Deadlock (24 page)

Why had Bledsoe offered me a ride in his plane if he was turning it over to Mattingly, anyway? Maybe he knew he wouldn’t have to make good on the offer. Or, if he expected the
Lucella
to be damaged only slightly, he could have taken off. But then how would he have explained Mattingly tome?

Round and round I went on these useless speculations, giving myself nothing but a headache. At the root of it all, I felt very bitter. It looked as though Bledsoe, who talked to me charmingly last night about
Veter Grimes
, had fooled me. Maybe he thought I’d be an impartial witness to his surprise at the wreck. I didn’t like the wound to my ego. At least I hadn’t gone to bed with him.

At O’Hare I looked Mattingly up in the phone book. He lived near Logan Square. Late as it was, exhausted, my head pounding and my clothes in ruins, I took a cab straight down there from the airport. It was nine-thirty when I rang the bell of a tidy bungalow in the 3600 North block of Pulaski.

It was opened almost immediately by Howard’s young, helpless wife, Elsie. She was struggling with the latter stages of pregnancy and she gasped when she saw me. I realized I must present a shocking sight.

“Hello, Elsie,” I said, walking past her into a tiny vestibule. “I’m V. I. Warshawski—Boom Boom’s cousin. We met a couple of times at hockey parties—remember? I need to talk to Howard.”

“I—Yes, I remember you. Howard—Howard’s not here.”

“No? You’re sure he’s not upstairs in bed asleep or something?”

Tears started rolling down her round, girlish cheeks. “He’s not here. He isn’t. Pierre—Pierre has called three times, and the last time he left a threat. But really, I don’t know where he is. I haven’t seen him for four days. I thought—I thought he was at—at the Coeur d’Argent with Pierre. But he wasn’t and I don’t know where he is and the baby may come any day and I’m so scared.” She was really sobbing now.

I coaxed her into the living room and sat her down on a bright blue sofa covered with plastic. A stack of knitting lay folded neatly on the veneer coffee table—she had obviously filled her lonely, frightened days making baby clothes. I rubbed her hands and talked soothingly to her. When she seemed a little calmer I made my way to the kitchen and fixed her a mug of steaming milk. Hunting around, I found some gin under the sink. I poured myself a healthy slug of that with a little orange juice and carried the two drinks back to the living room. My left arm protested even this insubstantial load.

“Here: drink this. It’ll make you feel a little better … Now. When was the last time you saw Howard?”

He had left Monday with a small overnight bag, saying he would be back on Wednesday. Here it was Friday and where was he? No, he hadn’t said where he was going. Did Thunder Bay sound familiar? She shrugged helplessly, tears swimming in her round blue eyes. Sault Ste. Marie? She just shook her head, crying gently, not saying anything.

“Has Howard said anything about the people he’s been running around with?”

“No,” she hiccoughed. “And when I told him you’d asked, he—he got really mad at me. He—he hit me and told me to keep our business to our—ourselves. And then he packed up and left and said he’d better not tell me where—where he was going, because I—I would just—just blab it around to people.”

I grimaced, silently thanking Boom Boom for the times he and Pierre had beaten up Howard.

“What about money? Howard had enough money lately?”

She brightened at that. Yes, he’d made a lot of money this spring and he’d given her two hundred dollars to buy a really nice crib and everything for the baby. She was quite proud of that and rambled on about it for a while—the only thing she could brag about.

I asked her if she had a mother or a sister or anyone she could stay with. She shrugged helplessly again and said all her family lived in Oklahoma. I looked at her impatiently. She wasn’t the kind of stray I wanted to befriend—if I did it once, she’d cling to me forever. Instead, I told her to call the fire department if she went into labor suddenly and didn’t know what to do about it—they’d send paramedics over to help her out.

As I got up to leave, I asked her to call me if Howard showed up. “And for goodness’ sake, don’t tell him you told me—he’ll only hit you again. Just go down to the corner grocery and use their pay phone. I really need to talk to him.”

