Rogue Island (30 page)

The news about the newspaper business was all bad. Desperate to stem the tide of red ink, papers all over the country slashed employee pay and laid off journalists by the thousands.
The Miami Herald. The Courier-Journal
of Louisville. The
Los Angeles Times. The Kansas City Star. The Baltimore Sun.
The
San Francisco Examiner. The Detroit News. The Philadelphia Inquirer
 … Not even
The New York Times
or
The Wall Street Journal
were immune.

By late July, I was no longer a suspect, and the paper had reinstated me. Wu Chiang's lawyer, more grateful than she needed to be for the credit-card records I'd mailed to her, had followed Brady Coyle's script exactly, providing Polecki with my alibis and pressing the chief of police for a public exoneration and apology. Polecki dragged his feet as long as he could before grudgingly issuing a statement. The cops had released my Bronco and my grandfather's gun, and the lawyer said she was holding them for me. I didn't give
her
my number, either.

I wanted to go home. I missed the scent of salt, spilled petroleum, and decaying shellfish that rose like Lazarus from the bay. I missed the bellowing of the parti-colored tugs that bulled rusting barges up the river. I missed the way the setting sun turned the marble dome of the statehouse the color of an antique gold coin. I missed Annie's tattoo, Mason's fedora, Charlie's omelets, Zerilli's Cubans, McCracken's crushing handshakes, Jack's Italian curses, and Gloria's one good eye. I missed knowing the names of almost everyone on the streets.

But there was still a price on my head. And it was only a matter of time before Providence joined the layoff trend. Would there be a job waiting if it were ever safe for me to return?

One evening Ruthie pulled out her photo albums, and we paged through them together on the couch. Ruthie and her sister—my mother—holding tennis rackets and mugging for the camera. Their father looking sharp in his Providence PD uniform, his chest bedecked with medals. Aidan and Meg ripping open Christmas presents. Little Liam playing with a Tonka hook-and-ladder truck.

When I was six, that truck and I were inseparable. I'd even slept with it. “Wow!” I said. “I'd forgotten how much I loved that thing.”

Ruthie smiled, got up, rummaged in the hall closet, and came back cradling the truck in her arms. I remembered it as a huge thing in my life, but when she handed it to me, I was surprised how small it was.

“I rescued it from the basement after your mother died,” she said. “You should have it.”

Maybe I'd sleep with it again. Better than sleeping alone.

In early August, the paper's owners finally tired of bleeding money and laid off 130 employees, 80 of them news staffers. I called Mason to learn the names. Abbruzzi. Sullivan. Ionata. Worcester. Richards … So many old friends.

“You and Gloria were on the list, too,” Mason said, “but I talked to Dad.”

I was touched that he'd done that for me. I wasn't surprised he'd kept his promise to her. But if readers and advertisers kept on deserting us, this wouldn't be the last of the layoffs. Mason might not be able to save us next time.

By mid-August, the Yankees were finished, their stars looking old and slow and the young pitchers they'd counted on not yet ready for the big time. But the Sox trailed the surprising Rays by seven games now, and three of our starting pitchers, our right fielder, our shortstop, and our third baseman were all on the disabled list. Ortiz had returned from his wrist injury, but he wasn't the same. And the great one, Manny Ramirez, was gone, traded to the Dodgers after throwing one tantrum too many about his pitiful twenty-million-dollar contract. I wondered what Rosie would have said about that. Me? After all that had happened, it was hard to care about baseball anymore.

On a Sunday afternoon in early September, the Providence paper's banner headline grabbed me before I grabbed it from the newsstand:
ARSON RETURNS TO MOUNT HOPE
.

I carried the paper to the Algiers Coffee House on Brattle Street and read it over a cup of Arabic coffee and a lamb-sausage sandwich. A duplex on Ivy Street had burned to the ground, and a fast-moving fire had gutted Zerilli's Market on Doyle Avenue. The story, under Mason's byline, quoted Polecki as saying the fires were definitely suspicious but still under investigation. When I turned to page eight for the rest of it, I was thrilled to see that the fire picture on the jump page was credited to Gloria.

Mason's story went on to speculate that the arsons had resumed because, after a quiet summer, the police and the neighborhood vigilante group known as the DiMaggios had “let their guard down.” I made a mental note to talk to Mason about clichés.

