The Brass Chills Read online

  “Well?” I said.

  He shook his head. “Plenty of facts,” he said. “I’d trade ’em all for one substantial clue.”

  “Fingerprints?” I knew that, when I’d left him, he’d been about to give the office a going-over.

  “Three sets,” he said. “Walker’s on the empty can, the glass, and the refrigerator. Miss James’s and Miss Lucas’s on the refrigerator. All negative. They all had reasons for leaving those prints. It would have been stranger if they hadn’t been there. Anyhow, the poisoner would have been feeble-minded not to wear gloves. What about you, Chris? Any ideas from talking to the men?”

  “They’re a swell bunch,” I said.

  He sighed. “Some of the swellest people I’ve ever met died in the electric chair.”

  Our conversation was interrupted by a sudden ringing of alarm bells all over the Ship. I had a vision of a torpedo about to crash into us amidships, but I swear I was too tired to care much.

  “Boat drill,” Bradley said. “You’d better get some sleep when this is over, Chris. You’re out on your feet.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said.

  I stumbled out on deck. The weather was foul, but the rain, dousing my head and face, freshened me up for the time being. There was enough of a sea so that you had to hang onto things. I was directed to a lifeboat and stood there in the gray dawn, getting soaked to the skin, while the ship’s officers gave us instructions to be followed in case of a torpedoing or an air attack. It still seemed to me little like something thought up by Cecil B. DeMille. I looked for Jess, but her station was on the port side. I’d have to see if I couldn’t change that. If anything happened, I wanted to be able to look out for her.

  The Ship was bigger than I’d imagined. She displaced about 12,000 tons, I learned, and had been used on a passenger-freight run between Calcutta, the Indies, and Frisco. These waters weren’t strange to her or to Captain Jorgensen. All her bright trim had been sloshed over with a muddy gray paint. She had a way of wallowing in a sea instead of riding it. I figured she must be loaded to capacity.

  After the drill I went back to my cabin. All I could think of was getting out of my wet clothes and into my bunk. Bill came in as I was rubbing myself down with a towel. He asked me if Bradley had made any headway. I told him I didn’t know, didn’t care, and if a Jap sub took a pot shot at us please not to disturb me.

  “Better get some breakfast first,” Bill said. “There’s no room service on this tub.”

  I was hungry. I decided I could wait long enough to get some scrambled egg powder under my belt. While I wriggled into a dry shirt Bill said:

  “The news is out. Every man in the work crew knows that somebody tried to poison Walker.”

  I muttered something about its being a help since we could check back and find out who started it.

  “You live in a dream world, Chris,” Bill said. “Did you ever try to check the source of a rumor?”

  We went to the dining saloon together. The Ship had been built to carry about two hundred passengers, and with crowding nearly all the work crew was able to sit down to eat at the same time. I found my place at a table with the leadermen. The saloon was jammed, but it was quieter than you’d have expected it to be with three hundred hungry men waiting to be fed.

  My place was at the head of the table, with big Joe Adams on my right and McCoy on my left. As I sat down there was a muttered “good morning” from the boys. Then I noticed that everyone at the table, including Bill, was watching me. I saw why.

  The breakfast fruit was canned plums; three for each man, swimming in a dish of pinkish juice. No one had started to eat.

  “How’s the doctor, Mr. Wells?” McCoy asked. “He’s going to be all right,” I said. I pulled the dish of plums toward me. The whole dining saloon grew quieter. I hate to admit it, but it hit me too, right smack where I lived. Bradley was certain the food wasn’t poisoned in the cans, but just the same I didn’t want to eat those plums. You’re one hell of a morale builder, chum, I thought.

  “We used to get these every Friday night for dessert when I was in prep school,” I said.

  Nobody seemed to find that interesting. They were watching.

  “Friday was steak day, too,” I said. “It was pretty smart of the management because twenty-five per cent of the boys were Catholic and couldn’t eat steak on Friday. I used to trade my plums for an extra piece of meat.”

  “Management is always smart that way,” Bill said. He wasn’t eating either.

