Live by Night

by Dennis Lehane

  Some mornings, depending on who got down to the casino first, one brought the other coffee. This morning, she brought it to him and they sat by the window in his room looking out at Scollay Square with its striped awnings and tall billboards as the first milk trucks puttered along Tremont Row. Penny told him that last night a fortune-teller had assured her she was destined to either die young or become a Trinitarian Pentecostal in Kansas. When Joe asked her if she was worried about dying, she said sure, but not half as much as moving to Kansas.

  When she left, he heard her talking to someone in the hall, and then Tim Hickey was standing in his doorway. Tim wore a dark pinstripe vest, unbuttoned, matching trousers, and a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned and no tie. Tim was a trim man with a fine head of white hair and the sad, helpless eyes of a death row chaplain.

  “Mr. Hickey, sir.”

  “Morning, Joe.” He drank coffee from an old-fashioned glass that caught the morning light rising off the sills. “That bank in Pittsfield?”

  “Yeah?” Joe said.

  “The guy you want to see comes in here Thursdays, but you’ll find him at the Upham’s Corner place most other nights. He’ll keep a homburg on the bar to the right of his drink. He’ll give you the lay of the building and the out-route too.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Hickey.”

  Hickey acknowledged that with a tip of his glass. “Another thing—’member that dealer we discussed last month?”

  “Carl,” Joe said, “yeah.”

  “He’s up to it again.”

  Carl Laubner, one of their blackjack dealers, had come from a joint that ran dirty games, and they couldn’t convince him to run a clean game here, not if any of the players in question looked less than 100 percent white. So if an Italian or a Greek sat down at the table, forget it. Carl magically pulled tens and aces for hole cards all night, or at least until the swarthier gents left the table.

  “Fire him,” Hickey said. “Soon as he comes in.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We don’t run that horseshit here. Agreed?”

  “Absolutely, Mr. Hickey. Absolutely.”

  “And fix the twelve slot, will you? It’s running loose. We might run a straight house, but we’re not a fucking charity, are we, Joe?”

  Joe wrote himself a note. “No, sir, we are not.”

  Tim Hickey ran one of the few clean casinos in Boston, which made it one of the most popular casinos in town, particularly for the high-class play. Tim had taught Joe that rigged games fleeced a chump maybe two, three times at the most before he got wise and stopped playing. Tim didn’t want to fleece someone a couple of times; he wanted to drain them for the rest of their lives. Keep ’em playing, keep ’em drinking, he told Joe, and they will fork over all their green and thank you for relieving them of the weight.

  “The people we service?” Tim said more than once. “They visit the night. But we live in it. They rent what we own. That means when they come to play in our sandbox, we make a profit off every grain.”

  Tim Hickey was one of the smarter men Joe had ever known. At the start of Prohibition, when the mobs in the city were split down ethnic lines—Italians mixing only with Italians, Jews mixing only with Jews, Irish mixing only with Irish—Hickey mixed with everyone. He aligned himself with Giancarlo Calabrese, who ran the Pescatore Mob while old man Pescatore was in prison, and together they started dealing in Caribbean rum when everyone else was dealing in whiskey. By the time the Detroit and New York gangs had leveraged their power to turn everyone else into subcontractors in the whiskey trade, the Hickey and Pescatore mobs had cornered the market on sugar and molasses. The product came out of Cuba mostly, crossed the Florida Straits, got turned into rum on U.S. soil, and took midnight runs up the Eastern Seaboard to be sold at an 80 percent markup.

  As soon as Tim had returned from his most recent trip to Tampa, he’d discussed the botched job at the Southie furniture warehouse with Joe. He commended Joe on being smart enough not to go for the house take in the counting room (“That avoided a war right there,” Tim said), and told him when he got to the bottom of why they’d been given such a dangerously bad tip, someone was going to hang from rafters as high as the Custom House spire.

  Joe wanted to believe him because the alternative was to believe Tim had sent them to that warehouse because he’d wanted to start a war with Albert White. It wouldn’t be beyond Tim to sacrifice men he’d mentored since they were boys with the aim of cornering the rum market for good. In fact, nothing was beyond Tim. Absolutely nothing. That’s what it took to stay on top in the rackets—everyone had to know you’d long ago amputated your conscience.

  In Joe’s room now, Tim added a spot of rum from his flask to his coffee and took a sip. He offered the flask to Joe, but Joe shook his head. Tim returned the flask to his pocket. “Where you been lately?”

  “I been here.”

  Hickey held his gaze. “You’ve been out every night this week and the week before. You got a girl?”

  Joe thought about lying but couldn’t see the point. “I do, yeah.”

  “She a nice girl?”

  “She’s lively. She’s”—Joe couldn’t think of the precise word—“something.”

  Hickey came off the doorjamb. “You got yourself a blood sticker, huh?” He mimed a needle plunging into his arm. “I can see it.” He came over and clamped a hand on the back of Joe’s neck. “You don’t get many shots at the good ones. Not in our line. She cook?”

  “She does.” Truth was, Joe had no idea.

