Detective Fiction Weekly. Vol. 118, No. 6, April 16, 1938

Boomer by W. E. Brandon

A man’s revenge finds its own burial ground beneath ten tons of hot steel

Her name was Jenny Carver. She was good-looking and built like a lingerie model. She had long dark hair and deep blue eyes and a soft, slender white throat.

She’d been stabbed to death with a pocket knife; a knife that must have been as sharp as a razor because her throat had been slit with it, not ripped. They knew it was a pocket knife by examining the bruised flesh around the stab wound in her breast, and by measuring the depth and size of the incision.

She’d been dumped on the sidewalk in front of her house and the milkman had been the first one to see her lying there...

Lieutenant Pherson sat behind the carved Jacobean desk in the study of the old house and looked at his notebook. “You’re John Carver?”

“Yes.”

“Her brother.”

“Yes.”

“Father and mother not living, that right?”

“Yes.”

Pherson looked up for the first time. John Carver was skinny but well built; about twenty-four, a year or so older than his sister. There was a dazed look in his eyes.

Pherson said: “This has been a hell of a thing. I want you to know that we’re not calling it quits until we get her killer. Keep your head clear and try to tell me everything you can. That’ll help us.”

“If you don’t get him,” young Carver said, “I will.”

“Leave that for us, son. Don’t go off your head.” Pherson looked at his notebook again. “You and your sister Jived here alone?”

“Yes.”

“Your father left you both pretty well fixed, didn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“So you had enough money to go around some, and so did she... I suppose you knew about everyone she ran around with.”

“Most of them.”

“And who she was with last night?”

“No. She said she had a date with some guy she’d just met. He goes to college somewhere.”

“Where’d she meet him?”

“I don’t know. While she was with a bunch of girls she knew, I think.”

“We’ll, check up on him. You don’t know any more about him? Can you give me a list of most of the men she went out with? Good. Here, write their names here... We’ll get this guy, son. We’ll have him in a week.”

John Carver looked up from his writing. “If you don’t I will.”

Pherson came back a week later. He had a snapshot of a thickly built kid, about seventeen, in a bathing suit.

“This is him,” he said. “We found out where your sister met him. At Jane Warder’s house. And this Jane Warder says she met him at her brother’s college and invited him down to this house party. And her brother says he got kicked out of school about a week ago for some trouble about a girl, so he’s the guy.”

John Carver studied the snapshot. His eyes glowed, faded. “He looks young.”

“That’s an old picture. Only one we could get. His name’s Joe Redter and he comes from a steel town in Pennsylvania. He’d been going to this college for three years when they kicked him out. Before then and during the summers since, he worked in the steel mill in his home town, so that gives us a lead. He’s twenty-two now, and that picture is five years old. The only picture of him we could get our hands on anyplace. It comes from his home town.”

John Carver was staring at the picture. “Did you check up on everyone else?”

“No one else saw her that night. It was either this guy or some screwball that was a stranger to her. And this guy’s faded now, see, so my dough’s on him.”

“Faded? You mean he‘s got clear away?”

Pherson grinned. “You don’t get clear away from a killing like this, kid. We’re checking up every place he ever lived or hung out in, and we’re checking his relatives and his friends in his hometown and the guys he worked with in the mill there. We’re getting his habits lined up, we know what he looks like and what he likes to do. He won’t get away from us, boy. Not for this.”

Young Carver’s eyes were still clouded, filled with the strange expression Pherson had noticed the first day. He said: “He won’t, all right.”

The detective slapped his shoulder brusquely. “Thought a lot of your sister, didn’t you?”

“She’s all the family I had. It’s been eight years since our parents died. She was the swellest girl in the—”

“Unwind. It’s tough, but that’s what the world’s made of, son. Some people find it out one way and some people find it out another. We’ll have that guy in a month.”

It was three weeks later when John Carver looked Pherson up at Police Headquarters. The detective spread out his hands.

