The Brass Chills Read online

  “No … no, I’ll be all right,” Jess said.

  “Call me if there’s any change at all in his condition,” he said. He nodded to me, and I followed him out into the office.

  I don’t think even then the full impact of the thing had hit me. I hadn’t thought beyond the fact that the tomato juice Alec had drunk was spoiled.

  But Bradley had. He was standing in the center of the office, filling his pipe from an oilskin pouch, while Cleave, Quartermayne, and I waited.

  “Of course it’s an attempt at murder,” he said.

  I looked where he was looking. The half-empty glass of tomato juice stood on the blotter on Alec’s desk. I found myself staring at it with the inner conviction that it might explode, like a time bomb. Beside it was a pyramid made by the five unopened cans of string beans. They, too, took on the proportions of five little infernal machines, replete with ticking mechanisms. It would have been better if they had been. We could have thrown them overboard and been done with it.

  II

  About two hours later a seaman led me along a dim passage to the ship’s library. This had been designated a sort of clubroom for the leadermen — what Bill Regan would have called another symptom of class privilege. The work crews were quartered on B deck; the ship’s officers, the leadermen, Bradley, Quartermayne, Cleave, the nurses, the doctor, and I on A deck. Whatever Bill might think, there was a practical reason for this. Cleave could contact all the key members of his personnel at a moment’s notice.

  Now it had taken on a far more sinister significance.

  I opened the door and went into the library. It was thick with tobacco smoke. The portholes were of course, closed and blacked over. Bill and the six other leadermen were there. Bill had been sent to rout them out and assemble them here for me.

  A buzz of conversation stopped as I appeared and I found myself the focus of seven pairs of eyes. Aside from Bill, these men were still just faces to me. I had met them all in Jorgensen’s cabin, earlier, but I still didn’t know which was which. I remembered Sam, who used to be the doorman at the Columbia Club in New York, Sam never forgot the names that went with faces … not if he hadn’t seen you for twenty years. Bill broke the ice.

  “How’s the doctor, Chris?” he asked.

  “He had a narrow squeak,” I said.

  “Bad food again?” He snapped a match into flame with his thumbnail, lit a cigarette.

  “We ought to do some checking up in the galley,” one of the men said. He was Joe Adams, boss of the sheetmetal workers. He had one of those chiseled New England faces and the muscles of a stevedore. “The boys are apt to get nervous if there’s much of this, Mr. Wells.”

  I had to let them have it. That was my job. “There’s nothing wrong in the galley,” I said. “Walker was poisoned. Deliberately.”

  Nobody spoke for a moment. I saw they weren’t too surprised. Joe Adams looked down at his huge fists, opening and closing them slowly as they rested on his knees.

  Bill squinted at me through the haze from his cigarette. “They didn’t wait long,” he said.

  “They?”

  He made a sweeping gesture. “Just they, Chris. They’ve been whispering to us for a long time. Telling us we were safe, when we weren’t. Telling us we were strong and self sufficient, when we weren’t. Making us hate the guy next door.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Ernest McCoy, looking puzzled. He was the pattern maker; a big, paunchy, good-natured Boston Irishman. “Why should somebody want to poison the doctor? He’s an awful nice fellow. I was talking to him this morning. Comes from Maine. I thought he got some of the same bad food that poisoned those five other birds.”

  “There’s no bad food,” I said.

  “You might call it uncanny,” said Tubby Garms. “Get it?” He guffawed. Nobody gave him a tumble. I discovered his puns were always given the silent treatment. He was a moon-faced, fair-haired wise guy, head of the shipwrights. Jack Oakie could have played him to the life.

  “On the level,” I said, “Walker was deliberately poisoned. So were the five men who got it yesterday.”

  Adams looked up from the contemplation of his fists. “Who says so?”

  “Bradley.”

  “He’s sure?”

  “Positive. Here’s the lowdown.”

  The doctor’s botulism theory was out. The tomato juice which had poisoned him and the beans which had poisoned the men had been put up by different companies. The presence of the bacillus botulinus in canned food could result only from criminal carelessness in the canning process. That two companies could make such a blunder and that both blunders should turn up here was just too much of a coincidence.

