Live by Night (8 page)

His father looked at his men, then back at Joe. “Fine company you keep, son. Any other fairy tales you have for me?”

“It's not a fairy tale.” Joe spit blood from his mouth. “They're going to kill her, Dad.”

“Well,
we
won't kill you, Joseph. In fact, I won't touch you a'tall. But some of my coworkers would like a word.”

Thomas Coughlin leaned forward, hands on his knees, and stared at his son.

Somewhere behind that gaze of iron lived a man who'd slept on the floor of Joe's hospital room for three days when Joe had the fever back in 1911, who'd read each of the city's eight newspapers to him, cover to cover, who told him he loved him, who told him if God wanted his son, He'd have to go through him, Thomas Xavier Coughlin, and God would know, sure, what a rough proposition that could turn out to be.

“Dad, listen to me. She's—”

His father spit in his face.

“He's all yours,” he said to his men and walked away.

“Find the car!” Joe screamed. “Find Donnie! She's in a car with Donnie!”

The first blow—a fist—connected with Joe's jaw. The second, a shot from a billy club, he was pretty sure, hit his temple. After that, all light disappeared from the night.

Chapter Six

All the Sinners Saints

T
he ambulance driver gave Thomas his first hint of the publicity nightmare about to descend on the BPD.

As they strapped Joe to a wooden gurney and lifted him into the back of the ambulance, the driver said, “You throw this kid off the roof?”

The rain came down in a clatter so loud they all had to shout.

Thomas's aide and driver, Sergeant Michael Pooley, said, “His injuries were sustained before we arrived.”

“Yeah?” The ambulance driver looked from one to the other, water pouring from the black brim of his white cap. “Horseshit.”

Thomas could feel the temperature rising in the alley, even in the rain, so he pointed at his son on the gurney. “This man was involved in the murders of those three police officers in New Hampshire.”

Sergeant Pooley said, “Feel better now, asshole?”

The ambulance driver was checking Joe's pulse, eyes on his wristwatch. “I read the papers. All I do most days—sit up in my cab and read the fucking papers. And this kid was the driver. And while they were chasing him, they shot another police car all to hell.” He placed Joe's wrist on his chest. “
He
didn't do it, though.”

Thomas looked at Joe's face—torn black lips, flattened nose, eyes swelled shut, a collapsed cheekbone, black blood crusted in his eyes and ears and nose and the corners of his mouth. Blood of Thomas's blood. His creation.

“But if he hadn't robbed the bank,” Thomas said, “they wouldn't be dead.”

“If the other cops hadn't used a fucking machine gun, they wouldn't be dead.” The driver closed the doors, looked at Pooley and Thomas, and Thomas was surprised by the revulsion in his eyes. “Your guys probably just beat this kid to death. But
he's
the criminal?”

Two guard units pulled in behind the ambulance, and all three vehicles drove off into the night. Thomas had to keep reminding himself to think of the beaten man in the ambulance as “Joe.” Thinking of him as “son” was too overwhelming. His flesh and blood, and a lot of that blood and some of that flesh lay in this alley.

He said to Pooley, “You put that APB out on Albert White?”

Pooley nodded. “And Loomis and Bones and Donnie No Last Name, but we assume it's Donnie Gishler, one of White's guys.”

“Make Gishler a priority. Get it out to all units that he might have a woman in the car. Where's Forman?”

Pooley chin-gestured. “Up the alley.”

Thomas started walking and Pooley fell in line. When they reached the crowd of policemen by the service door, Thomas avoided looking at the puddle of Joe's blood near his right foot, a puddle rich enough to receive the rain and still remain a bright red. Instead, he focused on his chief of detectives, Steve Forman.

“You got anything on the cars?”

Forman flipped open his steno notebook. “Dishwasher said there was a Cole Roadster parked in the alley between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty. After that, dishwasher said it was gone, said this Dodge replaced it.”

The Dodge was what they'd been trying to drag Joe into when Thomas and the cavalry had arrived.

