No liquor was allowed on the ship, so I was drinking coffee with dinner. The coffee was thin and I poured a lot of cream into it to give it some flavor.
“Could someone have come onto the ship, taken some tools, and brought them back without anyone noticing?”
Sheridan thought about it. “I suppose so,” he said reluctantly. “This isn’t like the navy where someone is always on watch. No one has to stay on board when we’re in port, and people come and go without anyone paying attention. Theoretically someone could go to the engine room without being caught, assuming he knew where the tools were. He’d have to be lucky, too, and not have anyone come on him by surprise … At any rate, I’d rather believe that than that one of my own men was involved.”
“Could one of your own men have done it?”
Again, it was possible, but why? I suggested that someone—perhaps Phillips, for example—had hired one of the crew to do his dirty work. Bledsoe and Sheridan discussed that energetically. They were both convinced that they’d gotten rid of their lone bad apple when they fired the man who put water in the holds last month.
Sheridan felt great confidence in the men under him. “I know my judgment could be wrong, but I can’t imagine any one of those guys deliberately sabotaging somebody’s car.”
We went on talking long after one of the junior cooks had cleared away the table and cleaned up the galley. Finally the chief engineer excused himself to go back to the engine room. He said I could question the other engineers and the four boilermen, but he didn’t think it would do me any good.
As he walked through the doorway, I said casually, “Were you in the engine room that night?”
He turned and looked me straight in the eye. “Yes, I was. And Yalmouth—my first engineer—was with me. We were going over the hydraulics preparatory to starting up the engines the next day.”
“Not out of each other’s sight all evening?”
“Not long enough to monkey with a car.”
He went on out the door. Bledsoe said, “Satisfied, Vic? Is Pole Star clean in your eyes?”
I shrugged in irritation. “I suppose so. Short of launching a full-scale investigation into everyone’s movements last Thursday night there’s not much else I can do to check up on you guys.” Something occurred to me. “You had a security force on board that night, didn’t you? Maybe Bemis can give me their names—they’d know if anyone had been climbing around with tools.” My villain might have persuaded a guard that he belonged on board: that probably wouldn’t be too difficult. But a guard would surely remember someone leaving the ship with a blowtorch and a ratchet wrench. Of course, if Bledsoe was behind the whole business, he might have paid off the guards, anyway.
I drank some cold coffee, looking at Bledsoe over the rim of the cup. “The whole thing turns on money, lots of money. It’s in the Eudora Grain contracts, but that’s not the only place.”
“True,” Bledsoe agreed. “There’s also a great deal in the freighter business itself, and there’s the amount I had to raise to pay for the Lucella. Maybe I embezzled it from Niels to pay for my flagship just before I left Grafalk Steamship.”
“Yes, and if he suspected that but couldn’t prove it, he might want to alert me to the possibility.”
Bledsoe smiled genially. “I can see that. You should definitely look into my finances as well as Phillips’s. I’ll tell my secretary to give you access to my files when we get back to Chicago.”
I thanked him politely. All that offer meant was, if he had something to hide, he had it concealed someplace other than in Pole Star’s books.
We spent the rest of the evening talking about opera. They’d had a collection of librettos in the Cantonville prison library and he’d read all of them. After he got out of prison he started attending the Cleveland Opera.
“Now I fly to New York five, six times a year for the Met and get season tickets to the Lyric … It gives me a queer feeling to talk about Cantonville with someone. My wife was the only person who knew about it—except Niels, of course. And neither of them ever mentioned it. It makes me feel almost guilty when I bring it up now.”
Around ten-thirty, two of the crew members came in with a cot and some blankets. They set the narrow bed up under the portholes in the starboard wall, bracing it to the side so it wouldn’t slide around with the rocking of the ship.
After they left, Bledsoe stood fiddling the change in his pockets with the awkwardness of a man who wants to make a pass but isn’t sure how it will be received. I didn’t try to help him out. I liked the way he kissed. But I’m not the kind of detective who hops nonchalantly from bed to bed: if someone’s been trying to kill me, it cools my enthusiasm. And I still didn’t have total trust in Bledsoe’s purity.