Deadlock

20 Unloading

The Braves did clobber the Cubs. Only Keith Moreland, hitting around.345, did anything we could enjoy, knocking a ball into the hands of an eager kid around nine sitting in front of me. However, the day was sunny, if chilly, the crowd enthusiastic, and Murray and I enjoyed a few hot dogs. I let him drink the beer-I don’t like the stuff.

Mike Silchuck had taken my picture a few dozen times in front of the ticket counter. Unfortunately all my scars were in places I didn’t feel like flashing in the middle of Addison, so they had to be content with a look of noble courage. Murray asked me questions briskly during the first three innings, then spent the fourth phoning his exclusive into the Herald-Star.

In the top half of the sixth, while the Braves scored five runs, I asked Murray about Mattingly.

“He’s a small-time hood, Vic. What do you want to know about him?”

“Who killed him?”

Like Mallory, he assumed immediately that Mattingly or his wife/mother/brothers were my clients. I gave him the same story I’d told Bobby.

“Besides, even though Boom Boom hated him, he felt sorry for poor little Elsie. I know he used to slip her a few bucks to stretch the housekeeping money, which I guess Mattingly doled out with a grudging fist, since he needed it for his gambling debts.”

“Why did she stay with him?” Murray asked irritably.

“Oh, Murray, grow up. Why does anyone stay with anyone? She was a child, a baby. She couldn’t have been eighteen when he married her, and everyone she knows is in Oklahoma… Well, let’s not get into the psychology of marriage. Just tell me if there are any leads into his death.”

He shook his head. “He was out of town for three or four days. Elsie doesn’t know where he went or how he got there, and the police haven’t dug up anyone who can help. They’ll question the hockey team, of course, but as far as I can tell most of the guys felt the same way your cousin did.”

So the connection with Bledsoe was still secret. Or the connection with his airplane, at any rate. “Was he wearing size twelve Arroyo hiking boots by any chance?”

Murray looked at me strangely. “The footprint left in Boom Boom’s apartment? I don’t know-but I’ll find out.”

I turned my attention to the rest of the game. My hero, Bill Buckner, struck out. Such is life. I kind of knew the feeling.

After the game Murray wandered home with me for something more substantial than hot dogs. I scrounged around in my bare larder and came up with tuna, frozen fettucine, and olives. We drank a bottle of Barolo and put crime behind us for a few hours, while I found out how much exercise my dislocated shoulder was up to.

Murray and I have been competitors on the crime scene, friends, and occasional lovers for several years. Somehow, though, the relationship never seems to develop. Maybe our rivalry over crime investigation gets in the way.

Around midnight the Star signaled him on his beeper and he left to deal with a Mafia shooting in River Forest. Beepers are one of the twentieth century’s most useless inventions. What difference does it make if your office finds you now rather than an hour from now? Why not give yourself a break?

I asked Murray this as he pulled his T-shirt over the thick auburn curls on his chest.

“If they didn’t know where to find me, the Sun-Times or the Trib would beat me to the story,” he mumbled through the cloth.

“Yeah,” I grumbled, lying back in bed. “Americans are afraid that if they unplug themselves from their electronic toys for five minutes, they’ll miss out on-everything. Life. Imagine no TV, no telephones, no beepers, no computers for three minutes. You’d die. You’d be like a beached whale-”

I was working myself into a frenzy over our appalling dependency on gadgets when Murray dropped a pillow over my face. “You talk too much, Vic.”

“This is what happened to the girl in Looking for Mr. Goodbar.” I padded naked after him down the hall to make sure all the locks got closed behind him. “She brings this guy home and he suffocates her with her own pillow… I hope you write a definitive exposé of the Chicago mob and get them run out of town.”

After Murray left I couldn’t get back to sleep. We’d gone to bed early, around seven-thirty, and slept for a couple of hours. Now I felt all the loose ends of the case whirling around in my head like trails of fettucine. I didn’t know where to find Bledsoe. It was too late to try the Phillipses again. Too late to call Grafalk, to find out if he had gone to that Christmas party alone. I’d already burgled the Eudora Grain offices. I’d even cleaned my apartment earlier in the day. Unless I wanted to wash dishes twice in twenty-four hours, there wasn’t anything for me to do except pace.

