They found a silver band and matching feather stuck to the ceiling of the car but no other evidence of Emma Gould.
The gunfire exchanged between the police and three gangsters behind the Hotel Statler entered the city’s historic mist about ten minutes after it happened. This, even though no one was hit and, in all the confusion, few bullets were actually fired. The criminals had the good fortune to flee the alley just as the theater crowd exited the restaurants and headed toward the Colonial or the Plymouth. A revival of Pygmalion had been sold out at the Colonial for three weeks, and the Plymouth had incurred the wrath of the Watch and Ward Society by staging The Playboy of the Western World. The Watch and Ward dispatched dozens of protesters, dowdy women with lemon-sucker lips and tireless vocal cords, but this just drew attention to the play. The women’s loud and strident presence wasn’t only a boon for business; it was also a godsend for the gangsters. The trio came pinwheeling out of the alley and the police crashed out onto the street not far behind, but when the Watch and Ward women saw the guns, they screamed and shrieked and pointed. Several couples on their way to the theater took awkward, violent cover in doorways, and a chauffeur swerved his employer’s Pierce-Arrow into a streetlamp as a light drizzle turned suddenly into a heavy downpour. By the time the officers got their wits back, the gangsters had commandeered a car on Piedmont Street and slipped off into a city pelted by relentless rain.
The “Statler Shootout” made for good copy. The narrative started simply—hero coppers shoot it out with cop-killer thugs and subdue and arrest one. It soon grew more complicated, however. Oscar Fayette, an ambulance driver, reported that the thug under arrest had been so severely beaten by the police that he might not live through the night. Shortly after midnight, unconfirmed rumors spread through the newsrooms along Washington Street that a woman had been seen locked in a car that had entered the waters of Lady’s Cove in Marblehead at top speed and sank to the bottom in less than a minute.
Then word went round that one of the gangsters involved in the Statler Shootout was none other than Albert White, the businessman. Albert White had, until this point, occupied an enviable position in the Boston social scene—that of a possible bootlegger, a likely rumrunner, a probable outlaw. Everyone assumed he had a hand in the rackets, but most could believe he managed to stay above the mayhem now plaguing the streets of every major city. Albert White was considered a “good” bootlegger. A gracious provider of a harmless vice who cut a striking figure in his pale suits and could regale a crowd with tales of his war heroics and his days as a policeman. But after the Statler Shootout (a moniker E. M. Statler tried, unsuccessfully, to get the papers to reconsider), that sentiment vanished. Police filed a warrant for Albert’s arrest. Whether he eventually beat the rap or not, his days of hobnobbing with respectable people were over. Thrills born of the vicarious and the salacious, it was acknowledged in the parlors and drawing rooms of Beacon Hill, had limits.
Then there was the fate that befell Deputy Police Superintendent Thomas Coughlin, once considered a shoo-in for commissioner and quite possibly the State House. When it was revealed in the next day’s late editions that the thug arrested and beaten at the scene was Coughlin’s own son, most readers refrained from judging him on issues of paternity because most knew the travails of trying to raise virtuous children in such a Gomorrahan age. But then the Examiner columnist Billy Kelleher wrote of his encounter with Joseph Coughlin on the staircase at the Statler. It was Kelleher who’d called the police and reported his sighting and Kelleher who reached the alley in time to see Thomas Coughlin feed his son to the lions under his command. The public recoiled—failing to raise your child properly was one thing. Ordering him beaten into a coma was quite another.
By the time Thomas was called to the commissioner’s office in Pemberton Square, he knew he’d never occupy it.
Commissioner Herbert Wilson stood behind his desk and waved Thomas to a chair. Wilson had run the department since 1922, after the previous commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis, who’d done more damage to it than the Kaiser had done to Belgium, graciously died of a heart attack. “Have a seat, Tom.”
Thomas Coughlin hated being called Tom, hated the diminutive nature of it, the callous familiarity.
