Chapter 7 - The View from Pier 4
The wind at Blackwood Basin always came from the northeast, smelling of salt water, diesel exhaust, and the sulfurous mud of the dredged channel.
It was three in the afternoon on Wednesday, twenty-four hours before the maritime commission was scheduled to cast its final vote on the deep-water harbor concessions.
I stood on the edge of Pier 4, where the new fifty-ton gantry crane was already being bolted to the reinforced concrete footings. Above me, the steel lattice reached ninety feet into the grey sky, its counterweights painted in the high-visibility yellow of the Tenth Street Logistics Corporation.
Beside me stood Joe Kowalski.
Joe was seventy-one, with hands that looked like cured hams and a back that had been bent into an iron curve by forty years of driving drift-pins into rail plates. He was wearing his orange safety vest over a faded denim jacket, his hard hat grey with cement dust.
"We hit forty-four feet at the low-water mark this morning, Daniel," Joe said, squinting out through the smoke of his pipe toward the channel buoys. "The Dutch dredger finished the second pass through the sandbar. You could bring an iron ore carrier through that gut right now and not scrape the barnacles off her keel."
"Good," I said.
"The railroad people were down here at noon," Joe added, turning his head to spit into the green water between the pilings. "Two fellows in grey suits with briefcases from Philadelphia. They asked who was in charge of the wharfage rights."
"What did you tell them?"
"I told them the owner was up on Tenth Street having a bowl of cabbage soup with his mother," Joe said, a dry, wheezing chuckle rattling in his chest. "They didn't like that. They said they had an option on the river frontage signed by Richard Holloway back in ninety-six."
"They don't have an option," I said. "They have an unrecorded memorandum of understanding that expired during the second Bush administration. Marcus filed the certificate of abandonment with the state transport board three hours ago."
A horn sounded from the perimeter gate.
A single car—not a limousine, not a town car, but an eight-year-old Buick LeSabre with a rusted rocker panel and a missing hubcap—was idling at the barrier.
The security guard looked up toward the pier, saw me, and held up three fingers.
"Let him in," I said into my radio.
The Buick came down the gravel road slowly, its shocks groaning over the ruts left by the concrete mixers. It stopped thirty feet from the gantry crane, its engine coughing twice before dying in a cloud of blue exhaust.
The driver’s door opened, and Daniel Vance-Caldwell—the judge’s son, Caroline’s second cousin, the boy who had held the silver tongs at the mahogany bar while my mother was in the water—stepped out onto the crushed stone.
He wasn't wearing his blue blazer.
He wore a pair of stiff, new work pants from a discount store, still showing the creases from the package, and a cheap nylon windbreaker that bore the logo of an auto-parts warehouse in Elizabeth. His face was white, his eyes darting toward the steel crane above us as if he expected a cable to snap and drop forty tons of counterweight onto his skull.
He didn't walk like a boy who had spent his summers sailing twelve-meter sloops in Narragansett Bay. He walked like a man who was walking into a parole office.
"Daniel," he said, stopping five feet from the edge of the pier.
"It’s Mr. Vance on this dock, Caldwell," Joe Kowalski said, not looking up from his pipe. "You’re not on the terrace now."
The boy swallowed. A small, dry click sounded in his throat.
"Mr. Vance," he corrected himself.
"What do you want, Caldwell?" I asked. I didn't turn around to face him; I kept my eyes on the channel, where a tug was guiding the first barge of cement pilings toward the southern slip.
"My father sent me," the boy said. His voice was unsteady, fighting the drone of the crane's generator fifty yards away. "He... he couldn't come himself. The state medical board took his license this morning. They’re auditing his private clinic accounts from the ninety-two expansion."
"I know," I said. "Marcus filed the audit petition at ten."
"He has two hundred thousand dollars left in his personal savings, Mr. Vance," the boy said, taking a step closer, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his nylon jacket. "That’s all there is. The house in Princeton is under a federal tax lien. If they seize that, he has nowhere to go. He’s seventy-six. He has a pacemaker."
"What did he tell you to ask for?"
"He wants to buy the release," Caldwell whispered. "The release on the chancery seal. The one you have in Jersey City. He says if you don't introduce the seal into the federal record on Thursday, he can take a voluntary retirement from the bar without criminal charges. He’ll sign over the rest of the river shares. All of them."
I turned around then.
I looked at his shoes. They were new work boots, bought that morning, the yellow leather clean and unblemished by cement dust or grease.
"You were the one holding the phone, weren't you?" I asked.
The boy blinked. "What?"
"At the fountain," I said. "When Caroline pushed her. You were the one standing behind Victoria, holding the phone with both hands so you could get her face when she came up through the pond."
His skin went from pale to the color of wet chalk. "I... I was just... Victoria told me to film it for the group. We didn't know she was your mother, Mr. Vance. We thought she was just... someone from the catering service."
"And if she had been someone from the catering service?"
He didn't have an answer. His mouth hung open by half an inch, his tongue dry against his lower teeth.
"If she had been an old woman who worked thirty years for fifty dollars a coat, it would have been funny?" I asked.
"No," he whispered. "No, sir."
"Go back to your father, Caldwell," I said.
"Mr. Vance, please—"
"Tell your father that the vellum goes to the grand jury at ten o'clock tomorrow morning," I said, my voice as level as the tide in the slip. "Tell him that if he wants to save his pension, he can hire a public defender from the legal aid society on Tenth Street. They’re very good with forgery cases. They handle three hundred of them a year from the lower wards."
"He’ll die in prison," the boy said, his eyes welling with that sudden, useless grief that comes to people who have never had to pay for a funeral out of a cigar box on a dresser.
"Then he’ll die where a lot of men from this district died," I said. "Except they went there for stealing five dollars' worth of coal to keep their children warm, and he went there for stealing an entire county to keep his daughter in riding horses."
I turned back to the water.
"Joe," I said.
"Yeah, Daniel."
"Get this LeSabre off the wharf," I said. "The delivery trucks for the gantry cables are due in ten minutes, and I don't want the road blocked by scrap metal."
"Right away, boss," Joe said.
May you like
He took his pipe from his mouth, pointed the stem toward the perimeter gate, and looked at the boy with the clean work boots.
"You heard the man," Joe said. "Turn it around. And watch the edge on the turn. The water’s forty feet deep down there, and nobody’s coming in after you."
