Tools.
Several screwdrivers, a hammer, three socket wrenches and two pair of pliers, a small saw.
The hand that touched his back was almost soft. He barely felt it. A big man not used to being touched, he would have expected it to have taken more force to remove him from his feet. But he’d been bent over, his feet set too closely together, one hand resting on his knee, the other holding a glass of whiskey. A cool gust found his chest as he entered the space between his home and the Andersons’, and he heard the flap of his own clothes in the night air. He opened his mouth, thinking he should scream, and the kitchen window flew up past his eyes like an elevator car. A wind filled his ears on a windless night. His whiskey glass hit the cobblestone first, followed by his head. It was an unpleasant sound, and it was followed by another as his spine cracked.
He looked up the walls of his home until his eyes found the edge of the roof and he thought he saw someone up there staring down at him but he couldn’t be sure. His eyes fell on the section of gutter that had detached from the brick and he reminded himself to add it to the list he kept of household repairs that needed seeing to. A long list, that. Never ending.
We found a screwdriver on top of the parapet, Cap’.”
Thomas Coughlin looked up from Eddie McKenna’s body. “What’s that?”
Detective Chris Gleason nodded. “Best we can tell, he was leaning over to remove an old fastener for that gutter, yeah? Thing had snapped in two. He was trying to get it out of the brick and…” Detective Gleason shrugged. “Sorry, Cap’.”
Thomas pointed at the shards of glass by Eddie’s left hand. “He had a drink in his hand, Detective.”
“Yes, sir.”
“In his hand.” Thomas looked up at the roof again. “You’re telling me he was unscrewing a fastener and drinking at the same time?”
“We found a bottle up there, sir. Power & Son. Irish whiskey.”
“I know his favored brand, Detective. You still can’t explain to me why he had a drink in one hand and—”
“He was right-handed, Cap’, yeah?”
Thomas looked in Gleason’s eyes. “What of it?”
“Drink was in his left hand.” Gleason removed his boater and smoothed back his hair. “Captain, sir, you know I don’t want to argue with you. Not over this. Man was a legend, sir. If I thought for one moment any foul play could be on the table? I’d shake this neighborhood ’til it fell into the harbor. But not a single neighbor heard a thing. The park was filled with people, and no one saw anything but a man alone up on a roof. No signs of a struggle, no hint of defensive wounds. Captain? He didn’t even scream, sir.”
Thomas waved it off and nodded at the same time. He closed his eyes for a moment and squatted by his oldest friend. He could see them as boys, filthy from their sea passage, as they ran from their captors. It had been Eddie who had picked the locks that had bound them to the galley sink. He’d done it on the last night, and when their jailers, two crewmen named Laurette and Rivers, came looking for them in the morning, they’d already insinuated themselves among the throngs in steerage. By the time Laurette spotted them and began pointing and shouting, the gangplank had been lowered and Tommy Coughlin and Eddie McKenna ran at top speed through a gauntlet of legs and bags and heavy crates that swung through the air. They dodged shipmen and customs men and policemen and the shrill whistles that repeatedly blew for them. As if in welcome. As if to say, This country is yours, boys, all yours, but you have to grab it.
Thomas looked over his shoulder at Gleason. “Leave us, Detective.”
“Yes, sir.”
Once Gleason’s footsteps had left the alley, Thomas took Eddie’s right hand in his. He looked at the scars on the knuckles, the missing flesh on the tip of the middle finger, courtesy of a knife fight in an alley back in ’03. He raised his friend’s hand to his lips and kissed it. He held on tightly and placed his cheek to it.
“We grabbed it, Eddie. Didn’t we?” He closed his eyes and bit into his lower lip for a moment.
He opened his eyes. He put his free hand to Eddie’s face and used his thumb to close the lids.
“Ah, we did, boy. We surely did.”
