I made a tour of the apartment to collect items of interest to me—Boom Boom’s first and last hockey sticks, a New Guinea hut totem from the living room, and some of the pictures of him in various hockey guises from the spare-room wall. Once more the picture of me in my maroon law school robes grinned incongruously from the wall. I took it off and added it to the stack under my arms. Once the clerks had gotten the papers to the right people and the cleaners had eliminated all the greasy dirt, I’d get the condo and the rest of his possessions onto the market. With any luck, I’d never have to visit this place again. I slung the items into my trunk and drove off. No one had ticketed me—maybe my luck was beginning to turn.

Next stop: the Eudora Grain offices. I badly wanted to talk to Bledsoe about why Mattingly had left Sault Ste. Marie in his airplane, but I still thought Phillips’s finances were an angle worth following up.

Late Saturday afternoon was an eerie time to visit the Port of Chicago. There wasn’t much activity at the elevators. The huge ships stood like sleeping giants, prepared to wake into violent activity if disturbed. I eased the Omega into the parking lot at Eudora’s Grain regional office and found myself tiptoeing across the blacktop to a side door.

A small bell was set into the wall with a little sign over it reading RING FOR DELIVERIES. I rang several times and waited five minutes. No one came. If there was a night watchman, he wasn’t yet on the premises. From my back pocket I pulled a house burglar’s compedium of commonly used picklocks and set out methodically to open the door.

Ten minutes later I was in Phillips’s office. Either he or the efficient Lois kept all the file cabinets locked. With an aggrieved sigh, I took out my picklocks again and opened all the cabinets in the room and the three in Lois’s desk outside his office door. I called Lotty and told her I wouldn’t be in for supper and set to work. If I’d been thinking, I would have brought some sandwiches and a thermos of coffee.

Phillips kept a strange collection of junk in his upper desk drawer—three different kinds of antacids; datebooks going back for six years, most of them without any appointments written in; nose drops; an old pair of overshoes; two broken calculators; and odd scraps of paper. These I carefully smoothed out and read. Most of them were phone messages which he’d crumpled up and tossed in the drawer. A couple from Grafalk, one from Argus. The others were all names I didn’t recognize, but I wrote them down in case I ran so far out of leads that I wanted to check them.