Deadlock

4 On the Waterfront

The Eudora Grain Company elevator lay in the labyrinth that makes up the Port of Chicago. The Port lines six miles of the Calumet River as it snakes south and west from its mouth near 95th Street. Each elevator or plant along the river has its own access road, and none of them is clearly marked.

I covered the twenty miles from my North Side apartment to 130th Street in good time, reaching the exit by eight o’clock. After that I got lost trying to make my way past the Calumet River, some steel mills, and a Ford assembly plant. It was nine-thirty before I found Eudora Grain’s regional office.

Their regional headquarters, a modern, single-story block, lay next to a giant elevator on the river. The elevator loomed behind the building at right angles, two sections of massive tubes, each containing perhaps a hundred ten-story-high cylinders. The sections were split by a slip where a boat could tie up. On the right side, railway tracks ran into a shed. A few hopper cars were there now and and a small group of hard-hatted men were fixing one onto a hoist. I watched, fascinated: the car disappeared up inside the elevator. On the far left side I could see the tip of a ship poking out-someone was apparently taking on a load of grain.

The building had a modern lobby with wide windows opening onto the river. Pictures of grain harvests-combines sweeping through thousands of acres of golden wheat, smaller versions of the mammoth elevator outside, trains taking on their golden hoard, boats unloading-covered the walls. I took a quick glance around, then approached a receptionist behind a marble counter set in the middle of the room. She was young and eager to help. After a spirited interchange with his secretary, she located the regional vice-president, Clayton Phillips. He came out to the foyer to meet me.

Phillips was a wooden man, perhaps in his early forties, with straw-colored hair and pale brown eyes. I took an immediate dislike to him, perhaps because he failed to offer me any condolences for Boom Boom, even when I introduced myself as his closest relative.

Phillips dithered around at the thought of my asking questions at the elevator. He couldn’t bring himself to say no, however, and I didn’t give him any help. He had an irritating habit of darting his eyes around the room when I asked him a question, instead of looking at me. I wondered if he found inspiration from the photographs lining the foyer.

“I don’t need to take any more of your time, Mr. Phillips,” I finally said. “I can find my own way around the elevator and ask the questions I want on my own.”

“Oh, I’ll come with you, uh-uh-” He looked at my business card, frowning.

“Miss Warshawski,” I said helpfully.

“Miss Warshawski. The foreman won’t like it if you come without an introduction.” His voice was deep but tight, the voice of a tense man speaking from the vocal cords rather than through the nasal passages.

Pete Margolis, the elevator foreman, didn’t seem happy to see us. However, I quickly realized his annoyance was directed more at Phillips than at me. Phillips merely introduced me as a “a young lady interested in the elevator.” When I gave Margolis my name and told him I was Boom Boom’s cousin, his manner changed abruptly. He wiped a dirty paw on the side of his overalls and shook hands with me, told me how sorry he was about my cousin’s accident, how much the men liked him, and how badly the company would miss him. He dug out a hard hat for me from under a pile of papers in his minuscule office.

Paying little attention to Phillips, he gave me a long and detailed tour, showing me where the hopper cars came in to dump their loads and how to operate the automatic hoist that lifted them into the heart of the elevator. Phillips trailed along, making ineffectual comments. He had his own hard hat, his name neatly lettered across the top, but his gray silk summer suit was totally out of place in the dirty plant.

Margolis took us up a long flight of narrow stairs that led into the interior of the elevator, perhaps three stories up. He opened a fire door at the top, and noise shattered my eardrums.

Dust covered everything. It swirled through the air, landing in layers on the high steel beams, creating a squeaky film on the metal floor. My toes quickly felt greasy inside their thick cotton socks. My running shoes skidded on the dusty floor. Under the ill-fitting, heavy hard hat, my hair became matted and sticky.

We stood on a catwalk looking down on the concrete floor of the elevator. Only a narrow waist-high handrail stood between me and an unpleasant crash onto the conveyor belts below. If I fell, they’d have to change the sign posted in the doorway: 9,640 man-hours without an accident.

