Live by Night

by Dennis Lehane

  When a woman once asked Joe how he could come from such a magnificent home and such a good family and still become a gangster, Joe’s answer was two-pronged: (a) he wasn’t a gangster, he was an outlaw; (b) he came from a magnificent house, not a magnificent home.

  Joe let himself into his father’s house. From the phone in the kitchen, he called the Gould household and got no answer. The satchel he’d carried into the house with him contained sixty-two thousand dollars. Even split three ways, it was enough to last any reasonably frugal man ten years, maybe fifteen. Joe wasn’t a frugal man, so he figured it’d last him four regular years. But on the run, it would last him eighteen months. No more. By then, he’d figure something out. It was what he was good at, thinking on the fly.

  Unquestionably, a voice that sounded suspiciously like his oldest brother’s said. It’s worked out so well so far.

  He called Uncle Bobo’s blind pig but got the same result as the Gould house. Then he remembered that Emma was attending the opening soiree at the Hotel Statler tonight at six. Joe pulled his watch from his vest: ten minutes to four.

  Two hours to kill in a city that was, by now, looking to kill him.

  That was far too much time out in the open. In that time they’d learn his name, his address, and come up with a list of his known associates and favorite haunts. They’d lock down all the train and bus stations, even the rural ones, and put up every last roadblock.

  But that could cut both ways. The roadblocks would prohibit entry into the city under the logic that he was still outside it. No one would ever assume he was here, planning to slip right back out again. And they wouldn’t assume that because only the world’s dumbest criminal would risk returning to the only city he’d ever called home after committing the biggest crime the region had seen in five or six years.

  Which made him the dumbest criminal in the world.

  Or the smartest. Because pretty much the only place they weren’t searching right now was the place right under their noses.

  Or so he told himself.

  What he could still do—what he should have done in Pittsfield—was vanish. Not in two hours. Now. Not wait around for a woman who might choose not to join him under the present circumstances. Just leave with the shirt on his back and a bag of money in his hand. The roads were all being watched, yes. Same for trains and buses. And even if he could get out to the farmlands south and west of the city and steal a horse, it wouldn’t do him any good because he didn’t know how to ride one.

  That left the sea.

  He’d need a boat, but not a pleasure craft and not an obvious rumrunner like a sea skiff or a garvey. He’d need a worker’s boat, one with rusted cleats and frayed tackle, a deck piled high with dented lobster traps. Something moored in Hull or Green Harbor or Gloucester. If he boarded by seven, it would probably be three or four in the morning before the fisherman noticed it missing.

  So now he was stealing from workingmen.

  Except the boat would be registered. Would have to be, or he’d move on to another. He’d get the address off the registration, mail the owner enough money to buy two boats or just get the fuck out of the lobster business altogether.

  It occurred to him that thinking like this could explain why, even after all the jobs he’d pulled, he rarely had much money in his pockets. Sometimes it seemed like he stole money from one place just to give it away somewhere else. But he also stole because it was fun and he was good at it and it led to other things he was good at like bootlegging and rum-running, which is why he knew his way around boats in the first place. Last June, he’d run a boat from a no-name fishing village in Ontario across Lake Huron to Bay City, Michigan, another from Jacksonville to Baltimore in October, and just last winter ferried cases of newly distilled rum out of Sarasota and across the Gulf of Mexico to New Orleans, where he’d blown his entire profit one weekend in the French Quarter on sins that, even now, he could only remember in fragments.

  So he could pilot most boats, which meant he could steal most boats. He could walk out this door and be on the South Shore in thirty minutes. The North Shore would take a little longer, but this time of year there’d probably be more boats up there to choose from. If he set out from Gloucester or Rockport, he could reach Nova Scotia in three to four days. And then he’d send for Emma after a couple of months.

  Which seemed a bit long.

  But she’d wait for him. She loved him. She’d never said it, true, but he could feel her wanting to. She loved him. He loved her.

  She’d wait.

