Danny stared across at this man he’d known his whole life. Seeing a new side to him, a side he’d suspected was there all along but had never actually witnessed.
“Why the mailing lists, Eddie? I thought we were looking for evidence of May Day uprising plans.”
“We’re looking for both,” Eddie said. “But if they’re as tight-lipped as you say, Dan, and if your detecting capabilities are a little less substantial than I’d hoped, then you just get me that mailing list before your face is all over the front page. Could you do that for your uncle, pal?” He stepped out of the booth and shrugged into his coat, tossed some coins on the table. “That should do it.”
“We just got here,” Danny said.
Eddie worked his face back into the mask it had always been around Danny—impish and benign. “City never sleeps, boy. I’ve got business in Brighton.”
“Brighton?”
Eddie nodded. “Stockyards. Hate that place.”
Danny followed Eddie toward the door. “Bracing cows now, Eddie?”
“Better.” Eddie pushed open the door into the cold. “Coloreds. Crazy dinges are meeting right now, after hours, to discuss their rights. You believe that? Where does it end? Next thing, the chinks’ll be holding our laundry hostage.”
Eddie’s driver pulled to the curb in his black Hudson. Eddie said, “Give you a lift?”
“I’ll walk.”
“Walk off that booze. Good idea,” he said. “Know anyone by the name of Finn by the bye?” Eddie’s face was blithe, open.
Danny kept his the same way. “In Brighton?”
Eddie frowned. “I said I was going to Brighton on a coon hunt. ‘Finn’ sound like a colored name to you?”
“Sounds Irish.”
“’Tis indeed. Know any?”
“Nope. Why?”
“Just wondering,” Eddie said. “You’re sure?”
“Just what I said, Eddie.” Danny turned up his collar against the wind. “Nope.”
Eddie nodded and reached for the car door.
“What he do?” Danny said.
“Huh?”
“This Finn you’re looking for,” Danny said. “What’d he do?”
Eddie stared into his face for a long time. “Good night, Dan.”
“’Night, Eddie.”
Eddie’s car drove up Beacon Street and Danny thought of going back in and calling Nora from the phone booth in the hotel lobby. Let her know that McKenna could be sniffing around her life. But then he pictured her with Connor—holding his hand, kissing him, maybe sitting on his lap when no one else was in the house to see—and he decided there were a lot of Finns in the world. And half of them were either in Ireland or Boston. McKenna could have been talking about any one of them. Any at all.
CHAPTER sixteen
The first thing Luther had to do at the building on Shawmut Avenue was make it weather-tight. That meant starting with the roof. A slate beauty, she was, fallen on ill fortune and neglect. He worked his way across her spine one fine cold morning when the air smelled of mill smoke and the sky was clean and blade-blue. He collected shards of slate the firemen’s axes had sent to the gutters and added them to those he’d retrieved from the floor below. He ripped sodden or scorched wood from their lathes and hammered fresh planks of oak in their places and covered it all with the slate he’d salvaged. When he ran out of that he used the slate Mrs. Giddreaux had somehow managed to procure from a company in Cleveland. He started on a Saturday at first light and finished up late of that Sunday afternoon. Sitting on the ridgeline of the roof, slick with sweat in the cold, he wiped his brow and gazed up at the clean sky. He turned his head and looked at the city spread out around him. He smelled the coming dusk in the air, though his eyes could see no evidence of it yet. As smells went, though, few were finer.
Luther’s weekday schedule was such that by the time the Coughlins sat for dinner, Luther, who’d set the table and helped Nora prepare the food, had already left. But on Sundays, dinners were all-day affairs, ones that occasionally reminded Luther of the ones at Aunt Marta and Uncle James’s on Standpipe Hill. Something about recent church attendance and Sunday finery brought out an inclination for pronouncements, he noticed, in white folk as well as black.
Serving drinks in the captain’s study, he sometimes got the feeling they were pronouncing for him. He’d catch sidelong glances from one of the captain’s associates as he pontificated about eugenics or proven intellectual disparities in the races or some similar bullshit only the truly indolent had time to discuss.