  “That’s important. Not if they’re good or bad, just that they’re willing to do it.” Hickey let go of his neck and walked back to the doorway. “Talk to that fella about the Pittsfield thing.”

  “I will, sir.”

  “Good man,” Tim said and headed downstairs to the office he kept behind the casino cashier.

  Carl Laubner ended up working two more nights before Joe remembered to fire him. Joe had forgotten a few things lately, including two appointments with Hymie Drago to move the merch’ from the Karshman Furs job. He had remembered to get to the slot machine and tighten the wheels good, but by the time Laubner came in on his shift that night, Joe was off with Emma Gould again.

  Since that night at the basement speakeasy in Charlestown, he and Emma had seen each other most nights. Most, not every. The other nights she was with Albert White, a situation Joe had thus far managed to characterize as annoying, though it was fast approaching the intolerable.

  When Joe wasn’t with Emma, all he could think about was when he would be. And then when they did meet, keeping their hands off each other went from an unlikely proposition to an impossible one. When her uncle’s speakeasy was closed, they had sex in it. When her parents and siblings were out of the apartment she shared with them, they had sex in it. They had sex in Joe’s car and sex in his room after he’d snuck her up the back stairs. They had sex on a cold hill, in a stand of bare trees overlooking the Mystic River, and on a cold November beach overlooking Savin Hill Cove in Dorchester. Standing, sitting, lying down—it didn’t make much difference to them. Inside, outside—same thing. When they had the luxury of an hour together, they filled it with as many new tricks and new positions as they could dream up. But when they had only a few minutes, then a few minutes would do.

  What they rarely did was talk. At least not about anything outside the borders of their seemingly bottomless addiction to each other.

  Behind Emma’s pale eyes and pale skin lay something coiled and caged. And not caged in a way that it wanted to come out. Caged in a way that demanded nothing come in. The cage opened when she took him inside her and for as long as they could sustain their lovemaking. In those moments, her eyes were open and searching and he could see her soul back there and the red light of her heart and whatever dreams she may have clung to as a child, temporarily untethered and freed of their cellar and its dark wall
s and padlocked door.

  Once he’d pulled out of her, though, and her breathing slowed to normal, he would watch those things recede like the tide.

  Didn’t matter, though. He was starting to suspect he was in love with her. In those rare moments when the cage opened and he was invited in, he found a person desperate to trust, desperate to love, hell, desperate to live. She just needed to see he was worthy of risking that trust, that love, that life.

  And he would be.

  He turned twenty years old that winter and he knew what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He wanted to become the one man Emma Gould put all her faith in.

  As the winter wore on, they risked appearing in public together a few times. Only on the nights when she had it on good authority that Albert White and his key men were out of town and only at establishments that were owned by Tim Hickey or his partners.

  One of Tim’s partners was Phil Cregger, who owned the Venetian Garden restaurant on the first floor of the Bromfield Hotel. Joe and Emma went there on a frigid night that smelled of snow even though the sky was clear. They’d just checked their coats and hats when a group exited the private room behind the kitchen and Joe knew them for what they were by their cigar smoke and the practiced bonhomie in their voices before he ever saw their faces—pols.

  Aldermen and selectmen and city councillors and fire captains and police captains and prosecutors—the shiny, smiling, grubby battery that kept the city’s lights on, barely. Kept the trains running and the traffic signals working, barely. Kept the populace ever aware that those services and a thousand more, big and small, could end—would end—were it not for their constant vigilance.

  He saw his father at the same moment his father noticed him. It was, as it usually was if they hadn’t seen each other in a while, unsettling if for no other reason than how completely they mirrored each other. Joe’s father was sixty. He’d sired Joe late after producing two sons at a more respectably youthful age. But whereas Connor and Danny carried the genetic strains of both parents in their faces and bodies and certainly their height (which came from the Fennessey side of the family, where the men grew tall), Joe had come out the spitting image of his old man. Same height, same build, same hard jawline, same nose and sharp cheekbones and eyes sunk back in their sockets just a little farther than normal, which made it all the harder for people to read what he was thinking. The only difference between Joe and his father was one of color. Joe’s eyes were blue whereas his father’s were green; Joe’s hair was the color of wheat, his father’s the color of flax. Otherwise, Joe’s father looked at him and saw his own youth mocking him. Joe looked at his father and saw liver spots and loose flesh, Death standing at the end of his bed at 3 A.M., tapping an impatient foot.

  After a few farewell handshakes and backslaps, his father broke from the crowd as the men lined up for their coats. He stood before his son. He thrust out his hand. “How are you?”

  Joe shook his hand. “Not bad, sir. You?”

  “Tip-top. I was promoted last month.”

  “Deputy superintendent of the BPD,” Joe said. “I heard.”

  “And you? Where are you working these days?”

  You’d have to have known Thomas Coughlin a long time to spot the effects of alcohol on him. It was never to be found in his speech, which remained smooth and firm and of consistent volume even after half a bottle of good Irish. It wasn’t to be found in any glassiness of the eyes. But if you knew where to look for it, you could find something predatory and mischievous in the glow of his handsome face, something that sized you up, found your weaknesses, and debated whether to dine on them.

