Live by Night (28 page)

“Got my eye on a new one,” he said. “What do you think of that?”

Dion said, “New becomes old the second you drive it off the lot.”

Kelvin Beauregard raised an eyebrow. “Good point, good point. Gentlemen, what can I do for you?”

He took a cigar from a humidor on his desk but didn't offer anyone else one.

Joe crossed his right leg over his left and hitched the crease in the ankle cuff. “We'd like to see if you could talk some sense into RD Pruitt.”

Beauregard said, “Ain't too many people had success doing that in their lives.”

“Be that as it may,” Joe said, “we'd like you to try.”

Beauregard bit the end off his cigar and spit it into a wastebasket. “RD's a grown man. He's not requested my counsel, so it would be disrespectful to give it. Even if I agreed with the reason. And tell me, because I'm confused, what the reason would be?”

Joe waited until Beauregard had lit his cigar, waited while he stared through the flame at him and then stared through the smoke at him.

“In the interest of his own self-preservation,” Joe said, “RD needs to quit shooting up my clubs and meet with me so we can come to an accommodation.”

“Clubs? What kind of clubs?”

Joe looked over at Dion and Sal and said nothing.

“Bridge clubs?” Beauregard said. “Rotary clubs? I belong to the Greater Tampa Rotary Club, myself, and I don't recall seeing you—”

“I come to you as an adult to discuss a piece of business,” Joe said, “and you want to play fucking games.”

Kelvin Beauregard put his feet up on his desk. “Is that what I want to do?”

“You sent this boy up against us. You knew he was crazy enough to do it. But all you're going to do is get him killed.”

“I sent who?”

Joe took a long breath through his nostrils. “You're the grand wizard of the Klan around here. Great, good for you. But you think we got where we got allowing a bunch of inbred shit packers like you and your friends to muscle us?”

“Ho, boy,” Beauregard said with a weary chuckle, “if you think that's all we are, you are making a fatal miscalculation. We're town clerks and bailiffs, jail guards and bankers. Police officers, deputies, even a judge. And we've decided something, Mr. Coughlin.” He lowered his feet from the desk. “We've decided we're going to squeeze you and your spics and your dagos or we're going to run you right out of town. If you're dim enough to fight us, we'll rain holy hellfire down on you and all you love.”

Joe said, “So what you're threatening me with is a whole bunch of people who are more powerful than you?”

“Exactly.”

“Then why am I talking to you?” Joe said and nodded at Dion.

Kelvin Beauregard had time to say “What?” before Dion crossed the office and blew his brains all over his enormous window.

Dion lifted the cigar off Kelvin Beauregard's chest and popped it in his mouth. He unscrewed the Maxim silencer from his pistol and hissed as he dropped it into the pocket of his raincoat.

“Thing's hot.”

Sal Urso said, “You're becoming such a little gal lately.”

They left the office and walked down the metal stairs to the cannery floor. Coming in, they'd worn fedoras pulled down over their foreheads and light-colored raincoats over flashy suits so that all the workers could see them for what they were—gangsters—and not look too long. They walked out the same way. If anyone recognized them from around Ybor, they'd know their reputation, and that would be enough to ensure a consensus of faulty vision on the sealing floor of the late Kelvin Beauregard's cannery.

J
oe sat on Chief Figgis's front porch in Hyde Park, absently flicking the cover of his father's watch open and closed, open and closed. The house was a classic bungalow with Arts and Crafts flourishes. Brown with eggshell trim. The chief had built the porch from wide planks of hickory, and he'd placed rattan furniture out there and a swing painted the same eggshell as the trim.

Chief Figgis pulled up in his car and got out and walked up the redbrick path between the perfectly manicured lawn.

“Come to my house?” he said to Joe.

“Save you the trouble of hauling me in.”

“Why would I haul you in?”

“Some of my men tell me you were looking for me.”

“Oh, right, right.” Figgis reached the porch and put his foot on the steps for a moment. “You shoot Kelvin Beauregard in the head?”

Joe squinted up at him. “Who's Kelvin Beauregard?”

“There endeth my questions,” Figgis said. “Want a beer? It's near beer but it's not bad.”

“Much obliged,” Joe said.

