Deadlock

by Sara Paretsky

  I cut into the repetitive flow. “When did this happen?”

  “Last night. Last night I stayed behind to see if I could find out anything about Mr. Phillips’s paycheck, you know, like you asked me to. I thought about it, and I thought, really, now, if Mr. Warshawski was killed like you say he was, and if this will help, I ought to find out. But Lois came in to see what I was doing. I guess she was all set to spy on me if I stayed late or stayed after lunch, and then she called Mr. Phillips at home. Well, he wasn’t home yet, of course. But she kept calling him, and about ten o’clock last night he called and told me they don’t need me to come in anymore and he’ll send me two weeks’ salary instead of notice. And, like I said, it just doesn’t seem fair.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I agreed warmly. “What did you tell her you were doing?”

  “Who?”

  “Lois,” I said patiently. “When she came in and asked you what you were doing, what did you tell her?”

  “Oh! I said I’d written a personal letter and I couldn’t find it so I was looking to see if it got thrown out.”

  I thought that was pretty fast thinking and said so.

  She laughed a little, pleased with the compliment, but added despondently, “She didn’t believe me, because there wasn’t any reason for it to be in Mr. Phillips’s wastebasket.”

  “Well, Janet, I don’t know what to say. You certainly tried your hardest. I’m extremely sorry you lost your job, and all for nothing, but if-”

  “It wasn’t all for nothing,” she interrupted. “I did find his pay stub just as you thought I might.”

  “Oh!” I stared at the receiver in disbelief. For once something in this cockeyed investigation had worked out the way I thought it should. “How much does he make?”

  “He gets thirty-five hundred forty-six dollars and fifteen cents every two weeks.”

  I tried multiplying in my head but I was still too groggy.

  “I figured it out on my calculator last night. That’s ninety-two thousand a year.” She paused, wistfully. “That’s a lot of money. I was only making seven-two hundred. And now I don’t have that.”

  “Look, Janet. Would you be willing to work downtown? I can get you some interviews-at the Ajax Insurance Company and a couple of other places.”

  She told me she’d think about it: she’d rather find something in her neighborhood. If that didn’t work out, she’d give me a call back and ask me to set up an interview for her. I thanked her profusely and we hung up.

  I lay back in bed and thought. Ninety-two thousand a year was a lot of money-for me or Janet. But for Phillips? Say he had good deductions and a good tax accountant. Still, he couldn’t take home more than sixty or so. His real estate tax bill was probably three thousand. A mortgage, maybe another fifteen. Dues at the Maritime Club and the monthly fees for tennis, twenty-five thousand. Tuition, et cetera, at Claremont. The boat. The Alfa. Food. Massandrea dresses for Jeannine. Maybe she bought them at the Elite Repeat shop, or used from Mrs. Grafalk. Still it would take a good hundred thousand net to cover everything.

  After breakfast I walked the mile between Lotty’s apartment and my own down on Halsted. I was getting out of shape from lying around too much, but I wasn’t sure I was up to running yet and I knew I couldn’t lift my ten-pound shoulder weights.

  My mailbox was bulging. I get the Wall Street Journal every day. Five copies were stacked with letters and a small parcel on the floor. I picked up two armfuls and climbed the three flights to my apartment. “No place like home,” I murmured to myself, looking with a jaundiced eye at the dust, the magazines strewn around the living room, and the bed which hadn’t been made for more than two weeks now. I put the mail down and gave myself over to one of my rare housewifely fits, vacuuming, dusting, hanging up clothes. Having ruined a pantsuit, a pair of jeans, a sweater, and a blouse since I left home, there was less to put away than there might have been.

  Glowing with virtue, I settled down with a cup of coffee to sort through the mail. Most of it was bills, which I tossed aside unopened. Why look at them just to get depressed? One envelope held a thirty-five-hundred-dollar check from Ajax to pay for a new car. I was grateful for the care of the U. S. Postal Service, which had left that on my lobby floor for any dope addict on Halsted to find. Also, wrapped in a small box were the keys to Boom Boom’s apartment with a note from Sergeant McGonnigal saying the police were through with their investigation and I could use it anytime I wanted to.

