Sara Paretsky - Deadlock

Harbor Road turned west toward Sheridan a hundred yards beyond the Grafalk estate. The Bentley disappeared around the corner at a good clip. I put the Chevette into gear and was getting ready to follow when a dark blue sports car came around the bend. Going fifty or so, the driver turned left across my path. I braked hard and avoided a collision by inches. The car, a Ferrari, went on through the brick pillars lining the drive, stopping with a great squeal just clear of the road.

Niels Grafalk came up to the Chevette before I had time to disappear. I couldn’t fool him with some tale about opinion polls. He was wearing a brown tweed jacket and an open-necked white shirt and his face was alive with anger.

“What the hell did you think you were doing?” he exploded at the Chevette.

“I’d like to ask you the same question. Do you ever signal before you turn?”

“What were you doing in front of my house anyway?” Anger had obscured his attention and he hadn’t noticed who I was at first; now recognition mixed with anger. “Oh, it’s you-the lady detective. What were you doing-trying to catch my wife or me in an indiscreet position?”

“Just admiring the view. I didn’t realize I needed life insurance to travel to the northern suburbs.” I started once more to move the car up Harbor Road, but he stuck a hand through the open window and seized my left arm. It was attached at the top to my dislocated shoulder and his grasp sent a shudder of pain through both arm and shoulder. I stopped the car once more.

“That’s right, you don’t do divorces, do you?” His dark blue eyes were flooded with emotion-anger, excitement, it was hard to tell. He released my arm and I turned off the ignition. My fingers strayed to my left shoulder to rub it. I let them fall-I wasn’t going to let him see he’d hurt me. I got out of the car, almost against my will, pulled by the force of his energy. That’s what it means to have a magnetic personality.

“You missed your wife.”

“I know-I passed her on the road. Now I want to know why you were spying on my property.”

“Honest Injun, Mr. Grafalk-I wasn’t spying. If I were, I wouldn’t do it right outside your front door like that. I’d conceal myself and you’d never know I was here.”

The blaze died down a bit in the blue eyes and he laughed. “What were you doing here, then?”

“Just passing through. Someone told me you lived here and I was gawking at it-it’s quite a nice place.”

“You didn’t find Clayton at home, did you?”

“Clayton? Oh, Clayton Phillips. No, I expect he’d be at work on a Monday afternoon, wouldn’t he?” It wouldn’t do to deny I’d been at the Phillipses-even though I’d used a fake name, Grafalk could check that pretty easily.

“You talked to Jeannine, then. What did you think of her?”

“Are you interviewing her for a job?”

“What?” He looked puzzled, then secretly amused. “How about a drink? Or don’t private eyes drink on duty?”

I looked at my watch-it was almost four-thirty. “Let me just move the Chevette out of the way of any further Lake Bluff menaces. It isn’t mine and I’d hate for something to happen to it.”

Grafalk was through being angry, or at least he had buried his anger below the civilized urbanity I’d seen down at the Port last week. He leaned against one of the brick pillars while I hauled at the stiff steering and maneuvered the car onto the grass verge. Inside the gates he put an arm around me to guide me up the drive. I gently disengaged it.

The house, made from the same brick as the pillars, lay about two hundred yards back from the road. Trees lined the front on both sides, so that you had no clue to how big the place really was as you approached it.

The lawn was almost completely green-another week and they’d have to give it the season’s first mowing. The trees were coming into leaf. Tulips and jonquils provided bursts of color at the corners of the house. Birds twittered with the business of springtime. They were nesting on some of the most expensive real estate in Chicago but they probably didn’t feel snobbish toward the sparrows in my neighborhood. I complimented Grafalk on the grounds.

“My father built the place back in the twenties. It’s a little more ornate than we care for today-but my wife likes it, so I’ve never done anything to change it.”

We went in through a side door and back to a glassed-in porch overlooking Lake Michigan. The lawn sloped down steeply to a sandy beach with a little cabana and a couple of beach umbrellas. A raft was anchored about thirty yards off-shore but I didn’t see a boat.

“Don’t you keep your boat out back here?”

Grafalk gave his rich man’s chuckle. He didn’t share his birds’ social indifference. “The beaches here have a very gradual slope-you can’t keep anything with more than a four-foot draw close to the shore.”

“Is there a harbor in Lake Bluff, then?”

“The closest public harbor’s in Waukegan. It’s extremely polluted, however. No, the commandant at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Rear Admiral Jergensen, is a personal friend. I tie my sailboat up there.”

That was handy. The Great Lakes Naval Training Station lay on Lake Bluff’s northern border. Where would Grafalk keep his yacht when Jergensen retired? The problems the very rich face are different from yours and mine.

I sat in a bamboo chaise lounge. Grafalk opened a window. He busied himself with ice and glasses in a bar built into the room’s teak panels. I opted for sherry-Mike Hammer is the only detective I know who can think and move while drinking whiskey. Or at least move. Maybe Mike’s secret is he doesn’t try to think.

With his back still turned to me, Grafalk spoke. “If you weren’t spying on me, you must have been spying on Clayton. What’d you find out?”

I put my feet on the red-flowered cushion sewn to the bamboo. “Let’s see. You want to know what I think about Jeannine and what I found out about Clayton. If I did divorces I’d suspect you of sleeping with Jeannine and wondering how much Phillips knew about it. Except you don’t strike me as the type who cares very much what men think about your cavorting with their wives.”

Grafalk threw back his sun-bleached head and gave a great shout of laughter. He brought me a fluted tulip-shaped glass filled with straw-colored liquid. I sipped it. The sherry was as smooth as liquid gold. I wished now I’d asked for scotch. A millionaire’s whiskey might be something unique.

Grafalk sat facing me in a chintz-covered armchair. “I guess I’m being too subtle, Miss Warshawski. I know you’ve been asking questions around the Port. When I find you up here it makes me think you’ve found something out about Phillips. We carry a lot of grain for Eudora. I’d like to know if there’s something going on with their Chicago operation I should know about.”

I took another sip of sherry and put the glass on a tiled table at my right hand. The floor was covered with hand-painted Italian tiles in bright reds and greens and yellows and the table top matched them.

“If there are problems with Eudora Grain that you should know about, ask David Argus. My main concern is who tried to kill me last Thursday night.”

“Kill you?” Grafalk’s bushy eyebrows arched. “You don’t strike me as the hysterical type, but that’s a pretty wild accusation.”

“Someone took out my brakes and steering last Thursday. It was only luck that kept me from careening into a semi on the Dan Ryan.”

Grafalk finished whatever he was drinking-it looked like a martini. Good old-fashioned businessman-no Perrier or white wine for him. “Do you have a good reason for thinking Clayton might have done it?”

“Well, he certainly had opportunity. But motive-no. No more than you or Martin Bledsoe or Mike Sheridan.”