Deadlock

by Sara Paretsky

  We were driving past the elevators lining the Calumet River and the entrance to the main Port. Large ships loomed everywhere, poking black smokestacks between gray columns of grain and cement elevators. Little trees struggled for life in patches of earth between railroad tracks, slag heaps, and pitted roadbeds. We passed a dead steel mill, a massive complex of rust-red buildings and railway junctions. The cyclone fence was padlocked shut at the entrance: the recession having its impact-the plant was closed.

  The headquarters for the Port of Chicago were completely rebuilt a few years ago. With new buildings, modern docks, and a well-paved road the place looked modern and efficient. Phillips stopped at a guard station where a city cop looked up from his paper and nodded him in. The Alfa purred across smooth tarmac and we stopped in a slot labeled EUDORA GRAIN. We locked the doors and I followed Phillips toward a row of modern buildings.

  Everything here was built on a giant scale. A series of cranes towered over the slips for the ships. Giant teeth hovered over one huge vessel and easily lifted the back of a fifty-ton semi from a stack and lowered it onto a waiting truck bed. Some ten ships were docked here at the main facility, flying the flag of many nations.

  All the Port buildings are constructed from the same tan brick, two stories high. The Grafalk Steamship Line offices occupied all of one of the larger blocks halfway along the wharf. A receptionist, middle-aged and pleasant, recognized Phillips by sight and sent us on back to see Percy MacKelvy, the dispatcher.

  Phillips was clearly a frequent visitor. Greeting various people by name, he led me through a narrow hall which crossed a couple of small rooms. We found the dispatcher in an office crammed with paper. Charts covered every wall and stacks of paper hid the desk, three chairs, and a good deal of the floor. A rumpled man in his mid-forties, wearing a white shirt long since wrinkled for the day, MacKelvy was on the phone when we came in. He took a cigar out of his mouth long enough to say hello.

  He grunted into the phone, moved a red tack on a chart of the lakes at his right hand, punched a query into a computer terminal next to the phone, and grunted again. Finally he said, “Six eighty-three a ton. Take it or leave it… Pick up on the fourth, six eighty-two… Can’t bring it any lower than that… No deal? Maybe next time.” He hung up, added a few numbers to the terminal, and snatched up a second phone which had started to ring. “This is a zoo,” he said to me, loosening his tie further. “MacKelvy… Yeah, yeah.” I watched as he followed a similar sequence with chart, tacks, and computer.

  When he hung up he said, “Hi, Clayton. This the lady you mentioned?”

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. My cousin Bernard Warshawski was killed last Monday when he fell under the Bertha Krupnik’s propeller.”

  The phone was ringing again. “Yeah? MacKelvy here. Yeah, hold on just a second… You figuring the Bertha was at fault somehow?”

  “No. I have some personal concerns as my cousin’s executor. I’d like to know if anyone saw the accident. Phillips here says you can tell me when the Bertha might be expected, either back here, or at some port where I could go talk to the crew.”

  “Hi, Duff,” he spoke into the phone. “Sulphur from Buffalo? Three eighty-eight a ton, pick up on the sixth, deliver to Chicago on the eighth. You got it.” He hung up. “What’s the scoop, Clayton? She likely to sue?”

  Phillips was standing as far from the desk as possible in the crowded room. He stood very still as it make himself psychologically as well as physically remote. He shrugged. “David has expressed some interest.”

  “What about Niels?”

  “I haven’t discussed it with him.”

  I put my hands on the mass of papers and leaned across the desk as the phone rang again.

  “MacKelvy here… Hi, Gumboldt. Hold on a sec, will you?”

  “Mr. MacKelvy, I’m not a hysterical widow trying to get financial restitution from the easiest possible source. I’m trying to find anyone who might have seen my cousin in the last minutes of his life. We’re talking about an open dock at ten in the morning. I can’t believe not a living soul saw him. I want to talk with the crew on the Bertha just to make sure.”

