Deadlock

by Sara Paretsky

  A dark blue Olds 88 sedan, new model, rested outside the attached three-car garage. It looked as if the lady of the house might be in.

  I rang the front bell. After a wait the door opened. A woman in her early forties, dark hair cut expensively to fall around her ears, stood there in a simple shirtwaist-Massandrea, it looked like. A good two hundred fifty dollars at Charles A. Stevens. Even though it was Monday afternoon at home, her makeup was perfect, ready for any unexpected visitors. Diamond drops hung from gold filigree attached to her ears.

  She looked at me coldly. “Yes?”

  “Good afternoon, Mrs. Phillips. I’m Ellen Edwards with Tri-State Research. We’re doing a survey of the wives of important corporate executives and I wanted to talk to you. Do you have a few minutes this afternoon, or could we set a time when it would be convenient?”

  She looked at me unblinkingly for a few minutes. “Who sent you?”

  “Tri-State did. Oh, you mean how did we get your name? By surveying the biggest companies in the Chicago area-or divisions of big companies like Eudora Grain-and getting the names of their top men.”

  “Is this going to be published someplace?”

  “We won’t use your name, Mrs. Phillips. We’re talking to five hundred women and we’ll just do some composite profiles.”

  She thought about it and finally decided, grudgingly, that she would talk to me. She took me into the house, into a back room that gave a good view of Lake Michigan. Through the window I watched a tanned, well-muscled young man struggling with an eighteen-foot sailboat tied to a mooring about twenty yards from the shore.

  We sat in wing chairs covered with needlepointed scenes in orange, blue, and green. Mrs. Phillips lighted a Kent. She didn’t offer me one-not that I smoke, it just would have been good manners.

  “Do you sail, Mrs. Phillips?”

  “No. I never cared to learn. That’s my son Paul. He just got home from Claremont for the summer.”

  “Do you have any other children?”

  They had two daughters, both in high school. What were her own hobbies? Needlepointing, of course-the ugly chair covers were examples of her handiwork. And tennis, she adored tennis. Now that they belonged to the Maritime Country Club she could play year round with good professionals.

  Had she lived in Lake Bluff long? The last five years. Before that they’d been in Park Forest South. Much closer to the Port, of course-but Lake Bluff was such a wonderful place to live. Such a good home for the girls, and, of course, for her.

  I told her the main things we were interested in were the advantages and disadvantages of being a corporate spouse. So the advantages had to include lifestyle-right? Unless she or he had independent means to support it?

  She gave a rather self-conscious laugh. “No, we’re not like the-like some of the families around here. Every penny we spend Clayton earns. Not that some of these people aren’t finding out what it’s like to have to struggle a bit.” She seemed about to expand on the statement but thought better of it.

  “Most of the women we talk to find their husbands’ schedules one of the biggest disadvantages-raising families alone, spending too much time alone. I imagine an executive like your husband puts in pretty long hours-and of course it’s quite a drive from here down to the Port.” The Tri-State Tollway to I-94 would be a smooth run, but he’d be doing it with the traffic as far as the Loop going in and starting at the Loop going home. Maybe ninety minutes if everything went well.

  “What time does he usually get home?”

  That varied, but generally by seven o’clock.

  Paul had gotten the sails up and was untying the boat. It looked pretty big for one person to handle alone, but Mrs. Phillips didn’t seem worried. She didn’t even watch as the boat bobbed off into the lake. Maybe she had total confidence in her son’s ability to handle the boat. Maybe she didn’t care what he did.

  I told her we’d just take a typical day in their lives together and go through it-say last Thursday. What time they had gotten up, what they had for breakfast, what she did with herself. What time her husband got home from work. I heard all the dreary details of a life without focus, the hours at the tennis club, at the beauty parlor, at the Edens Plaza Shopping Center, before I got the information I’d come for. Clayton hadn’t gotten home that night until nine. She remembered because she’d cooked a roast and finally she and the girls ate it without waiting for him. She couldn’t remember if he seemed upset or tired or if his clothes were covered with grease.

  “Covered with grease?” she echoed, astonished. “Why would your research firm want to know a thing like that?”

