Chapter Four B: The Interview That Failed
Daniel hardly slept. At five the next morning he walked to the diner before his shift, thinking he might find Marcel there. Instead he found Kent unlocking the doors and trying to maneuver a supply trolley over the threshold. Daniel caught the front wheel before a crate of glasses fell.
“You want a medal for that?” Kent muttered.
“I want you to tell me whether anybody called about me.”
Kent hesitated. “Two people. A woman asking if you still worked here. A man asking what time you finish. I said we don’t give out staff schedules.”
Daniel hadn’t expected that answer. “Thank you.”
“Don’t make a thing out of it. I don’t need strangers hanging around.”
Inside, the short-order cook, Bea, was cutting lemons. She was sixty, compact, and possessed of a habit of answering every question with another question.
“What kind of trouble?” she asked when Daniel told her about the visitors.
“Not sure yet.”
“Then be sure before you start calling it trouble.”
She pointed toward the small radio on the shelf. A local broadcast was advertising a ribbon-cutting at North Pier: a new dining hall, restored according to the traditions of the Harbor Night Shift Cooperative, would bring dignity to waterfront workers. An enthusiastic host described the project as a celebration of the city and a triumph of partnership.
“They’ve bought the story before they’ve opened the doors,” Bea said.
Daniel listened to the cheerful music beneath the advertisement. His father’s cooperative had apparently become a marketing concept. The thought was absurd enough to make him angry, but anger alone would not tell him what to do.
At seven, a woman with cropped silver hair came into the diner wearing a reflective jacket. She ordered black coffee and watched Daniel work. When he brought her check, she said, “Nathan Brooks taught me how to shut down a compressor without ruining the motor.”
Daniel set down the pen. “Did you know him?”
“Long enough to know he never asked for help until after the dangerous part was over.” She introduced herself as Lorna Quill, a former terminal dispatcher. “I heard an Orsini man came asking about you.”
“News travels fast.”
“Along the waterfront, bad news travels before the person who made it.”
Lorna didn’t want to meet at Nathan’s garage or discuss the old fire in public. She said a redevelopment interviewer had visited her two weeks earlier, asking her to appear at the opening of the new dining hall. They had prepared a statement for her to read, praising the waterfront’s cooperative spirit. She refused when she noticed the text called the original kitchen a charitable project run by local benefactors.
