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.”
“What dates this spring?” Bledsoe asked.
“One was the twenty-third of April. I don’t remember the others offhand.” I had the diary in my canvas bag but I didn’t want to show it to them.
Bledsoe and Sheridan looked at each other thoughtfully. Finally Bledsoe said, “The twenty-third was the date we were supposed to load up the Lucella.”
“You mean the day you found water in the holds?”
Sheridan nodded.
“Maybe the other dates also were connected with shipping accidents. Is there a record of such things?”
Bledsoe’s face twisted in thought. He shook his head. “That’s a pretty tall order. There are so many steamship lines and so many ports. The Great Lakes Underwriter discusses them if they’ve got anything to do with hull or cargo damage. That’d be the best place to start. Recent dates, one of us might be able to help you out.”
I was getting tired of all the legwork that didn’t lead in any real direction. I supposed I could track down the Great Lakes Underwriter and look for accidents to ships, but what would that tell me? Had Boom Boom uncovered some criminal ring vandalizing freighters? Just knowing that accidents had occurred wouldn’t tell me that.
Winstein had gone back down to the deck and Captain Bemis wandered over to join our group. “No further accidents are going to strike this ship. I’ve arranged for a security patrol on deck when they finish loading for the day.”
Bledsoe nodded. “I’ve been thinking maybe I’ll sail out with you.” He grinned. “No aspersion on your management of the ship, John, but the Lucella’s precious to all of us. I want to see her get this load to St. Catharines.”
“No problem, Martin. I’ll have the head cook get the stateroom ready.”
“We don’t run to people like stewards on freighters,” Bledsoe explained to me. “The head cook takes responsibility for the captain’s and the guest quarters. Everyone else fends for himself… What time do you figure to sail, John?”
The captain looked at his watch. “We’ve got about eleven more hours of loading, and Tri-State doesn’t want to pay overtime unless it’s just an hour or two. So anytime after nineteen hundred hours tomorrow.”
Bledsoe offered to give me a tour of the ship, if Bemis didn’t object. The captain gave his permission with a tolerant smile. Sheridan followed us down the narrow wooden stairs. “I get to show off the engine room,” he explained.
The bridge was perched on top of the pilothouse. There were four levels above deck, each smaller than the one below it. The captain and the chief engineer had their quarters on the third story, directly below the bridge. Sheridan opened his door so I could take a quick look inside.
I was surprised. “I thought everyone slept in narrow bunk beds with a tiny sink.” The chief engineer had a three-room suite, with an outsize bed in the bedroom, and an office cluttered with paper and tools.
Bledsoe laughed. “That was true in Dana’s day, but times have changed. The crew sleep six to a room but they have a big recreational lounge. They even have a Ping-Pong table, which provides its amusing moments in a high sea.”
The other officers and the head cook shared the second floor with the stateroom. The galley and the dining rooms-the captain’s dining room and crew’s mess-were on the deck floor and the crew’s quarters on the first floor below deck.
“We should have put the officers’ quarters over the stern,” Sheridan told Bledsoe as we went down below the water level to the engine room. “Even up where John and I are the engines throb horribly all night long. I can’t think why we let them build the whole caboodle into the pilothouse.”