Deadlock

9 Just Another Dead Black

Interstate 94 back to the city was clear that time of day. I made it to my office around one-thirty and checked in with my answering service. Murray had returned my call. I got back to him immediately.

“What’s up, Vic? You got something on the Kelvin death for me?”

“Not a sniffle. But I’m hoping you might oblige a lady and get one of your society people to do a little digging for me.”

“Vic, any time you want something like that, it’s usually a cover-up for some big story you don’t let us in on until after it’s over.”

“Murray! What a remark. How about Anita McGraw? How about Edward Purcell? And John Cotton? Weren’t those good stories?”

“Yeah, they were. But you led me around in circles first. You got something hot on Kelvin?”

“Well, maybe, in a way. I want some background on Paige Carrington.”

“Who’s she?”

“She’s a dancer. And she was hanging out with my cousin before he died. She was looking for some love letters in his condo the other day. Then Kelvin got knocked off. Whoever did it searched the place pretty thoroughly. It makes me nervous-I’d like to find out something about her background, and I also wondered if any of your gossip people-Greta Simon, for example-had sniffed out the relationship between her and Boom Boom.”

“Oh, yeah. Boom Boom Warshawski was your cousin. I should have guessed. You’re the only two Warshawskis I ever heard of. I was sorry to hear he died: I was quite a fan of his… Nothing fishy about his death, is there?”

“Not as far as I know, Murray. He seems to have slipped on some wet planks and gone under the screw of a lakes freighter.”

“Ouch. Jesus! Hard to imagine someone as agile as Boom Boom doing something like that… Look, as an old fan of his, I’ll be glad to help you out. But I’ve got dibs if anything turns up. Paige Carrington… What’s her father’s name?”

“I don’t know. She did mention something about growing up in Lake Bluff.”

“Okay, Vic. I’ll call you in two, three days.”

I unwrapped Janet’s tidy package and pulled out the papers. Three big accordion files marked June, July, and August were filled with hundreds of flimsies, each a carbon of a computer printout. Before going through them I went downstairs to Johnnie’s Steak Joynt, where I had a Fresca and a gyros sandwich. Thumbing through the Herald-Star, I saw a notice about Kelvin’s wake. It was today, starting at four, in a funeral home on the South Side. Maybe I should go.

Back in my office I cleared off the desktop by putting everything into the bottom drawer and spread the files out in front of me. They were computer reports, all arranged in the same way. Each showed a transaction date, a point of origin, a destination, a carrier, volume, weight, type, cost per bushel, and date of arrival. They reflected Eudora Grain’s shipments of grain over a three-month period. They weren’t legal documents but records of legal transactions. Each report was actually titled “Contract Verification Form.”

I scratched my head but started reading through them. Some showed more than one carrier, many three or four. Thus, I’d find Thunder Bay of St. Catherines on June 15 via GSL, canceled, via PSL, canceled, and finally picked up by a third carrier at a different rate. I should have brought my cousin’s list of the Great Lakes steamship lines. I frowned. PSL might be Bledsoe’s outfit, the Pole Star Line. GSL was perhaps Grafalk Steamship. But there were dozens of initials. I’d need a guide.

I looked at Boom Boom’s diary and pulled the forms that matched the dates he’d marked for last summer. There were fourteen for those three days. Since the forms were all in date order it was easy to pick out the ones I wanted, although frequently there was more than one report for each date. There were thirty-two records altogether. Twenty-one were multiple-contract shipments, eight of which ended up with GSL. Of the other eleven, five were with GSL. What did that mean? If GSL was Grafalk’s line, Eudora did a lot of business with him. But he had told me he had the biggest fleet on the lakes, so that wasn’t too surprising. PSL had lost seven shipments to GSL but had gotten two of its own in August. Their August rates were lower than the June rates; that might be the reason.