  “Yeah, Gum? Yeah… yeah… Toledo on the sixteenth? How about the seventeenth? Can’t help ya, fella. Night of the sixteenth? Say two-three in the morning?… Okay, fella some other time.” He shook his head worriedly. “Business is rotten. The steel slump’s killing us and so are the thousand-footers. Thank God, Eudora’s still shipping with us.”

  The constant interruptions were getting on my nerves. “I’m sure I can find the Bertha Krupnik, Mr. MacKelvy. I’m a private investigator and I’m used to tracking things down. An active ship on the Great Lakes can’t be that difficult to locate. I’m just asking you to make it easier.”

  MacKelvy shrugged. “I’ll have to talk to Niels. He’s coming down here for lunch, Miss-who’d you say?-and I’ll check with him then. Stop back here around two. Right, Clayton?”

  The phone rang again. “Who’s Niels?” I asked Phillips as we walked out of the office.

  “Niels Grafalk. He owns Grafalk Steamship.”

  “Want to give me a lift back to your office? I can pick up my car there and leave you to your meetings.”

  His pale eyes were darting around the hall, as if looking for someone or trying to get help from someplace. “Uh, sure.”

  We were in the front office, Phillips saying good-bye to the receptionist, when we heard a tremendous crash. I felt a shudder through the concrete floor and then the sound of glass breaking and metal screaming. The receptionist got out of her chair, startled.

  “What was that?”

  A couple of people came into the reception room from inside the building. “An earthquake?” “Sounds like a car crash.” “Was the building hit?” “Is the building falling over?”

  I went to the outer door. Car crash? Maybe, but a damned big car. Maybe one of those semis they’d been loading?

  Outside a large crowd was gathering. A siren in the distance grew louder. And at the north end of the pier a freighter stood, nose plowed into the side of the dock. Large chunks of concrete had broken in front of it like a metal road divider before a speeding car. Glass fragments broke loose from the sides of the ship as I moved with the crowd to gawk. A tall crane at the edge of the wharf twisted and slowly fell, crumpling on itself like a dying swan.

  Two police cars, blue lights flashing, squealed to a stop as close to the disaster as possible. I jumped to one side to avoid an ambulance wailing and honking behind me. The crowd in front of me parted to let it through. I followed quickly in its wake and made it close to the wreck.

  A crane and a couple of forklift trucks had been waiting at dockside. All three were thoroughly chewed up by the oncoming freighter. The police helped the ambulance driver pry one of the forklift drivers out of the mess of crumpled steel. An ugly sight. The crowd-stevedores, drivers, crew members-watched avidly. Disasters are good bowling-league conversation pieces.

  I turned away and found a man in a dirty white boiler suit looking at me. His face was sunburned dark red-brown and his eyes were a deep bright blue. “What happened?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Ship rammed the dock. My guess is they were bringing it in from the engine room and someone went full ahead instead of full astern.”

  “Sorry, I’m a stranger here. Can you translate?”

  “Know anything about how you steer a ship?”

  I shook my head.

  “Oh. Well, it’s hard to explain without showing you the controls. But basically you have two levers, one for each screw. Now if you’re out at sea you steer by turning the wheel. But coming into the dock, you use the levers. Putting one full ahead and one full astern-toward the back, that is-will swing you to the right or the left, depending on which one you move which way. Putting both of them full astern is like putting your car in reverse. Slows the ship way down and brings you gently up against the wharf. It looks like some poor bastard thought that was what he
was doing but went full ahead instead.

  “I see. It seems strange that a little thing like that could cause so much damage.

  “Well, if you drove your car at the pier-assuming you could get down in the water and do it-you’d be chewed up and the concrete walls would laugh at you. But your car-what kind do you drive?-about a ton and two hundred horsepower? Now that thing has twelve thousand horsepower and weighs about ten thousand tons. They did the equivalent of flooring her accelerator and that’s the result.”

  Someone had rigged a ladder up to the front of the ship. A couple of crew members, rather shaky, came down onto the pier. I felt a hand on my shoulder and jerked around. A tall man with a sunburned face and a magnificent shock of white hair shouldered past me. “Excuse me. Out of the way, please.”

  The police, who were keeping everyone else back from the forklift trucks and the ladder, let the white-haired man through without a question.