  I’d forgotten who I was supposed to be for a minute. “I wondered if you do your own laundry, or sent it out, or have a maid do it.”

  “We send it out. We can’t afford a maid.” She gave a sour smile. “Not yet, anyway. Maybe next year.”

  “Well, thank you for your time, Mrs. Phillips. We’ll mail you a copy of the report when we complete it. We’ll be bringing it out later this summer.”

  She took me back through the house. The furniture was expensive but not very attractive. Someone with more money than taste had picked it out-she, or Phillips, or the two of them together. As I said good-bye I idly asked who lived in the big brick place up the road, the one with the tennis courts.

  An expression combining awe and envy crossed her well-made-up face. “That’s the Grafalks. You ought to talk to her. Her husband owns one of the biggest first in town, ships. They have maids and a chauffeur-the works.”

  “Do you spend much time with them?”

  “Oh well, they lead their lives, we lead ours. They sponsored us in the Maritime Club and Niels takes Paul and Clayton sailing with him sometimes. But she’s pretty standoffish. If you don’t belong to the Symphony Board you aren’t worth much to her.” She seemed to feel she might have said too much, for she hastily changed the subject and said good-bye.

  I backed the Chevette onto Harbor Road and drove past the Grafalks’. So that was where the Viking lived. A pretty nice spread. I stopped the car and looked at it, half tempted to go in and try my pitch on Mrs. Grafalk. As I sat, a Bentley nosed its way through the gates and turned onto the road. A thin, middle-aged woman with graying black hair was at the wheel. She didn’t look at me as she came out-maybe they were used to gawkers. Or perhaps she wasn’t the owner but just a visitor-a sister member of the Symphony Board.

  Harbor Road turned west toward Sheridan a hundred yards beyond the Grafalk estate. The Bentley disappeared around the corner at a good clip. I put the Chevette into gear and was getting ready to follow when a dark blue sports car came around the bend. Going fifty or so, the driver turned left across my path. I braked hard and avoided a collision by inches. The car, a Ferrari, went on through the brick pillars lining the drive, stopping with a great squeal just clear of the road.

  Niels Grafalk came up to the Chevette before I had time to disappear. I couldn’t fool him with some tale about opinion polls. He was wearing a brown tweed jacket and an open-necked white shirt and his face was alive with anger.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” he exploded at the Chevette.

  “I’d like to ask you the same question. Do you ever signal before you turn?”

  “What were you doing in front of my house anyway?” Anger had obscured his attention and he hadn’t noticed who I was at first; now recognition mixed with anger. “Oh, it’s you-the lady detective. What were you doing-trying to catch my wife or me in an indiscreet position?”

  “Just admiring the view. I didn’t realize I needed life insurance to travel to the northern suburbs.” I started once more to move the car up Harbor Road, but he stuck a hand through the open window and seized my left arm. It was attached at the top to my dislocated shoulder and his grasp sent a shudder of pain through both arm and shoulder. I stopped the car once more.

  “That’s right, you don’t do divorces, do you?” His dark blue eyes were flooded with emotion-anger, exc
itement, it was hard to tell. He released my arm and I turned off the ignition. My fingers strayed to my left shoulder to rub it. I let them fall-I wasn’t going to let him see he’d hurt me. I got out of the car, almost against my will, pulled by the force of his energy. That’s what it means to have a magnetic personality.

  “You missed your wife.”

  “I know-I passed her on the road. Now I want to know why you were spying on my property.”

  “Honest Injun, Mr. Grafalk-I wasn’t spying. If I were, I wouldn’t do it right outside your front door like that. I’d conceal myself and you’d never know I was here.”

  The blaze died down a bit in the blue eyes and he laughed. “What were you doing here, then?”

  “Just passing through. Someone told me you lived here and I was gawking at it-it’s quite a nice place.”

  “You didn’t find Clayton at home, did you?”

  “Clayton? Oh, Clayton Phillips. No, I expect he’d be at work on a Monday afternoon, wouldn’t he?” It wouldn’t do to deny I’d been at the Phillipses-even though I’d used a fake name, Grafalk could check that pretty easily.

  “You talked to Jeannine, then. What did you think of her?”