About one-thirty the walls started to close in on me. I got dressed and took one of my mother’s diamond earrings from the locked cupboard built into my closet. I went out onto Halsted, deserted in the early morning except for a few drunks, got into the Omega, and headed out to Lake Shore Drive. I rode south for several miles, past the Loop, and pulled off at Meigs Field, the small airport on Chicago’s lakefront.

The blue landing lights cast no illumination in the thick dark. They seemed like meaningless dots, not part of a human network. Behind the tiny runway lapped Lake Michigan, a dark shape. I felt desolate. Not even a beeper linked me with the rest of the world.

I skirted the runway and stumbled through the weed-grown rocks down to the water’s edge, shivering at the nameless menace in the black water. The water slapping at my feet seemed to call me to itself. Let me enfold you in the mysteries of my depths. All the dark things you fear will become your delight. Don’t think of drowning, of Boom Boom choking and fighting for air. Think of infinite rest, no responsibilities, no need for control. Just perfect rest.

The roar of an engine brought me back to myself. A two-seater plane was landing. It looked like a living creature, its lights flashing busily, wings flopping for the descent, like a noisy insect settling down for a short rest.

I stumbled back across the rocks to the little terminal. No one was in the waiting room. I went back outside and followed the two men who had just landed into an office. There a thin young man with straw-colored hair and a very pointed nose went over their flight charts with them. They were talking about some wind pattern which had caught them up around Galena and the three had an animated discussion on what might have caused it. This went on for a good ten minutes while I wandered around the room looking at different aerial photos of the city and surrounding countryside.

At last the thin young man pulled himself reluctantly from the weather map and asked if he could help me in some way.

I gave my most ingratiating smile-Lauren Bacall trying to get Sam Spade to do her dirty work for her. “I came in on Mr. Bledsoe’s plane Friday night and I think I might have lost an earring.” I pulled my mother’s diamond drop from my jacket pocket. “It looks like this. The post must have come out.”

The young man frowned. “When did you come in?”

“Friday. It would have been around five, I guess.”

“What kind of plane does Bledsoe fly?”

I gave a helpless, feminine shrug. “I don’t know. It seats about six people, I think. It’s new,” I added helpfully. “The paint’s fresh and shiny-”

The young men exchanged a masculine smirk with the other two. Women are so stupid. He pulled a logbook out of a drawer and ran his finger down the entries. “Bledsoe. Oh yes. A Piper Cub. Came in at five-twenty on Friday. There was only one passenger, though. The pilot didn’t say anything about a woman.”

“Well, I did ask him specially not to. I didn’t want a record that I’d been on the plane. But now I’ve lost this earring and all, I don’t know what I’ll do… Will Cappy be in this morning? Could you ask him to look for me?”

“He only comes in when Mr. Bledsoe needs him to fly.”

“Well, maybe you have a number where I could reach him?”

After a certain amount of hemming and hawing, during which the other two were winking surreptitiously at each other, the young man gave me Cappy’s phone number. I thanked him profusely and took off. Whatever gets the job done.

Back home I remembered the memorabilia I’d picked up at Boom Boom’s apartment and took them out of the trunk. My left arm continued to heal, despite constant abuse, and the load brought on only minor twinges. With the pile of stuff balanced on my right arm, I fumbled at the door locks left-handed. The New Guinea totem started to wobble. I struggled to save it, and the pictures crashed to the floor. I swore under my breath, put everything down, unlocked the door with both hands, propped it open with my foot, and carried the things properly into the building.

I’d saved the totem, but the glass over the pictures had cracked. I put them on the coffee table and took the frames apart gingerly, knocking the glass into a waste can.

The photo of me in my graduation robes was wedged extremely tightly into the frame. Boom Boom must have put too many sheets of cardboard in to allow the back to fit properly. “You shouldn’t have bought such a cheap frame for me, Boom Boom,” I muttered to myself. I finally went into the kitchen for a couple of oven mitts. With those on, I forced the frame away from the backing, spilling glass everywhere.

Between the picture and the backing was a thickly folded stack of white paper. No wonder the photo was wedged in so tightly.

I unfolded the stack. It turned out to be two sheets of paper. One was an invoice from the Grafalk Steamship Line to the Eudora Grain Company. Terms: 10 days, 2 percent, 30 days net, 60 days, 18 percent interest. It showed loads by vessel, date of shipment, and date of arrival. The second, written in Boom Boom’s meticulous hand, listed six dates when Pole Star had lost shipments to Grafalk.