I looked at my watch. It was almost three o’clock. If I was going to Kelvin’s wake I’d have to go home and put on a dress. I gathered up all the files and took them to an office service shop on the building’s fifth floor where they do clerical jobs for one-person offices like mine. I asked them to make me a copy of each of the forms and refile them in date order. The man behind the counter was pleased but someone in the background groaned.

I drove home and changed quickly into the navy suit I’d worn to Boom Boom’s funeral. I made good time going back south-it was only four-thirty when I got to the funeral home. A tan brick bungalow at 71st and Damen with a tiny lawn manicured within an inch of the ground had been converted to a funeral parlor. A vacant lot on its south side was packed with cars. I found a place for the Lynx on 71st Place and went into the home. I was the only white person there.

Kelvin’s body was displayed in an open casket surrounded with waxy lilies and candles. I made the obligatory stop to look. He was laid out in his best suit; his face in repose had the same unresponsive stare I’d encountered Tuesday night.

I turned to condole with the family. Mrs. Kelvin was standing in quiet dignity, wearing a black wool dress and surrounded by her children. I shook hands with a woman my own age in a black suit and pearls, two younger men, and with Mrs. Kelvin.

“Thank you for coming down, Miss Warshawski,” the widow said in her deep voice. “These are my children and my grandchildren.” She gave me their names and I told them how sorry I was.

The little room was crowded with friends and relations, heavy-bosomed women clutching handkerchiefs, dark-suited men, and preternaturally quiet children. They moved a little closer to the grieving family as I stood there-protection against the white woman who drove Kelvin to his death.

“I was a little hasty in how I spoke to you yesterday,” Mrs. Kelvin said. “I believed you must have known something was going to happen in that apartment.”

There was a little murmur of assent from the group behind me.

“I still think you must have known something was going on. But blaming people won’t bring my husband back to life.” She gave the ghost of a smile. “He was a very stubborn man. He could have called for help if he knew someone was going into that place-he should have called for help, called the police.” Again the murmur of assent from the people around her. “But once he knew someone was breaking in, he wanted to handle it by himself. And that’s not your fault.”

“Do the police have any leads?” I asked.

The young woman in the black suit gave a bitter smile. Daughter or daughter-in-law-I couldn’t remember. “They aren’t going to do anything. They have the pictures, the film from the TV consoles Daddy watched, but the killers had their faces and hands covered. So the police say if no one can recognize them there’s nothing they can do.”

Mrs. Kelvin spoke sadly. “We keep telling them there was something going on in that apartment-we keep telling them that you knew about it. But they aren’t going to do anything. They’re just treating it like another black killing and they aren’t going to do a thing.”

I looked around at the group. People were watching me steadily. Not exactly with hostility-more as though I was some unpredictable species, perhaps an ibex.

“You know my cousin died last week, Mrs. Kelvin. He fell from a wharf under the screw of a freighter. There were no witnesses. I’m trying to find out whether he fell or was pushed. Your husband’s death makes me think he was pushed. If I can find out for sure and find out who did it, they’ll probably be the same people who killed Mr. Kelvin. I know catching the murderer is a small consolation in the midst of great grief, but it’s the best I can offer-for myself as well as you.”

“Little white girl going to succeed where the police failed.” The person behind me spoke softly but audibly and a few people laughed.

“Amelia!” Mrs. Kelvin spoke sharply. “No need to be rude. She’s trying to be kind.”

I looked around coolly. “I’m a detective and I have a pretty good record.” I turned back to Mrs. Kelvin. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

I shook her hand and left, heading back to the Dan Ryan and the Loop. It was after five and traffic scarcely moved. Fourteen lanes and all of it bumper-to-bumper within high concrete walls. Truck exhaust mingled with the damp still air. I shut the windows and wriggled out of my jacket. It was chilly on the lakefront but muggy in the expressway’s canyon.

I inched my way downtown and oozed off the expressway at Roosevelt Road. Main police headquarters are at State and Roosevelt, a good location, close to a lot of crime. I wanted to see if anyone there would give me any information about Kelvin.

