “So I found you!” the cop exclaimed. His tone implied that this fact was a major surprise.

  “Not very difficult,” Ray observed, “since I put my address on the employment form in two places.” He surveyed the thick-set man without enthusiasm. “I didn’t hear you knock.”

  The cop flexed a huge, hairy hand suggestively. “You’ll hear me knock! With my fist against your noggin if you get smart!”

  Ray tossed the book onto his bed. “What gives me the unexpected pleasure of this delightful visit?”

  His sarcasm was entirely lost on the big bruiser. “The pleasure is all mine, bud,” the man said. “I thought sure you’d have scrammed out of here quick, before we nabbed you. Guess you ain’t quite bright.”

  Ray was puzzled. “If you’ll tell me what this is all about…”

  “You know! Get your hat, fellow. You and me are goin’ over to the test lab.”

  “The test lab,” Ray parroted. “Why…”

  “Cut out the gab,” the big cop ordered. “Do you come along quiet or do I give you a workout first?” Ray’s heart sank. His fingers reached for his dice. They showed a pair of sixes.

  “Boxcars,” he said.

  “Just a box,” the cop remarked. “One plain, pine box! You’ve crapped out of the game right now.”

  It wasn’t reassuring.

  Ray went with the man without further argument. There wasn’t anything else he could do. He made another attempt to find out what was behind it all, but the cop refused to talk. His whole attitude was tough and strangely ominous.

  When he saw the other cops milling around the Test Department building Ray began to realize that something serious was involved. Not only company cops were outside the old brick structure but others—men from the regular city police.

  Upstairs in the chemical laboratory were more cops and men in business suits wearing square-toed shoes and derby hats, men on whose faces the label ‘plainclothes detective’ was easy to read.

  All the Test Department people were there, too. Not only Ashley and Gaylord and Clara Dunne, but, crowding around eagerly, excited small fry, the chemists and men who ran the apparatus in the physical lab.

  Even the plant big shots, Tracy and Harris, were there, standing somewhat apart from the others in the open space between the door of the chemical laboratory and the first row of laboratory benches. With them was a large, muscular-appearing man, partially bald and wearing a scrubby, black mustache.

  Ray had seen this man before. He remembered how an awestricken employee of the Ironton Works had once pointed him out as U. G. Flint, a representative of the steel combine’s governing hierarchy in New York and a man to whom even Tracy must defer.

  “I see you’ve got him, Bixler.” Harris was speaking to the bruiser who had brought Ray from the rooming house. The monk-like Assistant General Superintendent’s pale blue eyes stabbed at Ray accusingly.

  The company cop grinned, exposing plentiful gold caps among his tobacco-stained teeth. “I got him, sir,” he said proudly. “‘Windpipe’ Bixler always gets his man.

  The way he said it gave the impression of a Canadian Mountie closing in on his quarry after endless days on the long trail and a furious hand-to-hand struggle.

  Harris turned to LI. G. Flint. “I feel sure this is the guilty party, General. He’s an ex-convict with a shameful record. It’s a wonder to me we found him at all. He’s had time to get a hundred miles away.”

  Bixler said, “He was up an’ dressed, gettin’ ready to scram when I nabbed him.”

  Swift anger burned through Ray. “It happens I was in my room quietly reading when this man burst in,” he said, addressing his remarks to Quentin Harris. “I haven’t yet been told why.”

  It was Tracy who answered. The dapper executive’s handsome face was troubled. “I’m afraid you’re in a pretty nasty mess this time, Ray,” he said.

  “What have I done?”

  The partially bald man with the scrubby mustache came over and stood directly in front of Ray. His eyes, black and fathomless, were like drills. “Do you deny,” he asked, “that you threatened Walter Keene yesterday? That you said you would break his head?” He hadn’t been told yet, but Ray already knew the answer. The same hopeless trapped feeling he had experienced when the judge sentenced him to the penitentiary now numbed his muscles, took the starch from his spine.

