The Brass Chills

by Hugh Pentecost

  She didn’t answer. I felt insanely happy suddenly. So she’d been turning me aside, not because she didn’t like me, but because she did. Then Wasdell brought me back to earth with a thud.

  “You have testified that on the night that Mr. Quartermayne was murdered you were in your cabin with Mr. Regan. That he was with you for nearly an hour.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Surely, if that’s the case, you must have concluded that Mr. Regan was innocent.”

  “I don’t see that that follows,” Jess said.

  “But surely you wouldn’t — er — spend time alone with a man you still thought might be guilty of murder?”

  “I’m afraid,” Jess said, very quietly, “that you’re jumping at conclusions, Commander. There was nothing romantic about Mr. Regan’s presence in my cabin.”

  “You mean Regan wasn’t making love to you?”

  “I mean exactly that, Commander!”

  “Jess!” I found myself on my feet, starting across the room toward her. Bradley’s hand on my shoulder checked me. I sat down again. I was shaking like a leaf. She must have heard me speak but she didn’t turn her head.

  “What was Mr. Regan doing there?” Wasdell asked.

  “We … we were talking about Mr. Wells,” Jess said. “I … I was half crazy trying to figure things. You see, nobody knew much about him. He could have done it. He might-have come from the doctor’s office that night I met him, instead of from the captain’s cabin, as he said. He’d tried to get me to go somewhere with him where there was a light … where he could see what I looked like. It all sounded perfectly innocent, but he might have been trying to get me somewhere away from the buzzer so that I couldn’t have heard Dr. Walker when he rang for me.”

  “What had Regan to do with that?”

  “Mr. Regan bunked with Chris … Mr. Wells. They were together a great deal. I wanted to know what Mr. Regan thought.”

  “And what did he think?”

  “I told her,” said Bill in a loud voice, “that she was nuts! Chris had no more to do with attempted murder than Shirley Temple!”

  “Quiet, please, Mr. Regan,” Wasdell said. “Your turn will come.”

  “The hell with it!” Bill said. “You’re all playing the murderer’s game; insinuating, poking, prying. A babe in the woods could see that Miss James and Chris are in love with each other, Of course she wanted to know what I thought. She was going loopy because she was convinced it had to Chris or me. Well, I told her! It God damn well wasn’t either of us, and it still isn’t.”

  “Silence, Mr. Regan!” Cleave thundered.

  Bill ignored him. “Last night you were ready to hang me. Tonight you’re trying to hang Chris. Tomorrow the murderer will tease you into suspecting someone else, and you’ll go hell-for-leather after him.”

  “I’ll have you taken out of here if you don’t keep quiet!” Cleave said.

  Bill subsided, but some of the machinelike precision of the hearing was gone. Wasdell repeated his question to Jess.

  “Mr. Regan told me what he has just told you,” she said.

  “And did you believe him?”

  “I wanted to,” Jess said. “I wanted to, desperately.”

  “But you didn’t?”

  “I had no chance to think about it,” Jess said. “I felt like a heel for suspecting Chris. I was going to talk to him about it, and then we landed, and Mr. Quartermayne was found dead. You believed Mr. Regan was guilty, and once more I didn’t know what to believe. You see, I knew Mr. Regan was innocent because he’d been with me. He couldn’t have dropped those cigarettes outside the door. So … well, there it was, narrowed down to Chris again.”

  “Thank you, Miss James.”

  I didn’t care that her evidence hadn’t helped me. I didn’t care about anything except that she’d let me know that it made a difference to her. The horrible notions I’d had about Bill’s session in her cabin were exploded into a thousand pieces. And what about my notion that Bill himself was the murderer? Wouldn’t he have done his level best to throw suspicion on me if that were so?

  I was confused, but I felt ridiculously, light-headedly happy.

  V

  Bradley had almost no questions for Jess. He merely stressed the point that she had no concrete evidence that would implicate me. Her suspicion of me was solely the result of her attempt to reason the thing out.