CHAPTER thirty-six
Five minutes before the roll call of every shift, George Strivakis, the duty sergeant at the Oh-One station house on Hanover Street, rang a gong that hung just outside the station house door to let the men know it was time to report. When he opened the door late in the afternoon of Tuesday, September 9, he ignored a small hitch in his step as his eyes took note of the crowd gathered on the street. Only after he had rung the gong, giving it several hard hits from his metal rod, did he raise his head fully and take in the breadth of the mob.
There had to be at least five hundred people in front of him. The back edges of the throng continued to swell as men, women, and street urchins streamed in from the side streets. The roofs on the other side of Hanover filled, mostly kids up there, a few older ones who had the coal-pebble eyes of gang members. What immediately struck Sergeant George Strivakis was the quiet. Except for the scuffling of feet, the stray jangling of keys or coins, no one said a word. The energy, though, lived in their eyes. To a man, woman, and child they all bore the same pinned-back charge, the look of street dogs at sundown on the night of a full moon.
George Strivakis withdrew his gaze from the back of the crowd and settled on the men up front. Jesus. Coppers all. In civilian dress. He rang the gong again and then broke the silence with a hoarse shout: “Officers, report!”
It was Danny Coughlin who stepped forward. He walked up the steps and snapped a salute. Strivakis returned the salute. He’d always liked Danny, had long known he lacked the political touch to rise to a captaincy but had secretly hoped he’d become chief inspector one day like Crowley. Something shriveled in him as he considered this young man of such evident promise about to engage in mutiny.
“Don’t do it, son,” he whispered.
Danny’s eyes fixed on a spot just beyond Strivakis’s right shoulder.
“Sergeant,” he said, “the Boston police are on strike.”
With that, the silence shattered in a roar of cheers and hats thrown high in the air.
The strikers entered the station and filed downstairs to the property room. Captain Hoffman had added four extra men to the desk, and the strikers took their turns and handed in their department-issued property.
Danny stood before Sergeant Mal Ellenburg, whose distinguished career hadn’t been able to surmount his German ancestry during the war years. Down here since ’16, he’d become a house cat, the kind of cop who often forgot where he’d left his revolver.
Danny placed his own revolver on the counter between them, and Mal noted it on his clipboard before dropping it in a bin below. Danny followed the revolver with his department manual, hat number plate, call box and locker keys, and pocket billy. Mal noted it all and swept it away into various bins. He looked up at Danny and waited.
Danny looked back at him.
Mal held out his hand.
Danny stared into his face.
Mal closed his hand and opened it again.
“You gotta ask for it, Mal.”
“Jesus, Dan.”
Danny gritted his teeth to keep his mouth from trembling.
Mal looked away for a moment. When he looked back, he propped his elbow on the counter and flipped his palm open in front of Danny’s chest.
“Please turn over your shield, Officer Coughlin.”
Danny pulled back his jacket and exposed the badge pinned to his shirt. He unhooked the shield from its pin and slid the pin out of his shirt. He placed the pin back behind the hook and placed the shield in Mal Ellenburg’s palm.
“I’m coming back for that,” Danny said.
The strikers assembled in the foyer. They could hear the crowd outside and by the volume Danny assumed it had doubled. Something rammed into the door twice and then the door was flung open and ten men pushed their way inside and slammed the doo
r shut behind them. They were young mostly, a few older men who looked like they had the war in their eyes, and they’d been pelted with fruit and eggs.
Replacements. Volunteers. Scabs.
Danny placed the back of his hand on Kevin McRae’s chest to let him know the men should be allowed to pass unmolested and unremarked, and the strikers made a path as the replacements walked between them and up the stairs into the station.
Outside, the sound of the mob rattled and shook like a storm wind.
Inside, the snap of gun slides being racked in the first-floor weapons room. Handing out the riot guns, readying for a tussle.
Danny took a long, slow breath and opened the door.
