“You don’t?” Bledsoe pounced on that. “Then why would anyone blackmail me to keep it quiet?”
“Oh, I don’t think it’s very interesting. But you clearly do. Your reaction just now clinches it. What set me wondering was why you smashed a wineglass just because Grafalk made a crack that day about where you went to school.”
“I see.” Bledsoe gave a short laugh. “You’re not so dumb, are you?”
“I get by… I’d like to ask you one question in private, however.”
Bemis stood up politely. “I ought to look at the course, anyway… By the way, Martin’s occupying our only guest room. We’ll put a cot up for you in my dining room.”
I thanked him. Bledsoe looked at me speculatively. I leaned forward and said in a low voice, “I want to know that you didn’t get Sheridan to doctor my car while we were at dinner that night.” I saw a pulse start to move in his jaw. “Believe me, I hate to ask it. I hate even to think it. But that was a pretty horrifying experience-it shook my trust in human nature.”
Bledsoe pushed back his chair with enough force to knock it over. “Go ask him yourself! I’m fucked if I’ll put up with any more of this.”
He stormed down the stairs and the bridge echoed with the vibration of the slammed door. Bemis looked at me coldly, “I’m running a ship, Miss Warshawski, not a soap opera.”
I felt a violent surge of anger. “Are you, now? I’ve had a cousin killed and someone’s tried to kill me. Until I’m sure your ship and crew didn’t do it, you’ll damned well live in my soap opera and like it.”
Bemis left the helm and came over to lean across the table into my face. “I don’t blame you for being upset. You lost a cousin. You’ve been badly hurt. But I think you’re blowing up a couple of very sad accidents into a conspiracy and I won’t have you disrupting my ship while you do it.”
My temples pounded. I kept just enough control not to offer any grandiose threats. “Very well,” I said tightly, my vocal cords straining, “I won’t disrupt your ship. I would like to talk to the chief engineer while I am on board, however.”
Bemis jerked his head at Winstein. “Get the lady a hard hat, Mate.” He turned back to me. “You may question the chief. However, I don’t want you talking to the crew unless either the first mate or I am present. He’ll instruct the second mate to make sure that happens.”
“Thanks,” I said stiffly. While I waited for Winstein to bring me a hard hat, I stared moodily out the rear of the bridge. The sun was setting now and the shoreline showed as a distant wedge of purple in front of it. To the port side I could see a few chunks of ice. Winter lasted a long time in these parts.
I was doing a really swell job. So far I didn’t know a damned thing I hadn’t known three weeks ago, except how to load a Great Lakes freighter full of grain. In my mind’s ear I could hear my mother chewing me out for self-pity. “Anything but that, Victoria. Better for you to break the dishes than lie about feeling sorry for yourself.” She was right. I was just worn out from the aftermath of my accident. But that, in Gabriella’s eyes, was the reason, not the excuse-there was no excuse for sitting around sulking.
I pulled myself together. The first mate was waiting to escort me from the bridge. We walked down the narrow staircase, me following on his heels. He gave me a hard hat with his name on the front in faded black type; he explained that it was his spare and I was welcomed to it as long as I was on board.
“If you’re thinking of going down to talk to the chief now, why not wait until dinner? The chief eats dinner in the captain’s dining room and you can talk to him there. You won’t be able to hear each other over the engines, anyway.”
I looked at him grudgingly, wondering if he was deflecting me from Sheridan long enough to let Bledsoe tell him his version of the story.
“Where’s the captain’s dining room?” I asked.
Winstein took me there, a small, formal room on the starboard side of the main deck. Flowered curtains hung at the portholes and an enormous photo of the Lucella’s launching decorated the forward wall. The crew’s mess was next door to it. The same galley served both, but the captain was waited on at table by the cooks whereas the crew served themselves cafeteria style. The cooks would serve dinner between five-thirty and seven-thirty, Winstein told me. I could get breakfast there between six and eight in the morning.
