Deadlock (8 page)

“We’re very concerned about this vandalism to the
Lucella,”
Bemis told me. “We were sorry when young Warshawski died. But we’d also like to know what it was he had to say.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. I hadn’t talked to Boom Boom for several months … I was hoping he might have said something to you that would give me a clue about his state of mind.”

Bemis gave a frustrated sign. “He wanted to talk to us about this business with the holds. Sheridan told you about that? Well, Warshawski asked if we’d found the culprit. I told him yes. He said he thought there might be more to it than just a dissatisfied seaman. He had some additional checking to do, but he wanted to talk to me the next day.”

The first mate came onto the bridge and Bemis stopped talking to introduce me. The mate’s name was Keith Winstein. He was a wiry young man, perhaps thirty years old, with a shock of curly black hair.

“I’m telling her about the business with young Warshawski,” Bemis explained to the mate. “Anyway, Keith
here and I waited on the bridge until five on Tuesday, hoping to talk to him. Then we got the news that he’d died.”

“So no one here saw him fall!” I exclaimed.

The first mate shook his head regretfully. “I’m sorry, but we didn’t even realize there’d been an accident. We were tied up across the way, but none of our men was on deck when the ambulance came.”

I felt a sharp twist of disappointment. It seemed so—so unfair that Boom Boom could slide out of life without one person to see him do it. I tried to concentrate on the captain and his problem, but none of it seemed important to me. I felt stupid, as though I’d wasted a day. What had I expected to find out, anyway? Rushing around the wharf, playing detective, just to avoid admitting that my cousin was dead.

I suggested to Bemis and Winstein that they find the man they’d fired and question him more thoroughly, then pleaded a meeting in the Loop and asked the chief engineer to drive me back to the Eudora Grain parking lot. I picked up my Lynx there and headed north.

My apartment is the large, inexpensive top of a three-flat on Halsted, north of Belmont. Every year the hip young professionals in Lincoln Park move a little closer, threatening to chase me farther north with their condominium conversions, their wine bars, and their designer running clothes. So far Diversey, two blocks south, has held firm as the dividing line, but it could go any day.

I got home around seven, exhausted and confused. On the long drive back, snarled in commuter traffic for two hours, I’d wrestled with my depression. By the time I parked in front of my gray stone building the gloom had lifted a bit. I began wondering about some of the strange behavior down at the Port.

I poured myself a solid two fingers of Black Label and ran a bath. When you thought about it, it was very odd that Boom Boom had called the captain, made an appointment to discuss vandalism, and then died. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask Bemis or Winstein about the papers Boom Boom might have stolen.

It sounded as though Boom Boom might have been playing detective. Maybe that was why he was calling me—not out of despair but for a professional consultation. What had he discovered? Something worth my
finding out too? Was I still looking for some deeper importance to his death than an accident, or was there something to know?

I sipped my whiskey. I couldn’t sort my feelings out enough to tell. It was incredible to me that someone might kill Boom Boom to keep him from talking to Bemis. Still. What about the tension between Grafalk and Bledsoe? Boom Boom’s death following so quickly after his phone call to Bemis? The accident today at the wharf?

I got out of the tub and wrapped myself in a red bath sheet and poured another slug of scotch. There were enough odd actions down at the Port that it would be worth my asking a few more questions. Anyway, I thought, tossing off the whiskey, so what if I work out my grief by carrying out an investigation? Is that any stupider than getting drunk or whatever else people do when someone they love dies?

I put on a pair of clean jeans and a T-shirt and wandered out to the kitchen. A depressing sight—pans stacked around the sink, crumbs on the table, an old piece of aluminum foil, cheese congealed on the stove from a pasta primavera I’d made a few nights ago. I set about washing up—there are days when the mess hits you so squarely that you can’t add to it.

The refrigerator didn’t have much of interest in it. The wooden clock by the back door said nine—too late to go out for dinner, as tired as I was, so I settled for a bowl of canned pea soup and some toast.

Over another scotch I watched the tail end of a depressing Cubs defeat in New York—their eighth in a row. The New Tradition takes hold, I thought gloomily, and went to bed.

I woke up around six to another cold cloudy day. The first week in May and the weather was like November. I put on my long running pants and conscientiously did five miles around Belmont Harbor and back. I’d been using
Boom Boom’s death as an excuse for indolence and the run left me panting more than it should have.

I drank orange juice, showered, and had some fresh-ground coffee with a hard roll and cheese. It was seven-thirty. I was due at Eudora Grain in three hours to talk to the men. In the interim I could go back for a quick scan of Boom Boom’s belongings. I’d been looking for something personal on my previous visit, something that might indicate his state of mind. This time I’d concentrate on something that indicated a crime.

A small trickle of beautifully suited lawyers and doctors oozed from the 210 East Chestnut building. They had the unhealthy faces of people who eat and drink too much most of the time but keep their weight down through strenuous diets and racquetball in between. One of them held the door without really noticing me.

Up in Boom Boom’s condo I stopped again for a few minutes to look at the lake. The wind whipped whitecaps up on the green water. A tiny red sliver moved on the horizon, a freighter on its journey to the other side of the lakes. I stared for a long time before bracing my shoulders and heading to the study.

An appalling sight met me. The papers I had left in eight discrete piles were thrown pell-mell around the room. Drawers were open-ended, pictures pulled from the wall, pillows torn from a daybed in the corner and the bedding strewn about.

The wreckage was so confused and so violent that the worst abomination didn’t hit me for a few seconds. A body lay crumpled in the corner on the far side of the desk.

