I sat at her kitchen table with my stack of contracts and went through them until I found one that matched the invoice I had in hand. It was for three million bushels of soybeans going from Chicago to Buffalo on July 24, 1981. The price quoted in the contract was $0.33 a bushel. The invoice billed it at $0.35. Two cents a bushel on three million bushels. Came out to sixty thousand dollars.

Grafalk had been the low bidder on this shipment. Someone else had bit $0.335 and a third carrier $0.34. Grafalk picked up the bid at $0.33 and billed it at $0.35.

Boom Boom’s list of Pole Star’s lost contracts proved even more startling. On the forms I’d gotten from Janet, Grafalk was listed as the low bidder. But Boom Boom’s notes showed Pole Star as the low bidder. Phillips either had entered the contracts wrong or the invoices Boom Boom referred to were wrong.

It was time to get some explanations from these clowns. I was tired of being shown the old shell game every time I wanted information out of them. I stuffed all the papers back into the canvas bag and headed for the Port.

It was close to noon when I turned off I-94 at 130th Street. The friendly receptionist at Eudora Grain was answering the phone and nodded to me in recognition as I walked past her into the inner office. The sales reps were hanging up their phones, straightening their ties, getting ready for lunch. In front of Phillips’s office sat Lois, her bouffant hair lacquered into place. The phone was propped under her chin and she made a pretense of looking at some papers. She was talking in the intense, muttering way people do when they’re trying to pretend they’re not really making personal calls.

She lifted her eyes momentarily to me as I walked up to the desk but didn’t interrupt her conversation.

“Where’s Phillips?” I demanded.

She murmured something into the telephone and put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Do you have an appointment?”

I grinned at her. “Is he in today? He doesn’t seem to be at home.”

“I’m afraid he’s away from the office on business. Do you want to make an appointment?”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll come back.” I circled behind her and looked in Phillips’s office. There weren’t any signs that anyone had been there since me on Saturday night—no briefcase, no jacket, no half-smoked cigars. I didn’t think he was lurking outside the window in the parking lot but I went over and peered behind the drapes.

My assault on her boss’s office brought Lois, squawking, into his den. I grinned at her again. “Sorry to interrupt your conversation. Tell your mother it won’t happen again. Or is it your sister?”

She turned red and stomped back to her desk. I left, feeling pleased with myself.