Sara Paretsky - Deadlock

I tapped my teeth with a pencil, trying to figure out some way she could get Phillips’s salary without getting into trouble. Nothing occurred to me.

“How often do you get paid?”

“Every other week. Our next paycheck is due Friday.”

“Is there any chance you could look in his wastebasket at the end of the day? A lot of people just toss their pay stubs; maybe he does, too.”

“I’ll try,” she said dubiously.

“That’s the spirit,” I said heartily. “One other thing. Could you call over to the Pole Star Line and find out where the Lucella Wieser will be in the next couple of days?”

She sounded more reluctant than ever but copied the information down and said she would get back to me.

Bouchard was out; I left a message with his wife. After that I didn’t have anything to do but pace. I didn’t want to leave the apartment and risk missing Janet’s call. In the end, to pass the time, I worked on some vocal exercises. My mother had been a singer and she had trained me as a musician, hoping I would have the operatic career Hitler and Mussolini deprived her of. That never worked out, but I know a lot of breathing exercises and can sing all the main arias from Iphigénie en Tauride , the only opera my mother sang in professionally before she left Italy in 1938.

I was halfway through Iphigenia’s second-act entrance, creaking like a windy parlor organ, when Janet phoned back. The Lucella would be in Thunder Bay Thursday and Friday. They were unloading coal in Detroit today and would leave there this evening.

“And really, Miss Warshawski, I can’t help you anymore. I’m calling you now from a pay phone at the 7-11 but Lois was all over me about calling Pole Star. Now that Mr. Warshawski’s gone, I’m just back in the typing pool and there isn’t any reason for me to do things like that, you see.”

“I see. Well, Janet, you’ve done a great deal and I appreciate it very much.” I hesitated a second. “Do me one favor, though-if you hear anything suspicious, call me from home. Could you do that much?”

“I suppose,” she said doubtfully. “Although I don’t really know what I would hear.”

“Probably nothing. Just on the chance that you do,” I said patiently. We hung up and I massaged my sore left shoulder. Somewhere among the hundreds of books that lined Lotty’s walls must be an atlas. I started in the living room and worked my way along. I found a pre-World War II map of Austria, a 1941 Guide to the London Underground, and an old U.S. atlas. None of them showed anyplace along the Great Lakes called Thunder Bay. That was a big help.

Finally I called a travel agent and asked if there were any flights between Chicago and Thunder Bay. Air Canada had one flight a day, leaving Toronto at 6:20, arriving at 10:12 P.M. I’d have to take a 3:15 flight to Toronto.

“How far away is that, anyway?” I demanded. That was seven hours of travel. The travel agent didn’t know. Where was Thunder Bay? In Ontario. The agent didn’t know any more than that but agreed to make a reservation on the next day’s flight for me. Two hundred fifteen dollars to spend seven hours in an airplane-they ought to pay me. I charged it to my American Express account, tickets to be picked up tomorrow at O’Hare.

I looked for Thunder Bay on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes but still couldn’t find it. I guessed I’d know when I got there.

The rest of the day I spent in a whirlpool at the Irving Park Y, the poor person’s health club. I pay ninety dollars a year to use the pool and the Nautilus room. The only other people who go there are earnest youths intent on building perfect biceps or catching a game of basketball-no racquetball courts, no bars, no disco lights, and no hot pink warm-up outfits with designer labels.

The ticket agent at Air Canada told me Thunder Bay was Canada’s westernmost port on Lake Superior. I asked him why it hadn’t shown up on my map and he shrugged indifferently. One of the flight attendants was more helpful. On the way to Toronto she explained that the town used to be called Port Arthur; the name had been changed about ten years ago. I made a mental note to buy Lotty a modern atlas as a hostess present.

I checked my small canvas bag through in Chicago, since it contained the Smith & Wesson (disassembled in accordance with federal firearms regulations). I’d packed lightly, not intending to be gone beyond a day or two, just jeans, shirts, a heavy sweater, and underwear. I didn’t even carry a purse-just stuck my wallet in my jeans pocket.

After an hour’s layover in Toronto’s bright modern airport, I boarded Air Canada’s Ontario puddle jumper. We stopped five times on the way to Thunder Bay on tiny airstrips which loomed out of open country to receive us. As people got on and off they exchanged greetings and light conversation. It reminded me of a bus ride through rural Louisiana in the freedom-march days; I got just as leg of the trip climbed down rollaway stairs into a clear, cold night. We were perhaps six hundred miles north of Chicago, a difference in latitude sufficient for winter to have barely ended.

Most of my fellow passengers were wrapped in winter coats. I shivered across the tarmac in a cotton shirt and corduroy jacket, wishing I had carried my sweater instead of packing it. A husky young fellow with red, wind-whipped cheeks and a shock of black hair followed close behind with the luggage. I picked up my canvas bag and set off in search of a night’s lodging. Thunder Bay boasted a Holiday Inn. That sounded good enough to me. They had plenty of vacancies. I booked a room for two nights.

They told me they would send a car along for me-their regular van was broken. I waited forty-five minutes inside the tiny terminal, drinking a cup of bitter coffee from a vending machine to entertain myself. When the limo finally came, it was a beat-up station wagon which I almost missed until it was rolling away. Then I could read THUNDER BAY HOLIDAY INN painted on its side. I went racing after it, yelling frantically, my canvas bag bumping me in the leg. I longed for the gigantic, impersonal efficiency of O’Hare with its ranks of surly, illiterate cab drivers.

The car stopped fifty feet ahead of me and waited while I came panting up to it. The driver was a heavyset man dressed in a graying white pullover. When he turned to look at me, a pungent draft of stale beer swept over me. The forty-five minutes I’d been waiting he must have spent in a bar. However, if I tried to get a cab I might be there all night. I told him to take me to the Holiday Inn and I leaned back in the seat with my eyes shut, grasping the side strap. It couldn’t be any worse than riding with Lotty sober but the memory of my own accident was too fresh for me not to be nervous. We moved along at a good clip, ignoring honking horns.

It was well past eleven when my driver deposited me, intact, and I couldn’t find any place in walking distance still open for dinner. The motel restaurant was closed and so was a little Mandarin place across the street. I finally took an apple from a basket in the lobby and went to bed hungry. My shoulder was sore and the long flight had worn me out. I slept soundly and woke up again after nine.

My shoulder had recovered in the night-most of the stiffness was gone. I dressed more easily than I had for days, only feeling a twinge when I pulled the heavy wool sweater over my head. Before going down to breakfast I reassembled the Smith & Wesson and loaded it. I didn’t expect Bledsoe to jump me in front of the entire crew of the Lucella Wieser , but if he did the gun wasn’t going to do me much good with the barrel unattached to the hammer.