He took the seat.
“How’s your son?” Commissioner Wilson asked him.
“In a coma.”
Wilson nodded and exhaled slowly through his nostrils. “And every day he remains that way, Tom, the more he resembles a saint.” The commissioner peered across the desk at him. “You look terrible. You’ve been sleeping?”
Thomas shook his head. “Not since . . .” He’d spent the last two nights at his son’s hospital bed, counting his sins and praying to a God he scarcely believed in anymore. Joe’s doctor had told him that even if Joe came out of the coma, brain damage was a possibility. Thomas, in a rage—that white-hot rage of which everyone from his shit of a father to his wife to his sons had been justifiably frightened—had ordered other men to bludgeon his own son. Now he pictured his shame as a blade left on hot coals until the steel was black and serpent-coils of smoke slithered along the edges. The point entered his abdomen below the rib cage and moved through his insides, cutting and cutting until he couldn’t see or breathe.
“Any more information on the other two, the Bartolos?” the commissioner asked.
“I would’ve thought you’d heard by now.”
Wilson shook his head. “I’ve been in budget meetings all morning.”
“Just came over the Teletype. They got Paolo Bartolo.”
“Who’s they?”
“Vermont State Police.”
“Alive?”
Thomas shook his head.
For some reason they might never understand, Paolo Bartolo had been driving a car stuffed with canned hams; they filled the back and were piled up in the foot well of the passenger seat. When he rolled a red light on South Main Street in St. Albans, about fifteen miles shy of the Canadian border, a state trooper tried to pull him over. Paolo took off. The trooper gave chase and other staties joined in and they eventually drove the car off the road near a dairy farm in Enosburg Falls.
Whether Paolo pulled a gun as he exited his car on a fine spring afternoon was still being ascertained. It was possible that he reached for his waistband. Also possible that he simply didn’t raise his hands fast enough. Given that either Paolo or his brother Dion had executed state trooper Jacob Zobe on the side of a road very similar to this one, the troopers took no chances. Every officer fired his service revolver at least twice.
“How many cops responded?” Wilson asked.
“Seven, I believe, sir.”
“And how many bullets struck the felon?”
“Eleven is the number I heard, but the truth awaits a proper autopsy.”
“And Dion Bartolo?”
“Holed up in Montreal, I’d assume. Or nearby. Dion was always the smarter of the two. Paolo’s the one you’d expect to stick his head up.”
The commissioner lifted a sheet of paper off one small pile on his desk and placed it atop another small pile. He looked out the window, seemed entranced by the Custom House spire a few blocks away. “The department can’t let you walk back out of this office carrying the same rank you carried in, Tom. You understand that?”
“I do, yes.” Thomas glanced around the office he’d coveted for the past ten years and felt no sense of loss.
“And if I demoted you to captain, I’d have to have a division house to hand over to you.”
“Which you don’t.”
“Which I don’t.” The commissioner leaned forward, his hands clasped together. “You can pray exclusively for your son now, Thomas, because your career just reached its highest floor.”
She’s not dead,” Joe said.
He’d come out of the coma four hours before. Thomas had arrived at Mass. General ten minutes after
the doctor called. He’d brought the attorney Jack D’Jarvis with him. Jack D’Jarvis was a small, elderly man who wore wool suits of the most forgettable colors—tree bark brown, damp sand gray, blacks that appeared to have been left in the sun too long. His ties usually matched the suits; the collars of his shirts were yellowed, and on the rare occasions he wore a hat, it seemed too big for his head and perched on the tops of his ears. Jack D’Jarvis looked ready to be put out to pasture, and he’d looked that way for the better part of three decades, but no one but a stranger was stupid enough to believe it. He was the best criminal defense lawyer in the city, and few could name a close second. Over the years Jack D’Jarvis had dismantled at least two dozen ironclad cases Thomas had brought to the DA. It was said that when Jack D’Jarvis died, he’d spend his time in heaven springing all his former clients from hell.
