Hogarth departed for the Northwestern Station and a train to Schaumburg. Ferrant was staying in Scupperfield, Plouder’s apartment in the Hancock Building. I offered him a ride up in my Omega, which was parked in an underground garage nearby.
Before starting it I checked under the hood, looked at the oil, the brake fluid, the radiator. When Ferrant asked what I was doing I explained that I’d been in an accident recently and it made me more cautious about my car. Nothing seemed to be wrong.
On the short trip up Michigan Avenue to the Hancock I asked him if Scupperfield, Plouder had also underwritten the hull damage to the Leif Ericsson. They had; they underwrote all of the Grafalk Line.
“That’s how Bledsoe came to us—he knew us from working with Grafalk.
“I see.” I asked for his opinion of Bledsoe.
“One of the smartest men in the industry today. It’s not a good time to be in Great Lakes shipping, at least not for U.S. carriers. Your government gives considerable advantages to foreign flagships they don’t accord to U.S. vessels. Furthermore, old firms like Grafalk have some special legal positions that make it hard for a newcomer to break into the business. But Bledsoe can do it if anyone can. I just hope the wreck of the Lucella doesn’t put an end to Pole Star.”
He invited me to dine with him, but I thought I’d better get to the police with my news about Mattingly. I’d told my tale to Bledsoe, and now to the insurance people. Although I hadn’t given Murray Ryerson the name of the man with binoculars I’d seen at the Soo, he was no dummy—he might easily tie it in with my interest in Mattingly. Bobby Mallory was not going to look at me kindly if he read the story first in the Herald-Star.
I felt uneasy as I moved my car onto Lake Shore Drive. My life had been threatened two weeks ago. Phillips was dead, possibly because of the veiled threat I’d left with his son Saturday night. Perhaps he’d panicked, threatened to reveal what he knew, and been killed for his pains. Mattingly was dead, probably to keep him from boasting in the locker room that he’d blown up a ship. Boom Boom was dead because he knew that Phillips was fiddling grain invoices. Why was I still driving around? Maybe they thought more people would be killed when the Lucella went up. They might have been relying on that to get rid of me and be thinking up some other accident for me now. Or maybe they just didn’t believe I knew anything important.
I tried comforting myself with that idea the rest of the way home, but I had known even less when my car was sabotaged ten days ago. It occurred to me as I exited at Belmont that the deaths in this case had been staged as a species of accident: Boom Boom had fallen overboard, Mattingly had been hit by a car, Phillips crushed in a self-unloader. If my car had killed me as it was supposed to, I don’t suppose anyone would have gone to great pains to find that the steering control was sabotaged.
I hadn’t been able to convince the police that there might be a connection between the night watchman’s death and Boom Boom’s. They wanted to treat the threat on me as a routine act of vandalism. In other words, the murderer had gauged the psychology of the situation accurately. Now that I was prepared to divulge what I knew about Mattingly, how likely were the police to tie that in with Kelvin and Boom Boom? Not terribly.
I was half tempted to keep the news to myself. But the police have a good machinery for sifting through large crowds of witnesses. If they did follow up on my information, they could find out who picked Mattingly up at Meigs last Friday far more readily than I.
As I parked the car, carefully selecting a spot in front of a restaurant so that would-be attackers would face a maximum of witnesses, I decided I’d keep the story of Mattingly and the binoculars to myself. Just say that he’d flown back in Bledsoe’s plane.
22
Nighttime Chiseler
When I got to my apartment, I saw I was going to have to choose a story quickly. Sergeant McGonnigal was waiting for me in an unmarked brown Dodge. He got out when he saw me walking up the steps to the front door.
“Good evening, Miss Warshawski. Would you mind coming downtown with me? Lieutenant Mallory wants to ask you some questions.”
“What about?” I asked, taking out my keys and putting them in the front door.
McGonnigal shook his head. “I don’t know—he just asked me to bring you down.”
“Lieutenant Mallory thinks I should be living in Melrose Park with a husband and six children. I suspect any questions he wants to ask me have to do with how close I am to reaching that goal. Tell him to send me a Christmas card.” Just because I’d been going to see the police voluntarily didn’t mean I had to like it when they came to fetch me.