Live by Night (9 page)

Whether Paolo pulled a gun as he exited his car on a fine spring afternoon was still being ascertained. It was possible that he reached for his waistband. Also possible that he simply didn't raise his hands fast enough. Given that either Paolo or his brother Dion had executed state trooper Jacob Zobe on the side of a road very similar to this one, the troopers took no chances. Every officer fired his service revolver at least twice.

“How many cops responded?” Wilson asked.

“Seven, I believe, sir.”

“And how many bullets struck the felon?”

“Eleven is the number I heard, but the truth awaits a proper autopsy.”

“And Dion Bartolo?”

“Holed up in Montreal, I'd assume. Or nearby. Dion was always the smarter of the two. Paolo's the one you'd expect to stick his head up.”

The commissioner lifted a sheet of paper off one small pile on his desk and placed it atop another small pile. He looked out the window, seemed entranced by the Custom House spire a few blocks away. “The department can't let you walk back out of this office carrying the same rank you carried in, Tom. You understand that?”

“I do, yes.” Thomas glanced around the office he'd coveted for the past ten years and felt no sense of loss.

“And if I demoted you to captain, I'd have to have a division house to hand over to you.”

“Which you don't.”

“Which I don't.” The commissioner leaned forward, his hands clasped together. “You can pray exclusively for your son now, Thomas, because your career just reached its highest floor.”

S
he's not dead,” Joe said.

He'd come out of the coma four hours before. Thomas had arrived at Mass. General ten minutes after the doctor called. He'd brought the attorney Jack D'Jarvis with him. Jack D'Jarvis was a small, elderly man who wore wool suits of the most forgettable colors—tree bark brown, damp sand gray, blacks that appeared to have been left in the sun too long. His ties usually matched the suits; the collars of his shirts were yellowed, and on the rare occasions he wore a hat, it seemed too big for his head and perched on the tops of his ears. Jack D'Jarvis looked ready to be put out to pasture, and he'd looked that way for the better part of three decades, but no one but a stranger was stupid enough to believe it. He was the best criminal defense lawyer in the city, and few could name a close second. Over the years Jack D'Jarvis had dismantled at least two dozen ironclad cases Thomas had brought to the DA. It was said that when Jack D'Jarvis died, he'd spend his time in heaven springing all his former clients from hell.

The doctors examined Joe for two hours while Thomas and D'Jarvis cooled their heels in the corridor with the young patrolman manning the door.

“I can't get him off,” D'Jarvis said.

“I know that.”

“Rest assured, though, the second-degree murder charge is a farce and the state's attorney knows it. But your son will have to do time.”

“How much?”

D'Jarvis shrugged. “Ten years would be my guess.”

“In Charlestown?” Thomas shook his head. “There'll be nothing left of him to walk back out those doors.”

“Three police officers are dead, Thomas.”

“But he didn't kill them.”

“Which is why he won't get the chair. But pretend this is anyone else but your son and
you'd
want him to get twenty years.”

“But he is my son,” Thomas said.

The doctors exited the room.

One of them stopped to talk to Thomas. “I don't know what his skull is made of, but we're guessing it's not bone.”

“Doctor?”

“He's fine. No cranial bleeding, no loss of memory or speech disability. His nose and half his ribs are broken, and it'll be some time before he urinates without seeing blood in the bowl, but no brain damage that I can see.”

Thomas and Jack D'Jarvis went in and sat by Joe's bed and he considered them through his swollen black eyes.

“I was wrong,” Thomas said. “Dead wrong. And, sure, there's no excuse for it.”

Joe spoke through black lips crisscrossed with sutures. “You shouldn't have let them beat me?”

Thomas nodded. “I shouldn't have.”

“You going soft on me, old man?”

Thomas shook his head. “I should've done it myself.”

Joe's soft chuckle traveled through his nostrils. “With all due respect, sir, I'm happy your men did it. If you'd done it, I might be dead.”

Thomas smiled. “So you don't hate me?”

“First time I remember liking you in ten years.” Joe tried to raise himself off the pillow but failed. “Where's Emma?”

