Paige watched me with dark, angry eyes as I walked across the Persian rug to the front door. For once her exquisite poise deserted her, lines appeared around her mouth and eyes and she looked older.
26 On the Tiles
Back outside I sat on the stoop, unable to move any father. Fatigue fogged my brain. The day had started at Jeannine’s with confirmation that her husband pushed Boom Boom under the propeller of the Bertha Krupnik. Now came the news that her sister had gone out with Boom Boom only to spy on him for Grafalk.
What good would it do Boom Boom if I could prove Grafalk’s complicity in his death, or even in destroying the Lucella and the Poe Lock? Revenge brings only limited satisfaction, and I didn’t feel noble enough to act out of a disinterested sense of justice.
I stood up and looked around vaguely for a cab. A tall figure detached itself from the shadows and crossed the street to me.
“A satisfactory encounter?” Ferrant asked.
“You waiting around for me?” I said. “How about finding me a cab? Speaking as a detective, I guess it was satisfactory. But, as a human being, I can’t say it appealed to me much.”
“Look, how about dinner and you can tell me about it?”
“Roger, I’m too tired to eat and I don’t feel like telling anyone about it.”
He trotted over to State Street and flagged a cab there. He helped me inside and followed after.
“Look, you don’t have to tell me about the interview, but you’ll feel better after something hot to eat and another drink.”
I finally let myself be persuaded. He’d been very cooperative about looking into Grafalk’s records. If he wanted to hear the gory details of the rest of the case, why not?
We went to the Filigree, a restaurant in the Hanover House Hotel that resembles my idea of a men’s club: discreet tables with maroon drapes shielding diners from one another, a fireplace with a high marble mantel, and elderly waiters who seem to ooze a vague distrust of women diners: do they really appreciate the fine old vintages they’re drinking?
You go to the Filigree for steaks. Over a thick-cut T-bone and a bottle of Château St. Georges (1962) I felt myself reviving.
“Earlier this evening you said you weren’t really concerned about the locks or the freighters-that you were involved in this from a personal standpoint. What is that?”
I explained to Ferrant about my cousin and the problems down at Eudora Grain. “I was just visiting the woman he was dating the three months before he died. Her name is Paige Carrington. She’s a talented dancer, maybe not New York quality, but quite good. She is exquisite, the kind of woman you gawk at but who appears too perfect to touch. Anyway, it seems she’s been Grafalk’s mistress for a number of years. He arranged a party at which she could meet my cousin-said he wanted to buy some shares in the Hawks and asked Guy Odinflute to hold a party for him and the team. Boom Boom was always included in that kind of function and Grafalk saw to it that Paige had an invitation, too.
“Well, my cousin was easily as susceptible as the next man. When Paige made a dead-set at him, he responded-probably with enthusiasm. She’s that type of person. And she spent the next three or four months tracking what he was doing at Eudora Grain.
“When it became obvious that Boom Boom had discovered the extent of the problem there and was planning on blowing the whistle to Argus-Eudora’s chairman-Paige’s tender heart was touched: she got Grafalk and Phillips to try to buy off my cousin. Instead, they knocked him off.”
I drank some more wine and slumped back in my seat. I’d only been able to eat half the excellent steak.
I gestured with the wineglass. “This whole business with the freighters and the locks looks like something separate altogether. I wouldn’t even be interested if it didn’t seem to tie in with what happened to my cousin.” I finished my wine and poured myself another glass. At this rate I was going to be mildly sozzled; after the day I’d had, it felt good. Ferrant ordered a second bottle.
“I’ve got a couple of problems right now. One is, although Jeannine Phillips as good as told me that her husband pushed Boom Boom off the wharf, I don’t have any proof. She didn’t come out and say it in so many words, and nobody witnessed the drowning. I do have some skeletal proof about what was going on at Eudora. I could send that to Argus, but all it would do is discredit Phillips. Even if they make the tie-in with Grafalk stick, it doesn’t prove anything more criminal than taking kickbacks.”
The waiter took my plate with a contemptuous glance at the unfinished steak as the wine steward opened the second bottle of St. Émilion for us. Like many very thin men, Ferrant ate a great deal-he’d consumed a sixteen-ounce sirloin while we talked, along with oysters florentine, a special potatoes Filigree, and a platter of beefsteak tomatoes. He ordered chocolate cheesecake; I passed on dessert and had some more wine.
“The one thing I might be able to get Grafalk on is murdering Phillips.”
Ferrant sat up in his chair. “Go on, Vic! Grafalk murder Phillips?”
“He was last seen alive around one o’clock Sunday morning. The police figure he was in the holds and suffocated by 8:00 A.M. at the latest. So between one in the morning and eight in the morning someone bonked him on the head and got him onto a Great Lakes freighter. The police have a guard on duty at the entrance to the Port. Not that many people enter the Port that late at night, and they have a pretty good list of who came in. I’m sure that they’ve been through those people’s cars quite thoroughly. If one of them had driven Phillips’s body into the Port, they’d have nailed him for it. But they haven’t made an arrest.”
“Maybe the murderer brought him on board in a plastic bag and no blood got on his car… Was Grafalk at the Port that night?”
“He didn’t drive down there.”
“What’d he do-fly?”
“Don’t think so-a helicopter would be pretty noisy.”
“Then how did he get there?”
“Good heavens, Roger, I’m ashamed of you. You come from this island country, famous for four centuries of naval prowess. It ought to be the first thing to leap to your mind.”
His brow creased. “By boat? You must be joking.” He thought it over. “I suppose he could. But can you prove he did?”
“I don’t know. The evidence is so circumstantial-it’s going to be hard to sell people on it. For instance, you. Do you buy Grafalk as master criminal?”
He gave a half smile. “I don’t know. We proved the figures on Grafalk this afternoon. And yet-that’s a big jump to stuffing someone into a freighter to die… What about Bledsoe?”
I shook my head. “Bledsoe was up in the Soo and his plane was down in Chicago. Not only that, someone sent his plane back down here in such a way as to implicate him for a different murder.”
I wondered what the waiters would do if I curled up on the plush cushion and went to sleep. I yawned. “The trouble is, if I can’t convince you, when you believe the financial evidence, I know I’ll never convince the cops enough to swear out a search warrant. It’s a big step, going to look at a rich man’s yacht. They have to be real convinced before they do something like that.”
I leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes, still holding the wineglass. “He can’t get away with it,” I muttered to myself. But it looked as though he might. Even with blowing up the Lucella, because nobody knew where the depth charges came from. If only I had evidence, someone who’d see Grafalk and Phillips at his boat Sunday morning-or some bloodstains on the foredeck of Grafalk’s yacht.
I opened my eyes at Ferrant. “I need to get some proof. And the cards are not going to be stacked all his way. They just can’t be. Even if he is as rich as Rockefeller.”