Deadlock (28 page)

The noise came to an abrupt halt. The conveyor belt stopped and with it all its attendant racket. An authoritative figure moved over to the opening into the hold and called down a demand as to the cause of the belt’s stopping.

“Probably just an overload on one of the side belts,” Bledsoe muttered, looking extremely worried.

We heard a muffled shout from the hold, then a young man in a dirty blue boiler suit erupted up the ladder onto the deck. His face was greeny white under its smear of coal dust and he just made it to the side before he was sick.

“What is it?” the authoritative man yelled.

There were more cries coming from the hold. With a glance at Bledsoe, I started down the ladder the young engineer had just climbed up. Bledsoe followed close on my hands.

I jumped down the last three rungs onto the steel floor below. Six or seven hard-hatted figures were huddled over the figure-eight belt where it joined the side conveyors feeding it from the holds. I strode over and shoved them aside, Bledsoe peering around my back.

Clayton Phillips was staring up at me. His body was covered with coal. The pale brown eyes were open, the square jaw clenched. Blood had dried across his freckled cheekbones. I moved the men away and bent over to peer closely at his head. Coal had mostly filled in a large hole on the left side. It was mixed with congealed blood in a reddish-black, ghastly clot.

“It’s Phillips,” Bledsoe said, his voice constricted.

“Yes. We’d better call the police. You and I have a few questions to discuss, Martin.” I turned to the group of men. “Who’s in charge down here?”

A middle-aged man with heavy jowls said he was the chief engineer.

“Make sure no one touches the body or anything else. We’ll get the police over here.”

Bledsoe followed me tamely back up the ladder to the deck and off the ship. “There’s been an accident down below,” I told the Plymouth foreman. “We’re getting the police. They won’t be unloading the rest of the coal for a while.” The foreman took us into a small office just
around to the side of a long shed. I used the phone to call the Indiana State Police.

Bledsoe got into the Omega with me. We drove away from the yard in silence. I made my way back to the interstate and rode the few remaining miles over to the Indiana Dunes State Park. On a weekday afternoon, in early spring, the place was deserted. We climbed across the sand down to the shore. The only other people there were a bearded man and a sporty-looking woman with their golden retriever. The dog was swimming into the frothy waves after a large stick.

“You have a lot of explaining to do, Martin.”

He looked at me angrily. “You owe me a lot of explanations. How did Phillips get into that ship? Who blew up the
Lucella
? And how come you’re so quick on the spot every time disaster is about to strike Pole Star?”

“How come Mattingly flew back to Chicago on your plane?”

“Who the hell is Mattingly?”

I drew a breath. “You don’t know? Honestly?”

He shook his head.

“Then who did you send back to Chicago in your plane?”

“I didn’t.” He made an exasperated gesture. “I called Cappy as soon as I got to town and demanded the same thing of him. He insists I phoned from Thunder Bay and told him to fly this strange guy back—he said his name was Oleson. Obviously someone was impersonating me. But who and why? And since you clearly know who this guy is,
you
tell me.”

I looked out at the blue-green water. “Howard Mattingly was a second-string wing for the Chicago Black Hawks. He was killed early Saturday morning—run over by a car and left to die in a park on Chicago’s northwest side. He was up at the Soo on Friday. He fits the description of the guy Cappy flew back to Chicago. He
exploded the depth charges on the
Lucella
—I watched him do it.”

Bledsoe turned to me and grabbed my arm in a gesture of spontaneous fury. “Goddammit—if you watched him do it, how come you haven’t said anything to anyone? I’ve been talking my head off to the FBI and the Corps of Engineers for two days and you—you’ve been sitting on this information.”

I twisted away from his grasp and spoke coldly. “I only realized after the fact what Mattingly had been doing. I didn’t recognize him immediately. As we went down to the bottom of the lock, he picked up what looked like an outsize pair of binoculars. They must have been the radio controls for the detonators. The whole thing only dawned on me after the
Lucella
had gone sky-high … You may recall that you were in shock. You weren’t in any position to listen to anyone say anything. I thought I’d better leave and see if I could track him down.”

“But later. Why didn’t you talk to the police later?”

“Ah. That was because, when I got to the airport at Sault Ste. Marie, I found Mattingly had gone back to Chicago on your airplane, presumably under your orders. That really upset me—it made a mockery out of my judgment of your character. I wanted to talk to you about it first, before I told the police.”

The dog came bounding up to us, water spraying from its red-gold hair. It was an older dog—she sniffed at Martin with a white muzzle. The woman called to her and the dog bounded off again.

“And now?” he demanded.

“And now I’d like to know how Clayton Phillips came to be on the self-unloader of a ship you were leasing.”

He pounded the beach beside him. “You tell me, Vic. You’re the smart detective. You’re always turning up whenever there’s a crime about to be committed on my fleet … Unless you’ve decided that a man with my record
is capable of anything—capable of destroying his own dreams, capable of murder?”

I ignored his last statement.

“Phillips has been missing since yesterday morning. Where were you yesterday morning?”

His eyes were dark spots of anger in his face. “How dare you?” he yelled.

“Martin: listen to me. The police are going to ask that and you’re going to have to answer.”

He pressed his lips together and debated within himself. Finally he decided to master his temper. “I was closeted with my Lloyds representative up at the Soo until late yesterday. Gordon Firth—the Ajax chairman—flew up with him in Ajax’s jet and they brought me back down to Chicago about ten last night.”

“Where was the
Gertrude Ruttan
?”

“She was tied up at the Port. She steamed in Saturday afternoon and had to tie up for the weekend until they were ready to unload her. Some damned union regulation.”