The one who spoke the least but had the most fire in his eyes was the one Avery Wallace had warned him about, the captain’s right-hand man, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna. A fat man, given to breathing heavily through nostrils clogged with hair, he had a smile as bright as the full moon on a river, and one of those loud, jolly natures Luther believed could never be trusted. Men like that always hid the part of themselves that wasn’t smiling and hid it so deep it got all the hungrier, like a bear just come out of hibernation, lumbering out of that cave with a scent in its nose so focused it couldn’t ever be reasoned with.
Of all the men who joined the captain in the study on those Sundays—and the roster changed from week to week—it was McKenna who paid Luther the most attention. At first glance, it seemed welcome enough. He always thanked Luther when Luther brought him either a drink or a refill, whereas most of the men simply acted as if his servitude was their due and rarely acknowledged him at all. Upon entering the study, McKenna usually asked after Luther’s health, his week, how he was adapting to the cold weather. “You ever need an extra coat, son, you let us know. We usually have a few spares down at the station house. Can’t promise they’ll smell too fine, though.” He clapped Luther on the back.
He seemed to assume Luther was from the South and Luther saw no reason to dissuade him from the impression until it came up one late afternoon at Sunday dinner.
“Kentucky?” McKenna said.
At first Luther didn’t realize he was being addressed. He stood by the sideboard, filling a small bowl with sugar cubes.
“Louisville, I’m guessing. Am I right?” McKenna gazed openly at him as he placed a slice of pork in his mouth.
“Where I hail from, sir?”
McKenna’s eyes glimmered. “That’s the question, son.”
The captain took a sip of wine. “The lieutenant prides himself on his grasp of accents, he does.”
Danny said, “Can’t lose his own, though, uh?”
Connor and Joe laughed. McKenna wagged his fork at Danny. “A wiseacre since diapers, this one.” He turned his head. “So which is it, Luther?”
Before Luther could answer, Captain Coughlin raised a hand to him. “Make him guess, Mr. Laurence.”
“I did guess, Tom.”
“You guessed wrong.”
“Ah.” Eddie McKenna dabbed his lips with his napkin. “So, not Louisville?”
Luther shook his head. “No, sir.”
“Lexington?”
Luther shook his head again, felt the whole family looking at him.
McKenna leaned back, one hand caressing his belly. “Well, let’s see. You don’t have a deep enough drawl for Mis’sipi, tha’s fo’ sho’. And Gawgia is right out. Too deep for Virginia, though, and too fast, I think, for Alabama.”
“I’m guessing Bermuda,” Danny said.
Luther caught his eye and smiled. Of all the Coughlins, he had the least experience with Danny, but Avery had been right—you felt no lying in the man.
“Cuba,” Luther said to Danny.
“Too far south,” Danny said.
They both chuckled.
The gamesmanship left McKenna’s eyes. His flesh pinkened. “Ah, a bit a sport the lads are having now.” He smiled at Ellen Coughlin down the other end of the table. “A bit of sport,” he repeated and cut into his roast pork.
“So what’s the guess, Eddie?” Captain Coughlin speared a potato slice.
Eddie McKenna loo
ked up. “I’ll have to give Mr. Laurence a bit more thought before I hazard any more idle conjecture on that point.”
Luther turned back to the coffee tray, but not before he caught another look from Danny. Not an entirely pleasant look, one bearing a hint of pity.
Luther shrugged into his topcoat as he came out onto the stoop and saw Danny leaning against the hood of a nut-brown Oakland 49. Danny raised a bottle of something in Luther’s direction, and when Luther reached the street he saw that it was whiskey, the good stuff, prewar.
“A drink, Mr. Laurence?”
Luther took the bottle from Danny and raised it to his lips. He paused, looking at him, making sure sharing a bottle with a colored was what the man wanted. Danny gave him a quizzical arch of his eyebrow, and Luther tilted the bottle to his lips and drank.
