The Brass Chills Read online

  The Brass Chills

  Hugh Pentecost

  An Inspector Luke Bradley mystery

  Published by Bold Venture Press

  www.boldventurepress.com

  Cover design: Rich Harvey

  The Brass Chills by Hugh Pentecost

  Copyright 1943 by Judson Philips. Copyright renewed 1971.

  By arrangement with the Proprietor. All Rights Reserved.

  This book is available in print at most online retailers.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without express permission of the publisher and copyright holder. All persons, places and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to any actual persons, places or events is purely coincidental.

  License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your enjoyment only, then please purchase your own copy.

  Contents

  Edition Notes

  Introduction: “Dedicated to an American Hero” by Audrey Parente

  Dedication

  The Brass Chills

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Part Five

  About the Author

  Other Books by Judson P. Philips

  Connect with Bold Venture Press

  Edition notes

  The Brass Chills is dedicated to Howard Maier. Learn more about him in the introduction by Audrey Parente.

  The Brass Chills is the fourth novel by Judson P. Philips (as Hugh Pentecost) featuring Luke Bradley, the soft-spoken, hard-boiled cop. It represents a dramatic departure for the series, before Philips moved onto other literary endeavors.

  Bradley turned in his NYPD badge and has been recruited as a Navy lieutenant. Gone is supporting character Sergeant Rube Snyder. The familiar New York City locale has been replaced with Los Angeles, but only long enough to enlist screenwriter Chris Wells to help in the Navy’s secret undertaking.

  The familiar high-society whodunit has been replaced by war-time intrigue. Before the first chapter ends, they’re en route to a southwest Pacific island and a secret naval repair base.

  In another departure from series format, The Brass Chills is narrated in first person by Wells, further removing Bradley from the spotlight.

  Luke Bradley’s final appearances occur in The American magazine — the short stories “Death Wears a Copper Necktie” (October 1944) and “Trail of the Vulture” (June 1956).

  The text of this edition was taken from the Popular Library paperback, published in 1943.

  Dedicated to an American Hero

  Introduction by Audrey Parente

  During World War II, author Judson P. Philips (pen name Hugh Pentecost) had been turned down when he tried to enlist in the Special Services, being past draft age at 38. But he found a way to help the war effort himself, and admired friends of his who did the same.

  Years later Philips explained in Americans Remember the Homefront: An Oral Narrative (Hawthorn Books, 1977, a collection of interviews by a long-time Washington Journalist Roy Hoopes) that the air force offered him a commission as major to go abroad “and write letters home to the families whose fliers were killed in the war.”

  His answer: “The hell with that.”

  Instead he got involved in Writers War Board, a sort of propaganda agency. “My particular assignments were to promote for eventual recruitment…One of my first assignments was to do a story on WAC camps. For the first time, women were in the army, so I was flown around the country in some kind of old crate with a bench in the back, to write about WAC camps. As in most of the pieces I wrote for them, in the WAC feature I stressed how glamorous it was. The piece was placed in magazines and newspapers.

  Propaganda in print wasn’t the end of it. He also connected with radio, doing a show about the great secrets of war, Now It Can Be Told.

  “We had a staff in Washington, and its job was to dig out the great secrets. Of course, we got stuff that was no longer classified. But nonetheless, we got a lot of interesting material about little-known stuff; and we did that right till the bomb. I regret to say this, and I would deny it with my last breath, but most of the stuff we had was pretty stale. But it did come out of government agencies, and much of it had not been revealed before, because nobody was interested. We made it interesting.

  “Unfortunately — or fortunately — it was a prosperous time to work. God knows. Except for people who had sons in the service who were in danger, it was kind of a lush time. Hardships were nonsensical. When you recall life in New York in those war years, you remember irritations, you couldn’t get cigarettes. The deprivations, so called, that citizenry had to bear were laughable.

  “It isn’t that you couldn’t get cigarettes; you couldn’t get your brand, and what you smoked was horseshit wrapped in paper.

  “There was at that time an enormous amount of leftist excitement. This came out of the Spanish civil war. But in the process something developed which became McCarthyism. I was very active in radio during this time, and there was a tremendous battle going on within the unions that had to do with who might possibly be an enemy. It was started then. And it led to

  McCarthyism….

  “I never had any uncomfortable feeling about being out of uniform.”

  “I somehow see the war years in technicolor….”

  It’s not much of a stretch then to see how Philips (as Pentecost) created The Brass Chills, published in 1943. He weaves the lead character, a script writer, Chris Wells, into a relationship with former police inspector Lt. Luke Bradley. The story takes place immediately after Pearl Harbor and both men have been drafted for special service on a secret expedition with the Navy. Early on in the novel, Chris Wells’ character is clearly taken from Philips’ real-life experience of being rejected in attempts to join the military.

