Bones Don't Lie Read online

  “Ben Gaylord would be next in line,” Tracy murmured.

  “But Ashley wasn’t the one murdered. Therefore, ambition as the motive appears to be ruled out.” The General fixed Tracy with a speculative eye. “It leads to the thought that Keene might have been killed as a protective measure.”

  “Protective?”

  “Yes. By some Test Department employee, say, who was involved with him in this trouble we’ve been having on falsified tests.”

  “You think Keene was mixed up in that?” Tracy exhibited the greatest interest.

  “I know it.” Ray wondered at the big man’s emphasis. How could he be so sure of a thing like that?

  But Tracy did not question the General’s statement.

  “Keene was only a pawn in the game,” the General went on. “He was involved only to the extent of doctoring specified chemical analyses when requested to do so. Someone other than Keene in the department provided the brains. Someone who knows steel from A to Izzard.” The General shot a significant glance at Ray. “Someone smart enough to fool experienced outside inspectors.”

  “You mean either Ashley or Gaylord, then.” Tracy spoke confidently. “Ashley is a metallurgical engineer. He has written monographs on the crystalline structures of iron and steel. Ben Gaylord came up through the ranks from a plate mill gauger. Both men know the inspection game backward and forward.”

  “Looks as though we can count Ashley out. Apparently he was not in the plant last night. Has an alibi not only for the time of Keene’s death, but for the entire evening.”

  “Then you’ve narrowed it down to Gaylord!”

  The General laughed. “Not quite that fast. All the others I mentioned are still in the picture. Anyhow, both Gaylord and Miss Dunne were in the plant just on the edge of the time set by the Medical Examiner. The difference of half an hour, and the time of Keene’s death probably isn’t exact to within a full hour, would let them both out, too—that is, provided their time cards check with the stories they’ve told us.”

  A wry smile spread over Tracy’s handsome face. “Time cards wouldn’t mean much when a murder alibi is involved,” he said. “It’s always possible to have someone else punch the clock for you. It’s been done before, in every large plant.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’m particularly interested,” Tracy said, “in the matter of Cannon. What did you find out about that?”

  “We haven’t made any progress on that angle yet,” Flint said. “Bixler has checked and says positively Cannon was not admitted through any of the plant gates last night.”

  “Then he wasn’t there,” Tracy said almost as if he were relieved. “You saw someone else, Ray—someone who resembled Cannon.”

  Ray said, “That’s been suggested. Could be, of course. But I’m satisfied in my own mind I saw Glenn himself.”

  The General trimmed a fresh cigar, accepting with a curt nod the book of matches Ray held out to him, then glanced thoughtfully at the large “L” printed on the cover.

  “A relic of former days,” Ray volunteered. “Found them when I went through Dad’s things. Not much else was left.”

  The General nodded understandingly, returned the matches to Ray, and continued as if there had been no interruption.

  “The real motive for Keene’s murder might be something entirely personal. It might be based upon relationship, or revenge, or…well, a thousand and one things. It could be entirely trivial.”

  He rocked serenely in Tracy’s chair. “I’ve seen men kill each other over a lousy dollar. That’s why I say that motives can be trivial to the point of absurdity. And it’s why we can’t count out Bixler, or any of the others.”

  Tracy smiled broadly. “Even Quentin Harris might have killed him. Or maybe you did it yourself, General.”

  “I’m still a young man!” the General remarked. “I look forty-five or older, but I’m still in my thirties. And my life is more than half over. I had a hard time when I was a youngster!” He stopped rocking and sat up suddenly straight in the chair. “I’m quite capable of killing a man like Keene—quite capable. Or maybe you did it yourself, Tracy. As administrative head of these mills you would have one of the best motives of all. Particularly if you’d happened to know that Keene had been helping fake some of the tests, or if you were mixed up in it personally in any way. After all, you have an important and lucrative position to protect.”

  Tracy smiled, but it seemed a bit forced. “Touché!” he said.

