Live by Night

Joe looked over at Irv because he could feel the man seething, but, as always, Irv wouldn’t meet his eyes, just stared at his hands, which were clasped into fists.

“Well, he believes in you,” she said. “Mr. Coughlin, you will renounce your evil path. I just know it. I can see it in you. You will repent and become baptized in Jesus Christ. And you will make a great prophet. I see this as clearly as I see a sinless city on a hill, here in Tampa. And, yes, Mr. Coughlin, before you can make fun, I realize there are no hills in Tampa.”

“Well, none you’d notice, even if you were driving fast.”

She smiled a real smile, and it was the one he remembered from a few years ago, coming across her at the soda fountain or in the magazine section of Morin Drugstore.

Then it transformed into the sad, frozen one again, and her eyes brightened and she extended a gloved hand across the desk to him, and he shook it, thinking of the track scars it covered, as Loretta Figgis said, “I will one day spirit you off your path, Mr. Coughlin. Of that, you can be sure. I feel this to my bones.”

“Just because you feel it,” Joe said, “doesn’t make it so.”

“But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so.”

“I’ll grant you that.” Joe looked up at her. “Now why can’t you grant my opinions the same benefit of the doubt?”

Loretta’s sad smile brightened. “Because they’re wrong.”

Unfortunately for Joe, Esteban, and the Pescatore Family, as Loretta’s popularity rose, so did her legitimacy. After a few months, her proselytizing began to endanger the casino deal. Those who’d initially brought her up in public company had done so mostly to ridicule her or marvel at the circumstances that had brought her to her current state — all-American police chief’s daughter goes to Hollywood, comes back a raving loon with track marks in her arms that yokels mistake for stigmata. But the tone of the conversation began to shift not only as the roads clogged with both cars and foot traffic on nights it was rumored Loretta would appear at a revival, but also as regular townsfolk were exposed to her. Loretta, far from hiding from the public eye, engaged it. Not just in Hyde Park but also in West Tampa, Port of Tampa, and Ybor as well, where she liked to come to purchase coffee, her one vice.

She didn’t talk religion much during daylight hours. She was unfailingly polite, always quick to ask after someone’s health or the health of their loved ones. She never forgot a name. And she remained, even as the hard year of her “trials,” as she called them, had aged her, a strikingly beautiful woman. And beautiful in a conspicuously American way — full lips the same color as her burgundy hair, eyes honest and blue, skin as smooth and white as the sweet cream at the top of the morning milk bottle.

The fainting spells began to occur late in ’31 after the European banking crisis sucked the rest of the world into its vortex and killed all remaining hope for financial recovery. The spells came without warning or theatrics. She would be speaking of the ills of liquor or lust or (more and more lately) gambling — always in a quiet, slightly tremulous voice — and the visions God had sent her of a Tampa burned black by its own sins, a smoke-wisped wasteland of charred soil and smoldering piles of wood where homes had once stood, and she would remind them all of Lot’s wife and implore them not to look back, never to look back, but to look ahead to a shining city of white homes and white clothing and white people united in love of Christ and prayer and earnest desire to leave behind a world their children could be proud of. Somewhere in this sermon, her eyes would roll left and then right, her body swaying with them, and then she would drop. Sometimes she convulsed, sometimes a small amount of spittle leaked over her beautiful lips, but mostly she just appeared to be asleep. It was suggested (but only in the lowest circles) that part of the surge in her popularity stemmed from how lovely she looked when she lay prone on a stage, dressed in thin white crepe, thin enough so you could see her small, perfectly formed breasts and her slim, unblemished legs.

When Loretta lay on the stage like that, she was proof of God because only God could make something that beautiful, that fragile, and that powerful.

And so her swelling ranks of followers took her causes quite personally and none more so than the attempts of a local gangster to ravage their communities with the scourge of gambling. Soon the congressmen and the councilmen returned to Joe’s bagmen with “No,” or “We’ll need more time to consider all the variables,” though Joe noted the one thing they didn’t return with was his money.

The window was closing fast.

If Loretta Figgis were to meet with an untimely end — but in such a way as to be plausibly considered an “accident”—then after a respectful period of mourning, the casino idea would reach full flower. She loved Jesus so much, Joe told himself, he’d be doing her a service by bringing them together.