  Well, I had to face it. I carefully bisected a plum and removed the pit to my saucer. Then I ate it. Did I imagine it, or was there a curious fiat, tinny taste? I finished them all three in a hurry. When 1 pushed my empty plate away you could feel the whole room relax. A few of the men even picked up their spoons, but most of them waited for ham and eggs.

  Bill said afterward: “What an actor, Chris! You looked as if you were eating boiled thistles.”

  I lived through breakfast without suffering any sudden collapse. Then I went back to my cabin and crawled into my bunk. I didn’t bother to take off my clothes.

  When I woke, hours later, my life preserver, which I’d forgotten, was folded neatly in the bunk beside me.

  A good guy, Bill Regan.

  IV

  If we were ever convoyed on that trip, I can’t vouch for it. For three days it rained, and convoying vessels would have been invisible unless they’d come within seventy-five or a hundred yards of us. Under normal conditions this might have been a cause of uneasiness. But conditions weren’t normal. They weren’t normal at all.

  We were a tiny community, isolated on a slate-gray ship, plowing through slate-gray clouds and mist. We were committed to an objective, the Island, and there was no turning back. At the very center of each one of us suspicion gnawed. When we walked the deck, desperate for a little fresh air, we found ourselves looking back over our shoulders. In the library we’d look up from a book or magazine and find somebody staring at us … wondering.

  Our poisoner understood the refinement of psychological torture. If something more had happened immediately, it would have kept us busy, anchored to fact. Instead he made us wait, day after day, knowing that something would happen sooner or later, giving our imaginations plenty of rope. Bradley frankly admitted to failure. He was stymied. That wasn’t much help for a mass case of jitters.

  By the fifth day Alec Walker and the other poison victims were up and about. Alec’s first job was to analyze the remains of the tomato juice. I was in his office with Bradley when he reported on his findings.

  “I’ve been wondering about this as I lay in bed,” he said. “You see, I made a special study of botulism. Postgraduate work at Stanford. I thought perhaps I was hipped on the subject.”

  “And you were,” Bradley said.

  Alec shook his head, smiling. “It’s botulism, Lieutenant.”

  “Mercy, doctor, you’re a scientist and I shouldn’t argue with you,” Bradley said. “But I know something about the laws of probability.”

  “I agree with you,” said Alec. “Two different companies making that kind of mistake … ” He shrugged. “But this tomato juice is alive with the bacillus. That’s a scientific fact. How it got there is something else.”

  “It could be carried around in concentrated form?”

  “Why not? It can be isolated like any other germ.” Alec walked over to his desk and picked up a great thick book, a medical encyclopedia. “And this may interest you.” He had marked a place with a slip of paper and he opened the book to it. Bradley and I both stared, without understanding. “It’s not what’s there,” Alec said. “It’s what isn’t there.”

  The page on botulism had been torn out.

  “If I’d kicked the bucket,” Alec said dryly, “you were to have no way of knowing how to deal with this.”

  Even Alec’s knowledge of the proper treatment wasn’t too comforting. Only instant action gave the victim a chance. We couldn’t hope that the next pe
rson would be seized so conveniently near an alarm buzzer as Alec had been.

  Personally, I had something to keep my mind occupied besides the suspense of waiting for our fifth column to make another move. My job was to make friends, as against the long haul when we reached the Island. I ate at the table with the leadermen; I spent my evenings in the library where they gathered. I think I succeeded as well as anyone could have with the undercurrent of suspicion and uncertainty that existed. I found that most of them were not thinking at all about what lay ahead. They talked about their homes back in New England; their families; and, most often about the Yard. The minute the conversation veered around to the present, to our problem on the Ship, to the job that was waiting for us, the friendliness disappeared. Somebody would suggest checkers or cards. You could feel a restlessness take hold of everyone in the room.

