Deadlock

21 Fishing Trip

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a private investigator in blue jeans to see the chairman of a major U.S. corporation. I reached Ajax Insurance headquarters in the south Loop a little after five-traffic had been heavy all the way into the city. I was figuring on it being late enough for me to avoid the phalanx of secretaries who pave the entrance to a CEO’s office, but I’d forgotten Ajax’s security system.

Guards in the marble lobby of the sixty-story skyscraper demanded an employee identification card from me. I obviously didn’t have one. They wanted to know whom I was visiting-they would issue me a visitor’s pass if the person I wanted to see approved my visit.

When I told them Gordon Firth, they were appalled. They had a list of the chairman’s visitors. I wasn’t on it, and they suspected me of being an assassin from Aetna, hired to bump off the competition.

“I’m a private investigator,” I explained, pulling the photostat of my license from my wallet to show them. “I’m looking into a fifty-million-dollar loss Ajax sustained last week. It’s true I don’t have an appointment with Gordon Firth, but it’s important I see him or whomever he’s designating to handle this loss. It may affect Ajax’s ultimate liability.”

I argued with them some more and finally persuaded them if Ajax had to pay for the Lucella’s hull because they had kept me out of Firth’s office I’d remember their names and see that the money came out of their hides.

These arguments did not get me to Firth-as I say, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle-but they did bring me to a man in their Special Risks Department who was handling the loss. His name was Jack Hogarth and he came down to the lobby for me.

He walked briskly up to the guard station to meet me, his shirtsleeves pushed up to the elbows, his tie hanging loosely around his neck. He was about thirty-five or forty, dark, slight, with humorous brown-black eyes just now circles with heavy shadows.

“V. I. Warshawski, is it?” he asked, studying my card. “Come on up. If you’ve got some information on the Lucella you’re more welcome than a heat wave in January.”

I had to trot to keep up with him on the way to the elevator. We were carried quickly to the fifty-third floor; I yawned a couple of times to clear my ears. He barely waited for the elevator to open before plunging down the hall again, through double glass doors enclosing the elevator bank, and on to a walnut and crimson suite in the southeast corner of the building.

Papers were strewn across an executive-size walnut desk. A photograph of the Lucella as she lay fractured in the Poe Lock covered a table at one side, and a cutaway picture of a freighter hull was taped to the wood-paneled west wall.

I stopped to look at the photograph, enlarged to about three feet by two feet, and shuddered with remembered shock. Several more hatch covers had popped loose since I last saw the ship and the surfaces pointing steeply into the lock were covered with a thick smear of wet barley.

As I studied it, a very tall man got to his feet and strolled over to stand next to me. I hadn’t seen him when I first walked into the room-he’d been sitting in a corner behind the door.

“Shocking, isn’t it?” he said with a pronounced English accent.

“Very. It was even more shocking when it occurred.”

“Oh, you were there, were you?”

“Yes,” I answered shortly. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, a private investigator. And you’re-?”

He was Roger Ferrant from the London firm of Scupperfield, Plouder, the lead underwriters on the Lucella’s hull and cargo insurance.

“Roger is probably the most knowledgeable man in the world about Great Lakes shipping, even though he operates out of London,” Hogarth told me. He added to Ferrant, “Miss Warshawski may know something about our ultimate liability on the Lucella.”

I sat down in an armchair by the window where I could see the setting sun paint Buckingham Fountain a faint pink-gold. “I’m looking into the accident to the Lucella as part of a murder investigation. At the moment I have two separate crimes-the murder of a young man connected with the Eudora Grain Company, and the destruction of the Lucella. It’s not clear to me that they intersect. However, I was on board the Lucella pursuing my murder investigation when she blew up, and that’s given me something of a personal interest in the explosion.”

“Who’s your client?” Hogarth demanded.

“It’s a private individual-not someone you’d know… How long does it take to clear up a claim like this?”

“Years.” Ferrant and Hogarth spoke in chorus. The Englishman added, “Honestly, Miss Warshawski, it takes a very long time.” He stumbled a bit pronouncing my name, unlike Hogarth, who got it right the first time.

“Well, who pays Bledsoe’s expenses while he reassembles the Lucella?”

“We do,” Hogarth said. “Ferrant here handles the hull damage. We pay for the destroyed cargo and the business interruption-the loads that Bledsoe is forgoing by having his ship lying in the bottom of the lock.”

“Do you ante up a check to cover the cost of repairing the ship?”

“No,” Ferrant said. “We pay the bills as the shipyard submits them.”

“And your policy covers Pole Star even though it’s clear that someone blew up the ship, that it didn’t just crack due to bad workmanship?”

Ferrant crossed one storklike leg over the other. “That was one of the first questions we went into. As far as we can tell, it was not blown up as an act of war. There are other exclusions under the policy, but that’s the main one… Unless Bledsoe destroyed the ship himself.”

“There’d have to be a significant financial advantage to him for doing so,” I pointed out. “If he collected the value of the hull and could invest it while he rebuilt the ship, there might be some, but otherwise it doesn’t sound like it.”

“No,” Hogarth said impatiently. “There isn’t any point to ruining a brand-new ship like the Lucella. Now if it were one of those old clunkers that cost more to operate than they bring in revenues, I’d see it, but not a thousand-foot self-unloader.”

“Like Grafalk’s, you mean,” I said, remembering the Leif Ericsson running into the side of the wharf my first day down at the Port. “He’s better off collecting the insurance money than running his ships?”

“Not necessarily,” said Hogarth uneasily. “It’d depend on the extent of the damage. You’re thinking of the Leif Ericsson, aren’t you? He’ll have to pay for the damage to the wharf. That’s going to run him more than the cost of repairing the Ericsson’s hull.”