The doctors examined Joe for two hours while Thomas and D’Jarvis cooled their heels in the corridor with the young patrolman manning the door.
“I can’t get him off,” D’Jarvis said.
“I know that.”
“Rest assured, though, the second-degree murder charge is a farce and the state’s attorney knows it. But your son will have to do time.”
“How much?”
D’Jarvis shrugged. “Ten years would be my guess.”
“In Charlestown?” Thomas shook his head. “There’ll be nothing left of him to walk back out those doors.”
“Three police officers are dead, Thomas.”
“But he didn’t kill them.”
“Which is why he won’t get the chair. But pretend this is anyone else but your son and you’d want him to get twenty years.”
“But he is my son,” Thomas said.
The doctors exited the room.
One of them stopped to talk to Thomas. “I don’t know what his skull is made of, but we’re guessing it’s not bone.”
“Doctor?”
“He’s fine. No cranial bleeding, no loss of memory or speech disability. His nose and half his ribs are broken, and it’ll be some time before he urinates without seeing blood in the bowl, but no brain damage that I can see.”
Thomas and Jack D’Jarvis went in and sat by Joe’s bed and he considered them through his swollen black eyes.
“I was wrong,” Thomas said. “Dead wrong. And, sure, there’s no excuse for it.”
Joe spoke through black lips crisscrossed with sutures. “You shouldn’t have let them beat me?”
Thomas nodded. “I shouldn’t have.”
“You going soft on me, old man?”
Thomas shook his head. “I should’ve done it myself.”
Joe’s soft chuckle traveled through his nostrils. “With all due respect, sir, I’m happy your men did it. If you’d done it, I might be dead.”
Thomas smiled. “So you don’t hate me?”
“First time I remember liking you in ten years.” Joe tried to raise himself off the pillow but failed. “Where’s Emma?”
Jack D’Jarvis opened his mouth, but Thomas waved him off. He looked his son steadily in the face as he told him what had happened in Marblehead.
Joe sat with the information for a bit, turning it over. He said, somewhat desperately, “She’s not dead.”
“She is, son. And even if we’d acted immediately that night, Donnie Gishler was not of the disposition to be taken alive. She was dead as soon as she got in that car.”
“There’s no body,” Joe said. “So she’s not dead.”
“Joseph, they never found half the bodies on Titanic, but the poor souls are no longer with us just the same.”
“I won’t believe it.”
“You won’t? Or you don’t?”
“It’s the same thing.”
“Far from it.” Thomas shook his head. “We’ve pieced together some of what happened that night. She was Albert White’s moll. She betrayed you.”
“She did,” Joe said.
“And?”
Joe smiled, sutured lips and all. “And I don’t give a shit. I’m crazy about her.”
“ ‘Crazy’ isn’t love,” his father said.
“No, what is it?”
“Crazy.”
“All due respect, Dad, I witnessed your marriage for eighteen years, and that wasn’t love.”
“No,” his father agreed, “it wasn’t. So I know whereof I speak.” He sighed. “Either way, she’s gone, son. As dead as your mother, God rest her.”
Joe said, “What about Albert?”
Thomas sat on the side of the bed. “In the wind.”
Jack D’Jarvis said, “But rumored to be negotiating his return.”
Thomas looked over at him, and D’Jarvis nodded.
“Who’re you?” Joe asked D’Jarvis.
The lawyer extended his hand. “John D’Jarvis, Mr. Coughlin. Most people call me Jack.”
Joe’s swollen eyes opened as wide as they had since Thomas and Jack had entered the room.
“Damn,” he said. “Heard of you.”
“I’ve heard of you too,” D’Jarvis said. “Unfortunately, so has the whole state. On the other hand, one of the worst decisions your father has ever made could end up being the best thing that could have happened to you.”
“How so?” Thomas asked.