  The General said, “Locke, I don’t think we’ll need you now for a while. Keep your eyes open in your new job at the laboratory. If you run into anything you think I should know about, call me immediately—day or night. I’m staying at the George Washington. And… I’ll be talking with you again, soon.”

  Ray went through Tracy’s anteroom and along the side corridor past the door of Harris’ office. Jackie North was at her desk, typing as usual. Ray stuck his head around the door jamb.

  “Miss North,” he said, “may I speak with you a moment?”

  She glanced at him without interest. “I’m busy,” she said and went on with her work.

  “I could have put you on a spot,” he insisted. “You lied about Glenn Cannon. But I kept my mouth shut. I don’t know why I should protect you.”

  She got up and came over to the door. “Please go away,” she said in a low tone. “You’re going to get us both into trouble.”

  “You’re in trouble already,” Ray said. “You practically accused your boss of being a liar. If he doesn’t fire you something’s rotten.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Go away!”

  He planted himself solidly in the doorway. “It’s my neck that’s at stake in this affair. I don’t know why Flint didn’t force you to explain, but I want to know why you lied about not knowing Cannon.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  Ray said, “When I met you at the lab last night you called Cannon by his first name.”

  “You’re mistaken,” she said. But suddenly she put her small hand on his arm and pushed him outside into the hall, following. “We might be overheard in there.”

  “Okay by me,” he said bluntly. “I have nothing to conceal. But I’m asking you again: if you didn’t know Cannon, how did it happen you used his first name?”

  She gave him a scorching look. “You’re imagining things that didn’t happen.”

  “My imagination isn’t that good,” Ray said quietly. “I asked you how come Cannon was back at Ironton. You said he wasn’t back. And you added then what you told Flint this morning, that Mr. Tracy had practically thrown Glenn out of his office. You called him Glenn—not Cannon. I remember distinctly.”

  “Maybe,” she suggested, “you should see a psychiatrist. You’re suffering from hallucinations.”

  “You said,” Ray went on, ignoring her sarcasm, “that I must have some kind of a pull to get a job at Ironton—a pull with Mr. Tracy that Glenn Cannon didn’t have.”

  “Haven’t you?”

  “Why was it necessary to drag Mr. Tracy into it?” Ray demanded severely. “Mr. Tracy is a fine man. If he threw Cannon out of his office he must have had good and sufficient reason.”

  “Why did he hire you then?”

  “I was never an employee of the steel company,” Ray said. “Mr. Tracy has to think how it would seem to the high officials in New York if he hired back a former employee convicted of dishonesty. That didn’t apply in my case.”

  “From what I heard,” Jackie observed pointedly, “you were in the same mess with Cannon…up to your neck!”

  “I was framed,” Ray told her earnestly. “I had nothing whatever to do with accepting that worthless steel.”

  “So you’ve said! Well, mightn’t Cannon have been framed, too?”

  “It could be,” Ray admitted slowly. “But if I
were you, I’d steer clear of the guy, Miss North. The fact that Mr. Tracy wouldn’t hire him back shows in itself—”

  “The great Tracy can do no wrong, is that it? You’re very quick to stick up for Leonard Tracy, aren’t you?”

  “He’s been a friend to me.”

  “Has he?” she asked scornfully. “That’s what you think! And it makes you just about the biggest sucker I’ve ever seen.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Unexpectedly her attitude changed. She took his hand in hers. Her fingers were warm and friendly. “What you need,” she said, “is someone to look after you! You’re just a kid after all.”

  Ray was startled. He didn’t like to have a pretty girl his own age accuse him of being a kid. But before he could express his outrage, Jackie was speaking again.

  “You did think you were helping me,” she admitted. “The least I can do, then, is to warn you. I’d hate to have you killed when I might prevent it.”

  “Killed!”

  “Yes. You’ll surely be killed if someone doesn’t open your eyes to what it’s all about. You think Tracy is your friend. Actually, he’s your worst enemy.”

