Dennis Lehane: Live by Night

“I get off at midnight,” she said.

Joe lived on the top floor of a boardinghouse in the West End, just a short walk from the riot of Scollay Square. The boardinghouse was owned and operated by the Tim Hickey Mob, which had long had a presence in the city but had flourished in the six years since the Eighteenth Amendment took effect.

The first floor was usually occupied by Paddys right off the boat with woolen brogues and bodies of gristle. One of Joe’s jobs was to meet them at the docks and lead them to Hickey-owned soup kitchens, give them brown bread and white chowder and gray potatoes. He brought them back to the boardinghouse where they were packed three to a room on firm, clean mattresses while their clothes were laundered in the basement by the older whores. After a week or so, once they’d gotten some strength back and freed their hair of nits and their mouths of poisoned teeth, they’d sign voter registration cards and pledge bottomless support to Hickey candidates in next year’s elections. Then they were set loose with the names and addresses of other immigrants from the same villages or counties back home who might be counted on to find them jobs straightaway.

On the second floor of the boardinghouse, accessible only by a separate entrance, was the casino. The third was the whore floor. Joe lived on the fourth, in a room at the end of the hall. There was a nice bathroom on the floor that he shared with whichever high rollers were in town at the moment and Penny Palumbo, the star whore of Tim Hickey’s stable. Penny was twenty-five but looked seventeen and her hair was the color bottled honey got when the sun moved through it. A man had jumped off a roof over Penny Palumbo; another had stepped off a boat; a third, instead of killing himself, killed another guy. Joe liked her well enough; she was nice and wonderful to look at. But if her face looked seventeen, he’d bet her brain looked ten. It was solely occupied, as far as Joe could tell, by three songs and some vague wishes about becoming a dressmaker.

Some mornings, depending on who got down to the casino first, one brought the other coffee. This morning, she brought it to him and they sat by the window in his room looking out at Scollay Square with its striped awnings and tall billboards as the first milk trucks puttered along Tremont Row. Penny told him that last night a fortune-teller had assured her she was destined to either die young or become a Trinitarian Pentecostal in Kansas. When Joe asked her if she was worried about dying, she said sure, but not half as much as moving to Kansas.

When she left, he heard her talking to someone in the hall, and then Tim Hickey was standing in his doorway. Tim wore a dark pinstripe vest, unbuttoned, matching trousers, and a white shirt with the collar unbuttoned and no tie. Tim was a trim man with a fine head of white hair and the sad, helpless eyes of a death row chaplain.

“Mr. Hickey, sir.”

“Morning, Joe.” He drank coffee from an old-fashioned glass that caught the morning light rising off the sills. “That bank in Pittsfield?”

“Yeah?” Joe said.

“The guy you want to see comes in here Thursdays, but you’ll find him at the Upham’s Corner place most other nights. He’ll keep a homburg on the bar to the right of his drink. He’ll give you the lay of the building and the out-route too.”

“Thanks, Mr. Hickey.”

Hickey acknowledged that with a tip of his glass. “Another thing—’member that dealer we discussed last month?”

“Carl,” Joe said, “yeah.”

“He’s up to it again.”

Carl Laubner, one of their blackjack dealers, had come from a joint that ran dirty games, and they couldn’t convince him to run a clean game here, not if any of the players in question looked less than 100 percent white. So if an Italian or a Greek sat down at the table, forget it. Carl magically pulled tens and aces for hole cards all night, or at least until the swarthier gents left the table.

“Fire him,” Hickey said. “Soon as he comes in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We don’t run that horseshit here. Agreed?”

“Absolutely, Mr. Hickey. Absolutely.”

“And fix the twelve slot, will you? It’s running loose. We might run a straight house, but we’re not a fucking charity, are we, Joe?”

Joe wrote himself a note. “No, sir, we are not.”

Tim Hickey ran one of the few clean casinos in Boston, which made it one of the most popular casinos in town, particularly for the high-class play. Tim had taught Joe that rigged games fleeced a chump maybe two, three times at the most before he got wise and stopped playing. Tim didn’t want to fleece someone a couple of times; he wanted to drain them for the rest of their lives. Keep ’em playing, keep ’em drinking, he told Joe, and they will fork over all their green and thank you for relieving them of the weight.

“The people we service?” Tim said more than once. “They visit the night. But we live in it. They rent what we own. That means when they come to play in our sandbox, we make a profit off every grain.”

Tim Hickey was one of the smarter men Joe had ever known. At the start of Prohibition, when the mobs in the city were split down ethnic lines—Italians mixing only with Italians, Jews mixing only with Jews, Irish mixing only with Irish—Hickey mixed with everyone. He aligned himself with Giancarlo Calabrese, who ran the Pescatore Mob while old man Pescatore was in prison, and together they started dealing in Caribbean rum when everyone else was dealing in whiskey. By the time the Detroit and New York gangs had leveraged their power to turn everyone else into subcontractors in the whiskey trade, the Hickey and Pescatore mobs had cornered the market on sugar and molasses. The product came out of Cuba mostly, crossed the Florida Straits, got turned into rum on U.S. soil, and took midnight runs up the Eastern Seaboard to be sold at an 80 percent markup.

As soon as Tim had returned from his most recent trip to Tampa, he’d discussed the botched job at the Southie furniture warehouse with Joe. He commended Joe on being smart enough not to go for the house take in the counting room (“That avoided a war right there,” Tim said), and told him when he got to the bottom of why they’d been given such a dangerously bad tip, someone was going to hang from rafters as high as the Custom House spire.

Joe wanted to believe him because the alternative was to believe Tim had sent them to that warehouse because he’d wanted to start a war with Albert White. It wouldn’t be beyond Tim to sacrifice men he’d mentored since they were boys with the aim of cornering the rum market for good. In fact, nothing was beyond Tim. Absolutely nothing. That’s what it took to stay on top in the rackets—everyone had to know you’d long ago amputated your conscience.

In Joe’s room now, Tim added a spot of rum from his flask to his coffee and took a sip. He offered the flask to Joe, but Joe shook his head. Tim returned the flask to his pocket. “Where you been lately?”

“I been here.”

Hickey held his gaze. “You’ve been out every night this week and the week before. You got a girl?”

Joe thought about lying but couldn’t see the point. “I do, yeah.”

“She a nice girl?”

“She’s lively. She’s”—Joe couldn’t think of the precise word—“something.”

Hickey came off the doorjamb. “You got yourself a blood sticker, huh?” He mimed a needle plunging into his arm. “I can see it.” He came over and clamped a hand on the back of Joe’s neck. “You don’t get many shots at the good ones. Not in our line. She cook?”

“She does.” Truth was, Joe had no idea.

“That’s important. Not if they’re good or bad, just that they’re willing to do it.” Hickey let go of his neck and walked back to the doorway. “Talk to that fella about the Pittsfield thing.”