The Brass Chills Read online

  “A tight spot,” Bradley said.

  “I was paralyzed!” Jess said. “I couldn’t face him. Something about the look in his eyes … well, he scared hell out of me, Mr. Bradley.”

  “Mercy!” said Bradley, “he scared hell out of me!”

  “I got out of there quickly,” Jess said. “I tried to get Bill’s office on the shop telephone, but they couldn’t connect me. I tried to get Captain Cleave, but he was making a tour of the shops and I couldn’t locate him. So I started running for the foundry. I don’t know what I thought I was going to do, but I kept on running. Then I met Commander Wasdell.”

  “I never heard so many words come out of one person in my life,” Wasdell said, grinning. “I thought she’d gone wacky. But I wasn’t taking chances. I tagged along with her.”

  “For which we’re grateful,” Bradley said.

  “Think nothing of it,” Wasdell said. “It was a pleasure.” He looked down at the bloodstained butt of his gun with affection.

  ***

  The case against Walker was complete. After supper that night a few of us gathered in Cleave’s office. There was Bradley, and Wasdell, and Jess, who had no business there but whom I’d brought because I wouldn’t let her out of my sight, and the new master shipwright and boss of the job, one William Regan.

  Bradley was still not cheerful. “I’ll never forgive myself for having been suckered by that apparent attempt on Walker’s life, which he engineered himself. I guess it was because I wanted him to be innocent. He had to be innocent, because he was the only person on shipboard competent to deal with poison! I shut my eyes to the other possibility in that setup. God, it was so simple. The murderer had to know poisons, and Alec knew them. Yet I passed it up, although it was sticking out like a sore thumb!”

  “You can’t blame yourself, Lieutenant,” Cleave said. “It was on Dr. Walker’s information that you were basing your whole case.”

  “That doesn’t improve things,” Bradley said. “Jed Quartermayne and Ed Winthrop are dead, and so are a dozen other men we badly needed here.”

  “You and Jess should have let him die that night on the Ship,” I said.

  “He wouldn’t have died, Chris. He knew how to handle the stuff.”

  “What in God’s name drives a man to that sort of thing?” Wasdell said.

  “I don’t know if it would have helped if I’d checked his record. He took his postgraduate work in medicine in Germany. But there’s nothing odd about that. Hundreds of American doctors have done the same thing. You might expect, if anything, that he would have seen through the Nazi setup. But he must have been bitten by the bug. The motive is as simple as that. He believed in the Nazi idea, and he was ready to fight for it. He’d been waiting for a moment when he could do his cause the most good. This expedition was ideal.

  “As for the rest of the case, it needs no explanation. He was never under watch after he’d been poisoned himself. He had a free hand from start to finish. He could smuggle in the poison without difficulty because he was the only person competent to tell us what was and what wasn’t poison. Nobody bothered with his diathermy machine. Yet I knew that such an apparatus could be used for short-wave sending. But Alec was beyond suspicion.”

  That was that. When we went out, Bill grinned at Jess and me.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to move out of the shack,” he said.

  “Move out?” I didn’t get what he was talking about.

  “Surely you two aren’t going to delay things,” Bill said.

  ***

  They executed Alec Walker on a hot sunny afternoon, with nearly the whole personnel looking on. And that night the Seahorse left us and the Seaspray took her place.

  On another sunny afternoon a week or so later, Jess and I were married. Bill was best man. Tubby Garms came through, as was to be expected, with a crack about “the best man doesn’t always get the girl.” McCoy didn’t get it. He said naturally the best man didn’t get the girl.

  And then, a few days later, the Seaspray left us, fit for service again. Since then we’ve repaired battle damage on half a dozen other battlewagons. When you hear about some new body-blow at the Jap navy, you can make a pretty good guess that Bill, and big Joe, and McCoy, and the rest of us have had a hand in it.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Judson Philips, a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award winner, was born in Northfield, Mass. in 1903. He began his writing career in the pulp fiction magazines in 1924, while earning his journalism degree from Columbia University.

  In 1939 he won the $10,000 Dodd Mead Mystery Contest, using the pen name Hugh Pentecost, for Cancelled in Red. This marked a turning point in his career, as he created a second body of work for slick magazines and paperbacks as Pentecost.

  He continued using both names simultaneously, living between New York and Connecticut, producing more than 500 works. One of his best-known series was The Park Avenue Hunt Club, which appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly.

  Philips owned a newspaper, and wrote columns for other newspapers. He owned an equity summer stock theater, “The Sharon Playhouse,” where he wrote and produced plays. In the meantime, he wrote radio and film scripts for movies and television. Later he hosted a political and arts program in Connecticut’s “Northwest Corner,” broadcast out of Torrington.

  Philips was married five times and had four children. He died of complications from emphysema in 1989, at age 85, in Canaan, Connecticut.

  Other books by this author

  Visit our website to discover other books by Judson P. Philips and Hugh Pentecost:

  The Inspector Luke Bradley series by Hugh Pentecost

  Cancelled in Red

  The 24th Horse

  I’ll Sing at You Funeral

  The Brass Chills

  Pulp Adventures magazine #21

  “The Lacquer Box” by Judson P. Philips

  Judson P. Philips biography

  Once a Pulp Man: The Secret Life of Judson P. Philips as Hugh Pentecost

  By Audrey Parente

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