  Then Wasdell called big Joe Adams. He began by questioning Joe about the night Quartermayne died. The net result was that all the leadermen were accounted for during the evening excepting Bill Regan. There was a loophole here, and Wasdell seemed to know it. The point was that there was no way of telling when the poison had been put in Quartermayne’s medicine. No one could be certain when he’d last taken it; that is to say, before the dose that had killed him. Wasdell himself made this clear, which was more of a break than I’d have gotten from a hard-boiled district attorney.

  Then he got down to the evening before.

  “I understand the leadermen held a meeting last night.”

  “That’s right,” Big Joe said. He sat there, massaging one fist in the palm of the other hand.

  “Why?”

  “We weren’t satisfied,” Joe said, “You weren’t satisfied with what?”

  “The way things were being handled,” Joe said. “It was pretty clear to us Bill Regan was guilty.”

  “A flexible mind,” said Bill, and Cleave glowered at him.

  Big Joe just kept massaging his fist. “We got a job to do,” he said. “We don’t care about technicalities of evidence. Hell, I might be next, or Ed Winthrop, or almost anyone. We didn’t aim to sit around and wait for Lieutenant Bradley to dig up something to satisfy a lawyer. We’re fighting a war, and one of the enemy is right here at our base. You don’t need a court order to knock off the enemy.”

  “What happened at the meeting?” Wasdell asked.

  “We decided to take a hand in things ourselves.”

  “What sort of a hand?”

  “We figured this way,” Joe said. “We figured Regan had found a way to get rid of the poison before he was searched. He might have dropped it almost anywhere. It wouldn’t be noticed in the dark. Then, after he was searched he’d get it back and keep it close to him. That’s how it looked to us, so we decided to search his shack and his belongings.”

  “Was it a unanimous decision?” Wasdell asked.

  “Well … ”

  “I was against it, sir,” Ed Winthrop said. “Leave riveting to riveters and police work to policemen. That’s the way I saw it. But the others were for it, so I went with them.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Winthrop. So you all went to the shack, Adams?”

  “What happened then?”

  “Regan and Mr. Wells were there. We told them why we’d come. Mr. Wells went out. We didn’t think anything about it then because he wasn’t on our mind. But afterward … ”

  “Mr. Wells came to see me, Commander,” Bradley interrupted. “He reported that the leadermen were searching Regan’s belongings.”

  Wasdell nodded. “Go ahead, Adams.”

  “Well, we searched. We turned the place upside-down, but we didn’t find anything. Then Cameron, who was going through one of the closets, felt something in the lining of Mr. Wells white uniform coat. We slit the lining, and there was the page out of Dr. Walker’s medical book that the murderer had stolen. Well, that changed things.”

  “So you went to look for Mr. Wells?”

  “You’re damn right we went to look for him. But we forgot about Regan. He found Wells before we did and warned him, and Wells took to the woods. Maybe in a court of law you got to have his signature on a confession, but running away was proof enough for me and for the rest of the boys.”

  “Thank you, Adams.”

  I heard a match strike, and then the aromatic smell of Bradley’s pipe. “I’d like to ask you something, Adams,” he said.

  “Shoot,” Adams said. “And don’t get me wrong, Lieut
enant. We got nothing against you personally. It’s just that you got certain methods we don’t think fit this kind of situation.”

  “You want action,” Bradley suggested.

  “You’re damn right.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Bradley softly, “whether it happens to be the right action or not?”

  “I didn’t say that, I … ”

  “But you were ready to string Wells up to the nearest palm tree if you caught him.”

  “He killed Jed Quartermayne,” Adams said grimly. “If I had my way, I’d settle with him all by myself, and I wouldn’t need a rope or a tree.”

  “And you contend that he attempted to kill Dr. Walker?”

  “That page out of the book is proof of it, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Bradley said. “Did you find any evidence to prove Mr. Wells put that page in the lining of his coat?”

  “It was there, wasn’t it?”

  “But someone else could have put it there. Or are you familiar with Mr. Well’s hemstitching? I assume the lining had been resewed.”

  “Why would anyone else put it there?”

