Live by Night

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.