“Well, if you drove your car at the pier—assuming you could get down in the water and do it—you’d be chewed up and the concrete walls would laugh at you. But your car—what kind do you drive?—about a ton and two hundred horsepower? Now that thing has twelve thousand horsepower and weighs about ten thousand tons. They did the equivalent of flooring her accelerator and that’s the result.”
Someone had rigged a ladder up to the front of the ship. A couple of crew members, rather shaky, came down onto the pier. I felt a hand on my shoulder and jerked around. A tall man with a sunburned face and a magnificent shock of white hair shouldered past me. “Excuse me. Out of the way, please.”
The police, who were keeping everyone else back from the forklift trucks and the ladder, let the white-haired man through without a question.
“Who’s that?” I asked my informative acquaintance. “He looks like a Viking.”
“He is a Viking. That’s Niels Grafalk. He owns this sorry hunk of steel … Poor devil!”
Niels Grafalk. I didn’t think the timing was too hot to go swarming up the ladder after him in search of the Bertha Krupnik. Unless…
“Is this the Bertha Krupnik?”
“No,” my friend answered. “It’s the Leif Ericsson. You got some special interest in the Bertha?”
“Yeah, I’m trying to find out where she is. I can’t get MacKelvy—d’you know him?—to let the information loose without Grafalk’s say-so. You wouldn’t know, would you?”
When my acquaintance wanted to know the reason, I felt an impulse to shut up and go home. I couldn’t think of anything much stupider than my obsession about Boom Boom and his accident. Obviously, from the crowd converging here, disaster brought a lot of people to the scene. Margolis had been right: if the men at the elevator knew anything about Boom Boom’s death, they would have been talking about it. It was probably high time to return to Chicago and serve some processes to their reluctant recipients.
My companion saw my hesitation. “Look—it’s time for lunch. Why don’t you let me take you over to the Salle de la Mer—it’s the private club for owners and officers here. I just need to shed this boiler suit and get a jacket.”
I looked at my jeans and running shoes. “I’m hardly dressed for a private club.”
He assured me they didn’t care about what women wore—only men have to observe clothing rules in the modern restaurant. He left me to watch the debacle at the pier for a few minutes while he went to change. I was wondering vaguely what had happened to Phillips when I saw him picking his way tentatively through the crowd to the Leif Ericsson. Something in his hesitant manner irritated me profoundly.
5
A Glass in the Hand
“I’m Mike Sheridan, chief engineer on the Lucella Wieser.”
“And I’m V. I. Warshawski, a private investigator.”
The waiter brought our drinks, white wine for me and vodka and tonic for Sheridan.
“You’re related to Boom Boom Warshawski, aren’t you?”
“I’m his cousin … You connected with the Lucella Weiser that was across from the Bertha Krupnik when he fell under the propeller last week?”
He agreed, and I commented enthusiastically on what a small world it was. “I’ve been trying to find someone who might have seen my cousin die. To tell you the truth, I think it’s pretty hopeless—judging by the crowd that wreck out there drew.” I explained my search and why the Lucella was included in it.
Sheridan drank some vodka. “I have to admit I knew who you were when you were standing on the wharf. Someone pointed you out to me and I wanted to talk to you.” He smiled apologetically. “People gossip a lot in a place like this … Your cousin was coming over to talk to John Bemis, the Lucella’s captain, that afternoon. He claimed to know something about an act of vandalism that kept us from loading for a week. In fact that’s why we were tied up across the way: we were supposed to be taking on grain at that Eudora elevator, but we ended up with water in our holds. We had to dry them out and get Board of Health clearance again before we could load.”
“You mean someone deliberately put water in your holds? That was the vandalism?”
He nodded. “We assumed it was done by a disgruntled crewman. We asked him to leave the ship. He didn’t raise a fuss about it so I think we were right. But your cousin sounded serious, and of course Bemis wanted to talk to him. You wouldn’t know anything about what was on his mind, would you?”
I shook my head. “That’s part of the problem. I hadn’t seen Boom Boom for two or three months before he died. To tell you the truth, I was mostly worried that he might have—well, let himself fall because he was terribly depressed about not being able to skate or play hockey anymore. But, from what you’re saying and what Pete Margolis at the elevator said, he’d gotten pretty involved in what was going on down here, not depressed at all. I’d sure like to know, though, if anyone on the Bertha or the Lucella saw the accident firsthand.”