  “Two nights ago you were convinced Regan was guilty. I tried to tell you someone had framed him with those cigarette butts. You didn’t believe me. I take it you do think he was framed now?”

  “He must have been.”

  “Then how do you know Mr. Wells wasn’t framed?”

  Big Joe was getting red in the face. “He ran away, didn’t he?”

  “You were going to string him up!” Bradley said. “Mercy, I’d have run myself.”

  “If he wasn’t guilty, he should have stood his ground and faced us.”

  “They used to try witches in Salem that way,” Bradley said dryly. “Hold ’em under water for fifteen minutes, and if they didn’t die they were innocent. Hanging would be the same sort of treatment, I suppose. A dead man has very little chance of proving his innocence.” Then Bradley’s voice rose, and a kind of fierce anger came into it. “You men are guilty, every last one of you, of a kind of savagery I wouldn’t have believed possible in decent Americans. You’ve lost your heads like a bunch of old women. If you were under Navy discipline, and I was your commanding offer, every damned one of you would be in irons. You aren’t guilty of murder, but only because Mr. Wells ran!”

  “Bravo!” murmured Bill Regan.

  Bradley turned to Cleave. “I move, sir, that the case against Mr. Wells be dropped. There has not been one shred of evidence presented, except that he ran in the face of a hysterical mob of old women. The page from the medical book was found in his coat, but cigarettes of a certain brand were found outside Quartermayne’s door. Possession of poison has not been proved. He had opportunity, but so had everyone on the Ship quartered on A deck. We’ve already seen that the murderer is trying to frame someone. Regan and Wells can’t both be guilty. It’s my contention that neither of them is.”

  “I’m against it,” Adams said.

  “Why don’t you draw lots, Joe, and just hang anybody who happens to get the short straw?” Bill said.

  “I’ve had enough out of you, Regan,” Big Joe said. “Just because the heat happens to be off you.”

  “Maybe you’ll change your mind tomorrow,” Bill said.

  Cleave brought his fist down on the table. “Silence!” he ordered. He and Wasdell put their heads together in a whispered conference. Then Cleave said: “We’ll recess this hearing for a few moments. Guard! Please take Mr. Wells outside while we confer informally about this.”

  O’Rourk’s man, who’d been guarding the door, came over and took me by the arm. I had been staring at Jess, trying to get her to look at me, but she didn’t. As I was led past Bradley he patted my shoulder.

  “Things not looking too bad, kid,” he said. “I told you you ought to have a talk with that gal.”

  “Nobody seems to have stuck his neck out, though,” I said.

  He gave me a funny look. “Think not?” he said.

  VI

  The guard and I went out along the path about thirty yards from the building. I sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. The guard promptly ordered me to put it out.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I forgot.”

  “Can’t run any risks,” he said.

  I asked him his name, and he said it was Butterfield. I asked him how long he’d been stationed here.

  “ ’Bout a month,” he said. “I was at Manila, see. They took us out of there just three days before those sons of bitches bombed hell out of it. We ain’t even had a smell of a Jap around here, worse luck.”

  “Give ’em time,” I said. “We’re sitting on dynamite.”

  “I hope they come,” Butterfield said. “I had some buddies that took it over there on Bataan. The score ain’t nearly even, Mr. Wells. Who did it, Mr. Wells?”

  “Did what?”

  “Put that piece of paper in the linen’ of your uniform coat?”

  “Don’t you think I did?”

  Butterfield spat. He had substituted eating tobacco for cigarettes. “You never been in the Army or Navy or Marines, have you?”

  “No.”

  “I have. Fifteen years. I’ve seen all kinds of officers in my day, Mr. Wells. They come all shapes and sizes and kinds. There’s stuffed shirts, and there’s career men, and guys who don’t think of nothin’ but keepin’ buttons shiny. Discipline’s all right; you got to have it. But some guys make a religion of it. Some guys are hard-boiled but square; they won’t give an inch, but they play it on the level. Then there’s regular guys. Guys who know their place, and don’t step out of it, but you’d follow ’em anywhere. You never say to yourself you’re smarter than he is. You know he’s comin’ down the home stretch while you’re still breakin’ from the barrier, when it comes to thinkin’?”

