“Mr. Warshawski thought rules like that were pretty stupid. So he’d just ignore them. Lois couldn’t stand him because he didn’t pay any attention to anything she said.” She smiled briefly, a tender, amused smile, not spiteful. Boom Boom must have livened up the place quite a bit. Stanley Cup winners don’t get there by too scrupulous attention to rules. Lois’s petty ways must have struck him as some kind of decrepit penalty box.

“Anyway, the week before he died, Mr. Warshawski pulled several months of contracts—all last summer’s, I think—and took them home with him. If Lois found out she’d really get me in trouble, because he’s gone and I was his secretary and she’d have to blame someone.”

“Don’t worry: I won’t tell anyone you told me. What did he do with them?”

“I don’t know. But I do know he took a couple of them in with him to see Mr. Phillips late Monday night.”

“Did they have any kind of argument?”

She shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know. We were all on our way out the door when he went in. Even Lois. Not that she’d say if she knew.”

I scratched my head. That was probably the origin of the rumors about Boom Boom stealing papers and fighting with Phillips. Maybe my cousin thought Phillips was enticing customers from the ancient Mr. Cagney in Toledo. Or that Phillips hadn’t been telling him everything he needed to know. I wondered if I’d be able to understand a shipping contract if I saw one.

“Any chance I could look at the files my cousin took home with him?”

She wanted to know why. I looked at her kind, middle-aged face. She had been fond of Boom Boom, her young boss. “I’m not satisfied with the accounts I’ve heard of my cousin’s death. He was an athlete, you know, despite his bad ankle. It would take more than a slippery wharf to get him into the lake. If he’d had a fight with Phillips over something important, he might have been mad enough to get careless. He had quite a temper, but he couldn’t fight Phillips with fists and sticks the way he could the Islanders.”

She pursed her mouth up, thinking it over. “I don’t think he was angry the morning he died. He came here before going over to the elevator, you know, and I’d say his mood was—excited. He reminded me of my little boy when he’s just pulled off some big stunt on his dirt bike.”

“The other thing I’m wondering is if someone might have pushed him in.”