Pete Margolis stood at my right side. He grabbed my arm and gesticulated with his free hand. I shook my head. He leaned over next to my right ear. “This is where it comes in,” he bellowed. “They bring the boxcars up here and dump them. Then it goes by conveyor belt.”

I nodded. A series of conveyor belts caused much of the clanking, shattering noise, but the hoist that lifted boxcars ninety feet in the air as though they were toys also contributed to the din. The belts ferried grain from the towers where boxcars dumped it over to chutes that spilled it into cargo holds of ships moored outside. A lot of grain dust escaped in the process. Most of the men on the floor wore respirators, but few seemed to have any ear protection.

“Wheat?” I screamed into Margolis’s ear.

“Barley. About thirty-five bushels to the ton.”

He shouted something at Phillips and we went on across the gangway outside, to a narrow ledge overlooking the water. I gulped in the cold April air and let my ears adjust to the relative quiet.

Below us sat a dirty old ship tied to the dock by a series of cables. She was riding above her normal waterline, where the black paint on the hull gave way abruptly to a peeling greenish color. On her deck, more men in hard hats and dirty boiler suits were guiding three massive grain chutes with ropes, filling the holds through some twelve or fourteen openings in the deck. Next to each opening lay its lid-“hatch cover,” Phillips told me. A mass of coiled ropes lay near the back end, our end, where the pilothouse stood. I felt slightly dizzy. I grew up in South Chicago where steel mills dot the lake, so I’ve seen plenty of Great Lakes freighters close up, but they always give me the same feeling-stomach contractions and shivers up the spine. Something about the hull thrusting invisibly into black water.

A cold wind whipped around the river. The water was too sheltered here for whitecaps, but grain dust blew up at us, mixed with cigarette wrappers and potato chip bags. I coughed and turned my head aside.

“Your cousin was standing at the stern.” I followed Phillips’s pointing finger. “Even if someone were leaning forward they wouldn’t have been able to see him from up here.”

I tried, but the angle of the elevator cut off the view partway along the pilothouse. “What about all those people on deck? And there’re a couple down there on the ground.”

Phillips swallowed a superior smile. “The O. R. Daley’s tied up now and loading. When the ship is casting off all the elevator people are gone and everyone connected with the ship has an assignment. They wouldn’t pay much attention to a guy on the wharf.”

“Someone must have seen him,” I said stubbornly. “What about it, Mr. Margolis? Any problem with you if I talk to the men on the elevator?”

Margolis shrugged. “Everyone liked your cousin, Miss Warshawski. If they’d seen anything they’d have come forward with it by now… But you think it’ll do some good I don’t mind. They’ll break for lunch in two shifts starting in twenty-five minutes.”

I scanned the wharf. “Maybe you could show me exactly where my cousin went in.”

“We really don’t know,” Phillips responded, his deep voice trying to hide impatience. “But if it will make you feel better in some way… Pete, maybe you could take Miss Warshawski down.”

Margolis looked back at the elevator, hesitated, then reluctantly agreed.

“This isn’t the ship that was here then, is it?”

“No, of course not,” Phillips said.

“Know which one was?” I asked.

“There’s no way of knowing that,” Phillips said, just as Margolis said, “The Bertha Krupnik.”

“Well, maybe you’re right.” Phillips gave a strained smile. “I keep forgetting that Pete here has the day-to-day details of this operation at his fingertips.”

“Yup. It was supposed to be the Lucella Wieser. Then she had that accident-water in the hold or something-and they brought up three old tubs to take her load. The Bertha was the last of ’em. Pilot’s an old friend of mine. He like to’ve lost his lunch when he heard about Boom Boom… your cousin, I mean. He was a hockey fan himself.”

“Where’s the Bertha Krupnik now?”

