The Given Day (60 page)

"Then you should have fought harder," McKenna said. "Because your true place in this world, Luther? Is back where you fucking came from."

"Mr. Marcus Garvey says pretty much the same thing," Luther said.

"Comparing me to Garvey, are we?" McKenna said with a slightly dreamy smile and a shrug. " 'Tis no bother. Do you like working for the Coughlins?"

"I did."

One of the cops sauntered over until he was directly behind Luther.

"That's right," McKenna said. "I'd forgotten--you were let go. Killed a bunch of people in Tulsa, ran from your wife and child, came here to work for a police captain, and still you fucked that up. If you were a cat, I'd say you were near down to your last life."

Luther could feel Clayton's eyes. Clayton would have heard about Tulsa through the grapevine. He would have never guessed, though, that his new friend could have been involved. Luther wanted to explain it, but all he could do was look back at McKenna.

"What you want me to do now?" Luther said. "That's the point here--get me to do something for you?"

McKenna toasted that with a flask. "Coming along?"

"What?" Luther said.

"This building. Your remodeling." McKenna lifted a crowbar off the floor.

"I guess."

"Almost there, I'd say. 'Least on this floor." He smashed out two windowpanes with the crowbar. "That help?"

Some glass tinkled to the floor, and Luther wondered what it was in some people made feeding hate so pleasant.

500DENNIS LEHANE

The cop behind Luther chuckled softly. He stepped alongside him and caressed his chest with his nightstick. His cheeks were burned by the wind and his face reminded Luther of a turnip left too long in the fields. He smelled of whiskey.

The other cop carried the toolbox across the room and placed it between Luther and McKenna.

"We were men with an agreement. Men," McKenna said, leaning in close enough for Luther to smell his whiskey-tongue and drugstore aftershave. "And you went running to Tommy Coughlin and his over-privileged whelp of a son? You thought that would save you, but, Lord, all it did was curse you."

He slapped Luther so hard Luther spun in place and fell to his hip. "Get up!"

Luther stood.

"You spoke out of turn about me?" McKenna kicked Luther in the shin so hard Luther had to replant his other leg so as not to fall. "You asked the royal Coughlins for special dispensation with me?"

McKenna pulled his service revolver and placed it to Luther's forehead. "I am Edward McKenna of the Boston Police Department. I am not someone else. I am not some lackey! I am Edward McKenna, Lieutenant, and you are remiss!"

Luther tilted his eyes up. That black barrel fed from Luther's head to McKenna's hand like a growth.

"Yes, suh."

"Don't you 'yes, suh' me." McKenna hit Luther's head with the butt of the pistol.

Luther's knees dropped halfway to the floor but he snapped back up before his knees could make contact. "Yes, suh," he said again.

McKenna extended his arm and placed the barrel between Luther's eyes again. He cocked the hammer. He uncocked it. He cocked it again. He gave Luther a wide, amber-toothed smile.

Luther was dog-tired, bone-tired, heart-tired. He could see the fear covering Clayton's face in a sweat, and he understood it, he could iden--

THE GIVEN DAYtify with it. But he couldn't touch it. Not right now. Fear wasn't his problem now. Sick was. He was sick of running and sick of this whole game he'd been playing since he could stand on two feet. Sick of cops, sick of power, sick of this world.

"Whatever you're gonna do, McKenna? Shit. Just fucking do it."

McKenna nodded. McKenna smiled. McKenna holstered his weapon.

The barrel had left a mark on Luther's forehead, an indentation he could feel. It itched. He took a step back and resisted the urge to touch the spot.

"Ah, son, you embarrassed me with the Coughlins, and embarrassment is not something a man of my ambitions can abide." He spread his arms wide. "I just can't."

"Okay."

"Ah, if only it were as easy as 'okay.' But it's not. You'll need to be taxed." McKenna gestured at the toolbox. "You'll put that in the vault you built, if you please."

Luther pictured his mother watching him from above, a pain in her heart at what her only son had allowed his life to become.

"What's in it?"

"Bad things," McKenna said. "Bad, bad things. I want you to know that, Luther. I want you to know that what you're doing is a terrible thing that will immeasurably hurt the people you care about. I want you to realize that you brought this on yourself and that there is, I assure you, no way out for you or your wife."

