Rogue Island (7 page)

I turned my back on him, walked back to my desk, checked my computer messages, and found another from Lomax:

A
ND WHAT'S WITH THE JACKET AND TIE TODAY?
D
ID SOMEBODY DIE OR SOMETHING?

*   *   *

That afternoon, Rosie sat beside me in a church pew and wept into my shoulder.

Firefighters from six states had come to Tony DePrisco's funeral at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus on Camp Street, just two blocks from the cellar where he'd burned to death.

A few rows in front of us, I saw the bent figure of Tony's wife Jessica, her sleeping daughter Mikaila curled in her lap. A dazed little boy sat stone still on either side of her—Tony Jr. and Jake.

Father Paul Mauro, a wizened little man who had presided at Tony's confirmation more than twenty-five years ago, stood in front of the closed casket and spoke of heroism, integrity, sacrifice, and salvation. I had to smile a little. The Tony I knew was a goof-off who'd passed math and English by copying from my exam papers, and whose lone contribution to our school's athletic prowess was kidnapping other schools' mascots. Somehow he'd managed to snag the senior-prom queen and then squeak through the fire academy after washing out twice. In nearly twenty years as a fireman, he'd never won a commendation. He would have wondered who Father Mauro was talking about.

A hand closed around mine and squeezed hard enough to make me cringe.
Rosie,
I thought to myself,
we really need to stop meeting like this.

Late that afternoon, I finished knocking out the feature on the DiMaggios for the next day's paper, describing the hats and bats and laying the bullshit quotes on thick. By then it was too late to catch the end of the Sox spring-training game, even if I'd been in the mood, so I decided to get a head start on the weekend piece about Polecki and Roselli. I double-checked the stats on their abysmal record for closing cases and called McCracken at home for a not-for-attribution quote about how insurance investigators all over New England were calling them “Dumb and Dumber.”

The Farrelly Brothers' lowbrow comedy was a local favorite because Dumb and Dumber hailed from Providence, the movie starting with an establishing shot of Hope Street. Another reason to be proud.

Me? Call me Dumbest. By midnight I was cruising Mount Hope on the off chance that I might spot something. It was no way to investigate anything, but I couldn't sit around doing nothing, and I was out of ideas.

14

On Larch Street, a big-screen TV glowed blue behind the thin white curtains of a two-story bungalow where I covered a mob hit ten years back, the widow and her teenage daughter living comfortably there now on their monthly Mafia pension. On Hopedale Road, the lights were all out in the second-floor tenement where Sean and Louisa Mulligan had managed to raise two boys and a girl on a milkman's salary. On Doyle Avenue, an idle front-end loader with “Dio Construction” in green letters on its flank sat among the ruins of a burned-out triple-decker.

Neighborhood trash pickup was Thursday morning, and by the look of the mess in the snow, most folks had already dragged their trash barrels and Hefty bags to the curb. At the corner of Ivy and Forest, Norwegian brown rats, their eyes burning red in my headlights, yanked food scraps from holes they had burrowed in the plastic. Down the street from Zerilli's store, a half dozen dogs had toppled a couple of trash barrels and were partying at the curb.

I decided to join them. I unscrewed the lid from my thermos, swigged coffee, and popped in a CD. Tommy Castro rocked the Bronco with electric blues:

All my nasty habits … they just won't let me be

I'd been circling for most of an hour when I spied someone crossing the street half a block ahead, silhouetted in the wash of a streetlight that hadn't been shot out yet. The figure walked like a woman and carried something. Too small for a gasoline can. Could have been a large handgun, or maybe a camera with a telephoto lens. Before I could check it out, blue lights flashed in my rearview.

I pulled Secretariat to the curb and listened in on my police scanner as the cops ran my plate. In the mirror, I saw one cop climb out of the cruiser's passenger-side door and position herself at the rear of the Bronco, her gun unholstered and pressed against her right leg. Her partner got out on the driver's side and walked toward me, flashlight in his right hand, left hand resting on the butt of his revolver. I rolled down the window, the cold hitting me like a karate chop, as he shined his light in my face.

