Harbor Road turned west toward Sheridan a hundred yards beyond the Grafalk estate. The Bentley disappeared around the corner at a good clip. I put the Chevette into gear and was getting ready to follow when a dark blue sports car came around the bend. Going fifty or so, the driver turned left across my path. I braked hard and avoided a collision by inches. The car, a Ferrari, went on through the brick pillars lining the drive, stopping with a great squeal just clear of the road.
Niels Grafalk came up to the Chevette before I had time to disappear. I couldn’t fool him with some tale about opinion polls. He was wearing a brown tweed jacket and
an open-necked white shirt and his face was alive with anger.
“What the hell did you think you were doing?” he exploded at the Chevette.
“I’d like to ask you the same question. Do you ever signal before you turn?”
“What were you doing in front of my house anyway?” Anger had obscured his attention and he hadn’t noticed who I was at first; now recognition mixed with anger. “Oh, it’s you—the lady detective. What were you doing—trying to catch my wife or me in an indiscreet position?”
“Just admiring the view. I didn’t realize I needed life insurance to travel to the northern suburbs.” I started once more to move the car up Harbor Road, but he stuck a hand through the open window and seized my left arm. It was attached at the top to my dislocated shoulder and his grasp sent a shudder of pain through both arm and shoulder. I stopped the car once more.
“That’s right, you don’t do divorces, do you?” His dark blue eyes were flooded with emotion—anger, excitement, it was hard to tell. He released my arm and I turned off the ignition. My fingers strayed to my left shoulder to rub it. I let them fall—I wasn’t going to let him see he’d hurt me. I got out of the car, almost against my will, pulled by the force of his energy. That’s what it means to have a magnetic personality.
“You missed your wife.”
“I know—I passed her on the road. Now I want to know why you were spying on my property.”
“Honest Injun, Mr. Grafalk—I wasn’t spying. If I were, I wouldn’t do it right outside your front door like that. I’d conceal myself and you’d never know I was here.”
The blaze died down a bit in the blue eyes and he laughed. “What were you doing here, then?”
“Just passing through. Someone told me you lived here and I was gawking at it—it’s quite a nice place.”
“You didn’t find Clayton at home, did you?”
“Clayton? Oh, Clayton Phillips. No, I expect he’d be at work on a Monday afternoon, wouldn’t he?” It wouldn’t do to deny I’d been at the Phillipses—even though I’d used a fake name, Grafalk could check that pretty easily.
“You talked to Jeannine, then. What did you think of her?”
“Are you interviewing her for a job?”
“What?” He looked puzzled, then secretly amused. “How about a drink? Or don’t private eyes drink on duty?”
I looked at my watch—it was almost four-thirty. “Let me just move the Chevette out of the way of any further Lake Bluff menaces. It isn’t mine and I’d hate for something to happen to it.”
Grafalk was through being angry, or at least he had buried his anger below the civilized urbanity I’d seen down at the Port last week. He leaned against one of the brick pillars while I hauled at the stiff steering and maneuvered the car onto the grass verge. Inside the gates he put an arm around me to guide me up the drive. I gently disengaged it.
The house, made from the same brick as the pillars, lay about two hundred yards back from the road. Trees lined the front on both sides, so that you had no clue to how big the place really was as you approached it.
The lawn was almost completely green—another week and they’d have to give it the season’s first mowing. The trees were coming into leaf. Tulips and jonquils provided bursts of color at the corners of the house. Birds twittered with the business of springtime. They were nesting on some of the most expensive real estate in Chicago but they probably didn’t feel snobbish toward the sparrows in my neighborhood. I complimented Grafalk on the grounds.
“My father built the place back in the twenties. It’s a
little more ornate than we care for today—but my wife likes it, so I’ve never done anything to change it.”
We went in through a side door and back to a glassed-in porch overlooking Lake Michigan. The lawn sloped down steeply to a sandy beach with a little cabana and a couple of beach umbrellas. A raft was anchored about thirty yards off-shore but I didn’t see a boat.
“Don’t you keep your boat out back here?”
Grafalk gave his rich man’s chuckle. He didn’t share his birds’ social indifference. “The beaches here have a very gradual slope—you can’t keep anything with more than a four-foot draw close to the shore.”
