Deadlock

He took my arm in a steely grip and moved me back into the lounge with him, turning the light back on with his other hand.

“Do sit down, Miss Warshawski. You know, you have my heartfelt admiration. You are a very resourceful lady, with good survival instincts. By now you should be dead several times over. And I was impressed with the reconstruction you gave Paige, quite impressed indeed.”

He was wearing evening clothes, a black suit tailored to his wide shoulders and narrow hips. He looked handsome in them, and there was an expression of suppressed excitement in his face which made him appear younger than he was.

He let go of my arm and I sat in one of the leather-covered straight-back chairs next to the card table. “Thank you, Mr. Grafalk. I’ll have to remember to ask you for a reference the next time a client inquires.”

He sat down facing me. “Ah, yes. I fear your clients will be deprived of your services soon, Miss Warshawski. A pity, since you have the brains and the skill to be of help to people. By the way, who are you working for now? Not Martin, I hope.”

“I’m working for my cousin,” I said levelly.

“How quixotic of you. Avenging the memory of the dead Boom Boom. Paige says you don’t believe he fell under the Bertha Krupnik by accident.”

“My parents discouraged a faith in Santa Claus at an early age. Paige never struck me as terribly naive, either- just reluctant to face facts which might upset her comfort.”

Grafalk smiled a bit. He opened the latched liquor cupboard and pulled out a decanter. “Some Armagnac, Vic? You don’t mind if I call you that, do you? Warshawski is an awkward name to keep repeating and we have a long conversation in front of us… Don’t blame Paige, my dear Vic. She’s a very special person, but she has these strong needs for material possessions that go back to her early childhood. You know the story of her father?”

“A heartrending tale,” I said dryly. “It’s amazing that she and her sister were able to go on living at all.”

He smiled again. “Poverty is all relative. At any rate, Paige doesn’t want to jeopardize her current standard of living by thinking about anything… too dangerous.”

“How does Mrs. Grafalk feel about the situation?”

“With Paige, you mean? Claire is an admirable woman. Now that our two children are through school she’s thoroughly absorbed in a variety of charities, all of which benefit profoundly by Grafalk backing. They claim the bulk of her attention and she’s just as pleased to have mine diverted elsewhere. She’s never been very interested in Grafalk Steamship either, unfortunately.”

“Whereas it has Paige’s breathless attention? That’s a little hard for me to picture, somehow.”

“You’re sure you don’t want any Armagnac? It’s quite good, really.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” My stomach warned me against putting any more alcohol on top of last night’s St. Emilion.

He poured himself some more. “Paige is in a position where she has to be interested in what interests me. I don’t mind knowing I’ve got her her attention-it’s quite intense and delightful whether bought or volunteered. And I’m afraid the steamship line is the thing I care most about.”

“So much that you killed Phillips and Mattingly, got Phillips to push my cousin off the wharf, and blew up the Lucella Wieser to protect it? Oh yes. I forgot Henry Kelvin, the night watchman in Boom Boom’s building.”

Grafalk stretched his legs out and swirled the brandy in his glass. “Technically, Sandy did most of the damage. Sandy’s my chauffeur and general factotum. He planted the depth charges on the Lucella-quite a diver. He was a frogman in the navy, served on my ship in World War II. When he was discharged I hired him. Anyway, technically, Sandy did the dirty work.”

“But you’re an accessory. The law holds you equally responsible.”

“The law will have to find out first. Right now, they seem extremely uninterested in me.”

“When they have the evidence that Phillips received his head wound here in this lounge their interest will pick up considerably.”

“Yes, but who’s going to tell them? Sandy won’t. I won’t. And you, I’m afraid, aren’t going to be with us when we return to port. So you won’t.”

He was trying to frighten me and succeeding rather well.

“Phillips called you Saturday night after he got my message, didn’t he?”

“Yes. I’m afraid Clayton was cracking. He was a smart enough man in his way, but he worried about details too much. He knew if you told Argus about the invoices his career would be finished. He wanted me to do something to help him out. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much I could do at that point.”

“Why’d you kill him, though? What possible harm could it do you if word got out that you’d been involved in some kickbacks in assigning cargoes? You own the controlling interest in Grafalk Steamship-your board can’t force you to resign.”

“Oh, I agree. Unfortunately, even though we hadn’t involved Clayton in the-uh-mishap to the Lucella, he knew my feelings toward Martin too well. He suspected I was responsible and threatened to divulge that to the Coast Guard if I didn’t protect him with Argus.”

“So you smashed a hole in the side of his head-What’d you use? One of these andirons?-and sailed him down to the Port. Putting him on the Gertrude Ruttan was a macabre touch. What would you have done if Bledsoe hadn’t had a ship in port?”

“Used someone else’s. It just seemed more poetic to use one of Martin’s. What made you think of it?”

“It wasn’t that difficult, Niels. The police patrol that facility. They were questioning everyone who’d been down there between midnight and six Sunday morning, inspecting their cars, too, I’m sure. So whoever put the body in the holds had to get to the ship without going by the police. Once I realized that, it was pretty easy to see it must have come by boat. A helicopter would have attracted too much attention.”

It pricked his vanity to have his great idea treated lightly. “We won’t run those risks with you, Vic. We’ll leave you a couple of miles offshore with a good strong weight to hold you down.”

I have always feared death by drowning more than any other end-the dark water sucking me down into itself. My hands were trembling slightly. I pressed them to the sides of my legs so that Grafalk couldn’t see.

“It was the destruction of the Lucella I couldn’t figure out at first. I knew you were angry with Bledsoe for leaving you, but I didn’t realize how much you hated him. Also, the Eudora shipping contracts I looked at puzzled me. There were quite a number of orders last year which Pole Star gave up to Grafalk Steamship. For a while I thought you two were in collusion, but there wasn’t any financial advantage to Bledsoe from the Lucella being blown up. Quite the contrary.

“Then he told me Monday that you’d pressured him while he was financing the Lucella-you knew he’d never raise the money if word got out on the street that he’d been in jail for embezzling. So you promised to keep it to yourself if he’d give you some of his shipping contracts.

“That explained the water in the holds, too. Once the Lucella was financed, you could tell the world and be damned, as far as he cared. He started underbidding you-considerably-and you got Mattingly to bribe one of the sailors to put water in her holds. So she lost the load, and in a rather expensive way.”

Grafalk wasn’t so relaxed now. He drew his legs up and crossed them. “How’d you know that?” he asked sharply.

“Boom Boom saw Mattingly there. He wrote Pierre Bouchard that he’d seen Mattingly under odd circumstances. I thought it must have been up here on the Brynulf, but Paige told me Mattingly didn’t go on that expedition. The only other really odd place for my cousin to have seen him was down at the Port. It bothered Boom Boom enough to try to get Bouchard to trace Mattingly, and he wouldn’t have done that for something trivial… But what I really want to know, Niels, is how long Grafalk Steamship has been losing money?”

He got up with a sudden movement that knocked his brandy glass over. “Who told you that?”

“Niels, you’re like an elephant on a rampage. You’re leaving a trail of broken trees behind you and you think no one else can see them. You didn’t have to tell me Grafalk Steamship was the only thing you really cared about. It was obvious the first day I met you. Then your fury with Bledsoe for deserting you was totally irrational. People leave jobs every day for new jobs or to set up their own businesses. I could see you might feel hurt if you gave Bledsoe his big chance. But, my God! You acted like King Richard when one of his barons broke the oath of fealty. Bledsoe didn’t work for Grafalk Steamship-he worked for you. It was a personal betrayal when he left you.”