Deadlock

“Oh, I’ll come with you, uh-uh-” He looked at my business card, frowning.

“Miss Warshawski,” I said helpfully.

“Miss Warshawski. The foreman won’t like it if you come without an introduction.” His voice was deep but tight, the voice of a tense man speaking from the vocal cords rather than through the nasal passages.

Pete Margolis, the elevator foreman, didn’t seem happy to see us. However, I quickly realized his annoyance was directed more at Phillips than at me. Phillips merely introduced me as a “a young lady interested in the elevator.” When I gave Margolis my name and told him I was Boom Boom’s cousin, his manner changed abruptly. He wiped a dirty paw on the side of his overalls and shook hands with me, told me how sorry he was about my cousin’s accident, how much the men liked him, and how badly the company would miss him. He dug out a hard hat for me from under a pile of papers in his minuscule office.

Paying little attention to Phillips, he gave me a long and detailed tour, showing me where the hopper cars came in to dump their loads and how to operate the automatic hoist that lifted them into the heart of the elevator. Phillips trailed along, making ineffectual comments. He had his own hard hat, his name neatly lettered across the top, but his gray silk summer suit was totally out of place in the dirty plant.

Margolis took us up a long flight of narrow stairs that led into the interior of the elevator, perhaps three stories up. He opened a fire door at the top, and noise shattered my eardrums.

Dust covered everything. It swirled through the air, landing in layers on the high steel beams, creating a squeaky film on the metal floor. My toes quickly felt greasy inside their thick cotton socks. My running shoes skidded on the dusty floor. Under the ill-fitting, heavy hard hat, my hair became matted and sticky.

We stood on a catwalk looking down on the concrete floor of the elevator. Only a narrow waist-high handrail stood between me and an unpleasant crash onto the conveyor belts below. If I fell, they’d have to change the sign posted in the doorway: 9,640 man-hours without an accident.

Pete Margolis stood at my right side. He grabbed my arm and gesticulated with his free hand. I shook my head. He leaned over next to my right ear. “This is where it comes in,” he bellowed. “They bring the boxcars up here and dump them. Then it goes by conveyor belt.”

I nodded. A series of conveyor belts caused much of the clanking, shattering noise, but the hoist that lifted boxcars ninety feet in the air as though they were toys also contributed to the din. The belts ferried grain from the towers where boxcars dumped it over to chutes that spilled it into cargo holds of ships moored outside. A lot of grain dust escaped in the process. Most of the men on the floor wore respirators, but few seemed to have any ear protection.

“Wheat?” I screamed into Margolis’s ear.

“Barley. About thirty-five bushels to the ton.”

He shouted something at Phillips and we went on across the gangway outside, to a narrow ledge overlooking the water. I gulped in the cold April air and let my ears adjust to the relative quiet.

Below us sat a dirty old ship tied to the dock by a series of cables. She was riding above her normal waterline, where the black paint on the hull gave way abruptly to a peeling greenish color. On her deck, more men in hard hats and dirty boiler suits were guiding three massive grain chutes with ropes, filling the holds through some twelve or fourteen openings in the deck. Next to each opening lay its lid-“hatch cover,” Phillips told me. A mass of coiled ropes lay near the back end, our end, where the pilothouse stood. I felt slightly dizzy. I grew up in South Chicago where steel mills dot the lake, so I’ve seen plenty of Great Lakes freighters close up, but they always give me the same feeling-stomach contractions and shivers up the spine. Something about the hull thrusting invisibly into black water.

A cold wind whipped around the river. The water was too sheltered here for whitecaps, but grain dust blew up at us, mixed with cigarette wrappers and potato chip bags. I coughed and turned my head aside.

“Your cousin was standing at the stern.” I followed Phillips’s pointing finger. “Even if someone were leaning forward they wouldn’t have been able to see him from up here.”

I tried, but the angle of the elevator cut off the view partway along the pilothouse. “What about all those people on deck? And there’re a couple down there on the ground.”

Phillips swallowed a superior smile. “The O. R. Daley’s tied up now and loading. When the ship is casting off all the elevator people are gone and everyone connected with the ship has an assignment. They wouldn’t pay much attention to a guy on the wharf.”

“Someone must have seen him,” I said stubbornly. “What about it, Mr. Margolis? Any problem with you if I talk to the men on the elevator?”

Margolis shrugged. “Everyone liked your cousin, Miss Warshawski. If they’d seen anything they’d have come forward with it by now… But you think it’ll do some good I don’t mind. They’ll break for lunch in two shifts starting in twenty-five minutes.”

I scanned the wharf. “Maybe you could show me exactly where my cousin went in.”

“We really don’t know,” Phillips responded, his deep voice trying to hide impatience. “But if it will make you feel better in some way… Pete, maybe you could take Miss Warshawski down.”

Margolis looked back at the elevator, hesitated, then reluctantly agreed.

“This isn’t the ship that was here then, is it?”

“No, of course not,” Phillips said.

“Know which one was?” I asked.

“There’s no way of knowing that,” Phillips said, just as Margolis said, “The Bertha Krupnik.”

“Well, maybe you’re right.” Phillips gave a strained smile. “I keep forgetting that Pete here has the day-to-day details of this operation at his fingertips.”

“Yup. It was supposed to be the Lucella Wieser. Then she had that accident-water in the hold or something-and they brought up three old tubs to take her load. The Bertha was the last of ’em. Pilot’s an old friend of mine. He like to’ve lost his lunch when he heard about Boom Boom… your cousin, I mean. He was a hockey fan himself.”

“Where’s the Bertha Krupnik now?”

Margolis shook his head. “No way of knowing that. She’s one of Grafalk’s, though. You could ask them. Their dispatcher would know.” He hesitated for a minute. “You might want to check with the Lucella. She was tied up over there.” He pointed across the old boat at our feet to another pier about two hundred yards away. “They moved her over out of the way while they cleaned out her holds. She moved out yesterday or the day before.” He shook his head. “Don’t think anyone’s going to be able to tell you anything, though. You know what people are like. If they’d seen your cousin go in they’d have said something fast enough at the time.”

Unless they were embarrassed at not doing anything to help, I thought. “Where’s Grafalk’s office?”

“Do you really want to go there, Miss Warshawski?” Phillips asked. “It’s not the kind of place you should just go into without some sort of credential or justification.”

“I have a credential.” I fished my private investigator’s license out of my wallet. “I’ve asked a lot of people a lot of questions based on this.”

His wooden expression didn’t change, but he turned red to the roots of his pale blond hair. “I think I should go over with you and introduce you to the right person.”

“You want to swing by the Lucella with her, too, Mr. Phillips?” Margolis asked.

“Not particularly. I’m running late as it is. I’ll have to go back to your office, Pete, and call Rodriguez from there.”

“Look, Mr. Phillips,” I put in, “I can take care of myself perfectly well. I don’t need you to interrupt your schedule to ferry me around.”

He assured me it was no problem, he really wanted to do it if I thought it was necessary. It occurred to me he might be worrying that I would turn up some witness suggesting that Eudora Grain had been negligent. In any case, he could smooth my path at Grafalk’s, so I didn’t mind his tagging along.

While he went back through the elevator to use the phone, Margolis took me down a narrow iron ladder to the wharf. Close up, the ship looked even dirtier. Heavy cables extended from the deck and tied her up fast to large knobs sticking out of the concrete wharf. Like the ship, the cables were old, frayed, and none too clean. As Margolis led me to the rear of the O. R. Daley, I notice how badly the paint had cracked above the waterline. “O. R. Daley. Grafalk Steamship Line. Chicago.” was painted in chipped white