  “I suppose that’s true,” I said. “But what’s it got to do with me?”

  “I was thinkin’ about this Bradley,” he said. “You get so you can feel a good officer in your bones before he ever opens his trap to give an order. That’s the way I figure this Bradley. He don’t think you done it. That’s good enough for me.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Or maybe I ought to thank Bradley.”

  “That Adams is a screwball,” Butterfield said. “He don’t use his head, tryin’ to pin it on one guy one day and on another the next. He just keeps everybody nervous that way. Maybe he’s got a reason. Maybe he wants to see somebody get it.”

  “Joe? You mean he’s the poisoner?”

  “He’s working awful hard, at this, ain’t he? He ain’t the head man, but he keeps takin’ the play away from the head man. What about the babe? Is it like this Regan said? Are you and her cookin’ with gas?”

  “I don’t know about her,” I said.

  “Maybe they ought to of sent you home,” Butterfield said. “Babes are worse’n poison. You know why I never had these two front teeth of mine fixed?”

  “Why?”

  “So I’ll remember every time I look in my shavin’ mirror what a sap I was over a babe in Manila two years ago.”

  “What happened to the teeth?”

  “Husband,” said Butterfield, and spat again. “You can’t put your heart into beatin’ up a babe’s husband. He’s got rights, ain’t he? I’m fightin’ a strictly defensive action, and he clips me.”

  Before he could give me the rest of the gory details a low whistle came from the direction of the building.

  “That’s O’Rourk,” Butterfield said. “We’re wanted.”

  We went back into Cleave’s office. Everybody was sitting just the way they had been when I left, except that Jess and Ellen Lucas were gone. My heart sank. It looked as if I wouldn’t get a chance to talk to Jess tonight.

  Bradley began to speak as soon as I was seated. “I have withheld one point during this hearing, Captain. I had a reason. I hoped that by not clearing Mr. Wells at once, the man we’re really after might show his hand. I’m satisfied the maneuver was not entirely without succ
ess. I would now like to make that point on Mr. Wells’s behalf.”

  “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  “It is simply this,” Bradley said. “Unless you believe there is more than one person operating against us — and I do not — Mr. Wells has to be innocent. He didn’t come aboard the Ship until hours after the first poisoning took place. He couldn’t possibly have had any direct hand in that.” He looked around the room, and you could hear a sort of sigh of escaping breath. “I repeat my request, sir, that the case against Mr. Wells be dropped.”

  ***

  There wasn’t anything to it after that. Alec gave me a broad grin as he and Cleave and Ed Winthrop and Wasdell and O’Rourk went into a brief huddle. Then Cleave came around from behind the table and held out his hand to me.

  “I’m glad to clear you of the charges, Mr. Wells. I wish Bradley had let me in on this before we went through this rigmarole.”

  “One of his decoys, sir,” I said. “I can’t say I see just what he gained by it, but he seems satisfied.”

  “It may have its benefits,” Cleave said. “The men should trust you implicitly now. I hope you’ll be able to turn that confidence to some advantage. We’re still in a hell of a spot.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  Bradley, Alec, Bill, and I left the hearing together. As soon as we were out of earshot of the others, I suggested to Bradley that he give.

  “Give?” he said.

  “You hinted that you got some kind of a lead out of that three-ring circus.”

  “Strictly propaganda,” Bradley said. He sounded unhappy. “I hoped someone would make a slip, Chris. They didn’t. I was just trying to give the guy the impression he still had something to worry about.”

  “You’d better watch your step,” Alec said, “or he may try his stuff on you.”

  “I wish to God he would,” Bradley said. “I’ve been waiting for it, hopefully!”

  Bill and I left them at the entrance to our shack. We went in and Bill lit the light. I just stood there with my hands hanging down.

  “I guess it’s my turn to let you take a poke at me,” I said.

  “I ought to,” he said. Then he burst out laughing and clapped me on the shoulder. “I saw your face when Jess testified. It was as good as a Christmas present, chum.”