  “Are you interviewing her for a job?”

  “What?” He looked puzzled, then secretly amused. “How about a drink? Or don’t private eyes drink on duty?”

  I looked at my watch-it was almost four-thirty. “Let me just move the Chevette out of the way of any further Lake Bluff menaces. It isn’t mine and I’d hate for something to happen to it.”

  Grafalk was through being angry, or at least he had buried his anger below the civilized urbanity I’d seen down at the Port last week. He leaned against one of the brick pillars while I hauled at the stiff steering and maneuvered the car onto the grass verge. Inside the gates he put an arm around me to guide me up the drive. I gently disengaged it.

  The house, made from the same brick as the pillars, lay about two hundred yards back from the road. Trees lined the front on both sides, so that you had no clue to how big the place really was as you approached it.

  The lawn was almost completely green-another week and they’d have to give it the season’s first mowing. The trees were coming into leaf. Tulips and jonquils provided bursts of color at the corners of the house. Birds twittered with the business of springtime. They were nesting on some of the most expensive real estate in Chicago but they probably didn’t feel snobbish toward the sparrows in my neighborhood. I complimented Grafalk on the grounds.

  “My father built the place back in the twenties. It’s a little more ornate than we care for today-but my wife likes it, so I’ve never done anything to change it.”

  We went in through a side door and back to a glassed-in porch overlooking Lake Michigan. The lawn sloped down steeply to a sandy beach with a little cabana and a couple of beach umbrellas. A raft was anchored about thirty yards off-shore but I didn’t see a boat.

  “Don’t you keep your boat out back here?”

  Grafalk gave his rich man’s chuckle. He didn’t share his birds’ social indifference. “The beaches here have a very gradual slope-you can’t keep anything with more than a four-foot draw close to the shore.”

  “Is there a harbor in Lake Bluff, then?”

  “The closest public harbor’s in Waukegan. It’s extremely polluted, however. No, the commandant at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Rear Admiral Jergensen, is a personal friend. I tie my sailboat up there.”

  That was handy. The Great Lakes Naval Training Station lay on Lake Bluff’s northern border. Where would Grafalk keep his yacht when Jergensen retired? The problems the very rich face are different from yours and mine.

  I sat in a bamboo chaise lounge. Grafalk opened a window. He busied himself with ice and glasses in a bar built into the room’s teak panels. I opted for sherry-Mike Hammer is the only detective I know who can think and move while drinking whiskey. Or at least move. Maybe Mike’s secret is he doesn’t try to think.

  With his back still turned to me, Grafalk spoke. “If you weren’t spying on me, you must have been spying on Clayton. What’d you find out?”

  I put my feet on the red-flowered cushion sewn to the bamboo. “Let’s see. You want to know what I think about Jeannine and what I found out about Clayton. If I did divorces I’d suspect you of sleeping with Jeannine and wondering how much Phillips knew about it. Except you don’t strike me as the type who cares very much what men think about your cavorting with their wives.”

  Grafalk threw back his sun-bleached head and gave a great shout of laughter. He brought me a fluted tulip-shaped glass filled with straw-colored liquid. I sipped it. The sherry was as smooth as liquid gold. I wished now I’d asked for scotch. A millionaire’s whiskey might be something unique.

  Grafalk sat facing me in a chintz-covered armchair. “I guess I’m being too subtle, Miss Warshawski. I know you’ve been asking questions around the Port. When I find you up here it makes me think you’ve found something out about Phillips. We carry a lot of grain for Eudora. I’d like to know if there’s something going on with their Chicago operation I should know about.”

  I took another sip of sherry and put the glass on a tiled table at my right hand. The floor was covered with hand-painted Italian tiles in bright reds and greens and yellows and the table top matched them.

  “If there are problems with Eudora Grain that you should know about, ask David Argus. My main concern is who tried to kill me last Thursday night.”

  “Kill you?” Grafalk’s bushy eyebrows arched. “You don’t strike me as the hysterical type, but that’s a pretty wild accusation.”

  “Someone took out my brakes and steering last Thursday. It was only luck that kept me from careening into a semi on the Dan Ryan.”

