Deadlock

by Sara Paretsky

  This was one of the rare occasions when I wished I had a partner, someone who could dig into Paige’s background while I disguised myself as a load of wheat and infiltrated Eudora Grain.

  I paid the bill and headed for home and a free phone. Relatively free. Murray Ryerson, crime reporter for the Herald-Star, had left for the night. They took a message from me at the city desk. I also left my name and number on Fackley’s phone machine. There was nothing more I could do tonight, so I went to bed. A life of nonstop thrills.

  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.”

  “Don’t worry: I won’t tell anyone you told me. What did he do with them?”

  “I don’t know. But I do know he took a couple of them in with him to see Mr. Phillips late Monday night.”

  “Did they have any kind of argument?”

  She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. We were all on our way out the door when he went in. Even Lois. Not that she’d say if she knew.”

  I scratched my head. That was probably the origin of the rumors about Boom Boom stealing papers and fighting with Phillips. Maybe my cousin thought Phillips was enticing customers from the ancient Mr. Cagney in Toledo. Or that Phillips hadn’t been telling him everything he needed to know. I wondered if I’d be able to understand a shipping contract if I saw one.

  “Any chance I could look at the files my cousin took home with him?”

  She wanted to know why. I looked at her kind, middle-aged face. She had been fond of Boom Boom, her young boss. “I’m not satisfied with the accounts I’ve heard of my cousin’s death. He was an athlete, you know, despite his bad ankle. It would take more than a slippery wharf to get him into the lake. If he’d had a fight with Phillips over something important, he might have been mad enough to get careless. He had quite a temper, but he couldn’t fight Phillips with fists and sticks the way he could the Islanders.”

  She pursed her mouth up, thinking it over. “I don’t think he was angry the morning he died. He came here before going over to the elevator, you know, and I’d say his mood was-excited. He reminded me of my little boy when he’s just pulled off some big stunt on his dirt bike.”

  “The other thing I’m wondering is if someone might have pushed him in.”

  She gulped once or twice at that. Why would someone push a nice young man like Mr. Warshawski to his death? I didn’t know, I told her, but it was possible those files might give me some kind of clue. I explained to her that I was a private investigator by profession. That seemed to satisfy her: she promised to hunt them up for me while Lois was at lunch.

  I asked her if there were anyone else in the office with whom Boom Boom might have quarreled. Or, failing that, whom he might have been close to.

  “The people he worked with most were the sales reps. They do all the buying and selling. And, of course, Mr. Quinchley, who handles the Board of Trade on his computer.”

  She gave me names of some of the likelier prospects and went back to her desk. I went out to the pit to see if I could find Brimford or Ashton, two of the reps Boom Boom had usually worked with. They were both on the phone, so I wandered around a bit, getting covert stares. There were some half dozen typists handling correspondence, bills, contracts, invoices, who knows what else. A few cubbyholes like Boom Boom’s were stuck along the windows here and there. One of them held a man sitting at a computer terminal-Quinchley, hard at work with the Board of Trade.

  Phillip’s office was in the far corner. His secretary, a woman about my age with a bouffant hairdo I’d last seen in seventh grade, was over interrogating Janet. What does that cousin of Warshawski’s want now? I grinned to myself.

  Ashton hung up his phone. I stopped him as he started dialing again and asked if he’d mind talking to me for a few minutes. He was a heavyset guy in his middle or late forties; he followed me goodnaturedly into Boom Boom’s cubicle. I explained again who I was and that I was trying to find out more about Boom Boom’s job and whether he had tangled with anyone in the organization.

  Ashton was friendly, but he didn’t want to commit himself to anything. Not with a strange woman, anyway. He agreed with Janet’s description of my cousin’s job. He liked Boom Boom-he livened the place up quite a bit, and he was smart, too. Didn’t try to trade on his relations with Argus. But as to whether he quarreled with anyone-he didn’t think so, but I’d have to talk to Phillips about that. How had Boom Boom and Phillips gotten along? Again, I’d have to ask Phillips, and that was that.

  By the time we finished, the other guy, Brimford, had taken off. I shrugged. I didn’t think talking to him would help me any. Going through Boom Boom’s tidy, well-sorted drawers, I quickly realized he could have had a dozen dangerous documents connected with the shipping industry and I wouldn’t know it. He had lists of farmers supplying Eudora Grain, lists of Great Lakes carriers, lists of rail carriers and their jobbers, bills of lading, reports of loads, by date, back copies of Grain News, weather forecasts… I flipped through three drawers with neatly labeled files. They were all organized topic by topic but none of it meant anything to me. Other than that Boom Boom had gotten totally immersed in a very complicated business.

