Deadlock (26 page)

“You know I don’t like you calling up and chatting about crime with me, Vicki. And I hope you wouldn’t do it just to get my goat. So it must be you’ve got some special interest in the case. What is it?”

“No, not that,” I said hastily. “But I know his wife. She’s a fragile woman—just a child, really, and I don’t think this shock’ll be too good for her. Her first baby is due any second.”

“Yeah, she had it this morning. Between you and me, she’s well rid of that specimen. He was a petty grafter, had his hand stuck in everybody’s pocket. He owed gambling money, too. If he’d been a starter they’d of had him fixing games.”

“You figure one of his creditors got tired of waiting and ran him over?”

“I don’t figure anything for your consumption. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a hundred times, quit fooling around with crime. You’ll only get hurt. Leave that—”

“—to the police. They’re paid to handle it.” I finished with him in chorus. “Make it more like a million times, Bobby. Thanks. Give my love to Eileen,” I added as he hung up on me.

Next I tried Murray Ryerson. He wasn’t at the
Star
but I found him at home, just staggering out of bed.

“V. I. who?” he grumbled. “It’s only eleven in the morning.”

“Wake up, sunshine. I want to talk to you.”

“Vic, if you knew how long I’ve waited to hear those words from you. My mother keeps telling me, ‘No, she’s just using you, Murray. She just wants to worm crime information out of you.’ But deep down, I keep believing, in my secret heart, that one day my warmest passions will be reciprocated.”

“Murray, your warmest passion, next to beer, is for a hot story. I guess I reciprocate that. Why don’t you come up and watch the poor old Cubbies take on the winningest team in baseball and I’ll give you an exclusive on the wreck of the
Lucella
.”

“What do you know about that?” he asked sharply.

“I was there. I was an eyewitness. I watched the whole thing happen. I may even have seen the man—or woman—who planted the depth charges.”

“My God, Vic, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you’re calling me out of the blue like this. Who was it? Where did you see them? Was it up at the locks? Is this on the level?”

“Certainly,” I said virtuously. “Have we got a date?”

“Let me get Mike Silchuck up there with his camera to get a shot of you. Now, let’s start at the beginning. Why were you on the
Lucella
?”

“Are you going to come to the game with me or not?”

“Oh, all right. But it’s no joy for me to watch Atlanta massacre our faithful boys in blue.”

He agreed to meet me at the bleachers at twelve forty-five. Right before he hung up he said, “What do you want from me, Vic? Why the elaborate setup?”

“See you at the game, Murray.” I laughed and hung up.

Before leaving the park I tried Phillips again. Jeannine answered.

“Hello, Mrs. Phillips. This is V. I. Warshawski. I’m a business associate of your husband’s. May I speak to him, please?”

He wasn’t in. She didn’t know when he would be in. I thought she was lying. Under her hauteur she sounded scared. I tried probing a little but couldn’t get a handle on it. Finally I asked her what time he’d gone out. She hung up on me.

The Braves did clobber the Cubs. Only Keith Moreland, hitting around .345, did anything we could enjoy, knocking a ball into the hands of an eager kid around nine sitting in front of me. However, the day was sunny, if chilly, the crowd enthusiastic, and Murray and I enjoyed a few hot dogs. I let him drink the beer—I don’t like the stuff.

Mike Silchuck had taken my picture a few dozen times in front of the ticket counter. Unfortunately all my scars were in places I didn’t feel like flashing in the middle of Addison, so they had to be content with a look of noble courage. Murray asked me questions briskly during the first three innings, then spent the fourth phoning his exclusive into the
Herald-Star
.

In the top half of the sixth, while the Braves scored five runs, I asked Murray about Mattingly.

“He’s a small-time hood, Vic. What do you want to know about him?”

“Who killed him?”

Like Mallory, he assumed immediately that Mattingly or his wife/mother/brothers were my clients. I gave him the same story I’d told Bobby.

