We went on talking long after one of the junior cooks had cleared away the table and cleaned up the galley. Finally the chief engineer excused himself to go back to the engine room. He said I could question the other engineers and the four boilermen, but he didn’t think it would do me any good.

As he walked through the doorway, I said casually, “Were you in the engine room that night?”

He turned and looked me straight in the eye. “Yes, I was. And Yalmouth—my first engineer—was with me. We were going over the hydraulics preparatory to starting up the engines the next day.”

“Not out of each other’s sight all evening?”

“Not long enough to monkey with a car.”

He went on out the door. Bledsoe said, “Satisfied, Vic? Is Pole Star clean in your eyes?”

I shrugged in irritation. “I suppose so. Short of launching a full-scale investigation into everyone’s movements last Thursday night there’s not much else I can do to check up on you guys.” Something occurred to me. “You had a security force on board that night, didn’t you? Maybe Bemis can give me their names—they’d know if anyone had been climbing around with tools.” My villain might have persuaded a guard that he belonged on board: that probably wouldn’t be too difficult. But a guard would surely remember someone leaving the ship with a blowtorch and a ratchet wrench. Of course, if Bledsoe was behind the whole business, he might have paid off the guards, anyway.

I drank some cold coffee, looking at Bledsoe over the rim of the cup. “The whole thing turns on money, lots of money. It’s in the Eudora Grain contracts, but that’s not the only place.”

“True,” Bledsoe agreed. “There’s also a great deal in the freighter business itself, and there’s the amount I had to raise to pay for the Lucella. Maybe I embezzled it from Niels to pay for my flagship just before I left Grafalk Steamship.”

“Yes, and if he suspected that but couldn’t prove it, he might want to alert me to the possibility.”

Bledsoe smiled genially. “I can see that. You should definitely look into my finances as well as Phillips’s. I’ll tell my secretary to give you access to my files when we get back to Chicago.”

I thanked him politely. All that offer meant was, if he had something to hide, he had it concealed someplace other than in Pole Star’s books.

We spent the rest of the evening talking about opera. They’d had a collection of librettos in the Cantonville prison library and he’d read all of them. After he got out of prison he started attending the Cleveland Opera.