“We been doing everything we can. We checked on everyone applying for passports; he didn’t go that way. The Shipping Board gave us their record of everyone going to sea on American boats in any job. Not there. Not even a likely alias. We’ve contacted a dozen steel mills in the area near his home town and are getting their cooperation. Rolling mill — that’s what he’d get into. Hot-mill, they call it. That’s what he’s always done. We’ve watched the railroads and the buses and the highways. We’ve broadcast his description over the country and put what we’ve got on file with the Criminal Record Office. He’s hiding someplace now, but we’ll get him.”

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.

He stayed at Crowning Steel for eight months as a craneman, and then quit. He went over into Ohio. He went on into Pennsylvania. He came back through Middleton, Ohio, a year later, and hired into a small mill in Indiana the next spring.

He’d changed, but his eyes remained the same; his eyes and his mind. He knew, himself, that he was insane; if being crazy meant getting off the main track. He’d been fired from one job for getting in a fight and nearly killing another millhand, and he’d seen there that his temper was keeping up with his mind. He saw how he was going, but he didn’t know how to stop. He was turning himself into a madman, but it seemed to him, subconsciously, that his way out was along the road he was going. He couldn’t stop, give it up, forget about it; his mind would fly apart at that. It had held that one picture up too long.

He never wasted words, talked with the men he worked with. Unless he saw a heavy built young man, with coarse black hair, and wide set ears and a thick bridged nose... Then he watched him, started dropping into the mill restaurant at the same time, talked with him about other mills, checked up on him until he had made certain it was the wrong man.

In Indiana, at the small Harper Mills, he was put on the big crane, working on the annealing floor. It was a job for a good craneman, but left a man a lot of hours free every turn.

He’d been there three days when he met Sack Berman. Sack was short, built like a gorilla; he was a doubler on the big mill, a job that took a man to do. Part of every other heat he’d take the sheets from the mill after the breakdown, pull them apart — the hot bars stuck together as they were rolled into sheets — and help the heater shove them into the furnace to be reheated. As they came back after their next pass he caught one end of them with his tongs, waited until the matcher had separated them again, and then folded them over, like books, sent them back for another reheating. It was a tough job — and a man had to have sheet mill experience to take it on.

Sack Berman had had experience. He liked to talk about his jobs in the Pittsburgh mills. He talked to John Carver about them. And he had big, flapping ears, the lobes far out from the cheeks. And a thick bridged nose, shoved to the right. His hair was brown, not black, but at the part it was a different color. That might have been just dirt. Maybe...

John Carver talked with him about other mills.

“Boomer?” Sack asked.

“Boomer. Get tired of one place.”

“Me too, boy. I been wanting to shove on somewhere else for a couple years. Maybe will, next spring.”

“Hell,” said John Carver, his eyes glowing, “go now.”

Sack hesitated. “One thing about it, you get no good jobs that way. Guess I’ll wait...” He brought up one wide, muscled hand to snap the cigarette from his mouth. John Carver looked at it, at the web of flesh between the thumb and forefinger. It was grimy from the mill, but not tattooed.

Sack went on: “And this is a good town, here. Plenty live. You married? We’ll go out some payday and kick the burg apart.” Sack took out a penknife and opened it, ran the point of the blade up and down his thumb. John Carver would see a lot of that knife; it was Sack’s habit to hold it in his hand when he talked, balance it, flip it up in the air and catch it. John Carver would see the knife in his sleep...

He saw Sack in a saloon a couple of weeks later, saw him again in the same place a week after that. And that evening Sack said, “Got a couple of babes lined up for later.”

“Boy,” said John Carver, “I’m on.” The coiled snake in him was restless, was baring its fangs, growing more anxious to spring. He couldn’t see clearly, his hands were shaking so that the liquor spilled from his glass...

The two babes wanted to play and be coy and Sack didn’t. They were in Sack’s car, out on a country road. John Carver, in the back seat, was kissing the girl in his arms, listening blindly to what he could hear from the front.

“You don’t think a millman’s good enough for you, do you, honey?” Sack bantered.

“Oh, I think you’re grand. You big ham.”

“Ham, huh? I’ll tell you something, honey. I’m a college man. You didn’t know that, did you?” Sack was pretty drunk. “University educated, that’s me. How I rate now?”

