The Brass Chills Read online

  We had to get him! We had to get him so that in a day or two the Seahorse, shrouded by darkness, could slip away to join the fleet again, ready for another crack at the business of making history, and clearing the decks for another damaged ship.

  I suddenly felt that I couldn’t stand there for, another minute, just thinking, I wanted to get out and swing my fists, but against which man? You’ve got a brain, chum! Make it work! Put the pieces together! What the hell good are you?

  I trudged around after Bill, with the two ensigns trudging too, stumbling over piles of stuff, flattening myself against machinery as men passed carrying buckets of molten metal, swung on long poles between them. An innocent glass of tomato juice, and a stealthy hand pouring into it death … death as certain and dreadful as any that could be brought about by bullets, or bombs, or torpedoes. This first move aimed at the one man who might conceivably save subsequent victims.

  A bottle of cough medicine. Again that stealthy hand, uncapping the bottle and filling it with death. And Jed Quartermayne, crawling across the floor, torn by the agony of dying, trying in his last moment to write down the name of the enemy.

  The sending key on a short-wave set. A thermos jug, filled with coffee … and with death again. The hand places it, innocent, inviting, on the desk. Bill was to die. But he hadn’t because Ed Winthrop had been thirstier than he was.

  Go back of that hand, chum. Follow it up the arm to a face! But what face? Not Bill’s or mine or Bradley’s or Jess’s. Cleave, gray, gaunt, his life tied up in the service of his country? Tubby Garms, his moon face cracked in laughter at some corny pun? McCoy, not getting the point, plaintive, his eyes filled with tears as he looked at the flag floating in the ocean breeze? Lew Lewis, dark, moody, so typically the stolid, conservative American he could have posed for a poster? Big Joe Adams, stubbornly insisting on Bill’s guilt, refusing to listen to reason or to examine evidence? Was he too insistent?

  Round and round. Getting nowhere. A pile of cigarette stubs left by that same stealthy hand. There was a glove on the hand, of course, because there were no prints. The thermos bottle, left in a row with dozens of others, the face, smiling and joking, as it filled it with death. And no doubt, that same hand, holding a gun or a bob, had searched through the woods for me the day before yesterday.

  Bill and the two ensigns and I stood watching while men poured metal. The moulds for the tubes are placed in the ground in an upright position. The pouring is as delicate as the mixing of chemicals in a laboratory.

  “Okay, boys, take it easy,” Bill said. His voice was tense.

  “You got to be careful not to agitate the metal,” one of the ensigns said in my ear. “Air bubbles.”

  I watched, almost breathless. It seemed as tricky as the job of a surgeon holding a scalpel over the exposed section of a man’s brain,

  “Easy. Easy.” Bill’s voice was steady, but you could feel the tightness of his nerves. A mistake here, a movement made too quickly, and they would have to start over … go back two hours in time.

  And then it happened.

  Someone grabbed my shoulder from behind and sent me staggering to my knees in a heap of rubble. I struggled up and saw Joe Adams, eyes blazing, break through between the two ensigns. Bill never had a chance. Adams swung a right that caught him, unprepared, and knocked him backward over a stacked pile of sheet metal. Before Bill could recover Adams dove at him.

  Someone shouted a warning, and there was a scream of pain. A trickle of boiling steel was running across the floor. Over the noise of machines, the crane’s bell, I heard a thunder of voices. Adams wasn’t alone. Fifty or sixty men had tailed him into the foundry. They were his own crew from the sheet-metal shop. Other men were crowding in from outside.

  Adams was killing Bill. His huge fists were pounding at Bill’s face, his throat, his stomach. I know I started forward. I know the two ensigns started forward. But before we reached Bill, Bradley was there.

  I don’t know how he managed it, but he had Adams off Bill quicker than it takes to tell it. Adams was down on his knees, one arm twisted behind him.

  “Get Regan into his office!” Bradley ordered the ensigns.

  They help Bill get up. His face was white, streaked with red. His breath made that terrible gasping sound. His legs wouldn’t hold him up and the two officers had almost to carry him.

  Bradley still had Adams by the arm.