  Ray said, “Why, that’s perfectly ridiculous. He gave me a job and…”

  Jackie said, “Hush! Listen to me.” She plucked the red-framed glasses from her slightly retrouseé little nose. Golden specks in her soft brown eyes glinted with excitement. “I heard something else that went on in Tracy’s office, something I haven’t mentioned to anyone…yet.” Her voice dropped. “Yesterday morning, just after Tracy had told Harris to arrange to put you on the payroll, I started into Tracy’s office to ask him about something Harris wanted. I got the door partly open and heard Tracy talking on the telephone. He didn’t see me. I backed out and shut the door softly so he never knew I’d overheard him.”

  She was whispering now, so low that Ray had to bend close to hear. He could smell the faint scent of her hair and the perfume she was wearing. It made him feel he’d like to go on protecting Jackie North indefinitely.

  “Tracy was talking to Bixler,” she said. “There was no shouting this time. Tracy was telling Bixler he’d hired you. Then he said to Bixler that no matter how carefully a steel plant is run, accidents can happen. He said that there was always a possibility something might happen to you. You might slip and fall into a ladle full of molten steel. Or a crane operator might drop a load of plates while you were walking underneath.”

  Jackie stopped then, her eyes fastened on Ray’s face. “Don’t you believe me?”

  He said, “Sure. I believe you. But what of it? Mr. Tracy was right. Accidents do happen in steel mills. We all know that.”

  “I think he wanted you to he killed!”

  “Why, that doesn’t make sense! Why should Mr. Tracy want anything to happen to me?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She jerked her hand away from him suddenly. “You figure it out. I’ve warned you now. I’ve told you what he said. And the way he said it, he was practically ordering Bixler to make sure something did happen to you!”

  Chapter Eight

  Ray Locke went back to his room in the bleak, malodorous rooming house. He changed from his work clothes to the good suit he had worn upon his arrival at Ironton, then took the street car into the city.

  Only a few cents remained in his pockets. His first stop was a pawn shop, where he left his platinum-banded wrist watch. Emerging with folding money in his possession once more, he headed for the main office of the telephone company.

  When he left there, twenty minutes later, he had definite information to show that his own statement to the authorities was not based upon an impossibility. Glenn Cannon had been released from prison at about the same time as Ray himself. The officials at the penitentiary had no information as to where Cannon might have gone after his parole.

  From the telephone building, Rays next call was the public library, a huge structure, its gray masonry now a sooty black from years of exposure to smoke from the mills.

  In the high-vaulted, central reading room, Ray went up to the Inquiry desk. “I’m looking for Miss Jackson,” he informed the wrinkled little old lady on duty there.

  “I’m Miss Jackson.”

  Ray said, “Fine. My boss, Mr. Ashley, asked me to see you. He thinks he must have left a page of notes in a book he was reading here last night.”

  “Mr. Ashley?” She patted a lock of yellowish-white hair into place. Then comprehension dawned in her washed-out blue eyes. “Oh, you mean Mr. Christopher Ashley of the steel company.”

  Ray nodded. “That’s right. The book is Masey’s Micrographic Analysis of Austenitic Steels.”

  “You must have the title confused,” she informed him kindly. “Masey’s book is reserved.” She pointed to a glass-enclosed bookcase behind the desk. “It’s been under lock and key for forty-eight hours. We’re holding it for Professor Quine of the mining engineering staff at Tech. No one would have been allowed to take it last evening, even to read in the library.”

  Ray contrived to look bewildered. “That’s mighty queer. I could have sworn that was the book he mentioned.” He started to turn away, then swung back to the librarian. “Don’t you recall seeing Mr. Ashley last night?”

  “No,” she said positively, “I don’t. But I was in and out of the stacks a great deal and could easily have missed him, though he generally comes and speaks to me.”

  “Well, thanks anyway,” he said. “Evidently I’ve got the whole thing mixed up.”

