Suspension

by Richard E. Crabbe

  “Tommy, wake up, man!” someone called from the hall. His eyes snapped open and he jackknifed up in bed, awake but groggy. Boom, boom, boom, boom.

  “C’mon, Tommy. Open up!” That got him going finally. He came near to tripping over both Grant and Lee, who were milling nervously in the hall.

  “Out of the way, fleabags!”

  It was Sam. Tom knew immediately from the look on his friend’s face that it was not good news.

  “Sam, what the fuck time … ?”

  Sam’s look stopped the words in Tom’s throat.

  “It’s Mary, Tom. Get dressed, and let’s go.” Tom hadn’t heard anything beyond “It’s Mary.” He lived in dread of this sort of thing, knowing it would happen in the course of a business like hers. He didn’t say a word, just turned and ran back to his bedroom. His dream lingered and the guilt of it left him with a gnawing hole in his gut, as if he really had been with Emily. He cursed himself as he dressed. Sam stood in the hall outside his door for a second, then came in. Tom had a dozen questions he wanted answered but he knew it would just slow him down to ask them of Sam. Mary was alive, that was all that was important. Sam would have told him right away if she wasn’t. He never dressed so fast in his life, at least not since the war.

  He was back out in two minutes, tucking the Colt under his arm.

  “Let’s go. You can tell me on the way.” There was a hack waiting on the blackened cobbles of Lafayette Place. They got in and Sam barked, “New York Hospital.”

  “How bad is it, Sam? No sugar-coating.”

  Sam took a deep breath. “First off, she’s not gonna die or anything. She’s pretty busted up, though. Left arm’s broke, maybe a rib or two. Hurts when she breathes,” he explained. “She’s got a hell of a shiner … face is swole up. Aside from that, bruises and such.” Tom listened grim and stony-faced, his mouth set like a straight razor.

  “A client? I want to know, so I can kill the bastard.” Braddock growled. The clatter of hooves and wheels on cobbles couldn’t mask the tone. Knowing Tom, it was no idle threat. A chill went through Sam as he hoped he could contain Braddock before things got completely out of hand. He took a deep breath.

  “It was a raid. You’ll not be killin’ anyone, partner.”

  Braddock almost jumped out of his seat and the cab rocked as he slammed his fist against the door.

  “Christ! What the fuck is going on? The Sixteenth’s never given her any trouble, not like this. She pays who she has to.” Tom almost shouted, the confusion clear on his face as he looked to Sam for answers.

  “I know. I can’t make it out either.” Sam watched Tom from the corner of his eye as he said this.

  “Besides, they know who some of her clients are so they leave her alone,” Tom said. “I don’t get it. It’s not like Parker,” he said, referring to the Sixteenth Precinct’s commander. “Sure it was them?” Tom couldn’t see Sam’s face clearly in the darkened cab but something wasn’t right.

  “We’re almost there,” Sam said, looking out the window. “Mary’ll tell you what happened. Don’t know it all myself.”

  Tom gave him a short, hard look. “Not like you to hold out on me, Sam.”

  Sam hesitated, opening his mouth for an instant before he stopped himself. “Just my guess is all, so I’ll keep it to myself,” Sam said carefully. “We’re here anyway. I’ll pay the cabbie, you go on up. Room 214.”

  Tom bounded up the stairs to the second floor and blew down a broad corridor. His shoes clacked and echoed on the tile floors. After a wrong turn and a quick about-face he found the room. He turned the knob quietly, as if he were housebreaking, and eased the door open. There was no light in the room. The dark and the sickroom smells hung inside, solid as a wall. There were two beds. Tom couldn’t make out which Mary was in. Then he saw Chelsea crumpled in a chair beside the far bed. The window near the bed let in a soft gray light from the gas lamps on the street. Tom stole across the room, to Mary’s bedside, not wanting to wake them. The lamplight cast long thin shadows across her bed like prison bars. Even in the night’s indistinct caress Mary’s face looked swollen and dark. Her head rested on the pillow, the uninjured side down. Her hair was matted and wild. One arm lay on the blanket. It was swathed in a white sling. Her breathing seemed swift, shallow, birdlike. Tom heard footsteps in the hall. A moment later Sam crept in.