So anyone who could get into the Port and get onto the ship could have put a hole in the side of Phillips’s head and shoved him into a cargo hold. He’d just fall down into the load and show up with the rest of the cargo when it came out on the conveyor belt. Very neat. “Who knew the
Gertrude Ruttan
would be there over the weekend?”

He shrugged. “Anyone who knows anything about the ships in and out of the Port.”

“That narrows it down a lot,” I said sarcastically. “Same thing for who fixed my car, for who killed Boom Boom. I was figuring Phillips for that job, but now he’s dead, too. So that leaves the other people who were around at the time. Grafalk. Bemis. Sheridan. You.”

“I was up in the Soo all day yesterday.”

“Yeah, but you could hire someone.”

“So could Niels,” he pointed out. “You’re not working for him, are you? Did he hire you to set me up?”

I shook my head.

“Who’re you working for then, Warshawski?”

“My cousin.”

“Boom Boom? He’s dead.”

“I know. That’s why I’m working for him. We had a pact, Boom Boom and I. We took care of each other. Someone shoved him under the
Bertha Krupnik
. He left me evidence of the reason why which I found last night. Part of that evidence implicates you, Martin. I want to know why you were letting so many of your contracts with Eudora go to Grafalk.”

He shook his head. “I looked at those contracts. There was nothing wrong with them.”

“There was nothing wrong with them, except that you were letting Grafalk pick up a number of orders when you were the low bidder. Now are you going to tell me why or am I going to have to go to Pole Star and interrogate your staff and go through your books and repeat that boring routine?”

He sighed. “I didn’t kill your cousin, Warshawski. If anyone did, it was Grafalk. Why don’t you focus on him and find out how he blew up my ship and forget these contracts?”

“Martin, you’re not a dummy. Think it through. It looks like you and Grafalk were in collusion on those shipping orders. Mattingly flew back to Chicago in
your
plane and Phillips’s body was found on
your
ship. If I was a cop, I wouldn’t look too much further—if I had all that information.”

He made a wrenching gesture with his right arm. Frustration.

“All right. It’s true,” he shouted. “I did let Niels have some of my orders. Are you going to put me in jail for it?”

I didn’t say anything.

After a brief pause he continued more calmly. “I was trying to put financing together for the
Lucella
. Niels was getting desperate for orders. The steel slump was hurting
everyone, but Grafalk was really taking it on the chin because of all those damned small ships of his. He told me he would let the story of my evil past out to the financial community if I didn’t give him some of my orders.”

“Could that really have hurt you?”

He gave a wry smile. “I didn’t want to find out. I was trying to raise fifty million dollars. I couldn’t see the Fort Dearborn Trust giving me a nickel if they knew I’d served two years for embezzling.”

“I see. And then what?”

“Oh, as soon as the
Lucella
was launched I told Niels to publish and be damned. As long as I’m making money no one is going to care a tinker’s dam about my record. When you need money, they make you sign an acolyte’s pledge before they give it to you. When you’ve got it—they don’t care where it came from. But Niels was furious.”

“It’s a might big jump from pressuring you over a few grain orders to blowing up your ship, though.”

He insisted stubbornly that no one else cared enough. We talked about it for half an hour or more, but he wouldn’t budge. I told him finally that I’d investigate Niels as well.

The golden retriever had departed with her people by the time we got to our feet and climbed back over the sand hills to the parking lot. A few children stared at us incuriously, waiting for the grown-ups to disappear before launching their own reckless deeds.

I drove Bledsoe back to the steel mill, now heavily thronged with Indiana and Chicago police. The four o’clock shift was arriving and I dropped him at the gates. The cops might want to talk to me later, as a witness, but they’d have to find me—I had other things to do.

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a private investigator in blue jeans to see the chairman of a major U.S. corporation. I reached Ajax Insurance headquarters in the south Loop a little after five—traffic had been heavy all the way into the city. I was figuring on it being late enough for me to avoid the phalanx of secretaries who pave the entrance to a CEO’s office, but I’d forgotten Ajax’s security system.

Guards in the marble lobby of the sixty-story skyscraper demanded an employee identification card from me. I obviously didn’t have one. They wanted to know whom I was visiting—they would issue me a visitor’s pass if the person I wanted to see approved my visit.

When I told them Gordon Firth, they were appalled. They had a list of the chairman’s visitors. I wasn’t on it, and they suspected me of being an assassin from Aetna, hired to bump off the competition.

“I’m a private investigator,” I explained, pulling the photostat of my license from my wallet to show them. “I’m looking into a fifty-million-dollar loss Ajax sustained last week. It’s true I don’t have an appointment with Gordon Firth, but it’s important I see him or whomever
he’s designating to handle this loss. It may affect Ajax’s ultimate liability.”

I argued with them some more and finally persuaded them if Ajax had to pay for the
Lucella
’s hull because they had kept me out of Firth’s office I’d remember their names and see that the money came out of their hides.

These arguments did not get me to Firth—as I say, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle—but they did bring me to a man in their Special Risks Department who was handling the loss. His name was Jack Hogarth and he came down to the lobby for me.

He walked briskly up to the guard station to meet me, his shirtsleeves pushed up to the elbows, his tie hanging loosely around his neck. He was about thirty-five or forty, dark, slight, with humorous brown-black eyes just now circles with heavy shadows.

“V. I. Warshawski, is it?” he asked, studying my card. “Come on up. If you’ve got some information on the
Lucella
you’re more welcome than a heat wave in January.”

I had to trot to keep up with him on the way to the elevator. We were carried quickly to the fifty-third floor; I yawned a couple of times to clear my ears. He barely waited for the elevator to open before plunging down the hall again, through double glass doors enclosing the elevator bank, and on to a walnut and crimson suite in the southeast corner of the building.