  Wells is drafted for a secret mission, and that is where the lead character takes on the real life persona of a friend of Philips’ to whom he dedicates the book: Howard Maier, a former assistant television director in New York who did go to work for the United States Information Agency. Maier was a political specialist for the Voice of America, who died of cancer Jan. 28, 1983 in Hallandale, Fla., where he had lived since his retirement in 1966. He was 77 years old when he died. Philips knew Mr. Maier in New York before and during the early war years of the 1940’s before Maier actually entered the Army. Maier returned to his work in New York in 1946 when he returned to civilian life and continued his friendship with Philips.

  As with Philips’ other books, the dedication in The Brass Chills is to the person he knows and respects, Maier, but without any explanation whatsoever.

  Audrey Parente is the author of Once a Pulp Man: The Secret Life of Judson P. Philips as Hugh Pentecost. She is a retired Pulitzer-nominated journalist, and now serves as the editor at Bold Venture Press. Her novel Pulp Noir: A Cluttered Romance also is available from Bold Venture Press.

  Dedicated to

  Howard Maier

  PART ONE

  I

  THERE is a good deal that can’t be told at this time. It would give aid and comfort to the enemy if the name of the Island were made public. The Island is the means for striking hard body-blows at the enemy, and they would very much like to locate it and put it out of business.

  Names don’t matter much. Names of places. Names of ships. Some day history may mention the Island in the same breath with such sturdy outposts as Bataa
n and Tobruk. I like to think, however, that it will fall into a different category. Bataan and Tobruk stand for stubborn, heroic defense; but the Island was one of the first springboards for attack.

  There is another thing about the Island: to most of us “attack” means uniforms and guns, tanks and ships and planes. The Island saw the machines of war, but its heart and soul was a crew of men in overalls, with wrenches and hammers and welding torches in their hands. Men who worked and laughed and fought together; men from New England, from the Middle West, from the California coast; men who lived at such close quarters that an arm, flung carelessly outward in sleep, would wake a friend.

  Light men and dark men; tall men and fat men and thin men; men whose hearts were stouter than the tough muscles in their arms and backs. But mostly this is a story of two men. One had been a detective but now wore the insignia of a lieutenant in the Navy. The other was a murderer, This is the story of a duel between those two, a duel which lasted for weeks. It brought fear to some, threatened disaster for all, and cost the lives of those whose names will never be inscribed on the roll of heroes, though that is where they belong.

  On the day it ended I was sitting alone in my office. There were reports on my desk to fill out, but I was not working at them. I was listening; listening for the end. Everyone else had gone to see it with their own eyes. I couldn’t. I thought I was the only one who couldn’t, but as I sat there the other door opened and Bradley came in. His red hair was rumpled, and new lines in his face seemed to have grown deeper. His gray eyes, usually clear and direct, were clouded.

  “You didn’t go,” I said.

  “No, Chris,” he said. He sat down beside my desk. He was almost never without his short-stemmed black pipe. It was in his hand now, but he didn’t smoke. He sat there, tapping the stem against his teeth. Waiting.

  “This is a big day for you,” I said. “All the cases you ever solved back home, rolled into one, were not as important as this.”

  He didn’t answer for a moment. I could see the network of wrinkles at the corners of his eyes contract. He was not yet forty, but sometimes he looked like an old man who had carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  “I can’t forget,” he said, “that I sang songs with him, bummed cigarettes from him, ate and slept with him. I can’t forget that. I can’t forget, by God, that I liked him.”

  “I know,” I said.

  We didn’t talk any more. We just waited. At last we heard it. The guns of a firing squad. A few hundred yards away a man lay dead in the dust, and I knew that every gun had been aimed at his heart with a prayer.

  Bradley’s voice sounded far away. “Well, that’s that,” he said.

  That was the end. The beginning was elsewhere.

  II

  It really began on the seventh of December, 1941. A lot of things began that day. A sleeping giant woke up and found somebody had tied a can to his tail. But then I thought of it in terms of me.

  I was working in my office at World Wide Pictures that Sunday afternoon, making revisions on a script that was already in the shooting. How I happened to be working at World Wide is a story in itself. I had gone into Wall Street after college, been a customer’s man, and worked up to a partnership in a firm. You remember how things were in the Street after ’29. Our firm stayed together, but the office boy could have handled our business.

  At a cocktail party one afternoon I met a man who was a producer at World Wide. They were about to make one of those screwball comedies about Wall Street. After eight martinis I found myself hired as a technical expert. I went out, to Hollywood, figuring it as a sort of Arabian Nights vacation with pay. Before the picture was done I was collaborating with the author on the script, and World Wide offered me a writer’s contract. It was wacky. I wasn’t a writer, but that’s the way Hollywood is. I figured they’d find that out in a few months, but the salary was unbelievable, and maybe by then stocks and bonds would be looking up.

  That was three years ago. The Street isn’t yet taking nourishment, and by some freak I’d turned out to be a pretty good script man. I still figured it as a sort of stop-gap. One of these days I’d go back to my proper niche.