  “Get up,” he said harshly.

  Adams got up, his face twisted in pain. Bradley wasn’t being gentle.

  “Into the office,” he said. He marched Adams straight toward the crowd of men. I thought they weren’t going to let him through.

  “The minute you let go of my arm I’ll take care of you too, Bradley,” Adams said. “You been playing ball, with that murdering louse from the start.”

  “All right,” said Bradley quietly. “All right!” He dropped his hold on Adams and stood facing him. “You’re a bungling clown, Adams. I suppose you might as well get what’s coming to you.”

  I said a little prayer that in the riot that was coming I might get in a couple of haymakers before somebody got me. But nothing happened. The two men stood staring at each other, Adams breathing hard, Bradley like a block of ice. Then Bradley said, “Follow me.” He walked straight into the crowd of men and they opened a way for him. Adams followed.

  In the office Bill was sprawled in the chair behind his desk. One of the ensigns was bathing his face with a wet handkerchief. He tried to get up when he saw Adams, but Bradley ordered him to sit down.

  “All right, Adams, let’s have it.”

  Adams turned to one of his men who had moved forward as far as the door. “Got it there, Pat?”

  The man nodded. He handed Adams a thermos bottle. Adams put it down on Bill’s desk with a bang.

  “I found this waiting for me!” he said. “It was put on the desk in my office sometime during the morning. Ed Winthrop fell for it, but I didn’t, see?”

  “How do you know there’s anything the matter with it?” Bradley asked.

  “Am I supposed to drink it to find out?” Adams shouted. “You have the guy cold, but do you do anything about it? No, you put him back to work. Naturally he wants to get me. I’m the guy who’s seen through this thing from the start.”

  “Regan’s been under close guard all day,” Bradley said. “When do you think he was able to plant this bottle in your office?”

  “I tell you when! When he said he was getting the doctor for Ed, when everybody knows he wasn’t. He couldn’t find the doctor, he said!” Adams laughed, harshly. “He couldn’t find him because he was looking for him in my office!”

  “Anybody see him there?”

  “Would he show himself if he could help it?” Bradley turned to me. “Mr. Wells, send somebody for Dr. Walker. We’ll soon find out about this.”

  ***

  It was about five minutes before Alec came. Bradley took the thermos and filled its metal cap with coffee.

  “Take this back to the infirmary, doctor, and test it for the botulinus bacillus.”

  “Right,” Alec said.

  “How long will it take?”

  “Twenty minutes … half an hour,” Alec said. His voice hardened. “I’m prepared for this test, Lieutenant.”

  “We’ll wait here,” Bradley said. “Now sit down, Adams, and cool off. It’s a hundred to one there’s nothing wrong with your coffee. Get your men back to their shop.”

  “We’re seeing this through,” Adams said.

  Bradley reached for the phone on the desk. “I’m giving you thirty seconds to get them back to work. Then I send for O’Rourk and an armed guard to escort them back!”

  Again Adams lost. The men went.

  We waited for Alec, Bill and Adams’ and the two ensigns and Bradley and me. Bill was fidgeting in his chair. Finally he couldn’t stand it any longer.

  “That whole casting was ruined, Bradley,” he said. “For God sake, let me go out there and get things reorga
nized while we wait.”

  “Sit still,” Bradley said.

  “But damn it, man—”

  “Sit still!”

  I looked at my wrist watch. The second hand moved as if it was fighting its way through molasses. Through the glass panel I saw the crew men examining the results of the spoiled casting.

  Minutes … endless, dragging minutes. Then I saw Alec coming toward the office, and even at a distance the look on his face told me that Bradley had guessed wrong. He came in and closed the door behind him. He looked curiously at Adams.

  “You’re a lucky man, Joe,” he said. “There were enough botulinus germs in that coffee to wipe out every man on the base.”

  “Looks like a long shot home, Lieutenant,” Adams said. “What have you got to say to that?”

  Bradley had been smoking his pipe. He laid it down carefully on the desk.

  “The doctor could be wrong,” he said.

  “Sorry,” Alec said. “There’s not a possibility of doubt, Bradley.”

