Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938
- Автор: Трит Лоуренс, Вулрич Корнелл
- Год: 1938
- Язык: английский
- Год: The Red Star News Company
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938». Краткое содержание книги:
Young Carver looked thinner. He said, in a strained voice: “I will, if you don’t. I’m tired waiting. I want to see the dirty—”
“Hey.” Pherson rose from his chair. “You’re letting this thing get you off the road, boy.” He came around the desk. “You look like you’re half nuts.”
“I can’t stand it. I keep seeing her — dead like that — and that damned skunk going free. I’ll kill him myself!”
He turned and slammed out the door...
He returned two weeks later. Pherson said: “We’re not supposed to let this out, but we think we’ve got a line on him. We’ve about made certain that he got out of here on a train. We got the ticket from the railroad company and the punch mark on it gave us the conductor. We ran him down, and he got us the trainman and the Pullman porter. The porter gave us a practical identification. The guy had tried to change himself but he didn’t know how, and he had a face that was hard to hide. Only thing was, he had a tattoo, a heart with an arrow through it, on his right hand, on that web of flesh there between the thumb and forefinger. The porter swears that wasn’t there.
“Now he might have had it taken off. People that knew him said the lobe of his ear was out a good ways from his cheek and looked unnatural. The porter noticed that. And a wide bridged nose, pushed some over to the right. Same height, same build, about the same weight. And the right time.”
“Where did the train take him to?”
“Indiana. It was going into Chicago, but he got off at Goshen. Indiana. We’d swear to it that he’s in that state yet.”
“Then why don’t you go out there? Run him down, damn it, drag him back here.”
Pherson was patient. “We’re checking the district through the mail, the telegraph and telephone companies, and using the State license bureaus — see, if he gets a driver’s license, say, we’ve got him — and permit bureaus, and the water companies. And the gas and light companies and tax bureaus and school systems — in case he tries to go on someplace and get his degree, and we’re checking business mailing lists and directories and fraternal and labor organizations and we’ve sent a circular to five hundred laundry and dry cleaning establishments. We’re watching automobiles agencies, and any kind of transportation stations, and welfare offices. He won’t be able to raise a finger without running into one or the other of those, and when he does, he’s nabbed. Police out there are working with us. Well get him.”
John Carver’s fists knotted.
“You can’t watch all those things, sitting here in an office! You know it; you’re just hoping for luck. Because the case is out of the newspapers by now you’ve given it up. He’s out there, probably living like anyone else, and—”
“I feel sorry for you,” said Pherson, “but you’re not doing anything but take up my time.”
“I’ll get out. I just want to tell you that I’m quitting my job. I’m an electrical engineer, I’ve worked seven years at it, and now I... it... I—”
Pherson stepped to the door and called a couple of cops. “Take him to the Psycopathic Hospital for observation.”
Young Carver was leaning against the wall trying to talk, unable to form the words.
Pherson went out with them, stepped in the inspector’s office to tell him about it. “He’s cracked clear up. Probably been working his brain too hard, anyhow; they said he was a smart guy and headed places. Be padded places now.”
They examined John Carver’s sanity for three clays and turned him loose, with a warning to get a good rest and forget about avenging his sister, if he wanted to keep his mind.
He quit his job and left town the next week He hung around Gary, Indiana, for three weeks before he got a job in the sheet hot-mill at Crowning Steel.
He went in standing turns as a spellhand. It was summer weather, and John Carver had never done hard work before. They put a pair of three-foot tongs in his hand and told him to grab a red-hot sheet of metal and drag it out of the rolls and pile it.
He worked in a daze of raw heat, a thicker, more stunning daze than the thing which had held his mind since that morning he had seen his sister. Water blisters burned on his face and his feet; sweat soaked him. There was nothing in the place but heat and noise and men and sweat.
Someone showed him the salt pills to take if he wanted to keep on his feet, keep from going all in with the heat. He saw one man fall over that first day with the cramps; a big, middle-aged Kentuckian. He’d have made two of John Carver. They carried him out on a stretcher.
The next day it was a different job, and the next another one. He worked odd hours; sometimes days, sometimes nights. When he wasn’t working he got books from the public library, took them to his furnished room, studied them. Books on criminal investigation.
On his eighth day in the mill, they gave him a turn spellhanding the pair-heater on a handmill. Every third heat — every forty-five minutes or so — it was his job to pull the hot bars from the pair furnace, drag them to the rolls, help the rougher swing them onto the rails. He was all in after the second heat.
He was back at work after the next turn, and they sent him down to drag scale iron — iron that was so hot it was next to melting. The man he worked with wore an asbestos mask over his face, like a rougher, and had a handkerchief tied around his neck. John Carver didn’t pay conscious attention to the heat. He felt it, but it didn’t reach his mind; nothing did but the purpose with which it was filled.
He worked fast, with a hardness that was beyond his size. He didn’t back away when the yellow sheet of iron rolled out of the leveller; he stood there waiting on it, bit his tongs into it viciously, dragged it as though it was cold. His face was burned until bright red spots stood on his cheek bones like rouge.
He was all in when the turn was half over.
He went back again, into the heat that hit a man in the face like a solid thing when he’ walked into the mill doors; into the heat that took your breath out, smothered you, dimmed your sight, made your nose run as though you were crying; he worked with his mouth wide open, gasping like a fish, blinking his eyes trying to see, each fifteen minute heat seeming like a week.
He couldn’t take the hard work — not and do what he wanted to. He wanted to see the men that worked in there; so far he hadn’t said ten words to anyone; his mind wouldn’t let him waste words on a man who wasn’t thick built, with stiff black hair and bat ears and a thick bridged nose, pushed to the right.
He’d seen the overhead cranes, which ran up and down the mill, picked up finished iron from the mills and carried it to the pack shears, carried the sheared iron from there back to the annealing floor. He saw the cranemen having long intervals of rest, sitting around on benches, talking with the others.
He went back to the office, to the hot-mill superintendent, told him what he could do and asked for a job on the electrical gang.
The superintendent looked at the references he gave him. “What the hell is a guy like you doing as a spellhand?”
“I wanted the experience.”
“You could get a crack at something better than craneman.”
John Carver’s eyes exploded. He started to say something, and the look on his burned face startled the boss. But he held it back, said after a minute: “I want to start in from there.”
“Well, that’s your business. We’ll see.” He looked after Carver as he went out, his heavy, belting soled shoes clumping on the cement floor. The guy had looked for a minute as though he was going off his nut. He looked half batty anyhow. The superintendent shrugged. Maybe an electrical genius.