I tried to call Whoosh, but his home number was unlisted and the phones in his store were melted lumps of plastic.

75

Next morning, I borrowed Aunt Ruthie's immaculate two-year-old Camry and headed south on I-95. An hour later I turned off at Branch Avenue, parked on the street by the gate to the North Burial Ground, opened the trunk, and took out my Tonka hook-and-ladder truck. A bunch of dead mums slumped against the headstone that marked the final resting place of Scott and Melissa Rueda. I placed the toy on the twins' grave and took the dead flowers away.

Then I walked to the car, cruised a few miles east, and swung into Swan Point Cemetery. Rosie was buried among the rhododendrons, about fifty yards west of where they'd planted Ruggerio “the Blind Pig” Bruccola. Her grave was smothered in a mound of dead flowers. I cleared them away, preserving the mementos her fellow firefighters had placed there—three fire hats, a brass nozzle from a fire hose, several dozen Providence FD patches, and a few score more from other fire departments around the state. I draped a signed Manny Ramirez jersey over the shoulders of her gravestone, kneeled in the grass, and talked with her for a while, just the two of us reminiscing about our Hope High days while watching a tug churn its way up the Seekonk River. I kidded her about the neon flowered monstrosity she'd worn to the prom. She made fun of my awkward, left-handed layups. We agreed we had made a mistake, that one time we slept together, but we weren't sure if the mistake was doing it at all or not giving it another try.

“I'm so sorry I missed the funeral, Rosie. I would have been there, but Aunt Ruthie talked me out of it. If she hadn't, I'd probably be lying right next to you.”

When the chat between two friends turned into a conversation between the living and the dead, and I couldn't hear her voice anymore, I walked back to the car, taking the jersey along with me. She'd want to wear it again the next time I dropped by to talk, and there was no point in leaving it behind so some punk could steal it.

I took a shortcut past Brown Stadium and swung Ruthie's car onto Doyle Avenue. The store was a blackened shell, and Whoosh was standing out front supervising a sidewalk sale of smoke-damaged goods. I parked on the street, strolled over to him, and stuck out my hand.

“Do I know you?”

“You do.”

“You're gonna have to remind me.”

“Look harder,” I said, and removed my sunglasses.

He squinted at my face, then said, “Ah, shit. I didn't figure you for a suicide.”

“Hard to recognize me with the beard?”

“Yeah, but what really threw me was the Yankees cap and jersey. Fuckin' good disguise.”

“Take a walk with me.”

“Hang on a sec,” he said.

He walked through the store's charred doorway and disappeared into the ruins. A couple of minutes later, he emerged carrying a stack of six wooden cigar boxes.

“Might as well have these,” he said. “The heat dried them out, but throw some apple slices into the boxes, and some of them should come back okay.”

I thanked him and locked the boxes in the trunk of Ruthie's car. Then we strolled together under the old, half-dead maples lining the sidewalk, where a few of the leaves were starting to turn.

“I'm so sorry about Rosie. I know the two of you were close.”

“My best friend.”

“John McCready was mine, so I know how you must feel.” He threw his arms wide. “So many fucking fires. So many neighbors dead.”

“Sorry about the store,” I said.

“Hell, that's the least of it.”

“Going to rebuild?”

“Gonna reopen next week in a storefront on Hope Street,” he said. “It's a good space. Giordano gave it to me in a straight swap for the old place. Guess he's thinking of building something here. Damned good of him, though. And to think I had him pegged for an asshole.”

“The DiMaggios still on patrol?”

“They disbanded back in June when it looked like the fires had stopped. Big fuckin' mistake. As of last night, they're back on the streets. They catch the prick what burned my place down and I won't be calling the cops next time. He's going right into the Field's Point sludge incinerator.”

“Whoever he is, he's just a hired hand,” I said. “Want the names of the bastards who sent him?”

76

“It's Mulligan. I need a favor.”

“Name it.”

“I need you to get the recording and documents out of your safe deposit box and bring them to me.”

“What's up?”

“Better you don't know.”

“Okay. When and where?”

“The Battleship Cove visitors' parking lot in Fall River at eleven
A.M.
Saturday.”

“I'll be there.”

“You still driving the black Acura?”

“Yeah.”

“Just pull in, and I'll see you.”

