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.
21 Fishing Trip
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.
Papers were strewn across an executive-size walnut desk. A photograph of the Lucella as she lay fractured in the Poe Lock covered a table at one side, and a cutaway picture of a freighter hull was taped to the wood-paneled west wall.
I stopped to look at the photograph, enlarged to about three feet by two feet, and shuddered with remembered shock. Several more hatch covers had popped loose since I last saw the ship and the surfaces pointing steeply into the lock were covered with a thick smear of wet barley.
As I studied it, a very tall man got to his feet and strolled over to stand next to me. I hadn’t seen him when I first walked into the room-he’d been sitting in a corner behind the door.
“Shocking, isn’t it?” he said with a pronounced English accent.
“Very. It was even more shocking when it occurred.”
“Oh, you were there, were you?”
“Yes,” I answered shortly. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, a private investigator. And you’re-?”
He was Roger Ferrant from the London firm of Scupperfield, Plouder, the lead underwriters on the Lucella’s hull and cargo insurance.
“Roger is probably the most knowledgeable man in the world about Great Lakes shipping, even though he operates out of London,” Hogarth told me. He added to Ferrant, “Miss Warshawski may know something about our ultimate liability on the Lucella.”
I sat down in an armchair by the window where I could see the setting sun paint Buckingham Fountain a faint pink-gold. “I’m looking into the accident to the Lucella as part of a murder investigation. At the moment I have two separate crimes-the murder of a young man connected with the Eudora Grain Company, and the destruction of the Lucella. It’s not clear to me that they intersect. However, I was on board the Lucella pursuing my murder investigation when she blew up, and that’s given me something of a personal interest in the explosion.”
“Who’s your client?” Hogarth demanded.
“It’s a private individual-not someone you’d know… How long does it take to clear up a claim like this?”
“Years.” Ferrant and Hogarth spoke in chorus. The Englishman added, “Honestly, Miss Warshawski, it takes a very long time.” He stumbled a bit pronouncing my name, unlike Hogarth, who got it right the first time.
“Well, who pays Bledsoe’s expenses while he reassembles the Lucella?”
“We do,” Hogarth said. “Ferrant here handles the hull damage. We pay for the destroyed cargo and the business interruption-the loads that Bledsoe is forgoing by having his ship lying in the bottom of the lock.”
“Do you ante up a check to cover the cost of repairing the ship?”
“No,” Ferrant said. “We pay the bills as the shipyard submits them.”
“And your policy covers Pole Star even though it’s clear that someone blew up the ship, that it didn’t just crack due to bad workmanship?”
Ferrant crossed one storklike leg over the other. “That was one of the first questions we went into. As far as we can tell, it was not blown u
p as an act of war. There are other exclusions under the policy, but that’s the main one… Unless Bledsoe destroyed the ship himself.”
“There’d have to be a significant financial advantage to him for doing so,” I pointed out. “If he collected the value of the hull and could invest it while he rebuilt the ship, there might be some, but otherwise it doesn’t sound like it.”
“No,” Hogarth said impatiently. “There isn’t any point to ruining a brand-new ship like the Lucella. Now if it were one of those old clunkers that cost more to operate than they bring in revenues, I’d see it, but not a thousand-foot self-unloader.”
“Like Grafalk’s, you mean,” I said, remembering the Leif Ericsson running into the side of the wharf my first day down at the Port. “He’s better off collecting the insurance money than running his ships?”
“Not necessarily,” said Hogarth uneasily. “It’d depend on the extent of the damage. You’re thinking of the Leif Ericsson, aren’t you? He’ll have to pay for the damage to the wharf. That’s going to run him more than the cost of repairing the Ericsson’s hull.”
Bledsoe had told me he wasn’t liable for the damage to the lock. I asked Hogarth about that. He made a face. “That’s another one that’s going to tie the lawyers up for a decade or two. If Bledsoe was responsible for the damage to the ship, which in turn damaged the forward lock gates, he’s liable. If we can find the real culprit, he’s liable. That’s what we’d like to do: find whoever blew up the ship so we can subrogate against him-or her.”
I looked a question.
“Subrogate-get him to repay us for whatever we pay Bledsoe. And if we don’t find the real culprit, your rich Uncle Sam is going to pay for the lock. He’ll probably have to anyway-no one could afford to replace that. They’ll just prosecute and send whoever did it to jail for twenty years. If they can find him.” The phone rang and he answered it. The caller seemed to be his wife: he told her placatingly that he’d be out of the office in twenty minutes and please to hold dinner for him.
He turned to me with an aggrieved expression. “I thought you came by because you had some hot information on the Lucella. All we’ve been doing is answering your questions.”
I laughed. “I don’t have any information for you now. But I think I may in a day or two. You’ve given me some ideas I want to play around with first.” I hesitated, then decided to go ahead and tell them about Mattingly. I was on my way to the police to let them know, anyway. “The thing is, the guy who probably set off the explosion has been murdered himself. If the police can track down who killed him, they’ll probably find the person who paid him to blow up the ship. I’m sure Mattingly was killed to keep him from bragging about it. He was a disagreeable guy who liked to boast about the sleazy things he did.”
Getting the inside story on Mattingly cheered up Hogarth and Ferrant, even though it hadn’t helped their investigation into ultimate liability much. They put on their suit jackets and walked out of the office with me.
“The thing is,” Ferrant said confidentially in his English accent, “it’s just cheering to know there may really be a villain out there.”
“Yeah,” I said as we came out in the deserted lobby, “but what if you find he works for another one of your insureds?”
“You mustn’t say things like that,” Ferrant said. “You really mustn’t. I feel like eating for the first time since I heard about the Lucella last Saturday morning. I don’t want you to ruin my dinner with horrible suggestions.”