“Oh, you’re marvelous.”

“Come on, don’t stall me, sweetheart. Where’s your room?”

“It’s at home, of course.”

“Of course, of course. But I mean some place just for you and me.”

The girl in John Carver’s arms jerked up her head. “What’s the matter, Jackie? Something scare you?”

John Carver slowly settled back on his scat. His eyes were wide, staring. Sack looked back. He laughed. “We’re heading for town, Jack. The gals will show us where to go.”

“I could tell you where to go right now,” said the girl beside him with emphasis.

Sack raised his hand and hit her in the face. “You dirty little crimp. Playing lady with me.” He hit her again.

John Carver went head first into the front seat. He slammed out at Sack’s face with both hands, madly, savagely. Something hit him, he bounced and passed out...

He was stretched out on the road when he came to. Sack was rubbing his hands, the girls were standing behind him giggling.

“Boy,” said Sack, “you must have been pretty high.”

“Yeah.” Carver raised his head, dropped it back at the pain.

Sack grinned. “I’ll take a look at your chin.”

They were in the glare of the car’s headlights. Sack put his right hand up under Carver’s chin; he’d just been rubbing his wrists, and that web of flesh between his thumb and forefinger had been reddened by the friction.

The print of a heart with an arrow through it stood out, like a scar, on the reddened skin.

John Carver closed his eyes. “I’ll be all right now,” he said.

He was stripping off hot iron from the annealing pots. He’d run the rack of the crane over the tray stacked with iron, lower it until the hookups had clamped it around a lift of the hot, annealed sheet steel and carry it down to the other end of the annealing floor to be piled according to size.

Four or five men were sitting around a cold pile of iron, eating sandwiches from their lunch buckets, enjoying for a while the comparative coolness of the annealing floor. One of them was Sack Berman.

Carver saw them leaving, straggling back up to the mills; he stopped the crane, yelled down to Sack: “Stick around a minute. I’m coming down for dinner after this next lift.”

Sack nodded up and down and stretched out on the cold pile for a sleep. His turn wasn’t on for half an hour. He looked up to laugh and rub his chin.

John Carver shouted back: “My head feels like hell.” He saw Sack get out his knife, start scraping his fingernails with it. The snake was writhing, coiling more tightly, gathering itself...

He went back for the last lift, picked it up, swung it out over the annealing floor. There were ten tons of hot sheet iron in the rack.

He was carrying it low, lower than usual, only a few feet above the other iron piled on the floor. He carried it toward the pile Sack lay on, his hands tightened on the controls, and the snake lashed out.

He reversed the crane so that it howled like a street car jamming to a stop. In a split instant the lift jerked back, shuddered and stopped with ten tons of steel hanging plumb — and then he dropped it.

A wild yell ripped out, hung for a heartbeat in the crash of other sound, broke off. John Carver jabbed his elbow against a live, low voltage wire, burned it, held it there until it seared in, deep and crippling. He fell against the wall of his cage, passed out, partly from the pain of the burn, but partly from the sudden, emptying absence of that deadly snake from his brain...

When they picked the lift up off Sack Berman they found him spread out thin, like an unbaked gingerbread man. John Carver was absolved of guilt of recklessness — it was an accident that he’d burnt his arm and lost control — but the thing hit him so hard that he quit the mill.

He saw Pherson on the street a month later. The detective stopped him.

“Heard you were back in town. On your old job?”

“Sure am. Working like the devil.”

“Fine.” Pherson studied him. “You look a lot different from the last time I saw you.”

Carver laughed. “Feel different. Been in steel mills for a couple of years.”

“Steel? Hell, you weren’t looking for... You know we never got a line on that guy, don’t you?”

“I got that out of my mind,” said John Carver. “The mills did that for me. Might have been there yet, but I saw a bad accident, and lost my taste for it. Saw a man flattened out under ten tons of hot iron.”

“The devil.” Pherson stared at him. He couldn’t get it.

“Yeah. The smell was so bad you couldn’t go in there for a day. Flattened him out and sizzled him... Well, got to get along.”

“So long.” Pherson looked after him as he walked whistling down the street.