  More conclusive, though, was the action of the poison itself. The five men had been taken ill within twenty minutes of eating. Alec’s case was different. He was a tomato juice addict. He kept several cans of it in a refrigerator in the office along with the serums and perishable medical supplies. He had opened a can and drunk a glass of the juice early in the evening. Nothing had happened. He had poured the remains from the can into a glass and put the glass in the ice box. He had been in the captain’s cabin with the rest of us for more than an hour. Then he’d gone back to his office, intending to make tests on the canned beans. He was perfectly well then. Jess was in the sick-bay with the patients. The movement of the ship had made her feel a little woozy, and Walker had sent her up on deck for some air, telling her he’d buzz for her if she was needed. After she’d gone out, he’d taken the glass of tomato juice from the refrigerator and drunk it. Almost instantly he was violently ill. The only possible conclusion was that the second glass of juice had been poisoned while Walker was away from the office.

  “But who could have got at the juice to poison it if the nurse was there?” McCoy asked.

  It was a question I’d been dreading. Jess was in the box. Bradley had made that plain too.

  “Miss James,” I told McCoy, “was in the sick-bay. It was her duty to stand by the patients there. The refrigerator is in the office. The vibration of the engines, the general ship’s noises, would have kept her from hearing the opening or closing of a door unless it was slammed. And this rubber matting deadens any sound of footsteps.”

  McCoy didn’t look convinced.

  “Besides that,” I said, “if it hadn’t been for Miss James’s quick action, Walker would probably be dead.” I looked over at Bill Regan and saw a faint twinkle in his eyes. I felt my face get red, I had pointed out these same facts to Bradley with some heat, and he had said; “Mercy, Miss James, it seems you’ve found yourself a knight-errant.” I know you’re not supposed to lose your head over a girl whose voice you hear in the dark, but something like that had happened to me. My values and perspective had moved over and plunked themselves down in another pew the moment she’d stopped to look at me in that dim, passage. I couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen it in my face. I’d lit a cigarette for her during Bradley’s inquisition, and our eyes had met over the flame of my lighter. I saw gratitude there for my effort to back her up. That was all.

  Ed Winthrop, the master machinist, broke in on my thoughts. He was a tall, stoop-shouldered, bespectacled fellow.

  “What’s behind it, Mr. Wells? Who could have it in for the doctor and those five men?”

  “No one has it in for them, Ed,” Bill said. “Someone’s trying to scare us, to divide us, to make us doubt each other.”

  Ed Winthrop scowled. It wasn’t in him to think along Bill’s lines. He was a real, old-time craftsman. His great grandfather had built wooden ships at Portsmouth for George III. His grandfather and father had lived in Kittery and the Portsmouth Yard had been their lives. Like them, Ed ate, slept, and dreamed machinery.

  “Divide us?” he said vaguely.

  “Surely there’s no suspicion of any of us!” said Scotty Cameron, the electrician; a bald, dour-faced Scotsman.

  “I’m afraid there is,” I said,

  “Of us?” Lew Lewis, the last of the six, was a ri
gger; dark, quiet, introspective.

  “I’m afraid so,” I said. I explained. “Because we haven’t had any chance for a boat drill, Captain Cleave has had marines stationed at all the companionways on B deck to help the men there in case of trouble. These marines have reported that no one on B deck was out of quarters during the time when Walker’s tomato juice was poisoned. That leaves us.”

  “You mean just us … here in this room?” Lewis was still incredulous.

  “No. There’s Quartermayne and Bradley and Cleave himself. And the two nurses.”

  “I’ll bet it’s that Lucas dame,” said Tubby Garms. “She’s got a face like Sitting Bull’s tomahawk.”

  Scotty Cameron was counting on his fingers. “Thirteen!” he said glumly. “We’ll probably one by one be murdered in our beds.” He turned out to be the pessimist of all time. If you announced casually that the sun would come up as usual tomorrow, Scotty would express doubt.

  “What about the nurses?” Lewis said.