Boom Boom had also listed the bids. In four lots, Pole Star was the low bidder. I started hunting through the apartment for my bag with the contract copies in it, then remembered I had left it at Lotty’s. Not even Lotty could I rouse at three in the morning just to get some papers.

I fixed myself a large scotch and stood at the living room window drinking it. I stared down at the late-night traffic on Halsted. Boom Boom had tried to call me to tell me what he’d found out. When he couldn’t get hold of me, he stuffed the papers behind my picture-not for me to find, but to keep anyone else from finding them. He’d thought he’d get back to them, and to me, so he didn’t leave a message for me. A spasm of pain contracted my chest. I missed Boom Boom terribly. I wanted to cry, but no tears would come.

I finally left the window and went to bed. I didn’t sleep much and what sleep I had was tormented by dreams of Boom Boom stretching his arms out from a cold, black lake while I stood helplessly by. At seven I gave up trying to rest and took a bath. I waited until eight o’clock, then called Bledsoe’s pilot, Cappy. His wife answered and called him in from the backyard where he was planting petunias.

“Mr. Cappy?” I said.

“Capstone. People call me Cappy.”

“I see… Mr. Capstone, my name is Warshawski. I’m a detective and I’m looking into Howard Mattingly’s death.”

“Never heard of the guy.”

“Wasn’t he your passenger back from Sault Ste. Marie on Friday night?”

“Nope. Not that guy.”

“Bright red hair? Scar on the left side of his face? Stocky build?”

He guessed that sounded like the same person.

“Well, we believe he was traveling under an assumed name. He turned up dead later that night. What I’m trying to find out is where he went when he left the airport.”

“Couldn’t tell you that. All I know, there was a car waiting for him at Meigs. He got in it and they took off. I was filling out my log forms, didn’t really notice.”

He hadn’t been able to see the driver. No, he couldn’t say what kind of car. It was big, not a limo, but it might have been a Caddy or an Oldsmobile.

“How did you come to take this guy home? I thought you were going to fly Mr. Bledsoe down, but you left before the Lucella got through the lock.”

“Yeah, well, Mr. Bledsoe called and told me he wasn’t flying down. Told me to take this guy instead. He said his name was Oleson and that’s what I put down on the log.”

“When did Bledsoe call you? He was on board ship all day Friday.”

He’d called Thursday afternoon. No, Cappy couldn’t swear it was Bledsoe. Matter of fact, Bledsoe himself had just phoned with the same question. But he didn’t take orders from anyone except the plane owner-so who else could it have been?

The logic of this argument somewhat escaped me. I asked him for whom else he flew, but he got huffy and said his client list was confidential.

Hanging up slowly, I wondered again if it was time to turn my information about Mattingly over to Bobby Mallory. The police could put their investigative machinery into motion and start questioning everyone who’d been at Meigs Field on Friday night until they found someone to identify that car. I looked at Boom Boom’s documents on the table next to the phone. The answer to the mess lay in these papers. I’d give myself twenty-four more hours, then turn it over to Bobby.

I tried calling Pole Star. The lines were busy. I tried Eudora Grain. The receptionist told me Mr. Phillips had not yet come in for the day. Was he expected? As far as she knew. I called his Lake Bluff residence. Mrs. Phillips told me tightly that her husband had left for work. So he had come home last night? I asked. She hung up on me again.

I made myself coffee and toast and dressed for action: running shoes, blue jeans, a gray cotton shirt, and a denim jacket. I regretted my Smith & Wesson, lying somewhere at the bottom of the Poe Lock. Maybe when they hauled up the Lucella they could fish my gun out of the moldy barley and give it back to me.

Before I took off, the doorbell rang. I buzzed the caller in through the front door and went on downstairs to meet him. It turned out to be a process server-a college student-with a summons for me to attend a Court of Inquiry in Sault Ste. Marie next Monday. The youth seemed relieved that I accepted it so calmly, merely stuffing it into my shoulder bag. I serve a lot of subpoenas myself-recipients range from tetchy to violent.

I stopped at the corner to buy Lotty a bunch of irises and chrysanthemums and zipped up to her apartment in the Omega. Since my little suitcase was also mushed in with fifty thousand tons of barley at Sault Ste. Marie, I stuffed my belongings into a grocery bag. I put the flowers on the kitchen table with a note.

