Deadlock (25 page)

“What name?”

“Did you not call Anna before you left town? You wanted to know what man we met at Christmas, when Boom Boom met Paige Carrington?”

“Oh yes.” I’d forgotten all about that. The man who was interested in buying a few shares of the Black Hawks, the man for whom Odinflute had set up his party. “Yes. Who was it?”

“His name is Niels Grafalk. Myron says after all he decided not to buy.”

“I see,” I said weakly. I said nothing else and after a bit Bouchard said, “Vic? Vic? Are you still there?”

“What? Oh yes. Yes, thanks very much, Pierre … Let me know if you hear from Mattingly.”

Though distracted, I took my check over to Humboldt Olds where I bought an Omega, a 1981 red model with fifteen thousand miles on it, power steering and power brakes. I had to sign a finance contract for eight hundred dollars but that wouldn’t prove impossible. I’d just bill Boom Boom’s estate for a hefty fee when all this mess was cleaned up. If it ever was.

So Grafalk had been interested in the Black Hawks. And Paige had been present at that same party. Now whom had she known? Who took her? It was an interesting coincidence. I wondered what she would tell me if I called her.

Driving in a slight daze, I reached Boom Boom’s apartment at three-thirty, parking the Olds in front of a
NO PARKING
sign at Chestnut and Seneca. After two weeks of neglect, which had included a burglary and a police investigation, the place looked far worse than mine had this morning. Gray dust from the fingerprint detectors covered all the papers. White chalk still marked the outline of Henry Kelvin’s body next to the desk.

I poured myself a glass of Chivas. I was damned if I was going to clean up two places in one day. Instead, I made a stab at reassembling the papers in their appropriate categories. I’d hire a cleaning crew and some temporary clerks to do the rest of the work. Frankly, I was sick of the place.

I made a tour of the apartment to collect items of interest to me—Boom Boom’s first and last hockey sticks, a New Guinea hut totem from the living room, and some of the pictures of him in various hockey guises from the spare-room wall. Once more the picture of me in my maroon law school robes grinned incongruously from the wall. I took it off and added it to the stack under my arms.
Once the clerks had gotten the papers to the right people and the cleaners had eliminated all the greasy dirt, I’d get the condo and the rest of his possessions onto the market. With any luck, I’d never have to visit this place again. I slung the items into my trunk and drove off. No one had ticketed me—maybe my luck was beginning to turn.

Next stop: the Eudora Grain offices. I badly wanted to talk to Bledsoe about why Mattingly had left Sault Ste. Marie in his airplane, but I still thought Phillips’s finances were an angle worth following up.

Late Saturday afternoon was an eerie time to visit the Port of Chicago. There wasn’t much activity at the elevators. The huge ships stood like sleeping giants, prepared to wake into violent activity if disturbed. I eased the Omega into the parking lot at Eudora’s Grain regional office and found myself tiptoeing across the blacktop to a side door.

A small bell was set into the wall with a little sign over it reading
RING FOR DELIVERIES
. I rang several times and waited five minutes. No one came. If there was a night watchman, he wasn’t yet on the premises. From my back pocket I pulled a house burglar’s compedium of commonly used picklocks and set out methodically to open the door.

Ten minutes later I was in Phillips’s office. Either he or the efficient Lois kept all the file cabinets locked. With an aggrieved sigh, I took out my picklocks again and opened all the cabinets in the room and the three in Lois’s desk outside his office door. I called Lotty and told her I wouldn’t be in for supper and set to work. If I’d been thinking, I would have brought some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee.

Phillips kept a strange collection of junk in his upper desk drawer—three different kinds of antacids; datebooks going back for six years, most of them without any appointments written in; nose drops; an old pair of overshoes; two broken calculators; and odd scraps of paper.
These I carefully smoothed out and read. Most of them were phone messages which he’d crumpled up and tossed in the drawer. A couple from Grafalk, one from Argus. The others were all names I didn’t recognize, but I wrote them down in case I ran so far out of leads that I wanted to check them.