  I shut the file drawers and rummaged through the top of the desk, where I found pads of paper covered with Boom Boom’s meticulous handwriting. The sight of it suddenly made me want to cry. Little notes he had written to himself to remind him of what he’d learned or what he had to do. Boom Boom planned everything very carefully. Maybe that was what gave him the energy to be so wild on the ice-he knew he had his life in shape behind him.

  His desk diary was filled with appointments. I copied the names he’d entered in the last few weeks of his life. He’d seen Paige on Saturday and again on Monday night. For Tuesday, April 27, he had written in John Bemis’s name and Argus with a question mark. He wanted to talk to Bemis on the Lucella and then-depending on what was said-he would call Argus? That was interesting.

  Flipping through the pages, I noticed that he’d taken to circling some of the dates. I sat up in my chair and started through the diary page by page. Nothing in January, February, or March, but three dates in April-the twenty-third, the sixteenth, and the fifth. I turned back to the front cover, which displayed a 1981 and 1983 calendar along with 1982 at a glance. He had circled twenty-three days in 1981 and three in 1982. In 1981 he’d started with March 28 and ended with November 13. I put the diary in my handbag and looked through the rest of the office.

  I’d covered about everything there was-unless I looked at each sheet of paper-when Janet reappeared. “Mr. Phillips has come in and he’d like to see you.” She paused. “I’ll leave those files in here for you before you go… You won’t say anything to him, will you?”

  I reassured her and went over to the corner office. It was a real office-the heart of the castle, guarded by a frosty turnkey. Lois looked up briefly from her typing. Efficiency personified. “He’s expecting you. Go on in.”

  Phillips was on the phone when I went in. He covered the mouthpiece long enough to ask me to sit down, then went on with his conversation. His office contrasted with the utilitarian furnishings elsewhere in the building. Not that they were remarkably ornate, but they were of good quality. The furniture was made out of real wood, perhaps walnut, rather than pressed board coated with vinyl. Thick gray carpeting covered the floor and an antique clock adorned the wall facing the desk. A view of the parking lot was mercifully shrouded by heavy drapes.

  Phillips himself was looking handsome, if a trifle heavy and stiff, in a pale blue woolen suit. A darker blue shirt with his initials on the pocket set off the suit and his fair hair to perfection. He must make a good packet: the way he dressed, that Alfa-a fourteen-thousand-dollar car, and it was a new one-the antique clock.

  Phillips disengaged himself from the phone call. He smiled woodenly and said, “I was a little surprised to see you down here this morning. I thought we’d taken care of your questions the other day.”

  “I’m afraid not. My questions are like Hydra’s heads-the more you lop off the more I have to ask.”

  “Well, uh, I hear you’ve been going around bothering the folks here. Girls like Janet have their jobs to do. If you have questions, could you bring them to me? I’d sure appreciate that, and we wouldn’t have to interrupt th
e other folks’ work out there.”

  I felt he was trying too hard for a casual approach. It didn’t fit his perfect tailoring or his deep, tight voice.

  “Okay. Why was my cousin discussing last summer’s shipping contracts with you?”

  A tide of crimson washed through his face and receded abruptly, leaving a row of freckles standing out on his cheekbones. I hadn’t noticed those before.

  “Contracts? We weren’t!”

  I crossed my legs. “Boom Boom made a note of it in his desk diary,” I lied. “He was very meticulous, you know: he wrote down everything he did.”

  “Maybe he did discuss them with me at some point. I don’t remember everything we talked about-we were together a great deal. I was training him, you know.”

  “Maybe you can remember what he discussed with you the night before he died if it wasn’t the contracts. I understand he stayed late to meet with you.” He didn’t say anything. “That was last Monday night, if you’ve forgotten. April 26.”

  “I haven’t forgotten when your cousin died. But the only reason we stayed late was to go over some routine items we didn’t have time for during the day. In my position I’m often tied up for hours at a time. Lois tries to help me keep on top of my calendar but it isn’t always possible. So Warshawski and I would stay late to go over questions that we couldn’t get to earlier.”

  “I see.” I had promised Janet I wouldn’t get her in trouble, so I couldn’t tell him I had a witness who’d seen Boom Boom with the files. She was the only person who could have told me-Lois wouldn’t have any trouble figuring that out.

  Phillips was looking more relaxed. He stuck a cautious finger behind his collar and eased his tie a bit. “Anything else?”

  “Are your sales reps paid on commission?”

  “Sure. That’s the best way to keep them active.”

  “What about you?”

  “Well, we officers don’t have access to direct sales, so it wouldn’t be a very fair system.”