Grafalk had been the low bidder on this shipment. Someone else had bit $0.335 and a third carrier $0.34. Grafalk picked up the bid at $0.33 and billed it at $0.35.
Boom Boom’s list of Pole Star’s lost contracts proved even more startling. On the forms I’d gotten from Janet, Grafalk was listed as the low bidder. But Boom Boom’s notes showed Pole Star as the low bidder. Phillips either had entered the contracts wrong or the invoices Boom Boom referred to were wrong.
It was time to get some explanations from these clowns. I was tired of being shown the old shell game every time I wanted information out of them. I stuffed all the papers back into the canvas bag and headed for the Port.
It was close to noon when I turned off I-94 at 130th Street. The friendly receptionist at Eudora Grain was answering the phone and nodded to me in recognition as I walked past her into the inner office. The sales reps were hanging up their phones, straightening their ties, getting ready for lunch. In front of Phillips’s office sat Lois, her bouffant hair lacquered into place. The phone was propped under her chin and she made a pretense of looking at some papers. She was talking in the intense, muttering way people do when they’re trying to pretend they’re not really making personal calls.
She lifted her eyes momentarily to me as I walked up to the desk but didn’t interrupt her conversation.
“Where’s Phillips?” I demanded.
She murmured something into the telephone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you have an appointment?”
I grinned at her. “Is he in today? He doesn’t seem to be at home.”
“I’m afraid he’s away from the office on business. Do you want to make an appointment?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll come back.” I circled behind her and looked in Phillips’s office. There weren’t any signs that anyone had been there since me on Saturday night—no briefcase, no jacket, no half-smoked cigars. I didn’t think he was lurking outside the window in the parking lot but I went over and peered behind the drapes.
My assault on her boss’s office brought Lois, squawking, into his den. I grinned at her again. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation. Tell your mother it won’t happen again. Or is it your sister?”
She turned red and stomped back to her desk. I left, feeling pleased with myself.
I headed to the main part of the Port. Grafalk wasn’t in; he didn’t come down to the Port every day, the receptionist explained. I debated going to talk to Percy MacKelvy, the dispatcher, but decided I’d rather talk directly to Grafalk.
I walked over to Pole Star’s little office. The office manager there was harassed but trying to be calm. As I talked to her she took one call from the Toronto Sun inquiring into the Lucella’s accident and another from KLWN Radio in Lawrence, Kansas.
“It’s been like this all morning. I’d like to get the phone disconnected, but we need to stay in touch with our lawyers, and we do have other ships carrying freight. We don’t want to miss any orders.”
“I thought the Lucella was the only ship you owned.”
“It’s the only big one,” she explained. “But we lease a number of others. In fact Martin got so sick of the newspapers he went down to Plymouth Iron and Steel to watch them unload coal from the Gertrude Ruttan. She’s a seven-hundred-foot self-unloading vessel. We lease her from Triage—they’re a big shipbuilding company. Sort of like Fruehauf for trucks—they don’t carry much cargo in their own right, just lease the vessels.”
I asked for directions to the Plymouth yard and she obligingly gave them to me. It was another ten miles around the lake to the east. She was a very helpful young woman—even gave me a pass to get into the Plymouth plant.
We were into the middle of May and the air was still quite chilly. I wondered whether we were heading for a new ice age. It’s not cold winters that cause them but cool summers when the snow doesn’t melt. I buttoned my jacket up to the neck and rode with the windows rolled all the way up.
As I moved into steel territory the blue air darkened and turned red-black. I felt as though every movement closer to the mills carried me further back in time to the grimy streets of South Chicago where I grew up. The women in the streets had the same pinched, worn look as they hurried their toddlers along. A grocery store on a corner reminded me of the place at 91st and Commercial where I used to buy a hard roll on my way to school, and I stopped the car to get a snack in lieu of lunch. I almost expected old Mr. Kowolsky to step up behind the counter, but instead an energetic young Mexican weighed my apple and carefully wrapped a carton of blueberry yogurt for me.