Margolis shook his head. “No way of knowing that. She’s one of Grafalk’s, though. You could ask them. Their dispatcher would know.” He hesitated for a minute. “You might want to check with the Lucella. She was tied up over there.” He pointed across the old boat at our feet to another pier about two hundred yards away. “They moved her over out of the way while they cleaned out her holds. She moved out yesterday or the day before.” He shook his head. “Don’t think anyone’s going to be able to tell you anything, though. You know what people are like. If they’d seen your cousin go in they’d have said something fast enough at the time.”

Unless they were embarrassed at not doing anything to help, I thought. “Where’s Grafalk’s office?”

“Do you really want to go there, Miss Warshawski?” Phillips asked. “It’s not the kind of place you should just go into without some sort of credential or justification.”

“I have a credential.” I fished my private investigator’s license out of my wallet. “I’ve asked a lot of people a lot of questions based on this.”

His wooden expression didn’t change, but he turned red to the roots of his pale blond hair. “I think I should go over with you and introduce you to the right person.”

“You want to swing by the Lucella with her, too, Mr. Phillips?” Margolis asked.

“Not particularly. I’m running late as it is. I’ll have to go back to your office, Pete, and call Rodriguez from there.”

“Look, Mr. Phillips,” I put in, “I can take care of myself perfectly well. I don’t need you to interrupt your schedule to ferry me around.”

He assured me it was no problem, he really wanted to do it if I thought it was necessary. It occurred to me he might be worrying that I would turn up some witness suggesting that Eudora Grain had been negligent. In any case, he could smooth my path at Grafalk’s, so I didn’t mind his tagging along.

While he went back through the elevator to use the phone, Margolis took me down a narrow iron ladder to the wharf. Close up, the ship looked even dirtier. Heavy cables extended from the deck and tied her up fast to large knobs sticking out of the concrete wharf. Like the ship, the cables were old, frayed, and none too clean. As Margolis led me to the rear of the O. R. Daley, I notice how badly the paint had cracked above the waterline. “O. R. Daley. Grafalk Steamship Line. Chicago.” was painted in chipped white letters near the back.

“Your cousin was probably standing here.” The concrete had ended, replaced by faded wood planks. “It was a sloppy day. We had to stop loading every few hours, cover the hatches, and wait for the rain to end. Very long job. Anyway, wood like this-real old, you know-gets very slippery when it’s wet. If Boom Boom-your cousin, I mean-was leaning over to see something, he might’ve just slipped and fallen right in. He did have that bad leg.”

“What would he be leaning over to look at, though?”

“Anything. He was an inquisitive guy. Very interested in everything and anything about the ships and the business. Between you and me, he got on Phillips’s nerves a bit.” He spat expertly into the water. “But, what I hear, Argus got him this job and Phillips didn’t like to stand up to him.”

David Argus was chairman of Eudora Grain. He’d flown in from Eudora, Kansas, to attend Boom Boom’s funeral and had made a hundred-dollar donation to a children’s home in Boom Boom’s name. He hadn’t gone to the post-funeral party, lucky devil, but he’d shaken my hand briefly after the ceremony, a short, stocky guy in his sixties who exuded a blast-furnace personality. If he had been my cousin’s patron, Boom Boom was well protected in the organization. But I couldn’t believe Boom Boom would abuse the relationship, and said so.

“Naw, nothing like that. But Phillips didn’t like having a young guy around that he had to look after. Nope, Boom Boom worked real hard, didn’t ask for any special favors the way he might’ve, being a star and all. I’d say the fellows liked him pretty well.”

“Someone was telling me there was a lot of talk down here about my cousin-that he might have committed suicide.” I looked at the foreman steadily.

He gave a surprised grimace. “Not so far as I know. I haven’t heard anything. You could talk to the men. But, like I say, I haven’t heard anything.”

Phillips walked toward us dusting his hands. Margolis jerked his head toward Phillips. “You going with him? Want to come back later to talk to the men?”