  Grafalk finished whatever he was drinking-it looked like a martini. Good old-fashioned businessman-no Perrier or white wine for him. “Do you have a good reason for thinking Clayton might have done it?”

  “Well, he certainly had opportunity. But motive-no. No more than you or Martin Bledsoe or Mike Sheridan.”

  Grafalk stopped on his way back to the bar and looked at me. “You suspect them as well? You’re sure the-uh-damage took place at the Port? Could it have been vandals?”

  I swallowed some more sherry. “Yes, yes, and possibly, although I don’t believe it. It’s true anyone could empty brake fluid with a little ingenuity-but what vandals carry around a ratchet wrench and a cutting torch just on the off chance that they’ll find a car to mutilate? They’re much more likely to slash tires, steal hubcaps, or smash in windows. Or all three.”

  Grafalk brought over the sherry bottle and topped off my glass. I tried to pretend I drank the stuff every day and didn’t attempt to read the label. I’d never be able to afford this sherry anyway; what did I care what it was called?

  He sat back down with a fresh martini and looked at me intently. He was turning something over in his mind. “How much do you know about Martin Bledsoe?”

  I stiffened. “I’ve met him a few times. Why?”

  “He didn’t tell you anything about his background at dinner on Thursday?”

  I put the expensive glass down with a snap on the tiled table. “Now who is spying on whom, Mr. Grafalk?”

  He laughed again. “The Port is a small community, Miss Warshawski, and gossip about shipowners travels fast. Martin hasn’t asked a woman out to dinner since his wife died six years ago. Everyone was talking about it. Likewise your accident. I knew you were in the hospital but I didn’t know someone had deliberately tampered with your car.”

  “The Herald-Star gave me a front-page story-picture of my poor Lynx with its front missing and everything… Gossip about Bledsoe must be buried pretty deep. No one gave me a whiff about his background that sounded as troublesome as you’re seeming to imply.”

  “It is buried deep. I’ve never told anyone about it, even when Martin left me and I was mad enough to want to hurt him badly. But if there has been a crime commi
tted, if there’s been an attempt on your life, you should know about it.”

  I didn’t say anything. Outside, the house cast a lengthening shadow on the beach.

  “Martin grew up in Cleveland. Bledsoe is his mother’s maiden name. He never knew who his father was. It could have been any of a series of drunken sailors on Cleveland’s waterfront.”

  “That’s not a crime, Mr. Grafalk. And scarcely his fault.”

  “True. That’s just to give you a flavor of his home life. He left when he was fifteen, lied about his age, and signed on to sail the Great Lakes. In those days you didn’t need the training you do now, and, of course, there was a lot more shipping-no waiting around union halls hoping to get called up for a job. Any warm body that could haul ropes and lift two hundred pounds would do. And Martin was strong for his age.” He paused to swallow his drink.

  “Well, he was a smart fellow and he came to the attention of one of my mates. A man who liked to help the young men in his charge, not stand on their heads. When he was nineteen Martin ended up in our Toledo office. He obviously had far too many brains to waste just doing muscle work that any stupid Polack could handle.”

  “I see,” I murmured. “Maybe you could find an opening for me on one of your boats if detective work palls.”

  He stared at me for a minute. “Oh, Warshawski. I see. Don’t show your hackles-it’s not worth it. The waterfront is filled with Poles strong as oxen but not much brainpower.”

  I thought of Boom Boom’s cousins and declined arguing the point.

  “Anyway, to make a long story very short, Martin was operating in an environment he could understand intellectually but not socially. He’d never had much formal education and he never learned any sense of ethics or morality. He was handling too much money and he siphoned some of it off. I lost a tough argument with my father about prosecuting Martin. I had found him, I had pushed him-I was only thirty myself at the time. I wanted to give him a second chance. Dad refused and Martin spent two years in a Cantonville prison. My father died the month before he was released and I hired him back immediately. He never did anything else criminal that I’m aware of-but if there’s some trouble between Pole Star and Eudora Grain or at Eudora Grain itself that involves money, you should know about Martin’s background. I’m relying on your discretion to keep it to yourself-I wouldn’t want Argus, or even Clayton, for that matter, to know about it if it turns out nothing’s wrong.”