Lotty darling.

Thank you for looking after me. I’m hot on the scent. I’ll bring your keys by tonight or tomorrow night.

Vic

I had to keep the keys to lock the apartment door behind me.

I sat at her kitchen table with my stack of contracts and went through them until I found one that matched the invoice I had in hand. It was for three million bushels of soybeans going from Chicago to Buffalo on July 24, 1981. The price quoted in the contract was $0.33 a bushel. The invoice billed it at $0.35. Two cents a bushel on three million bushels. Came out to sixty thousand dollars.

Grafalk had been the low bidder on this shipment. Someone else had bit $0.335 and a third carrier $0.34. Grafalk picked up the bid at $0.33 and billed it at $0.35.

Boom Boom’s list of Pole Star’s lost contracts proved even more startling. On the forms I’d gotten from Janet, Grafalk was listed as the low bidder. But Boom Boom’s notes showed Pole Star as the low bidder. Phillips either had entered the contracts wrong or the invoices Boom Boom referred to were wrong.

It was time to get some explanations from these clowns. I was tired of being shown the old shell game every time I wanted information out of them. I stuffed all the papers back into the canvas bag and headed for the Port.

It was close to noon when I turned off I-94 at 130th Street. The friendly receptionist at Eudora Grain was answering the phone and nodded to me in recognition as I walked past her into the inner office. The sales reps were hanging up their phones, straightening their ties, getting ready for lunch. In front of Phillips’s office sat Lois, her bouffant hair lacquered into place. The phone was propped under her chin and she made a pretense of looking at some papers. She was talking in the intense, muttering way people do when they’re trying to pretend they’re not really making personal calls.

She lifted her eyes momentarily to me as I walked up to the desk but didn’t interrupt her conversation.

“Where’s Phillips?” I demanded.

She murmured something into the telephone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you have an appointment?”

I grinned at her. “Is he in today? He doesn’t seem to be at home.”

“I’m afraid he’s away from the office on business. Do you want to make an appointment?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll come back.” I circled behind her and looked in Phillips’s office. There weren’t any signs that anyone had been there since me on Saturday night-no briefcase, no jacket, no half-smoked cigars. I didn’t think he was lurking outside the window in the parking lot but I went over and peered behind the drapes.

My assault on her boss’s office brought Lois, squawking, into his den. I grinned at her again. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation. Tell your mother it won’t happen again. Or is it your sister?”

She turned red and stomped back to her desk. I left, feeling pleased with myself.

I headed to the main part of the Port. Grafalk wasn’t in; he didn’t come down to the Port every day, the receptionist explained. I debated going to talk to Percy MacKelvy, the dispatcher, but decided I’d rather talk directly to Grafalk.

I walked over to Pole Star’s little office. The office manager there was harassed but trying to be calm. As I talked to her she took one call from the Toronto Sun inquiring into the Lucella’s accident and another from KLWN Radio in Lawrence, Kansas.

“It’s been like this all morning. I’d like to get the phone disconnected, but we need to stay in touch with our lawyers, and we do have other ships carrying freight. We don’t want to miss any orders.”

“I thought the Lucella was the only ship you owned.”

“It’s the only big one,” she explained. “But we lease a number of others. In fact Martin got so sick of the newspapers he went down to Plymouth Iron and Steel to watch them unload coal from the Gertrude Ruttan. She’s a seven-hundred-foot self-unloading vessel. We lease her from Triage-they’re a big shipbuilding company. Sort of like Fruehauf for trucks-they don’t carry much cargo in their own right, just lease the vessels.”

I asked for directions to the Plymouth yard and she obligingly gave them to me. It was another ten miles around the lake to the east. She was a very helpful young woman-even gave me a pass to get into the Plymouth plant.

We were into the middle of May and the air was still quite chilly. I wondered whether we were heading for a new ice age. It’s not cold winters that cause them but cool summers when the snow doesn’t melt. I buttoned my jacket up to the neck and rode with the windows rolled all the way up.

As I moved into steel territory the blue air darkened and turned red-black. I felt as though every movement closer to the mills carried me further back in time to the grimy streets of South Chicago where I grew up. The women in the streets had the same pinched, worn look as they hurried their toddlers along. A grocery store on a corner reminded me of the place at 91st and Commercial where I used to buy a hard roll on my way to school, and I stopped the car to get a snack in lieu of lunch. I almost expected old Mr. Kowolsky to step up behind the counter, but instead an energetic young Mexican weighed my apple and carefully wrapped a carton of blueberry yogurt for me.