  I poured myself more coffee and thought about what I should do. First on the list was Mattingly. I called Pierre Bouchard and asked him where I could find Mattingly if he were in town but not at home.

  He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “That I could not tell you, Vic. I have avoided the man constantly. But I will call around and see what I can find out.”

  I told him Elsie was due any day now and he clicked his tongue again. “That man! What an excrescence he is!”

  “By the way, Pierre, does Howard know how to do deep-sea diving?”

  “Deep-sea diving?” he echoed. “No, Vic, I am telling you, I do not know him well. I do not know his personal habits. But I will ask… Oh, don’t hang up-I have that name for you.”

  “What name?”

  “Did you not call Anna before you left town? You wanted to know what man we met at Christmas, when Boom Boom met Paige Carrington?”

  “Oh yes.” I’d forgotten all about that. The man who was interested in buying a few shares of the Black Hawks, the man for whom Odinflute had set up his party. “Yes. Who was it?”

  “His name is Niels Grafalk. Myron says after all he decided not to buy.”

  “I see,” I said weakly. I said nothing else and after a bit Bouchard said, “Vic? Vic? Are you still there?”

  “What? Oh yes. Yes, thanks very much, Pierre… Let me know if you hear from Mattingly.”

  Though distracted, I took my check over to Humboldt Olds where I bought an Omega, a 1981 red model with fifteen thousand miles on it, power steering and power brakes. I had to sign a finance contract for eight hundred dollars but that wouldn’t prove impossible. I’d just bill Boom Boom’s estate for a hefty fee when all this mess was cleaned up. If it ever was.

  So Grafalk had been interested in the Black Hawks. And Paige had been present at that same party. Now whom had she known? Who took her? It was an interesting coincidence. I wondered what she would tell me if I called her.

  Driving in a slight daze, I reached Boom Boom’s apartment at three-thirty, parking the Olds in front of a NO PARKING sign at Chestnut and Seneca. After two weeks of neglect, which had included a burglary and a police investigation, the place looked far worse than mine had this morning. Gray dust from the fingerprint detectors covered all the papers. White chalk still marked the outline of Henry Kelvin’s body next to the desk.

  I poured myself a glass of Chivas. I was damned if I was going to clean up two places in one day. Instead, I made a stab at reassembling the papers in their appropriate categories. I’d hire a cleaning crew and some temporary clerks to do the rest of the work. Frankly, I was sick of the place.

  I made a tour of the apartment to collect items of interest to me-Boom Boom’s first and last hockey sticks, a New Guinea hut totem from the living room, and some of the pictures of him in various hockey guises from the spare-room wall. Once more the picture of me in my maroon law school robes grinned incongruously from the wall. I took it off and added it to the stack under my arms. Once the clerks had gotten the papers to the right people and the cleaners had eliminated all the greasy dirt, I’d get the condo and the rest of his possessions onto the market. With any luck, I’d never have to visit this place again. I slung the items into my trunk and drove off. No one had ticketed me-maybe my luck was beginning to turn.

  Next stop: the Eudora Grain offices. I badly wanted to talk to Bledsoe about why Mattingly had left Sault Ste. Marie in his airplane, but I still thought Phillips’s finances were an angle worth following up.

 
Late Saturday afternoon was an eerie time to visit the Port of Chicago. There wasn’t much activity at the elevators. The huge ships stood like sleeping giants, prepared to wake into violent activity if disturbed. I eased the Omega into the parking lot at Eudora’s Grain regional office and found myself tiptoeing across the blacktop to a side door.

  A small bell was set into the wall with a little sign over it reading RING FOR DELIVERIES. I rang several times and waited five minutes. No one came. If there was a night watchman, he wasn’t yet on the premises. From my back pocket I pulled a house burglar’s compedium of commonly used picklocks and set out methodically to open the door.

  Ten minutes later I was in Phillips’s office. Either he or the efficient Lois kept all the file cabinets locked. With an aggrieved sigh, I took out my picklocks again and opened all the cabinets in the room and the three in Lois’s desk outside his office door. I called Lotty and told her I wouldn’t be in for supper and set to work. If I’d been thinking, I would have brought some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee.