She turned pathetically forlorn eyes to me. I doubted very much if I’d ever hear from her. It would be beyond her powers to deceive her domineering husband even over so simple a matter as a phone call. I felt a pang of guilt leaving her behind, but it was swallowed by fatigue as I got to the corner of Addison and Pulaski.

I hailed a Yellow Cab there to take me crosstown to Lotty’s. Five miles on city streets is a slow ride and I went to sleep in the lurching, elderly vehicle about the time we crossed Milwaukee Avenue. The movement of the taxi made me think I was back on board the
Lucella
. Bledsoe was standing next to me, holding onto the self-loader. He kept staring at me with his compelling gray
eyes, repeating, “Vic: I wasn’t on the plane. I wasn’t on the plane.”

I woke up with a start as we turned onto Sheffield and the driver asked me for Lotty’s apartment number. As I paid him off and made my weary way up to the second floor, my dream remained very real to me. It contained an important message about Bledsoe but I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

Lotty greeted me with a most uncharacteristic gasp of relief. “My God, Vic, it’s really you! You made it back!” She hugged me fiercely.

“Lotty, what on earth is the matter? Didn’t you think you’d see me again?”

She put me at arm’s length, looked me up and down, kissed me again, and then gave a more Lotty-like grin. “The boat you were on, Vic. It was on the news. The explosion and so on. Four dead, they said, one of them a woman, but they wouldn’t give names until the families were notified. I was afraid, my dear, afraid you might be the only woman on board.”

By now she had ascertained my disheveled state. She hustled me into the bathroom and sat me in a steaming bath in her old-fashioned porcelain tub. She blew her nose briskly and went off to put a chicken on to simmer, then came back with two tumblers of my scotch. Lotty rarely drank—she was clearly deeply upset.

She perched on a three-legged stool while I soaked my sore shoulder and related the highlights of my adventures.

“I can’t believe Bledsoe hired Mattingly,” I concluded. “I just don’t believe my judgment of character can be so wrong. Bledsoe and his captain roused my hackles. But I
liked them.” I went on to tell her the same thoughts that had tormented my four-hour ride in from the Soo. “I guess I’ll have to put my prejudices aside and look into Pole Star’s insurance arrangements and their general financial health.”

“Sleep on it,” Lotty advised. “You have a lot of different avenues to explore. In the morning one of them will look the most promising. Maybe Phillips. He has the most definite tie to Boom Boom, after all.”

Wrapped in a large terry-cloth robe, I sat with her in the kitchen eating the chicken and feeling comfort seep into the worn spots of my mind. After dinner Lotty rubbed Myoflex into my back and arms. She gave me a muscle relaxant and I fell into a deep, peppermint-scented sleep.

The phone dragged me out of the depths some ten hours later. Lotty came in and gently touched my arm. I opened bleary eyes.

“Phone’s for you, my dear. Janet somebody—used to be Boom Boom’s secretary.”

I shook my head groggily and sat up to take the phone by the guest bed.

Janet’s homey, middle-aged voice woke me up more thoroughly. She was upset. “Miss Warshawski, I’ve been fired. Mr. Phillips told me it was because they didn’t have enough for me to do, with Mr. Warshawski gone and all. But I think it’s because I was going through those files for you. I don’t think they would have fired me if I hadn’t done that. I mean, there was always enough work before—”

I cut into the repetitive flow. “When did this happen?”

“Last night. Last night I stayed behind to see if I could find out anything about Mr. Phillips’s paycheck, you know, like you asked me to. I thought about it, and I thought, really, now, if Mr. Warshawski was killed like you say he
was, and if this will help, I ought to find out. But Lois came in to see what I was doing. I guess she was all set to spy on me if I stayed late or stayed after lunch, and then she called Mr. Phillips at home. Well, he wasn’t home yet, of course. But she kept calling him, and about ten o’clock last night he called and told me they don’t need me to come in anymore and he’ll send me two weeks’ salary instead of notice. And, like I said, it just doesn’t seem fair.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I agreed warmly. “What did you tell her you were doing?”

