Deadlock

14 Potluck

As I headed back toward the Edens and poverty, I felt as though someone were spinning me around in a swivel chair. Grafalk’s sherry and Grafalk’s story had clearly been provided for a reason. But what? By the time I got back to Lotty’s the sherry had worn off and my shoulder ached.

Lotty’s street is even more decrepit than the stretch of Halsted I inhabit. Bottles mingled with crumpled paper cups in the gutter. A ’72 Impala drooped on the near front side where someone had removed the wheel. An overweight woman bustled along with five small children, each staggering under a heavy bag of groceries. She yelled at them in shrill Spanish. I don’t speak it, but it’s close enough to Italian for me to know it was good-natured chivvying, not angry bullying.

Someone had left a beer can on Lotty’s front steps. I picked it up and carried it in with me. Lotty creates a small island of sanity and sanitation on the street and I wanted to help maintain that.

I smelled pot-au-feu as I opened the door; I suddenly felt good about being here to eat a hearty meal rather than at a seven-course affair in Lake Bluff. Lotty was sitting in the spotless kitchen reading when I came in. She put a marker in her book, took off her black-rimmed glasses, and placed both on a corner of the butcher block.

“It smells great. Anything for me to do?… Lotty, did you ever own seventy matching forks and spoons?”

Her dark eyes gleamed with amusement. “No, my dear, but my grandmother did. At least that many. I had to polish them every Friday afternoon when I was eight. Where have you been that they have seventy matching forks and spoons?”

I told her about my afternoon’s inquiries while she finished the stew and served it. We ate it with thick-crusted Viennese bread. “The trouble is, I’m going in too many different directions. I need to find out about Bledsoe. I need to find out about my car. I need to find out about Phillips’s money. I need to know who broke into Boom Boom’s apartment and killed Henry Kelvin. What were they looking for, anyway? I’d been through all his papers and he didn’t have anything that looked like a hot secret to me.” I pushed an onion around my plate, brooding. “And of course, top of the list, who pushed Boom Boom into Lake Michigan?”

“Well, what tasks can you turn over to someone else-the police, or perhaps Pierre Bouchard? He wants to help.”

“Yeah, the police. According to the Kelvin family, they’re doing sweet nothing about locating his murderers. I can see Sergeant McGonnigal’s point, of course: they haven’t got a clue qua clue. Trouble is, they refuse to connect Kelvin with Boom Boom. If they did that, they might be able to muscle in and get some real information out of the Port. But they think Boom Boom died accidentally. Same thing with my crash. They want that to be vandals.” I fiddled with my spoon. It was stainless steel and matched my knife and fork. Lotty had style.

“I have a kind of crazy idea. I want to go meet the Lucella at the next port she calls in and have it out with Bledsoe-find out what he’s been up to and whether Grafalk’s telling the truth and whether the chief engineer or the captain could’ve monkeyed with my car. I know there’s stuff I can do down here. But it’ll wait three or four days. I want to talk to those guys now.”

Lotty pursed her lips, dark eyes alert. “Why not, after all? They won’t be back here for-what did you say? Seven weeks? You can’t wait that long, anyway-their memories will have gone stale.”

“The way to do it is to track them down through Grain News. It lists contracts and when and where they’re to be picked up. That way, Bledsoe’s office won’t be able to warn him that I’m coming: I like to catch people au naturel.”

I got up and stacked the plates in the sink, running hot water from the tap.

“What is this?” Lotty demanded. “Your head wound must have been worse than I thought.”

I looked at her suspiciously.

“When did you ever clean up dishes within two days of using them?”

I swatted her with a dish towel and pursued my idea. It sounded good. I could get my corporate spy, Janet, to find out how much Phillips earned. Maybe she could even snatch a look at his bankbook, although Lois probably guarded that with her fiery dragon breath. If Bouchard was in town he could find out who this guy was who was interested in buying a share of the Black Hawks. That was the person who’d introduced Paige to Boom Boom last Christmas.

Lotty rubbed Myoflex into my shoulder before I went to bed and fixed me up with a sling to keep me from twisting the joint in my sleep. Nonetheless I woke the next morning barely able to use my left arm. I wasn’t going to be able to drive that damned car anyplace, and I’d planned on taking it down to my cousin’s apartment to look at his copies of Grain News. The police were through there; as soon as I collected the keys I could go back to it.