Figgis went into the house and came back out with two near beers and a dog. The beers were cold and the dog was old, a gray bloodhound with soft ears the size of banana leaves. He lay on the porch between Joe and the door and snored with both eyes open.

“I need to get to RD,” Joe said after thanking Figgis for the beer.

“I expect you would feel that way.”

“You know how this ends if you don't help me,” Joe said.

“No,” Chief Figgis said, “I don't.”

“It ends with more bodies, more bloodshed, more newspapers writing about ‘Cigar City Slaughter' and the like. It ends with you getting pushed out.”

“You too.”

Joe shrugged. “Maybe.”

“Difference is, when you get pushed out, someone does it with a bullet to the back of your ear.”

“If he goes away,” Joe says, “the war ends. Peace returns.”

Figgis shook his head. “I'm not selling my wife's brother down the river.”

Joe looked out on the street. It was a lovely brick street with several tidy bungalows cheerfully painted and some old Southern homes with farmers' porches and even a couple of bowfront brownstones at the head of the street. The oaks were all stately and tall and the air smelled of gardenias.

“I don't want to do this,” Joe said.

“Do what?”

“What you're about to make me do.”

“I'm not making you do anything, Coughlin.”

“Yeah,” Joe said softly, “you are.”

He removed the first of the photos from his inside jacket pocket and placed it on the porch beside Chief Figgis. Figgis knew he shouldn't look at it. He just knew it. And for a moment, he kept his chin tilted hard toward his right shoulder. But then he turned his head back and looked down at what Joe had laid on his porch, two steps from the front door to his home, and his face was stricken white.

He looked up at Joe, then down at the photo and quickly away, and Joe went in for the kill.

He placed a second photo beside the first. “She didn't make it to Hollywood, Irv. She just made it to Los Angeles.”

Irving Figgis took a quick glance at the second photo, enough that it burned his eyes. He shut them tight and whispered, “That's not right, that's not right,” over and over.

He wept. Sobbed, actually. Hands over his face, head down, back heaving.

When he stopped, he left his face in his hands, and the dog came over and lay beside him on the porch and pressed its head against Figgis's outer thigh and shuddered, its lips flapping.

“We've got her with a special doctor,” Joe said.

Figgis lowered his hands, looked at Joe with hate in his red eyes. “What kind of doctor?”

“Kind gets people off heroin, Irv.”

Figgis held up one finger. “Do not ever call me by my Christian name again. You will call me Chief Figgis and Chief Figgis only for whatever days or years remain in our acquaintance. Are we clear?”

“We didn't
do
this to her,” Joe said. “We just found her. And pulled her out of where she was, which was a pretty bad spot.”

“And then figured out how to profit from it.” Figgis pointed at the picture of his daughter with the three men and the metal collar and chain. “You people peddle in that. Whether it's my daughter or someone else's.”

“I don't,” Joe said, knowing how feeble it sounded. “I just run rum.”

Figgis wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands and then the backs of them. “The profit from the rum buys the organization the other things. Don't you sit there, sir, and pretend it don't. Name your price.”

“What?”

“Your price. For telling me where my daughter is.” He turned and looked at Joe. “You tell me. Tell me where she is.”

“She's with a good doctor.”

Figgis thumped his fist off his porch.

“In a clean facility,” Joe said.

Figgis punched the floorboard.

“I can't tell you,” Joe said.

“Until?”

Joe looked at him for a long time.

Eventually Figgis rose and the dog rose with him. He went through his screen door and Joe heard him dialing. When he spoke into the phone his voice was higher and hoarser than normal. “RD, you're gonna meet this boy again and there ain't another discussion to be had on that matter.”

On the porch, Joe lit a cigarette. A few blocks away, horns beeped distantly on Howard.

“Yeah,” Figgis said into the phone, “I'll come too.”

Joe plucked a piece of tobacco off his tongue and gave it to the small breeze.

“You'll be safe. I swear.”

He hung up and stood at the screen for some time before pushing the door open, and he and the dog came back out on the porch.

“He'll meet you on Longboat Key, where they built that Ritz, at ten tonight. He said you come alone.”

“Okay.”

“When do I get her location?”

“When I walk out of my meeting with RD alive.”

