Deadlock (21 page)

The younger man unscrewed the bottom part of a pipe which came up from the floor at right angles to the overhead valve and then joined it. He stuck a stainless steel tube into the opening, checked his watch, and pulled the tube out again. It was covered with oil, which seemed to satisfy both of them. They tightened up the pipes again and wiped their hands on their grimy boiler suits.

At that point they realized I was there, or perhaps just realized I wasn’t a regular member of the team. Sheridan put his hands to my head to bellow an inquiry at me. I bellowed back at him. It was obvious that no one could conduct a conversation over the roar of the engines. I yelled in his ear that I would talk to him at dinner; I wasn’t sure he heard me but I turned and climbed back up onto the main deck.

Once outside I breathed in the late afternoon air thankfully. We were well away from the shore and it was quite cold. I remembered my bag resting among the coils of rope behind the pilothouse and went back there to take out my heavy sweater and put it on. I dug out a tam and pulled it down over my ears.

The engines clattered at my feet, less loudly but still noticeably. Turbulent water lifted the stern periodically, giving the
Lucella
a choppy, lurching ride.

In search of quiet I walked down to the bow. No one else was outside. As I walked the length of the ship, nearly a quarter mile, the noise gradually abated. By the time I reached the stern, the frontmost tip of the vessel, I couldn’t hear a sound except the water breaking against the bow. The sun setting behind us cast a long shadow of the bridge onto the deck.

No guardrail separated the deck from the water. Two thick parallel cables, about two feet apart, were strung
around the edge of the ship, attached to poles protruding every six feet or so. It would be quite easy to slip between them into the water.

A little bench had been screwed into the stem. You could sit on it and lean against a small toolshed and look into the water. The surface was greeny black, but where the ship cut through it the water turned over in a sheen of colors from lavender-white to blue-green to green to black—like dropping black ink onto wet paper and watching it separate into its individual hues.

A change in the light behind me made me brace myself. I reached for the Smith & Wesson as Bledsoe came up beside me.

“It would be easy to push you in, you know, and claim that you fell.”

“Is that a threat or an observation?” I pulled the gun out and released the safety.

He looked startled. “Put that damned thing away. I came out here to talk to you.”

I put the safety on and returned the gun to its holster. It wouldn’t do me much good at close quarters, anyway—I’d brought it out mainly for show.

Bledsoe was wearing a thick tweed jacket over a pale blue cashmere sweater. He looked nautical and comfortable. I was feeling the chill in my left shoulder—it had started to ache as I sat staring into the water.

“I blow up too fast,” he said abruptly. “But you don’t need a gun to keep me at bay, for Christ’s sake.”

“Fine.” I kept my feet braced, ready to spring to one side.

“Don’t make things so fucking difficult,” he snapped.

I didn’t move, but I didn’t relax either. He debated some point with himself—to stomp off offended or say what was on his mind. The second party won.

“It was Grafalk who told you about my youthful misadventure?”

“Yes.”

He nodded to himself. “I don’t think there’s another person who knows—or still cares … I was eighteen years old. I’d grown up in a waterfront slum. When he pulled me into the Cleveland office I ended up handling a lot of cash transactions. His mistake—he should never have put anyone that age in front of so much money. I didn’t steal it. That is, of course I stole it. What I mean is, I wasn’t thinking of stashing away loot and escaping to Argentina. I just wanted to live in a grand style. I bought myself a car.” He smiled reminiscently. “A red Packard roadster. Cars were hard to get in those days, right after the war, and I thought I was the slickest thing on the waterfront.”

The smile left his face. “Anyway, I was young and foolish and I spent the stuff blatantly, begging to be caught, really. Niels saw me through it, rehired me right out of Cantonville. He never mentioned it in twenty years. But he took it very personally when I set up Pole Star back in ’74. And he started throwing it in my face—that he knew I was a criminal at heart, that I’d stayed with him just to learn the secrets of his organization and then left.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I’d wanted to run my own show for years. My wife was sick, had Hodgkins disease, and we never had any children. I guess I turned all my energy to shipping. Besides, after Niels refused to build any thousand-footers, I wanted to have a ship like this one.” He patted the guy ropes affectionately. “This is a beautiful ship. It took four years to build. Took me three years to put the financing together. But it’s worth it. These things run at about a third the cost of the old five-hundred-footers. The cargo space goes up almost as the square of the length—I can carry seven times the load of a five-hundred-foot vessel … Anyway, I wanted one very badly and I had to start my own company to get it.”

How badly? I wondered to myself. Badly enough to run
a more sophisticated scam than he’d thought of thirty years ago and come up with the necessary capital? “What does a ship like this cost to build?”

“The
Lucella
ran just a hair under fifty million.”

“You float stock or bonds or what?”

“We did some of everything. Sheridan and Bemis coughed up their savings. I put mine in. The Fort Dearborn Trust owns the biggest chunk of this and we finally got them to arrange a series of loans with about ten other banks. Other people put in personal money. It’s a tremendous investment, and I want to make sure it carries a cargo every day between March 28 and January 1 so we can pay off the debt.”

He sat down next to me on the small bench and looked at me, his gray eyes probing. “But that isn’t what I came out here to say to you. I want to know why Niels brought up the story of my past. Not even Bemis and Sheridan know it, and if the tale had gotten around three years ago, I could never have built this beauty. If Niels wanted to hurt me, he could have done it then. So why did he tell you now?”

It was a good question. I stared into the churning water, trying to recall my conversation with Grafalk. Maybe he wanted to ventilate some of his pent-up bitterness against Bledsoe. It couldn’t have been from a desire to protect Phillips—he’d raised questions about Phillips, too.

“What do you know about the relationship between Grafalk and Clayton Phillips.”