The noise blew up from all sides and blew down from the rooftops. The crowd hadn’t doubled; it had tripled. Easily fifteen hundred people out here, and it was hard to tell from the faces who was for them and who was against because those faces had turned into grotesque masks of either glee or fury, and the shouts of “We love ya, boys!” were intermingled with “Fuck you, coppers!” and wails of “Why? Why?” and “Who will protect us?” The applause would have been deafening if it weren’t for the jeers and the projectiles of fruit and eggs, most of which splattered against the wall. A horn beeped insistently, and Danny could make out a truck just beyond the fringe of the crowd. The men in back were replacements by the look of them, because the look of them was scared. As he descended into it, Danny scanned the crowd as best he could, saw some crudely fashioned signs of both support and condemnation. The faces were Italian and Irish and young and old. Bolsheviks and anarchists mingled with several smug faces of the Black Hand. Not far from them, Danny recognized a few members of the Gusties, the largest street gang in Boston. If this was Southie, the Gusties’ home turf, it wouldn’t have been surprising, but the fact that they’d crossed the city and spread their ranks made Danny wonder if he could honestly answer the shouts of “Who will protect us?” with anything but “I don’t know.”
A thick guy popped out of the crowd and punched Kevin McRae full in the face. Danny was separated from him by a dozen people. As he pushed his way through, he heard the thick guy shouting, “’Member me, McRae? Broke my fucking arm during a nick last year? What you gonna do now?” By the time Danny reached Kevin, the guy was long gone, but others were taking his cue, others who’d shown up to do nothing more than pay back beatings they’d received at the hands of these no-longer cops, these ex-cops.
Ex-cops. Jesus.
Danny lifted Kevin to his feet as the crowd surged forward, bouncing off them. The men in the truck had dismounted and were fighting their way toward the station house. Someone threw a brick and one of the scabs went down. A whistle blew as the doors of the station opened and Strivakis and Ellenburg appeared on the steps, flanked by a few other sergeants and lieutenants and a half dozen white-faced volunteers.
As Danny watched the scabs fight their way toward the steps and Strivakis and Ellenburg swing their billy clubs to clear a path, his instinct was to run toward them, to help them, to join them. Another brick sailed through the crowd and glanced off the side of Strivakis’s head. Ellenburg caught him before he could go down and the two of them began to swing their billies with renewed fury, blood streaming down Strivakis’s face and into his collar. Danny took a step toward them, but Kevin pulled him back.
“Ain’t our fight anymore, Dan.”
Danny looked at him.
Kevin, his teeth bloodied, his breath short, said it again. “Ain’t our fight.”
The scabs made it through the doors as Danny and Kevin reached the back of the crowd and Strivakis took a few last swooping cracks at the crowd and then slammed the doors behind him. The mob beat on the doors. Some men overturned the truck that had delivered the recruits and someone lit the contents of a barrel on fire.
Ex-cops, Danny thought.
For the time being anyway.
Good Lord.
Ex-cops.
Commissioner Curtis sat behind his desk with a revolver lying just to the right of his ink blotter. “So, it’s begun.”
Mayor Peters nodded. “It has, Commissioner.”
Curtis’s bodyguard stood behind him with his arms folded across his chest. Another waited outside the door. Neither was from the department, because Curtis no longer trusted any of the men. They were Pinkertons. The one behind Curtis looked old and rheumatic, as if any sudden movement would send his limbs flying off. The one outside the door was obese. Neither, Peters decided, looked fit enough to provide protection with their bodies, so they could only be one other thing: shooters.
“We need to call out the State Guard,” Peters said.
Curtis shook his head. “No.”
“That’s not your decision, I’m afraid.”
Curtis leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “It’s not yours, either, Mr. Mayor. It’s the governor’s. I just got off the phone with him not five minutes ago and he made it very clear, we are not to engage the Guard at this juncture.”
“What juncture would you two prefer?” Peters said. “Rubble?”
“Governor Coolidge stated that countless studies have shown that rioting in a case like this never begins on the first night. It takes the mob a full day to mobilize.”
