The Given Day (34 page)

"I'll speak to Mayor Peters first thing in the morning. I'll convey to him my sense of urgency and arrange a meeting at City Hall for negotiations with the Boston Social Club. Do either of you have any objections to representing the men at that meeting?"

Danny looked over at Denton, wondering if O'Meara could hear the thumps of their hearts.

"No, sir."

"No, sir."

"Well, then." O'Meara held out his hand. "Allow me to thank you both. Sincerely."

They each shook the hand.

"You're the future of the Boston policemen's union, gentlemen." He gave them a gentle smile. "I hope you're up to the task. Now get out of the rain."

He climbed in the car. "To home, Reid, else the missus will think I've turned tomcat."

Reid Harper pulled away from the curb as O'Meara gave them a small wave through the window.

The rain soaked their hair and fell down the backs of their necks. "Jesus Christ," Mark Denton said. "Jesus Christ, Coughlin."

"I know."

"You know? Do you understand what you just did in there? You saved us."

"I didn't--"

Denton wrapped him in a bear hug and lifted him off the sidewalk. "You fucking saved us!"

He spun Danny over the sidewalk and hooted at the street and Danny struggled to break free but he was laughing now, too, the both of them laughing like lunatics on the street as the rain fell into Danny's eyes, and he wondered if he'd ever, in his life, felt this good.

He met Eddie McKenna one night in Governor's Square, at the bar of the Hotel Buckminster. "What have you got?"

"I'm getting closer to Bishop. But he's cagey."

McKenna spread his arms in the booth. "They suspect you of being a plant, you think?"

"Like I said before, it's definitely crossed their minds."

"Any ideas?"

Danny nodded. "One. It's risky."

"How risky?"

He produced a moleskin notebook, identical to the one he'd seen Fraina use. He'd been to four stationers before he'd found it. He handed it to McKenna.

"I've been working on that for two weeks."

McKenna leafed through it, his eyebrows going up a few times.

"I stained a few pages with coffee, even put a cigarette hole in one."

McKenna whistled softly. "I noticed."

"It's the political musings of Daniel Sante. What do you think?" McKenna thumbed through it. "You covered Montreal and the Spartacists. Nice. Oooh--Seattle and Ole Hanson. Good, good. You got Archangel in here?"

"Of course."

"The Versailles Conference?"

"You mean as a world-domination conspiracy?" Danny rolled his eyes. "You think I'd miss that one?"

"Careful," Eddie said without looking up. "Cocky gets undercover men hurt."

"I've gotten nowhere in weeks, Eddie. How could I possibly be cocky? I got the notebook and Bishop said he'll show it to Fraina, no promises. That's it."

Eddie handed it back. "That's good stuff. You'd almost think you believed it."

Danny let the comment pass and put the notebook back in his coat pocket.

Eddie flicked open his watch. "Stay away from union meetings for a while."

"I can't."

Eddie closed his watch and returned it to his vest. "Oh, that's right. You are the BSC these days."

"Bullshit."

"After the meeting you had with O'Meara the other night, that is the rumor, trust me." He smiled softly. "Almost thirty years on this force and I'll bet our dear commissioner doesn't even know my name."

Danny said, "Right place at the right time, I guess."

"Wrong place." He frowned. "You better watch yourself, boy. Because others have started watching you. Take some advice from Uncle Eddie--step back. There are storms imminent everywhere. Everywhere. On the streets, in the factory yards, and now in our own department. Power? That's ephemeral, Dan. More so now than ever before. You keep your head down."

"It's already up."

Eddie slapped the table.

Danny leaned back. He'd never seen Eddie McKenna lose his slippery calm.

"If you get your face in the paper meeting with the commissioner? The mayor? Have you thought of what that means to my investigation? I can't use you if Daniel Sante, apprentice-Bolshevik, becomes Aiden Coughlin, face of the BSC. I need Fraina's mailing list."

Danny stared across at this man he'd known his whole life. Seeing a new side to him, a side he'd suspected was there all along but had never actually witnessed.

"Why the mailing lists, Eddie? I thought we were looking for evidence of May Day uprising plans."

"We're looking for both," Eddie said. "But if they're as tight-lipped as you say, Dan, and if your detecting capabilities are a little less substantial than I'd hoped, then you just get me that mailing list before your face is all over the front page. Could you do that for your uncle, pal?" He stepped out of the booth and shrugged into his coat, tossed some coins on the table. "That should do it."