We settled on ten the next morning, break time for the morning shift. Margolis said he would talk to them in the meantime, but he really thought if anyone had seen anything he would have volunteered it. “An accident always gets a lot of talk. And Warshawski, being a celebrity and all, everyone who knew anything was mouthing off. I don’t think you’ll find out anything.”

Phillips came up to us. “Are you ready? I’ve talked to the dispatcher at Grafalk’s. They’re very reluctant to let you know where the Bertha Krupnik is, but they’ll talk to you if I bring you over.” He looked self-consciously at his watch.

I shook hands with Margolis, told him I’d see him in the morning, and followed Phillips on down the pier and around the back of the elevator. We picked our way across the deeply pocked yard, stepping over strips of rusted metal, to where Phillips’s green Alfa sat, sleek and incongruous between an old Impala and a rusty pickup. He put his hard hat carefully on the back seat and made a great show of starting the car, reversing it between ruts and sliding to the yard entrance. Once we’d turned onto 130th Street and were moving with the traffic I said, “You’re clearly annoyed about chauffeuring me around the Port. It doesn’t bother me to barge in on people without an escort-just as I did on you this morning. Why do you feel you have to come with me?”

He shot a quick glance at me. I noticed his hands gripping the wheel so tightly that the knuckles showed white. He didn’t say anything for a few minutes and I thought perhaps he was going to ignore me altogether. Finally he said in his deep, tight voice, “Who asked you to come down to the Port?”

“No one: I came on my own. Boom Boom Warshawski was my cousin and I feel an obligation to find out the circumstances surrounding his death.”

“Argus came to the funeral. Did he suggest there was anything wrong?”

“What are you trying to tell me, Phillips? Is there some reason to think that my cousin’s death was not an accident?”

“No. No,” he repeated quickly. He smiled and suddenly looked more human. “He came down here on Tuesday-Argus did-and put us through the wringer on safety at the elevators. He took a personal interest in your cousin and he was very upset when he died. I just wondered if he’d asked you to investigate this as part of your professional function rather than as Warshawski’s cousin.”

“I see… Well, Mr. Argus didn’t hire me. I guess I hired myself.” I thought about explaining my personal concern but my detective training made me cautious. Rule number something or other-never tell anybody anything unless you’re going to get something better in return. Maybe someday I’d write up a Manual for the Neophyte Detective.

We were driving past the elevators lining the Calumet River and the entrance to the main Port. Large ships loomed everywhere, poking black smokestacks between gray columns of grain and cement elevators. Little trees struggled for life in patches of earth between railroad tracks, slag heaps, and pitted roadbeds. We passed a dead steel mill, a massive complex of rust-red buildings and railway junctions. The cyclone fence was padlocked shut at the entrance: the recession having its impact-the plant was closed.

The headquarters for the Port of Chicago were completely rebuilt a few years ago. With new buildings, modern docks, and a well-paved road the place looked modern and efficient. Phillips stopped at a guard station where a city cop looked up from his paper and nodded him in. The Alfa purred across smooth tarmac and we stopped in a slot labeled EUDORA GRAIN. We locked the doors and I followed Phillips toward a row of modern buildings.

Everything here was built on a giant scale. A series of cranes towered over the slips for the ships. Giant teeth hovered over one huge vessel and easily lifted the back of a fifty-ton semi from a stack and lowered it onto a waiting truck bed. Some ten ships were docked here at the main facility, flying the flag of many nations.

All the Port buildings are constructed from the same tan brick, two stories high. The Grafalk Steamship Line offices occupied all of one of the larger blocks halfway along the wharf. A receptionist, middle-aged and pleasant, recognized Phillips by sight and sent us on back to see Percy MacKelvy, the dispatcher.

Phillips was clearly a frequent visitor. Greeting various people by name, he led me through a narrow hall which crossed a couple of small rooms. We found the dispatcher in an office crammed with paper. Charts covered every wall and stacks of paper hid the desk, three chairs, and a good deal of the floor. A rumpled man in his mid-forties, wearing a white shirt long since wrinkled for the day, MacKelvy was on the phone when we came in. He took a cigar out of his mouth long enough to say hello.