“I want a priority APB on the Roadster,” Thomas said. “It's being driven by Donald Gishler. There might be a woman in the backseat, Emma Gould. Steve, she's of the Charlestown Goulds. Know who I mean?”

“Oh, yeah,” Forman said.

“Not Bobo's kid. She's Ollie Gould's.”

“Okay.”

“Send someone to make sure she's not safe and sound in bed on Union Street. Sergeant Pooley?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have you seen this Donnie Gishler in the flesh?”

Pooley nodded. “He's about five-six, a hundred ninety pounds. Usually wears black knit caps. Had a handlebar mustache last time I saw him. The One-Six would have his mug shot.”

“Send someone to get it. And get out the description to all units.”

He looked at the puddle of his son's blood. A tooth floated in it.

He and his eldest son, Aiden, hadn't spoken in years, though he did receive the occasional letter filled with bland facts but no personal reflections. He didn't know where he lived or even if he was alive or dead. His middle son, Connor, had been blinded during the police strike riots of '19. Physically, he'd adapted to his infirmity with commendable speed, but mentally it had set ablaze his inclination toward self-pity, and he'd quickly turned to alcohol. After he'd failed to drink himself to death, he found religion. Shortly after he abandoned that flirtation (God apparently demanded more from his worshippers than a love affair with martyrdom), he took up residence at the Silas Abbotsford School for the Blind and Crippled. They gave him a custodian's job—this, for a man who'd been the youngest assistant district attorney in state history assigned as lead prosecutor on a capital case—and he lived out his days there, mopping floors he couldn't see. Every now and then he was offered a teaching job at the school, but he'd declined them all under the pretense of shyness. There was nothing shy about any of Thomas's sons. Connor had simply decided to shutter himself away from all who loved him. Which, in his case, meant Thomas.

And here now was his youngest son, given over to a life of crime, a life of whores and bootleggers and gun thugs. A life that always seemed to promise glamour and riches but rarely delivered either. And now, because of his compatriots and Thomas's own men, he might not live through the night.

Thomas stood in the rain and could smell nothing but the stink of his own horrid self.

“Find the girl,” he said to Pooley and Forman.

A
patrol officer in Salem spotted Donnie Gishler and Emma Gould. By the time the chase ended, nine cruisers were involved, all from small North Shore towns—Beverly, Peabody, Marblehead. Several of the policemen saw a woman in the backseat of the car; several didn't; one claimed he saw two or three girls back there, but they later confirmed he'd been drinking. After Donnie Gishler had driven two cruisers off the road at high speed, damaging both, and after the officers had taken his fire (however poorly aimed), they'd fired back.

Donnie Gishler's Cole Roadster left the road at 9:50
P.M.
in heavy rain. They were racing down Ocean Avenue in Marblehead alongside Lady's Cove when one of the policemen either fired a lucky shot into Gishler's tire or—more likely at forty miles an hour in the rain—the tire simply blew out from wear and tear. At that part of Ocean Avenue, there was very little avenue and endless ocean. The Cole left the road on three wheels, dipped over the shoulder, and snapped back out, its tires no longer touching ground. It entered eight feet of water with two of its windows shot out and sank before most of the policemen had left their vehicles.

A patrolman from Beverly, Lew Burleigh, stripped down to his skivvies and dove in, but it was dark, even after someone got the idea to point the cruisers' headlamps at the water. Lew Burleigh dove into the frigid water four times, enough to suffer hypothermia that landed him in the hospital for a day, but he never found the car.

The divers found it the next afternoon, shortly after two, Gishler still behind the wheel. A piece of the steering wheel had snapped off and entered his body through his armpit. The gearshift had perforated his groin. That's not what killed him, though. One of the more than fifty bullets fired by police that night had hit the back of his head. Even if the tire hadn't blown out, the car would have entered the water.

They found a silver band and matching feather stuck to the ceiling of the car but no other evidence of Emma Gould.

T
he 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.