"We just got here," Danny said.

Eddie worked his face back into the mask it had always been around Danny--impish and benign. "City never sleeps, boy. I've got business in Brighton."

"Brighton?"

Eddie nodded. "Stockyards. Hate that place."

Danny followed Eddie toward the door. "Bracing cows now, Eddie?"

"Better." Eddie pushed open the door into the cold. "Coloreds. Crazy dinges are meeting right now, after hours, to discuss their rights. You believe that? Where does it end? Next thing, the chinks'll be holding our laundry hostage."

Eddie's driver pulled to the curb in his black Hudson. Eddie said, "Give you a lift?"

"I'll walk."

"Walk off that booze. Good idea," he said. "Know anyone by the name of Finn by the bye?" Eddie's face was blithe, open.

Danny kept his the same way. "In Brighton?"

Eddie frowned. "I said I was going to Brighton on a coon hunt. 'Finn' sound like a colored name to you?"

"Sounds Irish."

" 'Tis indeed. Know any?"

"Nope. Why?"

"Just wondering," Eddie said. "You're sure?"

"Just what I said, Eddie." Danny turned up his collar against the wind. "Nope."

Eddie nodded and reached for the car door.

"What he do?" Danny said.

"Huh?"

"This Finn you're looking for," Danny said. "What'd he do?" Eddie stared into his face for a long time. "Good night, Dan." " 'Night, Eddie."

Eddie's car drove up Beacon Street and Danny thought of going back in and calling Nora from the phone booth in the hotel lobby. Let her know that McKenna could be sniffing around her life. But then he pictured her with Connor--holding his hand, kissing him, maybe sitting on his lap when no one else was in the house to see--and he decided there were a lot of Finns in the world. And half of them were either in Ireland or Boston. McKenna could have been talking about any one of them. Any at all. chapter sixteen The first thing Luther had to do at the building on Shawmut Avenue was make it weather-tight. That meant starting with the roof. A slate beauty, she was, fallen on ill fortune and neglect. He worked his way across her spine one fine cold morning when the air smelled of mill smoke and the sky was clean and blade-blue. He collected shards of slate the firemen's axes had sent to the gutters and added them to those he'd retrieved from the floor below. He ripped sodden or scorched wood from their lathes and hammered fresh planks of oak in their places and covered it all with the slate he'd salvaged. When he ran out of that he used the slate Mrs. Giddreaux had somehow managed to procure from a company in Cleveland. He started on a Saturday at first light and finished up late of that Sunday afternoon. Sitting on the ridgeline of the roof, slick with sweat in the cold, he wiped his brow and gazed up at the clean sky. He turned his head and looked at the city spread out around him. He smelled the coming dusk in the air, though his eyes could see no evidence of it yet. As smells went, though, few were fi ner.

Luther's weekday schedule was such that by the time the Coughlins sat for dinner, Luther, who'd set the table and helped Nora prepare the food, had already left. But on Sundays, dinners were all-day affairs, ones that occasionally reminded Luther of the ones at Aunt Marta and Uncle James's on Standpipe Hill. Something about recent church attendance and Sunday finery brought out an inclination for pronouncements, he noticed, in white folk as well as black.

Serving drinks in the captain's study, he sometimes got the feeling they were pronouncing for him. He'd catch sidelong glances from one of the captain's associates as he pontificated about eugenics or proven intellectual disparities in the races or some similar bullshit only the truly indolent had time to discuss.

The one who spoke the least but had the most fire in his eyes was the one Avery Wallace had warned him about, the captain's right-hand man, Lieutenant Eddie McKenna. A fat man, given to breathing heavily through nostrils clogged with hair, he had a smile as bright as the full moon on a river, and one of those loud, jolly natures Luther believed could never be trusted. Men like that always hid the part of themselves that wasn't smiling and hid it so deep it got all the hungrier, like a bear just come out of hibernation, lumbering out of that cave with a scent in its nose so focused it couldn't ever be reasoned with.

