“Lois,” I said patiently. “When she came in and asked you what you were doing, what did you tell her?”
“Oh! I said I’d written a personal letter and I couldn’t find it so I was looking to see if it got thrown out.”
I thought that was pretty fast thinking and said so.
She laughed a little, pleased with the compliment, but added despondently, “She didn’t believe me, because there wasn’t any reason for it to be in Mr. Phillips’s wastebasket.”
“Well, Janet, I don’t know what to say. You certainly tried your hardest. I’m extremely sorry you lost your job, and all for nothing, but if-”
“It wasn’t all for nothing,” she interrupted. “I did find his pay stub just as you thought I might.”
“Oh!” I stared at the receiver in disbelief. For once something in this cockeyed investigation had worked out the way I thought it should. “How much does he make?”
“He gets thirty-five hundred forty-six dollars and fifteen cents every two weeks.”
I tried multiplying in my head but I was still too groggy.
“I figured it out on my calculator last night. That’s ninety-two thousand a year.” She paused, wistfully. “That’s a lot of money. I was only making seven-two hundred. And now I don’t have that.”
“Look, Janet. Would you be willing to work downtown? I can get you some interviews-at the Ajax Insurance Company and a couple of other places.”
She told me she’d think about it: she’d rather find something in her neighborhood. If that didn’t work out, she’d give me a call back and ask me to set up an interview for her. I thanked her profusely and we hung up.
I lay back in bed and thought. Ninety-two thousand a year was a lot of money-for me or Janet. But for Phillips? Say he had good deductions and a good tax accountant. Still, he couldn’t take home more than sixty or so. His real estate tax bill was probably three thousand. A mortgage, maybe another fifteen. Dues at the Maritime Club and the monthly fees for tennis, twenty-five thousand. Tuition, et cetera, at Claremont. The boat. The Alfa. Food. Massandrea dresses for Jeannine. Maybe she bought them at the Elite Repeat shop, or used from Mrs. Grafalk. Still it would take a good hundred thousand net to cover everything.
After breakfast I walked the mile between Lotty’s apartment and my own down on Halsted. I was getting out of shape from lying around too much, but I wasn’t sure I was up to running yet and I knew I couldn’t lift my ten-pound shoulder weights.
My mailbox was bulging. I get the
Glowing with virtue, I settled down with a cup of coffee to sort through the mail. Most of it was bills, which I tossed aside unopened. Why look at them just to get depressed? One envelope held a thirty-five-hundred-dollar check from Ajax to pay for a new car. I was grateful for the care of the U. S. Postal Service, which had left that on my lobby floor for any dope addict on Halsted to find. Also, wrapped in a small box were the keys to Boom Boom’s apartment with a note from Sergeant McGonnigal saying the police were through with their investigation and I could use it anytime I wanted to.
I poured myself more coffee and thought about what I should do. First on the list was Mattingly. I called Pierre Bouchard and asked him where I could find Mattingly if he were in town but not at home.
He clicked his tongue against his teeth. “That I could not tell you, Vic. I have avoided the man constantly. But I will call around and see what I can find out.”
I told him Elsie was due any day now and he clicked his tongue again. “That man! What an excrescence he is!”
“By the way, Pierre, does Howard know how to do deep-sea diving?”
“Deep-sea diving?” he echoed. “No, Vic, I am telling you, I do not know him well. I do not know his personal habits. But I will ask… Oh, don’t hang up-I have that name for you.”
“What name?”
“Did you not call Anna before you left town? You wanted to know what man we met at Christmas, when Boom Boom met Paige Carrington?”
“Oh yes.” I’d forgotten all about that. The man who was interested in buying a few shares of the Black Hawks, the man for whom Odinflute had set up his party. “Yes. Who was it?”
“His name is Niels Grafalk. Myron says after all he decided not to buy.”
“I see,” I said weakly. I said nothing else and after a bit Bouchard said, “Vic? Vic? Are you still there?”
“What? Oh yes. Yes, thanks very much, Pierre… Let me know if you hear from Mattingly.”
Though distracted, I took my check over to Humboldt Olds where I bought an Omega, a 1981 red model with fifteen thousand miles on it, power steering and power brakes. I had to sign a finance contract for eight hundred dollars but that wouldn’t prove impossible. I’d just bill Boom Boom’s estate for a hefty fee when all this mess was cleaned up. If it ever was.
So Grafalk had been interested in the Black Hawks. And Paige had been present at that same party. Now whom had she known? Who took her? It was an interesting coincidence. I wondered what she would tell me if I called her.
Driving in a slight daze, I reached Boom Boom’s apartment at three-thirty, parking the Olds in front of a NO PARKING sign at Chestnut and Seneca. After two weeks of neglect, which had included a burglary and a police investigation, the place looked far worse than mine had this morning. Gray dust from the fingerprint detectors covered all the papers. White chalk still marked the outline of Henry Kelvin’s body next to the desk.
I poured myself a glass of Chivas. I was damned if I was going to clean up two places in one day. Instead, I made a stab at reassembling the papers in their appropriate categories. I’d hire a cleaning crew and some temporary clerks to do the rest of the work. Frankly, I was sick of the place.
I made a tour of the apartment to collect items of interest to me-Boom Boom’s first and last hockey sticks, a New Guinea hut totem from the living room, and some of the pictures of him in various hockey guises from the spare-room wall. Once more the picture of me in my maroon law school robes grinned incongruously from the wall. I took it off and added it to the stack under my arms. Once the clerks had gotten the papers to the right people and the cleaners had eliminated all the greasy dirt, I’d get the condo and the rest of his possessions onto the market. With any luck, I’d never have to visit this place again. I slung the items into my trunk and drove off. No one had ticketed me-maybe my luck was beginning to turn.
Next stop: the Eudora Grain offices. I badly wanted to talk to Bledsoe about why Mattingly had left Sault Ste. Marie in his airplane, but I still thought Phillips’s finances were an angle worth following up.
Late Saturday afternoon was an eerie time to visit the Port of Chicago. There wasn’t much activity at the elevators. The huge ships stood like sleeping giants, prepared to wake into violent activity if disturbed. I eased the Omega into the parking lot at Eudora’s Grain regional office and found myself tiptoeing across the blacktop to a side door.
A small bell was set into the wall with a little sign over it reading RING FOR DELIVERIES. I rang several times and waited five minutes. No one came. If there was a night watchman, he wasn’t yet on the premises. From my back pocket I pulled a house burglar’s compedium of commonly used picklocks and set out methodically to open the door.
Ten minutes later I was in Phillips’s office. Either he or the efficient Lois kept all the file cabinets locked. With an aggrieved sigh, I took out my picklocks again and opened all the cabinets in the room and the three in Lois’s desk outside his office door. I called Lotty and told her I wouldn’t be in for supper and set to work. If I’d been thinking, I would have brought some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee.
Phillips kept a strange collection of junk in his upper desk drawer-three different kinds of antacids; datebooks going back for six years, most of them without any appointments written in; nose drops; an old pair of overshoes; two broken calculators; and odd scraps of paper. These I carefully smoothed out and read. Most of them were phone messages which he’d crumpled up and tossed in the drawer. A couple from Grafalk, one from Argus. The others were all names I didn’t recognize, but I wrote them down in case I ran so far out of leads that I wanted to check them.
The ledgers were in a walnut filing cabinet on the window side of the office. I pulled them out with great
