Deadlock (12 page)

“You think this is a straight break and entry job?”

“What else would it be, Miss Warshawski?”

“Nothing of value was taken. Boom Boom had a stereo, some fancy cuff links and stuff, and it was all there.”

“Well, figure the guys are surprised by Kelvin. Then they see they’ve killed him rather than just stunning him like they intended. So they get nervous and leave. They don’t know whether someone else is going to come up looking for the guy if he doesn’t come back in so many minutes.”

I could see his point. Maybe I was making a mountain out of a molehill. Maybe I was upset by my cousin’s death and I wanted to blow it up into something bigger than an accident.

“You’re not trying to get involved in this, are you?”

“I am involved, Sergeant: it happened in my cousin’s apartment.”

“The lieutenant is not going to be happy if he hears you’re trying to stir up this case. You know that.”

I knew that. The lieutenant was Bobby Mallory and he did not like me to get involved in police work, especially murder cases.

I smiled. “If I stumble across anything looking through my cousin’s affairs, I don’t think that’ll upset him too much.”

“Just give us a chance to do our jobs, Miss Warshawski.”

“I spoke with the Kelvin family this afternoon. They’re not too sure you guys are really trying your hardest.”

He slammed his palm on his desk top. The three other men in the room tried to pretend they were still working. “Now why the hell did you go talk to them? One of the sons came around here and gave me a snootful. We’re doing out best. But, Christ, we haven’t got a damned thing to start from other than two pictures no one can identify and a size twelve boot!”

He pulled a file savagely from a stack on his desk and yanked a photograph from it to toss at me. I picked it up. It was a still made from the TV film of the men going into Boom Boom’s place. Two men, one in jeans and the other in chinos. They both wore corduroy sports jackets and had those Irish caps held up over their faces. McGonnigal handed me a couple of other stills. One showed them getting off the elevator—backward. Another showed them walking down the hall, crouched over to disguise their height. You could see their hands pretty clearly—they were wearing surgical gloves.

I gave the pictures back to McGonnigal. “Good luck, Sergeant. I’ll let you know if I come across anything.… When can I get the keys to the place back?”

He said Friday morning and warned me to be very, very careful. The police are always telling me that.

From my apartment I tried Boom Boom’s agent again, even though it was after six. Like me, Fackley worked unusual hours. He was in and answered the phone himself. I told him I wanted to get in touch with Pierre Bouchard, star forward for the Hawks and another of his clients. Fackley told me Bouchard was in his hometown, Quebec, playing in the Coeur d’Argent, a demonstration hockey tournament. Fackley gave me his Chicago phone number and agreed to see me the following Wednesday to go through Boom Boom’s papers.

I tried phoning the Pole Star Line but no one answered. There wasn’t much else I could do tonight. I called Lotty and we went out for dinner together and then to see
Chariots of Fire
.

The photocopies of Eudora Grain’s shipping records were ready for me at ten the next morning. I stuck them in a large canvas shoulder bag. The originals I wrapped in heavy brown paper, taped securely. Starting to write Janet’s name on top, I realized I didn’t know her last name. Women exist in a world of first names in business. Lois, Janet, Mr. Phillips, Mr. Warshawski. That’s why I use my initials.

I reached the Port before lunch and dropped the packet
off with the receptionist at Eudora Grain, then swung around to the main entrance, where Grafalk and Bledsoe had their offices. The guard at the gate gave me some static about going in without a pass but I finally convinced him I needed to talk to someone at Pole Star and he let me have a two-hour permit.

The Pole Star Line occupied only two rooms in one of the large sand-colored buildings at the far end of the pier. Although much smaller than Grafalk’s operation, their offices included the same organized chaos of computers, charts, and telephones. All were manipulated in an electronic symphony by one harassed but friendly young woman. She unplugged herself from the phone long enough to tell me that Bledsoe was at Elevator 9 with the
Lucella
. She sketched rough directions for me—it was back along the Calumet River several miles—and returned to a madly ringing phone.

Phillips came out of the Grafalk building as I passed it on the way to my car. He wasn’t sure whether to recognize me or not, so I solved the problem by saying hello to him.

“What are you doing here?” he demanded.

“Signing up for a water ballet class. How about you?”

He turned red again. “I assume you’re still asking questions about your cousin. More Hydra heads?”

I was surprised to find he could be whimsical. “I just want to clear all the bases—I still have to talk to the crew on the
Lucella
before she sails.”

“Well, I think you’ll find you’ve put a lot of energy into something not worth the effort. It’s to be hoped you find that out soon.”

“I’m moving as fast as I can. I figure water ballet can only help.” He snorted and strode over to the green Alfa. As I was climbing into the Lynx I heard him roar past, spitting a little gravel.

Elevator 9 was not one of Eudora Grain’s but belonged to the Tri-State Grain Co-op. A chain fence separated the
elevator yard from the road. Train tracks ran through a gap in it and a small guardhouse with a heavy, red-faced man reading the
Sun-Times
stood at the entrance. The Lynx bounced along the ruts to the guardhouse, where Redface reluctantly put down his paper and asked me what I wanted.

“I need to talk to Martin Bledsoe or John Bemis.”

He waved me in. It didn’t seem like much of a security system to me. I drove on around the potholes and pulled up into a gravel yard. A couple of boxcars were slowly moving along the rail siding and I stood for a minute to watch the hoist carry them up inside the elevator and dump their loads. Amazing process, really. I could understand why my cousin had gotten so intrigued by it.

I skirted around the elevator to the wharf where the
Lucella
lay. She was enormous, and a sense of mystery and dread filled me. The giant lay momentarily still, held down by steel cables three inches thick—a huge amphibious spider immobile in the coils of its own web. But when she started to move, what things would stir in the depths beneath that gigantic keel? I looked at the black water absorbing the hull and felt sick and slightly dizzy.

