There were more cries coming from the hold. With a glance at Bledsoe, I started down the ladder the young engineer had just climbed up. Bledsoe followed close on my hands.
I jumped down the last three rungs onto the steel floor below. Six or seven hard-hatted figures were huddled over the figure-eight belt where it joined the side conveyors feeding it from the holds. I strode over and shoved them aside, Bledsoe peering around my back.
Clayton Phillips was staring up at me. His body was covered with coal. The pale brown eyes were open, the square jaw clenched. Blood had dried across his freckled cheekbones. I moved the men away and bent over to peer closely at his head. Coal had mostly filled in a large hole on the left side. It was mixed with congealed blood in a reddish-black, ghastly clot.
“It’s Phillips,” Bledsoe said, his voice constricted.
“Yes. We’d better call the police. You and I have a few questions to discuss, Martin.” I turned to the group of men. “Who’s in charge down here?”
A middle-aged man with heavy jowls said he was the chief engineer.
“Make sure no one touches the body or anything else. We’ll get the police over here.”
Bledsoe followed me tamely back up the ladder to the deck and off the ship. “There’s been an accident down below,” I told the Plymouth foreman. “We’re getting the police. They won’t be unloading the rest of the coal for a while.” The foreman took us into a small office just around to the side of a long shed. I used the phone to call the Indiana State Police.
Bledsoe got into the Omega with me. We drove away from the yard in silence. I made my way back to the interstate and rode the few remaining miles over to the Indiana Dunes State Park. On a weekday afternoon, in early spring, the place was deserted. We climbed across the sand down to the shore. The only other people there were a bearded man and a sporty-looking woman with their golden retriever. The dog was swimming into the frothy waves after a large stick.
“You have a lot of explaining to do, Martin.”
He looked at me angrily. “You owe me a lot of explanations. How did Phillips get into that ship? Who blew up the Lucella? And how come you’re so quick on the spot every time disaster is about to strike Pole Star?”
“How come Mattingly flew back to Chicago on your plane?”
“Who the hell is Mattingly?”
I drew a breath. “You don’t know? Honestly?”
He shook his head.
“Then who did you send back to Chicago in your plane?”
“I didn’t.” He made an exasperated gesture. “I called Cappy as soon as I got to town and demanded the same thing of him. He insists I phoned from Thunder Bay and told him to fly this strange guy back—he said his name was Oleson. Obviously someone was impersonating me. But who and why? And since you clearly know who this guy is, you tell me.”
I looked out at the blue-green water. “Howard Mattingly was a second-string wing for the Chicago Black Hawks. He was killed early Saturday morning—run over by a car and left to die in a park on Chicago’s northwest side. He was up at the Soo on Friday. He fits the description of the guy Cappy flew back to Chicago. He exploded the depth charges on the Lucella—I watched him do it.”
Bledsoe turned to me and grabbed my arm in a gesture of spontaneous fury. “Goddammit—if you watched him do it, how come you haven’t said anything to anyone? I’ve been talking my head off to the FBI and the Corps of Engineers for two days and you—you’ve been sitting on this information.”
I twisted away from his grasp and spoke coldly. “I only realized after the fact what Mattingly had been doing. I didn’t recognize him immediately. As we went down to the bottom of the lock, he picked up what looked like an outsize pair of binoculars. They must have been the radio controls for the detonators. The whole thing only dawned on me after the Lucella had gone sky-high … You may recall that you were in shock. You weren’t in any position to listen to anyone say anything. I thought I’d better leave and see if I could track him down.”
“But later. Why didn’t you talk to the police later?”
“Ah. That was because, when I got to the airport at Sault Ste. Marie, I found Mattingly had gone back to Chicago on your airplane, presumably under your orders. That really upset me—it made a mockery out of my judgment of your character. I wanted to talk to you about it first, before I told the police.”
The dog came bounding up to us, water spraying from its red-gold hair. It was an older dog—she sniffed at Martin with a white muzzle. The woman called to her and the dog bounded off again.
“And now?” he demanded.
“And now I’d like to know how Clayton Phillips came to be on the self-unloader of a ship you were leasing.”
He pounded the beach beside him. “You tell me, Vic. You’re the smart detective. You’re always turning up whenever there’s a crime about to be committed on my fleet … Unless you’ve decided that a man with my record is capable of anything—capable of destroying his own dreams, capable of murder?”