Deadlock

I shook my head.

“Take the road around to the left. You’ll go past the coke ovens and a slag heap. You’ll be able to see the ship from there.”

I followed his directions, going by a long, narrow building where fire danced inside, visible through sliding doors opened to let in the cool air. Slag formed a mountain on my left. Bits of cinder blew onto the windshield of the Omega. Peering through it at the rutted track in front of me, I continued on around the furnaces until I saw the Gertrude looming above me.

Great hills of coal framed the lakefront. The Gertrude was getting ready to dump her load onto one of them. Hard-hatted men in boiler suits had tied up the ship. As I left the car and picked my way across the pockmarked yard, I could see them turning the swivel top of the ship’s self-unloader to position it over one of the smaller coal piles.

Bledsoe was on the ground talking with a man in a dirty gray boiler suit. The two weren’t speaking when I came up, just looking at the activity going on above them.

Bledsoe had lost weight in the three days since I’d last seen him. It was shockingly noticeable-he must have dropped ten pounds. His tweed jacket sagged across his shoulders instead of straining as if to contain his monumental energy.

“Martin,” I said. “Good to see you.”

He smiled with genuine pleasure. “Vic! How’d you run me to earth!”

I explained and he introduced me to the man he was standing with, the shift foreman. As we talked, a great clanking started and coal began moving down the conveyor belt onto the heap below.

“The self-unloader is quite a machine. You ought to watch it in action,” Bledsoe said into my ear. He went back to his car and got a second hard hat out of the trunk for me. We climbed up a ladder on the port side of the ship, away from the self-unloader, and Bledsoe took me over to watch coal coming up the wide figure-eight belt from the holds.

The coal came through quite fast, in large chunks. It takes about eight hours to unload the holds with a self- unloader, compared to two days using manual loader.

Bledsoe was clearly tense. He walked around, talking a bit to the crew, clenching and unclenching his fingers. He couldn’t stand still. At one point he caught me watching him and said, “I won’t relax until this load is off. Every time I move a cargo from now on, I’m not going to be able to sleep until I know the ship has made it in and out of port safely.”

“What’s the story on the Lucella?”

He grimaced. “The Coast Guard, the Corps of Engineers, and the FBI are mounting a full-scale investigation. Trouble is, until they get her out of the lock they won’t even be able to see what kind of explosive was used.”

“How long will that take?”

“A good ten months. That lock will be shut all summer and it’ll take most of next year to repair the gates.”

“Can you save the ship?”

“Oh yes, I think so. Mike’s been all over it with the guys from the Costain boatyard-the people who built her. They’ll take her out in sections, tow her back to Toledo, and weld her back together. She should be running again by the end of next summer.”

“Who pays to repair the lock?”

“I don’t know, but I’m not responsible for the damned thing blowing up. The army has to fix it. Unless the Court of Inquiry assigns liability to me. But there’s no way in hell they can do that.”

We were speaking almost in shouts to be heard over the clanking of the conveyor belts and the rattling of the coal going over the side. Some of the old energy was coming back into Bledsoe’s face as he talked. He was starting to elaborate on his legal position, pounding his right fist into his left palm, when we heard a piercing whistle.

The noise came to an abrupt halt. The conveyor belt stopped and with it all its attendant racket. An authoritative figure moved over to the opening into the hold and called down a demand as to the cause of the belt’s stopping.

“Probably just an overload on one of the side belts,” Bledsoe muttered, looking extremely worried.

We heard a muffled shout from the hold, then a young man in a dirty blue boiler suit erupted up the ladder onto the deck. His face was greeny white under its smear of coal dust and he just made it to the side before he was sick.

“What is it?” the authoritative man yelled.

There were more cries coming from the hold. With a glance at Bledsoe, I started down the ladder the young engineer had just climbed up. Bledsoe followed close on my hands.

I jumped down the last three rungs onto the steel floor below. Six or seven hard-hatted figures were huddled over the figure-eight belt where it joined the side conveyors feeding it from the holds. I strode over and shoved them aside, Bledsoe peering around my back.

Clayton Phillips was staring up at me. His body was covered with coal. The pale brown eyes were open, the square jaw clenched. Blood had dried across his freckled cheekbones. I moved the men away and bent over to peer closely at his head. Coal had mostly filled in a large hole on the left side. It was mixed with congealed blood in a reddish-black, ghastly clot.

“It’s Phillips,” Bledsoe said, his voice constricted.

“Yes. We’d better call the police. You and I have a few questions to discuss, Martin.” I turned to the group of men. “Who’s in charge down here?”

A middle-aged man with heavy jowls said he was the chief engineer.

“Make sure no one touches the body or anything else. We’ll get the police over here.”

Bledsoe followed me tamely back up the ladder to the deck and off the ship. “There’s been an accident down below,” I told the Plymouth foreman. “We’re getting the police. They won’t be unloading the rest of the coal for a while.” The foreman took us into a small office just around to the side of a long shed. I used the phone to call the Indiana State Police.

Bledsoe got into the Omega with me. We drove away from the yard in silence. I made my way back to the interstate and rode the few remaining miles over to the Indiana Dunes State Park. On a weekday afternoon, in early spring, the place was deserted. We climbed across the sand down to the shore. The only other people there were a bearded man and a sporty-looking woman with their golden retriever. The dog was swimming into the frothy waves after a large stick.

“You have a lot of explaining to do, Martin.”

He looked at me angrily. “You owe me a lot of explanations. How did Phillips get into that ship? Who blew up the Lucella? And how come you’re so quick on the spot every time disaster is about to strike Pole Star?”

“How come Mattingly flew back to Chicago on your plane?”

“Who the hell is Mattingly?”

I drew a breath. “You don’t know? Honestly?”

He shook his head.

“Then who did you send back to Chicago in your plane?”

“I didn’t.” He made an exasperated gesture. “I called Cappy as soon as I got to town and demanded the same thing of him. He insists I phoned from Thunder Bay and told him to fly this strange guy back-he said his name was Oleson. Obviously someone was impersonating me. But who and why? And since you clearly know who this guy is, you tell me.”

I looked out at the blue-green water. “Howard Mattingly was a second-string wing for the Chicago Black Hawks. He was killed early Saturday morning-run over by a car and left to die in a park on Chicago’s northwest side. He was up at the Soo on Friday. He fits the description of the guy Cappy flew back to Chicago. He exploded the depth charges on the Lucella-I watched him do it.”

Bledsoe turned to me and grabbed my arm in a gesture of spontaneous fury. “Goddammit-if you watched him do it, how come you haven’t said anything to anyone? I’ve been talking my head off to the FBI and the Corps of Engineers for two days and you-you’ve been sitting on this information.”

I twisted away from his grasp and spoke coldly. “I only realized after the fact what Mattingly had been doing. I didn’t recognize him immediately. As we went down to the bottom of the lock, he picked up what looked like an outsize pair of binoculars. They must have been the radio controls for the detonators. The whole thing only dawned