I walked gingerly past the mess of papers, trying not to disturb the chaos lest it contain any evidence. The man was dead. He held a gun in his hand, a Smith & Wesson .358, but he’d never used it. His neck had been broken, as nearly as I could tell without moving the body—I couldn’t see any wounds.

I lifted the head gently. The face stared at me impassively, the same expressionless face that had looked at me two nights ago in the lobby. It was the old black man who’d been on night duty. I lowered his head carefully and sprinted to Boom Boom’s lavish bathroom.

I drank a glass of water from the bathroom tap and the heaving subsided in my stomach. Using the phone next to the king-size bed to call the police, I noticed that the bedroom had come in for some minor disruption. The red and purple painting on the wall had been taken down and the magazines thrown to the floor. Drawers stood open in the polished walnut dresser and socks and underwear were on the floor.

I went through the rest of the apartment. Someone had clearly been looking for something. But what?

The night guard’s name had been Henry Kelvin. Mrs. Kelvin came with the police to identify the body, a dark, dignified woman whose grief was more impressive for the restraint with which she contained it.

The cops who showed up insisted on treating this as an ordinary break-in. Boom Boom’s death had been widely publicized. Some enterprising burglar no doubt took advantage of the situation; it was unfortunate that Kelvin had surprised him in the act. I kept pointing out that nothing of value had been taken but they insisted that Kelvin’s death had frightened off the intruders. In the end I gave up on it.

I called Margolis, the elevator foreman, to explain that I would be delayed, perhaps until the following day. At noon the police finished with me and took the body away on a stretcher. They were going to seal the apartment until they finished fingerprinting and analyzing everything.

I took a last look around. Either the intruders had found what they came for, or my cousin had hidden what they were looking for elsewhere, or there was nothing to
find but they were running scared. My mind flicked to Paige Carrington. Love letters? How close had she been to Boom Boom, really? I needed to talk to her again. Maybe to some of my cousin’s friends as well.

Mrs. Kelvin was sitting stiffly on the edge of one of the nubby white sofas in the lobby. When I got off the elevator she came over to me.

“I need to talk to you.” Her voice was harsh, the voice of someone who wanted to cry and was becoming angry instead.

“All right. I have an office downtown. Will that do?”

She looked around the exposed lobby, at the residents staring at her on their way to and from the elevator, and agreed. She followed me silently outside and over to Delaware, where I’d found a place to squeeze my little Mercury. Someday I’d have enough money for something really wonderful, like an Audi Quarto. But in the meantime I buy American.

Mrs. Kelvin didn’t say anything on the way downtown. I parked the car in a garage across from the Pulteney Building. She didn’t spare a glance for the dirty mosaic floors and the pitted marble walls. Fortunately the tired elevator was functioning. It creaked down to the ground floor and saved me the embarrassment of asking her to climb the four flights to my office.

We walked to the east end of the hall where my office overlooks the Wabash Avenue el, the side where cheap rents are even lower because of the noise. A train was squeaking and rattling its way past as I unlocked the door and ushered her to the armchair I keep for visitors.

I took the seat behind my desk, a big wooden model I picked up at a police auction. My desk faces the wall so that open space lies between me and my clients. I’ve never liked using furniture for hiding or intimidating.

Mrs. Kelvin sat stiffly in the armchair, her black
handbag upright in her lap. Her black hair was straightened and shaped away from her long face in severely regimented waves. She wore no makeup except for a dark orange lipstick.

“You talked to my husband Tuesday night, didn’t you?” she finally said.

“Yes, I did.” I kept my voice neutral. People talk more when you make yourself part of the scenery.

She nodded to herself. “He came home and told me about it. This job was pretty boring for him, so anything out of the way happened, he told me about it.” She nodded again. “You young Warshawski’s executor or something, that right?”

“I’m his cousin and his executor. My name is V. I. Warshawski.”

“My husband wasn’t a hockey fan, but he liked young Warshawski. Anyway, he came home Tuesday night—yesterday morning that would be—and told me some uppity white girl was telling him to look after the boy’s apartment. That was you.” She nodded again. I didn’t say anything.

“Now Henry did not need anybody telling him how to do his job.” She gave an angry half sob and controlled herself again. “But you told him special not to let anyone into your cousin’s apartment. So you must have known something was going on. Is that right?”

I looked at her steadily and shook my head. “The day man, Hinckley, had let someone into the apartment without my knowing about it ahead of time. There were things there that some crazy fan would find valuable—his hockey stick, stuff like that—and legal documents I didn’t want anyone else going through.”

“You didn’t know someone was going to break in like that?”

“No, Mrs. Kelvin. If I’d had any suspicion of such a thing I would have taken greater precautions.”

She compressed her lips. “You say you had no suspicion. Yet you took it upon yourself to tell my husband how to do his job.”

“I didn’t know your husband, Mrs. Kelvin. I’d never met him. So I couldn’t see whether he was the kind of person who took his work seriously. I wasn’t trying to tell him how to do his job, just trying to safeguard the interests my cousin left to my charge.”

“Well, he told me, he said, ‘I don’t know who that girl’—that’s you—‘thinks is going to try to get into that place. But I got my eye on it.’ So he plays the hero, and he gets killed. But you say you weren’t expecting anything special.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Sorry doesn’t bring the dead back to life.”

After she left I sat for a long time without doing anything. I did feel in a way as though I had sent the old man to his death. He got my goat Tuesday, acting like I was a talking elevator door or something. But he’d taken what I said seriously—more seriously than I had. He must have kept a close watch on the twenty-second floor from his TV console and seen someone go into my cousin’s place. Then he’d gone up after him. The rest was unpleasantly clear.