Live by Night

by Dennis Lehane

Eventually Joe turned in his chair a bit and asked Chief Figgis, “How soft is that kid’s head?”

  “As a grape.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. Do you think he’ll really take the deal?”

  Figgis shrugged. “Time will tell.”

  When RD showed up at the Parisian for his cut, he thanked Sian McAlpin when she handed it to him. He asked her to spell her name for him and told her it was right pretty when she did. He said he looked forward to their long association and had a drink at the bar. He was pleasant to all he encountered. Then he walked out, got in his car, and drove out past the Vayo Cigar Factory to Phyllis’s Place, the first speak where Joe had a drink in Ybor.

  The bomb RD Pruitt threw into Phyllis’s Place wasn’t much of a bomb, but it didn’t have to be. The main room was so small a tall man couldn’t clap his hands without his elbows hitting the wall.

  No one was killed, but a drummer named Cooey Cole lost his left thumb and never played again, and a seventeen-year-old girl who’d come in to pick up her daddy and drive him home lost a foot.

  Joe sent three two-man teams to find the bugsy fuck, but RD Pruitt went hard to ground. They scoured the whole of Ybor, then the whole of West Tampa, then the whole of Tampa itself. Nobody could find him.

  A week later, RD walked into another of Joe’s speaks on the east side, a place frequented almost exclusively by black Cubans. Walked in while the band was in full swing and the place was jumping. Ambled up to the stage and shot the bass trombonist in the knee and shot the singer in the stomach. He flipped an envelope onto the stage and walked out the back door.

  The envelope was addressed to Sir Joseph Coughlin Nigger Fucker. Inside was a two-word note:

  Sixty percent.

  Joe went to see Kelvin Beauregard at his cannery. He took Dion and Sal Urso with him, and they met in Beauregard’s office at the back of the building. It looked down on the sealing floor. Several dozen women dressed in frocks and aprons with matching headbands stood on the sweltering floor around a serpentine system of conveyor belts. Beauregard watched them through a floor-to-ceiling window. He didn’t get up when Joe and his men entered. He didn’t look at them for a full minute. Then he turned in his chair and smiled and jerked his thumb at the glass.

  “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.

  Joe 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

  John 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 o
bservation, 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.