Jack D'Jarvis opened his mouth, but Thomas waved him off. He looked his son steadily in the face as he told him what had happened in Marblehead.

Joe sat with the information for a bit, turning it over. He said, somewhat desperately, “She's not dead.”

“She is, son. And even if we'd acted immediately that night, Donnie Gishler was not of the disposition to be taken alive. She was dead as soon as she got in that car.”

“There's no body,” Joe said. “So she's not dead.”

“Joseph, they never found half the bodies on
Titanic,
but the poor souls are no longer with us just the same.”

“I won't believe it.”

“You won't? Or you don't?”

“It's the same thing.”

“Far from it.” Thomas shook his head. “We've pieced together some of what happened that night. She was Albert White's moll. She betrayed you.”

“She did,” Joe said.

“And?”

Joe smiled, sutured lips and all. “And I don't give a shit. I'm crazy about her.”

“ ‘Crazy' isn't love,” his father said.

“No, what is it?”

“Crazy.”

“All due respect, Dad, I witnessed your marriage for eighteen years, and that wasn't love.”

“No,” his father agreed, “it wasn't. So I know whereof I speak.” He sighed. “Either way, she's gone, son. As dead as your mother, God rest her.”

Joe said, “What about Albert?”

Thomas sat on the side of the bed. “In the wind.”

Jack D'Jarvis said, “But rumored to be negotiating his return.”

Thomas looked over at him, and D'Jarvis nodded.

“Who're you?” Joe asked D'Jarvis.

The lawyer extended his hand. “John D'Jarvis, Mr. Coughlin. Most people call me Jack.”

Joe's swollen eyes opened as wide as they had since Thomas and Jack had entered the room.

“Damn,” he said. “Heard of you.”

“I've heard of you too,” D'Jarvis said. “Unfortunately, so has the whole state. On the other hand, one of the worst decisions your father has ever made could end up being the best thing that could have happened to you.”

“How so?” Thomas asked.

“By beating him to a pulp, you turned him into a victim. The state's attorney isn't going to want to prosecute. He
will
but he won't want to.”

“Bondurant is state's attorney these days, right?” Joe asked.

D'Jarvis nodded. “You know him?”

“I know of him,” Joe said, the fear apparent on his bruised face.

“Thomas,” D'Jarvis asked, watching him carefully, “do you know Bondurant?”

Thomas said, “I do, yes.”

C
alvin Bondurant had married a Lenox of Beacon Hill and had produced three willowy daughters, one of whom had recently married a Lodge to great notice in the society pages. Bondurant was a tireless advocate of Prohibition, a fearless crusader against all manner of vice, which he proclaimed was a product of the lower classes and inferior races who'd been washing ashore in this great land the last seventy years. The last seventy years of immigration had been primarily limited to two races—the Irish and the Italians—so Bondurant's message wasn't particularly subtle. But when he ran for governor in a few years, his donors on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay would know he was the right man.

Bondurant's secretary ushered Thomas into his office on Kirkby and closed the doors behind them. Bondurant turned from where he stood by the window and gave Thomas an emotionless gaze.

“I've been expecting you.”

Ten years ago, Thomas had swept Calvin Bondurant up in a raid on a rooming house. Bondurant had been keeping time with several bottles of champagne and a naked young man of Mexican descent. In addition to a burgeoning career in prostitution, the Mexican turned out to be a former member of Pancho Villa's División del Norte who was wanted in his homeland on charges of treason. Thomas had deported the revolutionary back to Chihuahua and allowed Bondurant's name to vanish from the arrest logs.

“Well, here I am,” Thomas said.

“You turned your son the criminal into a victim. That's an amazing trick. Are you that smart, Deputy Superintendent?”

Thomas said, “Nobody's that smart.”

Bondurant shook his head. “Not true. A few people are. And you might be one of them. Tell him to plead. There are three dead cops in that town. Their funerals will be all over the front pages tomorrow. If he pleads to the bank robbery and, I don't know, reckless endangerment, I'll recommend twelve.”

“Years?”