“Besides, even though Boom Boom hated him, he felt sorry for poor little Elsie. I know he used to slip her a few
bucks to stretch the housekeeping money, which I guess Mattingly doled out with a grudging fist, since he needed it for his gambling debts.”

“Why did she stay with him?” Murray asked irritably.

“Oh, Murray, grow up. Why does anyone stay with anyone? She was a child, a baby. She couldn’t have been eighteen when he married her, and everyone she knows is in Oklahoma … Well, let’s not get into the psychology of marriage. Just tell me if there are any leads into his death.”

He shook his head. “He was out of town for three or four days. Elsie doesn’t know where he went or how he got there, and the police haven’t dug up anyone who can help. They’ll question the hockey team, of course, but as far as I can tell most of the guys felt the same way your cousin did.”

So the connection with Bledsoe was still secret. Or the connection with his airplane, at any rate. “Was he wearing size twelve Arroyo hiking boots by any chance?”

Murray looked at me strangely. “The footprint left in Boom Boom’s apartment? I don’t know—but I’ll find out.”

I turned my attention to the rest of the game. My hero, Bill Buckner, struck out. Such is life. I kind of knew the feeling.

After the game Murray wandered home with me for something more substantial than hot dogs. I scrounged around in my bare larder and came up with tuna, frozen fettucine, and olives. We drank a bottle of Barolo and put crime behind us for a few hours, while I found out how much exercise my dislocated shoulder was up to.

Murray and I have been competitors on the crime scene, friends, and occasional lovers for several years. Somehow, though, the relationship never seems to develop. Maybe our rivalry over crime investigation gets in the way.

Around midnight the
Star
signaled him on his beeper
and he left to deal with a Mafia shooting in River Forest. Beepers are one of the twentieth century’s most useless inventions. What difference does it make if your office finds you now rather than an hour from now? Why not give yourself a break?

I asked Murray this as he pulled his T-shirt over the thick auburn curls on his chest.

“If they didn’t know where to find me, the
Sun-Times
or the
Trib
would beat me to the story,” he mumbled through the cloth.

“Yeah,” I grumbled, lying back in bed. “Americans are afraid that if they unplug themselves from their electronic toys for five minutes, they’ll miss out on—everything. Life. Imagine no TV, no telephones, no beepers, no computers for three minutes. You’d die. You’d be like a beached whale—”

I was working myself into a frenzy over our appalling dependency on gadgets when Murray dropped a pillow over my face. “You talk too much, Vic.”

“This is what happened to the girl in
Looking for Mr. Goodbar.”
I padded naked after him down the hall to make sure all the locks got closed behind him. “She brings this guy home and he suffocates her with her own pillow … I hope you write a definitive exposé of the Chicago mob and get them run out of town.”

After Murray left I couldn’t get back to sleep. We’d gone to bed early, around seven-thirty, and slept for a couple of hours. Now I felt all the loose ends of the case whirling around in my head like trails of fettucine. I didn’t know where to find Bledsoe. It was too late to try the Phillipses again. Too late to call Grafalk, to find out if he had gone to that Christmas party alone. I’d already burgled the Eudora Grain offices. I’d even cleaned my apartment earlier in the day. Unless I wanted to wash dishes twice in twenty-four hours, there wasn’t anything for me to do except pace.

About one-thirty the walls started to close in on me. I got dressed and took one of my mother’s diamond earrings from the locked cupboard built into my closet. I went out onto Halsted, deserted in the early morning except for a few drunks, got into the Omega, and headed out to Lake Shore Drive. I rode south for several miles, past the Loop, and pulled off at Meigs Field, the small airport on Chicago’s lakefront.

The blue landing lights cast no illumination in the thick dark. They seemed like meaningless dots, not part of a human network. Behind the tiny runway lapped Lake Michigan, a dark shape. I felt desolate. Not even a beeper linked me with the rest of the world.

I skirted the runway and stumbled through the weed-grown rocks down to the water’s edge, shivering at the nameless menace in the black water. The water slapping at my feet seemed to call me to itself. Let me enfold you in the mysteries of my depths. All the dark things you fear will become your delight. Don’t think of drowning, of Boom Boom choking and fighting for air. Think of infinite rest, no responsibilities, no need for control. Just perfect rest.

The roar of an engine brought me back to myself. A two-seater plane was landing. It looked like a living creature, its lights flashing busily, wings flopping for the descent, like a noisy insect settling down for a short rest.

I stumbled back across the rocks to the little terminal. No one was in the waiting room. I went back outside and followed the two men who had just landed into an office. There a thin young man with straw-colored hair and a very pointed nose went over their flight charts with them. They were talking about some wind pattern which had caught them up around Galena and the three had an animated discussion on what might have caused it. This went on for a good ten minutes while I wandered around the room looking at different aerial photos of the city and surrounding countryside.

At last the thin young man pulled himself reluctantly from the weather map and asked if he could help me in some way.

I gave my most ingratiating smile—Lauren Bacall trying to get Sam Spade to do her dirty work for her. “I came in on Mr. Bledsoe’s plane Friday night and I think I might have lost an earring.” I pulled my mother’s diamond drop from my jacket pocket. “It looks like this. The post must have come out.”

The young man frowned. “When did you come in?”

“Friday. It would have been around five, I guess.”

“What kind of plane does Bledsoe fly?”

I gave a helpless, feminine shrug. “I don’t know. It seats about six people, I think. It’s new,” I added helpfully. “The paint’s fresh and shiny—”

The young men exchanged a masculine smirk with the other two. Women are so stupid. He pulled a logbook out of a drawer and ran his finger down the entries. “Bledsoe. Oh yes. A Piper Cub. Came in at five-twenty on Friday. There was only one passenger, though. The pilot didn’t say anything about a woman.”

“Well, I did ask him specially not to. I didn’t want a record that I’d been on the plane. But now I’ve lost this earring and all, I don’t know what I’ll do … Will Cappy be in this morning? Could you ask him to look for me?”

“He only comes in when Mr. Bledsoe needs him to fly.”

“Well, maybe you have a number where I could reach him?”

After a certain amount of hemming and hawing, during which the other two were winking surreptitiously at each other, the young man gave me Cappy’s phone number. I thanked him profusely and took off. Whatever gets the job done.

Back home I remembered the memorabilia I’d picked up at Boom Boom’s apartment and took them out of the trunk. My left arm continued to heal, despite constant
abuse, and the load brought on only minor twinges. With the pile of stuff balanced on my right arm, I fumbled at the door locks left-handed. The New Guinea totem started to wobble. I struggled to save it, and the pictures crashed to the floor. I swore under my breath, put everything down, unlocked the door with both hands, propped it open with my foot, and carried the things properly into the building.

I’d saved the totem, but the glass over the pictures had cracked. I put them on the coffee table and took the frames apart gingerly, knocking the glass into a waste can.

The photo of me in my graduation robes was wedged extremely tightly into the frame. Boom Boom must have put too many sheets of cardboard in to allow the back to fit properly. “You shouldn’t have bought such a cheap frame for me, Boom Boom,” I muttered to myself. I finally went into the kitchen for a couple of oven mitts. With those on, I forced the frame away from the backing, spilling glass everywhere.

Between the picture and the backing was a thickly folded stack of white paper. No wonder the photo was wedged in so tightly.

I unfolded the stack. It turned out to be two sheets of paper. One was an invoice from the Grafalk Steamship Line to the Eudora Grain Company. Terms: 10 days, 2 percent, 30 days net, 60 days, 18 percent interest. It showed loads by vessel, date of shipment, and date of arrival. The second, written in Boom Boom’s meticulous hand, listed six dates when Pole Star had lost shipments to Grafalk.