Little flecks of grain dust swirled through the air and reached me where I stood behind her. No one knew I was here. I began to see how Boom Boom could have fallen in unnoticed. I shivered and moved forward to the scene of the action.

An extension ladder was attached high up on the ship, with feet reaching the dock. It was sturdy and I forgot about the dark water underneath as I climbed up.

Except for a faint sound from the elevator and the chaff blowing in my eyes, I hadn’t noticed any activity down on the wharf. On deck was another story. It only takes twenty people or so to load a freighter but they were extremely busy.

Five giant chutes were poised over openings in the
deck. Guided by three men pulling them around with ropes, they spilled grain into the holds in a series of vast waterfalls. I couldn’t see all the way down the thousand-foot deck—a cloud of grain dust billowed up and obscured the bow from view.

I stood at the edge of a giant machine which seemed to be a long conveyor belt on a swivel, rather like a tank turret, and watched. The area beyond was posted
HARD HATS ONLY
.

No one noticed me for a few minutes. Then a whitened figure in a blue boiler suit came over to me. He took off his hard hat and I recognized the first mate, Keith Winstein. His curly black hair was powdered white below a line made by his hat.

“Hi, Mr. Winstein. I’m V. I. Warshawski—we met the other day. I’m looking for Mr. Bledsoe.”

“Sure I remember you. Bledsoe’s up on the bridge with the captain. Want me to take you up? Or you want to watch some of this first?”

He dug out a battered hard hat for me from the supply room behind the tank turret—“self-unloader,” he explained. It was attached to a series of conveyor belts in the holds and could unload the entire ship in under twenty-four hours.

Winstein led me along the port side away from the main activity with the chutes. The holds were about half full, he said: they’d be through in another twelve hours or so.

“We’ll take this cargo to the entrance of the Welland Canal and unload it onto oceangoing ships there. We’re too big for the Welland—the longest ships through there are the 740-footers.”

The
Lucella
had five cargo holds underneath with some thirty-five hatches opening into them. The chutes moved among the hatches, distributing the load evenly. In addition to the men guiding the chutes, another man watched
the flow of grain at each hold and directed those at the ropes among the various openings. Winstein went around and checked their work, then escorted me onto the bridge.

Bledsoe and the captain were standing at the front of the glass-enclosed room looking down at the deck. Bemis was leaning against the wheel, a piece of mahogany as tall as I am. Neither of them turned around until Winstein announced to the captain that he’d brought a visitor.

“Hello, Miss Warshawski.” The captain came over to me in a leisurely way. “Come to see what a freighter looks like in action?”

“It’s most impressive … I have a couple of questions for you, Mr. Bledsoe, if you have some time.”

Bledsoe’s right hand was swathed in bandages. I asked how it was doing. He assured me that it was healing well. “No tendons cut … What have you got for me?”

Bemis took Winstein off to one corner to inquire about progress below. Bledsoe and I sat at a couple of high wooden stools behind a large drafting table covered with navigation charts. I pulled the photocopies of the contract verification forms from my canvas bag, flicking off some pieces of chaff which had settled on them. Putting the papers on the drafting table, I leafed through them to find July 17, one of Boom Boom’s circled dates.

Bledsoe took the stack from me and fanned it. “These are Eudora Grain’s shipping contract records. How’d you come to have them?”

“One of the secretaries lent them to me. Captain Bemis told me you were the most knowledgeable person around on these sorts of deals. I can’t follow them—I was hoping you’d explain them to me.”

“Why not get Phillips to?”

“Oh, I wanted to go to the expert.”

The gray eyes were intelligent. He smiled ironically. “Well, there’s no great secret to them. You start off with a load at point A and you want to move it to point B. We
shippers move any cargo, but Eudora Grain is concerned chiefly with grain—although they may have a bit of lumber and coal now. So we’re talking about grain. Now, on this one, the order was first placed on July 17, so that’s the initial transaction date.”

He studied the document for a few minutes. “We have three million bushels of soybeans in Peoria and we want to move them to Buffalo. Hansel Baltic is buying the shipment there and that’s where our responsibility ends. So Phillips’s sales reps start scurrying around trying to find someone to carry the load. GLSL. They start there—Great Lakes Shipping Line. They’re charging four dollars and thirty-two cents a ton to carry it from Chicago to Buffalo and they need five vessels. With that big a load you’d normally bid it out among several carriers—I guess the rep was just being a little lazy on this one. Phillips has to bring it from Peoria by rail by the twenty-fourth of July and they’ll get it to Buffalo on the thirty-first or earlier.

“Now, in our business, contracts are set up and canceled routinely. That’s what makes it so confusing—and why the difference of a few cents is so important. See, here, later on the seventeenth, we offer to carry the load for four twenty-nine a ton. That was before we had the
Lucella
—we can go way under our old prices now because these thousand-footers are so much cheaper to operate.

“Anyway, then Grafalk came in on the eighteenth at $4.30 a ton but a promise to get it there by the twenty-ninth. Cutting it pretty close, really—wonder if they made it.”

“So there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this?”

Bledsoe studied it intently. “Not as far as I can tell. What made you think there would be?”

The chief engineer came in at that point. “Oh, hi there. What do you have?”

“Hi, Sheridan. Miss Warshawski’s been going over Eudora’s
shipping orders. She thought something might be wrong with them.”

“No, not that. I just needed help understanding them. I’ve been trying to figure out what my cousin might have known that he wanted to tell Captain Bemis. So I went through his papers yesterday over at Eudora Grain, and I learned he’d been particularly interested in these documents right before he died. I wondered if the fact that all these Pole Star contracts ended up with Grafalk was important.”