Everything here was built on a giant scale. A series of cranes towered over the slips for the ships. Giant teeth hovered over one huge vessel and easily lifted the back of a fifty-ton semi from a stack and lowered it onto a waiting truck bed. Some ten ships were docked here at the main facility, flying the flag of many nations.
All the Port buildings are constructed from the same tan brick, two stories high. The Grafalk Steamship Line offices occupied all of one of the larger blocks halfway along the wharf. A receptionist, middle-aged and pleasant, recognized Phillips by sight and sent us on back to see Percy MacKelvy, the dispatcher.
Phillips was clearly a frequent visitor. Greeting various people by name, he led me through a narrow hall which crossed a couple of small rooms. We found the dispatcher in an office crammed with paper. Charts covered every wall and stacks of paper hid the desk, three chairs, and a good deal of the floor. A rumpled man in his mid-forties, wearing a white shirt long since wrinkled for the day, MacKelvy was on the phone when we came in. He took a cigar out of his mouth long enough to say hello.
He grunted into the phone, moved a red tack on a chart of the lakes at his right hand, punched a query into a computer terminal next to the phone, and grunted again. Finally he said, “Six eighty-three a ton. Take it or leave it… Pick up on the fourth, six eighty-two… Can’t bring it any lower than that… No deal? Maybe next time.” He hung up, added a few numbers to the terminal, and snatched up a second phone which had started to ring. “This is a zoo,” he said to me, loosening his tie further. “MacKelvy… Yeah, yeah.” I watched as he followed a similar sequence with chart, tacks, and computer.
When he hung up he said, “Hi, Clayton. This the lady you mentioned?”
“Hi,” I said. “I’m V. I. Warshawski. My cousin Bernard Warshawski was killed last Monday when he fell under the Bertha Krupnik’s propeller.”
The phone was ringing again. “Yeah? MacKelvy here. Yeah, hold on just a second… You figuring the Bertha was at fault somehow?”
“No. I have some personal concerns as my cousin’s executor. I’d like to know if anyone saw the accident. Phillips here says you can tell me when the Bertha might be expected, either back here, or at some port where I could go talk to the crew.”
“Hi, Duff,” he spoke into the phone. “Sulphur from Buffalo? Three eighty-eight a ton, pick up on the sixth, deliver to Chicago on the eighth. You got it.” He hung up. “What’s the scoop, Clayton? She likely to sue?”
Phillips was standing as far from the desk as possible in the crowded room. He stood very still as it make himself psychologically as well as physically remote. He shrugged. “David has expressed some interest.”
“What about Niels?”
“I haven’t discussed it with him.”
I put my hands on the mass of papers and leaned across the desk as the phone rang again.
“MacKelvy here… Hi, Gumboldt. Hold on a sec, will you?”
“Mr. MacKelvy, I’m not a hysterical widow trying to get financial restitution from the easiest possible source. I’m trying to find anyone who might have seen my cousin in the last minutes of his life. We’re talking about an open dock at ten in the morning. I can’t believe not a living soul saw him. I want to talk with the crew on the Bertha just to make sure.”
“Yeah, Gum? Yeah… yeah… Toledo on the sixteenth? How about the seventeenth? Can’t help ya, fella. Night of the sixteenth? Say two-three in the morning?… Okay, fella some other time.” He shook his head worriedly. “Business is rotten. The steel slump’s killing us and so are the thousand-footers. Thank God, Eudora’s still shipping with us.”
The constant interruptions were getting on my nerves. “I’m sure I can find the Bertha Krupnik, Mr. MacKelvy. I’m a private investigator and I’m used to tracking things down. An active ship on the Great Lakes can’t be that difficult to locate. I’m just asking you to make it easier.”
MacKelvy shrugged. “I’ll have to talk to Niels. He’s coming down here for lunch, Miss-who’d you say?-and I’ll check with him then. Stop back here around two. Right, Clayton?”
The phone rang again. “Who’s Niels?” I asked Phillips as we walked out of the office.
“Niels Grafalk. He owns Grafalk Steamship.”
“Want to give me a lift back to your office? I can pick up my car there and leave you to your meetings.”
His pale eyes were darting around the hall, as if looking for someone or trying to get help from someplace. “Uh, sure.”
We were in the front office, Phillips saying good-bye to the receptionist, when we heard a tremendous crash. I felt a shudder through the concrete floor and then the sound of glass breaking and metal screaming. The receptionist got out of her chair, startled.
“What was that?”
A couple of people came into the reception room from inside the building. “An earthquake?” “Sounds like a car crash.” “Was the building hit?” “Is the building falling over?”
I went to the outer door. Car crash? Maybe, but a damned big car. Maybe one of those semis they’d been loading?
Outside a large crowd was gathering. A siren in the distance grew louder. And at the north end of the pier a freighter stood, nose plowed into the side of the dock. Large chunks of concrete had broken in front of it like a metal road divider before a speeding car. Glass fragments broke loose from the sides of the ship as I moved with the crowd to gawk. A tall crane at the edge of the wharf twisted and slowly fell, crumpling on itself like a dying swan.
Two police cars, blue lights flashing, squealed to a stop as close to the disaster as possible. I jumped to one side to avoid an ambulance wailing and honking behind me. The crowd in front of me parted to let it through. I followed quickly in its wake and made it close to the wreck.
A crane and a couple of forklift trucks had been waiting at dockside. All three were thoroughly chewed up by the oncoming freighter. The police helped the ambulance driver pry one of the forklift drivers out of the mess of crumpled steel. An ugly sight. The crowd-stevedores, drivers, crew members-watched avidly. Disasters are good bowling-league conversation pieces.
I turned away and found a man in a dirty white boiler suit looking at me. His face was sunburned dark red-brown and his eyes were a deep bright blue. “What happened?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Ship rammed the dock. My guess is they were bringing it in from the engine room and someone went full ahead instead of full astern.”
“Sorry, I’m a stranger here. Can you translate?”
“Know anything about how you steer a ship?”
I shook my head.
“Oh. Well, it’s hard to explain without showing you the controls. But basically you have two levers, one for each screw. Now if you’re out at sea you steer by turning the wheel. But coming into the dock, you use the levers. Putting one full ahead and one full astern-toward the back, that is-will swing you to the right or the left, depending on which one you move which way. Putting both of them full astern is like putting your car in reverse. Slows the ship way down and brings you gently up against the wharf. It looks like some poor bastard thought that was what he was doing but went full ahead instead.
“I see. It seems strange that a little thing like that could cause so much damage.
“Well, if you drove your car at the pier-assuming you could get down in the water and do it-you’d be chewed up and the concrete walls would laugh at you. But your car-what kind do you drive?-about a ton and two hundred horsepower? Now that thing has twelve thousand horsepower and weighs about ten thousand tons. They did the equivalent of flooring her accelerator and that’s the result.”