Live by Night

“He’s fine. No cranial bleeding, no loss of memory or speech disability. His nose and half his ribs are broken, and it’ll be some time before he urinates without seeing blood in the bowl, but no brain damage that I can see.”

Thomas and Jack D’Jarvis went in and sat by Joe’s bed and he considered them through his swollen black eyes.

“I was wrong,” Thomas said. “Dead wrong. And, sure, there’s no excuse for it.”

Joe spoke through black lips crisscrossed with sutures. “You shouldn’t have let them beat me?”

Thomas nodded. “I shouldn’t have.”

“You going soft on me, old man?”

Thomas shook his head. “I should’ve done it myself.”

Joe’s soft chuckle traveled through his nostrils. “With all due respect, sir, I’m happy your men did it. If you’d done it, I might be dead.”

Thomas smiled. “So you don’t hate me?”

“First time I remember liking you in ten years.” Joe tried to raise himself off the pillow but failed. “Where’s Emma?”

Jack D’Jarvis opened his mouth, but Thomas waved him off. He looked his son steadily in the face as he told him what had happened in Marblehead.

Joe sat with the information for a bit, turning it over. He said, somewhat desperately, “She’s not dead.”

“She is, son. And even if we’d acted immediately that night, Donnie Gishler was not of the disposition to be taken alive. She was dead as soon as she got in that car.”

“There’s no body,” Joe said. “So she’s not dead.”

“Joseph, they never found half the bodies on Titanic, but the poor souls are no longer with us just the same.”

“I won’t believe it.”

“You won’t? Or you don’t?”

“It’s the same thing.”

“Far from it.” Thomas shook his head. “We’ve pieced together some of what happened that night. She was Albert White’s moll. She betrayed you.”

“She did,” Joe said.

“And?”

Joe smiled, sutured lips and all. “And I don’t give a shit. I’m crazy about her.”

“ ‘Crazy’ isn’t love,” his father said.

“No, what is it?”

“Crazy.”

“All due respect, Dad, I witnessed your marriage for eighteen years, and that wasn’t love.”

“No,” his father agreed, “it wasn’t. So I know whereof I speak.” He sighed. “Either way, she’s gone, son. As dead as your mother, God rest her.”

Joe said, “What about Albert?”

Thomas sat on the side of the bed. “In the wind.”

Jack D’Jarvis said, “But rumored to be negotiating his return.”

Thomas looked over at him, and D’Jarvis nodded.

“Who’re you?” Joe asked D’Jarvis.

The lawyer extended his hand. “John D’Jarvis, Mr. Coughlin. Most people call me Jack.”

Joe’s swollen eyes opened as wide as they had since Thomas and Jack had entered the room.

“Damn,” he said. “Heard of you.”

“I’ve heard of you too,” D’Jarvis said. “Unfortunately, so has the whole state. On the other hand, one of the worst decisions your father has ever made could end up being the best thing that could have happened to you.”

“How so?” Thomas asked.

“By beating him to a pulp, you turned him into a victim. The state’s attorney isn’t going to want to prosecute. He will but he won’t want to.”

“Bondurant is state’s attorney these days, right?” Joe asked.

D’Jarvis nodded. “You know him?”

“I know of him,” Joe said, the fear apparent on his bruised face.

“Thomas,” D’Jarvis asked, watching him carefully, “do you know Bondurant?”

Thomas said, “I do, yes.”

Calvin Bondurant had married a Lenox of Beacon Hill and had produced three willowy daughters, one of whom had recently married a Lodge to great notice in the society pages. Bondurant was a tireless advocate of Prohibition, a fearless crusader against all manner of vice, which he proclaimed was a product of the lower classes and inferior races who’d been washing ashore in this great land the last seventy years. The last seventy years of immigration had been primarily limited to two races — the Irish and the Italians — so Bondurant’s message wasn’t particularly subtle. But when he ran for governor in a few years, his donors on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay would know he was the right man.

Bondurant’s secretary ushered Thomas into his office on Kirkby and closed the doors behind them. Bondurant turned from where he stood by the window and gave Thomas an emotionless gaze.

“I’ve been expecting you.”

Ten years ago, Thomas had swept Calvin Bondurant up in a raid on a rooming house. Bondurant had been keeping time with several bottles of champagne and a naked young man of Mexican descent. In addition to a burgeoning career in prostitution, the Mexican turned out to be a former member of Pancho Villa’s División del Norte who was wanted in his homeland on charges of treason. Thomas had deported the revolutionary back to Chihuahua and allowed Bondurant’s name to vanish from the arrest logs.

“Well, here I am,” Thomas said.

“You turned your son the criminal into a victim. That’s an amazing trick. Are you that smart, Deputy Superintendent?”

Thomas said, “Nobody’s that smart.”