Rogue Island (2 page)

“Investigative file,” Roselli said. “Not open to reporters or assholes, and you're both.”

“Sure,” I said, “but how about to a First Amendment watchdog from the Fourth Estate?”

“Not to one of them either,” Polecki said.

“Any connection to the other fires?”

“None,” Polecki said.

“Ain't nothin',” Roselli said.

“Any pattern to who owned the buildings?” I asked. “Were any of them overinsured? Did the fires start the same way?”

Polecki took his feet off the desk and leaned forward, the shift in weight making his chair scream for its life. Patches of red flared across his cheeks, maybe from anger, maybe from exertion.

“Trying to tell me my business, Mulligan?”

“We know what we're doing,” Roselli said.

No, you don't,
I thought, but I kept that to myself.

Polecki's stogie had gone out. He relit it, blew the exhaust at me, and grinned like he'd accomplished something. Then he took a few more puffs and flicked hot ash into his red dollar-store wastebasket.

“So Mount Hope is just having a run of bad luck?” I asked.

“Luck of the Irish,” Polecki said.

“Worst kind,” Roselli said.

“If you had the luck of the Irish, you'd be sorry and wish you were dead,” I said.

“Huh?” Polecki said.

Jesus. Doesn't anybody remember John Lennon anymore?

A wisp of smoke rose from the wastebasket, where the cigar ash smoldered in a greasy fried-chicken bucket.

“Look, asshole,” Polecki said, “I told you before, we got no comment on ongoing investigations.”

“Which this is,” Roselli said. “Why don't you go cover a traffic accident? Better yet, have one.”

As much as I enjoyed Roselli's sense of humor, I decided not to stick around for another punch line. The wastebasket was smoking like Polecki's stogie now and not smelling much better, so it seemed like an excellent time to go. I pulled the fire alarm in the hallway on my way out. Who knew the damned thing would actually work?

3

Veronica Tang, the courthouse reporter, rolled her eyes and snickered like a cartoon mouse. Except for a few Disney characters, I don't think I'd ever heard anyone snicker like that before.

“What happened after you pulled the alarm?”

“Don't know. I didn't stick around for the show.”

Veronica snickered again. I liked it when she did that. Then she tossed her hair and playfully punched me in the shoulder. I liked that too.

It was happy hour at Hopes, the local press hangout. Reporters and editors from the paper and producers and on-air “talent” from the city's TV stations were just beginning to trickle in.

“So why was Polecki being so uncooperative?” Veronica asked.

“Because he's an asshole.”

She stared at me until I added, “Okay, we've got some history.”

Fifteen years ago, the police academy had overlooked Polecki's youthful b&e conviction and admitted him as a favor to his father-in-law, the chairman of the Fourth Ward Democratic Committee. As a patrolman, he crashed a couple of patrol cars in high-speed chases. But hey, it was only two. He aced the sergeant's exam by paying the going rate of five hundred dollars for the answers, then rose through the ranks the Rhode Island way, slipping envelopes to the mayor's bagman. Two grand for his lieutenant bars, five grand to make captain. A Providence success story. I'd written about some of it, but it was too much to go into now, so all I said was:

“Three years ago, when he headed the tactical squad, I wrote a piece about his propensity for playing fungo with black kids' heads. A couple of Baptist preachers got hot about it and threatened to bring Al Sharpton to town for a protest march. Made the chief so jumpy that he transferred Polecki to the arson squad, a job that doesn't include a nightstick as standard equipment.”

Veronica lifted her stemmed glass and took another sip. “You're lucky he didn't shoot you when you walked through the door,” she said. “So what's your next step?”

“No idea,” I said. “If I could just find a fresh angle on this thing, maybe I could get out of doing that sappy Lassie-come-home story.”

Her eyes widened.

“You mean you haven't finished it yet?”

“Can't finish what I haven't started.”

“Jesus, Mulligan. Lomax gave it to you last Monday, for Chrissake.”

“Um,” I said.