My dad had been a sergeant, working mostly out of the Twenty-First District on the South Side. The brick building on 12th Street brought on a twinge of nostalgia-it had the same linoleum, the same cinder-block walls with yellow paint peeling away. A few harassed, overweight men behind the desk were processing everyone from drivers putting up bond for their licenses to women trying to see men brought in on assault charges. I waited my turn in line.

The desk officer I finally spoke to called inside on a microphone. “Sergeant McGonnigal, lady here to see you on the Kelvin case.”

McGonnigal came out a few minutes later, big, muscular, wearing a rumpled white shirt and brown slacks. We’d met a couple of years back when he was on the South Side and he remembered me immediately.

“Miss Warshawski. Nice to see you.” He ushered me back through the linoleum corridors to a tiny room he shared with three other men.

“Nice to see you, Sergeant. When were you transferred downtown?”

“Six, seven months ago. I got assigned to the Kelvin case last night.”

I explained that the murder had taken place in my cousin’s apartment and that I wanted to know when I could get back in and straighten out his papers. McGonnigal expressed the usual regrets at Boom Boom’s death-he’d been a fan, et cetera, and said they were almost finished with the apartment.

“Did you turn up anything? I understand the TV films showed two men going in. Any fingerprints?”

He grimaced. “They were too smart for that. We did find a footprint on the papers. One of them wears size twelve Arroyo hiking boots. But that doesn’t tell us much.”

“What killed Kelvin? He wasn’t shot, was he?”

He shook his head. “Someone gave him an almighty hard blow to the jaw and broke his neck. May only have meant to knock him out. Jesus! What a fist. Doesn’t tie in to any of our known B & E men.”

“You think this is a straight break and entry job?”

“What else would it be, Miss Warshawski?”

“Nothing of value was taken. Boom Boom had a stereo, some fancy cuff links and stuff, and it was all there.”

“Well, figure the guys are surprised by Kelvin. Then they see they’ve killed him rather than just stunning him like they intended. So they get nervous and leave. They don’t know whether someone else is going to come up looking for the guy if he doesn’t come back in so many minutes.”

I could see his point. Maybe I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe I was upset by my cousin’s death and I wanted to blow it up into something bigger than an accident.

“You’re not trying to get involved in this, are you?”

“I am involved, Sergeant: it happened in my cousin’s apartment.”

“The lieutenant is not going to be happy if he hears you’re trying to stir up this case. You know that.”

I knew that. The lieutenant was Bobby Mallory and he did not like me to get involved in police work, especially murder cases.

I smiled. “If I stumble across anything looking through my cousin’s affairs, I don’t think that’ll upset him too much.”

“Just give us a chance to do our jobs, Miss Warshawski.”

“I spoke with the Kelvin family this afternoon. They’re not too sure you guys are really trying your hardest.”

He slammed his palm on his desk top. The three other men in the room tried to pretend they were still working. “Now why the hell did you go talk to them? One of the sons came around here and gave me a snootful. We’re doing out best. But, Christ, we haven’t got a damned thing to start from other than two pictures no one can identify and a size twelve boot!”

He pulled a file savagely from a stack on his desk and yanked a photograph from it to toss at me. I picked it up. It was a still made from the TV film of the men going into Boom Boom’s place. Two men, one in jeans and the other in chinos. They both wore corduroy sports jackets and had those Irish caps held up over their faces. McGonnigal handed me a couple of other stills. One showed them getting off the elevator-backward. Another showed them walking down the hall, crouched over to disguise their height. You could see their hands pretty clearly-they were wearing surgical gloves.

I gave the pictures back to McGonnigal. “Good luck, Sergeant. I’ll let you know if I come across anything… When can I get the keys to the place back?”

He said Friday morning and warned me to be very, very careful. The police are always telling me that.