  “I think there is,” said Bradley.

  He acted so quickly that none of us could stop him. He picked up the thermos bottle, raised it to his mouth, and drank!

  “Bradley!” My voice was a stranger’s.

  He lowered the bottle and put it down on the desk. He looked straight at Alec, and I never saw eyes so cold and relentless.

  “How long do you think it will be before I die doctor?” he asked.

  VII

  Alec looked as stunned as I felt. “Good Lord, man,” he said. “We’ve got to get you to the infirmary quick or you haven’t got a chance. That stuff is deadly!”

  “Is it, doctor? Well, I think I’ll forgo your stomach pump. You see, I made that coffee myself. I put it on Adams’ desk this morning myself. I knew he’d blow his top when he found it. I knew you’d be called on to make a test, and that in order to keep the ball rolling you’d probably announce that this, too, was poisoned. It would keep things going in a jolly way.”

  Bradley’s words weren’t percolating. I heard them, I knew what they meant, but they didn’t make sense. Alec had been the very first victim of those attacks. If it hadn’t been for him, we’d never have known about the botulism business at all.

  Alec lifted his hand in an attempt to silence Bradley. “Listen,” he said, “Listen…!”

  “You listen,” Bradley said. “Everyone in this outfit was searched when they came ashore. Everything that could have contained poison was examined by you! There was only one person whose stuff wasn’t searched. Yours, doctor. After all, we depended on you to detect the poison. No one went over your medical supplies. We’d have been lost. We had to count on you! Oh, the build-up was perfect. Those five men who were poisoned on the Ship. You saved them. God knows whether they ever had botulosis or not. Then you yourself were attacked. Cleave ought to demote me for letting myself be fooled by that age-old trick!”

  Alec said: “Bradley, you’ve gone off your trolley. I know this thing has got you down, but this is fantastic.”

  “Is it? Shall we wait, doctor, to see when the poison in this coffee takes effect on me? Or shall we skip all that and stand you up against a wall where you belong? I had to force you to make a slip, my friend, and I’ve done it. This bottle has been watched every second since I put it on Adams’s desk with my own hands! That’s why I only gave you a cupful of it to test. Enough poison in it to kill every man here at the base, you said. I don’t feel a thing, doctor. I feel wonderful, for the first time since that night I worked so hard to save your miserable life. That was a good play. You made yourself really sick! Well, it’s all over, doctor. Finished! Done!”

  Alec turned to me. “You want this man to live don’t you, Wells? I tell you, he’s out of his mind. If we don’t get him to the infirmary in a matter of minutes, he’s done for.”

  I almost believed him. Almost, but not quite. Perhaps it was the strange twitching of his right eyelid I’d never seen before. Perhaps it was because the light struck his face as he turned, but I saw the fine beads of sweat on his forehead.

  “It won’t work, doctor,” Bradley said. “Mr. Wells is an old hand at spotting ham actors. It’s a nice try, though. If you pumped out my stomach and I lived, we’d never know whether this coffee was poisoned or not. If I died under treatment, as I almost certainly would, you’d pronounce it botulism, and that would be that. I’m going to get along quite handsomely without treatment.” He turned to Bill. “Okay, Regan. Are you willing to tell now?”

  Bill stood up. His lips were swollen and the one-sided smile must have hurt him. “So you guessed it, Bradley?”

  “You went to search the doctor’s stuff, didn’t you?”

  “On the nose,” Bill said. “Only I wonder if you know what I was looking for.”

  “The radio, of course,” Bradley said. “It’s the diathermy machine, isn’t it? I haven’t examined it, but it’s the only way I could figure it. I talked to Miss Lucas. She alibied both the doctor and Miss James for the time the message was being sent to the enemy. She said she and Miss James were making inventory of supplies. The doctor was giving a heat treatment to one of the men who had sprained a shoulder.”