  Maybe he’d just swing by the hotel. Pop his head in real quick, see if he could spot her. If they both vanished, they’d be impossible to trace. But if he disappeared and then sent for her, by that point, the cops or the BI could have figured out who she was and what she meant to him and she’d show up in Halifax with a posse on her tail. He’d open the door to greet her, they’d both go down in bullet rain.

  She wouldn’t wait.

  He either went with her now or without her forever.

  He looked at himself in the glass of his mother’s china cabinet and remembered why he’d come here in the first place—no matter where he decided to go, he wouldn’t get far dressed like this. The left shoulder of his coat was black with blood, his shoes and trouser cuffs were caked in mud, his shirt torn from the woods and speckled with blood.

  In the kitchen, he opened the bread box and pulled out a bottle of A. Finke’s Widow Rum. Or, as most called it, Finke’s. He removed his shoes and carried them and the rum with him up the service stairs to his father’s bedroom. In the bathroom, he washed as much of the dried blood from his ear as he could, careful not to disturb the heart of the scab. When he was certain it wasn’t going to bleed, he took a few steps back and appraised it in relation to the other ear and the rest of his face. As deformities went, it wasn’t going to make anyone look twice once the scab fell away. And even now, the majority of the black scab clung to the underside of his ear; it was noticeable, no question, but not in the way a black eye or broken nose would have been.

  He had a few sips of the Finke’s while he chose a suit from his father’s closet. There were fifteen of them, about thirteen too many for a policeman’s salary. Same with the shoes, the shirts, the ties and hats. Joe chose a striped malacca tan single-breasted suit from Hart Schaffner & Marx with a white Arrow shirt. The silk tie was black with diagonal red stripes every four inches or so, the shoes a pair of black Nettletons, and the hat a Knapp-Felt, as smooth as a dove’s breast. He stripped off his own clothes and folded them neatly on the floor. He placed his pistol and his shoes on top and changed into his father’s clothes, then returned the pistol to the waistband at the small of his back.

  Judging by the length of the trousers, he and his father weren’t exactly the same height after all. His father was a little taller. And his hat size a bit smaller than Joe’s. Joe dealt with the hat problem by tilting it back off the crown a bit so it looked jaunty. As for the length of his trousers, he double-rolled the cuffs and used safety pins from his late mother’s sewing table to hold them in place.

  He carried his old clothes and the bottle of good rum down into his father’s study. Even now he couldn’t deny that crossing the threshold into that room when his father wasn’t present felt sacrilegious. He stood at the threshold and listened to the house—the ticking of its cast-iron radiators, the scratch of the chime hammers in the grandfather clock down the hall as they prepared to strike four. Even though he was positive the house was empty, he felt watched.

  When the hammers did, in fact, fall on the chimes, Joe entered the office.

  The desk sat in front of tall bay windows overlooking the street. It was an ornate Victorian partners desk, built in Dublin in the middle of the last century. The kind of desk no tenant farmer’s son from the shitheel side of Clonakilty could have reasonably expected to ever grace his home. The same could be said for the match
ing credenza under the window, the Oriental rug, the thick, amber drapes, the Waterford decanters, the oak bookshelves and leather-bound books his father never bothered to read, the bronze curtain rods, the antique leather sofa and armchairs, the walnut humidor.

  Joe opened one of the cabinets beneath the bookshelves and crouched to confront the safe he found there. He dialed the combination—3-12-10, the months in which he and his two brothers had been born—and opened the safe. Some of his mother’s jewelry was in it, five hundred dollars in cash, the deed to the house, his parents’ birth certificates, a stack of papers Joe didn’t bother examining, and a little more than a thousand dollars in treasury bonds. Joe removed it all and placed it on the floor to the right of the cabinet door. At the back of the safe was a wall made of the same thick steel as the rest of it. Joe popped it off by pressing his thumbs hard against the upper corners and lay it on the floor of the first safe while he faced the dial of the second.