Winstein left me to go back to the bridge. I waited until he was out of sight and then descended into the engine room. I vaguely remembered my way from the previous visit, going through a utility room with a washer and dryer in it, then climbing down a flight of linoleum-covered stairs to the engine-room entrance.
Winstein was right about the noise. It was appalling. It filled every inch of my body and left my teeth shaking. A young man in greasy overalls was in the control booth that made up the entrance to the engines. I roared at him over the noise; after several tries he understood my query and told me I would find the chief engineer on level two inspecting the port journal bearings. Apparently only an idiot would not know about port journal bearings. Declining further assistance, I swung myself down a metal ladder to the level below.
The engines take up a good amount of space and I wandered around quite a bit before I saw anyone. I finally spotted a couple of hard-hatted figures behind a mass of pipes and made my way over to them. One was the chief engineer, Sheridan. The other was a young fellow whom I hadn’t seen before. I didn’t know whether to be pleased or disappointed not to find Bledsoe with Sheridan-it would have given a more solid direction to my inchoate searching to see them in cahoots.
The chief and the other man were totally absorbed in their inspection of a valve in a pipe running at eye level in front of them. They didn’t turn when I came up but continued their work.
The younger man unscrewed the bottom part of a pipe which came up from the floor at right angles to the overhead valve and then joined it. He stuck a stainless steel tube into the opening, checked his watch, and pulled the tube out again. It was covered with oil, which seemed to satisfy both of them. They tightened up the pipes again and wiped their hands on their grimy boiler suits.
At that point they realized I was there, or perhaps just realized I wasn’t a regular member of the team. Sheridan put his hands to my head to bellow an inquiry at me. I bellowed back at him. It was obvious that no one could conduct a conversation over the roar of the engines. I yelled in his ear that I would talk to him at dinner; I wasn’t sure he heard me but I turned and climbed back up onto the main deck.
Once outside I breathed in the late afternoon air thankfully. We were well away from the shore and it was quite cold. I remembered my bag resting among the coils of rope behind the pilothouse and went back there to take out my heavy sweater and put it on. I dug out a tam and pulled it down over my ears.
The engines clattered at my feet, less loudly but still noticeably. Turbulent water lifted the stern periodically, giving the Lucella a choppy, lurching ride.
In search of quiet I walked down to the bow. No one else was outside. As I walked the length of the ship, nearly a quarter mile, the noise gradually abated. By the time I reached the stern, the frontmost tip of the vessel, I couldn’t hear a sound except the water breaking against the bow. The sun setting behind us cast a long shadow of the bridge onto the deck.
No guardrail separated the deck from the water. Two thick parallel cables, about two feet apart, were strung around the edge of the ship, attached to poles protruding every six feet or so. It would be quite easy to slip between them into the water.
A little bench had been screwed into the stem. You could sit on it and lean against a small toolshed and look into the water. The surface was greeny black, but where the ship cut through it the water turned over in a sheen of colors from lavender-white to blue-green to green to black-like dropping black ink onto wet paper and watching it separate into its individual hues.
A change in the light behind me made me brace myself. I reached for the Smith & Wesson as Bledsoe came u
p beside me.
“It would be easy to push you in, you know, and claim that you fell.”
“Is that a threat or an observation?” I pulled the gun out and released the safety.
He looked startled. “Put that damned thing away. I came out here to talk to you.”
I put the safety on and returned the gun to its holster. It wouldn’t do me much good at close quarters, anyway-I’d brought it out mainly for show.
Bledsoe was wearing a thick tweed jacket over a pale blue cashmere sweater. He looked nautical and comfortable. I was feeling the chill in my left shoulder-it had started to ache as I sat staring into the water.
“I blow up too fast,” he said abruptly. “But you don’t need a gun to keep me at bay, for Christ’s sake.”
“Fine.” I kept my feet braced, ready to spring to one side.
“Don’t make things so fucking difficult,” he snapped.
I didn’t move, but I didn’t relax either. He debated some point with himself-to stomp off offended or say what was on his mind. The second party won.