“Is there a harbor in Lake Bluff, then?”
“The closest public harbor’s in Waukegan. It’s extremely polluted, however. No, the commandant at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Rear Admiral Jergensen, is a personal friend. I tie my sailboat up there.”
That was handy. The Great Lakes Naval Training Station lay on Lake Bluff’s northern border. Where would Grafalk keep his yacht when Jergensen retired? The problems the very rich face are different from yours and mine.
I sat in a bamboo chaise lounge. Grafalk opened a window. He busied himself with ice and glasses in a bar built into the room’s teak panels. I opted for sherry—Mike Hammer is the only detective I know who can think and move while drinking whiskey. Or at least move. Maybe Mike’s secret is he doesn’t try to think.
With his back still turned to me, Grafalk spoke. “If you weren’t spying on me, you must have been spying on Clayton. What’d you find out?”
I put my feet on the red-flowered cushion sewn to the bamboo. “Let’s see. You want to know what I think about Jeannine and what I found out about Clayton. If I did divorces I’d suspect you of sleeping with Jeannine and wondering how much Phillips knew about it. Except you don’t
strike me as the type who cares very much what men think about your cavorting with their wives.”
Grafalk threw back his sun-bleached head and gave a great shout of laughter. He brought me a fluted tulip-shaped glass filled with straw-colored liquid. I sipped it. The sherry was as smooth as liquid gold. I wished now I’d asked for scotch. A millionaire’s whiskey might be something unique.
Grafalk sat facing me in a chintz-covered armchair. “I guess I’m being too subtle, Miss Warshawski. I know you’ve been asking questions around the Port. When I find you up here it makes me think you’ve found something out about Phillips. We carry a lot of grain for Eudora. I’d like to know if there’s something going on with their Chicago operation I should know about.”
I took another sip of sherry and put the glass on a tiled table at my right hand. The floor was covered with hand-painted Italian tiles in bright reds and greens and yellows and the table top matched them.
“If there are problems with Eudora Grain that you should know about, ask David Argus. My main concern is who tried to kill me last Thursday night.”
“Kill you?” Grafalk’s bushy eyebrows arched. “You don’t strike me as the hysterical type, but that’s a pretty wild accusation.”
“Someone took out my brakes and steering last Thursday. It was only luck that kept me from careening into a semi on the Dan Ryan.”
Grafalk finished whatever he was drinking—it looked like a martini. Good old-fashioned businessman—no Perrier or white wine for him. “Do you have a good reason for thinking Clayton might have done it?”
“Well, he certainly had opportunity. But motive—no. No more than you or Martin Bledsoe or Mike Sheridan.”
Grafalk stopped on his way back to the bar and looked at me. “You suspect them as well? You’re sure the—uh—
damage took place at the Port? Could it have been vandals?”
I swallowed some more sherry. “Yes, yes, and possibly, although I don’t believe it. It’s true anyone could empty brake fluid with a little ingenuity—but what vandals carry around a ratchet wrench and a cutting torch just on the off chance that they’ll find a car to mutilate? They’re much more likely to slash tires, steal hubcaps, or smash in windows. Or all three.”
Grafalk brought over the sherry bottle and topped off my glass. I tried to pretend I drank the stuff every day and didn’t attempt to read the label. I’d never be able to afford this sherry anyway; what did I care what it was called?
He sat back down with a fresh martini and looked at me intently. He was turning something over in his mind. “How much do you know about Martin Bledsoe?”
I stiffened. “I’ve met him a few times. Why?”
“He didn’t tell you anything about his background at dinner on Thursday?”
I put the expensive glass down with a snap on the tiled table. “Now who is spying on whom, Mr. Grafalk?”
He laughed again. “The Port is a small community, Miss Warshawski, and gossip about shipowners travels fast. Martin hasn’t asked a woman out to dinner since his wife died six years ago. Everyone was talking about it. Likewise your accident. I knew you were in the hospital but I didn’t know someone had deliberately tampered with your car.”
“The
Herald-Star
gave me a front-page story—picture of my poor Lynx with its front missing and everything … Gossip about Bledsoe must be buried pretty deep. No one gave me a whiff about his background that sounded as troublesome as you’re seeming to imply.”
