Angelo concealed his annoyance with a cold smile. Slowly, very deliberately, he licked the chocolate-cupcake crumbs from his fingertips.
This guy, he thought, is an unmitigated pain in the ass. I’ve never seen anybody in such a fucking hurry. Unless, it suddenly occurred to him, someone’s told him something they haven’t bothered to tell me.
The detective lowered his feet to the ground and contemplated for a moment his own stack of completed manifests. Then he reached over, flicked through it and pulled one out. Ignoring Rand, he turned to the pier boss. “Hey, Tony, you got any other paper on this shipment?”
Piccardi glanced at the manifest of the Dionysos, then reached for a black looseleaf notebook. He kept one on every ship that left cargo on the pier.
It contained a copy of the bill of lading for each piece of cargo unloaded, the arrival notice sent to the broker handling the cargo, his delivery order cleared by Customs, and a pier sheet. Piccardi turned to the pier sheet for the ten barrels of diatome consigned to Durkee Filters in Queens.
It gave the name of the trucker who had made the pickup, the license number of his truck, the time he left the docks and the details of his load.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I remember this. Murphy usually picks this guy’s stuff up. Their guy didn’t come in that day. Guy in a Hertz truck made the pickup.”
Rand peered down at the manifest. “Angelo,” he said, “these barrels weigh five hundred pounds apiece.”
“No kidding?” Angelo gave Piccardi a look of illfeigned wonder. “Kid here, he’s got a mind like a computer.”
“So, in view of that, why are we wasting time on this when we’ve got two more piers to cover?”
Angelo twisted around on his stool until he faced the young agent. The smile, the wide toothy smile, was there, but his eyes had lost none of their chill. “Kid, you know something? You are right. Send this thing downtown, it’ll be ‘What’samatter? Can’t those guys divider But just for us, let’s check it out. That way tonight, over there in that Howard Johnson Motor Lodge they got you in, you put your head on the pillow, you’re going to sleep. You’ll know you’ve covered. Haven’t left anything hanging. Tony,” the detective interrogated the pier boss, “anybody here deal with this likely to remember anything about it?”
Piccardi pointed to two names at the bottom of the pier sheet. “Maybe the checker and the loader that handled the stuff.”
Angelo got up, his knee joints creaking. “Paisan, how about you taking us up there and introducing us to them?” He gave a wave of his index finger to Rand. “Come on, kid. Here’s your chance to see what a Brooklyn pier looks like.”
The Brooklyn Ocean Terminal was an endless dark cavern as wide as a football field and twice as long. The odor of burlap mingled in the dust-clogged air with the scent of spices, nuts and coffee, giving it a strange resemblance to an Oriental bazaar. At intervals along its length, shafts of light penetrated the dimness from the doors opening onto the ships tied up at the pier. Forklift trucks darted and circled through the pools of light they formed like water bugs skimming the surface of a pond.
Marching down the pier, Angelo Rocchia and Jack Rand passed pyramiding stacks of Greek olive oil, silver cans of cornseed oil from Turkey, dried raisins from the Sudan, sacks of Indian cashew nuts, bales of cotton from Pakistan, stinking cowhides from Afghanistan, burlap bags of coffee beans from Kenya.
The New Yorker waved at the row of goods disappearing into the shadows.
“You poke around in the corners, you wouldn’t believe the shit these longshoremen got stashed away.”
“Hey, Tony,” Angelo called after Piccardi, “tell me something. You get many rental trucks making pickups down here?”
“Naw,” Piccardi replied. “Two, three a week. Depends.”
He led them up to a cluster of longshoremen unloading pallets of copper tubing and beckoned to a short swarthy man, a cargo hook dangling from his right hand. Angelo noted the whites of the man’s eyes. They were spider-webbed with little pink tracings. Likes the vino, he thought.
Piccardi showed the man the sheet. “Guy here wants to know you remember anything about this pickup.”
Behind the man, work had stopped. The circle of longshoremen looked at Rand and Angelo in sullen, hostile silence. The docker didn’t even bother to look at Piccardi’s sheet. “Naw,” he said, his voice a hoarse rasp. “I wouldn’t remember nothing about it.”
Booze has got his voice too, Angelo mused. He reached into his pocket for a pack of Marlboros. It had been years since he’d given up smoking, but he always carried a pack, right beside his peanuts.
“Here, gumba,” he said to the docker in Italian, “have a smoke.”
As the man lit up, Angelo continued. “Look, what I got here got nothing to do with putting anybody locally in the can, you know what I mean?”
The docker gave Piccardi a wary glance. At that instant, all Angelo’s seemingly meaningless chatter in Piccardi’s office had its reward. With a barely discernible movement of his eyebrows, the pier boss indicated he was all right.
“What do them barrels look like?” Angelo prodded gently.
“Hey, you know, they’re big cans. Big fucking cans. Like garbage cans.”
“You remember the guy made the pickup?”
“No.”
“I mean, you know, was he a regular? A guy who knows his way around down here? Do the right thing and all?”
It was the tradition of the piers to “smear” the longshoremen who handled your load, to slip them five or ten dollars for their help. Angelo’s mention of the custom brought to the docker’s face the first intimation of a feeling, other than that of ill-will, that the detective had seen on it.
“Yeah.” The reply was a long growl. “Now I remember that jerk. He forgot.
We had to let him know something was dragging. You know-” he half whistled, half blew a spurt of air through his teeth-“put a little kabootz on him.
When he got the message, he come half a yard. Sure.” There was even a smile on the docker’s saturnine features. “I remember him.”
Angelo’s thick eyebrows rose. Who comes up with fifty bucks? he wondered. No Italian. No Irishman. In fact, no one who’s been around the docks. Has to be a stranger, a guy who isn’t onto it.
“You remember what he looked like?”
“Hey, you know, he was a guy. What could I tell you? A guy…
“Angelo.” Rand’s voice was sharp. “We’re wasting our time here. Let’s get on to the next dock.”
“Sure, kid, we’re on our way.” Angelo indicated Piccardi’s pier sheet. “How about the other guy that handled the load? The checker?”
“He’s on a break over at the Longshoremen’s Club.”
“Okay, kid, let’s stop in there on our way out.” Before Rand could articulate the protest Angelo knew was coming, the detective threw an arm around his shoulder. “Let me tell you what happens in an Italian club like this longshoremen’s place, kid,” he said, his voice a friendly growl. “They play Italian card games. You know how an Italian card game is? Everybody sits at the same side of the table.”
He gave a jovial laugh and slapped Rand on the back. “You interview guys at an Italian card game, it goes like this. `Who shot the guy?’ ‘Hey, I don’t know, I didn’t see nothin’. I was playing cards. Had my back to the door.’
So you ask the next guy, `What’d you see?T ‘Nothing, what could I tell you?
I was sitting my back to the door. Playing cards.’
“It’s always like that. Everybody sits on the same side. With their backs to the door. Nobody’s ever on the other three sides.” Angelo laughed, then stopped his march back down the pier. This guy, he told himself, is going to be no help to me in that club. I won’t get the time of day out of anybody with him standing beside me.