The ledgers were in a walnut filing cabinet on the window side of the office. I pulled them out with great alacrity. They were in the form of computer printouts, issued once a month with year-to-date totals and comparisons with prior years. After a certain amount of looking, I found report A36000059-G, payments to licensed carriers. All I needed now was my list of shipping contracts and I could compare the dates and see if the totals matched.

Or so I thought. I went out to Lois’s file cabinets and found the originals of the contracts Janet had photocopied for me. These I took back into Phillips’s office to lay next to report A36000059-G. Only then did I discover that the ledger recorded by invoice number, not by contract date. At first I thought I could just match totals of individual orders against totals in the ledger; I pulled the Pole Star Line’s as an example.

Unfortunately the carriers apparently submitted more than one job on an invoice. The invoice totals were so much greater than the individual transactions, and the number of total invoices paid so much smaller, that it seemed to me that was the only explanation.

I added and subtracted, matching the numbers up every way I could think of, but I was forced to conclude that I wasn’t going to be able to tell a thing without the individual invoices. And those I could not find. Not a one. I went through the rest of Phillips’s files and all through Lois’s and finally through the open file cabinets out on the floor. There wasn’t an invoice in the place.

Before giving up for the evening, I looked up the payroll
section of the ledgers. Phillips’s salary was listed there just as Janet had told me. If I’d known I was going to burgle the place I would never have let her risk getting fired by going through his garbage.

I tapped my front teeth with a pencil. If he was getting extra money from Eudora Grain, it wasn’t through the payroll account. Anyway, the ledgers were printed by the computers in Eudora, Kansas—if he was monkeying around with the accounts, he’d have to do it more subtly.

I shrugged and looked at my watch. It was after nine o’clock. I was tired. I was very hungry. And my shoulder was throbbing. I’d earned a good dinner, a long bath, and a sound sleep, but there was still another errand on the day’s agenda.

Back in my apartment, I threw some frozen pasta into a pot with tomatoes and basil and ran a bath. I plugged the phone into the bathroom wall and called Phillips’s Lake Bluff house. He wasn’t in, but his son politely asked if he could take a message.

I lifted my right leg out of the water and ran a soapy sponge over it while I considered. “This is V. I. Warshawski,” I said, spelling it for him. “Tell him that Mr. Argus’s auditors will want to know where the missing invoices are.”

The boy repeated the message back to me dubiously. “You got it.” I gave him both my and Lotty’s phone numbers and hung up.

The pasta was bubbling nicely and I took it into the bedroom with me while I got dressed—black velvet pants with a high-necked blouse and a form-fitting red and black velvet toreador jacket. High heels and very dangly earrings and I was set for an evening at the theater. Or the end of an evening at the theater. By some miracle I hadn’t spilled tomato juice on the white blouse. My luck really was turning.

I got to the Windy City Balletworks just at ten-thirty. A
bored young woman in a leotard and stretchy wraparound skirt told me the performance would end in ten minutes. She gave me a program and let me go in without paying.

The tiny theater was filled and I didn’t bother trying to find a seat in the dim light. I lounged against the back wall, taking off my shoes to stand in my stocking feet next to the ushers. A spirited
pas de deux
from a classical ballet was in progress. Paige was not the female dancer. Whoever it was, she seemed technically competent but lacked the special spark with which Paige infused her performance. The whole company appeared on stage for a complex finale, and the show was over.

When the lights came on, I squinted at the program to make sure Paige was, indeed, dancing tonight. Yes,
Pavane for a Dope Dealer
had been performed right before the second act of
Giselle
, which we’d just seen.

I went back out the hallway and followed a small group down to the door leading directly to the dressing rooms. Rather than accost Paige in her shared dressing room, I sat on a folding chair outside to wait. The dancers began coming out in twos and threes, not sparing me a glance. I’d provided myself with a novel, remembering the forty-five-minute wait here the last time I’d tried talking to Paige, and flicked through the pages, looking up in vain every time the door opened.

