He invited me to dine with him, but I thought I’d better get to the police with my news about Mattingly. I’d told my tale to Bledsoe, and now to the insurance people. Although I hadn’t given Murray Ryerson the name of the man with binoculars I’d seen at the Soo, he was no dummy—he might easily tie it in with my interest in Mattingly. Bobby Mallory was not going to look at me kindly if he read the story first in the Herald-Star.

I felt uneasy as I moved my car onto Lake Shore Drive. My life had been threatened two weeks ago. Phillips was dead, possibly because of the veiled threat I’d left with his son Saturday night. Perhaps he’d panicked, threatened to reveal what he knew, and been killed for his pains. Mattingly was dead, probably to keep him from boasting in the locker room that he’d blown up a ship. Boom Boom was dead because he knew that Phillips was fiddling grain invoices. Why was I still driving around? Maybe they thought more people would be killed when the Lucella went up. They might have been relying on that to get rid of me and be thinking up some other accident for me now. Or maybe they just didn’t believe I knew anything important.

I tried comforting myself with that idea the rest of the way home, but I had known even less when my car was sabotaged ten days ago. It occurred to me as I exited at Belmont that the deaths in this case had been staged as a species of accident: Boom Boom had fallen overboard, Mattingly had been hit by a car, Phillips crushed in a self-unloader. If my car had killed me as it was supposed to, I don’t suppose anyone would have gone to great pains to find that the steering control was sabotaged.

I hadn’t been able to convince the police that there might be a connection between the night watchman’s death and Boom Boom’s. They wanted to treat the threat on me as a routine act of vandalism. In other words, the murderer had gauged the psychology of the situation accurately. Now that I was prepared to divulge what I knew about Mattingly, how likely were the police to tie that in with Kelvin and Boom Boom? Not terribly.

I was half tempted to keep the news to myself. But the police have a good machinery for sifting through large crowds of witnesses. If they did follow up on my information, they could find out who picked Mattingly up at Meigs last Friday far more readily than I.