“Given that very few cities have ever watched their entire police department walk off the job,” Peters said, trying to keep his voice under control, “I’m wondering how many of these countless studies pertain to our immediate situation, Commissioner.”
“Mr. Mayor,” Curtis said, looking over at his bodyguard, as if he expected him to wrestle Peters to the ground, “you need to take your concerns up with the governor.”
Andrew Peters stood and took his boater from the corner of the desk. “If you’re wrong, Commissioner, don’t bother coming to work tomorrow.”
He left the office, trying to ignore the tremors in the backs of his legs.
Luther!”
Luther stopped at the corner of Winter and Tremont Streets and looked for the source of the voice. Hard to tell who could have called to him because the streets were filling as the sun flattened against red brick and the greens of the Common darkened with its passing. Several groups of men had spread themselves out in the Common and were openly running dice games, and the few women still on the streets walked quickly, most tightening their coats or cinching their collars close to their throats.
Bad times, he decided as he turned to walk down Tremont toward the Giddreauxs’ home, are definitely coming.
“Luther! Luther Laurence!”
He stopped again, his windpipe grown cold at the sound of his true surname. A familiar black face appeared between two white faces, swimming its way out of the crowd like a small balloon. Luther recognized the face but it still took him a few anxious seconds to place it with certainty as the man split between the two white people and came toward the sidewalk with one glad hand raised above his shoulder. He slapped the hand down into Luther’s and his grip was firm.
“Luther Laurence, I do declare!” He pulled Luther into a hug.
“Byron,” Luther said as they broke the hug.
Old Byron Jackson. His old boss at the Hotel Tulsa, head of the Colored Bellmen’s Union. A fair man with the tip pool. Old Byron, who smiled the brightest of all smiles for the white folk and cursed them with the nastiest shit imaginable as soon as they’d left his presence. Old Byron, who lived alone in an apartment above the hardware store on Admiral, and never spoke of the wife and daughter in the daguerreotype atop his bare dresser. Yeah, Old Byron was one of the good ones.
“A bit north for you, isn’t it?” Luther said.
“That’s the truth,” Old Byron said. “You, too, Luther. As I live, I never expected to find you here. Rumors had it…”
Old Byron looked out at the crowd.
“Had it what?” Luther said.
Old Byron leaned in, his eyes on the sidewalk. “Rumors had it you were dead, son.”
Luther gestured up Tremont wi
th his head and Old Byron fell into step as they walked toward Scollay Square and away from the Giddreauxs’ and the South End. It was slow going, the crowd thickening by the minute.
“Ain’t dead,” Luther said. “Just in Boston.”
Old Byron said, “What brings these folks out like this?”
“Police just walked off the job.”
“Hush your mouth.”
“They did,” Luther said.
“I read they might,” Old Byron said, “but I never would have believed it. This going to be bad for our folk, Luther?”
Luther shook his head. “I don’t think. Ain’t a lot of lynching up here, but you never know what’ll happen someone forgets to chain the dog.”
“Even the quietest dog, right?”
“Them most of all.” Luther smiled. “What brought you all the way up here, Byron?”
“Brother,” Old Byron said. “Got the cancer. Eating him alive.”
Luther looked over at him, saw the weight of it pulling his shoulders down.
“He got a chance?”
Old Byron shook his head. “It’s in his bones.”
Luther put a hand on the old man’s back. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you, son.”
“He in hospital?”
Old Byron shook his head. “Home.” He jerked a thumb off to his left. “West End.”
“You his only kin?”
“Got a sister. She in Texarkana. She too frail to travel.”
Luther didn’t know what else to say so he said “I’m sorry” again, and Old Byron shrugged.
“What you gone do, am I right?”
Off to their left someone screamed and Luther saw a woman with a bloody nose, her face clenched, as if expecting another punch from the man who ripped her necklace off and then ran toward the Common. Someone laughed. A kid shimmied up a streetlamp pole, pulled a hammer from his belt, and smashed the lamp.