“Don’t you keep your boat out back here?”

Grafalk gave his rich man’s chuckle. He didn’t share his birds’ social indifference. “The beaches here have a very gradual slope—you can’t keep anything with more than a four-foot draw close to the shore.”

“Is there a harbor in Lake Bluff, then?”

“The closest public harbor’s in Waukegan. It’s extremely polluted, however. No, the commandant at Great Lakes Naval Training Station, Rear Admiral Jergensen, is a personal friend. I tie my sailboat up there.”

That was handy. The Great Lakes Naval Training Station lay on Lake Bluff’s northern border. Where would Grafalk keep his yacht when Jergensen retired? The problems the very rich face are different from yours and mine.

I sat in a bamboo chaise lounge. Grafalk opened a window. He busied himself with ice and glasses in a bar built into the room’s teak panels. I opted for sherry—Mike Hammer is the only detective I know who can think and move while drinking whiskey. Or at least move. Maybe Mike’s secret is he doesn’t try to think.

With his back still turned to me, Grafalk spoke. “If you weren’t spying on me, you must have been spying on Clayton. What’d you find out?”

I put my feet on the red-flowered cushion sewn to the bamboo. “Let’s see. You want to know what I think about Jeannine and what I found out about Clayton. If I did divorces I’d suspect you of sleeping with Jeannine and wondering how much Phillips knew about it. Except you don’t strike me as the type who cares very much what men think about your cavorting with their wives.”

Grafalk threw back his sun-bleached head and gave a great shout of laughter. He brought me a fluted tulip-shaped glass filled with straw-colored liquid. I sipped it. The sherry was as smooth as liquid gold. I wished now I’d asked for scotch. A millionaire’s whiskey might be something unique.

Grafalk sat facing me in a chintz-covered armchair. “I guess I’m being too subtle, Miss Warshawski. I know you’ve been asking questions around the Port. When I find you up here it makes me think you’ve found something out about Phillips. We carry a lot of grain for Eudora. I’d like to know if there’s something going on with their Chicago operation I should know about.”

I took another sip of sherry and put the glass on a tiled table at my right hand. The floor was covered with hand-painted Italian tiles in bright reds and greens and yellows and the table top matched them.

“If there are problems with Eudora Grain that you should know about, ask David Argus. My main concern is who tried to kill me last Thursday night.”