“Brighton?”

Eddie nodded. “Stockyards. Hate that place.”

Danny followed Eddie toward the door. “Bracing cows now, Eddie?”

“Better.” Eddie pushed open the door into the cold. “Coloreds. Crazy dinges are meeting right now, after hours, to discuss their rights. You believe that? Where does it end? Next thing, the chinks’ll be holding our laundry hostage.”

Eddie’s driver pulled to the curb in his black Hudson. Eddie said, “Give you a lift?”

“I’ll walk.”

“Walk off that booze. Good idea,” he said. “Know anyone by the name of Finn by the bye?” Eddie’s face was blithe, open.

Danny kept his the same way. “In Brighton?”

Eddie frowned. “I said I was going to Brighton on a coon hunt. ‘Finn’ sound like a colored name to you?”

“Sounds Irish.”

“’Tis indeed. Know any?”

“Nope. Why?”

“Just wondering,” Eddie said. “You’re sure?”

“Just what I said, Eddie.” Danny turned up his collar against the wind. “Nope.”

Eddie nodded and reached for the car door.

“What he do?” Danny said.

“Huh?”

“This Finn you’re looking for,” Danny said. “What’d he do?”

Eddie stared into his face for a long time. “Good night, Dan.”

“’Night, Eddie.”

Eddie’s car drove up Beacon Street and Danny thought of going back in and calling Nora from the phone booth in the hotel lobby. Let her know that McKenna could be sniffing around her life. But then he pictured her with Connor—holding his hand, kissing him, maybe sitting on his lap when no one else was in the house to see—and he decided there were a lot of Finns in the world. And half of them were either in Ireland or Boston. McKenna could have been talking about any one of them. Any at all.

CHAPTER sixteen

The first thing Luther had to do at the building on Shawmut Avenue was make it weather-tight. That meant starting with the roof. A slate beauty, she was, fallen on ill fortune and neglect. He worked his way across her spine one fine cold morning when the air smelled of mill smoke and the sky was clean and blade-blue. He collected shards of slate the firemen’s axes had sent to the gutters and added them to those he’d retrieved from the floor below. He ripped sodden or scorched wood from their lathes and hammered fresh planks of oak in their places and covered it all with the slate he’d salvaged. When he ran out of that he used the slate Mrs. Giddreaux had somehow managed to procure from a company in Cleveland. He started on a Saturday at first light and finished up late of that Sunday afternoon. Sitting on the ridgeline of the roof, slick with sweat in the cold, he wiped his brow and gazed up at the clean sky. He turned his head and looked at the city spread out around him. He smelled the coming dusk in the air, though his eyes could see no evidence of it yet. As smells went, though, few were finer.

Luther’s weekday schedule was such that by the time the Coughlins sat for dinner, Luther, who’d set the table and helped Nora prepare the food, had already left. But on Sundays, dinners were all-day affairs, ones that occasionally reminded Luther of the ones at Aunt Marta and Uncle James’s on Standpipe Hill. Something about recent church attendance and Sunday finery brought out an inclination for pronouncements, he noticed, in white folk as well as black.