  Phillips kept a strange collection of junk in his upper desk drawer-three different kinds of antacids; datebooks going back for six years, most of them without any appointments written in; nose drops; an old pair of overshoes; two broken calculators; and odd scraps of paper. These I carefully smoothed out and read. Most of them were phone messages which he’d crumpled up and tossed in the drawer. A couple from Grafalk, one from Argus. The others were all names I didn’t recognize, but I wrote them down in case I ran so far out of leads that I wanted to check them.

  The ledgers were in a walnut filing cabinet on the window side of the office. I pulled them out with great alacrity. They were in the form of computer printouts, issued once a month with year-to-date totals and comparisons with prior years. After a certain amount of looking, I found report A36000059-G, payments to licensed carriers. All I needed now was my list of shipping contracts and I could compare the dates and see if the totals matched.

  Or so I thought. I went out to Lois’s file cabinets and found the originals of the contracts Janet had photocopied for me. These I took back into Phillips’s office to lay next to report A36000059-G. Only then did I discover that the ledger recorded by invoice number, not by contract date. At first I thought I could just match totals of individual orders against totals in the ledger; I pulled the Pole Star Line’s as an example.

  Unfortunately the carriers apparently submitted more than one job on an invoice. The invoice totals were so much greater than the individual transactions, and the number of total invoices paid so much smaller, that it seemed to me that was the only explanation.

  I added and subtracted, matching the numbers up every way I could think of, but I was forced to conclude that I wasn’t going to be able to tell a thing without the individual invoices. And those I could not find. Not a one. I went through the rest of Phillips’s files and all through Lois’s and finally through the open file cabinets out on the floor. There wasn’t an invoice in the place.

  Before giving up for the evening, I looked up the payroll section of the ledgers. Phillips’s salary was listed there just as Janet had told me. If I’d known I was going to burgle the place I would never have let her risk getting fired by going through his garbage.

  I tapped my front teeth with a pencil. If he was getting extra money from Eudora Grain, it wasn’t through the payroll account. Anyway, the ledgers were printed by the computers in Eudora, Kansas-if he was monkeying around with the accounts, he’d have to do it more subtly.

  I shrugged and looked at my watch. It was after nine o’clock. I was tired. I was very hungry. And my shoulder was throbbing. I’d earned a good dinner, a long bath, and a sound sleep, but there was still another errand on the day’s agenda.

  Back in my apartment, I threw some frozen pasta into a pot with tomatoes and basil and ran a bath. I plugged the phone into the bathroom wall and called Phillips’s Lake Bluff house. He wasn’t in, but his son politely asked if he could take a message.

  I lifted my right leg out of the water and ran a soapy sponge over it while I considered. “This is V. I. Warshawski,” I said, spelling it for him. “Tell him that Mr. Argus’s auditors will want to know where the missing invoices are.”

  The boy repeated the message back to me dubiously. “You got it.” I gave him both my and Lotty’s phone numbers and hung up.

  The pasta was bubbling nicely and I took it into the bedroom with me while I got dressed-black velvet pants with a high-necked blouse and a form-fitting red and black velvet toreador jacket. High heels and very dangly earrings and I was set for an evening at the theater. Or the end of an evening at the theater. By some miracle I hadn’t spilled tomato juice on the white blouse. My luck really was turning.

  I got to the Windy City Balletworks just at ten-thirty. A bored young woman in a leotard and stretchy wraparound skirt told me the performance would end in ten minutes. She gave me a program and let me go in without paying.

  The tiny theater was filled and I didn’t bother trying to find a seat in the dim light. I lounged against the back wall, taking off my shoes to stand in my stocking feet next to the ushers. A spirited pas de deux from a classical ballet was in progress. Paige was not the female dancer. Whoever it was, she seemed technically competent but lacked the special spark with which Paige infused her performance. The whole company appeared on stage for a complex finale, and the show was over.

  When the lights came on, I squinted at the program to make sure Paige was, indeed, dancing tonight. Yes, Pavane for a Dope Dealer had been performed right before the second act of Giselle, which we’d just seen.

