“How did you come to take this guy home? I thought you were going to fly Mr. Bledsoe down, but you left before the Lucella got through the lock.”
“Yeah, well, Mr. Bledsoe called and told me he wasn’t flying down. Told me to take this guy instead. He said his name was Oleson and that’s what I put down on the log.”
“When did Bledsoe call you? He was on board ship all day Friday.”
He’d called Thursday afternoon. No, Cappy couldn’t swear it was Bledsoe. Matter of fact, Bledsoe himself had just phoned with the same question. But he didn’t take orders from anyone except the plane owner-so who else could it have been?
The logic of this argument somewhat escaped me. I asked him for whom else he flew, but he got huffy and said his client list was confidential.
Hanging up slowly, I wondered again if it was time to turn my information about Mattingly over to Bobby Mallory. The police could put their investigative machinery into motion and start questioning everyone who’d been at Meigs Field on Friday night until they found someone to identify that car. I looked at Boom Boom’s documents on the table next to the phone. The answer to the mess lay in these papers. I’d give myself twenty-four more hours, then turn it over to Bobby.
I tried calling Pole Star. The lines were busy. I tried Eudora Grain. The receptionist told me Mr. Phillips had not yet come in for the day. Was he expected? As far as she knew. I called his Lake Bluff residence. Mrs. Phillips told me tightly that her husband had left for work. So he had come home last night? I asked. She hung up on me again.
I made myself coffee and toast and dressed for action: running shoes, blue jeans, a gray cotton shirt, and a denim jacket. I regretted my Smith & Wesson, lying somewhere at the bottom of the Poe Lock. Maybe when they hauled up the Lucella they could fish my gun out of the moldy barley and give it back to me.
Before I took off, the doorbell rang. I buzzed the caller in through the front door and went on downstairs to meet him. It turned out to be a process server-a college student-with a summons for me to attend a Court of Inquiry in Sault Ste. Marie next Monday. The youth seemed relieved that I accepted it so calmly, merely stuffing it into my shoulder bag. I serve a lot of subpoenas myself-recipients range from tetchy to violent.
I stopped at the corner to buy Lotty a bunch of irises and chrysanthemums and zipped up to her apartment in the Omega. Since my little suitcase was also mushed in with fifty thousand tons of barley at Sault Ste. Marie, I stuffed my belongings into a grocery bag. I put the flowers on the kitchen table with a note.
Lotty darling.
Thank you for looking after me. I’m hot on the scent. I’ll bring your keys by tonight or tomorrow night.
Vic
I had to keep the keys to lock the apartment door behind me.
I sat at her kitchen table with my stack of contracts and went through them until I found one that matched the invoice I had in hand. It was for three million bushels of soybeans going from Chicago to Buffalo on July 24, 1981. The price quoted in the contract was $0.33 a bushel. The invoice billed it at $0.35. Two cents a bushel on three million bushels. Came out to sixty thousand dollars.
Grafalk had been the low bidder on this shipment. Someone else had bit $0.335 and a third carrier $0.34. Grafalk picked up the bid at $0.33 and billed it at $0.35.
Boom Boom’s list of Pole Star’s lost contracts proved even more startling. On the forms I’d gotten from Janet, Grafalk was listed as the low bidder. But Boom Boom’s notes showed Pole Star as the low bidder. Phillips either had entered the contracts wrong or the invoices Boom Boom referred to were wrong.
It was time to get some explanations from these clowns. I was tired of being shown the old shell game every time I wanted information out of them. I stuffed all the papers back into the canvas bag and headed for the Port.
It was close to noon when I turned off I-94 at 130th Street. The friendly receptionist at Eudora Grain was answering the phone and nodded to me in recognition as I walked past her into the inner office. The sales reps were hanging up their phones, straightening their ties, getting ready for lunch. In front of Phillips’s office sat Lois, her bouffant hair lacquered into place. The phone was propped under her chin and she made a pretense of looking at some papers. She was talking in the intense, muttering way people do when they’re trying to pretend they’re not really making personal calls.
She lifted her eyes momentarily to me as I walked up to the desk but didn’t interrupt her conversation.
“Where’s Phillips?” I demanded.
She murmured something into the telephone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you have an appointment?”
I grinned at her. “Is he in today? He doesn’t seem to be at home.”
“I’m afraid he’s away from the office on business. Do you want to make an appointment?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll come back.” I circled behind her and looked in Phillips’s office. There weren’t any signs that anyone had been there since me on Saturday night-no briefcase, no jacket, no half-smoked cigars. I didn’t think he was lurking outside the window in the parking lot but I went over and peered behind the drapes.
My assault on her boss’s office brought Lois, squawking, into his den. I grinned at her again. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation. Tell your mother it won’t happen again. Or is it your sister?”
She turned red and stomped back to her desk. I left, feeling pleased with myself.
I headed to the main part of the Port. Grafalk wasn’t in; he didn’t come down to the Port every day, the receptionist explained. I debated going to talk to Percy MacKelvy, the dispatcher, but decided I’d rather talk directly to Grafalk.
I walked over to Pole Star’s little office. The office manager there was harassed but trying to be calm. As I talked to her she took one call from the Toronto Sun inquiring into the Lucella’s accident and another from KLWN Radio in Lawrence, Kansas.
“It’s been like this all morning. I’d like to get the phone disconnected, but we need to stay in touch with our lawyers, and we do have other ships carrying freight. We don’t want to miss any orders.”
“I thought the Lucella was the only ship you owned.”
“It’s the only big one,” she explained. “But we lease a number of others. In fact Martin got so sick of the newspapers he went down to Plymouth Iron and Steel to watch them unload coal from the Gertrude Ruttan. She’s a seven-hundred-foot self-unloading vessel. We lease her from Triage-they’re a big shipbuilding company. Sort of like Fruehauf for trucks-they don’t carry much cargo in their own right, just lease the vessels.”
I asked for directions to the Plymouth yard and she obligingly gave them to me. It was another ten miles around the lake to the east. She was a very helpful young woman-even gave me a pass to get into the Plymouth plant.
We were into the middle of May and the air was still quite chilly. I wondered whether we were heading for a new ice age. It’s not cold winters that cause them but cool summers when the snow doesn’t melt. I buttoned my jacket up to the neck and rode with the windows rolled all the way up.
As I moved into steel territory the blue air darkened and turned red-black. I felt as though every movement closer to the mills carried me further back in time to the grimy streets of South Chicago where I grew up. The women in the streets had the same pinched, worn look as they hurried their toddlers along. A grocery store on a corner reminded me of the place at 91st and Commercial where I used to buy a hard roll on my way to school, and I stopped the car to get a snack in lieu of lunch. I almost expected old Mr. Kowolsky to step up behind the counter, but instead an energetic young Mexican weighed my apple and carefully wrapped a carton of blueberry yogurt for me.