Sara Paretsky - Deadlock

“I need to talk to Martin Bledsoe or John Bemis.”

He waved me in. It didn’t seem like much of a security system to me. I drove on around the potholes and pulled up into a gravel yard. A couple of boxcars were slowly moving along the rail siding and I stood for a minute to watch the hoist carry them up inside the elevator and dump their loads. Amazing process, really. I could understand why my cousin had gotten so intrigued by it.

I skirted around the elevator to the wharf where the Lucella lay. She was enormous, and a sense of mystery and dread filled me. The giant lay momentarily still, held down by steel cables three inches thick-a huge amphibious spider immobile in the coils of its own web. But when she started to move, what things would stir in the depths beneath that gigantic keel? I looked at the black water absorbing the hull and felt sick and slightly dizzy.

Little flecks of grain dust swirled through the air and reached me where I stood behind her. No one knew I was here. I began to see how Boom Boom could have fallen in unnoticed. I shivered and moved forward to the scene of the action.

An extension ladder was attached high up on the ship, with feet reaching the dock. It was sturdy and I forgot about the dark water underneath as I climbed up.

Except for a faint sound from the elevator and the chaff blowing in my eyes, I hadn’t noticed any activity down on the wharf. On deck was another story. It only takes twenty people or so to load a freighter but they were extremely busy.

Five giant chutes were poised over openings in the deck. Guided by three men pulling them around with ropes, they spilled grain into the holds in a series of vast waterfalls. I couldn’t see all the way down the thousand-foot deck-a cloud of grain dust billowed up and obscured the bow from view.

I stood at the edge of a giant machine which seemed to be a long conveyor belt on a swivel, rather like a tank turret, and watched. The area beyond was posted HARD HATS ONLY.

No one noticed me for a few minutes. Then a whitened figure in a blue boiler suit came over to me. He took off his hard hat and I recognized the first mate, Keith Winstein. His curly black hair was powdered white below a line made by his hat.

“Hi, Mr. Winstein. I’m V. I. Warshawski-we met the other day. I’m looking for Mr. Bledsoe.”

“Sure I remember you. Bledsoe’s up on the bridge with the captain. Want me to take you up? Or you want to watch some of this first?”

He dug out a battered hard hat for me from the supply room behind the tank turret-“self-unloader,” he explained. It was attached to a series of conveyor belts in the holds and could unload the entire ship in under twenty-four hours.

Winstein led me along the port side away from the main activity with the chutes. The holds were about half full, he said: they’d be through in another twelve hours or so.

“We’ll take this cargo to the entrance of the Welland Canal and unload it onto oceangoing ships there. We’re too big for the Welland-the longest ships through there are the 740-footers.”

The Lucella had five cargo holds underneath with some thirty-five hatches opening into them. The chutes moved among the hatches, distributing the load evenly. In addition to the men guiding the chutes, another man watched the flow of grain at each hold and directed those at the ropes among the various openings. Winstein went around and checked their work, then escorted me onto the bridge.

Bledsoe and the captain were standing at the front of the glass-enclosed room looking down at the deck. Bemis was leaning against the wheel, a piece of mahogany as tall as I am. Neither of them turned around until Winstein announced to the captain that he’d brought a visitor.

“Hello, Miss Warshawski.” The captain came over to me in a leisurely way. “Come to see what a freighter looks like in action?”

“It’s most impressive… I have a couple of questions for you, Mr. Bledsoe, if you have some time.”

Bledsoe’s right hand was swathed in bandages. I asked how it was doing. He assured me that it was healing well. “No tendons cut… What have you got for me?”

Bemis took Winstein off to one corner to inquire about progress below. Bledsoe and I sat at a couple of high wooden stools behind a large drafting table covered with navigation charts. I pulled the photocopies of the contract verification forms from my canvas bag, flicking off some pieces of chaff which had settled on them. Putting the papers on the drafting table, I leafed through them to find July 17, one of Boom Boom’s circled dates.

Bledsoe took the stack from me and fanned it. “These are Eudora Grain’s shipping contract records. How’d you come to have them?”

“One of the secretaries lent them to me. Captain Bemis told me you were the most knowledgeable person around on these sorts of deals. I can’t follow them-I was hoping you’d explain them to me.”

“Why not get Phillips to?”

“Oh, I wanted to go to the expert.”

The gray eyes were intelligent. He smiled ironically. “Well, there’s no great secret to them. You start off with a load at point A and you want to move it to point B. We shippers move any cargo, but Eudora Grain is concerned chiefly with grain-although they may have a bit of lumber and coal now. So we’re talking about grain. Now, on this one, the order was first placed on July 17, so that’s the initial transaction date.”

He studied the document for a few minutes. “We have three million bushels of soybeans in Peoria and we want to move them to Buffalo. Hansel Baltic is buying the shipment there and that’s where our responsibility ends. So Phillips’s sales reps start scurrying around trying to find someone to carry the load. GLSL. They start there-Great Lakes Shipping Line. They’re charging four dollars and thirty-two cents a ton to carry it from Chicago to Buffalo and they need five vessels. With that big a load you’d normally bid it out among several carriers-I guess the rep was just being a little lazy on this one. Phillips has to bring it from Peoria by rail by the twenty-fourth of July and they’ll get it to Buffalo on the thirty-first or earlier.

“Now, in our business, contracts are set up and canceled routinely. That’s what makes it so confusing-and why the difference of a few cents is so important. See, here, later on the seventeenth, we offer to carry the load for four twenty-nine a ton. That was before we had the Lucella -we can go way under our old prices now because these thousand-footers are so much cheaper to operate.

“Anyway, then Grafalk came in on the eighteenth at $4.30 a ton but a promise to get it there by the twenty-ninth. Cutting it pretty close, really-wonder if they made it.”

“So there’s nothing out of the ordinary about this?”

Bledsoe studied it intently. “Not as far as I can tell. What made you think there would be?”

The chief engineer came in at that point. “Oh, hi there. What do you have?”

“Hi, Sheridan. Miss Warshawski’s been going over Eudora’s shipping orders. She thought something might be wrong with them.”

“No, not that. I just needed help understanding them. I’ve been trying to figure out what my cousin might have known that he wanted to tell Captain Bemis. So I went through his papers yesterday over at Eudora Grain, and I learned he’d been particularly interested in these documents right before he died. I wondered if the fact that all these Pole Star contracts ended up with Grafalk was important.”

Bledsoe looked at the documents again. “Not especially. Either they underbid us or they were promising an earlier delivery date.”

“The other question I had was why Boom Boom was interested in certain dates this spring.”