“By beating him to a pulp, you turned him into a victim. The state’s attorney isn’t going to want to prosecute. He will but he won’t want to.”
“Bondurant is state’s attorney these days, right?” Joe asked.
D’Jarvis nodded. “You know him?”
“I know of him,” Joe said, the fear apparent on his bruised face.
“Thomas,” D’Jarvis asked, watching him carefully, “do you know Bondurant?”
Thomas said, “I do, yes.”
Calvin Bondurant had married a Lenox of Beacon Hill and had produced three willowy daughters, one of whom had recently married a Lodge to great notice in the society pages. Bondurant was a tireless advocate of Prohibition, a fearless crusader against all manner of vice, which he proclaimed was a product of the lower classes and inferior races who’d been washing ashore in this great land the last seventy years. The last seventy years of immigration had been primarily limited to two races—the Irish and the Italians—so Bondurant’s message wasn’t particularly subtle. But when he ran for governor in a few years, his donors on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay would know he was the right man.
Bondurant’s secretary ushered Thomas into his office on Kirkby and closed the doors behind them. Bondurant turned from where he stood by the window and gave Thomas an emotionless gaze.
“I’ve been expecting you.”
Ten years ago, Thomas had swept Calvin Bondurant up in a raid on a rooming house. Bondurant had been keeping time with several bottles of champagne and a naked young man of Mexican descent. In addition to a burgeoning career in prostitution, the Mexican turned out to be a former member of Pancho Villa’s División del Norte who was wanted in his homeland on charges of treason. Thomas had deported the revolutionary back to Chihuahua and allowed Bondurant’s name to vanish from the arrest logs.
“Well, here I am,” Thomas said.
“You turned your son the criminal into a victim. That’s an amazing trick. Are you that smart, Deputy Superintendent?”
Thomas said, “Nobody’s that smart.”
Bondurant shook his head. “Not true. A few people are. And you might be one of them. Tell him to plead. There are three dead cops in that town. Their funerals will be all over the front pages tomorrow. If he pleads to the bank robbery and, I don’t know, reckless endangerment, I’ll recommend twelve.”
“Years?”
“For three dead cops? That’s light, Thomas.”
“Five.”
“Excuse me?”
“Five,” Thomas said.
“Not a chance.” Bondurant shook his head.
Thomas sat in his chair and didn’t move.
Bondurant shook his head again.
Thomas crossed his legs at the ankle.
Bondurant said, “Look.”
Thomas cocked his head slightly.
“Let me disabuse you of a notion or two, Deputy Superintendent.”
“Chief inspector.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I was demoted yesterday to chief inspector.”
The smile never reached Bondurant’s lips but it slipped through his eyes. A glint and then gone. “Then we can leave unsaid the notion I was going to dispel for you.”
“I have no notions or illusions,” Thomas said. “I’m a practical man.” He removed a photograph from his pocket and placed it on Bondurant’s desk.
Bondurant looked down at the picture. A door, faded red, the number 29 in its center. It was the door to a row house in Back Bay. What fluttered through Bondurant’s eyes this time was the opposite of mirth.
Thomas placed one finger on the man’s desk. “If you move to another building for your liaisons, I’ll know within an hour. I understand you’re building quite the war chest for your run for the governor’s office. Make it deep, counselor. A man with a deep war chest can take on all comers.” Thomas placed his hat on his head. He tugged at the center of the brim until he was sure it sat straight.
Bondurant looked at the piece of paper on his desk. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Seeing what you can do is of little interest to me.”
“I’m one man.”
“Five years,” Thomas said. “He gets five years.”
It was another two weeks before a woman’s forearm washed up in Nahant. Three days after that, a fisherman off the coast of Lynn pulled a femur into his net. The medical examiner determined that the femur and the forearm came from the same person—a woman in her early twenties, probably of Northern European stock, freckle-skinned and pale of flesh.
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