  “Both Democrats,” Bill said with a straight face. Then he burst out laughing as Lewis looked up like a hound, suddenly on the scent. He was a good Vermont Republican, and Bill was always ribbing him on his politics. He had much too much ammunition for Lew.

  “There’s the whole thing,” I told them. “Bradley would like it kept quiet for a few hours. He hopes to get to the bottom of it without having to throw a scare into everyone.”

  “He sounds like a politician,” Bill said.

  “How so?”

  “Politicians always work on the theory that the people can’t stand the truth. It’s a fallacy. About the only thing they couldn’t stand would be the truth about the politicians.”

  I grinned at him.

  “Bradley strikes me as a pretty competent guy,” I said.

  “Maybe. But I think it’s a mistake to hide anything from the gang.”

  “How do you think they’ll react when they hear there’s a murderer among them?” I asked.

  “Depends on how they hear about it,” Bill said. “Americans are funny. They’re not afraid of concrete danger. They’ll walk up to a burglar who’s armed with a gun and smack him down with a mashie niblick. But they’re like kids when it comes to rumors. Look how they’ve been sold on the bugaboo of labor! They think it’s some kind of a two-headed, fire-breathing communist monster. They forget that labor is the guy next door, cut out of the same piece of cloth.”

  “Come down off the soapbox,” I said. “Wouldn’t you say poison was pretty tangible?”

  “Is it, Chris?” Bill said. “Can you find it? Can you isolate it? Can you put your hands on it? If you do find it, can you be sure there isn’t more somewhere else? Maybe it’s a little tube of stuff you can throw over the rail. Is the danger done then, Chris? There may be a dozen more tubes, in someone’s pocket, in a mattress, behind a piece of paneling, in a lifeboat. And it may turn up in your next plate of soup. What are you going to do? Tear the ship apart piece by piece in a hunt for it? Strip everyone and burn their clothes?”

  “We could take turns watching the cook as he fixes the food,” McCoy suggested.

  The end of Bill’s cigarette glowed red. “Which one of us will you trust, Ernest, when you’re off duty? And will I trust you?”

  “That’s a hell of a thing to say, Bill!” McCoy was indignant.

  “I’m not being personal,” Bill said. “But think it over. These poisoning attempts are just sound effects for the main show.”

  “What do you mean, the main show?” Lewis asked.

  “We’ve got a job to do. Somebody would like to prevent it — sabotage it. I think things like this will keep on happening till Bradley gets his man or men, or until we’re all three hundred of us in three hundred padded cells. There are other ways besides poison. Something could go wrong with the ship; an open porthole might signal a Jap sub or a bomber; a fire might … ”

  “Shut up, Bill,” Joe Adams said. “He might just try to scare us to death!”

  Bill laughed. “He might at that! You got ideas on how to handle this, Joe?”

  Big Joe flexed his fists again. “I have if I could get my hands on the louse,” he said.

  “Well, look around and take your pick,” Bill said.

  “You shouldn’t talk that way, Bill,” said Ed Winthrop gravely. He took off his spectacles and polished them with a blue handkerchief. “All of us except Mr. Wells have worked together with Jed Quartermayne. We’re all good workmen. We volunteered for this job with just one thing in mind: to keep our subs in shape to smack hell out of the enemy. We’ve all got a clean record.” He looked at me apologetically. “I don’t mean to say I distrust you, Mr. Wells. I don’t. But we don’t know you like we know each other.”

  “That’s all right, Ed,” I said.

  “This war wasn’t thought up yesterday, Ed,” Bill said. “A man’s record might be clean for twenty years, and he could have been waiting all that time … for this.”

  “Bill’s right,” said Scotty Cameron. “There’s not one of us to be taken on faith, from Cleave on down.”

  I saw them look around at each other uneasily. It had started — the thing that was to tear us inside out for weeks. Suspicion, doubt, uncertainty, and plain unvarnished fear. We all began to understand it right then. It didn’t matter in the long run whether Alec Walker lived or died. The attack had been made, and now the brew was on the boil.

  A seaman stuck his head in the library door. “Mr. Regan? Lieutenant Bradley’d like to see you. The rest of you’re to wait here till he’s had a chance to talk to you.”

