Deadlock

22 Nighttime Chiseler

When I got to my apartment, I saw I was going to have to choose a story quickly. Sergeant McGonnigal was waiting for me in an unmarked brown Dodge. He got out when he saw me walking up the steps to the front door.

“Good evening, Miss Warshawski. Would you mind coming downtown with me? Lieutenant Mallory wants to ask you some questions.”

“What about?” I asked, taking out my keys and putting them in the front door.

McGonnigal shook his head. “I don’t know-he just asked me to bring you down.”

“Lieutenant Mallory thinks I should be living in Melrose Park with a husband and six children. I suspect any questions he wants to ask me have to do with how close I am to reaching that goal. Tell him to send me a Christmas card.” Just because I’d been going to see the police voluntarily didn’t mean I had to like it when they came to fetch me.

McGonnigal set his handsome mouth in a thin line. in as a material witness. Because Lieutenant Mallory was a friend of your father’s he wants you to come of your own free will to answer some questions.”

I was going to have to start wearing gloves if I ever wanted to make it as a burglar. “Very well. I’m coming of my own free will.” I opened the front door. “I need to get something to eat first. Want to come up with me to make sure I don’t swallow a cyanide tablet?”

McGonnigal made an angry gesture and told me he’d wait in the car. I ran quickly up the three flights to my apartment. The larder was still bare-I hadn’t had time to go to the store yet. I settled for a peanut butter sandwich made with the last two pieces of bread in the refrigerator and coffee reheated from breakfast. While I ate, I took Boom Boom’s documents and taped them inside a couple of old copies of Fortune.

I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and washed my face. I need to feel fresh and alert for a conversation with Bobby. I ran lightly back down the stairs to McGonnigal’s waiting car. My shoulder gave me only faint twinges. I realized gloomily that I could start jogging again in the morning.

McGonnigal had the engine running. He took off with an ostentatious squeal of rubber before I even closed the door all the way. I put on the seat belt. “You ought to wear yours if you’re going to drive like that,” I told him. “Insurance people and police-the two groups who see the most car accidents and the two you never see with seat belts.”

McGonnigal didn’t answer. In fact conversation flagged all the way downtown. I tried to interest him in the Cubs’ chances with Lee Elia and Dallas Green at the helm. He didn’t want to talk about it. “I hope you’re not a Yankee fan, Sergeant. If you are, you’re going to have to arrest me to get me into the same car with you.”

His only response was to drive faster. I kept up a monologue on the perfidies of the Yankees until we got to Twelfth Street, forbearing to comment on the fact that he was driving too fast for normal road conditions. He parked the car two feet from the curb and swung himself out, slamming the door behind him. I followed him into the back door of the Twelfth Street station.

“By the way, Sergeant, did you ever find anyone in the Kelvin murder?”

“It’s still open,” he said stiffly.

Mallory rated a tiny office in the maze making up the homicide division. The back wall was covered with a map of the city, precinct boundaries outlined in heavy black, high crime areas marked in red. Mallory was on the phone when we came in. I went over to look at my neighborhood. We had a very high homicide rate. There were a lot of rapes there, too. Maybe I would be better off in Melrose Park with six children.

Bobby hung up the phone and picked up a stack of papers. He put on his wire-rimmed glasses and started reading reports. “Come over here and sit down, Vicki.”

I sat on the far side of his metal desk while he continued reading. “You were at Plymouth Steel this morning when Clayton Phillips’s body was discovered.”

I didn’t say anything and he said sharply. “You were there, weren’t you?”

“I thought you were making a statement, not asking a question. Of course I was there-I called the police and I didn’t make any secret of who I was.”

“Don’t get smart with me. What were you doing down there?”

“I put Phillips’s body in the hold Sunday morning and I wanted to see people’s faces when it came out on the conveyor belt.”

Bobby slapped the desk top with his open palm. “Vicki, you’re this close to going to jail as a material witness.” He held up his thumb and middle finger to indicate a very tiny distance. “Tell me what you were doing down there.”

“I was looking for Martin Bledsoe. He owns the Pole Star Line.”

Bobby relaxed a bit. “Why?”

“I was on board the Lucella when she blew up last week. That’s his flagship. Someone put depth charges under her last Friday up in Sault Ste. Marie and-”

“Yes, I know all about that. What did you want to see Bledsoe for?”

“My suitcase fell into the middle of the ship. I wanted to know if they recovered it.”

Mallory turned red at that. “You don’t go bothering the owner of a steamship line for that kind of crap. Cut out the horseplay and tell me the truth.”

I shook my head earnestly. “I am telling you the truth. No one else knew anything about it, so I went to see him. You see, my Smith & Wesson was in my case. That cost me three hundred dollars and I can’t afford to replace it.”

I knew that would divert Bobby’s attention. He does not like the idea of my carrying a gun. He knows that my dad taught me how to use one. Tony believed most shooting accidents were caused by children not knowing anything about firearms. Since he had to keep his police revolver at home sometimes, he made me learn how to clean, load, and shoot it. Nonetheless, the idea of a woman toting around a Smith & Wesson is contrary to all Bobby’s notions of a proper lady’s life-style. He jumped on that, demanding to know why I had the gun with me on board ship and what I was doing on the Lucella anyway.

That was easier ground. I reminded him of my car accident. “You guys wanted to believe it was vandals. I thought it was someone connected with the Port. I went up to Thunder Bay to talk to the captain and the chief engineer of the Lucella. Since one of them might have tried to kill me, I took my gun with me.”

