Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

Gary smiled at Joe like he’d never heard such a thing.

“All those supply runs that didn’t make it?” Joe said. “Just about every bottle ended up in one of Albert White’s speaks.” He flicked his ash on the desk. “You explain that?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You don’t…?” Joe put both feet back on the floor.

“No, I mean, I don’t… What?”

Joe reached for his gun. “Sure you do.”

Gary smiled. He stopped smiling. He smiled again. “No, I don’t. Hey. Hey.”

“You’ve been pointing Albert White to our northeastern supply runs.” Joe ejected the .32’s magazine into his palm. He thumbed the top bullet.

Gary said it again. He said, “Hey.”

Joe peered down the sight. He said to Dion, “There’s still one in the chamber.”

“You should always leave one there. In case.”

“In case of what?” Joe jacked the bullet out of the chamber and caught it. He placed it on the desk, the tip pointing at Gary L. Smith.

“I don’t know,” Dion said. “Things you can’t see coming.”

Joe slammed the magazine back into the grip. He snapped a bullet into the chamber and placed the gun on his lap. “I had Dion drive by your house on the way over. You’ve got a nice house. Dion said the neighborhood’s called Hyde Park?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Funny.”

“What?”

“We’ve got a Hyde Park in Boston.”

“Oh. That is funny.”

“Well, it’s not hilarious or anything. Just interesting, kind of.”

“Yes.”

“Stucco?”

“Sorry?”

“Stucco. It’s made of stucco, right?”

“Well, it’s a wood frame, but, yeah, stucco skin.”

“Oh. So I was wrong.”

“No, you weren’t wrong.”

“You said wood.”

“The frame’s wood, but the skin, the surface, that’s, yeah, that’s stucco. So you, yeah, that’s what it is—a stucco house.”

“You like it?”

“Huh?”

“The wood-frame stucco house—do you like it?”

“It’s a little big now that my kids are…”

“What?”

“Grown. They’re gone.”

Joe scratched the back of his head with the barrel of the .32. “You’re going to have to pack it up.”

“I don’t—”

“Or hire someone to pack it up for you.” He shot his eyebrows in the direction of the phone. “They can send the stuff to wherever you end up.”

Smith tried to get back what had left the office fifteen minutes ago, the illusion that he was in control. “End up ? I’m not leaving.”

Joe stood and reached into the pocket of his suit jacket. “You fucking her?”

“What? Who?”

Joe jerked his thumb at the door behind him. “Miss Roe.”

Smith said, “What?”

Joe looked at Dion. “He’s fucking her.”

Dion stood. “Without question.”

Joe pulled a pair of train tickets out of his jacket. “She is a work of art, that one. Falling asleep inside of her must be like getting a glimpse of God. After that, you know everything’s going to be all right.”

He placed the tickets on the desk between them.

“I don’t care who you take—your wife, Miss Roe, hell, both of them or neither of them. But you will board the eleven o’clock Seaboard to do it. Tonight, Gary.”

He laughed. It was a short laugh. “I don’t think you under—”

Joe slapped Gary L. Smith across the face so hard he left his chair and banged his head on the radiator.

They waited for him to get off the floor. He righted his chair. He sat in it, all the blood gone from his face now, though some speckled his cheek and lip. Dion tossed a handkerchief at his chest.

“You either put yourself on that train, Gary”—Joe lifted his bullet off the desk—“or we put you under it.”

Heading to the car, Dion said, “You serious about that?”

“Yes.” Joe was irritated again, though not sure why. Sometimes a darkness just came over him. He’d like to say these sudden black moods had been happening only since prison, but the truth was they’d been descending on him since he could remember. Sometimes without reason or warning. But in this case, maybe because Smith had mentioned having children and Joe didn’t like thinking about a man he’d just humiliated having any kind of life outside this job.

“So, if he doesn’t get on that train, you’re prepared to kill him?”

Or maybe simply because he was a dark guy given to dark moods.

“No.” Joe stopped at the car and waited. “Men who work for us will.” He looked at Dion. “What am I, a fucking field hand?”

Dion opened the door for him and Joe climbed inside.

Joe had asked Maso to put him up in a hotel. His first month here, he didn’t want to think about anything but business—that included where his next meal was coming from, how his sheets and clothes got washed, and how long the fella who’d gotten to the bathroom ahead of him was going to stay there. Maso said he’d put him up at the Tampa Bay Hotel, which sounded fine to Joe, if a little unimaginative. He assumed it was a middle-of-the-road place with decent beds, bland but serviceable food, and flat pillows.

Instead, Dion pulled up in front of a lakefront palace. When Joe spoke the thought aloud, Dion said, “That’s actually what they call it—Plant’s Palace.” Henry Plant had built the place, much like he’d built most of Florida, to entice land speculators who’d come down over the past two decades in swarms.

Before Dion could pull up to the front door, a train crossed their path. Not a toy train, though he’d bet they had those here too, but a transcontinental locomotive, a quarter mile long. Joe and Dion sat just short of the parking lot and watched the train disgorge rich men and rich women and their rich children. While they waited, Joe counted more than a hundred windows in the building. At the top of the redbrick walls were several dormers Joe assumed housed the suites. Six minarets rose even higher than the dormers, pointing toward the hard white sky—a Russian winter palace in the middle of dredged Florida swampland.

A swank couple in starched whites left the train. Their three nannies and three swank children followed. Fast on their heels two Negro porters pushed luggage carts piled high with steamer trunks.

“Let’s come back,” Joe said.

“What?” Dion said. “We can park here and walk your bags over. Get you—”

“We’ll come back.” Joe watched the couple stroll inside like they’d grown up in places twice this size. “I don’t want to wait in line.”

Dion looked like he was about to say more on the subject, but then he sighed softly, and they drove back down the road and over small wooden bridges and past a golf course. An older couple sat in a rickshaw pulled by a small Latin guy in a white long-sleeve shirt and white pants. Small wooden signs pointed to the shuffleboard courts, the hunting preserve, canoes, tennis courts, and a racetrack. They drove past the golf course, greener than Joe would have bet in all this heat, and most people they saw wore white and carried parasols, even the men, and their laughter was dry and distant on the air.

He and Dion drove onto Lafayette and into downtown. Dion told Joe the Suarezes went back and forth from Cuba and few knew much about them. Ivelia, it was rumored, had been married to a man who’d died during the sugar workers’ rebellion back in ’12. It was also rumored that the story was a front to disguise her lesbian tendencies.

“Esteban,” Dion said, “owns a lot of companies, both here and over there. Young guy, way younger than his sister. But smart. His father was in business with Ybor himself when Ybor—”