“Martin, you’re not a dummy. Think it through. It looks like you and Grafalk were in collusion on those shipping orders. Mattingly flew back to Chicago in your plane and Phillips’s body was found on your ship. If I was a cop, I wouldn’t look too much further—if I had all that information.”

He made a wrenching gesture with his right arm. Frustration.

“All right. It’s true,” he shouted. “I did let Niels have some of my orders. Are you going to put me in jail for it?”

I didn’t say anything.

After a brief pause he continued more calmly. “I was trying to put financing together for the Lucella. Niels was getting desperate for orders. The steel slump was hurting everyone, but Grafalk was really taking it on the chin because of all those damned small ships of his. He told me he would let the story of my evil past out to the financial community if I didn’t give him some of my orders.”

“Could that really have hurt you?”

He gave a wry smile. “I didn’t want to find out. I was trying to raise fifty million dollars. I couldn’t see the Fort Dearborn Trust giving me a nickel if they knew I’d served two years for embezzling.”

“I see. And then what?”

“Oh, as soon as the Lucella was launched I told Niels to publish and be damned. As long as I’m making money no one is going to care a tinker’s dam about my record. When you need money, they make you sign an acolyte’s pledge before they give it to you. When you’ve got it—they don’t care where it came from. But Niels was furious.”

“It’s a might big jump from pressuring you over a few grain orders to blowing up your ship, though.”

He insisted stubbornly that no one else cared enough. We talked about it for half an hour or more, but he wouldn’t budge. I told him finally that I’d investigate Niels as well.

The golden retriever had departed with her people by the time we got to our feet and climbed back over the sand hills to the parking lot. A few children stared at us incuriously, waiting for the grown-ups to disappear before launching their own reckless deeds.

I drove Bledsoe back to the steel mill, now heavily thronged with Indiana and Chicago police. The four o’clock shift was arriving and I dropped him at the gates. The cops might want to talk to me later, as a witness, but they’d have to find me—I had other things to do.

Chapter 21

Fishing Trip