Bledsoe had told me he wasn’t liable for the damage to the lock. I asked Hogarth about that. He made a face. “That’s another one that’s going to tie the lawyers up for a decade or two. If Bledsoe was responsible for the damage to the ship, which in turn damaged the forward lock gates, he’s liable. If we can find the real culprit, he’s liable. That’s what we’d like to do: find whoever blew up the ship so we can subrogate against him-or her.”

I looked a question.

“Subrogate-get him to repay us for whatever we pay Bledsoe. And if we don’t find the real culprit, your rich Uncle Sam is going to pay for the lock. He’ll probably have to anyway-no one could afford to replace that. They’ll just prosecute and send whoever did it to jail for twenty years. If they can find him.” The phone rang and he answered it. The caller seemed to be his wife: he told her placatingly that he’d be out of the office in twenty minutes and please to hold dinner for him.

He turned to me with an aggrieved expression. “I thought you came by because you had some hot information on the Lucella. All we’ve been doing is answering your questions.”

I laughed. “I don’t have any information for you now. But I think I may in a day or two. You’ve given me some ideas I want to play around with first.” I hesitated, then decided to go ahead and tell them about Mattingly. I was on my way to the police to let them know, anyway. “The thing is, the guy who probably set off the explosion has been murdered himself. If the police can track down who killed him, they’ll probably find the person who paid him to blow up the ship. I’m sure Mattingly was killed to keep him from bragging about it. He was a disagreeable guy who liked to boast about the sleazy things he did.”

Getting the inside story on Mattingly cheered up Hogarth and Ferrant, even though it hadn’t helped their investigation into ultimate liability much. They put on their suit jackets and walked out of the office with me.

“The thing is,” Ferrant said confidentially in his English accent, “it’s just cheering to know there may really be a villain out there.”

“Yeah,” I said as we came out in the deserted lobby, “but what if you find he works for another one of your insureds?”

“You mustn’t say things like that,” Ferrant said. “You really mustn’t. I feel like eating for the first time since I heard about the Lucella last Saturday morning. I don’t want you to ruin my dinner with horrible suggestions.”

Hogarth departed for the Northwestern Station and a train to Schaumburg. Ferrant was staying in Scupperfield, Plouder’s apartment in the Hancock Building. I offered him a ride up in my Omega, which was parked in an underground garage nearby.

Before starting it I checked under the hood, looked at the oil, the brake fluid, the radiator. When Ferrant asked what I was doing I explained that I’d been in an accident recently and it made me more cautious about my car. Nothing seemed to be wrong.

On the short trip up Michigan Avenue to the Hancock I asked him if Scupperfield, Plouder had also underwritten the hull damage to the Leif Ericsson. They had; they underwrote all of the Grafalk Line.

“That’s how Bledsoe came to us-he knew us from working with Grafalk.

“I see.” I asked for his opinion of Bledsoe.

“One of the smartest men in the industry today. It’s not a good time to be in Great Lakes shipping, at least not for U.S. carriers. Your government gives considerable advantages to foreign flagships they don’t accord to U.S. vessels. Furthermore, old firms like Grafalk have some special legal positions that make it hard for a newcomer to break into the business. But Bledsoe can do it if anyone can. I just hope the wreck of the Lucella doesn’t put an end to Pole Star.”

He invited me to dine with him, but I thought I’d better get to the police with my news about Mattingly. I’d told my tale to Bledsoe, and now to the insurance people. Although I hadn’t given Murray Ryerson the name of the man with binoculars I’d seen at the Soo, he was no dummy-he might easily tie it in with my interest in Mattingly. Bobby Mallory was not going to look at me kindly if he read the story first in the Herald-Star.

I felt uneasy as I moved my car onto Lake Shore Drive. My life had been threatened two weeks ago. Phillips was dead, possibly because of the veiled threat I’d left with his son Saturday night. Perhaps he’d panicked, threatened to reveal what he knew, and been killed for his pains. Mattingly was dead, probably to keep him from boasting in the locker room that he’d blown up a ship. Boom Boom was dead because he knew that Phillips was fiddling grain invoices. Why was I still driving around? Maybe they thought more people would be killed when the Lucella went up. They might have been relying on that to get rid of me and be thinking up some other accident for me now. Or maybe they just didn’t believe I knew anything important.

I tried comforting myself with that idea the rest of the way home, but I had known even less when my car was sabotaged ten days ago. It occurred to me as I exited at Belmont that the deaths in this case had been staged as a species of accident: Boom Boom had fallen overboard, Mattingly had been hit by a car, Phillips crushed in a self-unloader. If my car had killed me as it was supposed to, I don’t suppose anyone would have gone to great pains to find that the steering control was sabotaged.

I hadn’t been able to convince the police that there might be a connection between the night watchman’s death and Boom Boom’s. They wanted to treat the threat on me as a routine act of vandalism. In other words, the murderer had gauged the psychology of the situation accurately. Now that I was prepared to divulge what I knew about Mattingly, how likely were the police to tie that in with Kelvin and Boom Boom? Not terribly.

I was half tempted to keep the news to myself. But the police have a good machinery for sifting through large crowds of witnesses. If they did follow up on my information, they could find out who picked Mattingly up at Meigs last Friday far more readily than I.

As I parked the car, carefully selecting a spot in front of a restaurant so that would-be attackers would face a maximum of witnesses, I decided I’d keep the story of Mattingly and the binoculars to myself. Just say that he’d flown back in Bledsoe’s plane.