  “I had an argument with Keene yesterday,” he said, trying to keep his voice firm. “Keene went out of his way to be insulting. I resented it, naturally. Is that a crime?”

  “If it stopped at that, no,” U. G. Flint said. His eyes pierced Ray steadily. “In this case, however…”

  He turned abruptly to the tall, hatchet-faced plainclothes detective who seemed to be in charge of the police detail. “Lieutenant Lambert, I think you’d better show this man to the other end of the room.”

  Lambert took Ray by the arm. His fingers, twisted in the cloth of Rays work shirt, bit painfully into the flesh beneath. As they marched together around the row of laboratory benches, Ray heard Harris make some crack about confronting a criminal with the evidence of his crime.

  Walter Keene was sitting at a small flat-topped desk halfway the length of the long laboratory. There was a thin pile of papers on the desk and one of Keene’s hands lay across them. The other hung loosely by his side.

  He was leaning back in the battered swivel chair, his wrinkled face unnaturally relaxed, his jaw dropped open. His beady eyes, too, were open wide, but their malicious glitter was gone. They were opaque now, glazed and dilated.

  Ray had known even before he saw the man that Keene would be dead. What surprised him was the lack of any sign of violence about the body. There was no disfigurement, no wounds, not even any blood. If it were not for those dead eyes, and the sagging jaw, the laboratory assistant might simply be sitting back, resting from his work.

  Ten feet from Keene’s body, in an aisle between the laboratory benches, a police photographer was focusing his camera. Other men were busily engaged, dusting for fingerprints, making sketches, the whole varied routine of preliminary police investigation.

  “What did you hit him with?” Lieutenant Lambert shot at Ray suddenly.

  Ray said, “I didn’t hit him with anything.”

  “How did you kill him, then?”

  “Has he been killed?” Ray asked. “Maybe—”

  “He looks dead, doesn’t he?”

  “Yes, but maybe he had a heart attack. Or…”

  “Maybe he was figuring his income tax,” Lambert said. “Perhaps when he saw the figures the shock was too great for him.”

  Tracy and Harris and LI. G. Flint had come down behind them. The laboratory people crowded silently in back.

  “Do you deny having killed this man?” Flint asked.

  “I didn’t touch him. Last time I saw Walter Keene he was all right. It looks as if…couldn’t he have died from natural causes?”

  “He could have,” Flint said, “but he didn’t.” He turned toward a small, white-haired man among the group near the body. “Dr. Roberts tells us this man’s skull has been fractured.”

  Ray spoke hurriedly, without thinking. “Maybe he fell downstairs. He could have climbed back up here before…”

  The Medical Examiner spoke decisively. “The head doesn’t look injured but the skull has been smashed into several pieces, literally shattered to bits. It doesn’t require an autopsy to know that this man couldn’t have walked a step. Death must have been ins
tantaneous.”

  “And that,” Lieutenant Lambert of the Homicide Squad remarked with emphasis, “makes it murder.” A feeling of utter despair swept over Ray. The mere fact of being involved in a murder investigation might be fatal so far as his future was concerned. A monthly report to the Parole Officer was a condition of his release from prison. It would take little to send him hack.

  He pulled forward against Lambert’s restraining hand, peering intently at the dead man’s head and noting the bruises on Walter Keene’s scalp, beneath the thin sandy hair. There were two small marks, one semicircular, a little smaller than a dime, the other a complete circle, twice as large as the first, red against the whiteness of the skin. Inside the circle was another mark shaped roughly like the letter T.

  Lambert jerked back on Ray’s arm. “What’re you trying to do?”

  “Nothing. Just looking.”

  “Take a good look at what you did, Locke! Maybe you’d like to confess now. It’ll go easier with you.”

  “There’s nothing to confess. Why do you want to make me the goat?”