“How you doing, Eddie?” Ed Lahey had been in my brother Aidan's posse back in the days when the word wasn't synonymous with
gang
.

“Mulligan? That you? The hell you doing out here middle of the night?”

“Same as you, Eddie. Wasting my time.”

“Got that right,” he said. “Supposed to cruise the neighborhood all night, stop anyone looks suspicious. Ever see anyone in Mount Hope who
didn't
look suspicious?”

“Just the pedophile priest,” I said. “I hear the bishop is transferring him to Woonsocket.”

“Not planning on burning anything down tonight, are you, Mulligan?”

“Not right this minute,” I said, “but I've got a cigar I'm saving for later.”

“No cans of gasoline in back?” His tone was light, but he shined his flashlight into the backseat, then walked back and peered through the window of the empty cargo space.

When he was done, he narrowed his eyes and told me to head for home.

“Okay, maybe I will.”

“Uh-huh. Sure you will. Look, you got a cell phone?”

“Yeah.”

“Here's my cell number,” he said, handing me a card. “Call it if you see anything. And next time you talk to your brother, tell him …”

I rolled the window up before he could finish. I had enough problems.

I drove down the block and turned right, looking for the figure I'd seen crossing the street, but of course, she was gone. A few minutes later, cruising up Cypress, I saw a couple of the DiMaggios, bats on their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet in the snow. I slowed, rolled the passenger-side window down, and leaned toward it.

“Hey, Vinnie! Seen anything unusual tonight?”

“Nothing 'cept for Lucinda Miller standing in her window, giving us a good look at her tits.”

His colleague snorted. “That ain't so unusual.”

I pulled out the three-flame Colibri that Zerilli had given me. I didn't have anything that needed welding, so I used it to fire up a Cuban and smoked as I prowled the empty streets. I didn't see anyone skulking about with a can of gasoline. I didn't see anyone resembling Mr. Rapture. Except for the DiMaggios, I didn't see anyone at all.

The CD cycled around to “Nasty Habits” twice before I shut it off. Around three in the morning, the Bronco's heater coughed and surrendered. The eastern sky was lightening when a newspaper delivery truck pulled up in front of Zerilli's store and heaved out two bundles of city editions. I headed home to catch a couple hours' sleep, see what my dreams could conjure.

I heard the phone ringing through the apartment door, stepped in, and picked up the receiver.

“You!

fucking!

bastard!”

“Hello, Dorcas.”

“So, who is she?”

“Who?”

“The bitch you've been out fucking all night.”

“What makes you think it was only one?”

“I'm still your wife, you evil bastard!”

“Good morning, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up. Just before I set the receiver down, I thought I heard Rewrite bark.

*  *  *

By the time I dragged myself in to work, the editors were meeting behind closed doors, discussing an issue that required their collective experience and judgment: Should the paper start printing the mayor's name as “aaaaCarozza” or stick with the more headline-friendly “Carozza”? Judging by the muffled sounds coming through the wall, the debate was heating up.

I snatched a newspaper off the stack beside the city desk and saw that page one was dominated by a four-column picture of Sassy. She had her paws on Ralph's shoulders, digging at his ear with her tongue while Gladys stood by looking embarrassed. Looking at the page made me feel bad about what I'd done. Not that I gave a damn about Hardcastle, but I cared a whole lot about the paper.

I was just a kid when Dan Rather broke into a Red Sox broadcast with the news that Pope Paul VI had died. “Maybe so,” my dad said, “but we won't know for sure till we read tomorrow's paper.” In a state where politicians lie like the rest of us breathe, the newspaper is the only institution people trust to tell the truth. I knew right then that I wanted to be a part of it.

That night, I prowled Mount Hope again in the heatless Bronco, giving it up around three in the morning, when hypothermia set in and even Tommy Castro's guitar couldn't heat things up. My apartment was warm only by comparison, the landlord thrifty with his heating oil.

