Deadlock

“Yes, and if he suspected that but couldn’t prove it, he might want to alert me to the possibility.”

Bledsoe smiled genially. “I can see that. You should definitely look into my finances as well as Phillips’s. I’ll tell my secretary to give you access to my files when we get back to Chicago.”

I thanked him politely. All that offer meant was, if he had something to hide, he had it concealed someplace other than in Pole Star’s books.

We spent the rest of the evening talking about opera. They’d had a collection of librettos in the Cantonville prison library and he’d read all of them. After he got out of prison he started attending the Cleveland Opera.

“Now I fly to New York five, six times a year for the Met and get season tickets to the Lyric… It gives me a queer feeling to talk about Cantonville with someone. My wife was the only person who knew about it-except Niels, of course. And neither of them ever mentioned it. It makes me feel almost guilty when I bring it up now.”

Around ten-thirty, two of the crew members came in with a cot and some blankets. They set the narrow bed up under the portholes in the starboard wall, bracing it to the side so it wouldn’t slide around with the rocking of the ship.

After they left, Bledsoe stood fiddling the change in his pockets with the awkwardness of a man who wants to make a pass but isn’t sure how it will be received. I didn’t try to help him out. I liked the way he kissed. But I’m not the kind of detective who hops nonchalantly from bed to bed: if someone’s been trying to kill me, it cools my enthusiasm. And I still didn’t have total trust in Bledsoe’s purity.

“Time for me to turn in,” I said briskly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

He hesitated for a few seconds longer, scanning my face for encouragement, then turned and went upstairs to the stateroom. I put the Smith & Wesson under the little pillow and climbed under the blankets in my jeans and shirt. Despite the noise of the engines and the lurching of the ship, I went to sleep almost immediately and slept soundly through the night.

The cooks woke me the next morning before six as they started clattering around in the galley next to the captain’s dining room. I tried pulling the bedding up over my ears but the disturbance was too persistent. Finally I got up and stumbled up to the next floor where the bathroom was. I changed my underwear and shirt and brushed my teeth.

It was too early for me to feel like eating, even though breakfast was ready, so I went out on deck to look at the day. The sun had just come up, a ball of liquid orange low in the eastern sky. A purple shoreline lay a mile or so to our left. We were going past some more of the small clumps of islands which had dotted the channel as we left Thunder Bay.

At breakfast Captain Bemis, the chief engineer, and Bledsoe were all in affable moods. Perhaps the fact I was leaving soon cheered them up. At any rate, even the captain was gracious, explaining our course to me. We were coming down the southeast coast of Lake Superior leading into the St. Mary’s Channel. “This is where the Edmund Fitzgerald went down in 1975,” he said. “It’s the best approach to the St. Mary’s, but it’s still a very shallow route, only thirty feet deep in places.”

“What happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald?”

“Everyone has his own theory. I don’t suppose they’ll ever know for certain. When they dove down to look at her, they found she’d been cut neatly in three pieces. Sank immediately. I’ve always blamed the Coast Guard for not keeping the channel markings in proper order. The waves were thirty feet high out here that night-one of them must have pushed the Fitzgerald into a trough and caused her to scrape against the bottom and snap. If they’d marked the channel properly, Captain McSorley would have avoided the shallowest spots.”

“The thing is,” the chief engineer added, “these lakers don’t have much support through the middle. They’re floating cargo holds. If they put a lot of beams through the holds they’d take up too much valuable cargo space. So you get these twenty- or thirty-foot waves out here, and they pick up a ship like this on either end. The middle doesn’t have any support and it just snaps. You go down very quickly.”

The head cook, a thick Polish woman in her mid-fifties, was pouring the captain’s coffee. As the chief spoke, she dropped the cup on the floor. “You should not talk like that, Chief Engineer. It is very bad luck.” She called to her underlings to come in and clean up the mess.

