“What?” Danny said.

His father turned, as if surprised to find him there. “Cerebral hemorrhage. Went off in his head like a bomb.”

“Sir?”

He held out his glass, his eyes wide. “Struck him to the floor of his parlor and he was off to see the angels before his wife could even get to the phone. Jesus H.”

“Sir, you’re not making sense. Who are you—?”

“He’s dead. Commissioner Stephen O’Meara is dead, Aiden.”

Danny put his hand on the back of a chair.

His father stared out at the walls of his study as if they held answers. “God help this department now.”

CHAPTER twenty-one

Stephen O’Meara was laid to rest at Holyhood Cemetery in Brookline on a white, windless morning. When Danny searched the sky he found neither birds nor sun. Frozen snow covered the ground and the treetops in a marble white cast that matched the sky and the breath of the mourners gathered around the grave. In the sharp air, the echo of Honor Guard’s twenty-one-gun salute sounded less like an echo and more like a second volley of gunfire from another, lesser burial on the other side of the frozen trees.

O’Meara’s widow, Isabella, sat with her three daughters and Mayor Peters. The daughters were all in their thirties and their husbands sat to their left followed by O’Meara’s grandchildren, who shivered and fidgeted. At the end of that long line sat the new commissioner, Edwin Upton Curtis. He was a short man with a face the color and texture of a long-discarded orange peel and eyes as dull as his brown shirt. Back when Danny was just out of diapers, Curtis had been mayor, the youngest in the history of the city. He was neither now—young nor mayor—but in 1896 he’d been a fair-haired Republican naïf who’d been fed to the rabid Democratic ward bosses while the Brahmins searched for a longer-term solution of more substantial timber. He’d left the highest office in City Hall one year after he entered it and the appointments that followed for him had so diminished in stature that two decades later, he’d been working as a customs clerk when outgoing Governor McCall appointed him to replace O’Meara.

“I can’t believe he had the guff to show up,” Steve Coyle said later at Fay Hall. “Man hates the Irish. Hates police. Hates Catholics. How’re we going to get a fair shake from him?”

Steve still called himself “police.” He still attended meetings. He had nowhere else to go. Still, his was the question at Fay Hall that morning. A megaphone had been placed on a stand in front of the stage for the men to give testimonials to their late commissioner, while the rest of the rank and file milled among the coffee urns and beer kegs. The captains and lieutenants and inspectors were holding their own memorial across town with fine china and French cuisine at Locke-Ober, but the foot soldiers were here in Roxbury, trying to voice their sense of loss for a man they’d barely known. So the testimonials had begun to fade as each man told a story about a chance meeting with the Great Man, a leader who was “tough but fair.” Milty McElone was up there now, recounting O’Meara’s obsession with uniforms, his ability to spot a tarnished button from ten yards out in a crowded squad room.