“I’ve got a couple of problems right now. One is, although Jeannine Phillips as good as told me that her husband pushed Boom Boom off the wharf, I don’t have any proof. She didn’t come out and say it in so many words, and nobody witnessed the drowning. I do have some skeletal proof about what was going on at Eudora. I could send that to Argus, but all it would do is discredit Phillips. Even if they make the tie-in with Grafalk stick, it doesn’t prove anything more criminal than taking kickbacks.”

The waiter took my plate with a contemptuous glance at the unfinished steak as the wine steward opened the second bottle of St. Émilion for us. Like many very thin men, Ferrant ate a great deal—he’d consumed a sixteen-ounce sirloin while we talked, along with oysters florentine, a special potatoes Filigree, and a platter of beefsteak tomatoes. He ordered chocolate cheesecake; I passed on dessert and had some more wine.

“The one thing I might be able to get Grafalk on is murdering Phillips.”

Ferrant sat up in his chair. “Go on, Vic! Grafalk murder Phillips?”

“He was last seen alive around one o’clock Sunday morning. The police figure he was in the holds and suffocated by 8:00 A.M. at the latest. So between one in the morning and eight in the morning someone bonked him on the head and got him onto a Great Lakes freighter. The police have a guard on duty at the entrance to the Port. Not that many people enter the Port that late at night, and they have a pretty good list of who came in. I’m sure that they’ve been through those people’s cars quite thoroughly. If one of them had driven Phillips’s body into the Port, they’d have nailed him for it. But they haven’t made an arrest.”

“Maybe the murderer brought him on board in a plastic bag and no blood got on his car … Was Grafalk at the Port that night?”

“He didn’t drive down there.”

“What’d he do—fly?”

“Don’t think so—a helicopter would be pretty noisy.”

“Then how did he get there?”

“Good heavens, Roger, I’m ashamed of you. You come from this island country, famous for four centuries of naval prowess. It ought to be the first thing to leap to your mind.”

His brow creased. “By boat? You must be joking.” He thought it over. “I suppose he could. But can you prove he did?”

“I don’t know. The evidence is so circumstantial—it’s going to be hard to sell people on it. For instance, you. Do you buy Grafalk as master criminal?”

He gave a half smile. “I don’t know. We proved the figures on Grafalk this afternoon. And yet—that’s a big jump to stuffing someone into a freighter to die … What about Bledsoe?”