When McKenna had the gun to his head, Luther had realized one truth beyond any: McKenna was going to kill him before this was over. Kill him and forget all about this. He'd leave Lila untouched simply because getting involved in a nigger prosecution over a thousand miles away was pointless if the source of his rage was already dead. So Luther knew this as well: no Luther, no danger to those he loved.

"I ain't selling out my people," he told McKenna. "Ain't planting anything in the NAACP offices. Fuck that and fuck you."

Clayton let loose a hiss of disbelief.

502DENNIS LEHANE

McKenna, though, looked like he'd been expecting it. "Is that right?"

"That's right." Luther looked down at the toolbox. He looked back up at McKenna. "I ain't--"

McKenna put a hand behind his ear, as if to hear better, pulled the revolver from his belt, and shot Clayton Tomes in the chest.

Clayton held up a hand, palm turned outward. He looked down at the smoke curling from the hole in his overalls. The smoke gave way to a stream of thick, dark fluid, and Clayton cupped his hand under it. He turned and walked carefully over to one of the cans of plaster he and Luther had just been sitting on while they ate and smoked and jawed. He touched the can with his hand before taking a seat.

He said, "What the . . . ?" and leaned his head back against the wall.

McKenna crossed his hands over his groin and tapped the barrel of the pistol against his thigh. "You were saying, Luther?"

Luther's lips trembled, hot tears pouring down his face. The air smelled of cordite. The walls shook from the winter wind.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Luther whispered. "What the fuck is--"

McKenna fired again. Clayton's eyes widened, and a small wet pop of disbelief left his mouth. The bullet hole appeared then, just below his Adam's apple. He grimaced, as if he'd eaten something that hadn't agreed with him and reached his hand toward Luther. Then his eyes rolled back from the effort and he lowered the hand to his lap. He closed his eyes. He took several shallow gulps of air and then the sound of him stopped.

McKenna took another sip from his flask. "Luther? Look at me."

Luther stared at Clayton. They'd just been talking about the fi nish-work that lay ahead. They'd just been eating sandwiches. Tears slid into Luther's mouth.

"Why would you do that? He didn't mean anyone harm. He never--"

THE GIVEN DAY"Because you don't run this monkey show. I do." McKenna tilted his head and bored his eyes into Luther's. "You're the monkey. Clear?"

McKenna slid the barrel of the gun into Luther's mouth. It was still hot enough to burn his tongue. He gagged on it. McKenna pulled back the hammer. "He was no American. He was not a member of any acceptable definition of the human race. He was labor. He was a footrest. He was a beast of burden, sure, nothing more. I disposed of him to prove a point, Luther: I would sooner mourn a footrest than the death of one of yours. Do you think I'm going to stand idly by while Isaiah Giddreaux and that clothed orangutan Du Bois attempt to mongrelize my race? Are you insane, lad?" He pulled the pistol from Luther's mouth and swung it at the walls. "This building is an affront to every value worth dying for in this country. Twenty years from now people will be stunned to hear we allowed you to live as freemen. That we paid you a wage. That we allowed you to converse with us or touch our food." He holstered the pistol and grabbed Luther by the shoulders and squeezed. "I will happily die for my ideals. You?"

Luther said nothing. He couldn't think of anything to say. He wanted to go to Clayton and hold his hand. Even though he was dead, Luther thought he could somehow make him feel less alone.

"If you speak to anyone about this, I will kill Yvette Giddreaux after she takes her lunch in Union Park some afternoon. If you don't do exactly what I tell you--whatever I tell you and whenever I tell you it--I will kill one nigger every week in this city. You'll know it's me because I will shoot them through the left eye so they will go to their nigger god half blind. And their deaths will be on your head, Luther Laurence. Yours and yours alone. Do we have an understanding?"

He let go of Luther and stepped back.

"Do we?"

Luther nodded.

"Good Negro." McKenna nodded. "Now Officer Hamilton and Officer Temple and myself, we're going to stay with you until-- Are you listening?"

504DENNIS LEHANE

Clayton's body fell off the plaster can. It lay on the floor, one arm pointed at the door. Luther turned his head away.

"We're going to stay here with you until dusk. Say you understand, Luther."

