The golden retriever had departed with her people by the time we got to our feet and climbed back over the sand hills to the parking lot. A few children stared at us incuriously, waiting for the grown-ups to disappear before launching their own reckless deeds.
I drove Bledsoe back to the steel mill, now heavily thronged with Indiana and Chicago police. The four o’clock shift was arriving and I dropped him at the gates. The cops might want to talk to me later, as a witness, but they’d have to find me—I had other things to do.
21
Fishing Trip
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a private investigator in blue jeans to see the chairman of a major U.S. corporation. I reached Ajax Insurance headquarters in the south Loop a little after five—traffic had been heavy all the way into the city. I was figuring on it being late enough for me to avoid the phalanx of secretaries who pave the entrance to a CEO’s office, but I’d forgotten Ajax’s security system.
Guards in the marble lobby of the sixty-story skyscraper demanded an employee identification card from me. I obviously didn’t have one. They wanted to know whom I was visiting—they would issue me a visitor’s pass if the person I wanted to see approved my visit.
When I told them Gordon Firth, they were appalled. They had a list of the chairman’s visitors. I wasn’t on it, and they suspected me of being an assassin from Aetna, hired to bump off the competition.
“I’m a private investigator,” I explained, pulling the photostat of my license from my wallet to show them. “I’m looking into a fifty-million-dollar loss Ajax sustained last week. It’s true I don’t have an appointment with Gordon Firth, but it’s important I see him or whomever he’s designating to handle this loss. It may affect Ajax’s ultimate liability.”
I argued with them some more and finally persuaded them if Ajax had to pay for the Lucella’s hull because they had kept me out of Firth’s office I’d remember their names and see that the money came out of their hides.
These arguments did not get me to Firth—as I say, it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle—but they did bring me to a man in their Special Risks Department who was handling the loss. His name was Jack Hogarth and he came down to the lobby for me.
He walked briskly up to the guard station to meet me, his shirtsleeves pushed up to the elbows, his tie hanging loosely around his neck. He was about thirty-five or forty, dark, slight, with humorous brown-black eyes just now circles with heavy shadows.
“V. I. Warshawski, is it?” he asked, studying my card. “Come on up. If you’ve got some information on the Lucella you’re more welcome than a heat wave in January.”
I had to trot to keep up with him on the way to the elevator. We were carried quickly to the fifty-third floor; I yawned a couple of times to clear my ears. He barely waited for the elevator to open before plunging down the hall again, through double glass doors enclosing the elevator bank, and on to a walnut and crimson suite in the southeast corner of the building.
Papers were strewn across an executive-size walnut desk. A photograph of the Lucella as she lay fractured in the Poe Lock covered a table at one side, and a cutaway picture of a freighter hull was taped to the wood-paneled west wall.
I stopped to look at the photograph, enlarged to about three feet by two feet, and shuddered with remembered shock. Several more hatch covers had popped loose since I last saw the ship and the surfaces pointing steeply into the lock were covered with a thick smear of wet barley.
As I studied it, a very tall man got to his feet and strolled over to stand next to me. I hadn’t seen him when I first walked into the room—he’d been sitting in a corner behind the door.
“Shocking, isn’t it?” he said with a pronounced English accent.
“Very. It was even more shocking when it occurred.”
“Oh, you were there, were you?”
“Yes,” I answered shortly. “I’m V. I. Warshawski, a private investigator. And you’re—?”
He was Roger Ferrant from the London firm of Scupperfield, Plouder, the lead underwriters on the Lucella’s hull and cargo insurance.
“Roger is probably the most knowledgeable man in the world about Great Lakes shipping, even though he operates out of London,” Hogarth told me. He added to Ferrant, “Miss Warshawski may know something about our ultimate liability on the Lucella.”
I sat down in an armchair by the window where I could see the setting sun paint Buckingham Fountain a faint pink-gold. “I’m looking into the accident to the Lucella as part of a murder investigation. At the moment I have two separate crimes—the murder of a young man connected with the Eudora Grain Company, and the destruction of the Lucella. It’s not clear to me that they intersect. However, I was on board the Lucella pursuing my murder investigation when she blew up, and that’s given me something of a personal interest in the explosion.”
“Who’s your client?” Hogarth demanded.