  When you make the kind of dough they paid me, Sunday is no barrier to work. Besides, it meant thousands more dollars to the company if they were held up when the cameras were ready to turn again on Monday morning. I remember I was trying to find the twist the script needed to make it come alive when a pop-eyed office boy stuck his head in and shouted:

  “The Japs are bombing Pearl Harbor, Mr. Wells!”

  For a minute I couldn’t think where Pearl Harbor was. Then I remembered. Honolulu. The beach at Waikiki. Aloha. For God sake, I thought. It still didn’t hit with any impact. Those two little yellow rats were negotiating with Mr. Hull in Washington. They’re just trying to scare us into accepting their terms, I thought. Well, Mr. Hull won’t scare, chums. I went back to doctoring up a bedroom scene so the Hays office would pass it.

  It wasn’t till I went out to supper that I began to understand what was going on. This was war. And it looked as if we’d been taken to the cleaners that day, maybe for keeps. Along about the middle of the night I suddenly saw red. Take a crack at us when our back is turned, will you? Okay. Okay!

  The next morning I was in the Navy’s recruiting office. I’m thirty-eight. I have on a $175-gabardine suit, a Sulka tie, a custom-made shirt, brown suede shoes. And I’m up to my neck in kids, gutter kids, stupid, ugly, dregs of the city’s slums. A young punk in uniform is ordering us around. Stand in that line! Sit in that chair! I thought, what the hell are you doing here, Chris? You don’t belong here. You belong with your own kind of people, wherever they are.

  Wherever they are! Who are your own kind of people? Socially they’re the kind of people who make the kind of dough you do. They’ve got glamour, and press agents to remind you of it. They laugh at your kind of jokes. They think your kind of politics. Your kind of people, I thought, are sitting over their breakfast or lunch tables, trying to talk their way out of the panic they feel by blaming someone. Wheeler or Lindbergh or Roosevelt or someone.

  Four hours, five, six … I stand there with those kids. All of a sudden I feel wonderful inside. These kids are my friends. Closer than that. They’re my blood. Sure, they can’t talk my language, they have no breeding, they don’t know from nothing. Only one thing they know. Their country’s been attacked. They don’t say that, but you feel it. And now I’m proud to be standing there, because they belong to me and I belong to them. I’m proud to throw my gabardine suit and my fancy shirt on the dirty heap in the corner, proud to stand naked, packed in a tiny room, sweating, elbowed, ordered around by a different young punk in uniform. But laughing and smiling and knowing that behind every smile the teeth are locked with such determination that no crowbar the Axis has yet invented will ever be able to pry them loose.

  It was in the midst of that exaltation that I finally came down to earth with a thud. I had got my clothes on after the physical, and I was passed into the office of a Commander Sullivan. He was looking over my application.

  “You’re a writer, Mr. Wells?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Uh-huh. How would you like to do publicity for the Navy, Mr. Wells?”

  “I wouldn’t,” I said. “I came down here because I want to get in there and pitch.”

  This Sullivan looked tired. He’d been at it all day long. Talking to a thousand guys, each one having his own idea of what he wanted to do.

  “You’ve never had any navy training,” he said. “You’re not a machinist. The one thing you do know that we can use is your ability with words. You’re a bit old to enlist as a gob, Mr. Wells.”

  “I’m wasting your time and you’re wasting mine,” I said. “If you can’t use me, there’s some branch of the service that can. To hell with publicity.”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  I felt as if someone had kicked the box from under me. I felt sunk.


  III

  I took Rosalind to dinner that night, and it got worse. I was shocked. I was shocked because she was shocked.

  “You must be crazy, Chris!” she said. “You don’t have to go to war. Everybody knows the Japanese are a pushover. It’ll all be over by spring. And there are a million men on the WPA and the CCC and heaven knows where else who’ll be taken in the Army. Besides, you’re as good as married, and they don’t take married men.”

  We were all done up in evening clothes. There was champagne, and pheasant under glass, and fresh asparagus. I remembered that dinner later when a hard cracker and a hunk of canned corn bed tasted a lot better. There was music, that night with Rosalind. And all the Hollywood big shots wearing their buttons. “Red Cross,” they said, “I gave,” or “Dieu et mon Droit.”

  “That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, Rozzi,” I said.

  “What?”

  “About being nearly married,” I said. We had been nearly married for three years. It was mildly pleasant, but distinctly unexciting.

  “Chris, what on earth?”

  “I just thought,” I said, “it might be a good thing to put it off till all this is over. Because I’m going, some way. And we might as well face the possibility that I won’t come back.”

  She started to talk to me as if I were a four-year-old child. “Chris, you’ve gotten all worked up about this. Let the people in charge run things. If they need you, they’ll call on you. You don’t have to go sticking your neck out. You’re outside the draft age. Your job is important to public morale.”

  “Nuts,” I said.

  “But it is, Chris.”

  “We don’t have to worry about public morale,” I said. I was thinking of those scrawny, hard-eyed, flat-stomached kids in the recruiting, office. I tried to explain. All she said was: