Deadlock (27 page)

Boom Boom had also listed the bids. In four lots, Pole Star was the low bidder. I started hunting through the apartment for my bag with the contract copies in it, then remembered I had left it at Lotty’s. Not even Lotty could I rouse at three in the morning just to get some papers.

I fixed myself a large scotch and stood at the living room window drinking it. I stared down at the late-night traffic on Halsted. Boom Boom had tried to call me to tell
me what he’d found out. When he couldn’t get hold of me, he stuffed the papers behind my picture—not for me to find, but to keep anyone else from finding them. He’d thought he’d get back to them, and to me, so he didn’t leave a message for me. A spasm of pain contracted my chest. I missed Boom Boom terribly. I wanted to cry, but no tears would come.

I finally left the window and went to bed. I didn’t sleep much and what sleep I had was tormented by dreams of Boom Boom stretching his arms out from a cold, black lake while I stood helplessly by. At seven I gave up trying to rest and took a bath. I waited until eight o’clock, then called Bledsoe’s pilot, Cappy. His wife answered and called him in from the backyard where he was planting petunias.

“Mr. Cappy?” I said.

“Capstone. People call me Cappy.”

“I see … Mr. Capstone, my name is Warshawski. I’m a detective and I’m looking into Howard Mattingly’s death.”

“Never heard of the guy.”

“Wasn’t he your passenger back from Sault Ste. Marie on Friday night?”

“Nope. Not that guy.”

“Bright red hair? Scar on the left side of his face? Stocky build?”

He guessed that sounded like the same person.

“Well, we believe he was traveling under an assumed name. He turned up dead later that night. What I’m trying to find out is where he went when he left the airport.”

“Couldn’t tell you that. All I know, there was a car waiting for him at Meigs. He got in it and they took off. I was filling out my log forms, didn’t really notice.”

He hadn’t been able to see the driver. No, he couldn’t say what kind of car. It was big, not a limo, but it might have been a Caddy or an Oldsmobile.

“How did you come to take this guy home? I thought you were going to fly Mr. Bledsoe down, but you left before the
Lucella
got through the lock.”

“Yeah, well, Mr. Bledsoe called and told me he wasn’t flying down. Told me to take this guy instead. He said his name was Oleson and that’s what I put down on the log.”

“When did Bledsoe call you? He was on board ship all day Friday.”

He’d called Thursday afternoon. No, Cappy couldn’t swear it was Bledsoe. Matter of fact, Bledsoe himself had just phoned with the same question. But he didn’t take orders from anyone except the plane owner—so who else could it have been?

The logic of this argument somewhat escaped me. I asked him for whom else he flew, but he got huffy and said his client list was confidential.

Hanging up slowly, I wondered again if it was time to turn my information about Mattingly over to Bobby Mallory. The police could put their investigative machinery into motion and start questioning everyone who’d been at Meigs Field on Friday night until they found someone to identify that car. I looked at Boom Boom’s documents on the table next to the phone. The answer to the mess lay in these papers. I’d give myself twenty-four more hours, then turn it over to Bobby.

I tried calling Pole Star. The lines were busy. I tried Eudora Grain. The receptionist told me Mr. Phillips had not yet come in for the day. Was he expected? As far as she knew. I called his Lake Bluff residence. Mrs. Phillips told me tightly that her husband had left for work. So he had come home last night? I asked. She hung up on me again.

I made myself coffee and toast and dressed for action: running shoes, blue jeans, a gray cotton shirt, and a denim jacket. I regretted my Smith & Wesson, lying somewhere at the bottom of the Poe Lock. Maybe when they hauled
up the
Lucella
they could fish my gun out of the moldy barley and give it back to me.

Before I took off, the doorbell rang. I buzzed the caller in through the front door and went on downstairs to meet him. It turned out to be a process server—a college student—with a summons for me to attend a Court of Inquiry in Sault Ste. Marie next Monday. The youth seemed relieved that I accepted it so calmly, merely stuffing it into my shoulder bag. I serve a lot of subpoenas myself—recipients range from tetchy to violent.

I stopped at the corner to buy Lotty a bunch of irises and chrysanthemums and zipped up to her apartment in the Omega. Since my little suitcase was also mushed in with fifty thousand tons of barley at Sault Ste. Marie, I stuffed my belongings into a grocery bag. I put the flowers on the kitchen table with a note.

I had to keep the keys to lock the apartment door behind me.

I sat at her kitchen table with my stack of contracts and went through them until I found one that matched the invoice I had in hand. It was for three million bushels of soybeans going from Chicago to Buffalo on July 24, 1981. The price quoted in the contract was $0.33 a bushel. The invoice billed it at $0.35. Two cents a bushel on three million bushels. Came out to sixty thousand dollars.

Grafalk had been the low bidder on this shipment. Someone else had bit $0.335 and a third carrier $0.34. Grafalk picked up the bid at $0.33 and billed it at $0.35.

Boom Boom’s list of Pole Star’s lost contracts proved even more startling. On the forms I’d gotten from Janet, Grafalk was listed as the low bidder. But Boom Boom’s notes showed Pole Star as the low bidder. Phillips either had entered the contracts wrong or the invoices Boom Boom referred to were wrong.

It was time to get some explanations from these clowns. I was tired of being shown the old shell game every time I wanted information out of them. I stuffed all the papers back into the canvas bag and headed for the Port.

It was close to noon when I turned off I-94 at 130th Street. The friendly receptionist at Eudora Grain was answering the phone and nodded to me in recognition as I walked past her into the inner office. The sales reps were hanging up their phones, straightening their ties, getting ready for lunch. In front of Phillips’s office sat Lois, her bouffant hair lacquered into place. The phone was propped under her chin and she made a pretense of looking at some papers. She was talking in the intense, muttering way people do when they’re trying to pretend they’re not really making personal calls.

She lifted her eyes momentarily to me as I walked up to the desk but didn’t interrupt her conversation.

“Where’s Phillips?” I demanded.

She murmured something into the telephone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you have an appointment?”

I grinned at her. “Is he in today? He doesn’t seem to be at home.”

“I’m afraid he’s away from the office on business. Do you want to make an appointment?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll come back.” I circled behind her and looked in Phillips’s office. There weren’t any signs that anyone had been there since me on Saturday night—no briefcase, no jacket, no half-smoked cigars. I didn’t
think he was lurking outside the window in the parking lot but I went over and peered behind the drapes.

My assault on her boss’s office brought Lois, squawking, into his den. I grinned at her again. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation. Tell your mother it won’t happen again. Or is it your sister?”

She turned red and stomped back to her desk. I left, feeling pleased with myself.

I headed to the main part of the Port. Grafalk wasn’t in; he didn’t come down to the Port every day, the receptionist explained. I debated going to talk to Percy MacKelvy, the dispatcher, but decided I’d rather talk directly to Grafalk.

I walked over to Pole Star’s little office. The office manager there was harassed but trying to be calm. As I talked to her she took one call from the Toronto
Sun
inquiring into the
Lucella
’s accident and another from KLWN Radio in Lawrence, Kansas.

“It’s been like this all morning. I’d like to get the phone disconnected, but we need to stay in touch with our lawyers, and we do have other ships carrying freight. We don’t want to miss any orders.”

“I thought the
Lucella
was the only ship you owned.”

“It’s the only big one,” she explained. “But we lease a number of others. In fact Martin got so sick of the newspapers he went down to Plymouth Iron and Steel to watch them unload coal from the
Gertrude Ruttan
. She’s a seven-hundred-foot self-unloading vessel. We lease her from Triage—they’re a big shipbuilding company. Sort of like Fruehauf for trucks—they don’t carry much cargo in their own right, just lease the vessels.”

I asked for directions to the Plymouth yard and she obligingly gave them to me. It was another ten miles around the lake to the east. She was a very helpful young woman—even gave me a pass to get into the Plymouth plant.

We were into the middle of May and the air was still quite chilly. I wondered whether we were heading for a new ice age. It’s not cold winters that cause them but cool summers when the snow doesn’t melt. I buttoned my jacket up to the neck and rode with the windows rolled all the way up.