“It was Grafalk who told you about my youthful misadventure?”
“Yes.”
He nodded to himself. “I don’t think there’s another person who knows-or still cares… I was eighteen years old. I’d grown up in a waterfront slum. When he pulled me into the Cleveland office I ended up handling a lot of cash transactions. His mistake-he should never have put anyone that age in front of so much money. I didn’t steal it. That is, of course I stole it. What I mean is, I wasn’t thinking of stashing away loot and escaping to Argentina. I just wanted to live in a grand style. I bought myself a car.” He smiled reminiscently. “A red Packard roadster. Cars were hard to get in those days, right after the war, and I thought I was the slickest thing on the waterfront.”
The smile left his face. “Anyway, I was young and foolish and I spent the stuff blatantly, begging to be caught, really. Niels saw me through it, rehired me right out of Cantonville. He never mentioned it in twenty years. But he took it very personally when I set up Pole Star back in ’74. And he started throwing it in my face-that he knew I was a criminal at heart, that I’d stayed with him just to learn the secrets of his organization and then left.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I’d wanted to run my own show for years. My wife was sick, had Hodgkins disease, and we never had any children. I guess I turned all my energy to shipping. Besides, after Niels refused to build any thousand-footers, I wanted to have a ship like this one.” He patted the guy ropes affectionately. “This is a beautiful ship. It took four years to build. Took me three years to put the financing together. But it’s worth it. These things run at about a third the cost of the old five-hundred-footers. The cargo space goes up almost as the square of the length-I can carry seven times the load of a five-hundred-foot vessel… Anyway, I wanted one very badly and I had to start my own company to get it.”
How badly? I wondered to myself. Badly enough to run a more sophisticated scam than he’d thought of thirty years ago and come up with the necessary capital? “What does a ship like this cost to build?”
“The Lucella ran just a hair under fifty million.”
“You float stock or bonds or what?”
“We did some of everything. Sheridan and Bemis coughed up their savings. I put mine in. The Fort Dearborn Trust owns the biggest chunk of this and we finally got them to arrange a series of loans with about ten other banks. Other people put in personal money. It’s a tremendous investment, and I want to make sure it carries a cargo every day between March 28 and January 1 so we can pay off the debt.”
He sat down next to me on the small bench and looked at me, his gray eyes probing. “But that isn’t what I came out here to say to you. I want to know why Niels brought up the story of my past. Not even Bemis and Sheridan know it, and if the tale had gotten around three years ago, I could never have built this beauty. If Niels wanted to hurt me, he could have done it then. So why did he tell you now?”
It was a good question. I stared into the churning water, trying to recall my conversation with Grafalk. Maybe he wanted to ventilate some of his pent-up bitterness against Bledsoe. It couldn’t have been from a desire to protect Phillips-he’d raised questions about Phillips, too.
“What do you know about the relationship between Grafalk and Clayton Phillips.”
“Phillips? Not much. Niels took him up as a protegé about the time I started Pole Star-a year or two later, maybe. Since he and I didn’t part too amicably, I didn’t see much of him. I don’t know what the deal was. Niels likes to patronize young men-I was probably the first one and he took up a number of others over the years.” He wrinkled his forehead. “Usually they seemed to have better abilities than Phillips. I don’t know how he manages to keep that office in the black.”
I looked at him intently. “What do you mean?”
Bledsoe shrugged. “He’s too-too finicky. Not the right word. He’s got brains but he gets in their way all the time. He has sales reps who are supposed to handle all the shipping contracts but he can’t leave ’em to it. He’s always getting involved in the negotiations. Since he doesn’t have day-to-day knowledge of the markets, he often screws up good deals and saddles Eudora with expensive contracts. I noticed that when I was Niels’s dispatcher ten years ago and I see it now with my own business.”
That didn’t sound criminal, just stupid. I said as much and Bledsoe laughed. “You looking for a crime just to drum up business or what?”