He gave me detailed directions on how to find the plant entrance, eyeing me with impartial enthusiasm while he did so. I felt slightly cheered by his guileless admiration and slowly made my way to the steelworks, eating my yogurt with my left hand while I drove with the right.

It was just two o’clock. The plant was between shift changes, so mine was the only car going past the guard station at the main entrance. A beefy young man inspected the pass they’d given me at Pole Star.

“You know where to find the Gertrude?”

I shook my head.

“Take the road around to the left. You’ll go past the coke ovens and a slag heap. You’ll be able to see the ship from there.”

I followed his directions, going by a long, narrow building where fire danced inside, visible through sliding doors opened to let in the cool air. Slag formed a mountain on my left. Bits of cinder blew onto the windshield of the Omega. Peering through it at the rutted track in front of me, I continued on around the furnaces until I saw the Gertrude looming above me.

Great hills of coal framed the lakefront. The Gertrude was getting ready to dump her load onto one of them. Hard-hatted men in boiler suits had tied up the ship. As I left the car and picked my way across the pockmarked yard, I could see them turning the swivel top of the ship’s self-unloader to position it over one of the smaller coal piles.

Bledsoe was on the ground talking with a man in a dirty gray boiler suit. The two weren’t speaking when I came up, just looking at the activity going on above them.

Bledsoe had lost weight in the three days since I’d last seen him. It was shockingly noticeable-he must have dropped ten pounds. His tweed jacket sagged across his shoulders instead of straining as if to contain his monumental energy.

“Martin,” I said. “Good to see you.”

He smiled with genuine pleasure. “Vic! How’d you run me to earth!”

I explained and he introduced me to the man he was standing with, the shift foreman. As we talked, a great clanking started and coal began moving down the conveyor belt onto the heap below.

“The self-unloader is quite a machine. You ought to watch it in action,” Bledsoe said into my ear. He went back to his car and got a second hard hat out of the trunk for me. We climbed up a ladder on the port side of the ship, away from the self-unloader, and Bledsoe took me over to watch coal coming up the wide figure-eight belt from the holds.

The coal came through quite fast, in large chunks. It takes about eight hours to unload the holds with a self-unloader, compared to two days using manual loader.

Bledsoe was clearly tense. He walked around, talking a bit to the crew, clenching and unclenching his fingers. He couldn’t stand still. At one point he caught me watching him and said, “I won’t relax until this load is off. Every time I move a cargo from now on, I’m not going to be able to sleep until I know the ship has made it in and out of port safely.”

“What’s the story on the Lucella?”

He grimaced. “The Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, and the FBI are mounting a full-scale investigation. Trouble is, until they get her out of the lock they won’t even be able to see what kind of explosive was used.”

“How long will that take?”

“A good ten months. That lock will be shut all summer and it’ll take most of next year to repair the gates.”

“Can you save the ship?”

“Oh yes, I think so. Mike’s been all over it with the guys from the Costain boatyard-the people who built her. They’ll take her out in sections, tow her back to Toledo, and weld her back together. She should be running again by the end of next summer.”

“Who pays to repair the lock?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not responsible for the damned thing blowing up. The army has to fix it. Unless the Court of Inquiry assigns liability to me. But there’s no way in hell they can do that.”

We were speaking almost in shouts to be heard over the clanking of the conveyor belts and the rattling of the coal going over the side. Some of the old energy was coming back into Bledsoe’s face as he talked. He was starting to elaborate on his legal position, pounding his right fist into his left palm, when we heard a piercing whistle.

The noise came to an abrupt halt. The conveyor belt stopped and with it all its attendant racket. An authoritative figure moved over to the opening into the hold and called down a demand as to the cause of the belt’s stopping.

“Probably just an overload on one of the side belts,” Bledsoe muttered, looking extremely worried.

We heard a muffled shout from the hold, then a young man in a dirty blue boiler suit erupted up the ladder onto the deck. His face was greeny white under its smear of coal dust and he just made it to the side before he was sick.

“What is it?” the authoritative man yelled.