Of all the men who joined the captain in the study on those Sundays--and the roster changed from week to week--it was McKenna who paid Luther the most attention. At first glance, it seemed welcome enough. He always thanked Luther when Luther brought him either a drink or a refill, whereas most of the men simply acted as if his servitude was their due and rarely acknowledged him at all. Upon entering the study, McKenna usually asked after Luther's health, his week, how he was adapting to the cold weather. "You ever need an extra coat, son, you let us know. We usually have a few spares down at the station house. Can't promise they'll smell too fine, though." He clapped Luther on the back.

He seemed to assume Luther was from the South and Luther saw no reason to dissuade him from the impression until it came up one late afternoon at Sunday dinner.

"Kentucky?" McKenna said.

At first Luther didn't realize he was being addressed. He stood by the sideboard, filling a small bowl with sugar cubes.

"Louisville, I'm guessing. Am I right?" McKenna gazed openly at him as he placed a slice of pork in his mouth.

"Where I hail from, sir?"

McKenna's eyes glimmered. "That's the question, son."

The captain took a sip of wine. "The lieutenant prides himself on his grasp of accents, he does."

Danny said, "Can't lose his own, though, uh?"

Connor and Joe laughed. McKenna wagged his fork at Danny. "A wiseacre since diapers, this one." He turned his head. "So which is it, Luther?"

Before Luther could answer, Captain Coughlin raised a hand to him. "Make him guess, Mr. Laurence."

"I did guess, Tom."

"You guessed wrong."

"Ah." Eddie McKenna dabbed his lips with his napkin. "So, not Louisville?"

Luther shook his head. "No, sir."

"Lexington?"

Luther shook his head again, felt the whole family looking at him.

McKenna leaned back, one hand caressing his belly. "Well, let's see. You don't have a deep enough drawl for Mis'sipi, tha's fo' sho'. And Gawgia is right out. Too deep for Virginia, though, and too fast, I think, for Alabama."

"I'm guessing Bermuda," Danny said.

Luther caught his eye and smiled. Of all the Coughlins, he had the least experience with Danny, but Avery had been right--you felt no lying in the man.

"Cuba," Luther said to Danny.

"Too far south," Danny said.

They both chuckled.

The gamesmanship left McKenna's eyes. His flesh pinkened. "Ah, a bit a sport the lads are having now." He smiled at Ellen Coughlin down the other end of the table. "A bit of sport," he repeated and cut into his roast pork.

"So what's the guess, Eddie?" Captain Coughlin speared a potato slice.

Eddie McKenna looked up. "I'll have to give Mr. Laurence a bit more thought before I hazard any more idle conjecture on that point."

Luther turned back to the coffee tray, but not before he caught another look from Danny. Not an entirely pleasant look, one bearing a hint of pity.

Luther shrugged into his topcoat as he came out onto the stoop and saw Danny leaning against the hood of a nut-brown Oakland 49.

Danny raised a bottle of something in Luther's direction, and when Luther reached the street he saw that it was whiskey, the good stuff, prewar.

"A drink, Mr. Laurence?"

Luther took the bottle from Danny and raised it to his lips. He paused, looking at him, making sure sharing a bottle with a colored was what the man wanted. Danny gave him a quizzical arch of his eyebrow, and Luther tilted the bottle to his lips and drank.

When Luther handed it back, the big cop didn't wipe the bottle with his sleeve, just tilted it to his own lips and took himself a healthy snort. "Good stuff, uh?"

Luther remembered how Avery Wallace had said this Coughlin was a strange who did his own thinking. He nodded.

"Nice night."

"Yeah." Crisp but windless, the air a bit chalky with the dust of dead leaves.

"Another?" Danny handed the bottle back.

Luther took a drink, eyeing the big white man and his open, handsome face. A lady-killer, Luther bet, but not the kind to make it his life's work. Something going on behind those eyes that told Luther this man heard music others didn't, took direction from who knew where. "You like working here?"

Luther nodded. "I do. You've a nice family, suh."

Danny rolled his eyes and took another swig. "Think you could drop the 'suh' shit with me, Mr. Laurence? Think that's possible?" Luther took a step back. "What do you want me to call you then?" "Out here? Danny'll do. In there?" He gestured with his chin at the house. "I guess Mr. Coughlin."

"What's your complaint against 'suh'? "

Danny shrugged. "It sounds like bullshit."

"Fair enough. You call me Luther, then."

Danny nodded. "Drink to it."

Luther chuckled as he lifted the bottle. "Avery warned me you were different."