Dennis Lehane - Live by Night

The window was closing fast.

If Loretta Figgis were to meet with an untimely end—but in such a way as to be plausibly considered an “accident”—then after a respectful period of mourning, the casino idea would reach full flower. She loved Jesus so much, Joe told himself, he’d be doing her a service by bringing them together.

So he knew what he had to do, but he had yet to give the order.

He went to see her preach. He stopped shaving for a day and dressed the part of a man who sold farming equipment or possibly owned a feed store—clean dungarees, white shirt, string tie, a dark canvas sport coat and a straw cowboy hat pulled low over his eyes. He had Sal drive him to the edge of the campgrounds the Reverend Ingalls was using that night, and he made his way down a thin dirt road between a small stand of pines until he reached the back of the crowd.

Along the shore of a pond, someone had built a small stage out of crate board, and Loretta stood on it with her father on the left and the reverend on the right, heads bowed. Loretta was speaking of a recent vision or dream (Joe came too late to hear which). With her back to the dark pond, in her white dress and white bonnet, she stood out against the black night like a midnight moon in a sky swept of stars. A family of three, she said—mother, father, tiny baby—had arrived in a strange land. The father, a businessman sent by his company to this strange land, had been instructed to wait for their driver inside the railway station and not venture outside. But it was hot inside the terminal and they had traveled far and wished to see their new land. They stepped outside and were instantly beset upon by a leopard as black as the inside of a coal bucket. And before the family had so much as its wits about them, the leopard had torn open their throats with its teeth. The man lay dying, watching the leopard slake itself on the blood of his wife, when another man appeared and shot that black leopard dead. This man told the dying businessman that he was the driver who had been hired by the company and all they’d had to do was wait for him.

But they hadn’t waited. Why hadn’t they waited?

And so it is with Jesus, Loretta said. Can you wait? Can you not give yourselves over to the earthly temptations that will tear your families asunder? Can you find a way to keep your loved ones safe from the beasts of prey until our Lord God and Savior returns?

“Or are you too weak?” Loretta asked.

“No!”

“Because I know that in my darkest hours, I’m too weak.”

“No!”

“I am,” Loretta cried. “But he gives me strength.” She pointed at the sky. “He fills my heart. But I need you to help me complete his wishes. I need your strength to continue preaching his word and doing his works and keeping the black leopards from eating our children and staining our hearts with endless sin. Will you help me?”

The crowd said Yes and Amen and Oh, yes. When Loretta closed her eyes and began to sway, the crowd opened its eyes and surged forward. When Loretta sighed, they moaned. When she fell to her knees, they gasped. And when she lay on her side, they exhaled as one. They reached for her without stepping any closer to the stage, as if some invisible barrier lay between them. They reached for something that wasn’t Loretta. Cried out to it. Promised all to it.

Loretta was its gateway, the portal by which they entered a world without sin, without dark, without fear. One where you were never alone. Because you had God. And you had Loretta.

“Tonight,” Dion said to him on the third-floor gallery of Joe’s home. “She’s gotta go.”

“You don’t think I’ve thought about it?” Joe said.

“Thinking about it ain’t the issue,” Dion said. “Acting on it is, boss.”

Joe pictured the Ritz, light pouring from its windows onto the dark sea, music flowing through its porticos and out across the Gulf as the dice rattled on the tables and the crowds cheered a winner, and he presided over all of it in tux and tails.

He asked himself, as he had so often over the past few weeks, What is one life?

People always died during building construction or laying steel tracks in the sun. They died from electrocution and other industrial accidents every single day, the world over. And for what? For the building of something good, something that would employ their fellow countrymen, put food on the table of the human race.

How would Loretta’s death be any different?

“It just would,” he said.

“What?” Dion peered at him.

Joe held up a hand in apology. “I can’t do it.”

“I can, ” Dion said.

Joe said, “If you buy a ticket to the dance, then you know the consequences or you damn well should. But these people who sleep while the rest of us stay up? Work their jobs, mow their lawns? They didn’t buy a ticket. Which means they don’t suffer the same penalties for their mistakes.”

Dion sighed. “She’s jeopardizing the entire fucking deal.”

“I know that.” Joe was thankful for the sunset, for the darkness that had found them on the gallery. If Dion could see his eyes clearly, he’d know how shaky Joe was with the decision, how close he was to crossing the line and never looking back. Christ, she was one woman. “But my mind’s made up. No one touches a hair on her head.”

“You’ll regret this,” Dion said.

Joe said, “No shit.”

A week later, when John Ringling’s minions asked for a meeting, Joe knew it was over. If not completely, certainly tabled for a while. The entire country was going wet again, wet with abandon, wet with fervor and joy, but Tampa, under Loretta Figgis’s influence, was swinging the other way. If they couldn’t trump her when it came to the acceptance of booze, which was a signature away from being legalized, they were sunk when it came to gambling. John Ringling’s men told Joe and Esteban that their boss had decided to hold on to the Ritz a little longer, wait out the dip in the economy, and revisit his options at a later time.

The meeting was held in Sarasota. When Joe and Esteban left, they drove over to Longboat Key and stood looking at the gleaming Mediterranean Almost Was on the Gulf of Mexico.

“It would have been a great casino,” Joe said.

“You’ll have another chance. Things swing back around.”

Joe shook his head. “Not all things.”

The last time Loretta Figgis and Joe saw each other alive was early in 1933. It had rained heavily for a week. That morning, the first cloudless day in some time, the ground fog rose so thick off the streets of Ybor it was as if the earth had turned itself upside down. Joe walked the boardwalk along Palm Avenue, distracted, Sal Urso pacing him from the opposite boardwalk, and Lefty Downer pacing both of them in a car inching along the center. Joe had just confirmed a rumor that Maso was considering another trip down here, his second in a year, and the fact that Maso hadn’t told him himself didn’t sit right. On top of that, stories in this morning’s papers said that President-elect Roosevelt planned to sign the Cullen-Harrison Act as soon as someone put a pen in his hand, effectively ending Prohibition. Joe had known it could never last, but he still hadn’t been prepared somehow. And if he was unprepared, he could only imagine how poorly all the mugs in the bootleg boomtowns like KC, Cincy, Chicago, New York, and Detroit were going to take the news. He’d sat on his bed this morning and tried to read the article so he could identify the exact week or month Roosevelt was going to wield that most popular of pens, but he was distracted because Graciela was puking up last night’s paella to beat the band. Normally, she had a cast-iron stomach, but lately the stress of running three shelters and eight different fund-raising groups was shredding her digestive system.