The Given Day (50 page)

He came upon a Framingham cop he'd never met before kicking a striker who offered no resis tance. The cop wasn't putting much into the kicks anymore, and the striker probably wasn't even conscious. Danny put his hand on the guy's shoulder and the guy raised his nightstick before he recognized the uniform.

"What?"

"You've made your point," Danny said. "Enough."

"Ain't no enough," the cop said and walked away.

Danny rode back to Boston in a bus with the other city cops. The sky hung low and gray. Scraps of frozen snow gripped the scalp of the earth like crabs.

"Meeting tonight, Dan?" Kenny Trescott asked him.

Danny had almost forgotten. Now that Mark Denton was rarely available to attend a BSC meeting, Danny had become the de facto head of the union. But it wasn't really a union anymore. It was, true to its original roots and its given name, a social club.

"Sure," Danny said, knowing it would be a waste of time. They were powerless again and they knew it, but some child's hope kept them coming back, kept them talking, kept them acting as if they had a voice that mattered.

Either that, or there was no place else to go.

He looked in Trescott's eyes and patted his arm. "Sure," he said again.

One afternoon on K Street, Captain Coughlin returned home early with a cold and sent Luther home.

THE GIVEN DAY"I have it from here," he said. "Go enjoy what's left of the day."

It was one of those sneaky days in late winter where spring came along to get a lay of the land. The gutters gurgled with a stream of melted snow; sun prisms and small rainbows formed in windows and on slick black tar. But Luther didn't give himself over to the idle stroll. He walked straightaway into the South End and made it to Nora's shoe factory just as her shift ended. She walked out sharing a cigarette with another girl, and Luther was immediately shocked at how gray she looked. Gray and bony.

"Well, look at himself," she said with a broad smile. "Molly, this is Luther, the one I used to work with."

Molly gave Luther a small wave and took a drag off her cigarette. "How are you?" Nora asked.

"I'm fine, girl." Luther felt desperate to apologize. "I couldn't get here before now. I really couldn't. The shifts, you know? They didn't--"

"Luther."

"And I didn't know where you lived. And I--"

"Luther." This time her hand found his arm. "Sure, it's fine. I understand, I do." She took the cigarette from Molly's hand, a practiced gesture between friends, and took a quick drag before handing it back. "Would you walk me home, Mr. Laurence?"

Luther gave her a small bow. "Be my pleasure, Miss O'Shea."

She didn't live on the worst street in the city, but it was close. Her rooming house was on Green Street in the West End, just off Scollay Square, in a block of buildings that catered primarily to sailors, where rooms could often be rented by the half hour.

When they reached her building, she said, "Go 'round back. It's a green door in the alley. I'll meet you there."

She went inside and Luther cut down the alley, all his wits about him, all senses turned up as high and awake as they got. Only four in the afternoon, but already Scollay Square was banging and bouncing, shouts echoing along the rooflines, a bottle breaking, a sudden burst of 418DENNIS LEHANE cackling followed by off-key piano playing. Luther reached the green door and she was waiting for him. He stepped in quickly, and she shut it behind him and he followed her back down the hallway to her room.

It must have been a closet once. Literally. The only thing that fi t in it was a child's bed and a table fit for holding a single potted plant. In place of a plant, she had an old kerosene lamp and she lit it before closing the door. She sat up at the head of the bed, and Luther took a seat at the foot. Her clothes were neatly folded and placed on the floor across from his feet and he had to be careful not to step on them.

"Ah now," she said, raising her hands to the room as if to a mansion, "we're in the lap of luxury, we are, Luther."

Luther tried to smile, but he couldn't. He'd grown up poor, but this? This was fucking grim. "I heard the factories never pay the women enough to support themselves."

"No," she said. "And they'll be cutting our hours, we hear." "When?"

"Soon." She shrugged.

"What'll you do?"

She chewed a thumbnail and gave him another shrug, her eyes strangely gay, as if this was some lark she was trying out. "Don't know."

Luther looked around for a hot plate. "Where do you cook?"

She shook her head. "We gather at our landlady's table every night--promptly, mind you--at five sharp. Usually it's beets. Sometimes potatoes. Last Tuesday, we even had meat. I don't know what kind of meat it 'twas exactly, but I assure you it was meat."

