“You a reporter?” said the cop.

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Even worse. Yo, Pete,” he called out to a young cop standing a few feet away. “What’s more trouble than a lawyer?”

“Two lawyers,” said Pete.

“Go tell Detective McDeiss to hold on to his wallet, there’s a lawyer here to see him.”

“Who died?” I managed to get out.

“Talk to McDeiss.”

“What happened?”

“Some guy got an early good-night kiss.”

Until then I hadn’t known if the victim was man or woman, now the possibilities narrowed. Half of the swooping bats dissolved and disappeared, yet that didn’t seem to help at all.

The pier was a flat sheet of cement, jutting out into the wide, slow Delaware River, just north of the Walt Whitman Bridge. Rail lines crisscrossed its length and an arcade-style warehouse squatted in its center, with trailers hitched at the bays in front like puppies sucking milk from their mother’s teats. Chocolate milk, because Pier 84 was the primary cocoa-receiving facility in the entire country. On Pier 84, burlap sacks, unloaded from heavy cargo ships, were thrown into shipping containers and hauled by rail and truck to the gay little chocolate town of Hershey, Pennsylvania. You would expect you could smell the sweet rich flavor of the chocolate even on the pier, but you’d be wrong. All you could smell that night was the wet of the river, the oxide of rusting metal, and something dark and desolate and sadly familiar beneath it all.

The warehouse now was in shadow, the river itself a thick black void. At the entrance to the pier, brown and low, squatted Frank’s, a lunch shack with tables out front and a blue sign reading: COLD BEER. To my right was the great steel bridge named after America ’s most American poet. I hear America singing, yeah yeah yeah. Not tonight, Walt, not with all the racket from the helicopters, not with that lump of something beneath the blue tarp.