When Luther handed it back, the big cop didn’t wipe the bottle with his sleeve, just tilted it to his own lips and took himself a healthy snort. “Good stuff, uh?”
Luther remembered how Avery Wallace had said this Coughlin was a strange who did his own thinking. He nodded.
“Nice night.”
“Yeah.” Crisp but windless, the air a bit chalky with the dust of dead leaves.
“Another?” Danny handed the bottle back.
Luther took a drink, eyeing the big white man and his open, handsome face. A lady-killer, Luther bet, but not the kind to make it his life’s work. Something going on behind those eyes that told Luther this man heard music others didn’t, took direction from who knew where.
“You like working here?”
Luther nodded. “I do. You’ve a nice family, suh.”
Danny rolled his eyes and took another swig. “Think you could drop the ‘suh’ shit with me, Mr. Laurence? Think that’s possible?”
Luther took a step back. “What do you want me to call you then?”
“Out here? Danny’ll do. In there?” He gestured with his chin at the house. “I guess Mr. Coughlin.”
“What’s your complaint against ‘suh’?”
Danny shrugged. “It sounds like bullshit.”
“Fair enough. You call me Luther, then.”
Danny nodded. “Drink to it.”
Luther chuckled as he lifted the bottle. “Avery warned me you were different.”
“Avery came back from the grave to tell you I was different?”
Luther shook his head. “He wrote a note to his ‘replacement.’”
“Ah.” Danny took the bottle back. “Whatta you think about my Uncle Eddie?”
“Seems nice enough.”
“No, he doesn’t.” Danny’s voice was soft.
Luther leaned against the car beside Danny. “No, he doesn’t.”
“You feel him circling you in there?”
“I felt it.”
“You got a nice clean past, Luther?”
“Clean as most, I guess.”
“That ain’t too clean.”
Luther smiled. “Fair point.”
Danny handed the bottle over again. “My Uncle Eddie? He reads people better than any man alive. Stares right through their heads and sees whatever it is they don’t want the world to find out. They got a suspect in one of the station houses nobody can break? They call in my uncle. He gets a confession every time. Uses whatever it takes to get one, too.”
Luther rolled the bottle between his palms. “Why you telling me this?”
“He smells something he doesn’t like about you—I can see it in his eyes—and we took that joke in there too far for his comfort. He started thinking we were laughing at him and that’s not good.”
“I appreciate the liquor.” Luther stepped away from the car. “Never shared a bottle with a white man before.” He shrugged. “But I best be getting home.”
“I’m not working you.”
“You ain’t, uh?” Luther looked at him. “How do I know that?”
Danny held out his hands. “Only two types of men in this world worth talking about—a man who is as he appears and the other kind. Which do you think I am?”
Luther felt the whiskey swimming beneath his flesh. “You about the strangest kind I’ve come across in this city.”
Danny took a drink, looked up at the stars. “Eddie might circle you for a year, even two. He’ll take all the time in the world, believe me. But when he finally does come for you? He’ll have left you no way out.” He met Luther’s eyes. “I’ve made my peace with whatever Eddie and my father do to achieve their ends with plug-uglies and grifters and gun-sels, but I don’t like it when they go after civilians. You understand?”
Luther placed his hands in his pockets as the crisp air grew darker, colder. “So you’re saying you can call off this dog?”
Danny shrugged. “Maybe. Won’t know until the time comes.”
Luther nodded. “And what’s your end?”
Danny smiled. “My end?”
Luther found himself smiling in return, feeling both of them circling now, but having fun with it. “Ain’t nothing free in this world but bad luck.”
“Nora,” Danny said.
Luther stepped back to the car and took the bottle from Danny. “What about her?”
“I’d like to know how things progress with her and my brother.”
Luther drank, eyeing Danny, then let loose a laugh.
“What?”
“Man’s in love with his brother’s girl and he says ‘what’ to me.” Luther laughed some more.