  “Who’s that?” I asked my informative acquaintance. “He looks like a Viking.”

  “He is a Viking. That’s Niels Grafalk. He owns this sorry hunk of steel… Poor devil!”

  Niels Grafalk. I didn’t think the timing was too hot to go swarming up the ladder after him in search of the Bertha Krupnik. Unless…

  “Is this the Bertha Krupnik?”

  “No,” my friend answered. “It’s the Leif Ericsson. You got some special interest in the Bertha?”

  “Yeah, I’m trying to find out where she is. I can’t get MacKelvy-d’you know him?-to let the information loose without Grafalk’s say-so. You wouldn’t know, would you?”

  When my acquaintance wanted to know the reason, I felt an impulse to shut up and go home. I couldn’t think of anything much stupider than my obsession about Boom Boom and his accident. Obviously, from the crowd converging here, disaster brought a lot of people to the scene. Margolis had been right: if the men at the elevator knew anything about Boom Boom’s death, they would have been talking about it. It was probably high time to return to Chicago and serve some processes to their reluctant recipients.

  My companion saw my hesitation. “Look-it’s time for lunch. Why don’t you let me take you over to the Salle de la Mer-it’s the private club for owners and officers here. I just need to shed this boiler suit and get a jacket.”

  I looked at my jeans and running shoes. “I’m hardly dressed for a private club.”

  He assured me they didn’t care about what women wore-only men have to observe clothing rules in the modern restaurant. He left me to watch the debacle at the pier for a few minutes while he went to change. I was wondering vaguely what had happened to Phillips when I saw him picking his way tentatively through the crowd to the Leif Ericsson. Something in his hesitant manner irritated me profoundly.

  5 A Glass in the Hand

  “I’m Mike Sheridan, chief engineer on the Lucella Wieser.”

  “And I’m V. I. Warshawski, a private investigator.”

  The waiter brought our drinks, white wine for me and vodka and tonic for Sheridan.

  “You’re related to Boom Boom Warshawski, aren’t you?”

  “I’m his cousin… You connected with the Lucella Weiser that was across from the Bertha Krupnik when he fell under the propeller last week?”

  He agreed, and I commented enthusiastically on what a small world it was. “I’ve been trying to find someone who might have seen my cousin die. To tell you the truth, I think it’s pretty hopeless-judging by the crowd that wreck out there drew.” I explained my search and why the Lucella was included in it.

  Sheridan drank some vodka. “I have to admit I knew who you were when you were standing on the wharf. Someone pointed you out to me and I wanted to talk to you.” He smiled apologetically. “People gossip a lot in a place like this… Your cousin was coming over to talk to John Bemis, the Lucella’s captain, that afternoon. He claimed to know something about an act of vandalism that kept us from loading for a week. In fact that’s why we were tied up across the way: we were supposed to be taking on grain at that Eudora elevator, but we ended up with water in our holds. We had to dry them out and get Board of Health clearance again before we could load.”

  “You mean someone deliberately put water in your holds? That was the vandalism?”

  He nodded. “We assumed it was done by a disgruntled crewman. We asked him to leave the ship. He didn’t raise a fuss about it so I think we were right. But your cousin sounded serious, and of course Bemis wanted to talk to him. You wouldn’t know anything about what was on his mind, would you?”

  I shook my head. “That’s part of the problem. I hadn’t seen Boom Boom for two or three months before he died. To tell you the truth, I was mostly worried that he might have-well, let himself fall because he was terribly depressed about not being able to skate or play hockey anymore. But, from what you’re saying and what Pete Margolis at the elevator said, he’d gotten pretty involved in what was going on down here, not depressed at all. I’d sure like to know, though, if anyone on the Bertha or the Lucella saw the accident firsthand.”

  Sheridan shook his head. “It’s true we were tied up across the way, but the Bertha Krupnik lay between us and the wharf. I don’t think anyone on the Lucella could have seen anything.”

  The waiter came back to take our orders; we told him we needed a few minutes to study the menu. He was back again within thirty seconds, coughing apologetically.

