“You know anything about the water in the holds of the Lucella?”

Margolis shrugged. “Guess they found the guy who did it. She was tied up here, waitin’ to load, when it happened. They pulled off the hatch covers and started to pour into the central hold when someone saw there was water in the thing. So they had to move her off and clean ’em out. Quite a mess, by the time they got twenty thousand bushels in there.”

“My cousin didn’t discuss it with you?”

Margolis shook his head. “Course, we didn’t talk too much. He’d ask me about the load and we’d chat about the Hawks’ chances but that’d be about it.”

He kept looking at the elevator as we were talking and I realized I was keeping him from his job. I couldn’t think of anything else to ask. I thanked him for his time and took off for Eudora Grain’s regional headquarters.

The receptionist vaguely remembered me from the other day and smiled at me. I reminded her who I was and told her that I had come to go through my cousin’s papers to see if he’d left anything personal down there.

She spoke to me between phone calls. “Why, certainly. We all liked Mr. Warshawski very much. It was a terrible thing that happened to him. I’ll just get his secretary to come out and get you … I hope you weren’t planning to see Mr. Phillips, because he’s out of the office right now … Janet, Mr. Warshawski’s cousin is here. She wants to look at his papers. Will you come out for her? … Good morning, Eudora Grain. One moment, please … Good morning, Eudora Grain … Won’t you sit down, Miss Warshawski? Janet will be right here.” She went back to her waiting calls and I flipped through the Wall Street Journal lying on the table in the waiting area.

Janet proved to be a woman at least twenty years my senior. She was quiet and well put together in a simple shirtwaist dress and canvas wedgies. She didn’t wear makeup or stockings—no one down in the Port dressed up as much as they do in the Loop. She told me she had come to the funeral and she was sorry she hadn’t talked to me then, but she knew what funerals were like—you had enough to do with your own relations without a lot of strangers bothering you.

She took me back to Boom Boom’s office, a cubbyhole, really, whose walls were glass from waist-height up. Like the Grafalk dispatcher MacKelvy’s, it had charts of the lakes covering all the walls. Unlike MacKelvy’s, it was extremely tidy.

I flipped through some reports lying on his desk top. “Can you tell me what Boom Boom was doing?”