The first mate shook his head regretfully. “I’m sorry, but we didn’t even realize there’d been an accident. We were tied up across the way, but none of our men was on deck when the ambulance came.”

I felt a sharp twist of disappointment. It seemed so—so unfair that Boom Boom could slide out of life without one person to see him do it. I tried to concentrate on the captain and his problem, but none of it seemed important to me. I felt stupid, as though I’d wasted a day. What had I expected to find out, anyway? Rushing around the wharf, playing detective, just to avoid admitting that my cousin was dead.

I suggested to Bemis and Winstein that they find the man they’d fired and question him more thoroughly, then pleaded a meeting in the Loop and asked the chief engineer to drive me back to the Eudora Grain parking lot. I picked up my Lynx there and headed north.

Chapter 7

Watchman, Tell Us of the Night

My apartment is the large, inexpensive top of a three-flat on Halsted, north of Belmont. Every year the hip young professionals in Lincoln Park move a little closer, threatening to chase me farther north with their condominium conversions, their wine bars, and their designer running clothes. So far Diversey, two blocks south, has held firm as the dividing line, but it could go any day.

I got home around seven, exhausted and confused. On the long drive back, snarled in commuter traffic for two hours, I’d wrestled with my depression. By the time I parked in front of my gray stone building the gloom had lifted a bit. I began wondering about some of the strange behavior down at the Port.

I poured myself a solid two fingers of Black Label and ran a bath. When you thought about it, it was very odd that Boom Boom had called the captain, made an appointment to discuss vandalism, and then died. It hadn’t even occurred to me to ask Bemis or Winstein about the papers Boom Boom might have stolen.

It sounded as though Boom Boom might have been playing detective. Maybe that was why he was calling me—not out of despair but for a professional consultation. What had he discovered? Something worth my finding out too? Was I still looking for some deeper importance to his death than an accident, or was there something to know?

I sipped my whiskey. I couldn’t sort my feelings out enough to tell. It was incredible to me that someone might kill Boom Boom to keep him from talking to Bemis. Still. What about the tension between Grafalk and Bledsoe? Boom Boom’s death following so quickly after his phone call to Bemis? The accident today at the wharf?