  Ashley spoke up from the rear. “You came barging into this laboratory yesterday, Locke. I should think you would have been ashamed even to show your face around here. You deliberately provoked an argument with Keene, made threats against his life. I heard it all myself.”

  “And you were hanging around last night,” Quentin Harris added quickly. “I have my own secretary’s statement to that effect.”

  Rays eyes searched the faces behind him for Jackie North. The pert little brunette was nowhere in sight.

  “It would be interesting,” he said, “to know what a girl from the general offices was doing inside the plant at two o’clock in the morning.”

  Tracy was looking hard at Harris. “Yes, Quentin. What was Miss North doing here?”

  The bulky Assistant General Superintendent lowered his eyes. He seemed embarrassed. “I don’t know.”

  Ray pressed his advantage. “And what was Glenn Cannon doing here with her?”

  Tracy’s gray-green eyes suddenly narrowed. “Cannon! He couldn’t have been here.” He turned to Bixler. “I gave explicit instructions that none of your men was to admit Cannon to the works without signed authorization from me!”

  The company cop said, “I passed your order along, Mr. Tracy. I don’t think none of my boys would have let him in. I’ll check on it.”

  “Do that. And report to me.”

  “Cannon was here,” Ray insisted. “At the lab. I saw him.”

  There was a flush of anger on Tracy’s cheeks. “How about it, Harris? Did you allow that man—”

  “I have never even seen Cannon, neither yesterday nor any other time.” There was a ring of truth in Harris’ statement. “Locke is lying.”

  “Cannon?” Flint said questioningly. “Is he the man…”

  Harris said, “He’s the man.”

  “We’ll have to check on that girl of yours, too,” Tracy said.

  Ray fired another shot in his own defense. “When I left here last night, Walter Keene had gone up into the chemical lab. I was downstairs with Miss Dunne. She’ll bear me out on that.”

  “I did see Locke go off past the machine shop,” Clara Dunne’s calm voice said. “I don’t know where he went after that, of course.”

  “I went straight out Gate Number Six,” Ray said. “You can check my card with the timekeeper.”

  “You can bet your neck we’ll do that,” Lambert promised. “You’re still the guilty guy in my hook, pally—a convict on the loose with a grudge to settle.”

  Ray was regaining his confidence. “Ben Gaylord, you were around here, too, when I checked out last night. I saw you through a window of the machine shop.”

  Gaylord was standing near Christopher Ashley. “I worked until two-thirty,” he said. “I went home from the machine shop without even coming back to the lab.”

  Ashley said, “You haven’t yet told us what you were doing around here at two o’clock.”

  It shouldn’t have caught Ray flat-footed, but it did. “I told Miss Dunne last night,” he said. “I came to check on a melt at the Open Hearth.”

  He knew he had made a bad mistake when Harris said, “It’ll be easy enough to verify that with Mr. Quirk.”

  The technical men from the homicide detail had finished their work and were packing up their paraphernalia.

  “You can get on back to Headquarters,” Lambert told them, “all except Jones and Reed. You fellows stick around with me until the meat-wagon gets here. Next thing I’ve got to get are statements from all these people.”

  Tracy glanced at U. G. Flint. “This is going to give us some more unfortunate publicity, General.”

  His attitude suggested that he, Ironton’s top executive, was looking to the General for guidance.

  The General was as tall as Lieutenant Lambert, but heavier. His heaviness was not that of fat, but rather the solidity of big bones and powerful muscles. His hair was jet black, without so much as a single gray or white hair. The shiny bald streak ran from his broad forehead to the back of his neck with the evenness of a swath cut through thick grass by a lawnmower.

  “I’m going to ask that you fellows handle this case in a highly irregular manner,” he said, addressing Lambert. “Don’t bother to take the statements. I’ll do it for you. In fact, I want to carry on the whole investigation myself.”