“For three dead cops? That's light, Thomas.”

“Five.”

“Excuse me?”

“Five,” Thomas said.

“Not a chance.” Bondurant shook his head.

Thomas sat in his chair and didn't move.

Bondurant shook his head again.

Thomas crossed his legs at the ankle.

Bondurant said, “Look.”

Thomas cocked his head slightly.

“Let me disabuse you of a notion or two, Deputy Superintendent.”

“Chief inspector.”

“I'm sorry?”

“I was demoted yesterday to chief inspector.”

The smile never reached Bondurant's lips but it slipped through his eyes. A glint and then gone. “Then we can leave unsaid the notion I was going to dispel for you.”

“I have no notions or illusions,” Thomas said. “I'm a practical man.” He removed a photograph from his pocket and placed it on Bondurant's desk.

Bondurant looked down at the picture. A door, faded red, the number 29 in its center. It was the door to a row house in Back Bay. What fluttered through Bondurant's eyes this time was the opposite of mirth.

Thomas placed one finger on the man's desk. “If you move to another building for your liaisons, I'll know within an hour. I understand you're building quite the war chest for your run for the governor's office. Make it deep, counselor. A man with a deep war chest can take on all comers.” Thomas placed his hat on his head. He tugged at the center of the brim until he was sure it sat straight.

Bondurant looked at the piece of paper on his desk. “I'll see what I can do.”

“
Seeing
what you can do is of little interest to me.”

“I'm one man.”

“Five years,” Thomas said. “He gets five years.”

I
t was another two weeks before a woman's forearm washed up in Nahant. Three days after that, a fisherman off the coast of Lynn pulled a femur into his net. The medical examiner determined that the femur and the forearm came from the same person—a woman in her early twenties, probably of Northern European stock, freckle-skinned and pale of flesh.

I
n
The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Joseph Coughlin
, Joe pled guilty to aiding and abetting an armed robbery. He was sentenced to five years and four months in prison.

H
e knew she was alive.

He knew it because the alternative was something he couldn't live with. He had faith in her existence because not to believe left him feeling stripped and flayed.

“She's gone,” his father said to him just before they transferred him from the Suffolk County Jail to Charlestown Penitentiary.

“No, she's not.”

“Listen to yourself.”

“No one saw her in the car when it went off the road.”

“At high speed in the rain at night? They put her in the car, son. The car went off the road. She died and floated off into the ocean.”

“Not until I see a body.”

“The
parts
of the body weren't enough?” His father held a hand up in apology. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “What will it take for you to accept reason?”

“It's not reason that she's dead. Not when I know she's alive.”

The more Joe said it, the more he knew she was dead. He could feel it in the same way he could feel that she'd loved him, even as she'd betrayed him. But if he admitted it, if he faced it, what did he have left but five years in the worst prison in the Northeast? No friends, no God, no family.

“She's alive, Dad.”

His father considered him for some time. “What did you love about her?”

“I'm sorry?”

“What did you love about this woman?”

Joe searched for the words. Eventually, he stumbled over a few that felt less inadequate than the rest. “She was becoming something with me that was different than what she showed to the rest of the world. Something, I dunno, softer.”

“That's loving a potential, not a person.”

“How would you know?”

His father cocked his head at that. “You were the child that was supposed to fill the distance between your mother and me. Were you aware of that?”

Joe said, “I knew about the distance.”

“Then you saw how well that plan worked out. People don't fix each other, Joseph. And they never become anything but what they've always been.”

Joe said, “I don't believe that.”

“Don't? Or won't?” His father closed his eyes. “Every breath, son, is luck.” He opened his eyes and they were pink in the corners. “Achievement? Depends on luck—to be born in the right place at the right time and be of the right color. To live long enough to be in the right place at the right time to make one's fortune. Yes, yes, hard work and talent make up the difference. They are crucial, and you know I'd never argue different. But the
foundation
of all lives is luck. Good or bad. Luck is life and life is luck. And it's leaking from the moment it lands in your hand. Don't waste yours pining for a dead woman who wasn't worthy of you in the first place.”