Sara Paretsky - Deadlock

“No. Our fathers were brothers, but Boom Boom and I both took after our mothers in appearance.”

“But you’re very like him around the eyes… It’s hard to tell how Mr. Phillips feels about anything. But I’d say he was glad your cousin was going to be off his hands before long.”

“Did they fight?”

“Oh no. At least not so that anyone here would know about it. But your cousin was an impatient person in a lot of ways. Maybe playing hockey made him want to do everything faster than Mr. Phillips is used to-he’s more the deliberate type.” She hesitated and my stomach muscles tightened: she was about to say something important if she didn’t think it would be indiscreet. I tried to make my eyes look like Boom Boom’s.

“The thing is, Mr. Phillips didn’t want him so involved in the shipping contracts. Each regional vice-president sort of owns his own contracts, and Mr. Phillips seemed to think if Mr. Warshawski got too involved with the customers he might be able to shift some of them to Toledo with him.”

“So did they argue about the contracts? Or the customers?”

“Now if I tell you this, I don’t want you getting me in trouble with Mr. Phillips.”

I promised her her secret was safe.

“You see, Lois-Mr. Phillips’s secretary-doesn’t like anyone touching the contract files.” She looked over her shoulder, as though Lois might be standing there listening. “It’s silly, really, because all the sales reps have to use them. We all have to be in and out of them all day long. But she acts like they’re-they’re diamonds or something. So if you take them you’re supposed to write a note on her desk saying which ones you’ve taken and then let her know when you bring them back.”

The boss’s secretary has a lot of control in an office and often exercises it through petty tyrannies like these. I murmured something encouraging.

“Mr. Warshawski thought rules like that were pretty stupid. So he’d just ignore them. Lois couldn’t stand him because he didn’t pay any attention to anything she said.” She smiled briefly, a tender, amused smile, not spiteful. Boom Boom must have livened up the place quite a bit. Stanley Cup winners don’t get there by too scrupulous attention to rules. Lois’s petty ways must have struck him as some kind of decrepit penalty box.

“Anyway, the week before he died, Mr. Warshawski pulled several months of contracts-all last summer’s, I think-and took them home with him. If Lois found out she’d really get me in trouble, because he’s gone and I was his secretary and she’d have to blame someone.”

“Don’t worry: I won’t tell anyone you told me. What did he do with them?”

“I don’t know. But I do know he took a couple of them in with him to see Mr. Phillips late Monday night.”

“Did they have any kind of argument?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. We were all on our way out the door when he went in. Even Lois. Not that she’d say if she knew.”

I scratched my head. That was probably the origin of the rumors about Boom Boom stealing papers and fighting with Phillips. Maybe my cousin thought Phillips was enticing customers from the ancient Mr. Cagney in Toledo. Or that Phillips hadn’t been telling him everything he needed to know. I wondered if I’d be able to understand a shipping contract if I saw one.

“Any chance I could look at the files my cousin took home with him?”

She wanted to know why. I looked at her kind, middle-aged face. She had been fond of Boom Boom, her young boss. “I’m not satisfied with the accounts I’ve heard of my cousin’s death. He was an athlete, you know, despite his bad ankle. It would take more than a slippery wharf to get him into the lake. If he’d had a fight with Phillips over something important, he might have been mad enough to get careless. He had quite a temper, but he couldn’t fight Phillips with fists and sticks the way he could the Islanders.”

She pursed her mouth up, thinking it over. “I don’t think he was angry the morning he died. He came here before going over to the elevator, you know, and I’d say his mood was-excited. He reminded me of my little boy when he’s just pulled off some big stunt on his dirt bike.”

“The other thing I’m wondering is if someone might have pushed him in.”

She gulped once or twice at that. Why would someone push a nice young man like Mr. Warshawski to his death? I didn’t know, I told her, but it was possible those files might give me some kind of clue. I explained to her that I was a private investigator by profession. That seemed to satisfy her: she promised to hunt them up for me while Lois was at lunch.

I asked her if there were anyone else in the office with whom Boom Boom might have quarreled. Or, failing that, whom he might have been close to.

“The people he worked with most were the sales reps. They do all the buying and selling. And, of course, Mr. Quinchley, who handles the Board of Trade on his computer.”

She gave me names of some of the likelier prospects and went back to her desk. I went out to the pit to see if I could find Brimford or Ashton, two of the reps Boom Boom had usually worked with. They were both on the phone, so I wandered around a bit, getting covert stares. There were some half dozen typists handling correspondence, bills, contracts, invoices, who knows what else. A few cubbyholes like Boom Boom’s were stuck along the windows here and there. One of them held a man sitting at a computer terminal-Quinchley, hard at work with the Board of Trade.

Phillip’s office was in the far corner. His secretary, a woman about my age with a bouffant hairdo I’d last seen in seventh grade, was over interrogating Janet. What does that cousin of Warshawski’s want now? I grinned to myself.

Ashton hung up his phone. I stopped him as he started dialing again and asked if he’d mind talking to me for a few minutes. He was a heavyset guy in his middle or late forties; he followed me goodnaturedly into Boom Boom’s cubicle. I explained again who I was and that I was trying to find out more about Boom Boom’s job and whether he had tangled with anyone in the organization.

Ashton was friendly, but he didn’t want to commit himself to anything. Not with a strange woman, anyway. He agreed with Janet’s description of my cousin’s job. He liked Boom Boom-he livened the place up quite a bit, and he was smart, too. Didn’t try to trade on his relations with Argus. But as to whether he quarreled with anyone-he didn’t think so, but I’d have to talk to Phillips about that. How had Boom Boom and Phillips gotten along? Again, I’d have to ask Phillips, and that was that.

By the time we finished, the other guy, Brimford, had taken off. I shrugged. I didn’t think talking to him would help me any. Going through Boom Boom’s tidy, well-sorted drawers, I quickly realized he could have had a dozen dangerous documents connected with the shipping industry and I wouldn’t know it. He had lists of farmers supplying Eudora Grain, lists of Great Lakes carriers, lists of rail carriers and their jobbers, bills of lading, reports of loads, by date, back copies of Grain News , weather forecasts… I flipped through three drawers with neatly labeled files. They were all organized topic by topic but none of it meant anything to me. Other than that Boom Boom had gotten totally immersed in a very complicated business.

I shut the file drawers and rummaged through the top of the desk, where I found pads of paper covered with Boom Boom’s meticulous handwriting. The sight of it suddenly made me want to cry. Little notes he had written to himself to remind him of what he’d learned or what he had to do. Boom Boom planned everything very carefully. Maybe that was what gave him the energy to be so wild on the ice-he knew he had his life in shape behind him.