"I understand," Luther said.

"Isn't that ducky?" McKenna put his arm around Luther. "Isn't that grand?" He steered Luther around until they were both facing Clayton's body.

"We're going to bury him in the backyard," McKenna said. "And we're going to put the toolbox in the vault. And we're going to come up with an acceptable story for you to tell Miss Amy Wagenfeld when she sends an investigator your way, which surely she will, as you will be the last person to have seen our Mr. Tomes before he absconded from our fair city, probably with an underage white girl. And once we've done all that, we'll wait for the announcement of the ribbon cutting. And you will call me the moment you know that date or . . . ?"

"You'll . . . you'll--"

"Kill a nigger," McKenna said, pushing Luther's head back and forth in a nod. "Is there any part of this I need to repeat for you?" Luther looked into the man's eyes. "No."

"Magnificent." He let go of Luther and removed his coat. "Boys, take off your coats, the both of you. Let's give Luther a hand with this plaster, shall we? Man shouldn't have to do everything by himself, sure." chapter thirty The house on K Street shriveled into itself. The rooms narrowed and the ceilings seemed to droop and the quiet that replaced Nora was spiteful. It remained that way through the spring and then deepened when word reached the Coughlins that Danny had taken Nora for a wife. Joe's mother went to her room with migraines, and the few times Connor wasn't working--and he worked around the clock lately--his breath stank of alcohol and his temper was so short that Joe gave him a wide berth whenever they found themselves in the same room. His father was even worse --Joe would look up to see the old man staring at him with a glaze in his eyes that suggested he'd been doing it for some time. The third time this happened, in the kitchen, Joe said, "What?"

His father's eyelids snapped. "Excuse me, boy?"

"You're staring, sir."

"Don't get lippy with me, son."

Joe dropped his eyes. It may have been the longest he'd dared hold his father's gaze in his life. "Yes, sir."

"Ah, you're just like him," his father said and opened his morning paper with a loud crackling of the pages.

506DENNIS LEHANE

Joe didn't bother asking who his father was referring to. Since the wedding, Danny's name had joined Nora's on the list of things you couldn't speak aloud. Even at twelve, Joe was all too aware that this list, which had been in place long before he was born, held the key to most mysteries of the Coughlin bloodline. The list was never discussed because one of the items on the list was the list itself, but Joe understood that fi rst and foremost on the list was anything that could cause embarrassment to the family--relatives who'd engaged in repeated public drunkenness (Uncle Mike), who'd married outside of the Church (Cousin Ed), who'd committed crimes (Cousin Eoin, out in California), committed suicide (Cousin Eoin again), or given birth out of wedlock (Aunt Somebody in Vancouver; she'd been so completely banished from the family that Joe didn't know her name; she existed like a small stream of smoke that curled into the room before someone thought to shut the door). Sex, Joe understood, was stamped in bold at the top of the list. Anything to do with it. Any hint that people even thought about it, never mind had it.

Money was never discussed. Nor were the vagaries of public opinion and the new modern mores, both of which were deemed anti- Catholic and anti- Hibernian as a matter of course. There were dozens of other items on the list, but you never knew what they were until you mentioned one and then you saw from a single look that you'd wandered out into the minefi eld.

What Joe missed most about Danny's absence was that Danny couldn't have given a shit about the list. He didn't believe in it. He'd bring up women's suffrage at the dinner table, talk about the latest debate over the length of a woman's skirt, ask his father what he thought of the rise of Negro lynchings in the South, wonder aloud why it took the Catholic Church eighteen hundred years to decide Mary was a virgin.

"That's enough," his mother had cried to that one, her eyes welling. "Now look what you did," his father said.

It was quite a feat--managing to hit two of the biggest, boldest items on the list, sex and the failings of the Church, at the same time.

THE GIVEN DAY"Sorry, Ma," Danny said and winked at Joe.

Christ, Joe missed that wink.

Danny had shown up at Gate of Heaven two days after the wedding. Joe saw him as he exited the building with his classmates, Danny out of uniform and leaning against the wrought-iron fence. Joe kept his composure, though heat flushed from his throat to his ankles in one long wet wave. He walked through the gate with his friends and turned as casually as he could toward his brother.