Veronica's brown eyes danced in amusement, but she shook her head disapprovingly, the neon bar lights doing the samba in her hair. Hair as black as the night sky when I was a kid. I hadn't found the nerve to ask her if she colored it.

She fished a handful of quarters out of her purse and swayed down the narrow aisle between the battered Formica tables and the pockmarked thirty-foot mahogany bar. I watched her progress in the mirror that ran the length of the room and saw that her little black skirt wasn't traveling in a straight line. She'd sipped a little too much chardonnay. I craved Bushmills, the best Irish whiskey that fit my wallet, but my ulcer kept asking the barkeep for club soda.

Journalists have been drinking themselves to death in this place ever since a reporter named Dykas sank his meager savings into it forty years ago. He named it Hopes because all of his were riding on it. It didn't look like much now and probably never did. Rickety chrome bar stools, a splintered floor, a stock high on octane and low on finesse. I'd been drinking here since I was eighteen, and the only renovation I'd noticed was the addition of a condom dispenser in the men's room.

But Hopes had the best jukebox in town: Son Seals, Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy, Ruth Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers. Veronica punched up something heart-wrenching by Etta James and steered her skirt back in my direction.

“The perfect song for a woman who's thinking of taking up with a married man,” she said as she settled back in her seat. I hated being reminded I was still officially hitched to Dorcas, but I reached across the table and took Veronica's hand as Etta set the mood.

Veronica was gorgeous and I wasn't. She was Princeton and I was Providence College. She was twenty-seven and I was on a collision course with forty. Her father was a Taiwanese immigrant who'd taught mathematics at MIT, gambled his life savings on Cisco and Intel stocks, and walked away with over a million before the dot-com bubble burst. My dad had been a Providence milkman and died broke. With only five years in the business, Veronica already worked her beat like a pro, while I filched confidential files and pulled fire alarms in government buildings. Maybe Veronica had lousy taste in men. Or maybe I was just an overachiever.

4

Ed Lomax hunched in his fake leather throne at the city desk, his huge hairless head swiveling like the turret of a Sherman tank. When he made city editor twelve years ago I thought he hated my stuff, the way he always grimaced and shook his head in apparent disgust as he read. Took me a month to figure out that he moved his head instead of his eyes as he tracked each line of type across the computer screen.

Lomax considered it his sacred duty to root out curse words in our copy. Such words, he believed, have no place in a family newspaper. Or, as he put it whenever a wayward “hell” or “damn” provoked him to speech, “I don't want any of that goddamned fucking shit in my goddamned fucking paper.”

He didn't speak often, preferring to communicate with his staff in terse orders dispensed through the newsroom's secure internal computer-messaging system. Every morning we'd arrive for work, log on, see the message function blinking, and find our assignments. They would look something like this:

W
EINER
W
AR.

Or this:

O
VERFLOW
F
OLLOW.

Or this:

B
RASS
K
NUCKLES
C
APER.

If you hadn't watched the local TV news, read everything on our paper's Web site, devoured our seven zoned print editions, studied the AP state wire, and scanned the five small competing Rhode Island dailies, you'd have to walk up to his desk and ask him what he was talking about. And he would give you that look. The one that meant you ought to consider opportunities in retailing.

I logged on and found this waiting for me:

D
OG STORY.
T
ODAY.
N
O MORE EXCUSES.

I messaged Lomax back and got an immediate reply:

C
AN WE TALK ABOUT THIS?

N
O.

I stood and caught his eye sixty feet across the newsroom. I smiled. He didn't. I shrugged on my brown leather bomber jacket and headed for Secretariat, my eight-year-old Ford Bronco parked at a fifteen-minute meter in front of the newspaper building. It had been sleeting, and the yellow parking ticket tucked under my wiper blade was sopping. I peeled it off the glass and slapped it on the windshield of the publisher's BMW, parked unticketed at an expired meter. It was a trick I'd picked up from the hero of a Loren D. Estleman detective novel, and I'd been using it for years now. The publisher just tossed the tickets at his secretary to be paid with company money. The secretary noticed the tickets were mine right off—but she's my cousin.