As I moved into steel territory the blue air darkened and turned red-black. I felt as though every movement closer to the mills carried me further back in time to the grimy streets of South Chicago where I grew up. The women in the streets had the same pinched, worn look as they hurried their toddlers along. A grocery store on a corner reminded me of the place at 91st and Commercial where I used to buy a hard roll on my way to school, and I stopped the car to get a snack in lieu of lunch. I almost expected old Mr. Kowolsky to step up behind the counter, but instead an energetic young Mexican weighed my apple and carefully wrapped a carton of blueberry yogurt for me.

He gave me detailed directions on how to find the plant entrance, eyeing me with impartial enthusiasm while he did so. I felt slightly cheered by his guileless admiration and slowly made my way to the steelworks, eating my yogurt with my left hand while I drove with the right.

It was just two o’clock. The plant was between shift changes, so mine was the only car going past the guard station at the main entrance. A beefy young man inspected the pass they’d given me at Pole Star.

“You know where to find the
Gertrude
?”

I shook my head.

“Take the road around to the left. You’ll go past the coke ovens and a slag heap. You’ll be able to see the ship from there.”

I followed his directions, going by a long, narrow building where fire danced inside, visible through sliding doors opened to let in the cool air. Slag formed a mountain on my left. Bits of cinder blew onto the windshield of the
Omega. Peering through it at the rutted track in front of me, I continued on around the furnaces until I saw the
Gertrude
looming above me.

Great hills of coal framed the lakefront. The
Gertrude
was getting ready to dump her load onto one of them. Hard-hatted men in boiler suits had tied up the ship. As I left the car and picked my way across the pockmarked yard, I could see them turning the swivel top of the ship’s self-unloader to position it over one of the smaller coal piles.

Bledsoe was on the ground talking with a man in a dirty gray boiler suit. The two weren’t speaking when I came up, just looking at the activity going on above them.

Bledsoe had lost weight in the three days since I’d last seen him. It was shockingly noticeable—he must have dropped ten pounds. His tweed jacket sagged across his shoulders instead of straining as if to contain his monumental energy.

“Martin,” I said. “Good to see you.”

He smiled with genuine pleasure. “Vic! How’d you run me to earth!”

I explained and he introduced me to the man he was standing with, the shift foreman. As we talked, a great clanking started and coal began moving down the conveyor belt onto the heap below.

“The self-unloader is quite a machine. You ought to watch it in action,” Bledsoe said into my ear. He went back to his car and got a second hard hat out of the trunk for me. We climbed up a ladder on the port side of the ship, away from the self-unloader, and Bledsoe took me over to watch coal coming up the wide figure-eight belt from the holds.

The coal came through quite fast, in large chunks. It takes about eight hours to unload the holds with a self-unloader, compared to two days using manual loader.

Bledsoe was clearly tense. He walked around, talking a
bit to the crew, clenching and unclenching his fingers. He couldn’t stand still. At one point he caught me watching him and said, “I won’t relax until this load is off. Every time I move a cargo from now on, I’m not going to be able to sleep until I know the ship has made it in and out of port safely.”

“What’s the story on the
Lucella
?”

He grimaced. “The Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, and the FBI are mounting a full-scale investigation. Trouble is, until they get her out of the lock they won’t even be able to see what kind of explosive was used.”

“How long will that take?”

“A good ten months. That lock will be shut all summer and it’ll take most of next year to repair the gates.”

“Can you save the ship?”

“Oh yes, I think so. Mike’s been all over it with the guys from the Costain boatyard—the people who built her. They’ll take her out in sections, tow her back to Toledo, and weld her back together. She should be running again by the end of next summer.”

“Who pays to repair the lock?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not responsible for the damned thing blowing up. The army has to fix it. Unless the Court of Inquiry assigns liability to me. But there’s no way in hell they can do that.”

We were speaking almost in shouts to be heard over the clanking of the conveyor belts and the rattling of the coal going over the side. Some of the old energy was coming back into Bledsoe’s face as he talked. He was starting to elaborate on his legal position, pounding his right fist into his left palm, when we heard a piercing whistle.