Hogarth departed for the Northwestern Station and a train to Schaumburg. Ferrant was staying in Scupperfield, Plouder’s apartment in the Hancock Building. I offered him a ride up in my Omega, which was parked in an underground garage nearby.
Before starting it I checked under the hood, looked at the oil, the brake fluid, the radiator. When Ferrant asked what I was doing I explained that I’d been in an accident recently and it made me more cautious about my car. Nothing seemed to be wrong.
On the short trip up Michigan Avenue to the Hancock I asked him if Scupperfield, Plouder had also underwritten the hull damage to the Leif Ericsson. They had; they underwrote all of the Grafalk Line.
“That’s how Bledsoe came to us-he knew us from working with Grafalk.
“I see.” I asked for his opinion of Bledsoe.
“One of the smartest men in the industry today. It’s not a good time to be in Great Lakes shipping, at least not for U.S. carriers. Your government gives considerable advantages to foreign flagships they don’t accord to U.S. vessels. Furthermore, old firms like Grafalk have some special legal positions that make it hard for a newcomer to break into the business. But Bledsoe can do it if anyone can. I just hope the wreck of the Lucella doesn’t put an end to Pole Star.”
He invited me to dine with him, but I thought I’d better get to the police with my news about Mattingly. I’d told my tale to Bledsoe, and now to the insurance people. Although I hadn’t given Murray Ryerson the name of the man with binoculars I’d seen at the Soo, he was no dummy-he might easily tie it in with my interest in Mattingly. Bobby Mallory was not going to look at me kindly if he read the story first in the Herald-Star.
I felt uneasy as I moved my car onto Lake Shore Drive. My life had been threatened two weeks ago. Phillips was dead, possibly because of the veiled threat I’d left with his son Saturday night. Perhaps he’d panicked, threatened to reveal what he knew, and been killed for his pains. Mattingly was dead, probably to keep him from boasting in the locker room that he’d blown up a ship. Boom Boom was dead because he knew that Phillips was fiddling grain invoices. Why was I still driving around? Maybe they thought more people would be killed when the Lucella went up. They might have been relying on that to get rid of me and be thinking up some other accident for me now. Or maybe they just didn’t believe I knew anything important.
I tried comforting myself with that idea the rest of the way home, but I had known even less when my car was sabotaged ten days ago. It occurred to me as I exited at Belmont that the deaths in this case had been staged as a species of accident: Boom Boom had fallen overboard, Mattingly had been hit by a car, Phillips crushed in a self-unloader. If my car had killed me as it was supposed to, I don’t suppose anyone would have gone to great pains to find that the steering control was sabotaged.
I hadn’t been able to convince the police that there might be a connection between the night watchman’s death and Boom Boom’s. They wanted to treat the threat on me as a routine act of vandalism. In other words, the murderer had gauged the psychology of the situation accurately. Now that I was prepared to divulge what I knew about Mattingly, how likely were the police to tie that in with Kelvin and Boom Boom? Not terribly.
I was half tempted to keep the news to myself. But the police have a good machinery for sifting through large crowds of witnesses. If they did follow up on my information, they could find out who picked Mattingly up at Meigs last Friday far more readily than I.
As I parked the car, carefully selecting a spot in front of a restaurant so that would-be attackers would face a maximum of witnesses, I decided I’d keep the story of Mattingly and the binoculars to myself. Just say that he’d flown back in Bledsoe’s plane.
22 Nighttime Chiseler
When I got to my apartment, I saw I was going to have to choose a story quickly. Sergeant McGonnigal was waiting for me in an unmarked brown Dodge. He got out when he saw me walking up the steps to the front door.
“Good evening, Miss Warshawski. Would you mind coming downtown with me? Lieutenant Mallory wants to ask you some questions.”
“What about?” I asked, taking out my keys and putting them in the front door.
McGonnigal shook his head. “I don’t know-he just asked me to bring you down.”
“Lieutenant Mallory thinks I should be living in Melrose Park with a husband and six children. I suspect any questions he wants to ask me have to do with how close I am to reaching that goal. Tell him to send me a Christmas card.” Just because I’d been g
oing to see the police voluntarily didn’t mean I had to like it when they came to fetch me.
McGonnigal set his handsome mouth in a thin line. in as a material witness. Because Lieutenant Mallory was a friend of your father’s he wants you to come of your own free will to answer some questions.”
I was going to have to start wearing gloves if I ever wanted to make it as a burglar. “Very well. I’m coming of my own free will.” I opened the front door. “I need to get something to eat first. Want to come up with me to make sure I don’t swallow a cyanide tablet?”
McGonnigal made an angry gesture and told me he’d wait in the car. I ran quickly up the three flights to my apartment. The larder was still bare-I hadn’t had time to go to the store yet. I settled for a peanut butter sandwich made with the last two pieces of bread in the refrigerator and coffee reheated from breakfast. While I ate, I took Boom Boom’s documents and taped them inside a couple of old copies of Fortune.
I went into the bathroom and brushed my teeth and washed my face. I need to feel fresh and alert for a conversation with Bobby. I ran lightly back down the stairs to McGonnigal’s waiting car. My shoulder gave me only faint twinges. I realized gloomily that I could start jogging again in the morning.
McGonnigal had the engine running. He took off with an ostentatious squeal of rubber before I even closed the door all the way. I put on the seat belt. “You ought to wear yours if you’re going to drive like that,” I told him. “Insurance people and police-the two groups who see the most car accidents and the two you never see with seat belts.”
McGonnigal didn’t answer. In fact conversation flagged all the way downtown. I tried to interest him in the Cubs’ chances with Lee Elia and Dallas Green at the helm. He didn’t want to talk about it. “I hope you’re not a Yankee fan, Sergeant. If you are, you’re going to have to arrest me to get me into the same car with you.”
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