Live by Night

That stopped the drink halfway to Joe’s mouth. “When?”

“Last night.”

“How?”

Esteban shook his head several times and moved behind his desk.

“Esteban, how?”

He looked out at his garden. “We have to assume she had returned to using heroin.”

“Okay…”

“Else, it would have been impossible.”

“Esteban,” Joe said.

“She cut off her genitalia, Joseph. Then—”

“Fuck,” Joe said. “Fuck no.”

“Then she cut her own windpipe.”

Joe put his face in his hands. He could see her in the coffee shop a month ago, could see her as a girl walking up the stairs of police headquarters in her plaid skirt and her little white socks and her saddle shoes, books under her arm. And then the one he only imagined but which was twice as vivid — mutilating herself as a bathtub filled with her blood, her mouth open in a permanent scream.

“Was it a bathtub?”

Esteban gave him a curious frown. “Was what a bathtub?”

“Where she killed herself.”

“No.” He shook his head. “She did it in bed. Her father’s bed.”

Joe put his hands over his face again and kept them there.

“Please tell me you’re not blaming yourself,” Esteban said after a while.

Joe said nothing.

“Joseph, look at me.”

Joe lowered his hands and exhaled a long breath.

“She went west, and like so many girls who do that, she was preyed upon. You didn’t prey on her.”

“But men in our profession did.” Joe placed his drink on the corner of the desk and paced the length of the rug and back again, trying to find the words. “Each compartment in this thing we do? Feeds the other compartments. The booze profits pay for the girls and the girls pay for the narcotics needed to hook other girls into fucking strangers for our profit. Those girls try to get off the shit or forget how to be docile? They get beaten, Esteban, you know that. They try to get clean, then they make themselves vulnerable to a smart cop. So someone cuts their throats and throws them in a river. And we’ve spent the last ten years raining bullets on the competition and on one another. And for what? For fucking money.”

“This is the ugly side of living life outside the law.”

“Aw, shit,” Joe said. “We’re not outlaws. We’re gangsters.”

Esteban held his gaze for a bit and then said, “There’s no talking to you when you’re like this.” He flipped the framed photo over on his desk and gazed at it. “We’re not our brother’s keeper, Joseph. In fact, it’s an insult to our brother to presume he can’t take care of himself.”

Loretta, Joe thought. Loretta, Loretta. We took and took from you and expected you to somehow soldier on without the parts we stole.

Esteban was pointing at the photograph. “Look at these people. They are dancing and drinking and living. Because they could be dead tomorrow. We could be dead tomorrow, you and I. If one of these revelers, say this man—”

Esteban pointed at a bulldog-faced gent in a white dinner jacket, a group of women arrayed behind him, like they were about to lift the chunky bastard onto their shoulders, the women all aglitter in sequins and lamé.

“—were to die on his drive home because he was too drunk on Suarez Reserve to see straight, is that our fault?”

Joe looked past the bulldog man to all those lovely women, most of them Cuban with hair and eyes the color of Graciela’s.

“Is that our fault?” Esteban said.

Except one woman. A smaller woman, looking away from the camera, at something out of the frame, as if someone had come into the room and called her name as the camera flashed. A woman with hair the color of sand and eyes as pale as winter.

“What?” Joe said.

“Is it our fault?” Esteban said. “If some mamón decides to—”

“When was this taken?” Joe said.

“When?”

“Yes, yes. When?”

“That’s the opening night of Zoot.”

“And when did it open?”

“Last month.”

Joe looked across the desk at him. “You’re sure?”

Esteban laughed. “It’s my restaurant. Of course I’m sure.”

Joe gulped his drink down. “There’s no way this photo could have been taken at another time and gotten mixed up with the one taken last month?”

“What? No. What other time?”

“Say six years ago.”

Esteban shook his head, still chuckling, but his eyes darkening with concern. “No, no, no, Joseph. No. This was taken a month ago. Why?”

“Because this woman right here?” Joe put his finger on Emma Gould. “She’s been dead since 1927.”

Part III All the Violent Children 1933–1935

Chapter twenty-three The Haircut

You’re sure it’s her?” Dion said the next morning in Joe’s office.

From his inside pocket, Joe removed the photograph Esteban had pulled back out of the frame last night. He placed it on the desk in front of Dion. “You tell me.”

Dion’s eyes drifted and then locked and finally widened. “Oh, yeah, that’s her all right.” He looked sideways at Joe. “You tell Graciela?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You tell your women everything?”

“I don’t tell ’em shit, but you’re more of a nance than me. And she’s carrying your child.”

“That’s true.” He looked up at the copper ceiling. “I didn’t tell her yet because I don’t know how.”