Jack D’Jarvis said, “But rumored to be negotiating his return.”
Thomas looked over at him, and D’Jarvis nodded.
“Who’re you?” Joe asked D’Jarvis.
The lawyer extended his hand. “John D’Jarvis, Mr. Coughlin. Most people call me Jack.”
Joe’s swollen eyes opened as wide as they had since Thomas and Jack had entered the room.
“Damn,” he said. “Heard of you.”
“I’ve heard of you too,” D’Jarvis said. “Unfortunately, so has the whole state. On the other hand, one of the worst decisions your father has ever made could end up being the best thing that could have happened to you.”
“How so?” Thomas asked.
“By beating him to a pulp, you turned him into a victim. The state’s attorney isn’t going to want to prosecute. He will but he won’t want to.”
“Bondurant is state’s attorney these days, right?” Joe asked.
D’Jarvis nodded. “You know him?”
“I know of him,” Joe said, the fear apparent on his bruised face.
“Thomas,” D’Jarvis asked, watching him carefully, “do you know Bondurant?”
Thomas said, “I do, yes.”
Calvin Bondurant had married a Lenox of Beacon Hill and had produced three willowy daughters, one of whom had recently married a Lodge to great notice in the society pages. Bondurant was a tireless advocate of Prohibition, a fearless crusader against all manner of vice, which he proclaimed was a product of the lower classes and inferior races who’d been washing ashore in this great land the last seventy years. The last seventy years of immigration had been primarily limited to two races—the Irish and the Italians—so Bondurant’s message wasn’t particularly subtle. But when he ran for governor in a few years, his donors on Beacon Hill and in Back Bay would know he was the right man.
Bondurant’s secretary ushered Thomas into his office on Kirkby and closed the doors behind them. Bondurant turned from where he stood by the window and gave Thomas an emotionless gaze.
“I’ve been expecting you.”
Ten years ago, Thomas had swept Calvin Bondurant up in a raid on a rooming house. Bondurant had been keeping time with several bottles of champagne and a naked young man of Mexican descent. In addition to a burgeoning career in prostitution, the Mexican turned out to be a former member of Pancho Villa’s División del Norte who was wanted in his homeland on charges of treason. Thomas had deported the revolutionary back to Chihuahua and allowed Bondurant’s name to vanish from the arrest logs.
“Well, here I am,” Thomas said.
“You turned your son the criminal into a victim. That’s an amazing trick. Are you that smart, Deputy Superintendent?”
Thomas said, “Nobody’s that smart.”
Bondurant shook his head. “Not true. A few people are. And you might be one of them. Tell him to plead. There are three dead cops in that town. Their funerals will be all over the front pages tomorrow. If he pleads to the bank robbery and, I don’t know, reckless endangerment, I’ll recommend twelve.”
“Years?”
“For three dead cops? That’s light, Thomas.”
“Five.”
“Excuse me?”
“Five,” Thomas said.
“Not a chance.” Bondurant shook his head.
Thomas sat in his chair and didn’t move.
Bondurant shook his head again.
Thomas crossed his legs at the ankle.
Bondurant said, “Look.”
Thomas cocked his head slightly.
“Let me disabuse you of a notion or two, Deputy Superintendent.”
“Chief inspector.”
“I’m sorry?”
“I was demoted yesterday to chief inspector.”
The smile never reached Bondurant’s lips but it slipped through his eyes. A glint and then gone. “Then we can leave unsaid the notion I was going to dispel for you.”
“I have no notions or illusions,” Thomas said. “I’m a practical man.” He removed a photograph from his pocket and placed it on Bondurant’s desk.
Bondurant looked down at the picture. A door, faded red, the number 29 in its center. It was the door to a row house in Back Bay. What fluttered through Bondurant’s eyes this time was the opposite of mirth.
Thomas placed one finger on the man’s desk. “If you move to another building for your liaisons, I’ll know within an hour. I understand you’re building quite the war chest for your run for the governor’s office. Make it deep, counselor. A man with a deep war chest can take on all comers.” Thomas placed his hat on his head. He tugged at the center of the brim until he was sure it sat straight.
Bondurant looked at the piece of paper on his desk. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Seeing what you can do is of little interest to me.”
“I’m one man.”
“Five years,” Thomas said. “He gets five years.”
It was another two weeks before a woman’s forearm washed up in Nahant. Three days after that, a fisherman off the coast of Lynn pulled a femur into his net. The medical examiner determined that the femur and the forearm came from the same person—a woman in her early twenties, probably of Northern European stock, freckle-skinned and pale of flesh.
In The Commonwealth of Massachusetts v. Joseph Coughlin, Joe pled guilty to aiding and abetting an armed robbery. He was sentenced to five years and four months in prison.
He knew she was alive.
He knew it because the alternative was something he couldn’t live with. He had faith in her existence because not to believe left him feeling stripped and flayed.
“She’s gone,” his father said to him just before they transferred him from the Suffolk County Jail to Charlestown Penitentiary.
“No, she’s not.”
“Listen to yourself.”
“No one saw her in the car when it went off the road.”
“At high speed in the rain at night? They put her in the car, son. The car went off the road. She died and floated off into the ocean.”
“Not until I see a body.”
“The parts of the body weren’t enough?” His father held a hand up in apology. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. “What will it take for you to accept reason?”
“It’s not reason that she’s dead. Not when I know she’s alive.”
The more Joe said it, the more he knew she was dead. He could feel it in the same way he could feel that she’d loved him, even as she’d betrayed him. But if he admitted it, if he faced it, what did he have left but five years in the worst prison in the Northeast? No friends, no God, no family.