Chapter 9 - The Harbor Clearance
The Red Hook Marine Terminal smelled of creosote, rotten cabbage, and the oily bilge water that gathered beneath the pier decking. It was four o’clock in the afternoon, two weeks after the funeral at Saint Patrick’s, and the winter sky over the East River had turned the color of an old galvanized bucket.
I sat in the small, glass-walled office above Pier 41.
The desk had belonged to Paulie Castiglione for fifteen years. It was made of cheap industrial steel with a green linoleum top, scarred with cigarette burns and ringed with brown circles from forty thousand cups of takeout espresso. In the top drawer, beside a box of three-inch drywall screws and an expired pistol permit from Nassau County, I had found three silver hairpins that had belonged to Isabelle.
She had dropped them there three months before she was murdered, probably while leaning over the desk to look at the shipping manifests for the summer house.
I had laid them on the blotter in a straight, parallel row.
Across from me sat Salvatore "The Goose" Giamatti, who ran the longshoremen’s local out of the hiring hall on Union Street. He was sixty, weighed two hundred and sixty pounds, and had four buttons missing from his leather work vest. His knuckles were gray with graphite grease from the crane winches, and he was sweating despite the fact that the steam radiator against the wall was clanking with half-frozen condensate.
"The Bishop’s people aren't showing up at the gate, Dominic," Sal said, his voice rough from forty years of yelling over diesel engines. "The three checkers from upstate... they haven't punched the clock since Tuesday. The boys from Local 1814 are asking who signs the vouchers for the Montreal run."
I didn't look at him. I was looking through the grease-filmed window at the pier below.
A flatbed truck was loading four massive crates of machine tools—the ones Grace had found in the records. Two men in blue coveralls were painting over the old Canadian freight stencils with black asphaltum paint, replacing them with the red-and-white shield of the Long Island Cold Storage Corporation.
"I sign the vouchers, Sal," I said.
"And the upstate people?"
"There are no upstate people," I said. "Thomas went out of business. The farm is closed."
Sal looked down at his boots. His heavy jaw worked, his tongue clicking against his molars in that dry, nervous habit all the old dock bosses had when the ownership changed without an announcement in the papers.
"Dominic," he muttered, leaning his elbows on the green linoleum. "Carmine Merlo had two people at the diner this morning. They were asking about the slip fees at Greenport. They said Paulie had promised the space to the Lucchese family for the Canadian grain."
I reached out and touched one of Isabelle’s hairpins with the tip of my forefinger. It was cold, thin, spring-tempered steel.
"Tell Carmine that the slips at Greenport belong to the Bennett family now," I said.
Sal’s eyes came up, small and wet like two black olives pressed into dough. "The cop's family?"
"Frank Bennett had a sister," I said. "She owns forty percent of the pier corporation as of yesterday morning. The deeds were filed in Riverhead by the surrogate court. If Carmine wants to berth a rowboat in Greenport, he can talk to her lawyer."
"Dominic... she’s a girl. She’s a domestic from the North Shore."
"She’s Frank Bennett’s sister," I said, my voice dropping an octave, becoming that flat, terrifying slate that made men look at their fingernails. "And she was in the room when Paulie died. She knows what an invoice looks like when it's written in lead, Sal. Do you want to explain the difference to her, or do you want me to do it?"
Sal stood up so fast his chair screeched four inches across the floor plates.
"No, Boss," he said, pulling his flat cap off his head and crushing it against his belly with both hands. "No. The local doesn't care whose name is on the stock certificates. We just want the cranes turning on the eight o'clock shift."
"The cranes will turn," I said. "Now get out of my office."
He left without closing the door.
I stayed at the desk until the harbor lights began to come on along the Brooklyn shore—pale, greenish-white sodium lamps that cast long, shivering ribbons of light across the greasy chop of the Buttermilk Channel.
My telephone gave a short, double-chirp.
I didn't reach for it immediately. I let it ring three times, listening to the dry, mechanical rhythm of the bell, then lifted the receiver.
"Yeah."
"Dominic." It was Grace. Her voice was clear, crisp, and completely free of the hospital smell that had clung to her two weeks ago. "The girls are finished with their tea."
"Did Olivia eat?"
"She ate two eggs and half a grapefruit," Grace said. "Then she told Mrs. Donnelly that the cook in the convent on Grand Avenue used to put nutmeg in the rice pudding, and she wanted to know why our kitchen didn't have any."
A strange, light feeling hit the center of my ribs—something that felt so much like a knife wound I had to put my hand against my vest to make sure the leather wasn't wet.
"Nutmeg," I said.
"She’s talking all the time now, Dominic," Grace said, her tone dropping into that quiet, steady cadence she used when the children were in the next room. "Sophie too. Nora told the butcher this morning that his dog had too many fleas on its tail."
I looked out at the lights of Manhattan across the bay. The towers stood against the dark like rows of lit chisels, cold and sharp and completely indifferent to whether a man in Brooklyn lived or died in his overcoat.
"I'm coming home, Grace," I said.
"Good," she said. "The driveway is iced over again. Sal is out there with the salt bucket, but you know how he is with his hip. Bring two bags of sand from the terminal if you have room in the trunk."
"I've got room," I said.
I hung up the phone.
May you like
I picked up Isabelle’s three silver hairpins from the green linoleum blotter. I didn't put them back in the drawer with the screws and the dead pistol permit. I slipped them into my waistcoat pocket, where they rested against the cold silver of her rosary beads, thin and sharp and clean against my ribs.
***
