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
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
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 the 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