  “Sleeping,” Tom whispered.

  Sam nodded. “Maybe I better go. You’re staying.” It was not a question.

  “Yeah,” Tom said more to Mary than his friend. “And, Sam … thanks.”

  Sam put a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “No problem. I was on duty anyway.” Sam said good-bye softly and went out, closing the door behind him.

  “Tommy … that you?” The door didn’t close hard, but it must have been enough to wake Mary.

  “It’s me, sweetheart.” He bent low to kiss her damp forehead. Her hand found his. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Bout as good as I look, maybe worse,” she said with a weak grin. “How … I look?”

  Tom didn’t answer. “Who did this? Sam said it was a raid.”

  Mary fixed worried eyes on Tom. “It was,” she said slowly. “Couldn’t understand … at first,” she said, shaking her head a little. “Haven’t had … trouble from them. Then I saw the others.”

  Tom stiffened. “What others? Who was with them?” he probed a little too roughly.

  Mary hesitated. “Only knew one or two by sight,” she said cautiously, seeming to want to hold it back. “Tommy, I don’t want to get you upset. What happened was partly my own fault,” she tried to explain, but he could see she was trying to gloss it over. “I got so mad. You know how I can get.” Tom nodded. He knew. “Well, I got so mad … was screaming at them and hitting and one of them hit me back. I fell over a chair,” she said with a rueful chuckle that drew a grimace of pain across her face. “That’s what hurt my arm. Hurts to breathe too but that was my fault,” she was too quick to add. The real story was much worse than that. It hadn’t been just one fall that caused her injuries, and not just one officer who’d hit her. There had been other things too, things she’d never tell Tom. Those things she could withstand; she wasn’t so sure about him. It wasn’t for herself she wasn’t telling it all, it was for Tom. She looked into his eyes seeing the doubt and the anger, knowing he suspected more. “Nobody to blame but me,” she said quietly but as firmly as she could.

  Tom was silent, his face half in soft, gray light, half in tar-black shadow.

  “You haven’t told me who the others were,” he reminded her in a voice soft yet hard.

  “Tommy, promise me you won’t do anything,” Mary said, pleading.

  Tom looked at her, his face dark and purposeful. He was not to be denied. “Tell me,” he said flatly. “I won’t have you busted up like this and do nothing. What kind of man would I be?” he asked, knowing the answer. “They busted up your place too, right?” He’d seen those kinds of raids before.

  Mary tried to reason with him. “This isn’t about you, Tom.” Though she knew with perfect clarity that it was. “It’s not about whether you can defend me or not. And my place … ?” Mary was quiet for a moment, thinking of herself more than her place. “There’s nothing broken that can’t be fixed.”

  Tom was getting tired of her trying to protect him. She didn’t really have to say the name. He knew.

  “It was Coffin’s boys, wasn’t it? He’s behind this. Should’ve seen it right away.” He could see the confirmation in her eyes. “That son of a bitch!”

  Mary clutched at his arm with her good hand. “I think so,” she said in a small voice. “I heard them talking.”

  “Fuck! That son of a bitch!” Tom almost shouted. He got up, a huge black silhouette looming against the flannel-gray light outside. His black hands looked like sledgehammers clenched at his sides.

  Mary had feared this more than anything. He’d kill Coffin if she wasn’t able to control him.

  “Tommy, no! You can’
t solve anything that way,” she pleaded. “They’ll be waiting for you too.” She tried to appeal to his logical side. “There’s other ways to handle this.”

  “Not for me, not this. That bastard won’t face me himself, so he hits at you!” Tom said in a low, almost incredulous growl. “He’s gonna find out what it means to be hit. I guarantee he won’t like it.” Tom started for the door, a shadow blacker than the night. He was in a rage that took him out of himself, a blinding state of limited thought and unlimited action. How much of it was a residual guilt from his dream of Emily he couldn’t know, but it clung to him like cheap perfume. Nothing Mary could say was going to stop him, so she said the only thing left to say.

  “I love you, Tommy.”