  Bill stood up, dropped his cigarette on the floor and stepped on it. “Well, here we go, playing cops and robbers,” he said. At the door he paused and looked back at me, grinning. “I’ll lay eight to one I can tell you what Bradley’s first question will be: what was I doing hanging around in the passage outside the sick-bay when you sent me for him.”

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll bite. What were you doing there?”

  “You’ll be sore, Chris,” he said. “You see, I met the James girl when I came aboard yesterday. I’m a normal male, with normal male impulses. I thought I’d try to make a little time before someone beat me to it. But you certainly break fast from the barrier, Chris.”

  “I’m a strong finisher, too,” I said.

  III

  I guess there isn’t any one of you who hasn’t got some inkling of what it’s like not to get information on a critical subject. We all went through it after Pearl Harbor, remember? How much damage had been done? Had our navy really been put out of action for good? Had there been treachery in high places? Were we beaten before we’d even started?

  Something like that went on in the Ship’s library for the next couple of hours. Bill didn’t come back. But after a while the seaman returned and said Lew Lewis was wanted. They went out like that, one by one. You could see the growing strain on the faces of those who were left.

  I was impressed by the eagerness with which the leadermen whitewashed each other. It couldn’t be one of them. Hell, they knew each other inside out. It couldn’t be Jed Quartermayne — the Jed stood for the old New England name of Jedediah. He’d been like a father to all of them. His work was his life. Cleave was a navy officer, dedicated to the service of his country. Treachery from him was unthinkable. There they stopped, leaving Bradley and me and the two nurses. I didn’t blame them. I was doing my own tidy job of exonerating. I knew it wasn’t me. I had developed a blind faith in Bradley. And it couldn’t be Jess.

  I remember sitting there in the library, with only Ed Winthrop and the dour Cameron left, each of us withdrawn into our own speculation. I was thinking strictly in terms of myself. It’s strange how long it takes to get you out of that habit. You remember Lou Nova, who was going to knock out Joe Louis with what he called a “cosmic punch”? I thought, that’s what happened to me. A cosmic punch, right in the solar plexus. Here I was, wondering if, when we got home, Jess might not like the guest room in my house for th
e master bedroom. There was more sunlight and closet space!

  I looked up, with an impulse to let someone in on my cockeyed thoughts, and found I was alone with Ed Winthrop. He was staring at me through his steel-rimmed glasses. We both smiled; tight, self-conscious smiles.

  “Look, Ed,” I said. “Eighteen hours ago I woke up a discontented Hollywood script writer. I’d never heard of anyone in this outfit. I’d never heard of this expedition. I was called down to headquarters, assigned, and was never out of Bradley’s sight till I got aboard this ship. Whoever’s responsible for this had to make plans; had to come prepared. So help me, I didn’t have the chance.”

  He nodded, slowly, down and up. “It’s like an endless belt,” he said. “You figure on one guy, and then you know it couldn’t be him, and you go on to the next, and pretty soon you’re right back at the man you started with.”

  “It stinks,” I said.

  “Mr. Wells, we got to get him,” he said earnestly.

  “I know.”

  “Take Scotty,” he said. “I’ve known him all my life. We’re sharing a cabin here. I’d trust him with my life, with my money.” He hesitated, and a warm loyalty crept into his voice. “I’d trust him with my tools,” he said, and I knew that was the ultimate. “Turning against your friends and your country must be like a disease, Mr. Wells.”

  “The world is suffering from a plague of sick men,” I said.

  He nodded again. “So if it happened to be your best friend, you’d just have to figure that the sickness got him, and that he’d be better off … out of the way.”

  “Look, Ed, do you suspect Scotty?”

  “Good Lord, no!” he said, startled. “But it has to be somebody’s friend. It has to be somebody who’s trusted. And we’ll keep guessing and hoping. Maybe that’ll turn into kind of a sickness, too.”

  “Let’s hope Bradley settles things before it gets chronic,” I said.

  Then the seaman came and took Ed away, and I was alone.

  It had been a full, exhausting day. I dozed off in my chair. I woke with Bradley gently shaking my shoulder. He looked as tired as I felt.