“It is buried deep. I’ve never told anyone about it, even when Martin left me and I was mad enough to want to hurt him badly. But if there has been a crime committed, if
there’s been an attempt on your life, you should know about it.”
I didn’t say anything. Outside, the house cast a lengthening shadow on the beach.
“Martin grew up in Cleveland. Bledsoe is his mother’s maiden name. He never knew who his father was. It could have been any of a series of drunken sailors on Cleveland’s waterfront.”
“That’s not a crime, Mr. Grafalk. And scarcely his fault.”
“True. That’s just to give you a flavor of his home life. He left when he was fifteen, lied about his age, and signed on to sail the Great Lakes. In those days you didn’t need the training you do now, and, of course, there was a lot more shipping—no waiting around union halls hoping to get called up for a job. Any warm body that could haul ropes and lift two hundred pounds would do. And Martin was strong for his age.” He paused to swallow his drink.
“Well, he was a smart fellow and he came to the attention of one of my mates. A man who liked to help the young men in his charge, not stand on their heads. When he was nineteen Martin ended up in our Toledo office. He obviously had far too many brains to waste just doing muscle work that any stupid Polack could handle.”
“I see,” I murmured. “Maybe you could find an opening for me on one of your boats if detective work palls.”
He stared at me for a minute. “Oh, Warshawski. I see. Don’t show your hackles—it’s not worth it. The waterfront is filled with Poles strong as oxen but not much brainpower.”
I thought of Boom Boom’s cousins and declined arguing the point.
“Anyway, to make a long story very short, Martin was operating in an environment he could understand intellectually
but not socially. He’d never had much formal education and he never learned any sense of ethics or morality. He was handling too much money and he siphoned some of it off. I lost a tough argument with my father about prosecuting Martin. I had found him, I had pushed him—I was only thirty myself at the time. I wanted to give him a second chance. Dad refused and Martin spent two years in a Cantonville prison. My father died the month before he was released and I hired him back immediately. He never did anything else criminal that I’m aware of—but if there’s some trouble between Pole Star and Eudora Grain or at Eudora Grain itself that involves money, you should know about Martin’s background. I’m relying on your discretion to keep it to yourself—I wouldn’t want Argus, or even Clayton, for that matter, to know about it if it turns out nothing’s wrong.”
I finished my sherry. “So that was what you meant that day at lunch. Bledsoe educated himself in prison and you were hinting you could tell people about it if you wanted to.”
“I didn’t think you’d caught that.”
“Even a boneheaded Polack couldn’t miss that one … Last week you were threatening him, today you’re protecting him—sort of. Which is it?”
Anger flashed across Grafalk’s face and was quickly erased. “Martin and I have—a tacit understanding. He doesn’t attack my fleet, I don’t tell people about his disreputable past. He was making fun of the Grafalk Line. I was backing him off.”
“What do
you
think is going on at Eudora Grain?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve leaped to a couple of conclusions, based on my investigations down at the Port. You think there might be some kind of a financial problem down there. You’re concerned enough to reveal a well-concealed truth about
Bledsoe. Not even his ship’s officers know it—or if they do, they’re too loyal to betray it. You must think something pretty serious is wrong.”
Grafalk shook his head and gave a slightly condescending smile. “Now
you’re
leaping to conclusions, Miss Warshawski. Everyone knows you’ve been looking into your cousin’s death. And they know you and Phillips have had a few words together—you just can’t keep secrets in a closed community like that. If there is something wrong at Eudora Grain, it would have to involve money. Nothing else important could be wrong there.” He swirled the olive in his glass. “It’s none of my business—but I do periodically wonder where Clayton Phillips gets his money.”
I looked at him steadily. “Argus pays him well. He inherited it. His wife did. Any reason why one of those possibilities wouldn’t be good enough?”
He shrugged. “I’m a very wealthy man, Miss Warshawski. I grew up with a lot of money and I’m used to living with it. There are plenty of people without money who are at ease with and around it—Martin’s one and Admiral Jergensen another. But Clayton and Jeannine aren’t. If they inherited it, it was an unexpected windfall late in life.”
“Still possible. They don’t have to measure it in your class to afford that house and their other amenities. Maybe a crabby old grandmother hoarded it so that it would give everyone the least possible pleasure—that happens at least as often as embezzlement.”