Sleeping alone under a thin blanket, I dreamed of Norwegian brown rats with glowing red eyes and fierce cartoon dogs that wore red baseball caps and wielded Louisville Sluggers. The hair on the backs of their necks stood up as they growled in the dark and swung their bats at a man clutching a gas can in his left hand. He tried to escape the blows by crawling headfirst into an overturned plastic trash barrel, but the dogs clamped their jaws on his ankles and yanked him out. Their snapping teeth tore chunks of flesh from his thighs, and the rats scurried to devour the bloody pieces. A police car, blue lights swirling, roared down the street and screeched to a stop. The cops leaped out, shouted “Good dogs,” tossed them Beggin' Strips, and stomped the man with their gleaming black jackboots. His mouth opened in a silent scream.

He had my face.

15

On Saturday, my clock radio roused me just before noon, blaring that we were in for a cold snap, which got me wondering what we'd
been
having.

I dropped Secretariat at the Shell station on Broadway to see what they could do about the heater. The mechanic was a lanky, murmuring dude named Dwayne who had “Butch” embroidered over the pocket of his blue work shirt. Five years after his dad died and left him the station, he was still wearing the old man's clothes.

“Secretariat off his feed again?” he said. “How 'bout I take him out back and shoot him so you can break in a new nag?” Dwayne had been tending to Secretariat for years, and he never tired of the same horse joke.

“I just can't bear to let him go,” I said, and told him about the heater.

On the walk back to my place, I called Veronica.

“Mulligan! I was beginning to think you didn't like me anymore.”

“No chance of that, cutie. What say I take you out on the town tonight?”

“On the town or
around
the town? We're not cruising Mount Hope sniffing for smoke, are we?”

She was on to me. “Well,” I said, “that
is
the part of town I had in mind. I thought maybe you'd like to drive.”

“Secretariat in the shop again?”

“Yup.”

“Pick you up at seven.”

And she did, driving her slate-gray Mitsubishi Eclipse straight to Camille's on Bradford Street, where we shared a bottle of wine and ate mounds of spaghetti. Veronica treated, tapping into the five-hundred-dollar monthly allowance from Daddy that supplemented her meager paycheck. Good thing, or I'd have had to do some business with the loan shark eating with his aged mother at a table by the windows. Then it was off to the Cineplex in East Providence for the new Jackie Chan movie, he and his comic-relief sidekick doing a better job of catching the bad guys than I was.

This wasn't the romantic evening of street prowling and rat watching I'd had in mind, but I was having a pretty good time, especially whenever she leaned over to kiss me. Besides, she had the car keys, so there wasn't much I could do about it.

Afterward, she came up. We sat together on my bed and watched Craig Ferguson on my sixteen-inch Emerson. She sipped Russian River, her favorite kind of chardonnay, straight from the bottle, and I did the same with Maalox. The police radio, turned down low, chirped benignly in the background. Veronica thought Ferguson was the funniest man on television. I didn't watch enough TV to know if she had a point.

“Mulligan?” Veronica said, sleep lurking at the edges of her voice. “Are you seeing anybody else?”

I flashed on Dorcas asking, “How many bitches are you fucking now?” Same Mulligan, different woman, better vocabulary.

“Do Polecki and Roselli count?”

She smiled and shook her head.

“Well, then it's no,” I said.

“Hardcastle says you've been stepping out with the blonde in the photo lab.”

“Gloria Costa?”

“Yeah, her.”

“Not happening,” I said. “And Hardcastle is an asshole. You shouldn't be getting your news from him, and that includes what he writes in his lame column. I've got a bad feeling he makes some of it up.”

“Maybe. But I do think Gloria's sweet on you.”

“I think you could be right.”

The police radio chirped again, making me wonder how I was going to get to Mount Hope if something happened after Veronica went home. I was still thinking about that when she stripped down to her bra and panties and slid under the covers. I didn't put up a fight. I snapped off the light, took off everything but my boxers, and crawled in beside her. It had been a long time since anyone felt that good in my arms. Maybe no one ever had.

“Mulligan?”

“Um?”

“Is that an erection?”

“God, I hope so.”

“Well, quit poking me with it.”

“You sure? Man my age, no telling when I'll get another one.”

She laughed, reached under the sheet, and ran a finger along my length, and for just a moment I thought she was relenting.