“He was killed, Vicki,” Bobby said with heavy sarcasm. “We were printing his office and doing everything else to it to find out if he was killed there.”

“Was he?”

Mallory drew a doodle on his desk pad. “He actually died of suffocation in the cargo holds. We don’t know where he received the head wound—that would have killed him anyway if he hadn’t suffocated first.”

My stomach turned over. What a terrible death. I didn’t like Phillips but I hadn’t wished him that kind of end. Although if he had pushed Boom Boom overboard … “When do they think it happened?”

“About six Sunday morning. Give or take a few hours. Now, Vicki: I want to know what you were doing in the guy’s office. And when you were doing it.”

“About six yesterday morning I went down there to talk to him about my cousin’s death. When he refused to answer my questions, I became enraged and hit him over the head with that brass thing he’s got sitting on the front of his desk.”

Bobby gave me such an angry stare, I felt my stomach turn over again. He called to McGonnigal, who was waiting outside the door. “Take down everything she says. If there’s one more smart remark, book her as a material witness. I’m getting sick of this.” He turned to me. “When were you down there?”

I looked at my fingernails on my right hand. Time for a manicure. The left was no better. “Saturday night.”

“And what were you doing there?”

“If I’d been burglarizing the place, I’d have been smart enough to wear gloves. I wasn’t. I was looking for information that might show Phillips led a life of crime.”

“Who’s your client, Vicki?”

I shook my head. “Privileged information, Bobby.”

We talked about that for a while. I still regarded Boom Boom as my client, but I was damned if I was going to tell Bobby that. Lock me up indeed.

“You can’t drag a body into the Port without someone noticing you,” I remarked at one point. “There’s a police guard at the gates. Have you asked them for the names of everyone who came into the Port early Sunday?”

Mallory gave me a withering look. “We can think of the easy ones, too. We’re questioning those people right now.”

“Was Niels Grafalk one of them?”

Bobby gave me a sharp glance. “No. Our guy didn’t see him. Why?”

I shrugged. “Just curious.”

Bobby kept asking why I was down at Phillips’s office, what information I had expected to find, and so on.

Finally I said, “Bobby, you think Boom Boom’s death was an accident. I think he was murdered. I was looking for something that would tie Eudora Grain into his death, because it happened at their elevator after he had been arguing with their man.”