Deadlock

by Sara Paretsky

  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.

  Lotty darling.

  Thank you for looking after me. I’m hot on the scent. I’ll bring your keys by tonight or tomorrow night.

  Vic

  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.

  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 ste
amed 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?”