Rogue Island (31 page)

“Okay,” Arena said. “Let's see what you've got for us.”

I spread the lot plan and architectural renderings out on the table. The men stood and hunched over them. Whoosh pointed a bony finger at the “Dio Construction” label in the right-hand corner of the lot plan and muttered, “Bastard.”

Once they were satisfied, I placed the billing records for the incorporation papers on the table. Arena picked them up, examined them, and passed them to his right.

When they were done, I put the recorder on the table and pressed play. It was hard to hear over the cries of the gulls and the swish of foot-high waves breaking on the rocks.

“Play it again,” Arena said.

When it got to the part where Giordano mentioned the vacancy at Little Rhody Realty, Grasso picked up the recorder, pressed rewind, and played that part again.

“Cheryl Scibelli was my wife's sister's kid,” he said.

The recording played to the end again, and I clicked it off. No one spoke. Arena pushed his chair back from the table, stood, turned his back on us, and stared out to sea.

It was a minute, maybe two, before he rejoined us at the table. He had questions.

Where'd I get the architectural drawings?

I'd stolen them from Brady Coyle's office.

How'd I get my hands on the billing records?

I respectfully declined to say.

“My fucking
lawyer
is part of this?” Arena said.

“He is,” I said. And then I told him it was Coyle who'd been leaking grand-jury testimony to the newspaper.

“You know this for a fact?”

“I do.”

“Why the hell would he do that?”

“Would you have sanctioned the arsons?” I asked.

“A warehouse fire to collect the insurance, sure. We'd be okay with something like that. But torching a whole neighborhood? Roasting babies and firemen? Burning Whoosh's store down? Involving Carmine's niece in it and then whacking her to cover it up? Fuck, no.”

“Coyle knows that,” I said. “He's sandbagging your case to get you out of the way.”

Arena walked over to me. I stood. He grasped my hands in both of his again, then reached up and draped an arm across my shoulder.

“We are all in your debt,” he said.

It was my signal to go. I gathered the documents from the table, shoved the recorder in my jeans, and walked up the sloping lawn toward the house.

78

Tuesday I slouched in front of Aunt Ruthie's TV and fell asleep watching the final game of the regular season, a meaningless tune-up against the Yankees.

That was the day it happened. The news was a gaudy headline in the next day's paper.

Shortly after noon, according to witnesses, a stranger in an ankle-length black raincoat strode briskly through the yard at Dio Construction. He entered the main building through the side entrance and stepped into Johnny Dio's outer office.

“I thought it was odd,” the secretary told the homicide twins later. “It wasn't raining.” But what she said to the stranger was, “May I help you?”

The man brushed past her, threw open the coat like he thought he was “Doc” Holliday, and raised an 8-shot pistol-grip Mossberg shotgun. He opened the inner door, fired three blasts, let the gun fall to the floor, told the secretary to wait ten minutes before calling the police, and walked out into a sunny afternoon.

“It happened so fast!” the secretary told the cops. No, she couldn't provide a description.

As Dio bled to death on his office floor, gunshots disturbed the perfect ambiance of the main dining room at Camille's on Bradford Street. Afterward, no one could remember how many shooters there had been, what they looked like, or what door they'd left by. All anyone could say for sure was what the police could plainly see: Vinnie Giordano had enjoyed his last plate of Chef Granata's justly famous Vongole alla Giovanni.

Brady Coyle knew none of this as he and his luncheon companion sipped from their glasses of Russian River and perused the menu at the Capital Grille. She settled on the pan-fried calamari appetizer and the Maine lobster salad. He ordered the clam chowder and the seared citrus-glazed salmon. As they waited for their food, he told lawyer jokes. She toyed with the little silver typewriter on the chain around her neck. She'd come up from Washington to see him, and he planned to make the most of it. He reached across the table and took her hand.

As they dug into their main courses, Channel 10 interrupted its regular programming with a bulletin about a shooting at Camille's. But the volume was turned low on the TV over the bar, and neither of them took notice. They decided against dessert.

