Sara Paretsky - Deadlock

I disengaged my left hand and picked up my wineglass. I swallowed and the tightness in my throat eased. I looked at Lotty. She gave an impish smile.

“You are a detective, Vic. If you really want to be totally sure about Boom Boom, you could try investigating what happened.”

The Eudora Grain Company elevator lay in the labyrinth that makes up the Port of Chicago. The Port lines six miles of the Calumet River as it snakes south and west from its mouth near 95th Street. Each elevator or plant along the river has its own access road, and none of them is clearly marked.

I covered the twenty miles from my North Side apartment to 130th Street in good time, reaching the exit by eight o’clock. After that I got lost trying to make my way past the Calumet River, some steel mills, and a Ford assembly plant. It was nine-thirty before I found Eudora Grain’s regional office.

Their regional headquarters, a modern, single-story block, lay next to a giant elevator on the river. The elevator loomed behind the building at right angles, two sections of massive tubes, each containing perhaps a hundred ten-story-high cylinders. The sections were split by a slip where a boat could tie up. On the right side, railway tracks ran into a shed. A few hopper cars were there now and and a small group of hard-hatted men were fixing one onto a hoist. I watched, fascinated: the car disappeared up inside the elevator. On the far left side I could see the tip of a ship poking out-someone was apparently taking on a load of grain.

The building had a modern lobby with wide windows opening onto the river. Pictures of grain harvests-combines sweeping through thousands of acres of golden wheat, smaller versions of the mammoth elevator outside, trains taking on their golden hoard, boats unloading-covered the walls. I took a quick glance around, then approached a receptionist behind a marble counter set in the middle of the room. She was young and eager to help. After a spirited interchange with his secretary, she located the regional vice-president, Clayton Phillips. He came out to the foyer to meet me.

Phillips was a wooden man, perhaps in his early forties, with straw-colored hair and pale brown eyes. I took an immediate dislike to him, perhaps because he failed to offer me any condolences for Boom Boom, even when I introduced myself as his closest relative.

Phillips dithered around at the thought of my asking questions at the elevator. He couldn’t bring himself to say no, however, and I didn’t give him any help. He had an irritating habit of darting his eyes around the room when I asked him a question, instead of looking at me. I wondered if he found inspiration from the photographs lining the foyer.

“I don’t need to take any more of your time, Mr. Phillips,” I finally said. “I can find my own way around the elevator and ask the questions I want on my own.”

“Oh, I’ll come with you, uh-uh-” He looked at my business card, frowning.

“Miss Warshawski,” I said helpfully.

“Miss Warshawski. The foreman won’t like it if you come without an introduction.” His voice was deep but tight, the voice of a tense man speaking from the vocal cords rather than through the nasal passages.

Pete Margolis, the elevator foreman, didn’t seem happy to see us. However, I quickly realized his annoyance was directed more at Phillips than at me. Phillips merely introduced me as a “a young lady interested in the elevator.” When I gave Margolis my name and told him I was Boom Boom’s cousin, his manner changed abruptly. He wiped a dirty paw on the side of his overalls and shook hands with me, told me how sorry he was about my cousin’s accident, how much the men liked him, and how badly the company would miss him. He dug out a hard hat for me from under a pile of papers in his minuscule office.

Paying little attention to Phillips, he gave me a long and detailed tour, showing me where the hopper cars came in to dump their loads and how to operate the automatic hoist that lifted them into the heart of the elevator. Phillips trailed along, making ineffectual comments. He had his own hard hat, his name neatly lettered across the top, but his gray silk summer suit was totally out of place in the dirty plant.

Margolis took us up a long flight of narrow stairs that led into the interior of the elevator, perhaps three stories up. He opened a fire door at the top, and noise shattered my eardrums.

Dust covered everything. It swirled through the air, landing in layers on the high steel beams, creating a squeaky film on the metal floor. My toes quickly felt greasy inside their thick cotton socks. My running shoes skidded on the dusty floor. Under the ill-fitting, heavy hard hat, my hair became matted and sticky.

We stood on a catwalk looking down on the concrete floor of the elevator. Only a narrow waist-high handrail stood between me and an unpleasant crash onto the conveyor belts below. If I fell, they’d have to change the sign posted in the doorway: 9,640 man-hours without an accident.

Pete Margolis stood at my right side. He grabbed my arm and gesticulated with his free hand. I shook my head. He leaned over next to my right ear. “This is where it comes in,” he bellowed. “They bring the boxcars up here and dump them. Then it goes by conveyor belt.”

I nodded. A series of conveyor belts caused much of the clanking, shattering noise, but the hoist that lifted boxcars ninety feet in the air as though they were toys also contributed to the din. The belts ferried grain from the towers where boxcars dumped it over to chutes that spilled it into cargo holds of ships moored outside. A lot of grain dust escaped in the process. Most of the men on the floor wore respirators, but few seemed to have any ear protection.

“Wheat?” I screamed into Margolis’s ear.

“Barley. About thirty-five bushels to the ton.”

He shouted something at Phillips and we went on across the gangway outside, to a narrow ledge overlooking the water. I gulped in the cold April air and let my ears adjust to the relative quiet.

Below us sat a dirty old ship tied to the dock by a series of cables. She was riding above her normal waterline, where the black paint on the hull gave way abruptly to a peeling greenish color. On her deck, more men in hard hats and dirty boiler suits were guiding three massive grain chutes with ropes, filling the holds through some twelve or fourteen openings in the deck. Next to each opening lay its lid-“hatch cover,” Phillips told me. A mass of coiled ropes lay near the back end, our end, where the pilothouse stood. I felt slightly dizzy. I grew up in South Chicago where steel mills dot the lake, so I’ve seen plenty of Great Lakes freighters close up, but they always give me the same feeling-stomach contractions and shivers up the spine. Something about the hull thrusting invisibly into black water.

A cold wind whipped around the river. The water was too sheltered here for whitecaps, but grain dust blew up at us, mixed with cigarette wrappers and potato chip bags. I coughed and turned my head aside.

“Your cousin was standing at the stern.” I followed Phillips’s pointing finger. “Even if someone were leaning forward they wouldn’t have been able to see him from up here.”

I tried, but the angle of the elevator cut off the view partway along the pilothouse. “What about all those people on deck? And there’re a couple down there on the ground.”

Phillips swallowed a superior smile. “The O. R. Daley ’s tied up now and loading. When the ship is casting off all the elevator people are gone and everyone connected with the ship has an assignment. They wouldn’t pay much attention to a guy on the wharf.”