There were more cries coming from the hold. With a glance at Bledsoe, I started down the ladder the young engineer had just climbed up. Bledsoe followed close on my hands.

I jumped down the last three rungs onto the steel floor below. Six or seven hard-hatted figures were huddled over the figure-eight belt where it joined the side conveyors feeding it from the holds. I strode over and shoved them aside, Bledsoe peering around my back.

Clayton Phillips was staring up at me. His body was covered with coal. The pale brown eyes were open, the square jaw clenched. Blood had dried across his freckled cheekbones. I moved the men away and bent over to peer closely at his head. Coal had mostly filled in a large hole on the left side. It was mixed with congealed blood in a reddish-black, ghastly clot.

“It’s Phillips,” Bledsoe said, his voice constricted.

“Yes. We’d better call the police. You and I have a few questions to discuss, Martin.” I turned to the group of men. “Who’s in charge down here?”

A middle-aged man with heavy jowls said he was the chief engineer.

“Make sure no one touches the body or anything else. We’ll get the police over here.”

Bledsoe followed me tamely back up the ladder to the deck and off the ship. “There’s been an accident down below,” I told the Plymouth foreman. “We’re getting the police. They won’t be unloading the rest of the coal for a while.” The foreman took us into a small office just around to the side of a long shed. I used the phone to call the Indiana State Police.

Bledsoe got into the Omega with me. We drove away from the yard in silence. I made my way back to the interstate and rode the few remaining miles over to the Indiana Dunes State Park. On a weekday afternoon, in early spring, the place was deserted. We climbed across the sand down to the shore. The only other people there were a bearded man and a sporty-looking woman with their golden retriever. The dog was swimming into the frothy waves after a large stick.

“You have a lot of explaining to do, Martin.”

He looked at me angrily. “You owe me a lot of explanations. How did Phillips get into that ship? Who blew up the Lucella? And how come you’re so quick on the spot every time disaster is about to strike Pole Star?”

“How come Mattingly flew back to Chicago on your plane?”

“Who the hell is Mattingly?”

I drew a breath. “You don’t know? Honestly?”

He shook his head.

“Then who did you send back to Chicago in your plane?”

“I didn’t.” He made an exasperated gesture. “I called Cappy as soon as I got to town and demanded the same thing of him. He insists I phoned from Thunder Bay and told him to fly this strange guy back-he said his name was Oleson. Obviously someone was impersonating me. But who and why? And since you clearly know who this guy is, you tell me.”

I looked out at the blue-green water. “Howard Mattingly was a second-string wing for the Chicago Black Hawks. He was killed early Saturday morning-run over by a car and left to die in a park on Chicago’s northwest side. He was up at the Soo on Friday. He fits the description of the guy Cappy flew back to Chicago. He exploded the depth charges on the Lucella-I watched him do it.”

Bledsoe turned to me and grabbed my arm in a gesture of spontaneous fury. “Goddammit-if you watched him do it, how come you haven’t said anything to anyone? I’ve been talking my head off to the FBI and the Corps of Engineers for two days and you-you’ve been sitting on this information.”

I twisted away from his grasp and spoke coldly. “I only realized after the fact what Mattingly had been doing. I didn’t recognize him immediately. As we went down to the bottom of the lock, he picked up what looked like an outsize pair of binoculars. They must have been the radio controls for the detonators. The whole thing only dawned on me after the Lucella had gone sky-high… You may recall that you were in shock. You weren’t in any position to listen to anyone say anything. I thought I’d better leave and see if I could track him down.”

“But later. Why didn’t you talk to the police later?”

“Ah. That was because, when I got to the airport at Sault Ste. Marie, I found Mattingly had gone back to Chicago on your airplane, presumably under your orders. That really upset me-it made a mockery out of my judgment of your character. I wanted to talk to you about it first, before I told the police.”

The dog came bounding up to us, water spraying from its red-gold hair. It was an older dog-she sniffed at Martin with a white muzzle. The woman called to her and the dog bounded off again.

“And now?” he demanded.

“And now I’d like to know how Clayton Phillips came to be on the self-unloader of a ship you were leasing.”

He pounded the beach beside him. “You tell me, Vic. You’re the smart detective. You’re always turning up whenever there’s a crime about to be committed on my fleet… Unless you’ve decided that a man with my record is capable of anything-capable of destroying his own dreams, capable of murder?”

I ignored his last statement.