Joe walked to his car.

“Do it yourself.”

He looked back at Figgis. “What?”

“If you're going to kill him, be man enough to pull the trigger yourself. Ain't no pride in having other people do what you're too weak to do yourself.”

“Ain't no pride in most things,” Joe said.

“You're wrong. I wake up every morning, look myself in the mirror, and know I walk a righteous path. You?” Figgis let the question hang in the air.

Joe opened his car door, started to get in.

“Wait.”

Joe looked back at the man on the porch, who was now less of a man because Joe had stolen a crucial part of him and was going to drive off with it.

Figgis flashed his torn eyes at Joe's suit jacket. His voice was shaky. “You got any more in there?”

Joe could feel them sitting in the pocket, as repugnant as abscessed gums.

“No.” He got into his car and drove off.

Chapter Nineteen

No Better Days

J
ohn Ringling, the circus impresario and great benefactor to Sarasota, had built the Ritz-Carlton on Longboat Key back in '26, whereupon he'd promptly run into money problems and left it sitting there on a cove, its back to the Gulf, rooms with no furniture, walls with no crown molding.

Back when he'd first moved to Tampa, Joe had taken a dozen trips along the coastline, looking for spots to off-load contraband. He and Esteban had some boats running molasses into the Port of Tampa, and they had the town so locked up they only lost one in ten loads. But they also paid boats to run bottled rum, Spanish
anís,
and
orujo
straight from Havana to West Central Florida. This allowed them to skip the distilling process on U.S. soil, which removed a time-consuming step, but it left the boats open to a wider array of Volstead enforcers, including T-men, G-men, and the Coast Guard. And no matter how crazy and how talented a pilot Farruco Diaz was, all he could do was spot the laws coming, not stop them. (Which is why he continued to lobby for a machine gun and gunner to go with his machine gun mount.)

Until such a day as Joe and Esteban decided to declare open war on the Coast Guard and J. Edgar's men, however, the small barrier islands that dotted this stretch of Gulf coastline—Longboat Key, Casey Key, Siesta Key, among others—were perfect places to duck and hide or temporarily stow a load.

They were also perfect places to get boxed in, because those same keys had only two ways on and off—one, the boat you'd sailed in on, and two, a bridge. One bridge. So if the laws were closing in, megaphones blaring, searchlights scouring, and you didn't have a way to fly off the island, then you, sir, were going to jail.

Over the years, they'd temporarily dumped a dozen or so loads at the Ritz. Not Joe, personally, but he'd heard the stories about the place. Ringling had gotten the skeleton up, even installed the plumbing and subflooring, but then he'd walked away. Just left it sitting there, this three-hundred-room Spanish Mediterranean, so big that if they'd lit the rooms, you could probably see it from Havana.

Joe got there an hour early. He'd brought a flashlight with him, had asked Dion to pick him up a good one, and this one wasn't bad, but it still needed frequent rests. The beam would gradually dim, begin to flicker, and then it would vanish entirely. Joe would have to shut it off for a few minutes and then turn it back on and go through the same process all over again. It occurred to him as he waited in the dark of what he believed had been meant to be a third-floor restaurant, that people were flashlights—they beamed, they dimmed, they flickered and died. It was a morbid and childish observation, but on the drive down he'd grown morbid and maybe a bit childish in his pique at RD Pruitt because he knew that RD was just one in a line. He wasn't the exception, he was the rule. And if Joe succeeded in erasing him as a problem tonight, another RD Pruitt would come along soon after.

Because the business was illegal, it was, by necessity, dirty. And dirty businesses attracted dirty people. People of small minds and big cruelty.

Joe walked out onto the white limestone veranda and listened to the surf and Ringling's imported royal palm fronds rustling in the warm night breeze.

The drys were losing; the country was pushing back against the Eighteenth. Prohibition would end. Maybe not for ten years, but it could be as soon as two. Either way, its obituary was written, it just hadn't been published. Joe and Esteban had bought into importing companies up and down the Gulf Coast and along the Eastern Seaboard. They were cash poor right now, but the first morning alcohol became legal again, they could flip a switch and their operation would arise, gleaming, into the bright new day. The distilleries were all in place, the shipping companies currently specializing in glassware, the bottling plants servicing soda pop companies. By the afternoon of that first morning, they'd be up and running, ready to take over what they estimated to be well within their reach—16 to 18 percent of the U.S. rum market.

