A huge black man squatted next to him. He was sixty and overweight; he was wearing a light gray silk suit, gray silk shirt with a maroon tie, and gray alligator shoes. His face was coarse, deep lines ran down the sides of his mouth, and his hair was powdered with gray. But his eyes were large, soft, and kind, and his hand rested gently on Hawkins’s back.

“You sick, man?” he asked.

Hawkins looked past him and saw a gray Cadillac almost the color of the suit waiting at the end of the dock.

“Hey, boy,” the black man said, rubbing Hawkins’s back gently. “Nothin’ kin be so bad. I’ll git you a drink, a steak, find you a little nookie, you’ll be okay, boy.”

“I’m okay,” Hawkins said.

“No, you ain’t. You in awful condition . . . what happened to you?”

Hawkins looked at the other man’s gentle homely face and said, “A man I love is a murderer, and I can make him pay for it—” he stopped. The man put his hand under Hawkins’s arm and pulled him effortlessly to his feet. He brushed at Hawkins’s jacket.

“A man?” he said. “A lover man, a frien’, what?”

“Like . . . a father,” Hawkins answered.

The man stopped brushing and looked very serious. “You can’t bitch aroun’ with yo’ daddy, boy, no matter what he done.”

The man let Hawkins go, and after a moment Hawkins took the tape and the report out of his pocket. The man watched him closely as he walked to the very edge of the dock. He looked down at the river that ran at his feet, crumpled the report into a ball, drew back his arm, and threw the tape and report out into the river. The tape sank at once. The report fell slower, held up by the wind. It hit the water, bobbed, then blended with the other litter and Hawkins couldn’t see it anymore. Tears he couldn’t control ran down his face and the other man took his arm, clucked with sympathy, and led him gently but insistently off the dock to the sunny street.