Sheridan shrugged. “It’s all the men do talk about when there’s a storm brewing. Ship disasters are like cancer-the other guy is always the one who’s going to get it, anyway.” All the same, he apologized to the cook and changed the subject.

Bemis told me we’d be getting into the Soo locks around three o’clock. He suggested that I watch from the bridge so I could see the approach and the way the ship was steered into the channel. After lunch I packed up my little canvas bag for a quick departure: Bledsoe told me we’d have about two minutes to climb over the side of the Lucella onto shore before they opened the lock gates and she went on through to Lake Huron.

I checked that my credit cards and cash were in my front jeans pocket and put the Smith & Wesson into the bag. There didn’t seem much point in lugging it around in the shoulder holster while I was on board. I stowed the bag next to the pilothouse while I went up on the bridge to watch the Lucella slide into the lock. We were now well into the channel of the St. Mary’s River, following a slow-moving procession.

“Your position into the locks is determined by your position when you arrive at the mouth of the channel,” Bemis explained. “So there’s a lot of racing to get into the channel first. We passed a couple of five-hundred-footers earlier this morning. I can’t stand tying up here-enforced boredom and everyone gets restless.”

“It’s expensive to tie up,” Bledsoe said sharply. “This ship costs ten thousand dollars a day to operate. She has to make every second count.”

I raised my eyebrows, trying to calculate costs in my head. Bledsoe looked at me angrily. “Yes, it’s another financial motive, Vic.”

I shrugged and walked over to where the helmsman, Red, was turning the wheel. Two inches of cigar stuck out of his pudgy face. He steered off various landmarks without glancing at the tiller. The huge ship moved easily under his hands.

As we drew nearer to the locks, the U.S. Coast Guard started talking to Bemis on the radio. The captain gave them his ship’s name, length, and weight. Of the four locks closing the twenty-four-foot drop between Lake Superior and Lake Huron, only the Poe was big enough to handle the thousand-foot freighters. We would be the second ship into the Poe, following an upbound vessel.

Bemis slowed the diesels to their lowest possible speed. He called down to the engine room and ordered them to put the engines into neutral. Behind us I could see three or four other freighters sitting in the channel. Those farther back tied up at the bank while they waited.

Below us the deck stretched magnificently away. We watched the first mate, Winstein, talking with a group of seamen who would climb down ladders to the sides of the lock and tie up the ship. Theirs was a demanding job physically-they had to keep up tension on the cables as the ship sank and the ropes became slack. Then, just before the gates opened into Lake Huron they would untie the ropes and leap back on board.

We waited about half a mile from the locks themselves. The sun glinted off the water and dressed up the dingy skylines of the twin cities. Canada’s Sault Ste. Marie lay to our left, dominated by the giant Algoma Steelworks on the shoreline. In fact, coming up to our current resting place, the captain had steered using different parts of the Algoma plant-off the second smokestack, off the first coal heap, and so on.

After a forty-minute wait the Coast Guard told Bemis he could proceed. As the engines increased their revolutions slightly, a giant freighter passed us upbound, giving one long hoot on its whistle. Bemis pushed a button and the Lucella responded with an equally long blast and began to move forward. A few minutes later we were nosing into the lock.

The Poe Lock is only 110 feet wide; the Lucella, 105. That gave Red two and a half feet on either side-not much room for error. Slowly we glided forward, bisecting the distance and coming to a halt about twenty feet from the southern gate. Red never once looked at the wheel.

The gates were mammoth wooden structures reinforced with thick steel struts. I turned to watch them swing shut behind us, guided electrically from the bank.

As soon as the gates closed, our crew lowered ladders and scrambled down to the bank. I thanked Bemis for the use of his ship and the chance to talk to some of his crew and turned to go with Bledsoe down to the deck.

Most of the crew came on deck for the passage through the Soo. I shook hands with the head cook, Anna, thanking her in my few words of stumbling Polish for her cooking. Delighted, she unleashed a torrent of smiling Polish on me, which I ducked from as gracefully as I could.