“I don’t need to drum up business. I’ve plenty in Chicago to occupy me if I ever get this mess unsnarled.” I got up. Stowing away on the Lucella had been one of my stupider ideas. None of them would tell me anything and I didn’t know how to sort out natural loyalty to the ship and each other from concealing a crime. “But I’ll find out.” I spoke aloud without realizing it.
“Vic, don’t be so angry. No one on this ship tried to kill you. I’m not convinced anyone tried to kill you.” He held up a hand as I started to talk. “I know your car was vandalized. But it was probably done by a couple of punks who never saw you in their life.”
I shook my head, tired. “There are too many coincidences, Martin. I just can’t believe that Boom Boom and the watchman in his building died and I was almost killed through a series of unrelated events. I can’t believe it. And I start wondering why you and the captain want me to believe it so badly.”
He stuck his hands in his pockets and whistled silently. “Why don’t you step me through your logic? I’m not saying I’ll buy it. But give me a chance.”
I drew a breath. If he were responsible, he knew all about it anyway. If he wasn’t, there wasn’t any harm in his knowing. I explained about Boom Boom’s death, the quarrel with Phillips, the search through my cousin’s apartment, Henry Kelvin’s death.
“There’s got to be a reason for it and the reason is at the Port. It has to be. You told me those shipping orders I showed you last week seemed perfectly legitimate. So I don’t know where else to look. If Phillips was deliberately fudging the contracts and running Eudora Grain’s Chicago office at a loss, that’d be a reason. Although I think Argus would have been on his tail for that a long time ago, especially if he’s been doing it for ten years.” I pushed back the tam and rubbed my forehead. “I was hoping it would be those shipping orders, since that’s what Boom Boom was arguing over with Phillips two days before he died.”
Bledsoe looked at me seriously. “If you really want to be certain, you’ll have to look at the invoices. The contracts themselves appear fine, but you want to see what Phillips actually paid for the orders. How much do you know about the way an office like that operates?”
I shook my head. “Not much.”
“Well, Phillips’s main job is to act as the controller. He should leave the sales to his salesmen but doesn’t. He handles all the financial stuff. Now it’s his job, too, to know prices and what the market is doing so that when he pays bills he can check on his reps to m
ake sure they’re getting the best prices. But he’s supposed to stay out of the selling end. He handles the money.”
I narrowed my eyes. A man who handled all the money bore further investigation. Trouble was, everything in this damned case bore further investigation and I wasn’t getting anywhere. I massaged my stiffening shoulder, trying to push my frustration away.
Bledsoe was still speaking; I’d missed some of it.
“You getting off in Sault Ste. Marie? I’ll fly you down to Chicago-my plane is there and I’m planning on going back to the office this week.”
We got up together and started back down the long deck. The sun had set and the sky was turning from purple to gray-black. Overhead, the first stars were coming out, pricks of light in the dusky curtain. I’d have to come back out when it was completely dark. In the city one doesn’t see too many stars.
17 Deadlock
Bledsoe and I joined the chief engineer in the captain’s dining room, where he was eating roast beef and mashed potatoes. Bemis was still up on the bridge-Bledsoe explained that the captain would stay up there until the ship was out of a tricky channel and well into the middle of Lake Superior. We three were the only ones in the dining room-the other officers ate with the crew. Handwritten menus at our plates offered a choice of two entrees, vegetables, and dessert. Over baked chicken and broccoli I talked to Sheridan about my accident.
The chief agreed that he had cutting torches of different sizes on board, as well as every possible variety of wrench. “But if you’re asking me to tell you if any of them were used last Thursday, I couldn’t. We don’t keep the tools under lock and key-it’d be too time-consuming to get at them.” He buttered a roll and ate a chunk of it. “We have eight people on engine-room duty when the ship’s at sea and all of them need to get at the tools. We’ve never had any problems and as long as we don’t I plan to keep free access to them.”
No liquor was allowed on the ship, so I was drinking coffee with dinner. The coffee was thin and I poured a lot of cream into it to give it some flavor.
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