  And there was time, plenty of time, for what had become an all-important concern of mine. Jess, of course. I hadn’t recovered from the cosmic punch. I’d argue with myself about it, when she wasn’t around for me to talk to. She was just another girl, I’d tell myself. Pretty and attractive and competent, of course, but just another girl. I didn’t really know anything about her; her tastes, whether our interests would be the same. Then I’d face it squarely and admit that none of these things mattered. Jess was the end of the world, for my money. I hadn’t felt anything like this since I’d gone through the agonies of puppy love at the age of sixteen. This couldn’t be that, because, hell, I was nearly forty, wasn’t I?

  There was one obstacle to my getting down to brass tacks with Jess. That obstacle was Bill Regan. I’d no sooner maneuver to get her alone, say on the forward deck, then Bill would saunter up and it would become a threesome. I felt possessive, and annoyed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I couldn’t take her out on a date somewhere! There wasn’t any place to go.

  It got to be a kind of a game. Bill and I never talked about it when we were alone. We’d sit in the library, discussing anything in the world but Jess. Bill would say he had to get some cigarettes from the ship’s store. The minute he was gone I’d start out on a still hunt for Jess. Half the time we’d meet, sheepishly, outside the door of the sick-bay, having approached it from different directions. Once Bill said:

  “We could toss a coin to see who leaves the field, Chris.”

  “Nothing doing,” I said.

  He sighed. “It was just an idea.”

  I had the feeling that it was only a game with him, but I couldn’t tell him what it meant to me. I remember one afternoon about ten days out I managed to get to the sick-bay without Bill. Jess wasn’t supposed to go on duty for another hour, but I had knocked on her cabin door and got no answer. I thought perhaps she and Miss Lucas had made some kind of shift in their duty periods.

  Miss Lucas was sitting at Alec’s desk filling out a report.

  “Oh it’s you!” she said, as I came in. Tubby’s description of her as looking like Sitting Bull’s tomahawk was a trifle harsh. Just a trifle. She was about forty, but for some reason I thought of her as being old enough for a maiden aunt of mine.

  “Jess here?” I asked.

  “You’ve got eyes!”

  “Even for you, angel,” I said.

  She sniffed. But as I turned to leave she called, after me. “If it matters,” she said, “you’ll find Jess on the sun deck. Probably with that communist friend of yours.”

  “Bill?”

  “I don’t know any other communists around here,” she said.

  “Thanks, Ellen,” I said.

  “Don’t thank me,” she said tartly. “It’s self-protection. I have to share a cabin with the girl. Her ideas are outrageous enough as it is, without adding Regan’s.”

  “Does she talk about him a lot?” I asked, something curling up inside my stomach.

  “She doesn’t talk about either of you. Now scat! I’m working!”

  I found Jess on the sun deck, and for a wonder she was alone. It was one of the few hot, sunny days we’d had. Jess was stretched out on a deck chair in shorts and what I believe is technically called a halter. A pair of dark glasses hid her blue eyes.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She looked around. “Oh, hello, Chris.”

  “Mind if I sit down … at least until the stampede hits us?”

  She laughed. “Help yourself.”

  I sat down on the edge of the leg rest of her chair.

  “It’s swell up here,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Cigarette?”

  “No, thanks.”

  I lit one for myself. The deck watch went slowly by. They paced the rail of the ship, twenty-four hours a day, in an endless vigil for that periscope or that dot in the sky that might spell disaster. Jess noticed him too.

  “If you shut your eyes,” she said, “you can almost persuade yourself, lying up here in the sun, that everything else in the world is a nightmare.”

  “Yes,” I said. What’s the matter with you, Wells, I thought. Where’s your flair for dialogue? You ought to be able to tell her what’s on your mind. As if she didn’t know. But I just sat there, like a bump on a log.

  “Mow much longer do you think this trip is going to last, Chris?”

  “Dunno,” I said. “If we’re heading directly for some place, we should get there soon. But we’re probably going all around the, map to make it.” Then I said, “They can drop anchor right now. This is perfect. You know you’re very lovely, Jess.”

  “Why, Mr. Wells!” she said. She always turned it off that way, laughing.

  “What do you think of Bill?” I asked her.

