Deadlock (4 page)

At five o’clock I rummaged through the spotless kitchen and found a can of coffee and an electric percolator. I made a pot and carried it back into the study with me. At eight-thirty I located Boom Boom’s liquor supply in a carved Chinese chest in the dining room and poured myself a Chivas—not my first choice in scotch but an adequate substitute for Black Label.

By ten o’clock I was surrounded by stacks of papers—a pile for Fackley, the agent. One for the attorney, Simonds.
Quite a few for the garbage. A few things of sentimental value to me. One or two that might interest Paige. Some memorabilia for the Hockey Hall of Fame in Eveleth, Minnesota, and some other items for the Black Hawks.

I was tired. My olive silk blouse had a smear of greasy dust across the front. My nylons were full of runs. I was hungry. I hadn’t found Paige’s letters. Maybe I’d feel better after some food. At any rate, I’d been through all the drawers, including the ones in the desk. What had I really expected to find?

Abruptly I stood and skirted the mounds of paper to get to the telephone. I dialed a number I knew by heart and was relieved to hear it answered on the third ring.

“This is Dr. Herschel.”

“Lotty: it’s Vic. I’ve been sorting through my cousin’s papers and gotten myself thoroughly depressed. Have you eaten?”

She had had dinner several hours ago but agreed to meet me at the Chesterton Hotel for coffee while I got something to eat.

I washed up in the master bedroom, looking enviously at the sunken tub with its whirlpool attachment. Relief for my cousin’s shattered ankle. I wondered if he’d bought the condo for the whirlpool. It would be like Boom Boom, tidy in details but not very practical.

On my way out I stopped to talk to the doorman, Hinckley. He was long gone for the day. The man on duty now was more of a security guard. He sat behind a desk with TV consoles on it—he could see the street or the garage or look at any of the thirty floors. A tired old black man with tiny wrinkles that showed only when I got close to him, he looked at me impassively as I explained who I was. I showed him my power of attorney from Simonds and told him I would be coming around until my cousin’s affairs were straightened out and the unit was sold.

He didn’t say anything. He didn’t blink or move his head, just looked at me through expressionless brown eyes whose irises were stained yellow with age.

I could feel my voice rising and checked it. “The man on duty this afternoon let someone into the apartment. Can you please see that no one goes in unless I accompany him or her?”

He continued to stare at me with unblinking eyes. I felt anger flush my face. I turned and left him sitting under the mustard-colored weaving.

“What were you looking for?” Lotty sat drinking coffee, her sharp black eyes probing me, but with affection.

I took a bite of my sandwich. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve been a detective too long—I keep expecting to find secrets in people’s desks.”

We were sitting in the Dortmunder Restaurant in the basement of the Chesterton Hotel. I had picked a half bottle of Pomerol from the wine bins that lined the walls and was drinking it with a sandwich—Emmenthaler on thin, homemade rye bread. Service is slow at Dortmunder’s—they’re used to the old ladies who live in the hotel whiling away an afternoon over a cup of coffee and a single pastry.

“My dear, I don’t want to press you if you don’t want to think about it. But you never sort papers. Even for your cousin you would give them to the attorney unless you were looking for something. So what you were looking for was very important to you, right?”

Lotty is Austrian. She learned English in London where she spent her adolescence, and a trace of a Viennese accent underlies the English inflection of her sharp, crisp words. We’ve been friends for a long time.

I finished my sandwich and drank some more wine,
then held the glass, turning it to catch the light. I stared into the ruby glow and thought. Finally I put the glass down.

“Boom Boom left an urgent message with my answering service. I don’t know if he was just terribly depressed or in some trouble at Eudora Grain, but he never left that kind of message for me before.” I stared again at the wine. “Lotty, I was looking for a letter that said, ‘Dear Vic, I’ve been accused of stealing some papers. Between that and losing my ankle I’m so blue I can’t take it anymore.’ Or ‘Dear Vic—I’m in love with Paige Carrington and life is great.’ She says he was and maybe so—but she’s so—so, oh, sophisticated, maybe. Or perfect—it’s hard for me to picture him in love with her. He liked women who were more human.”

Lotty set down her coffee cup and put her square, strong fingers over mine. “Could you be jealous?”

“Oh, a little. But not so much that it would distort my judgment. Maybe it’s egocentrism, though. I hadn’t called him for two months. I keep going over it in my head—we’d often let months go by without being in touch. But I can’t help feeling I let him down.”

The hold on my fingers tightened. “Boom Boom knew he could count on you, Vic. You have too many times to remember when that was so. He called you. And he knew you’d come through, even if he had to wait a few days.”

I disengaged my left hand and picked up my wineglass. I swallowed and the tightness in my throat eased. I looked at Lotty. She gave an impish smile.

“You are a detective, Vic. If you really want to be totally sure about Boom Boom, you could try investigating what happened.”

The Eudora Grain Company elevator lay in the labyrinth that makes up the Port of Chicago. The Port lines six miles of the Calumet River as it snakes south and west from its mouth near 95th Street. Each elevator or plant along the river has its own access road, and none of them is clearly marked.

I covered the twenty miles from my North Side apartment to 130th Street in good time, reaching the exit by eight o’clock. After that I got lost trying to make my way past the Calumet River, some steel mills, and a Ford assembly plant. It was nine-thirty before I found Eudora Grain’s regional office.