  I went back out the hallway and followed a small group down to the door leading directly to the dressing rooms. Rather than accost Paige in her shared dressing room, I sat on a folding chair outside to wait. The dancers began coming out in twos and threes, not sparing me a glance. I’d provided myself with a novel, remembering the forty-five-minute wait here the last time I’d tried talking to Paige, and flicked through the pages, looking up in vain every time the door opened.

  Fifty minutes went by. Just as I was thinking she might have left at the end of the Pavane, she finally emerged. As usual, her exquisite good looks made me feel a little wistful. Tonight she had on a silvery fur coat, possibly fox, which made her resemble Geraldine Chaplin in the middle of the Russian winter in Dr. Zhivago.

  “Hello, Paige. I’m afraid I got here too late to see the Pavane. Perhaps I can make the matinee tomorrow.”

  She gave a slight start and then a wary smile. “Hello, Vic. What impertinent questions have you come to ask me? I hope they’re not long, because I’m late for a dinner engagement.”

  “Trying to drown your sorrows?”

  She gave me an indignant look. “Life goes on, Vic. You need to learn that.”

  “So it does, Paige. I’m sorry to have to drag you into a past you’re trying to forget, but I’d like to know who took you to Guy Odinflute’s party.”

  “Who-what?”

  “Remember the Christmas party where you met Boom Boom? Niels Grafalk wanted to meet some hockey players, trying to decide whether to buy into the Black Hawks, and Odinflute gave a party for him. Or have you blocked that out along with the rest of the dead past?”

  Her eyes blazed suddenly dark and her cheeks turned red. Without a word, she lifted her hand to slap me in the face. I caught her by the wrist and gently lowered her hand to her side. “Don’t hit me, Paige-I learned my fighting in the streets and I wouldn’t want to lose my temper and hurt you… Who took you to Odinflute’s party?”

  “None of your damned business. Now will you leave the theater before I call the guard and tell him you’re molesting me? And please do not ever come back. It will make me ill to have you watch me dance.”

  She moved with angry grace down the hall and out the front door. I followed in time to see her get into a dark sedan. A man was driving but I couldn’t make out his face in the dim light.

  I didn’t feel in the hu
mor for company, even Lotty’s astringent love. I gave her a call from my apartment to tell her not to worry. She didn’t, usually, but I knew she’d been pretty upset after the destruction of the Lucella.

  In the morning I went down to the corner for the Sunday Herald-Star and some croissants. While the coffee dripped in my porcelain coffeepot I tried Mattingly. No one answered. I wondered if Elsie had gone to the hospital. I tried Phillips, but no one answered there either. It was almost eleven-maybe they had to put in a ritual appearance at the Lake Bluff Presbyterian Church.

  I propped the paper up against the coffeepot and sat down to work my way through it. I’d once told Murray the only reason I buy the Herald-Star is because it has the most comics in the city. Actually, it has the best crime coverage, too. But I always read the funnies first.

  I was halfway through my second cup when I came to the squib about Mattingly. I’d almost passed it over. The headline on an inner page read “Hit-and-run Victim in Kosciuszko Park” but his name must have caught my eye and I went back and read the story through completely.

  The body of a man identified as Howard Mattingly was found late last night in Kosciuszko Park. Victor Golun, 23, of North Central Avenue, was jogging through the park at ten last evening when he found Mattingly’s body concealed behind a tree on one of the jogging paths. Mattingly, 33, was a reserve wing for the Chicago Black Hawks. Police say he had been hit by a car and carried to the park to die. They estimated he had been dead at least twenty hours when Golun found the body. Mattingly is survived by his wife, Elsie, 20, by two brothers, and by his mother.

  I counted back in my head. He’d died by two Saturday morning at the latest, probably been hit sometime Friday evening, maybe right after he got back from Sault Ste. Marie. I knew I should call Bobby Mallory and tell him to trace Mattingly’s movements from when he got off Bledsoe’s plane Friday night. But I wanted to talk to Bledsoe myself first and find out why Mattingly had flown home in his plane.