  Ray worried about this conflicting scrap of information all the way back to the mill. He knew he did not need to report at the laboratory until eight the next morning, but he mingled with the stream of workers on the midnight shift and pretended to punch back into the plant.

  There were lights on the second floor of the test lab and a hundred-watt bulb in the gooseneck over the side entrance near Ashley’s office glared harshly. Ray veered away from the blue glow of the machine shop windows to approach through the shadows.

  He had almost reached the building when he saw a light glimmer fleetingly downstairs in the office section. It was a stealthy light which vanished almost immediately. Ray stopped, stepping closer to the brick wall.

  In a moment the light gleamed again. Evidently someone with a flashlight was roaming the offices.

  The third time the light showed, it was through the window next to Ashley’s office. Ray dodged around the corner beyond the glare from the gooseneck bulb, easing to the side of the pane from which the beam came. It shone steadily now.

  He investigated cautiously with one eye at the edge of the sash. He was looking into the Test Department’s clerical office. The flashlight had been set on a desk top so that its beam shone along the crowded row of filing cabinets.

  A man was standing with his back toward Ray, rooting through an open file drawer. He pulled out some old test sheets, brought them over nearer the light to examine them more closely, then shoved them into a leather briefcase on the desk behind the flashlight. He turned then, and Ray could see his face.

  The man was Quentin Harris.

  Ray didn’t linger after that. He slid away from the window, went on swiftly around the building and on out of the plant.

  His first morning on the new job next day was uneventful. Ashley was not around. Gaylord seemed pleased to have Ray working with him. The Chief Inspector put him to work on the big Norton testing machine, pulling tests for tensile strength.

  It was like old times. Ray forgot his uneasiness while he was so busy. But his dice, when he consulted them at odd moments throughout the morning, had developed a strange reluctance to show anything except twos and threes.

  The jaws of the trap became clearly visible to him for the first time during lunch hour, when he decided to relax and stretch his legs with a short walk around the plant. He recalled Jackie North’s warning but in dayli
ght her fears seemed remote and unreal.

  He went into the rail mill, standing for a few minutes to watch white-hot, oblong billets slide endlessly through the tiers, or stands, of rolls. The billets emerged from the furnaces upon moving trains of small rollers. They passed through the huge rolls themselves, moved back and forth as the driving gears, line upon line of massive metal cogwheels black with grease, reversed continually. Each pass beneath the rolls narrowed and lengthened the billet, shaping it, until it finally emerged in a long ribbon of steel rail to be cut into proper lengths by hot-saws at the far end of the mill.

  Fascinated as always by the sight, Ray went out on a narrow footway which crossed the moving beds upon which the glowing steel shuttled back and forth. He stood on the catwalk, arms against the small pipe guard rail, engrossed with the chaos of roaring machinery, the clang of metal and the shrill repeated blasts of whistle signals.

  Suddenly he was half lifted and violently shoved. It was so entirely unexpected that Ray plunged head first over the narrow railing before he knew what was happening. Only the instinctive clutch of his fingers at the pipe guard rail saved him. They caught, held him, as waves of heat struck upward from a white-hot rail section sliding past underneath the catwalk.

  Ray struggled back through the space below the guard rail. A hulking form in a blue uniform was on the footway beside him. Bixler’s battered features wore an expression of exaggerated dismay, his protruding jaw sagged.

  “You want to watch yourself, bud!” he said. “Might get hurt stumblin’ around thataway.”

  “You dirty bastard! You tried to push me into the rolls!” Ray accused.

  He was trembling in spite of himself. The fate he had so narrowly escaped was a dreadful one. Had he landed on the moving bed below, Ray knew he would have gone through the rolls before the boss roller could have had time to stop his gears.

  He had once heard of a man to whom that had happened. The poor devil had first been crushed into the shape of a rail, bones pulverized. Then, terrific heat had bloated the corpse into a long, hideous balloon, ghastly beyond imagination.