  “That’s the way it had to be,” Bill said. “And you see, Lieutenant, no one could have been wandering around my office, unnoticed, except you or Cleave or Chris or friend Alec. Everyone else was supposed to be on a specific job. I’ve been wondering for a long time, because Alec is the only man in the whole list of suspects who didn’t have someone else watching him all the time. That was because he’d been one of the victims. No one checked his luggage or supplies. It was dead simple. But I needed proof. I needed it quick, before Joe here had me strapped in the hot seat again. When I saw there was nothing I could do to help Ed Winthrop, I took it on the lam, waited until the doctor left the infirmary to come over here. I found the diathermy machine. A message could be sent with it, but I couldn’t prove it had been. I wasn’t going to talk till I had proof, because little Alec here is too damned handy with his little pet germs. All I had to do was open my trap, and I’d have had to go on a forty-day fast if I expected to live.”

  Perhaps if Bill hadn’t been bruised and groggy from his encounter with Adams, he might have reached Walker. He lunged at him, but too late. Walker had drawn an automatic, and in that small office it looked as if our collective geese were cooked. His lips drew back from his teeth.

  “All right. Don’t move, any of you,” he said. He took a step backward toward the door. “I suppose you will call this the fortunes of war. Your silly, college-boy ethics would see it that way. God, how I’ve laughed at you. Here I was, all alone, turning hundreds of you into a bunch of panicky children. They taught us to expect you to act like that.”

  “Yes, doctor,” said Bradley very softly, “we’re frightened, bewildered sheep. You saw an example of that during last night’s attack. And by the way, doctor, what are your plans when you shoot your way out of here? You’re not going to get very far, you know. The spirit of brotherly love is not apt to be extended very warmly in your direction.”

  Alec’s eyelids twitched. “We’ll see,” he said.

  “If you’re by any chance thinking of sending another message over your little machine, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. O’Rourk and his men are guarding it. You may find your reception on the warm side.”

  Alec reached behind him for the handle of the door. Before he touched it the door opened inward.

  I think everybody in the room jumped at once. Alec’s gun went off, sounding like a cannon in that cramped space, and then I saw Commander Wasdell clubbing Alec over the head with the butt of his service revolver. He seemed to be having a good time.

  Then I saw Jess. She had been behind Wasdell. She came straight toward me through a haze of powder smoke straight toward me and into my arms.

  “Chris, darling! You’re all right?” Her voice was shaky. “I was so terribly afraid we’d be too late.”

  VIII

 
That tiny office was a madhouse for the next few minutes. I know I held Jess very tightly in my arms. I know I suddenly realized I was never going to have to say the things I’d been trying to get my nerve up to say on the long trip out. I just kept whispering in her ear, “Darling, darling, darling,” and she was holding close to me.

  The two young ensigns dragged Alec out of there. It wasn’t pleasant. He had completely blown his top, kicking, screaming, with flecks of foam dotting his lips.

  Only Bradley seemed unrelieved of his cold hard anger. He gave Wasdell a tight smile. “I suppose it would be bad form, Commander, to say that the marines certainly arrived in the nick of time.”

  “It wasn’t my doing,” Wasdell said. “You’ve got Miss James to thank for that.”

  Jess was instantly the center of attention, and I had reluctantly to let her become detached from me for a few moments.

  “Dr. Walker came back from here with the coffee to test,” she said. “I helped him in the other tests, and I knew the routine backwards. I prepared the instruments he needed and then stood by in case he needed me for anything.” She laughed. “I don’t know why or how my mind ever happened to work for me. I no more suspected Dr. Walker than I did … than I did myself.” She gave me a shy, half-apologetic glance. “But you see he left out one stage of the process that I knew was absolutely vital. When he turned to me and told me that the coffee was poisoned I … well, I didn’t know what to think.”

  She reached out, and I felt her fingers tighten around mine. I guess the reaction was beginning to set in, because as she went on her voice was quite unsteady.

  “You see, he couldn’t have known, having left out that one step. It wasn’t any time for guesswork on his part. I … I still didn’t add it up to make sense. He left to report back to you, and I started to clean up his equipment and put it away. The whole thing bothered me so I followed him after a moment. He’d gone to his office. I was just going in to speak to him when I saw him take that gun out of his desk drawer. I … I guess I knew the answer then.”