“Phillips? Not much. Niels took him up as a protegé about the time I started Pole Star—a year or two later, maybe. Since he and I didn’t part too amicably, I didn’t see much of him. I don’t know what the deal was. Niels likes to patronize young men—I was probably the first one and he took up a number of others over the years.” He wrinkled his forehead. “Usually they seemed to have better abilities than Phillips. I don’t know how he manages to keep that office in the black.”

I looked at him intently. “What do you mean?”

Bledsoe shrugged. “He’s too—too finicky. Not the right word. He’s got brains but he gets in their way all the time. He has sales reps who are supposed to handle all the shipping contracts but he can’t leave ’em to it. He’s always getting involved in the negotiations. Since he doesn’t have day-to-day knowledge of the markets, he often screws up good deals and saddles Eudora with expensive contracts. I noticed that when I was Niels’s dispatcher ten years ago and I see it now with my own business.”

That didn’t sound criminal, just stupid. I said as much and Bledsoe laughed. “You looking for a crime just to drum up business or what?”

“I don’t need to drum up business. I’ve plenty in Chicago to occupy me if I ever get this mess unsnarled.” I got up. Stowing away on the
Lucella
had been one of my stupider ideas. None of them would tell me anything and I didn’t know how to sort out natural loyalty to the ship and each other from concealing a crime. “But I’ll find out.” I spoke aloud without realizing it.

“Vic, don’t be so angry. No one on this ship tried to kill you. I’m not convinced anyone tried to kill you.” He held up a hand as I started to talk. “I know your car was vandalized. But it was probably done by a couple of punks who never saw you in their life.”

I shook my head, tired. “There are too many coincidences, Martin. I just can’t believe that Boom Boom and the watchman in his building died and I was almost killed through a series of unrelated events. I can’t believe it. And I start wondering why you and the captain want me to believe it so badly.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled silently. “Why don’t you step me through your logic? I’m not saying I’ll buy it. But give me a chance.”

I drew a breath. If he were responsible, he knew all about it anyway. If he wasn’t, there wasn’t any harm in his
knowing. I explained about Boom Boom’s death, the quarrel with Phillips, the search through my cousin’s apartment, Henry Kelvin’s death.

“There’s got to be a reason for it and the reason is at the Port. It has to be. You told me those shipping orders I showed you last week seemed perfectly legitimate. So I don’t know where else to look. If Phillips was deliberately fudging the contracts and running Eudora Grain’s Chicago office at a loss, that’d be a reason. Although I think Argus would have been on his tail for that a long time ago, especially if he’s been doing it for ten years.” I pushed back the tam and rubbed my forehead. “I was hoping it would be those shipping orders, since that’s what Boom Boom was arguing over with Phillips two days before he died.”

Bledsoe looked at me seriously. “If you really want to be certain, you’ll have to look at the invoices. The contracts themselves appear fine, but you want to see what Phillips actually paid for the orders. How much do you know about the way an office like that operates?”

I shook my head. “Not much.”

“Well, Phillips’s main job is to act as the controller. He should leave the sales to his salesmen but doesn’t. He handles all the financial stuff. Now it’s his job, too, to know prices and what the market is doing so that when he pays bills he can check on his reps to make sure they’re getting the best prices. But he’s supposed to stay out of the selling end. He handles the money.”

I narrowed my eyes. A man who handled all the money bore further investigation. Trouble was, everything in this damned case bore further investigation and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I massaged my stiffening shoulder, trying to push my frustration away.

Bledsoe was still speaking; I’d missed some of it.

“You getting off in Sault Ste. Marie? I’ll fly you down
to Chicago—my plane is there and I’m planning on going back to the office this week.”

We got up together and started back down the long deck. The sun had set and the sky was turning from purple to gray-black. Overhead, the first stars were coming out, pricks of light in the dusky curtain. I’d have to come back out when it was completely dark. In the city one doesn’t see too many stars.

Bledsoe and I joined the chief engineer in the captain’s dining room, where he was eating roast beef and mashed potatoes. Bemis was still up on the bridge—Bledsoe explained that the captain would stay up there until the ship was out of a tricky channel and well into the middle of Lake Superior. We three were the only ones in the dining room—the other officers ate with the crew. Handwritten menus at our plates offered a choice of two entrees, vegetables, and dessert. Over baked chicken and broccoli I talked to Sheridan about my accident.

The chief agreed that he had cutting torches of different sizes on board, as well as every possible variety of wrench. “But if you’re asking me to tell you if any of them were used last Thursday, I couldn’t. We don’t keep the tools under lock and key—it’d be too time-consuming to get at them.” He buttered a roll and ate a chunk of it. “We have eight people on engine-room duty when the ship’s at sea and all of them need to get at the tools. We’ve never had any problems and as long as we don’t I plan to keep free access to them.”

No liquor was allowed on the ship, so I was drinking coffee with dinner. The coffee was thin and I poured a lot of cream into it to give it some flavor.

“Could someone have come onto the ship, taken some tools, and brought them back without anyone noticing?”

Sheridan thought about it. “I suppose so,” he said reluctantly. “This isn’t like the navy where someone is always on watch. No one has to stay on board when we’re in port, and people come and go without anyone paying attention. Theoretically someone could go to the engine room without being caught, assuming he knew where the tools were. He’d have to be lucky, too, and not have anyone come on him by surprise … At any rate, I’d rather believe that than that one of my own men was involved.”

“Could one of your own men have done it?”

Again, it was possible, but why? I suggested that someone—perhaps Phillips, for example—had hired one of the crew to do his dirty work. Bledsoe and Sheridan discussed that energetically. They were both convinced that they’d gotten rid of their lone bad apple when they fired the man who put water in the holds last month.