  “He’s swell,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “He is.”

  “You know, Chris, I had a pretty cockeyed picture of what they call ‘the worker’ before I met Bill and these others.”

  “I thought trained nurses knew all about all kinds of people,” I said.

  “I haven’t always been a nurse,” she said. “I started taking a special course about a year and a half ago. Before that it was country clubs and coming-out parties.”

  “What happened?” I asked. “Did you go broke or something?”

  “No. The way things have been, Chris, you can’t just do nothing. I thought maybe when I’d learned my job I could go to England or Russia or some place with an ambulance unit. Then we got into it, and here I am.”

  “I didn’t think much about it till Pearl Harbor,” I said. “Then it bit me too. This is a pretty swell bunch of fellows.”

  She frowned without answering. We were both thinking the same thing, I guess. There was a rat among them somewhere.

  “I wouldn’t call Bill typical,” I said.

  She laughed again. “Who’s interested in someone typical.”

  “Ouch!” I said.

  “Why, Chris, are you typical of something?”

  “Everyone in Hollywood is typed,” I said. “Everyone in Wall Street is typed.”

  “You mixed the ingredients,” she said. “I wouldn’t call you usual.”

  “I suppose you would if I got personal.”

  “These are my own eyelashes … and teeth,” she said. “What else personal do you want to know, Mr. Wells?”

  “You’ve been pushing me off like that for ten days,” I said. “Would it matter so much if I put it into words? I’m not a colorful character, Jess. I’m just an ordinary guy. I’m not even a hero. I was scared to death when they dragged me out onto this ship.”

  “Me too,” she said. “Things got unpleasantly real then, didn’t they?”

  “Jess, shut up, will you?” I said. “You can tell me to go peddle my papers when I get through, but I’ve got to say it. Not that it’ll surprise you. But that night we met on the deck, in the dark … and then when I first saw you in the passage … well, damn it, I knew then. No one else will ever measure up. I’m hooked. I feel like a clumsy, gawky kid at dancing school. I’d like to be dashing, and witty, and debonair, but I can’t.
I guess because I’ve been struck by lightning. I can’t be casual about it, Jess darling, because suddenly it’s the only thing in the world that matters. I want you to know that … ”

  “Time’s up,” said an impudent voice behind me. It was Bill Regan, grinning like an ape. “I must be slipping,” he said. “How long has this been going on?”

  My face must have looked like a boiled lobster. I didn’t know whether he’d heard what I’d been saying or not. I looked at Jess, and the black glasses hid anything that her eyes might have told me. I felt frustrated.

  “You should have hollered,” Bill said to Jess. “If I’d known you were alone with this wolf, I’d have rescued you.”

  “I’ve been having a lovely time,” Jess said. She pushed herself upright in the chair.

  “You see,” I said to Bill. “You turn up and she has to leave!”

  “Naturally,” he said. “She needed help to be saved from a fate worse than death.”

  Jess stood up. “I’ve got to relieve Lucas,” she said. “You boys take a nice brisk walk together. It’ll help your appetites for supper.”

  Bill and I watched her go.

  “She’s a great kid,” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. I could have poked him in the eye then and there with pleasure.

  V

  Then, on the thirteenth night — a fact to which Scotty Cameron called our attention later — everything happened in the space of half an hour.

  Three days had passed since my abortive attempt to tell Jess what was on my mind. I’d tried to get a moment alone with her ever since without any luck. A couple of the men were down with grippe, so she and Lucas were on duty for strict periods. They worked eight hours on and eight off. A good part of the off-time they slept. They had to eat their meals. There wasn’t very much free time. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought Jess was deliberately avoiding giving me the opportunity.

  After three days of that I was pretty nearly cuckoo. I decided I was going to corner her, and if Bill showed up I was going to put my cards on the table for his benefit too. This wasn’t kid stuff.

  Jess had the shift from noon till eight in the evening. I knew she’d eat her supper when she came off, and after about an hour she’d turn in for sleep. During that hour I was determined to say my say.