I knew that would divert Bobby’s attention. He does not like the idea of my carrying a gun. He knows that my dad taught me how to use one. Tony believed most shooting accidents were caused by children not knowing anything about firearms. Since he had to keep his police revolver at home sometimes, he made me learn how to clean, load, and shoot it. Nonetheless, the idea of a woman toting around a Smith & Wesson is contrary to all Bobby’s notions of a proper lady’s life-style. He jumped on that, demanding to know why I had the gun with me on board ship and what I was doing on the Lucella anyway.
That was easier ground. I reminded him of my car accident. “You guys wanted to believe it was vandals. I thought it was someone connected with the Port. I went up to Thunder Bay to talk to the captain and the chief engineer of the Lucella. Since one of them might have tried to kill me, I took my gun with me.”
We talked about that for a while. I reiterated my belief that Boom Boom had been pushed under the Bertha Krupnik. I told him I thought Henry Kelvin, the night watchman in his building, had been killed when he surprised intruders trying to find evidence that Boom Boom had of a crime down at the Port. Bobby wouldn’t be persuaded. As far as he was concerned, Boom Boom had fallen in by accident, I was the victim of vandals, and Kelvin had interrupted a routine housebreaking. At that point a stubborn decision to keep the rest of my information to myself overtook me. If they were going to be so damned pigheaded, I would be, too.
When Bobby got back to my fingerprints in Phillips’s office, I evaded the issue. “What were you guys doing fingerprinting the man’s office, anyway?”
“He was killed, Vicki,” Bobby said with heavy sarcasm. “We were printing his office and doing everything else to it to find out if he was killed there.”
“Was he?”
Mallory drew a doodle on his desk pad. “He actually died of suffocation in the cargo holds. We don’t know where he received the head wound—that would have killed him anyway if he hadn’t suffocated first.”
My stomach turned over. What a terrible death. I didn’t like Phillips but I hadn’t wished him that kind of end. Although if he had pushed Boom Boom overboard … “When do they think it happened?”
“About six Sunday morning. Give or take a few hours. Now, Vicki: I want to know what you were doing in the guy’s office. And when you were doing it.”
“About six yesterday morning I went down there to talk to him about my cousin’s death. When he refused to answer my questions, I became enraged and hit him over the head with that brass thing he’s got sitting on the front of his desk.”
Bobby gave me such an angry stare, I felt my stomach turn over again. He called to McGonnigal, who was waiting outside the door. “Take down everything she says. If there’s one more smart remark, book her as a material witness. I’m getting sick of this.” He turned to me. “When were you down there?”
I looked at my fingernails on my right hand. Time for a manicure. The left was no better. “Saturday night.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“If I’d been burglarizing the place, I’d have been smart enough to wear gloves. I wasn’t. I was looking for information that might show Phillips led a life of crime.”
“Who’s your client, Vicki?”
I shook my head. “Privileged information, Bobby.”
We talked about that for a while. I still regarded Boom Boom as my client, but I was damned if I was going to tell Bobby that. Lock me up indeed.
“You can’t drag a body into the Port without someone noticing you,” I remarked at one point. “There’s a police guard at the gates. Have you asked them for the names of everyone who came into the Port early Sunday?”
Mallory gave me a withering look. “We can think of the easy ones, too. We’re questioning those people right now.”
“Was Niels Grafalk one of them?”
Bobby gave me a sharp glance. “No. Our guy didn’t see him. Why?”
I shrugged. “Just curious.”
Bobby kept asking why I was down at Phillips’s office, what information I had expected to find, and so on.
Finally I said, “Bobby, you think Boom Boom’s death was an accident. I think he was murdered. I was looking for something that would tie Eudora Grain into his death, because it happened at their elevator after he had been arguing with their man.”
Mallory made a neat pile of the papers on his desk. He took off his wire-rimmed glasses and placed them on top of it. That was a signal that the interrogation was over. “Vicki, I know how much you loved Boom Boom. I think that’s making you place too much importance on his death. We see that a lot in here, you know. Someone loses their son or wife or father in a terrible accident. They can’t believe it’s happened, so they say it’s murder. If there’s a conspiracy, it makes the death easier to handle—their loved one was important enough for someone to want to kill.