Joe closed his eyes and sucked in the sea air and wondered how many more RD Pruitts he'd have to deal with before he achieved that goal. Truth was, he didn't understand an RD, a guy who came at the world wanting to beat it at some competition that existed only in his head, a battle to the death, no question, because death was the only blessing and the only peace he'd ever find on this earth. And maybe it wasn't only RD and his ilk who bothered Joe; maybe it was what you had to do to put an end to them. You had to kneel down in the grime with them. You had to show a good man like Irving Figgis pictures of his firstborn with a cock in her ass and a chain around her neck, track marks running down her arm like garter snakes baked crisp by the sun.

He hadn't needed to put the second picture down in front of Irving Figgis, but he'd done so because it made things go quicker. What concerned him more and more about this business to which he'd hitched his star was that every time you sold off another piece of yourself in the name of expediency, the easier it got.

The other night, he and Graciela had gone out for drinks at the Riviera and dinner at the Columbia and then caught a show at the Satin Sky. They'd been accompanied by Sal Urso, who was Joe's full-time driver now, and their car was shadowed by Lefty Downer, who watched them when Dion was dealing with other matters. The bartender at the Riviera had tripped and fallen to one knee trying to get Graciela's chair pulled out for her before she arrived at the table. When the waitress at the Columbia spilled a drink on the table and some of it leaked onto Joe's pants, the maître d', the manager, and eventually the owner had come to the table to apologize. Joe then had to convince them not to fire the waitress. He argued that her mistake was honest, and that her service was, in all other respects, impeccable and had been every time they'd been lucky to have her service their table. (
Service
. Joe hated that word.) The men had relented, of course, but as Graciela reminded him on their way to Satin Sky, what else would they say to Joe's face? See if she still has a job next week, Graciela said. At the Satin Sky, the tables were all taken, but then before Joe and Graciela could turn back to the car where Sal waited, the manager, Pepe, rushed over to them and assured them that four patrons had just paid their check. Joe and Graciela watched two men approach a table of four, whisper in the ears of the couples sitting there, and hasten their exit with hands on their elbows.

At the table, neither Joe nor Graciela spoke for some time. They drank their drinks, they watched the band. Graciela looked around the room and then out at Sal standing by the car, his eyes never leaving them. She looked at the patrons and the waiters who pretended not to watch them.

She said, “I've become the people my parents worked for.”

Joe said nothing because every response he thought of would be a lie.

Something was getting lost in them, something that was starting to live by day, where the swells lived, where the insurance salesmen and the bankers lived, where the civic meetings were held and the little flags were waved at the Main Street parades, where you sold out the truth of yourself for the story of yourself.

But along the sidewalks lit by dim, yellow lamps and in the alleys and abandoned lots, people begged for food and blankets. And if you got past them, their children worked the next corner.

The reality was, he liked the story of himself. Liked it better than the truth of himself. In the truth of himself, he was second-class and grubby and always out of step. He still had his Boston accent and didn't know how to dress right, and he thought too many thoughts that most people would find “funny.” The truth of himself was a scared little boy, mislaid by his parents like reading glasses on a Sunday afternoon, treated to random kindnesses by older brothers who came without notice and departed without warning. The truth of himself was a lonely boy in an empty house, waiting for someone to knock on his bedroom door and ask if he was okay.

The story of himself, on the other hand, was of a gangster prince. A man who had a full-time driver and bodyguard. A man of wealth and stature. A man for whom people abandoned their seats simply because he coveted them.

Graciela
was
right—they had become the people her parents worked for. But they were better versions. And her parents, hungry as they were, would have expected no less. You couldn't fight the Haves. The only thing you could do was become them to such a degree that they came to you for what they had not.

He left the veranda and reentered the hotel. He turned his flashlight back on, saw the great wide room where high society had been poised to drink and eat and dance and do whatever else it was that high society did.

What else
did
high society do?

He couldn't think of an answer right off.

What else did people do?

