Deadlock

Mallory turned red at that. “You don’t go bothering the owner of a steamship line for that kind of crap. Cut out the horseplay and tell me the truth.”

I shook my head earnestly. “I am telling you the truth. No one else knew anything about it, so I went to see him. You see, my Smith & Wesson was in my case. That cost me three hundred dollars and I can’t afford to replace it.”

I knew that would divert Bobby’s attention. He does not like the idea of my carrying a gun. He knows that my dad taught me how to use one. Tony believed most shooting accidents were caused by children not knowing anything about firearms. Since he had to keep his police revolver at home sometimes, he made me learn how to clean, load, and shoot it. Nonetheless, the idea of a woman toting around a Smith & Wesson is contrary to all Bobby’s notions of a proper lady’s life-style. He jumped on that, demanding to know why I had the gun with me on board ship and what I was doing on the Lucella anyway.

That was easier ground. I reminded him of my car accident. “You guys wanted to believe it was vandals. I thought it was someone connected with the Port. I went up to Thunder Bay to talk to the captain and the chief engineer of the Lucella. Since one of them might have tried to kill me, I took my gun with me.”

We talked about that for a while. I reiterated my belief that Boom Boom had been pushed under the Bertha Krupnik. I told him I thought Henry Kelvin, the night watchman in his building, had been killed when he surprised intruders trying to find evidence that Boom Boom had of a crime down at the Port. Bobby wouldn’t be persuaded. As far as he was concerned, Boom Boom had fallen in by accident, I was the victim of vandals, and Kelvin had interrupted a routine housebreaking. At that point a stubborn decision to keep the rest of my information to myself overtook me. If they were going to be so damned pigheaded, I would be, too.

When Bobby got back to my fingerprints in Phillips’s office, I evaded the issue. “What were you guys doing fingerprinting the man’s office, anyway?”

“He was killed, Vicki,” Bobby said with heavy sarcasm. “We were printing his office and doing everything else to it to find out if he was killed there.”

“Was he?”

Mallory drew a doodle on his desk pad. “He actually died of suffocation in the cargo holds. We don’t know where he received the head wound-that would have killed him anyway if he hadn’t suffocated first.”

My stomach turned over. What a terrible death. I didn’t like Phillips but I hadn’t wished him that kind of end. Although if he had pushed Boom Boom overboard… “When do they think it happened?”

“About six Sunday morning. Give or take a few hours. Now, Vicki: I want to know what you were doing in the guy’s office. And when you were doing it.”

“About six yesterday morning I went down there to talk to him about my cousin’s death. When he refused to answer my questions, I became enraged and hit him over the head with that brass thing he’s got sitting on the front of his desk.”

Bobby gave me such an angry stare, I felt my stomach turn over again. He called to McGonnigal, who was waiting outside the door. “Take down everything she says. If there’s one more smart remark, book her as a material witness. I’m getting sick of this.” He turned to me. “When were you down there?”

I looked at my fingernails on my right hand. Time for a manicure. The left was no better. “Saturday night.”

“And what were you doing there?”

“If I’d been burglarizing the place, I’d have been smart enough to wear gloves. I wasn’t. I was looking for information that might show Phillips led a life of crime.”

“Who’s your client, Vicki?”

I shook my head. “Privileged information, Bobby.”

We talked about that for a while. I still regarded Boom Boom as my client, but I was damned if I was going to tell Bobby that. Lock me up indeed.

“You can’t drag a body into the Port without someone noticing you,” I remarked at one point. “There’s a police guard at the gates. Have you asked them for the names of everyone who came into the Port early Sunday?”

Mallory gave me a withering look. “We can think of the easy ones, too. We’re questioning those people right now.”

“Was Niels Grafalk one of them?”

Bobby gave me a sharp glance. “No. Our guy didn’t see him. Why?”

I shrugged. “Just curious.”

Bobby kept asking why I was down at Phillips’s office, what information I had expected to find, and so on.

Finally I said, “Bobby, you think Boom Boom’s death was an accident. I think he was murdered. I was looking for something that would tie Eudora Grain into his death, because it happened at their elevator after he had been arguing with their man.”

Mallory made a neat pile of the papers on his desk. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and placed them on top of it. That was a signal that the interrogation was over. “Vicki, I know how much you loved Boom Boom. I think that’s making you place too much importance on his death. We see that a lot in here, you know. Someone loses their son or wife or father in a terrible accident. They can’t believe it’s happened, so they say it’s murder. If there’s a conspiracy, it makes the death easier to handle-their loved one was important enough for someone to want to kill.

“Now, you’ve had a rough time lately, Vicki. Your cousin died and you almost got killed yourself in a bad accident. You go away for a few weeks, go someplace warm and lie in the sun for a while. You need to give yourself a chance to recover from all this.”

After that, naturally, I didn’t tell him about Boom Boom’s documents or about Mattingly flying in from the Soo on Bledsoe’s plane. McGonnigal offered to take me home, but in a continuing spirit of perverseness I told him I could find the way myself. I got up stiffly-we’d been talking for over two hours. It was close to ten when I boarded the northbound subway at Roosevelt Road. I took it as far as Clark and Division, then transferred to a number 22 bus, getting off at Belmont and Broadway. I could walk the last half mile or so home.

I was very tired. The pain had come back in my shoulder, perhaps from sitting so long in one position. I walked as rapidly as I could across Belmont to Halsted. Lincoln Avenue cuts in at an angle there, and a large triangle on the south side of the street is a scraggy vacant lot. I held my keys clenched between my fingers, watching shadows in the bushes. At the front door to my building I kept a weather eye out for anything unusual. I didn’t want to be the fourth victim of this extremely efficient murderer.

Three dePaul students share the second-floor apartment. As I walked up the stairs, one of them stuck her head out the door. “Oh, it’s you,” she said. She came all the way out, followed by her two roommates, one male and one female. In an excited trio they told me someone had tried to break into my apartment about an hour before. A man had rung their doorbell. When they buzzed him in, he’d gone past their door to the third floor.

“We told him you weren’t home,” one of the women said, “but he went on up anyway. After a while we heard him kind of chiseling away at the door. So we got the bread knife and went up after him.”

“My God,” I said. “He could have killed you. Why didn’t you call the police?”

The first speaker shrugged thin shoulders in a Blue Demon T-shirt. “There were three of us and one of him. Besides, you know what the police are like-they’d never come in time in this neighborhood.”

I asked if they could describe the intruder. He was thin and seemed wiry. He had a ski mask on, which frightened them more than the incident itself. When he saw them coming up the stairs, he dropped the chisel, pushed past them, and ran down the steps and up Halsted. They hadn’t tried to chase him, for which I was grateful-I didn’t need injuries to them on my conscience, too.

They gave me the chisel, an expensive Sorby tool. I thanked them profusely and invited all three up to my apartment for a nightcap. They were curious about me and came eagerly. I served them Martell in my mother’s red Venetian glasses and answered their enthusiastic questions about my life as a private investigator. It seemed a small price to pay for saving my apartment, and perhaps me, from a late night intruder.

23 A House of Mourning