We talked about that for a while. I reiterated my belief that Boom Boom had been pushed under the Bertha Krupnik. I told him I thought Henry Kelvin, the night watchman in his building, had been killed when he surprised intruders trying to find evidence that Boom Boom had of a crime down at the Port. Bobby wouldn’t be persuaded. As far as he was concerned, Boom Boom had fallen in by accident, I was the victim of vandals, and Kelvin had interrupted a routine housebreaking. At that point a stubborn decision to keep the rest of my information to myself overtook me. If they were going to be so damned pigheaded, I would be, too.

When Bobby got back to my fingerprints in Phillips’s office, I evaded the issue. “What were you guys doing fingerprinting the man’s office, anyway?”

“He was killed, Vicki,” Bobby said with heavy sarcasm. “We were printing his office and doing everything else to it to find out if he was killed there.”

“Was he?”

Mallory drew a doodle on his desk pad. “He actually died of suffocation in the cargo holds. We don’t know where he received the head wound-that would have killed him anyway if he hadn’t suffocated first.”

My stomach turned over. What a terrible death. I didn’t like Phillips but I hadn’t wished him that kind of end. Although if he had pushed Boom Boom overboard… “When do they think it happened?”

“About six Sunday morning. Give or take a few hours. Now, Vicki: I want to know what you were doing in the guy’s office. And when you were doing it.”

“About six yesterday morning I went down there to talk to him about my cousin’s death. When he refused to answer my questions, I became enraged and hit him over the head with that brass thing he’s got sitting on the front of his desk.”

Bobby gave me such an angry stare, I felt my stomach turn over again. He called to McGonnigal, who was waiting outside the door. “Take down everything she says. If there’s one more smart remark, book her as a material witness. I’m getting sick of this.” He turned to me. “When were you down there?”

I looked at my fingernails on my right hand. Time for a manicure. The left was no better. “Saturday night.”

“And what were you doing there?”

“If I’d been burglarizing the place, I’d have been smart enough to wear gloves. I wasn’t. I was looking for information that might show Phillips led a life of crime.”

“Who’s your client, Vicki?”

I shook my head. “Privileged information, Bobby.”

We talked about that for a while. I still regarded Boom Boom as my client, but I was damned if I was going to tell Bobby that. Lock me up indeed.

“You can’t drag a body into the Port without someone noticing you,” I remarked at one point. “There’s a police guard at the gates. Have you asked them for the names of everyone who came into the Port early Sunday?”

Mallory gave me a withering look. “We can think of the easy ones, too. We’re questioning those people right now.”

“Was Niels Grafalk one of them?”

Bobby gave me a sharp glance. “No. Our guy didn’t see him. Why?”

I shrugged. “Just curious.”

Bobby kept asking why I was down at Phillips’s office, what information I had expected to find, and so on.

Finally I said, “Bobby, you think Boom Boom’s death was an accident. I think he was murdered. I was looking for something that would tie Eudora Grain into his death, because it happened at their elevator after he had been arguing with their man.”

Mallory made a neat pile of the papers on his desk. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and placed them on top of it. That was a signal that the interrogation was over. “Vicki, I know how much you loved Boom Boom. I think that’s making you place too much importance on his death. We see that a lot in here, you know. Someone loses their son or wife or father in a terrible accident. They can’t believe it’s happened, so they say it’s murder. If there’s a conspiracy, it makes the death easier to handle-their loved one was important enough for someone to want to kill.

“Now, you’ve had a rough time lately, Vicki. Your cousin died and you almost got killed yourself in a bad accident. You go away for a few weeks, go someplace warm and lie in the sun for a while. You need to give yourself a chance to recover from all this.”

After that, naturally, I didn’t tell him about Boom Boom’s documents or about Mattingly flying in from the Soo on Bledsoe’s plane. McGonnigal offered to take me home, but in a continuing spirit of perverseness I told him I could find the way myself. I got up stiffly-we’d been talking for over two hours. It was close to ten when I boarded the northbound subway at Roosevelt Road. I took it as far as Clark and Division, then transferred to a number 22 bus, getting off at Belmont and Broadway. I could walk the last half mile or so home.

I was very tired. The pain had come back in my shoulder, perhaps from sitting so long in one position. I walked as rapidly as I could across Belmont to Halsted. Lincoln Avenue cuts in at an angle there, and a large triangle on the south side of the street is a scraggy vacant lot. I held my keys clenched between my fingers, watching shadows in the bushes. At the front door to my building I kept a weather eye out for anything unusual. I didn’t want to be the fourth victim of this extremely efficient murderer.

Three dePaul students share the second-floor apartment. As I walked up the stairs, one of them stuck her head out the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She came all the way out, followed by her two roommates, one male and one female. In an excited trio they told me someone had tried to break into my apartment about an hour before. A man had rung their doorbell. When they buzzed him in, he’d gone past their door to the third floor.

“We told him you weren’t home,” one of the women said, “but he went on up anyway. After a while we heard him kind of chiseling away at the door. So we got the bread knife and went up after him.”

“My God,” I said. “He could have killed you. Why didn’t you call the police?”

The first speaker shrugged thin shoulders in a Blue Demon T-shirt. “There were three of us and one of him. Besides, you know what the police are like-they’d never come in time in this neighborhood.”

I asked if they could describe the intruder. He was thin and seemed wiry. He had a ski mask on, which frightened them more than the incident itself. When he saw them coming up the stairs, he dropped the chisel, pushed past them, and ran down the steps and up Halsted. They hadn’t tried to chase him, for which I was grateful-I didn’t need injuries to them on my conscience, too.

They gave me the chisel, an expensive Sorby tool. I thanked them profusely and invited all three up to my apartment for a nightcap. They were curious about me and came eagerly. I served them Martell in my mother’s red Venetian glasses and answered their enthusiastic questions about my life as a private investigator. It seemed a small price to pay for saving my apartment, and perhaps me, from a late night intruder.