  The combination here had been much harder to figure out. He’d tried all the birthdays in the family and got nowhere. He tried the numbers of the stationhouses where his father had worked over the years. Same result. When he recalled that his father sometimes said good luck, bad luck, and death all came in threes, he tried every permutation of that number. No luck. He’d started the process when he was fourteen. One day when he was seventeen, he’d noticed some correspondence his father had left out on his desk—a letter to a friend who’d become fire chief in Lewiston, Maine. The letter was typed on his father’s Underwood and filled with lies that wrapped ’round and ’round the paper like ribbon—“Ellen and I are blessed, still as smitten as the day we met . . .” “Aiden recovered quite well from the dark events of 9/19 . . . ” “Connor has made remarkable strides with his infirmity . . . ” and “Looks like Joseph will enter Boston College in the fall. He speaks of working in the bond trade . . .” At the bottom of all this bullshit, he’d signed it Yours, TXC. It was the way he signed everything. Never wrote out his full name, as if to do so would somehow compromise him.

  TXC.

  Thomas Xavier Coughlin.

  TXC.

  20-24-3.

  Joe dialed the numbers now and the second safe opened with a sharp peep of the hinges.

  It was roughly two feet deep. A foot and a half of that was filled with money. Bricks of it, tightly bound in red rubber bands. Some of the bills had entered the safe before Joe was born and some had probably been placed there in the last week. A lifetime of payoffs and kickbacks and graft. His father—a pillar of the City on the Hill, the Athens of America, the Hub of the Universe—was more a criminal than Joe could ever aspire to be. Because Joe had never figured out how to show more than one face to the world, whereas his father had so many faces at his disposal the question was which of them was the original and which the imitations.

  Joe knew that if he cleaned out the safe tonight, he’d have enough to live on the run for ten years. Or, if he got to somewhere far enough that they stopped looking, he could buy his way into the refining of Cuban sugar and/or the distilling of molasses, turn himself into a pirate king within three years, never have to worry about shelter or a hot meal the rest of his days.

  But he didn’t want his father’s money. He’d stolen his clothes because the idea of leaving the city dressed as the old son of a bitch appealed to him, but he’d break his own hands before he’d spend his father’s cash with them.

  He placed his neatly folded clothes and muddy shoes on top of his father’s dirty money. He thought of leaving a note, but he couldn’t think of anything else he’d want to say, so he closed the door and spun the dial. He replaced the fake wall of the first safe and locked that up too.

  He walked around the office for a minute, mulling it over one last time. To try to get to Emma during a function that most of the city’s luminaries would attend, where the guests would arrive by limousine and invitation only, would be the pinnacle of insanity. In the cool of his father’s study, maybe some of the old man’s pragmatism, merciless as it was, finally rubbed off. Joe had to take what the gods had given him—an exit route out of the very city he was expected to enter. Time was not on his side, though. He had to go out this front door, hop into the purloined Dodge, and scoot north like the road itself had caught fire.

  He looked out the window at K Street on a damp spring evening and reminded himself that she loved him and she’d wait.

  Out on the street, he sat in the Dodge and stared back at the house of his birth, the house that had shaped the man he was now. By Boston Irish standards, he’d grown up in the lap of luxury. He’d never gone to bed hungry, never felt the street press through the soles of his shoes. He’d been educated, first by the nuns, then by the Jesuits until he dropped out in eleventh grade. Compared to most he met in his line of work, his upbringing had been positively cushy.

  But there was a hole at the center of it, a great distance between Joe and his parents that reflected the distance between his mother and his father and his mother and the world at large. His parents had fought a war before he was born, a war that had ended in a peace so fragile that to acknowledge its existence could cause it to shatter, so no one ever discussed it. But the battlefield had still lain between them; she sat on her side, he sat on his. And Joe sat out in the middle, between the trenches, in the scorched dirt. The hole at the center of his house had been a hole at the center of his parents and one day the hole had found the center of Joe. There was a time, several full years during his childhood actually, when he’d hoped things could be different. But he couldn’t remember anymore why he’d felt that way. Things weren’t ever what they were supposed to be; they were what they were, and that was the simple truth of it, a truth that didn’t change just because you wanted it to.