  Lambert demurred at once. “It’s my job, Mr. Flint. The Commissioner—”

  “The Commissioner will see things my way, I’m sure.” The General’s tone was smooth but positive. “I’ll speak to him myself.”

  “But what will I…”

  “You’ll do nothing. Just stick around. Technically, of course, you’re still handling everything, only I’ll do the work for you. I’ll ask your force to help with details. When the case is solved you’ll get full credit. That’s the way American-Consolidated Steel would like to handle it.”

  Lieutenant Lambert shrugged. “I guess that’s that! What good would it do for eighty bucks a week to argue against two billion smackers?”

  As the technical men trooped toward the stairs Lambert said, “Just one thing, Mr. Flint. Why don’t you let me run in this bird Locke on suspicion? Chances are, he’s guilty. If not,”—he hunched his thin shoulders expressively—“well, no harm’s done.”

  The General’s piercing eyes studied Ray coldly. The man was evidently a plenty tough cookie, Ray thought, but fortunately there seemed no particular prejudice either for or against him in the General’s mind.

  “Maybe he’s guilty,” the General said. “Maybe not. One thing’s certain, however: at two o’clock this morning this laboratory must have been as crowded as Times Square on New Year’s Eve.” He frowned, then continued, “I’m going to have a little session with Locke first. Then I want to see some of these other people over at the office building. Suppose you come over to Mr. Tracy’s office when you’re ready, Lieutenant.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in about half an hour.”

  The General said something to Tracy in an undertone. Tracy nodded, then stepped out in front of the knot of Test Department employees, facing them.

  “Everyone get back to work now,” he said. “We’ve all got plenty to do and a lot of time’s been lost already. The excitement’s over.”

  “One thing more,” he added as they began reluctantly to disperse. “Mr. U. G. Flint”—he nodded toward the General—“will want to talk privately with certain people among you about this unfortunate affair. I shall expect you all to cooperate with him to the utmost. Mr. Flint will have full and complete authority around this plant and nothing he desires to do is to be questioned by anyone.”

  Tracy, Harris and the General turned then to the stairs.

  Over his shoulder the General said, “Bixler, you’d better bring Locke.”

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nbsp; The huge company cop laid a heavy hand on Ray’s shoulder. “You see what I mean, bud?” he suggested with an unpleasant grin. “Them boxcars meant just one wooden box!”

  Chapter Four

  Ashley’s office, which the General had commandeered for his talk with Ray, was furnished only with a scarred, oak, flat-top desk, a single oak armchair, a steel filing cabinet, and an old black leather couch, vintage of the late nineteenth century. There was no carpet on the floor. The only wall decorations were a graph of steel production and the business cycle since 1850, a calendar with the picture of a pretty girl scantily clad, and a framed diploma showing that a Master of Science degree had been conferred on Christopher Ashley at Lehigh in 1913.

  The General gestured to the chair at the side of the desk and Ray sat down. The General swung around and transfixed him with his shrewd, piercing eyes.

  “Well, young man, you’re in a very serious jam.” The big man’s tone was a simple statement of fact. It was not friendly, but neither was it hostile.

  “I realize that, sir.”

  “For your own good,” the General said, “it would be wise to tell me the exact truth.”

  “That’s what I intend to do.”

  “You still deny you killed this man Keene?”

  “I didn’t know Keene was dead until I saw him upstairs just now.”

  “But you had good reason to kill him?”

  Ray said, “No. Certainly not. You don’t kill a man just for making a nasty crack.”

  “You threatened him.”

  “I threatened to beat him up. He did deserve a beating.”

  “You threatened his life. We have witnesses to that.”

  Ray’s fingers picked at a roughness of the wood in the chair arm. “I was angry. I guess I did say something about breaking his head. I was just sounding off. I didn’t mean it at all the way it sounds now.”

  The General placed the palm of his hand flat against the desk top, leaning his weight against it with the elbow bent. There were coarse black hairs on the man’s wrist and on the back of his hand.