8 Learning the Business
I tried Murray again in the morning after my run. I was getting up too early these days-the star reporter hadn’t arrived for work yet. I left another message and got dressed: navy linen slacks, a white shirt, and a navy Chanel jacket. A crimson scarf and low-heeled navy loafers completed the ensemble. Tough but elegant, the image I wanted to get across at Eudora Grain. I tossed an outsize shirt and my running shoes into the back seat to wear at the elevator-I wasn’t going to ruin any good clothes down there.
Margolis was waiting for me. As the men came off shift for their morning break I talked to them informally in the yard. Most were pretty cooperative: seeing a detective, even a lady detective, relieved the monotony of the day. None of them had seen anything of my cousin’s death, however. One of them suggested that I talk to the men on the Lucella. Another said I ought to speak to Phillips.
“He hanging around here? I don’t remember that,” a short fellow with enormous forearms said.
“Yup. He was here. He come through with Warshawski and told Dubcek here to put on his earmuffs.”
They debated the matter and finally agreed that the speaker was right. “He stuck pretty close to Warshawski. Don’t know how he missed him out there on the wharf. Guess he was in with Margolis.”
I asked about the papers Boom Boom was supposed to have stolen. They were reticent but I finally pried out the information that Phillips and Boom Boom had had a terrible argument about some papers. That Phillips had accused my cousin of stealing? I asked. No, someone else said-it was the other way around. Warshawski had accused Phillips. None of them had actually heard the argument-it was just a rumor.
That seemed to be that. I checked back with Margolis. Phillips had been with him at what might have been the critical time. After the Bertha Krupnik pulled away he had asked impatiently for Warshawski and had gone out to the wharf to get him and found him floating off the pier. They’d hauled Boom Boom up right away and given first aid, but he had been dead for twenty minutes or more.
“You know anything about the water in the holds of the Lucella?”
Margolis shrugged. “Guess they found the guy who did it. She was tied up here, waitin’ to load, when it happened. They pulled off the hatch covers and started to pour into the central hold when someone saw there was water in the thing. So they had to move her off and clean ’em out. Quite a mess, by the time they got twenty thousand bushels in there.”
“My cousin didn’t discuss it with you?”
Margolis shook his head. “Course, we didn’t talk too much. He’d ask me about the load and we’d chat about the Hawks’ chances but that’d be about it.”
He kept looking at the elevator as we were talking and I realized I was keeping him from his job. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. I thanked him for his time and took off for Eudora Grain’s regional headquarters.
The receptionist vaguely remembered me from the other day and smiled at me. I reminded her who I was and told her that I had come to go through my cousin’s papers to see if he’d left anything personal down there.
She spoke to me between phone calls. “Why, certainly. We all liked Mr. Warshawski very much. It was a terrible thing that happened to him. I’ll just get his secretary to come out and get you… I hope you weren’t planning to see Mr. Phillips, because he’s out of the office right now… Janet, Mr. Warshawski’s cousin is here. She wants to look at his papers. Will you come out for her?… Good morning, Eudora Grain. One moment, please… Good morning, Eudora Grain… Won’t you sit down, Miss Warshawski? Janet will be right here.” She went back to her waiting calls and I flipped through the Wall Street Journal lying on the table in the waiting area.
Janet proved to be a woman at least twenty years my senior. She was quiet and well put together in a simple shirtwaist dress and canvas wedgies. She didn’t wear makeup or stockings-no one down in the Port dressed up as much as they do in the Loop. She told me she had come to the funeral and she was sorry she hadn’t talked to me then, but she knew what funerals were like-you had enough to do with your own relations without a lot of strangers bothering you.
She took me back to Boom Boom’s office, a cubbyhole, really, whose walls were glass from waist-height up. Like the Grafalk dispatcher MacKelvy’s, it had charts of the lakes covering all the walls. Unlike MacKelvy’s, it was extremely tidy.
I flipped through some reports lying on his desk top. “Can you tell me what Boom Boom was doing?”
She stood in the doorway. I gestured to one of the vinyl-covered chairs. After a minute’s hesitation she turned to a woman in the outer area behind us. “Can you take my calls, Effie?” She sat down.
“Mr. Argus brought him in here just out of sympathy at first. But after a few months everyone could see your cousin was really smart. So Mr. Angus was having Mr. Phillips train him. The idea was he would be able to take over one of the regional offices in another year or so-probably Toledo, where old Mr. Cagney is getting ready to retire.”
Secretaries always know what is going on in an office. “Did Phillips know Boom Boom was being groomed? How did he feel about it?”
She looked at me consideringly. “You don’t look much like your cousin, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“No. Our fathers were brothers, but Boom Boom and I both took after our mothers in appearance.”
“But you’re very like him around the eyes… It’s hard to tell how Mr. Phillips feels about anything. But I’d say he was glad your cousin was going to be off his hands before long.”
“Did they fight?”
“Oh no. At least not so that anyone here would know about it. But your cousin was an impatient person in a lot of ways. Maybe playing hockey made him want to do everything faster than Mr. Phillips is used to-he’s more the deliberate type.” She hesitated and my stomach muscles tightened: she was about to say something important if she didn’t think it would be indiscreet. I tried to make my eyes look like Boom Boom’s.
“The thing is, Mr. Phillips didn’t want him so involved in the shipping contracts. Each regional vice-president sort of owns his own contracts, and Mr. Phillips seemed to think if Mr. Warshawski got too involved with the customers he might be able to shift some of them to Toledo with him.”
“So did they argue about the contracts? Or the customers?”
“Now if I tell you this, I don’t want you getting me in trouble with Mr. Phillips.”
I promised her her secret was safe.
“You see, Lois-Mr. Phillips’s secretary-doesn’t like anyone touching the contract files.” She looked over her shoulder, as though Lois might be standing there listening. “It’s silly, really, because all the sales reps have to use them. We all have to be in and out of them all day long. But she acts like they’re-they’re diamonds or something. So if you take them you’re supposed to write a note on her desk saying which ones you’ve taken and then let her know when you bring them back.”
The boss’s secretary has a lot of control in an office and often exercises it through petty tyrannies like these. I murmured something encouraging.
“Mr. Warshawski thought rules like that were pretty stupid. So he’d just ignore them. Lois couldn’t stand him because he didn’t pay any attention to anything she said.” She smiled briefly, a tender, amused smile, not spiteful. Boom Boom must have livened up the place quite a bit. Stanley Cup winners don’t get there by too scrupulous attention to rules. Lois’s petty ways must have struck him as some kind of decrepit penalty box.
“Anyway, the week before he died, Mr. Warshawski pulled several months of contracts-all last summer’s, I think-and took them home with him. If Lois found out she’d really get me in trouble, because he’s gone and I was his secretary and she’d have to blame someone.”