He grunted into the phone, moved a red tack on a chart of the lakes at his right hand, punched a query into a computer terminal next to the phone, and grunted again. Finally he said, “Six eighty-three a ton. Take it or leave it… Pick up on the fourth, six eighty-two… Can’t bring it any lower than that… No deal? Maybe next time.” He hung up, added a few numbers to the terminal, and snatched up a second phone which had started to ring. “This is a zoo,” he said to me, loosening his tie further. “MacKelvy… Yeah, yeah.” I watched as he followed a similar sequence with chart, tacks, and computer.

When he hung up he said, “Hi, Clayton. This the lady you mentioned?”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. My cousin Bernard Warshawski was killed last Monday when he fell under the Bertha Krupnik’s propeller.”

The phone was ringing again. “Yeah? MacKelvy here. Yeah, hold on just a second… You figuring the Bertha was at fault somehow?”

“No. I have some personal concerns as my cousin’s executor. I’d like to know if anyone saw the accident. Phillips here says you can tell me when the Bertha might be expected, either back here, or at some port where I could go talk to the crew.”

“Hi, Duff,” he spoke into the phone. “Sulphur from Buffalo? Three eighty-eight a ton, pick up on the sixth, deliver to Chicago on the eighth. You got it.” He hung up. “What’s the scoop, Clayton? She likely to sue?”

Phillips was standing as far from the desk as possible in the crowded room. He stood very still as it make himself psychologically as well as physically remote. He shrugged. “David has expressed some interest.”

“What about Niels?”

“I haven’t discussed it with him.”

I put my hands on the mass of papers and leaned across the desk as the phone rang again.

“MacKelvy here… Hi, Gumboldt. Hold on a sec, will you?”

“Mr. MacKelvy, I’m not a hysterical widow trying to get financial restitution from the easiest possible source. I’m trying to find anyone who might have seen my cousin in the last minutes of his life. We’re talking about an open dock at ten in the morning. I can’t believe not a living soul saw him. I want to talk with the crew on the Bertha just to make sure.”

“Yeah, Gum? Yeah… yeah… Toledo on the sixteenth? How about the seventeenth? Can’t help ya, fella. Night of the sixteenth? Say two-three in the morning?… Okay, fella some other time.” He shook his head worriedly. “Business is rotten. The steel slump’s killing us and so are the thousand-footers. Thank God, Eudora’s still shipping with us.”

The constant interruptions were getting on my nerves. “I’m sure I can find the Bertha Krupnik, Mr. MacKelvy. I’m a private investigator and I’m used to tracking things down. An active ship on the Great Lakes can’t be that difficult to locate. I’m just asking you to make it easier.”

MacKelvy shrugged. “I’ll have to talk to Niels. He’s coming down here for lunch, Miss-who’d you say?-and I’ll check with him then. Stop back here around two. Right, Clayton?”

The phone rang again. “Who’s Niels?” I asked Phillips as we walked out of the office.

“Niels Grafalk. He owns Grafalk Steamship.”

“Want to give me a lift back to your office? I can pick up my car there and leave you to your meetings.”

His pale eyes were darting around the hall, as if looking for someone or trying to get help from someplace. “Uh, sure.”

We were in the front office, Phillips saying good-bye to the receptionist, when we heard a tremendous crash. I felt a shudder through the concrete floor and then the sound of glass breaking and metal screaming. The receptionist got out of her chair, startled.

“What was that?”

A couple of people came into the reception room from inside the building. “An earthquake?” “Sounds like a car crash.” “Was the building hit?” “Is the building falling over?”

I went to the outer door. Car crash? Maybe, but a damned big car. Maybe one of those semis they’d been loading?

Outside a large crowd was gathering. A siren in the distance grew louder. And at the north end of the pier a freighter stood, nose plowed into the side of the dock. Large chunks of concrete had broken in front of it like a metal road divider before a speeding car. Glass fragments broke loose from the sides of the ship as I moved with the crowd to gawk. A tall crane at the edge of the wharf twisted and slowly fell, crumpling on itself like a dying swan.