He paid the tab and left a generous tip. Outside on the sidewalk, she stood on tiptoes as he leaned in for a kiss. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a man approaching. He stood about five foot five, not much taller than she, but big in the shoulders. Red scaly patches speckled his shaved skull.

The man drew a little black pistol from his windbreaker and pressed it into Coyle's ear.

She screamed.

The gun popped.

She was surprised it wasn't louder.

Coyle toppled into the gutter.

The man stood over him and fired three more shots, making sure.

He turned then and looked at her, thinking about it. The magazine of his .25-caliber Raven Arms semiautomatic still held two rounds.

“No,” she said. “Please, no.”

He shrugged and let the gun slip from his hand. It landed soundlessly on Coyle's body. Then the little thug crossed the street and strolled through Burnside Park as if he didn't have a care in the world.

The woman's shoulders shook. For just a moment, she thought she was going to lose her expensive lunch. Then she regained her composure, opened her purse, took out a pen and pad, and started taking notes.

I read Mason's sketchy story about the hits in the Providence paper. A breathless, blow-by-blow, first-person account of Coyle's execution appeared in
The Washington Post.
Veronica's source had paid off for her one last time.

79

My old landlord let me move back into the America Street apartment in return for half the back rent, which I covered with an advance on my Visa card. He wasn't happy about the arrangement, but nobody else had wanted the dump.

I wiped away the dust, hung my grandfather's forty-five back on the cracked plaster wall, and arranged to have the utilities and phone turned back on. Guess who called first?

“You!

fucking!

bastard!”

“Hello, Dorcas. How nice to hear your voice.”

“Where the hell have you been?”

“Visiting Aunt Ruthie.”

“For the whole fucking summer?”

“That's right. Hey, how's Rewrite doing? You didn't really take her to the pound, did you?”

“What if I did?”

“Are you remembering her heartworm pills?”

“Fuck you,” she said, and I hung up.

In the morning I shaved the beard, saddled up Secretariat, rolled down Atwells Avenue past Camille's, crossed over I-95, and parked at a fifteen-minute meter in front of the newspaper.

When I stepped off the elevator, Mason got up from his desk to greet me. I stuck out my hand. He ignored it and wrapped me up in a bear hug. Gloria dashed over from the photo desk to do the same. I liked her hug better.

“Hey, everybody!” Hardcastle shouted. “The arsonist's back from summer camp.”

It was good to hear his drawl again, but it was sad to see so many of the cubicles bare and empty. I walked to my desk past the one where Dante Ionata and Wayne Worcester had spent the last ten years exposing the polluters who were poisoning the bay. The bastards would be getting away with it from now on.

I logged on to my computer and checked my messages. There were several hundred. The most recent one, from Lomax, had been sent this morning:

C
ADAVER DOGS FEATURE DONE YET?

His way of saying “Welcome back.”

Shortly after ten, Lomax asked Mason and me to join him in Pemberton's office.

“The truth now,” Pemberton said. “Which one of you really wrote that arson exposé last spring?”

“Mason did,” I said.

“Mulligan did,” Mason said.

“I see. Well, how about a double byline, then? If the two of you can put your heads together and update it this afternoon, we'd like to lead the paper with it tomorrow.”

“Sure, we can do that,” I said. Of course, there were a few details I'd have to leave out.

“How come we can run it now when we couldn't run it then?” Mason said.

“Because dead men don't sue,” Lomax said.

Mid-afternoon, my desk phone rang.

“Mulligan?”

“Yeah.”

“I heard you were back to work.”

“You heard right.”

“I'm glad.”

“That why you called? To welcome me back?”

“I just wanted to say I'm sorry.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I don't want it to end like this.”

“What sort of ending do you have in mind?”

“That lust-filled weekend you talked about? We can still have it. Why don't you come down this weekend? Or maybe I could come up there.”

“I'm busy.”

She was silent for a moment. I could hear her breathing.

“He didn't mean anything to me.”