Danny joined him. “Let’s say Nora and I have a history.”
“That ain’t news,” Luther said. “I only been in the same room with you both this one time but my blind, dead uncle could have seen it.”
“That obvious, uh?”
“To most. Can’t figure out why Mr. Connor can’t see it. He can’t see a lot when it comes to her.”
“No, he can’t.”
“Why don’t you just ask the woman for her hand? She’ll jump at it.”
“No, she won’t. Believe me.”
“She will. That rope? Shit. That’s love.”
Danny shook his head. “You ever known a woman acted logically when it came to love?”
“No.”
“Well, then.” Danny looked up at the house. “I don’t know the first thing about them. Can’t tell you what they’re thinking from minute to minute.”
Luther smiled and shook his head. “I ’spect you get along just fine all the same.”
Danny held up the bottle. “We got about two fingers left. Last swig?”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Luther took a snort and handed the bottle back, watched Danny drain it. “I’ll keep my eyes and ears open. How’s that?”
“Fair. Eddie makes a run at you, you keep me informed.”
Luther held out his hand. “Deal.”
Danny shook his hand. “Glad we could get to know each other, Luther.”
“The same, Danny.”
Back at the building on Shawmut Avenue, Luther checked and re-checked for leaks, but nothing came down through the ceilings, and he found no moisture in the walls. He ripped all the plaster out, first thing, and saw that plenty of the wood behind it could be salvaged, some with little more than hope and tenderness, but hope and tenderness would have to do. Same with the flooring and the staircase. Normally a place that had been this fucked-up by neglect and then fire and water damage, the first thing you’d do would be to gut it to its skin. But given their limited finances and beg-borrow-steal approach, the only solution in this case was to salvage what could be salvaged, right down to the nails themselves. He and Clayton Tomes, the Wagenfelds’ houseman, worked similar hours in their South Boston households and even had the same day off. After one dinner with Yvette Giddreaux, Clayton had been enlisted into the project before he knew what hit him, and that weekend, Luther finally had some help. They spent the day carrying the salvageable wood and metal and brass fixtures up to the third floor so they could get to work on installing the plumbing and electrical next week.
; It was hard work. Dusty and sweaty and chalky. The pull of pry bars and the tear of wood and the wrench of the hammer’s claw. Kind of work made your shoulders tighten hard against your neck, the cartilage under your kneecaps feel like rock salt, dug hot stones into the small of your back and bit the edges of your spine. Kind of work made a man sit down in the middle of a dusty floor and lower his head to his knees and whisper, “Whew,” and keep his head down and his eyes closed a bit longer.
After weeks in the Coughlin house doing almost nothing, though, Luther wouldn’t have traded it for anything. This was work of the hand and of the mind and of muscle. Work that left some hint of itself and yourself behind after you were gone.
Craftsmanship, his Uncle Cornelius had once told him, was just a fancy word for what happened when labor met love.
“Shit.” Clayton, lying on his back in the entrance hallway, stared up at the ceiling two stories above. “You realize that if she’s committed to indoor plumbing—”
“She is.”
“—then the waste pipe, Luther—the waste pipe alone—that going to have to climb up from the basement to a roof vent? That’s four stories, boy.”
“Five-inch pipe, too.” Luther chuckled. “Cast iron.”
“And we got to run more pipes off that pipe on every floor? Two maybe off the bathrooms?” Clayton’s eyes widened to saucers. “Luther, this shit’s crazy.”
“Yeah.”
“Then why you smiling?”
“Why you?” Luther said.
What about Danny?” Luther asked Nora as they walked through Haymarket.
“What about him?”
“He doesn’t seem to fit that family somehow.”
“I’m not sure Aiden fits anything.”
“How come sometimes you-all call him Danny and other times Aiden?”
She shrugged. “It just happened. You don’t call him Mister Danny, I’ve noticed.”
“So?”
“You call Connor ‘Mister.’ You even do it with Joe.”
The Given Day Page 28