  “Mr. Grafalk wants to know if you and the lady would join him and Mr. Phillips at his table.”

  Sheridan and I looked at each other in surprise. I hadn’t noticed either of them come in. We followed the waiter across the rose and purple carpet to a table in the corner on the other side. Grafalk stood up to shake hands with Sheridan.

  “Thanks for interrupting your lunch to join us, Mike.” To me he added, “I’m Niels Grafalk.”

  “How do you do, Mr. Grafalk. I’m V. I. Warshawski.”

  Grafalk wore a soft tweed jacket, tailored to fit his body, and an open-necked white shirt. I didn’t have to know he was born with money to feel that he was a man used to controlling things around him. He exuded a seafaring atmosphere, his hair bleached white, his face red with wind and sunburn.

  “Phillips here told me you were asking some questions of Percy MacKelvy. Since I’m on the spot, maybe you can tell me why you’re interested in Grafalk Steamship.”

  I embarked on a story which by now seemed very threadbare. “Mr. MacKelvy thought he ought to check with you before he told me where the Bertha Krupnik is,” I finished.

  “I see.” Grafalk looked at me sharply. “Phillips told me you were a private investigator. I thought maybe you’d decided to do some snooping around my company.”

  “When people meet a policeman unexpectedly they often feel guilty: nameless crimes rise up to confront them. When they meet a private investigator they usually feel defensive: don’t come snooping around me. I’m used to it,” I said.

  Grafalk threw his head back and let out a loud crack of laughter. Sheridan gave me a sardonic smile but Phillips looked as strained as ever.

  “If you have a minute after lunch, walk back with me to the office-I’ll get Percy to cough up the Bertha’s whereabouts for you.”

  The waiter came to take our order. I asked for a whole artichoke stuffed with shrimp. Grafalk chose grilled lake trout, as did Phillips. Sheridan ordered a steak. “When you spend nine months of your life on the water, beef has a solid, earthy appeal.”

  “So tell me, how does a young woman like you get involved in a career as a detective? You work for a firm or for yourself?”

  “I’ve been in business for myself for about six years. Before that I was an attorney with the Public Defender in Cook County. I got tired of seeing poor innocent chumps go off to Stateville because the police wouldn’t follow up our investigations and find real culprits. And I got even more tired of watching clever guilty rascals get off scot-free because they could afford attorneys who know how to tap-dance around the law. So I thought-à la
Doña Quixote perhaps-that I’d see what I could do on my own about the situation.”

  Grafalk smiled with amusement over a glass of Niersteiner gutes Domthal. “Who usually hires you?”

  “I do a certain amount of financial crime-that’s my specialty. The Transicon Company; that business last year with Ajax Insurance and the Knifegrinders… I just finished a job involving computer fraud in wire transfers at a small bank in Peoria. I fill in the gaps tracking down missing witnesses and serving subpoenas on people anxious to avoid a day in court.”

  Grafalk was watching me with the same amused smile-wealthy man enjoying the foibles of the middle class: what do the simple folk do if they don’t own a steamship company? The smile grew rigid. He was looking at someone behind me whom he apparently didn’t want to see. I turned as a stocky man in a gray business suit walked up to the table.

  “Hello, Martin.”

  “Hello, Niels… Hi, Sheridan. Niels trying to enlist your help with the Ericsson?”

  “Hi, Martin. This is V. I. Warshawski. She’s Boom Boom Warshawski’s cousin-down here asking us all a few questions about his death,” Sheridan said.

  “How do you do, Miss Warshawski. I was very sorry about the accident to your cousin. None of us knew him well, but we all admired him as a hockey player.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He was introduced as Martin Bledsoe, owner of the Pole Star Line, which included the Lucella Wieser. He took a vacant chair between Sheidan and Phillips, asking Grafalk after he sat down if it was okay to join us.

  “Glad to have you, Martin,” the Viking said warmly. I must have imagined the strain in his smile a few minutes before.

  “Sorry about the Ericsson, Niels. Hell of a mess out there. You figure out what happened?”

  “Looked to me like she ran into the dock, Martin. But we’ll know for sure after we’ve made a complete investigation.”