They worked. When they could find it. Even when they couldn't, they raised families, drove their cars if they could afford the upkeep and gas. They went to movies or listened to the radio or caught a show. They smoked.

And the rich . . . ?

They gambled.

Joe could see it in a great smash of light. While the rest of the country lined up for soup and begged for spare change, the rich remained rich. And idle. And bored.

This restaurant he walked through, this restaurant that never was, wasn't a restaurant at all. It was a casino floor. He could see the roulette wheel in the center, the craps tables over by the south wall, the card tables along the north wall. He saw a Persian carpet and crystal chandeliers with ruby and diamond pendants.

He left the room and moved down the main corridor. The conference rooms he passed became music halls—big band in one, vaudeville in another, Cuban jazz in the third, maybe even a movie theater in the fourth.

The rooms. He ran up to the fourth floor and looked at the ones overlooking the Gulf. Jesus, they were breathtaking. Every floor would have its own butler, standing at the ready when you got off the lifts. He'd be at the service of all guests on that floor twenty-four hours a day. Every room would, of course, have a radio. And a ceiling fan. And maybe those French toilets he'd heard about, ones shot water up your ass. They'd have masseuses on call, twelve hours of room service, two, no three, concierges. He walked back down to the second floor. The flashlight needed another rest, so he shut it off, because he knew the staircase now. On the second floor, he found the ballroom. It was in the center of the floor with a large viewing rotunda above it, a place to stroll on warm spring nights and watch others of bottomless wealth dance under the stars painted on the domed roof.

What he saw, clearer than any clear he'd ever known, was that the rich would come in here for the dazzle and the elegance and the chance to risk it all against a rigged game, as rigged as the one they'd been running on the poor for centuries.

And he'd indulge it. He'd encourage it. And he'd profit from it.

Nobody—not Rockefeller, not Du Pont or Carnegie or J. P. Morgan—beat the house. Unless they were the house. And in this casino, the only house was him.

He shook his flashlight several times and turned it on.

For some reason, he was surprised to find them waiting for him—RD Pruitt and two other men. RD, in a stiff tan suit and a black string tie. The cuffs of his trousers stopped just short of his black shoes, exposing the white socks underneath. He had two boys with him—'shine runners by the look of them, smelling of corn, sour mash, and methanol. No suits on these boys—just short ties on short collar shirts, wool trousers held up by suspenders.

They turned their flashlights on Joe, and it was all he could do not to blink into them.

RD said, “You came.”

“I came.”

“Where's my brother-in-law?”

“He didn't come.”

“Just as well.” He pointed at the boy to his right. “This here is Carver Pruitt, my cousin.” He pointed at the boy on his left. “And
his
cousin on his mama's side? Harold LaBute.” He turned to them. “Boys, this here is the one killed Kelvin. Careful now, he might decide to kill you all.”

Carver Pruitt raised his rifle to his shoulder. “Not likely.”

“This one?” RD sidestepped along the ballroom, pointing at Joe. “He's rat tricky. You take your eye off that pea shooter, I promise it'll be in his hands.”

“Aww,” Joe said, “shucks.”

“You a man of your word?” RD asked Joe.

“Depends on who I give it to.”

“So you ain't come alone like I ordered.”

“No,” Joe said, “I ain't come alone.”

“Well, where they at?”

“Shit, RD, I tell you that, I spoil the fun.”

“We watched you come in,” RD said. “We been sitting out there three hours. You show up an hour early, think you get the drop on us?” He chuckled. “So we know you came alone. How you like that?”

“Trust me,” Joe said, “I'm not alone.”

RD crossed the ballroom, and his guns followed him until they were all standing in the center.

The switchblade Joe had brought with him was already open, the base of the handle tucked lightly under the band of the wristwatch he wore solely for this occasion. All he had to do was flex his wrist and the blade would drop into his palm.

“I don't want no sixty percent.”

“I know that,” Joe said.

“What you think I want then?”

“Don't know,” Joe said. “I suspect? I suspect a return to, I dunno, the way things
used to be
? Am I warm?”

“You about on the griddle.”

“But there wasn't no way things used to be,” Joe said. “That's our problem, RD. I spent two years in prison doing nothing but reading. Know what I found out?”

“No. You tell me, though, won't ya?”