Sheridan felt great confidence in the men under him. “I know my judgment could be wrong, but I can’t imagine any one of those guys deliberately sabotaging somebody’s car.”
We went on talking long after one of the junior cooks had cleared away the table and cleaned up the galley. Finally the chief engineer excused himself to go back to the engine room. He said I could question the other engineers and the four boilermen, but he didn’t think it would do me any good.
As he walked through the doorway, I said casually, “Were you in the engine room that night?”
He turned and looked me straight in the eye. “Yes, I was. And Yalmouth-my first engineer-was with me. We were going over the hydraulics preparatory to starting up the engines the next day.”
“Not out of each other’s sight all evening?”
“Not long enough to monkey with a car.”
He went on out the door. Bledsoe said, “Satisfied, Vic? Is Pole Star clean in your eyes?”
I shrugged in irritation. “I suppose so. Short of launching a full-scale investigation into everyone’s movements last Thursday night there’s not much else I can do to check up on you guys.” Something occurred to me. “You had a security force on board that night, didn’t you? Maybe Bemis can give me their names-they’d know if anyone had been climbing around with tools.” My villain might have persuaded a guard that he belonged on board: that probably wouldn’t be too difficult. But a guard would surely remember someone leaving the ship with a blowtorch and a ratchet wrench. Of course, if Bledsoe was behind the whole business, he might have paid off the guards, anyway.
I drank some cold coffee, looking at Bledsoe over the rim of the cup. “The whole thing turns on money, lots of money. It’s in the Eudora Grain contracts, but that’s not the only place.”
“True,” Bledsoe agreed. “There’s also a great deal in the freighter business itself, and there’s the amount I had to raise to pay for the Lucella. Maybe I embezzled it from Niels to pay for my flagship just before I left Grafalk Steamship.”
“Yes, and if he suspected that but couldn’t prove it, he might want to alert me to the possibility.”
Bledsoe smiled genially. “I can see that. You should definitely look into my finances as well as Phillips’s. I’ll tell my secretary to give you access to my files when we get back to Chicago.”
I thanked him politely. All that offer meant was, if he had something to hide, he had it concealed someplace other than in Pole Star’s books.
We spent the rest of the evening talking about opera. They’d had a collection of librettos in the Cantonville prison library and he’d read all of them. After he got out of prison he started attending the Cleveland Opera.
“Now I fly to New York five, six times a year for the Met and get season tickets to the Lyric… It gives me a queer feeling to talk about Cantonville with someone. My wife was the only person who knew about it-except Niels, of course. And neither of them ever mentioned it. It makes me feel almost guilty when I bring it up now.”
Around ten-thirty, two of the crew members came in with a cot and some blankets. They set the narrow bed up under the portholes in the starboard wall, bracing it to the side so it wouldn’t slide around with the rocking of the ship.
After they left, Bledsoe stood fiddling the change in his pockets with the awkwardness of a man who wants to make a pass but isn’t sure how it will be received. I didn’t try to help him out. I liked the way he kissed. But I’m not the kind of detective who hops nonchalantly from bed to bed: if someone’s been trying to kill me, it cools my enthusiasm. And I still didn’t have total trust in Bledsoe’s purity.
“Time for me to turn in,” I said briskly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
He hesitated for a few seconds longer, scanning my face for encouragement, then turned and went upstairs to the stateroom. I put the Smith & Wesson under the little pillow and climbed under the blankets in my jeans and shirt. Despite the noise of the engines and the lurching of the ship, I went to sleep almost immediately and slept soundly through the night.
The cooks woke me the next morning before six as they started clattering around in the galley next to the captain’s dining room. I tried pulling the bedding up over my ears but the disturbance was too persistent. Finally I got up and stumbled up to the next floor where the bathroom was. I changed my underwear and shirt and brushed my teeth.
It was too early for me to feel like eating, even though breakfast was ready, so I went out on deck to look at the day. The sun had just come up, a ball of liquid orange low in the eastern sky. A purple shoreline lay a mile or so to our left. We were going past some more of the small clumps of islands which had dotted the channel as we left Thunder Bay.
At breakfast Captain Bemis, the chief engineer, and Bledsoe were all in affable moods. Perhaps the fact I was leaving soon cheered them up. At any rate, even the captain was gracious, explaining our course to me. We were coming down the southeast coast of Lake Superior leading into the St. Mary’s Channel. “This is where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975,” he said. “It’s the best approach to the St. Mary’s, but it’s still a very shallow route, only thirty feet deep in places.”
“What happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald?”
“Everyone has his own theory. I don’t suppose they’ll ever know for certain. When they dove down to look at her, they found she’d been cut neatly in three pieces. Sank immediately. I’ve always blamed the Coast Guard for not keeping the channel markings in proper order. The waves were thirty feet high out here that night-one of them must have pushed the Fitzgerald into a trough and caused her to scrape against the bottom and snap. If they’d marked the channel properly, Captain McSorley would have avoided the shallowest spots.”
“The thing is,” the chief engineer added, “these lakers don’t have much support through the middle. They’re floating cargo holds. If they put a lot of beams through the holds they’d take up too much valuable cargo space. So you get these twenty- or thirty-foot waves out here, and they pick up a ship like this on either end. The middle doesn’t have any support and it just snaps. You go down very quickly.”
The head cook, a thick Polish woman in her mid-fifties, was pouring the captain’s coffee. As the chief spoke, she dropped the cup on the floor. “You should not talk like that, Chief Engineer. It is very bad luck.” She called to her underlings to come in and clean up the mess.
Sheridan shrugged. “It’s all the men do talk about when there’s a storm brewing. Ship disasters are like cancer-the other guy is always the one who’s going to get it, anyway.” All the same, he apologized to the cook and changed the subject.
Bemis told me we’d be getting into the Soo locks around three o’clock. He suggested that I watch from the bridge so I could see the approach and the way the ship was steered into the channel. After lunch I packed up my little canvas bag for a quick departure: Bledsoe told me we’d have about two minutes to climb over the side of the Lucella onto shore before they opened the lock gates and she went on through to Lake Huron.
I checked that my credit cards and cash were in my front jeans pocket and put the Smith & Wesson into the bag. There didn’t seem much point in lugging it around in the shoulder holster while I was on board. I stowed the bag next to the pilothouse while I went up on the bridge to watch the Lucella slide into the lock. We were now well into the channel of the St. Mary’s River, following a slow-moving procession.