Outside, someone screamed. Impossible to tell if it was from pain or enjoyment.

"I won't allow this here," Luther said.

"What?"

He said it again. "I won't allow this. You and Clayton the only friends I made in this town. I won't abide this." He shook his head. "No, sir."

THE GIVEN DAY"Luther, you can't--"

"Know I killed a man?"

She stopped chewing her thumb and looked at him with big eyes.

"That's what brought me here, missy-thing. Shot a man straight up through his head. Had to leave behind my wife and she's pregnant with my child. So I've been doing some hard things, some hard time since I got here. And damned if anyone--you included--is gonna tell me what I can and can't do. I can damn well get you some food. Put some meat back on you. That I can do."

She stared at him. Outside, catcalls, the honking of horns.

She said, " 'Missy-thing'?" and the tears came with her laughter, and Luther hugged the first white woman he'd ever hugged in his life. She smelled white, he thought, starchy. He could feel her bones as she wept into his shirt, and he hated the Coughlins. Hated them outright. Hated them wholesale.

In early spring, Danny followed Nora home from work. He kept a city block behind her the whole way, and she never once looked back. He watched her enter a rooming house off Scollay Square, maybe the worst section of the city in which a woman could live. Also the cheapest.

He walked back toward the North End. It wasn't his fault. If she ended up destitute and a ghost of herself, well, she shouldn't have lied, should she?

Luther received a letter from Lila in March. It came in an eight-by- eleven envelope and there was another envelope, a small white one, that had already been opened, in there alongside a newspaper clipping.

Dear Luther, Aunt Marta says babys in the belly turn a womans head upside down and make her see things and feel things that dont make a lick of sense. Still I have seen a man lately to many times to count. He has Satans smile and he drives a black Oakland 8. I have seen him outside the house and in town and twice outside the post office. That is why I will not write for a while for the last time I caught him trying to look at the letters in my hand. He has never said a word to me except hello and good morning but I think we know who he is Luther. I think it was him who left this newspaper article in the envelope at the door one day. The other article I clipped myself You will know why. If you need to contact me please send mail to Aunt Martas house. My belly is huge and my feet ache all the time and climbing stairs is a chore but I am happy. Please be careful and safe.

Love, Lila Even as he felt dread at the rest of the letter and fear of the newspaper clippings, still folded, that he held in his hand, Luther stared at one word above all others--love.

He closed his eyes. Thank you, Lila. Thank you, Lord.

He unfolded the first clipping. A small article from the Tulsa Star:

DA DROPS CHARGES AGAINST NEGRO Richard Poulson, a Negro bartender at the Club Almighty in Greenwood, was released from state custody when District Attorney Honus Stroudt refused to press charges in return for the Negro Poulson's pleading guilty to illegal use of a firearm. The Negro Poulson was the sole survivor of Clarence Tell's shooting rampage in the Club Almighty on the night of November 17 of last year. Slain in the shooting were Jackson Broscious and Munroe Dandiford, both Greenwood Negroes and reputed purveyors of narcotics and prostitution. Clarence Tell, also a Negro, was killed by the Negro Poulson after he received the Negro Tell's fire. DA Stroudt said, "It is clear that the Negro Poulson fi red in self- defense for fear of his life and nearly succumbed to THE GIVEN DAYwounds inflicted by the Negro Tell. The people are satisfied." The Negro Poulson will serve three years' probation for the weapons charge.

So Smoke was a free man. And a reasonably healthy one. Luther played it back in his head for the umpteenth time--Smoke lying in a growing pool of blood on the stage. His arm outstretched, the back of his head to Luther. Even now, knowing what he knew would come of it, he still doubted he could have pulled that trigger. Deacon Broscious was a different thing, a different circumstance--looking Luther in the eye, talking his bullshit talk. But could Luther have shot what he'd believed was a dying man in the back of the head? No. And yet he knew he probably should have. He turned over the envelope and saw his name and nothing else written across it in a male's blocky handwriting. He opened the envelope and looked at the second clipping and decided to remove "probably" from his thoughts. Should have. Without question or regret.