Two police cars, blue lights flashing, squealed to a stop as close to the disaster as possible. I jumped to one side to avoid an ambulance wailing and honking behind me. The crowd in front of me parted to let it through. I followed quickly in its wake and made it close to the wreck.

A crane and a couple of forklift trucks had been waiting at dockside. All three were thoroughly chewed up by the oncoming freighter. The police helped the ambulance driver pry one of the forklift drivers out of the mess of crumpled steel. An ugly sight. The crowd-stevedores, drivers, crew members-watched avidly. Disasters are good bowling-league conversation pieces.

I turned away and found a man in a dirty white boiler suit looking at me. His face was sunburned dark red-brown and his eyes were a deep bright blue. “What happened?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Ship rammed the dock. My guess is they were bringing it in from the engine room and someone went full ahead instead of full astern.”

“Sorry, I’m a stranger here. Can you translate?”

“Know anything about how you steer a ship?”

I shook my head.

“Oh. Well, it’s hard to explain without showing you the controls. But basically you have two levers, one for each screw. Now if you’re out at sea you steer by turning the wheel. But coming into the dock, you use the levers. Putting one full ahead and one full astern-toward the back, that is-will swing you to the right or the left, depending on which one you move which way. Putting both of them full astern is like putting your car in reverse. Slows the ship way down and brings you gently up against the wharf. It looks like some poor bastard thought that was what he was doing but went full ahead instead.

“I see. It seems strange that a little thing like that could cause so much damage.

“Well, if you drove your car at the pier-assuming you could get down in the water and do it-you’d be chewed up and the concrete walls would laugh at you. But your car-what kind do you drive?-about a ton and two hundred horsepower? Now that thing has twelve thousand horsepower and weighs about ten thousand tons. They did the equivalent of flooring her accelerator and that’s the result.”

Someone had rigged a ladder up to the front of the ship. A couple of crew members, rather shaky, came down onto the pier. I felt a hand on my shoulder and jerked around. A tall man with a sunburned face and a magnificent shock of white hair shouldered past me. “Excuse me. Out of the way, please.”

The police, who were keeping everyone else back from the forklift trucks and the ladder, let the white-haired man through without a question.

“Who’s that?” I asked my informative acquaintance. “He looks like a Viking.”

“He is a Viking. That’s Niels Grafalk. He owns this sorry hunk of steel… Poor devil!”

Niels Grafalk. I didn’t think the timing was too hot to go swarming up the ladder after him in search of the Bertha Krupnik. Unless…

“Is this the Bertha Krupnik?”

“No,” my friend answered. “It’s the Leif Ericsson. You got some special interest in the Bertha?”

“Yeah, I’m trying to find out where she is. I can’t get MacKelvy-d’you know him?-to let the information loose without Grafalk’s say-so. You wouldn’t know, would you?”

When my acquaintance wanted to know the reason, I felt an impulse to shut up and go home. I couldn’t think of anything much stupider than my obsession about Boom Boom and his accident. Obviously, from the crowd converging here, disaster brought a lot of people to the scene. Margolis had been right: if the men at the elevator knew anything about Boom Boom’s death, they would have been talking about it. It was probably high time to return to Chicago and serve some processes to their reluctant recipients.

My companion saw my hesitation. “Look-it’s time for lunch. Why don’t you let me take you over to the Salle de la Mer-it’s the private club for owners and officers here. I just need to shed this boiler suit and get a jacket.”

I looked at my jeans and running shoes. “I’m hardly dressed for a private club.”

He assured me they didn’t care about what women wore-only men have to observe clothing rules in the modern restaurant. He left me to watch the debacle at the pier for a few minutes while he went to change. I was wondering vaguely what had happened to Phillips when I saw him picking his way tentatively through the crowd to the Leif Ericsson. Something in his hesitant manner irritated me profoundly.