The dog story was waiting for me in the Silver Lake section of the city, just a few miles west of downtown. I decided to go east instead, sloshing on foot across Kennedy Plaza toward an old red-brick office building on the other side of the Providence River.

By the time I got there, my Reeboks were full of slush. I wasted ten minutes watching a secretary flash her thighs and waiting for feeling to return to my toes before I was waved through to the fire insurance investigator's cluttered inner office. Autographed photos of Providence College basketball greats lined the cream-colored walls. Billy Donovan, Marvin Barnes, Ernie DiGregorio, Kevin Stacom, Joey Hassett, John Thompson, Jimmy Walker, Lenny Wilkins, Ray Flynn, and my old teammate, Brady Coyle. No Mulligan. Benchwarmers didn't rate.

I'd met Bruce McCracken back in the days when he was a skinny kid trying to find himself, and I was a skinnier kid with dreams of being the next Edward R. Murrow. We'd taken a couple of journalism classes together at the little Dominican college before he decided the First Amendment was for suckers. Lately he'd become a gym rat, and he proved it with a crushing handshake. New muscles strained the seams of his blue Sears blazer.

“What do you think we're dealing with?” I asked, wiggling my numb fingers.

“Well, it's more than just a run of bad luck,” he said.

“I gather you talked to Polecki.”

“And his ventriloquist dummy. I swear, when Roselli talks I can see Polecki's mouth move. I can't decide if they're totally incompetent or if they just enjoy being assholes.”

“The choices are not mutually exclusive,” I said.

McCracken grinned. Even his teeth had muscles.

“We wrote policies on three of the Mount Hope houses,” he said. “The claims total more than seven hundred grand, so naturally we're interested. Polecki gave me copies of his files on all nine fires. He's happy to have me do his work for him. Can't say I mind if you do mine for me.”

He shoved a stack of manila folders to the edge of his desk.

“Just don't take them from the office. And no, you can't make copies.”

I flipped through the nine files and set aside two cases that were not labeled “arson” or “suspicious origin.” Then I settled down with the rest. Method of entry varied, but not by much. Sometimes the torch had gone in through the bulkhead, snapping off the padlock with a bolt cutter. More often he'd just kicked in a cellar window. Each fire had started in the basement, which is where I'd whip out the Zippo if I wanted to burn a house down. Even I knew fire spreads upward. Each fire had at least three points of origin, proof that they were not accidental.

In two of the cases, scrapings Polecki and Roselli had sent to the state police crime lab showed no signs of an accelerant. The lab techs had worked with the two goofballs before, so they went to the scenes themselves to collect more scrapings, this time from spots below the heaviest charring. Gas chromatology tests on the new samples showed both fires were started with generous splashes of gasoline, same as the others.

But those seven burned tenement houses were owned by five different real estate companies. They were insured by three different insurance companies. None seemed to be insured for more than its market value. I scribbled all the company names in my notepad, but I couldn't see anything in it.

“What do you make of it?” I asked.

“What do
you
make of it?”

“Doesn't have the look of an insurance scam.”

“Probably not,” McCracken said, “although you can't rule it out entirely. In Providence, half of all fires are started by someone rubbing his mortgage and his insurance policy together.”

He waited for a laugh, but I had heard the line before.

“Well,” he said, “we've got seven arsons, all within a half mile of each other, all set the same way, all strictly amateur. A pro would use a timing device and be in Newport knocking back boilermakers at the White Horse Tavern before anybody smelled smoke.”

“A firebug, then?”

“Maybe. What's ‘Chief Lesbo' telling you?”

“I told you before. Rosie likes guys.”

“Something you know from experience?”

You could say that. In first grade, I pushed her on the swings. In junior high, she bent down to cry on my shoulder when some boy she liked called her “Stilts.” In high school, I took her to the prom. And the summer before college we made love, but we'd been pals for so long that it was like sleeping with my sister. Every straight man I knew would think me a fool, but Rosie and I never twisted the sheets again.