Live by Night (Coughlin 2)

The strike was called off.

RD Pruitt had been Klan before he left to do a two-year bid at the State Prison Farm at Raiford, so there was little reason to believe he hadn’t joined right back up when he got out. The first speak he stuck up, a hole-in-the-wall in the back of a bodega on Twenty-seventh, was directly across the train tracks from an old shotgun shack rumored to be the headquarters for the local Klavern run by Kelvin Beauregard. As RD was helping himself to the night’s till, he gestured at the wall closest to the tracks and said, “We all be watching so we best not see no laws.”

When Joe heard that, he knew he was dealing with a moron—who the fuck would call the police when a speakeasy was robbed? But the “we” gave him pause because the Klan were just waiting for someone like Joe to stick his head up. A Catholic Yankee who worked with the Latins, Italians, and Negroes, shacked up with a Cuban, and made his money selling the demon rum—what wasn’t there to hate about him?

In fact, he realized pretty quickly, that’s exactly what they were doing. They were calling him out. The foot soldiers of the Klan might have been a collection of inbred idiots with fourth-grade educations at third-rate schools, but their leaders tended to be a bit smarter. Besides Kelvin Beauregard, a local cannery owner and city councilman, the group was rumored to include Judge Franklin of the 13th Judicial Court, a dozen cops, and even Hopper Hewitt, publisher of the Tampa Examiner.

The other, far more meaningful complication, in Joe’s view, was that RD’s brother-in-law was Irving Figgis, also known as Eagle Eye Irv, but more formally as Tampa’s chief of police.

Since their first meeting back in ’29, Chief Figgis had brought Joe in for questioning a few times, just to keep clear the adversarial nature of their relationship. Joe would sit in his office and sometimes Irv would have his secretary bring them lemonade, and Joe would look at the pictures on his desk—the beautiful wife, and the two apple-haired children, the boy, Caleb, a dead ringer for his daddy, and the girl, Loretta, still so beautiful it muddied Joe’s brain whenever he looked at her. She’d been homecoming queen at Hillsborough High School and had been winning all sorts of awards in local theater since she was a pup. So no one was surprised when she headed west for Hollywood upon graduation. Like everyone else, Joe expected to see her up on the big screen any day now. She had that light about her that turned people around her into moths.

Surrounded by the images of his perfect life, Irv had warned Joe on more than one occasion that if his department ever found anything to tie him to the Mercy job, they’d damn well rope Joe up for the rest of his life. And who knew what the Feds would do from there—maybe tie that rope around his neck, drop him through the gallows. But otherwise, Irv let Joe and Esteban and their people be, as long as they all stayed the hell out of white Tampa.

But now here came RD Pruitt sticking up the fourth Pescatore speakeasy in a single month and fairly begging Joe to retaliate.

“All four bartenders have said the same thing about this kid,” Dion told Joe, “said he’s sick-mean. You can see it in him. He’s gonna kill somebody next time or the time after.”

Joe had known plenty of guys in prison who fit that description and they normally left you with only three choices—get them to work for you, get them to ignore you, or kill them. There was no way Joe wanted RD to work for him and no way RD would take orders from a Catholic or a Cuban, so that left options two and three.

One morning in February, he met with Chief Figgis at the Tropicale, the day warm and dry, Joe having learned by now that from late October to the end of April, the climate here was hard to beat. They sipped their coffees with a boost of Suarez Reserve added to it, and Chief Figgis looked out onto Seventh with an itch in his stare and fidgeted in his chair.

Lately there was something tucked just behind the corner of him that was trying not to drown. Some second heart beating in his ears, beating in his throat, beating behind his eyes enough to make them bulge sometimes.

Joe didn’t have a clue what had gone wrong in the man’s life—maybe his wife had run off, maybe someone he loved had died—but it was clear something ate at him lately, took the vigor from him, took the certainty too.

He said, “You hear the Perez factory is closing?”

“Shit,” Joe said. “That’s got, what, four hundred workers?”

“Five hundred. Five hundred more people without jobs, five hundred pairs of idle hands waiting to do the devil’s handiwork. But, shit, even the devil ain’t hiring these days. So they ain’t going to get up to much of anything but drinking and fighting and robbing and making my job all the harder, but at least I got one.”

Joe said, “I heard Jeb Paul’s closing his dry goods store.”

“Heard that too. Been in his family since before this city had a name.”

“A shame.”

“Damn shame, what it is.”

They drank, and RD Pruitt sauntered in off the street. Wore himself a tan knicker suit with wide lapels, a white golf cap, and two-toned Oxfords like he was heading out to the back nine. Rolled a toothpick across his lower lip.

Soon as he sat down, Joe saw it in his face clear as a stream—fear. It lived back behind his eyes, leaked out of his pores. Most people didn’t see it because they mistook its public faces—hatred and ill temper—for rage. But Joe had studied it for two years in Charlestown, and he’d discovered that the worst of the men in there were also the most terrified—terrified of being found out as cowards or, worse, victims, themselves, of other terrible and terrified men. Terrified someone was going to infect them with more poison and terrified someone might come and take their poison away. This terror moved through their eyes like quicksilver; you had to catch it on your first meeting, in the first minute, or you’d never see it again. But in that moment of original contact, they were still assembling themselves for you, so you could spy the fear animal as it dashed back into its cave, and Joe was sad to see that RD Pruitt’s animal was as big as a boar, which meant he’d be twice as mean and twice as unreasonable because he was twice as scared.

As RD sat, Joe offered his hand.

RD shook his head. “Don’t shake hands with papists.” He smiled and showed Joe his palms. “I mean no offense.”

“None taken.” Joe left the hand out there. “Help if I said I haven’t been in church for half my life?”

RD chuckled and shook his head some more.