  He stopped at that, his hand on the doorknob. In two heartbeats he was back at her side, holding her so close it made her ribs ache. “I love you too, Mary. Always.”

  She felt the tension in him as he said that, the rage below the words, the frustration. She held him tighter despite her ribs.

  “But I have to go.”

  “Tommy, don’t.” She tried again. “Even if you kill him … and his men don’t kill you … they’ll hang you for it. There’s no winning.” She could see that none of this was working. Tom wasn’t thinking. He was acting on some instinctive level. His eyes just glazed over when she talked of the consequences.

  “I’m going.” He kissed her one last time. This time he rose and left quickly, afraid she might stop him again.

  Mary wished she could cry. She wished she could slap some sense into him. Tom was running out to throw away his life and their future with it. But when she cried her ribs hurt so badly it took her breath away. So the tears ran down her cheeks in silent little rivers. The stabbing pain in her side was to her the death of hope and of heart.

  Striking at Mary made it not just business anymore. This was personal. Coffin had made the mistake of his life if he thought that something like this could put the reins back on him, Tom thought. Coffin would pay and to hell with the consequences. The fact that Coffin was a captain of police meant nothing. The fact that his little corps of men were probably ready for him meant nothing. Tom’s rage was like some force of nature, swirling blowing and crashing inside his head, obliterating everything in its path, blotting out all reason, logic, and caution. Right now it focused on blotting out Coffin. Tom’s shoes echoed down the tiled corridor like a metronome. They fell fast and heavy.

  Tom knew where Coffin lived, over on Thirty-sixth Street, near Lexington. There were no cabs in sight, so he set off on foot. It was the walk that saved him. The streets were deserted. Nothing moved, no horsecars were in sight, no carriages or pedestrians. Tom walked the streets alone, in an alternating dream of blackness and light. The gas lamps cast pools of artificial day and reason somehow seemed stronger in their bright circles, but there were black gulfs between, gulfs where rage and madness ruled. As he strode from one pool of light to the next on those blackened sleeping streets, the light slowly started to seep in and the light was Mary.

  He thought of the things she’d said, felt the things she hadn’t. For perhaps the first time since the war, he started to think of someone else before himself. It was something he hadn’t had much practice doing. But now, with his future and hers in the balance, he was compelled to. At first, he cursed in the darkness between the gas amps. Coffin had earned his death. He would deliver it. Terribly, swiftly, Coffin would finally reap what he had sown. That was a promise and a commitment that he’d not go back on. But as he thought of his Mary, for that was how he thought of her, his temper cooled. On that long echoing walk, his brain slowly started to take control. He needed a plan. He couldn’t just knock on Coffin’s door and shoot him in his pajamas, no matter how appealing that might be. He wanted to be with Mary for the rest of his life. The only way that could happen was if he was very smart about what he did in the next few minutes. His mind was working feverishly when he heard footsteps behind him.

  It didn’t really surprise him that he had been tailed. In the state he was in when he left the hospital, he wouldn’t have noticed an army behind him. It only made sense for one of the corps to keep watch at the hospital. Tom was surprised it had taken him this long to wake up to it. He had just come to Thirty-fourth and Fifth. A. T. Stewart’s marble mansion loomed on the opposite corner, a monument to the merchant prince. It was said that the place cost over $3 million. Stewart had razed Sarsaparilla Townsend’s brownstone mansion just so he could build a bigger one of marble on the same spot. “Money to burn,” Tom thought absently. A quick glance over his shoulder showed his tail had stopped half a block back to loiter in a doorway. He didn’t like being tailed. He didn’t care who it was, whether he knew him or not, whether they had gotten drunk together or not. He’d have to put a stop to it. Nobody was going to tail him and get away with it.