“That I can believe, but how does that make it better?”

She didn't have anything to say to that. I could hear her breath again. While I was away, Verizon had worked some new digital miracle with the phone. I smelled the sweet scent that collected in the curve of her neck. Her lips brushed the side of my face. It made me shiver.

“Don't you miss me?”

“Hell, yes.”

“So why can't you forgive me?”

Preachers say forgiveness is good for the soul. That it does more for the person who forgives than for the one who is forgiven, cleansing the mind of anger and resentment. What a load of crap.

“Mulligan? Forgive me, please?”

“I won't because all of me wants to, regardless of the consequences, and because you've counted on that from the very beginning.”

“What? I didn't quite catch that.”

I didn't say anything. Doesn't anybody watch
The Maltese Falcon
anymore?

“I don't understand anything that's happening,” she said, her voice small now, not quite a whimper. “Who was the man with the gun? Why did he shoot Brady?”

“Because he deserved it,” I said. “Check the Providence paper's Web site tomorrow and you can read all about it.”

“I could have been killed,” she said. “Don't you care?”

“You're lucky I wasn't the one holding the gun,” I said, and hung up.

After work, Gloria invited me to the Trinity Brewhouse for a drink.

“What about Hopes?”

“I like this new place,” she said. “I don't drink at Hopes much anymore.”

For a second, I flashed on an intimate evening with Gloria. Over the last few months, I'd been beaten, betrayed, and bereaved, and now I needed somebody's arms around me. But not Gloria's. At least, not right now. I still ached for Veronica, and Gloria was not a woman to be trifled with. I told her I was tired. I told her I just wanted to go home.

But that's not what I did.

I peeled the yellow parking ticket off my windshield, stuck it under the wiper of the publisher's BMW, and drove over to Camp Street to catch up with Jack Centofanti for a few minutes. Then I popped into Hopes and found McCracken drinking alone at a table in back.

“So,” he whispered as I sat across from him with my club soda. “I guess I'm an accessory to murder.”

“Sorry I had to involve you.”

“Aw, that's okay. Only one thing I'm sorry about.”

“What's that?”

“The pro who set the fires is still out there, for hire to the next asshole who wants something burned down.”

“The guy who attacked Gloria and killed Rosie is still out there, too,” I said.

“Probably the same guy.”

After he left, I flirted with Annie and asked her when she got off. She laughed and turned me down flat, so I finished my drink and drove to Good Time Charlie's, where Marie was just finishing her shift.

I wooed her with a cheap dinner at the diner, brought her home, and took her to bed. She was athletic and enthusiastic. I told myself she could give Veronica lessons. I was so full of shit.

In the morning, I awoke to the familiar sound of Angela Anselmo screeching at her kids. I got up, stepped into the bathroom, and noticed that Veronica's yellow toothbrush was still in the porcelain holder above my sink. I plucked it out, snapped it in half, and tossed it in the garbage.

Marie and I showered together. She scrubbed my back, and I took my sweet time with hers. She was dressing when I heard rustling at the apartment door.

Peering through the peephole, I saw nothing but the cracked plaster wall across the hall. I flipped the dead bolt, yanked the door open, and discovered something black and hairy sitting at my threshold.

“Rewrite!”

She leaped at me and almost knocked me down.

Her hair was matted and she smelled bad. A note was tucked under her collar: “You take care of the bitch for a while.”

I fed her some cold cuts from the fridge. Then Marie helped me give her a bath in the tub.

“What am I going to do with you?” I said out loud as I rinsed the suds from her thick, curly coat. Rewrite cocked her head and looked at me with her glistening brown eyes. The landlord would pitch a fit, and with my crazy hours, how could I take care of her anyway?

Then it dawned on me.

There was a nice couple in Silver Lake who knew how to love a dog.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Patricia Smith, one of our greatest living poets, edited every line of every draft and helped this befuddled male create credible love scenes—both on the page and off. Thank you, baby, for permission to excerpt your poem “Spinning 'til You Get Dizzy.”