A photo clipping reprinted in the January 22 issue of the Tulsa Sun described the great molasses flood under the headline "Boston Slum Disaster."

There was nothing special about the articlejust one more on the North End disaster that the rest of the country seemed humored by. The only thing that made this clipping special was that every time the word Boston was used--a total of nine times--it had been circled in red.

Rayme Finch was carrying a box to his car when he found Thomas Coughlin waiting for him. The car was government issue and was, as befit a government department that was underfunded and undervalued, a heap of shit. He'd left the engine idling, not only because the ignition often refused to engage but also because he secretly hoped someone would steal it. If that wish were granted this morning, however, he'd regret it--the car, shit heap or no, was his only transport back to Washington.

422DENNIS LEHANE

No one would be stealing it for the moment, though, not with a police captain leaning against the hood. Finch acknowledged Captain Coughlin with a flick of his head as he placed the box of offi ce supplies in the trunk.

"Shoving off, are we?"

Finch closed the trunk. " 'Fraid so."

"A shame," Thomas Coughlin said.

Finch shrugged. "Boston radicals turned out to be a bit more docile than we'd heard."

"Except for the one my son killed."

"Federico, yes. He was a believer. And you?"

"Sorry?"

"How's your investigation going? We never did hear much from the BPD."

"There wasn't much to tell. They're hard nuts to crack, these groups." Finch nodded. "You told me a few months ago they'd be easy." "History's ledger will judge me overconfident on that entry, I admit."

"Not one of your men has gathered any evidence?"

"None substantial."

"Hard to believe."

"I can't see why. It's no secret we're a police department caught in a regime change. Had O'Meara, God rest him, not perished, why, you and I, Rayme? We'd be having this lovely conversation while watching a ship depart for Italy with Galleani himself shackled in her bowels."

Finch smiled in spite of himself. "I'd heard you were the slipperiest sheriff in this slippery one-horse town. Seems my sources weren't embellishing."

Thomas Coughlin cocked his head, his face narrowed in confusion. "I think you have been misinformed, Agent Finch. Sure, we've more than one horse in this town. Dozens actually." He tipped his hat. "Safe travels."

Finch stood by the car and watched the captain walk back up the THE GIVEN DAYstreet. He decided he was one of those men whose greatest gift lay in the inability of others to ever guess what he was truly thinking. That made him a dangerous man, to be sure, but valuable, too, pricelessly so.

We'll meet again, Captain. Finch entered the building and climbed the stairs toward his last box in an otherwise empty office. No doubt in my mind, we will definitely meet again.

Danny, Mark Denton, and Kevin McRae were called into the po
lice commissioner's office in the middle of April. They were led into the office, which was empty, by Stuart Nichols, the commissioner's secretary, who promptly left them alone.

They sat in stiff chairs in front of Commissioner Curtis's vast desk and waited. It was nine o'clock at night. A raw night of occasional hail.

After ten minutes, they left their chairs. McRae walked over to a window. Mark stretched with a soft yawn. Danny paced from one end of the office to the other.

By nine-twenty, Danny and Mark stood at the window while Kevin paced. Every now and then the three of them exchanged a look of suppressed exasperation, but no one said anything.

At nine-twenty-five, they took their seats again. As they did, the door to their left opened and Edwin Upton Curtis entered, followed by Herbert Parker, his chief counsel. As the commissioner took up a post behind his desk, Herbert Parker briskly passed in front of the three officers and placed a sheet of paper on each of their laps.

Danny looked down at it.

"Sign it," Curtis said.

"What is it?" Kevin McRae said.

"That should be evident," Herbert Parker said and came around the desk behind Curtis and folded his arms across his chest.

"It's your raise," Curtis said and took his seat. "As you wished." Danny scanned the page. "Two hundred a year?"

Curtis nodded. "As to your other wishes, we'll take them into 424DENNIS LEHANE consideration, but I wouldn't hold out hope. Most were for luxuries, not necessities."

Mark Denton seemed stricken of the power of speech for a moment. He raised the paper up by his ear, then slowly lowered it back to his knee. "It's not enough anymore."