“Lotta good it does us, then,” Luther said.
She said that?” Danny said from the phone in his rooming house. “She was running from me?”
“She did.” Luther sat at the phone table in the Giddreauxs’ foyer.
“She say it like she was tired of running?”
“No,” Luther said. “She said it like she was right used to it.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry.”
“No. Thanks, really. Eddie come at you yet?”
“He let me know he’s on his way. Not how or what yet, though.”
“Okay. Well, when he does …”
“I’ll let you know.”
“What do you think of her?”
“Nora?”
“Yeah.”
“I think she’s too much woman for you.”
Danny’s laugh was a booming thing. Could make you feel like a bomb went off at your feet. “You do, uh?”
“Just an opinion.”
“’Night, Luther.”
“’Night, Danny.”
One of Nora’s secrets was that she smoked. Luther had caught her at it early in his time at the Coughlin house, and it had since become their habit to sneak out for one together while Mrs. Ellen Coughlin prepared herself for dinner in the bathroom but long before Mr. Connor or Captain Coughlin had returned from work.
One of those times, on a high-sun-deep-chill afternoon, Luther asked her about Danny again.
“What of him?”
“You said you were running from him.”
“I did?”
“Yeah.”
“I was sober?”
“In the kitchen that time.”
“Ah.” She shrugged and exhaled at the same time, her cigarette held up in front of her face. “Well, maybe he ran from me.”
“Oh?”
Her eyes flashed, that danger you sensed in her getting closer to the surface. “You want to know something about your friend Aiden? Something you’d never guess?”
Luther knew it was one of those times silence was your best friend.
Nora blew out another stream of smoke, this one coming out fast and bitter. “He seems very much the rebel, yeah? Very independent and free-thinking, he does, yeah?” She shook her head, took another hard drag off her cigarette. “He’s not. In the end, he’s not a’tall.” She looked at Luther, a smile forcing its way onto her face. “In the end, he couldn’t live with my past, that past you’re so curious about. He wanted to be, I believe the word was, ‘respectable.’ And I, sure, I couldn’t give him that.”
“But Mr. Connor, he don’t strike me as the type who—”
She shook her head repeatedly. “Mr. Connor knows nothing of my past. Only Danny. And look how the knowledge tossed us in the fire.” She gave him another tight smile and stubbed out her cigarette with her toe. She lifted the dead butt off the frozen porch and placed it in the pocket of her apron. “Are we done with the questions for the day, Mr. Laurence?”
He nodded.
“What’s her name?” she said.
He met her gaze. “Lila.”
“Lila,” she said, her voice softening. “A fine name, that.”
Luther and Clayton Tomes were doing structural demolition in the Shawmut Avenue building on a Saturday so cold they could see their breath. Even so, the demo was such hard work — crowbar and sledgehammer work — that within the first hour they’d stripped down to their undershirts.
Close to noon, they took a break and ate the sandwiches Mrs. Giddreaux had prepared for them and drank a couple beers.
“After this,” Clayton said, “we — what? — patch up that subflooring?”
Luther nodded and lit a cigarette, blew out the smoke in a long, weary exhale. “Next week, week after, we can run the electrical up back of them walls, maybe get around to some of them pipes you so excited about.”
“Shit.” Clayton shook his head and let out a loud yawn. “All this work for nothing but a higher ideal? Place for us in Nigger Heaven, sure.”
Luther gave him a soft smile but didn’t say anything. He’d lost comfort with saying “nigger,” even though the only time he’d ever used it was around other colored men. But both Jessie and the Deacon Broscious had used it constantly, and some part of Luther felt he’d entombed it with them back at the Club Almighty. He couldn’t explain it any better than that, just that it didn’t feel right coming off his tongue any longer. Like most things, he assumed, the feeling would pass, but for now….
“Well, I guess we might as well—”
He stopped talking when he saw McKenna stroll through the front door like he owned the damn building. He stood in the foyer, looking up at the dilapidated staircase.
“Damn,” Clayton whispered. “Police.”
“I know it. He’s a friend of my boss. And he act all friendly, but he ain’t. Ain’t no friend of ours, nohow.”
Clayton nodded because they’d both met plenty of white men that fit that description in their lives. McKenna entered the room where they’d been working, a big room, nearest to the kitchen, probably had been a dining room fifty years ago.
The first words out of McKenna’s mouth: “Canton?”
“Columbus,” Luther said.
“Ah, right enough.” McKenna smiled at Luther, then turned to Clayton. “I don’t believe we’ve met.” He held out a meaty hand. “Lieutenant McKenna, BPD.”
“Clayton Tomes.” Clayton shook the hand.
McKenna gripped his hand, kept shaking it, his smile frozen to his face, his eyes searching Clayton’s and then Luther’s, seeming to look right into his heart.
“You work for the widow on M Street. Mrs. Wagenfeld. Correct?”
Clayton nodded. “Uh, yes, suh.”
“Just so.” McKenna dropped Clayton’s hand. “She’s rumored to keep a small fortune in Spanish doubloons beneath her coal bin. Any truth to this, Clayton?”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir.”
“Wouldn’t tell anyone anyway if you did!” McKenna laughed and slapped Clayton on the back so hard Clayton stumbled forward a couple of steps.
McKenna stepped close to Luther. “What brought you here?”
“Suh?” Luther said. “You know I live with the Giddreauxs. This is going to be the headquarters.”
McKenna shot his eyebrows at Clayton. “The headquarters? Of what?”
“The NAACP,” Luther said.
“Ah, grand stuff,” McKenna said. “I remodeled me own house once. A constant headache, that.” He moved a crowbar to the side with his foot. “You’re in the demolition phase, I see.”
“Yes, suh.”
“Coming along?”
“Yes, suh.”
“Almost there, I’d say. ’Least on this floor. My original question, Luther, however, did not pertain to your working in this building. No. When I asked what brought you here, the ‘here’ I referred to was Boston herself. For instance, Clayton Tomes, where do you hail from, son?”
“The West End, sir. Born and raised.”
“Exactly,” McKenna said. “Our coloreds tend to be homegrown, Luther. Few come here without a good reason when they could find much more of their kind in New York or, Lord knows, Chicago or Detroit. So what brought you here?”
“A job,” Luther said.
McKenna nodded. “To come eight hundred miles just to drive Ellen Coughlin to church? Seems funny.”
Luther shrugged. “Well, then, I guess it’s funny, suh.”
“’Tis, ’tis,” McKenna said. “A girl?”
“Suh?”
“You got yourself a girl up these parts?”
“No.”
McKenna rubbed the stubble along his jaw, looked over at Clayton again, as if they played this game together. “See, I’d believe you came eight hundred miles for cunny. Now that’s a valid story. But, as it is?”