Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

“And how many bullets struck the felon?”

“Eleven is the number I heard, but the truth awaits a proper autopsy.”

“And Dion Bartolo?”

“Holed up in Montreal, I’d assume. Or nearby. Dion was always the smarter of the two. Paolo’s the one you’d expect to stick his head up.”

The commissioner lifted a sheet of paper off one small pile on his desk and placed it atop another small pile. He looked out the window, seemed entranced by the Custom House spire a few blocks away. “The department can’t let you walk back out of this office carrying the same rank you carried in, Tom. You understand that?”

“I do, yes.” Thomas glanced around the office he’d coveted for the past ten years and felt no sense of loss.

“And if I demoted you to captain, I’d have to have a division house to hand over to you.”

“Which you don’t.”

“Which I don’t.” The commissioner leaned forward, his hands clasped together. “You can pray exclusively for your son now, Thomas, because your career just reached its highest floor.”

She’s not dead,” Joe said.

He’d come out of the coma four hours before. Thomas had arrived at Mass. General ten minutes after the doctor called. He’d brought the attorney Jack D’Jarvis with him. Jack D’Jarvis was a small, elderly man who wore wool suits of the most forgettable colors—tree bark brown, damp sand gray, blacks that appeared to have been left in the sun too long. His ties usually matched the suits; the collars of his shirts were yellowed, and on the rare occasions he wore a hat, it seemed too big for his head and perched on the tops of his ears. Jack D’Jarvis looked ready to be put out to pasture, and he’d looked that way for the better part of three decades, but no one but a stranger was stupid enough to believe it. He was the best criminal defense lawyer in the city, and few could name a close second. Over the years Jack D’Jarvis had dismantled at least two dozen ironclad cases Thomas had brought to the DA. It was said that when Jack D’Jarvis died, he’d spend his time in heaven springing all his former clients from hell.

The doctors examined Joe for two hours while Thomas and D’Jarvis cooled their heels in the corridor with the young patrolman manning the door.

“I can’t get him off,” D’Jarvis said.

“I know that.”

“Rest assured, though, the second-degree murder charge is a farce and the state’s attorney knows it. But your son will have to do time.”

“How much?”

D’Jarvis shrugged. “Ten years would be my guess.”

“In Charlestown?” Thomas shook his head. “There’ll be nothing left of him to walk back out those doors.”

“Three police officers are dead, Thomas.”

“But he didn’t kill them.”

“Which is why he won’t get the chair. But pretend this is anyone else but your son and you’d want him to get twenty years.”

“But he is my son,” Thomas said.

The doctors exited the room.

One of them stopped to talk to Thomas. “I don’t know what his skull is made of, but we’re guessing it’s not bone.”

“Doctor?”

“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.