Deadlock

“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,