  He drove over to the East Coast Bus Line Terminal on St. James. It was a small yellow-brick building surrounded by much taller ones, and Joe gambled that any laws looking for him would be stationed by the bus terminals on the northern side of the building, not the lockers in the southwestern corner.

  He slipped in through the exit door there and right into the rush-hour crowd. He let the crowd work for him, never bucking the flow, never trying to edge past anyone. And for once he had no complaints about not being tall. As soon as he got into the thick of the throngs, his was just another head bobbing alongside so many others. He counted two cops near the doors to the terminals and one in the crowd about sixty feet away.

  He popped out of the streaming crowd into the quiet of the locker bank. This was where, simply by dint of being alone, he was most noticeable. He’d already removed three thousand dollars from the satchel and buckled it back up. He had the key to locker 217 in his right hand, the bag in his left. Inside 217 was $7,435, twelve pocket watches and thirteen wristwatches, two sterling silver money clips, a gold tie pin, and assorted women’s jewelry he’d never gotten around to selling because he’d suspected the fences were trying to fleece him. He took smooth strides to the locker, raised his right hand, which only trembled slightly, and opened it.

  Behind him, someone called, “Hey!”

  Joe kept his eyes straight ahead. The tremor in his hand turned into a spasm as he swung the locker door back.

  “I said, ‘Hey!’ ”

  Joe pushed the satchel into the locker, closed the door.

  “Hey, you! Hey!”

  Joe turned the key, locked the door, and pocketed the key.

  “Hey!”

  Joe turned, picturing the cop waiting for him, service revolver drawn, probably young, probably jumpy. . . .

  A wino sat on the floor by a trash barrel. Bone thin, nothing to him but red eyes, red cheeks, and sinew. His jaw jutted in Joe’s direction.

  “The fuck you looking at?” he asked.

  The laugh left Joe’s mouth like a bark. He reached in his pocket, came back with a ten spot. He stooped and handed it to the old wino.

  “Looki
ng at you, Pops. Looking at you.”

  The guy belched at that, but Joe was already moving away, lost in the crowd.

  Outside, he walked east on St. James toward the two klieg lights crossing back and forth in the low clouds above the new hotel. It calmed him for a moment to imagine his money sitting safe and sound in the locker until he chose to return for it. A decision, he thought as he turned onto Essex Street, that was a bit unorthodox when a fella was planning a lifetime on the run.

  If you’re leaving the country, why leave the money here?

  So I can come back for it.

  Why would you need to come back for it?

  In case I don’t make it out tonight.

  There’s your answer.

  There’s no answer. What answer?

  You didn’t want them to find the money on you.

  Exactly.

  Because you know you’re going to get caught.

  Chapter Five

  Rough Work

  He entered the Hotel Statler through the employee entrance. When a porter and then a dishwasher gave him curious glances, he lifted his hat and shot them confident smiles and two-finger salutes, a bon vivant avoiding the crowds out front, and they gave him nods and smiles in return.

  Going through the kitchen, he could hear a piano, a peppy clarinet, and a steady bass coming from the lobby. He climbed a dark concrete staircase. He opened the door up top and came out by a marble staircase into a kingdom of light and smoke and music.

  Joe had been in a few swank hotel lobbies in his time, but he’d never seen anything like this. The clarinetist and the cellist stood near brass entrance doors so unblemished the light bouncing off them turned the dust motes in the air gold. Corinthian columns rose from marble floors to wrought iron balconies. The molding was creamy alabaster, and every ten yards a heavy chandelier descended, the same pendant shape as the candelabras in their six-foot stands. Blood-dark couches perched on Oriental rugs. Two grand pianos, submerged in white flowers, sat on either side of the lobby. The pianists lightly tinkled the keys and carried on repartee with the crowd and each other.