“Who?”

“Lois,” I said patiently. “When she came in and asked you what you were doing, what did you tell her?”

“Oh! I said I’d written a personal letter and I couldn’t find it so I was looking to see if it got thrown out.”

I thought that was pretty fast thinking and said so.

She laughed a little, pleased with the compliment, but added despondently, “She didn’t believe me, because there wasn’t any reason for it to be in Mr. Phillips’s wastebasket.”

“Well, Janet, I don’t know what to say. You certainly tried your hardest. I’m extremely sorry you lost your job, and all for nothing, but if—”

“It wasn’t all for nothing,” she interrupted. “I did find his pay stub just as you thought I might.”

“Oh!” I stared at the receiver in disbelief. For once something in this cockeyed investigation had worked out the way I thought it should. “How much does he make?”

“He gets thirty-five hundred forty-six dollars and fifteen cents every two weeks.”

I tried multiplying in my head but I was still too groggy.

“I figured it out on my calculator last night. That’s ninety-two thousand a year.” She paused, wistfully. “That’s a lot of money. I was only making seven-two hundred. And now I don’t have that.”

“Look, Janet. Would you be willing to work downtown? I can get you some interviews—at the Ajax Insurance Company and a couple of other places.”

She told me she’d think about it: she’d rather find something in her neighborhood. If that didn’t work out, she’d give me a call back and ask me to set up an interview for her. I thanked her profusely and we hung up.

I lay back in bed and thought. Ninety-two thousand a year was a lot of money—for me or Janet. But for Phillips? Say he had good deductions and a good tax accountant. Still, he couldn’t take home more than sixty or so. His real estate tax bill was probably three thousand. A mortgage, maybe another fifteen. Dues at the Maritime Club and the monthly fees for tennis, twenty-five thousand. Tuition, et cetera, at Claremont. The boat. The Alfa. Food. Massandrea dresses for Jeannine. Maybe she bought them at the Elite Repeat shop, or used from Mrs. Grafalk. Still it would take a good hundred thousand net to cover everything.

After breakfast I walked the mile between Lotty’s apartment and my own down on Halsted. I was getting out of shape from lying around too much, but I wasn’t sure I was up to running yet and I knew I couldn’t lift my ten-pound shoulder weights.

My mailbox was bulging. I get the
Wall Street Journal
every day. Five copies were stacked with letters and a small parcel on the floor. I picked up two armfuls and climbed the three flights to my apartment. “No place like home,” I murmured to myself, looking with a jaundiced eye at the dust, the magazines strewn around the living room, and the bed which hadn’t been made for more than two weeks now. I put the mail down and gave myself over to one of my rare housewifely fits, vacuuming, dusting, hanging up clothes. Having ruined a pantsuit, a pair of jeans, a sweater, and a blouse since I left home, there was less to put away than there might have been.

Glowing with virtue, I settled down with a cup of coffee to sort through the mail. Most of it was bills, which I tossed aside unopened. Why look at them just to get depressed? One envelope held a thirty-five-hundred-dollar check from Ajax to pay for a new car. I was grateful for the care of the U. S. Postal Service, which had left that on my lobby floor for any dope addict on Halsted to find. Also, wrapped in a small box were the keys to Boom Boom’s apartment with a note from Sergeant McGonnigal saying the police were through with their investigation and I could use it anytime I wanted to.

I poured myself more coffee and thought about what I should do. First on the list was Mattingly. I called Pierre Bouchard and asked him where I could find Mattingly if he were in town but not at home.

He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “That I could not tell you, Vic. I have avoided the man constantly. But I will call around and see what I can find out.”

I told him Elsie was due any day now and he clicked his tongue again. “That man! What an excrescence he is!”

“By the way, Pierre, does Howard know how to do deep-sea diving?”

“Deep-sea diving?” he echoed. “No, Vic, I am telling you, I do not know him well. I do not know his personal habits. But I will ask … Oh, don’t hang up—I have that name for you.”