The Second Mystery Novel by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery, detective, hardboiled, Crime, police
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2015-12-08T05:00:00+00:00

BONES DON’T LIE, by Curtiss T. Gardner

Originally published in 1946.

DEDICATION

For Mildred

Chapter One

The sprawling gray mills, wrapped in their eternal pall of smoke, were a lift to young Ray Locke’s spirits as he first saw them from the train window in the early morning. His spirits needed a lift. It had been a long year since he last saw the Ironton plant of American-Consolidated Steel, an endless year.

Nervousness came later, after he had made the half-hour trolley ride from the city, and stood before the plant’s Administration Building. Then it was only nervousness based upon the almost hopeless task confronting him.

Before he walked up the granite steps, he plucked from his vest pocket the pair of large bone dice he always carried. They had belonged to his father and he was strongly attached to them. He rattled them now in his loosely cupped hand, opened his fingers, palm flat.

Ray grimaced. “Snake eyes! Not so good.”

But the dice seemed to be wrong—at first—when he was admitted to the office of the General Superintendent with no more than a ten-minute wait. He would not have been too surprised if he hadn’t been admitted.

Leonard Tracy, czar of the Ironton Works, sat behind the huge, custom-built, circular desk in his elaborate private office. He was a tall, slender man of early middle age, and the double-breasted, blue pinstripe suit with knife-edge creases gave him a dapper look. Tracy was distinctly handsome. He had, in fact, such a distinguished appearance that he might have modeled for a whisky ad—except for the scar.

The scar began on Tracy’s right cheek, just above the jawbone, and ran down his throat to disappear beneath his collar. It was a dull brick-red, with a brownish tinge like blood recently dried. In the process of healing, livid white scar tissue had drawn and puckered hideously, resulting in a repulsive disfigurement.

Tracy got up as Ray entered, coming around the curve of his desk with hand outstretched. “Ray Locke! Glad to see you, boy!” He waved to a deep chair upholstered in blue leather. “Sit down, Ray. How are you?”

Ray eased himself into the comfortable seat. Tracy’s cordiality seemed an excellent beginning. Better than he had anticipated. But then Tracy, he remembered, was always pleasant, the type of man who had carefully studied the art of saying, “no,” without arousing resentment.

“You’re looking well,” Tracy went on. The usual stock phrases cloaked a crack salesman’s trick of putting his own personality across by raising the other fellow’s ego.

Ray Locke had taken a good look at himself in the mirror of the train washroom. He was not looking well. The dead pallor of his skin made his black eyes seem too large for his narrow, rather pointed face, as if he were recovering from a serious illness.

The bad haircut, too short, didn’t help, either. And he’d noticed scattered threads of gray among the black. They hadn’t been there a year ago, any of them. He was much too young for gray hairs.

“I’m fine,” he said, unable to keep his eyes from the scar.

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