Next morning I got up, put on my good shirt, drove down to that gate, and asked the girl at reception to call the corporate loss prevention number off the poster in the break room, the one that’s been hanging there so long it’s yellow, and to tell them Alvie Renner was standing in the lobby with a notebook.
A woman named Priscilla Hoyt drove over from Pittsburgh and was there by one o’clock.
Here’s what a night man notices.
Every trailer that goes out of that building gets a numbered plastic seal on the door, and the number goes on the bill of lading, and the driver signs for it. That’s the whole system. A trailer that’s been opened and re-sealed has a different number than the one written on the paper, and nobody ever looks, because who has time.
I look. I’ve looked since 2011, when a fellow named Dutch taught me to walk the dock and read the seals before I locked the doors, because Dutch had seen it done at a place in Youngstown.
Thirty years of little notebooks in a drawer at my house. Date, dock door, trailer number, seal number, what time, who was on shift. Fourteen of them.
Nine times in two years a seal number on the door did not match the number on the paperwork in the office. Nine nights. And on all nine of those nights, the same two names are on the shift board — the shipping lead and a yard jockey, and neither one of them was scheduled on any of the eleven nights I noted where everything was clean.
Priscilla put my nine dates against the inventory variances. Every one of them lined up with a short count. She put them against the gate camera archive, which only holds ninety days but held enough. She put them against the yard jockey’s fuel card.
It took her nine days.
There were eleven pallets over two years, not one, and the last one — the one they hung on me — went out at 3:20 in the morning on a trailer that was supposed to be empty and sitting on the north fence.
They called the whole night shift in on a Thursday afternoon, on the clock, and the plant manager and Priscilla stood on the dock and said the names and said the police had it. Then they said mine, and said that a man who had been walking that dock for thirty years had been the only person in the building keeping a record, and that his notebook was now evidence in a felony case.
The security manager was gone that same week. Nobody made a speech about him.
They gave me my keys, twelve days of back pay, and a new thermos, stainless, with the company logo on it, which I appreciated and which I have not used one time.
The one I carry is the dented one. Dutch gave me that thermos in 1997 out of the back of his truck when I came on nights, and inside the cap he’d written four words in marker that have mostly worn off now.
Read the seals, kid.
Thirty years I figured I was just the man who locked the doors. Turns out I was the only one reading, and a man who writes down what he reads is a hard thing to walk out of a building.