“Phillips has been missing since yesterday morning. Where were you yesterday morning?”

His eyes were dark spots of anger in his face. “How dare you?” he yelled.

“Martin: listen to me. The police are going to ask that and you’re going to have to answer.”

He pressed his lips together and debated within himself. Finally he decided to master his temper. “I was closeted with my Lloyds representative up at the Soo until late yesterday. Gordon Firth-the Ajax chairman-flew up with him in Ajax’s jet and they brought me back down to Chicago about ten last night.”

“Where was the Gertrude Ruttan?”

“She was tied up at the Port. She steamed in Saturday afternoon and had to tie up for the weekend until they were ready to unload her. Some damned union regulation.”

So anyone who could get into the Port and get onto the ship could have put a hole in the side of Phillips’s head and shoved him into a cargo hold. He’d just fall down into the load and show up with the rest of the cargo when it came out on the conveyor belt. Very neat. “Who knew the Gertrude Ruttan would be there over the weekend?”

He shrugged. “Anyone who knows anything about the ships in and out of the Port.”

“That narrows it down a lot,” I said sarcastically. “Same thing for who fixed my car, for who killed Boom Boom. I was figuring Phillips for that job, but now he’s dead, too. So that leaves the other people who were around at the time. Grafalk. Bemis. Sheridan. You.”

“I was up in the Soo all day yesterday.”

“Yeah, but you could hire someone.”

“So could Niels,” he pointed out. “You’re not working for him, are you? Did he hire you to set me up?”

I shook my head.

“Who’re you working for then, Warshawski?”

“My cousin.”

“Boom Boom? He’s dead.”

“I know. That’s why I’m working for him. We had a pact, Boom Boom and I. We took care of each other. Someone shoved him under the Bertha Krupnik. He left me evidence of the reason why which I found last night. Part of that evidence implicates you, Martin. I want to know why you were letting so many of your contracts with Eudora go to Grafalk.”

He shook his head. “I looked at those contracts. There was nothing wrong with them.”

“There was nothing wrong with them, except that you were letting Grafalk pick up a number of orders when you were the low bidder. Now are you going to tell me why or am I going to have to go to Pole Star and interrogate your staff and go through your books and repeat that boring routine?”

He sighed. “I didn’t kill your cousin, Warshawski. If anyone did, it was Grafalk. Why don’t you focus on him and find out how he blew up my ship and forget these contracts?”

“Martin, you’re not a dummy. Think it through. It looks like you and Grafalk were in collusion on those shipping orders. Mattingly flew back to Chicago in your plane and Phillips’s body was found on your ship. If I was a cop, I wouldn’t look too much further-if I had all that information.”

He made a wrenching gesture with his right arm. Frustration.

“All right. It’s true,” he shouted. “I did let Niels have some of my orders. Are you going to put me in jail for it?”

I didn’t say anything.

After a brief pause he continued more calmly. “I was trying to put financing together for the Lucella. Niels was getting desperate for orders. The steel slump was hurting everyone, but Grafalk was really taking it on the chin because of all those damned small ships of his. He told me he would let the story of my evil past out to the financial community if I didn’t give him some of my orders.”

“Could that really have hurt you?”

He gave a wry smile. “I didn’t want to find out. I was trying to raise fifty million dollars. I couldn’t see the Fort Dearborn Trust giving me a nickel if they knew I’d served two years for embezzling.”

“I see. And then what?”

“Oh, as soon as the Lucella was launched I told Niels to publish and be damned. As long as I’m making money no one is going to care a tinker’s dam about my record. When you need money, they make you sign an acolyte’s pledge before they give it to you. When you’ve got it-they don’t care where it came from. But Niels was furious.”

“It’s a might big jump from pressuring you over a few grain orders to blowing up your ship, though.”

He insisted stubbornly that no one else cared enough. We talked about it for half an hour or more, but he wouldn’t budge. I told him finally that I’d investigate Niels as well.

The golden retriever had departed with her people by the time we got to our feet and climbed back over the sand hills to the parking lot. A few children stared at us incuriously, waiting for the grown-ups to disappear before launching their own reckless deeds.

I drove Bledsoe back to the steel mill, now heavily thronged with Indiana and Chicago police. The four o’clock shift was arriving and I dropped him at the gates. The cops might want to talk to me later, as a witness, but they’d have to find me-I had other things to do.