Their regional headquarters, a modern, single-story block, lay next to a giant elevator on the river. The elevator loomed behind the building at right angles, two sections of massive tubes, each containing perhaps a hundred ten-story-high cylinders. The sections were split by a slip where a boat could tie up. On the right side, railway tracks ran into a shed. A few hopper cars were there now and and a small group of hard-hatted men were fixing one onto a hoist. I watched, fascinated: the car disappeared up inside the elevator. On the far left side I could see the tip of
a ship poking out—someone was apparently taking on a load of grain.

The building had a modern lobby with wide windows opening onto the river. Pictures of grain harvests—combines sweeping through thousands of acres of golden wheat, smaller versions of the mammoth elevator outside, trains taking on their golden hoard, boats unloading—covered the walls. I took a quick glance around, then approached a receptionist behind a marble counter set in the middle of the room. She was young and eager to help. After a spirited interchange with his secretary, she located the regional vice-president, Clayton Phillips. He came out to the foyer to meet me.

Phillips was a wooden man, perhaps in his early forties, with straw-colored hair and pale brown eyes. I took an immediate dislike to him, perhaps because he failed to offer me any condolences for Boom Boom, even when I introduced myself as his closest relative.

Phillips dithered around at the thought of my asking questions at the elevator. He couldn’t bring himself to say no, however, and I didn’t give him any help. He had an irritating habit of darting his eyes around the room when I asked him a question, instead of looking at me. I wondered if he found inspiration from the photographs lining the foyer.

“I don’t need to take any more of your time, Mr. Phillips,” I finally said. “I can find my own way around the elevator and ask the questions I want on my own.”

“Oh, I’ll come with you, uh—uh—” He looked at my business card, frowning.

“Miss Warshawski,” I said helpfully.

“Miss Warshawski. The foreman won’t like it if you come without an introduction.” His voice was deep but tight, the voice of a tense man speaking from the vocal cords rather than through the nasal passages.

Pete Margolis, the elevator foreman, didn’t seem happy
to see us. However, I quickly realized his annoyance was directed more at Phillips than at me. Phillips merely introduced me as a “a young lady interested in the elevator.” When I gave Margolis my name and told him I was Boom Boom’s cousin, his manner changed abruptly. He wiped a dirty paw on the side of his overalls and shook hands with me, told me how sorry he was about my cousin’s accident, how much the men liked him, and how badly the company would miss him. He dug out a hard hat for me from under a pile of papers in his minuscule office.

Paying little attention to Phillips, he gave me a long and detailed tour, showing me where the hopper cars came in to dump their loads and how to operate the automatic hoist that lifted them into the heart of the elevator. Phillips trailed along, making ineffectual comments. He had his own hard hat, his name neatly lettered across the top, but his gray silk summer suit was totally out of place in the dirty plant.

Margolis took us up a long flight of narrow stairs that led into the interior of the elevator, perhaps three stories up. He opened a fire door at the top, and noise shattered my eardrums.

Dust covered everything. It swirled through the air, landing in layers on the high steel beams, creating a squeaky film on the metal floor. My toes quickly felt greasy inside their thick cotton socks. My running shoes skidded on the dusty floor. Under the ill-fitting, heavy hard hat, my hair became matted and sticky.

We stood on a catwalk looking down on the concrete floor of the elevator. Only a narrow waist-high handrail stood between me and an unpleasant crash onto the conveyor belts below. If I fell, they’d have to change the sign posted in the doorway: 9,640 man-hours without an accident.

Pete Margolis stood at my right side. He grabbed my arm and gesticulated with his free hand. I shook my head.
He leaned over next to my right ear. “This is where it comes in,” he bellowed. “They bring the boxcars up here and dump them. Then it goes by conveyor belt.”

I nodded. A series of conveyor belts caused much of the clanking, shattering noise, but the hoist that lifted boxcars ninety feet in the air as though they were toys also contributed to the din. The belts ferried grain from the towers where boxcars dumped it over to chutes that spilled it into cargo holds of ships moored outside. A lot of grain dust escaped in the process. Most of the men on the floor wore respirators, but few seemed to have any ear protection.

“Wheat?” I screamed into Margolis’s ear.

“Barley. About thirty-five bushels to the ton.”

He shouted something at Phillips and we went on across the gangway outside, to a narrow ledge overlooking the water. I gulped in the cold April air and let my ears adjust to the relative quiet.

Below us sat a dirty old ship tied to the dock by a series of cables. She was riding above her normal waterline, where the black paint on the hull gave way abruptly to a peeling greenish color. On her deck, more men in hard hats and dirty boiler suits were guiding three massive grain chutes with ropes, filling the holds through some twelve or fourteen openings in the deck. Next to each opening lay its lid—“hatch cover,” Phillips told me. A mass of coiled ropes lay near the back end, our end, where the pilothouse stood. I felt slightly dizzy. I grew up in South Chicago where steel mills dot the lake, so I’ve seen plenty of Great Lakes freighters close up, but they always give me the same feeling—stomach contractions and shivers up the spine. Something about the hull thrusting invisibly into black water.

A cold wind whipped around the river. The water was too sheltered here for whitecaps, but grain dust blew up at us, mixed with cigarette wrappers and potato chip bags. I coughed and turned my head aside.