  “Dad,” Joe said, “this is Emma Gould.”

  Thomas Coughlin took her hand and kissed the knuckles. “A pleasure, Miss Gould.” He tilted his head to the maître d’. “The corner table, Gerard, please.” He smiled at Joe and Emma. “Do you mind if I join you? I’m famished.”

  They got through the salads pleasantly enough.

  Thomas told stories of Joe’s childhood, the point of which was invariably what a scamp Joe had been, how irrepressible and full of beans. In his father’s retelling, they were whimsical stories fit for the Hal Roach shorts at a Saturday matinee. His father left out how the stories had usually ended—with a slap or the strap.

  Emma smiled and chuckled at all the right places, but Joe could see she was pretending. They were all pretending. Joe and Thomas pretended to be bound by the love between a father and son and Emma pretended not to notice that they weren’t.

  After the story about six-year-old Joe in his father’s garden—a story told so many times over the years Joe could predict to a breath his father’s pauses—Thomas asked Emma where her family hailed from.

  “Charlestown,” she said, and Joe worried he heard a hint of defiance in her voice.

  “No, I mean before they came here. You’re clearly Irish. Do you know where your ancestors were born?”

  The waiter cleared the salad plates as Emma said, “My mother’s father was from Kerry and my father’s mother was from Cork.”

  “I’m from just outside Cork,” Thomas said with uncommon delight.

  Emma sipped her water but didn’t say anything, a part of her missing suddenly. Joe had seen this before—she had a way of disconnecting from a situation if it wasn’t to her liking. Her body remained, like something left behind in the chair during her escape, but the essence of her, whatever made Emma Emma, was gone.

  “What was her maiden name, your grandmother?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “You don’t know?”

  Emma shrugged. “She’s dead.”

  “But it’s your heritage.” Thomas was flummoxed.

  Emma gave that another shrug. She lit a cigarette. Thomas showed no reaction but Joe knew he was aghast. Flappers appalled him on countless levels—women smoking, flashing thigh, lowering necklines, appearing drunk in public without shame or fear of civic scorn.

  “How long have you known my son?” Thomas smiled.

  “Few months.”

  “Are you two—?”

  “Dad.”

  “Joseph?”

  “We don’t know what we are.”

  Secretly he’d hoped Emma would take the opportunity to clarify what, in fact, they were, but instead she shot him a quick look that asked how much longer they had to sit here and went back to smoking, her eyes drifting, anchorless, around the grand room.

  The entrées reached the table, and they passed the next twenty minutes talking about the quality of the steaks and the béarnaise sauce and the new carpeting Cregger had recently installed.

  During dessert, Thomas lit his own cigarette. “So what is it you do, dear?”

  “I work at Papadikis Furniture.”

  “Which department?”

  “Secretarial.”

  “Did my son pilfer a couch? Is that how you met?”

  “Dad,” Joe said.

  “I’m just wondering how you met,” his father said.

  Emma lit a cigarette and looked out at the room. “This is a real swank place.”

  “It’s just that I’m well aware how my son earns a living. I can only assume that if you’ve come into contact with him, it was either during a crime or in an establishment populated by rough characters.”

  “Dad,” Joe said, “I was hoping we’d have a nice dinner.”

  “I thought we just did. Miss Gould?”

  Emma looked over at him.

  “Have my questions this evening made you uncomfortable?”

  Emma locked him in that cool gaze of hers, the one that could freeze a fresh coat of roofing tar. “I don’t know what you’re on about. And I don’t particularly care.”

  Thomas leaned back in his chair and sipped his coffee. “I’m on about you being the type of lass who consorts with criminals, whic
h may not be the best thing for your reputation. The fact that the criminal in question happens to be my son isn’t the issue. It’s that my son, criminal or no, is still my son and I have paternal feelings for him, feelings that cause me to question the wisdom of his consorting with the type of woman who knowingly consorts with criminals.” Thomas placed his coffee cup back on the saucer and smiled at her. “Did you follow all that?”

  Joe stood. “Okay, we’re going.”

  But Emma didn’t move. She dropped her chin to the heel of her hand and considered Thomas for some time, the cigarette smoldering next to her ear. “My uncle mentioned a copper he has on his payroll, name of Coughlin. That you?” She gave him a tight smile to match his own and took a drag off her cigarette.

  “This uncle would be your Uncle Robert, the one everyone calls Bobo?”

  She flicked her eyelids in the affirmative.

  “The police officer to whom you refer is named Elmore Conklin, Miss Gould. He’s stationed in Charlestown and is known to collect shakedown payments from illegal establishments like Bobo’s. I rarely get over to Charlestown, myself. But as deputy superintendent, I’d be happy to take a more focused interest in your uncle’s establishment.” Thomas stubbed out his cigarette. “Would that please you, dear?”

  Emma held out her hand to Joe. “I need to powder.”

  Joe gave her tip money for the ladies’-room attendant and they watched her cross the restaurant. Joe wondered if she’d return to the table or grab her coat and just keep walking.