77

Saturday morning, I splurged on a couple of Tommy Castro CDs at Satellite Records in Boston. “Take the Highway Down” boomed from the speakers of Aunt Ruthie's Camry as I cruised south on Route 24 toward Newport, the documents and recording McCracken had delivered locked in the trunk. As I crawled along Ocean Avenue looking for an address, I cued the CD to “You Knew the Job Was Dangerous.”

The house was a sprawling Nantucket-style cottage with weathered shingles, a broad white porch, and an expanse of chemical-green lawn. It perched on a rocky outcrop with a glorious view of the sea.

As I turned into the crushed-shell drive, two heavyset men stepped in front of the car and ordered me to get out. They were dressed in identical navy blue suits with chalk pinstripes, and from the way their jackets hung, I could tell they were carrying. They patted me down, politely asked me to unbutton my David Ortiz jersey so they could be sure I wasn't wearing a wire, and then swung the car doors open. They felt under the seats, checked the glove box, and asked me to open the trunk for inspection. When they were done, they directed me to continue up the winding drive and park under the trees. I nosed in behind five new Cadillacs, their paint shielded from the sun by sprawling oaks. All of the cars had “Cadillac Frank” emblems affixed beside their brake lights.

As I walked across the lawn to the house, Whoosh stepped down from the porch to shake my hand. Then he took me by the arm and guided me around back, where the smell of good cooking mingled with the salt air. A slight old man with a spatula in his hand was fussing over two gas grills laden with steaks, chicken breasts, and Italian sausages. Three somewhat younger men in white Bermuda shorts and Tommy Bahama shirts lounged by a glistening pool. Babes in thong bikinis passed among them with trays of tall frosty glasses decorated with little umbrellas.

“Nice,” I said.

Whoosh looked at me and smirked.

“What were you expecting? Satriale's Pork Store?”

He handled the introductions, but I already knew all their names.

Giuseppe Arena, free on bail pending his labor-racketeering trial, put the spatula down, wiped his hands on his “Kiss the Cook” apron, and clasped my right hand in both of his. “Good of you to come,” he said. “Grab yourself a drink. The meat will be ready in a few minutes.”

We ate with Gorham sterling knives and forks, balancing Limoges plates on our laps. Music poured softly from poolside speakers. Joan Armatrading, Annie Lennox, India.Arie—voices that sparkled like the Atlantic on this cloudless late-September day.

I turned to Whoosh, who was meticulously constructing a sandwich from a heap of sausage, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and Italian bread.

“Great choice of music.”

He smirked again.

“What were you expecting, Wayne Newton?”

The conversation veered from the Red Sox to the attributes of the waitresses and back around to the Red Sox again. The Sox had stormed back when I wasn't looking and had a headlock on a play-off spot. With Rhode Islanders going out of their minds placing bets on the looming play-offs, Whoosh was primed for a killing.

By three in the afternoon, as the plates were being cleared away, I fetched the recording and documents from my car. Then Arena led us down the sloping lawn toward a stone breakwater that thrust forty yards into the sea. Halfway down the breakwater, a long table covered with a white tablecloth had been set with wine glasses and carafes of red and white. No worries about listening devices in this unlikely meeting spot.

Arena claimed the chair at the head of the table. The rest of us seated ourselves as Whoosh filled our glasses. Arena, labor racketeer and acting boss. Carmine Grasso, Rhode Island's biggest fence. “Cadillac Frank” DeAngelo, car dealer and chief executive of the state's biggest luxury-car theft ring. Blackjack Baldelli, the no-show jobs king. And Whoosh, Rhode Island's most successful bookmaker.

Johnny Dio and Vinnie Giordano were conspicuously absent.

Two more men in chalk-striped navy suits stood at the end of the breakwater, binoculars hanging from their necks, making sure none of the sailboats tacking in the light breeze ventured too close.

Once, Raymond L. S. Patriarca had ruled the rackets from Maine to central Connecticut from his little storefront office on Atwells Avenue. But in the seventies and eighties, federal investigators used their new toys—electronic surveillance and the RICO act—to break the power of the Mafia here, just like almost everywhere else. Now the mob was small-time, scratching for a piece of the action against the big boys who ran the drug cartels, the state lotteries, the Indian casinos, and the “escort services” that let you choose your whore on their Web sites.