  Tom crossed Thirty-fourth and walked up Fifth past Stewart’s mansion, then trotted quickly across Fifth on Thirty-fifth, and out of sight of his pursuer. He heard the footsteps before he saw his man hurrying to catch up. From the blackness on the side of a brownstone’s front stairs, he waited as his quarry hustled past. Tom didn’t recognize him. It didn’t matter. Tom sprang out behind the man with his best speed and stealth. The cop was alert, though, and the scrape of Tom’s shoe brought him around in a backhanded swipe as Tom closed in. A heavy sap whistled over Tom’s head as he ducked. An instant later Tom’s right drove into the cop’s side. It landed just below the ribs, and Tom was rewarded with a sickening whoof of pain as his man doubled over. He caught a halfhearted swing of the sap with his left, then chopped down on the exposed neck with his right. It felt good to watch the man go down. For all he knew this might have been the one who hit Mary.

  The cop was down, but a hand fumbled for his pistol as he lay on the sidewalk. Thinking of Mary, Tom kicked the cop in the ribs. He thought he heard something break. Tom bent over, reached under the man’s jacket, and took his pistol.

  “No hard feelings, sport,” Tom said without meaning it. In another five minutes, Braddock stood before Coffin’s town house. He looked up at the double doors with their heavy brass knobs and knocker. He was going to enjoy this, he decided. A grim smile creased his lips but he wiped it away. It wouldn’t do to smile right now, not with what he planned to do. The big brass knocker boomed through the house, shaking the front doors in their hinges.

  Chapter Seventeen

  And it is our own city which is to be forever famous

  for possessing this greatest architectural and engineering

  work of the continent and of the age.

  —THOMAS KINSELLA

  Mary slept fitfully. Though her body yearned for it, her mind gave her no peace. Silent tears carved her cheeks. In the course of just a few hours she had lost nearly everything of value to her. Her business was in shambles. Her girls, whom she cared for like family, were in Jefferson Market jail cells. Her clients would probably not return anytime soon, if ever. And far, far worse was Tom. He had gone to throw his life away and their future with it. She had longed for that future. Its pull was irresistible. But he was sacrificing it for his pride and his stupid, manly honor. She thought she had loved him for those things. She wept in the dark, mourning the life they might have had.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want Coffin to pay for what he’d done. He deserved a savage beating at the very least. But as much as Mary might have wanted Coffin to suffer, she knew it was useless to try. If his private army didn’t get Tom, the law surely would. Mary didn’t imagine there was any clause in police regulations permitting the beating of captains. If Tom was lucky enough to live, he’d be spending the next few years on Blackwell’s Island. He might not survive that either. Mary had no doubt about Coffin’s reach extending into that place. Tom had put plenty of men there over the years. He’d be living among a crowd who’d like nothing better than to see him dead.

  It wasn’t worth it, none of it. Coffin could go on living a long and happy life fo
r all Mary cared. He could become police commissioner, or mayor. It didn’t matter. He could feel he’d won, take pride in punishing her and Tom and bringing him to heel. What did it matter, so long as Tom and she were together. They could go anywhere, San Francisco or Chicago, anywhere they could rebuild their lives. That didn’t seem possible now. Chelsea held her hand through her mourning night. Mary must have fallen asleep like that, surrendering at last to exhaustion. She woke with a little start. The hand in hers stroked her fingers, a soothing, healing caress. Her right eye opened halfway. The left one, swollen shut, didn’t open at all. Through the sand of her sleep, the half awake world took on a bleary cast. Her room was gray. The black of night had fled to the corners and behind the bed. Chelsea stroked her hand, caressing her back to a painless sleep. Chelsea’s big strong fingers seemed to cradle her little hand like a broken bird, calming, soothing. In her half sleep Mary imagined the hand was much bigger than Chelsea’s. It seemed half again too big. A lazy eye opened to resolve the disparity and put her maid back into proper perspective.

  The gray-lit room swam, blurry and colorless. Chelsea loomed large, her outline a massive, darker gray. A small frown sent a stab of pain through her swollen eye.

  Mary stirred and focused. “Chelsea?”

  “It’s me, sweetheart. I’m here,” a voice said. Chelsea had never called her sweetheart before. She was so big in the dark. She’d never noticed how big Chelsea was. Mary began to imagine it wasn’t her maid who held her hand. But that wasn’t possible.

  “Tommy?” she heard herself say. “Tommy?” His hand tightened on hers in a reassuring squeeze.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” Tom said softly, almost sheepishly. “Didn’t expect to see me, did you?”