Fifty minutes went by. Just as I was thinking she might have left at the end of the
Pavane
, she finally emerged. As usual, her exquisite good looks made me feel a little wistful. Tonight she had on a silvery fur coat, possibly fox, which made her resemble Geraldine Chaplin in the middle of the Russian winter in
Dr. Zhivago
.

“Hello, Paige. I’m afraid I got here too late to see the
Pavane
. Perhaps I can make the matinee tomorrow.”

She gave a slight start and then a wary smile. “Hello, Vic. What impertinent questions have you come to ask
me? I hope they’re not long, because I’m late for a dinner engagement.”

“Trying to drown your sorrows?”

She gave me an indignant look. “Life goes on, Vic. You need to learn that.”

“So it does, Paige. I’m sorry to have to drag you into a past you’re trying to forget, but I’d like to know who took you to Guy Odinflute’s party.”

“Who—what?”

“Remember the Christmas party where you met Boom Boom? Niels Grafalk wanted to meet some hockey players, trying to decide whether to buy into the Black Hawks, and Odinflute gave a party for him. Or have you blocked that out along with the rest of the dead past?”

Her eyes blazed suddenly dark and her cheeks turned red. Without a word, she lifted her hand to slap me in the face. I caught her by the wrist and gently lowered her hand to her side. “Don’t hit me, Paige—I learned my fighting in the streets and I wouldn’t want to lose my temper and hurt you … Who took you to Odinflute’s party?”

“None of your damned business. Now will you leave the theater before I call the guard and tell him you’re molesting me? And please do not ever come back. It will make me ill to have you watch me dance.”

She moved with angry grace down the hall and out the front door. I followed in time to see her get into a dark sedan. A man was driving but I couldn’t make out his face in the dim light.

I didn’t feel in the humor for company, even Lotty’s astringent love. I gave her a call from my apartment to tell her not to worry. She didn’t, usually, but I knew she’d been pretty upset after the destruction of the
Lucella
.

In the morning I went down to the corner for the Sunday
Herald-Star
and some croissants. While the coffee dripped in my porcelain coffeepot I tried Mattingly. No one answered. I wondered if Elsie had gone to the hospital.
I tried Phillips, but no one answered there either. It was almost eleven—maybe they had to put in a ritual appearance at the Lake Bluff Presbyterian Church.

I propped the paper up against the coffeepot and sat down to work my way through it. I’d once told Murray the only reason I buy the
Herald-Star
is because it has the most comics in the city. Actually, it has the best crime coverage, too. But I always read the funnies first.

I was halfway through my second cup when I came to the squib about Mattingly. I’d almost passed it over. The headline on an inner page read “Hit-and-run Victim in Kosciuszko Park” but his name must have caught my eye and I went back and read the story through completely.

I counted back in my head. He’d died by two Saturday morning at the latest, probably been hit sometime Friday evening, maybe right after he got back from Sault Ste. Marie. I knew I should call Bobby Mallory and tell him to trace Mattingly’s movements from when he got off Bledsoe’s plane Friday night. But I wanted to talk to Bledsoe myself first and find out why Mattingly had flown home in his plane.

Bledsoe’s home phone wasn’t listed in any of the Chicago or suburban directories. On an off chance I tried the Pole Star Line, but of course no one was there on Sunday.

I called Bobby Mallory to find out if anything had happened in the Henry Kelvin murder. “I got the keys back and went down there. The place was pretty grim. You guys make an arrest yet?”

“You on their payroll or something, Vicki? That family’s bugging us day in and day out. We don’t solve crimes faster for that kind of hassling.”

Depends on who’s doing the hassling, I thought. But I kept that comment to myself—I wanted information more than I wanted to hear Bobby scream at me. So I made a sympathetic clucking in my throat.

“I read about that hit-and-run case in Kosciuszko Park. You know, that guy Mattingly used to play with Boom Boom on the Black Hawks. I hope the Hawks have got a good employee benefits plan—the team doesn’t seem to be holding up too well.”