Lotty offered me her car, but I couldn’t see one-handedly driving a stick shift. I stomped around the apartment, enjoying a first-rate tantrum.

As she left for the clinic, Lotty said dryly, “I hesitate to interfere, but what problems will your rage solve? Can’t you do some of your business by phone?”

I stiffened momentarily, then relaxed. “Right, Lotty. Pit-dog Warshawski will be called off.”

She blew me a kiss and left, and I phoned Janet at Eudora Grain to see if she could find out how much Phillips earned.

“I don’t think I could do that, Miss Warshawski. Payroll information is confidential.”

“Janet, wouldn’t you like Boom Boom’s murderer caught?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking that over. I don’t see how he could have been murdered. Who would want to do it, anyway?”

I counted to ten in Italian. “Someone on your case about the information you’ve been getting me?”

Not exactly, she explained, but Lois had started asking her what she was doing in the office while everyone else was at lunch. Yesterday she’d come in just seconds after Janet closed the drawer where Mr. Phillips’s home address was filed. “If I stay late today, she’s sure to hang around to spy on me.”

I tapped my teeth with a pencil, trying to figure out some way she could get Phillips’s salary without getting into trouble. Nothing occurred to me.

“How often do you get paid?”

“Every other week. Our next paycheck is due Friday.”

“Is there any chance you could look in his wastebasket at the end of the day? A lot of people just toss their pay stubs; maybe he does, too.”

“I’ll try,” she said dubiously.

“That’s the spirit,” I said heartily. “One other thing. Could you call over to the Pole Star Line and find out where the Lucella Wieser will be in the next couple of days?”

She sounded more reluctant than ever but copied the information down and said she would get back to me.

Bouchard was out; I left a message with his wife. After that I didn’t have anything to do but pace. I didn’t want to leave the apartment and risk missing Janet’s call. In the end, to pass the time, I worked on some vocal exercises. My mother had been a singer and she had trained me as a musician, hoping I would have the operatic career Hitler and Mussolini deprived her of. That never worked out, but I know a lot of breathing exercises and can sing all the main arias from Iphigénie en Tauride, the only opera my mother sang in professionally before she left Italy in 1938.

I was halfway through Iphigenia’s second-act entrance, creaking like a windy parlor organ, when Janet phoned back. The Lucella would be in Thunder Bay Thursday and Friday. They were unloading coal in Detroit today and would leave there this evening.

“And really, Miss Warshawski, I can’t help you anymore. I’m calling you now from a pay phone at the 7-11 but Lois was all over me about calling Pole Star. Now that Mr. Warshawski’s gone, I’m just back in the typing pool and there isn’t any reason for me to do things like that, you see.”

“I see. Well, Janet, you’ve done a great deal and I appreciate it very much.” I hesitated a second. “Do me one favor, though-if you hear anything suspicious, call me from home. Could you do that much?”

“I suppose,” she said doubtfully. “Although I don’t really know what I would hear.”

“Probably nothing. Just on the chance that you do,” I said patiently. We hung up and I massaged my sore left shoulder. Somewhere among the hundreds of books that lined Lotty’s walls must be an atlas. I started in the living room and worked my way along. I found a pre-World War II map of Austria, a 1941 Guide to the London Underground, and an old U.S. atlas. None of them showed anyplace along the Great Lakes called Thunder Bay. That was a big help.

Finally I called a travel agent and asked if there were any flights between Chicago and Thunder Bay. Air Canada had one flight a day, leaving Toronto at 6:20, arriving at 10:12 P.M. I’d have to take a 3:15 flight to Toronto.

“How far away is that, anyway?” I demanded. That was seven hours of travel. The travel agent didn’t know. Where was Thunder Bay? In Ontario. The agent didn’t know any more than that but agreed to make a reservation on the next day’s flight for me. Two hundred fifteen dollars to spend seven hours in an airplane-they ought to pay me. I charged it to my American Express account, tickets to be picked up tomorrow at O’Hare.

I looked for Thunder Bay on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes but still couldn’t find it. I guessed I’d know when I got there.

The rest of the day I spent in a whirlpool at the Irving Park Y, the poor person’s health club. I pay ninety dollars a year to use the pool and the Nautilus room. The only other people who go there are earnest youths intent on building perfect biceps or catching a game of basketball-no racquetball courts, no bars, no disco lights, and no hot pink warm-up outfits with designer labels.