Rogue Island (8 page)

“Nice try, funny man” she said, “but it's just not happening until the test results come back.”

I was still trying to think of a snappy comeback when she drifted off. I watched her sleep as my hard-on processed the bad news. Was she really paranoid about AIDS or just trying to slow things down? I didn't know, and her deep, even breathing told me this was not the time to ask. The ulcer was grumbling, so I got up for another gulp of Maalox, then slid back into bed, buried my face in her hair, and breathed all of her in.

In the morning, I discovered she'd gotten up during the night and turned off the police radio. I decided not to make an issue of it.

Veronica had come prepared, scrubbing her teeth with a yellow toothbrush she pulled from her purse. When she was done, she placed it next to mine in the holder under my bathroom mirror. That seemed promising—and a little scary.

“Anything else you want to store in there? Some Jean Naté? A blow-dryer? I could use some clean towels.”

She laughed. We kissed. The toothbrush stayed.

Veronica lived in an efficiency apartment in Fox Point, the modern red-brick building an unsightly intruder in a neighborhood of well-preserved early nineteenth-century shingle-clad colonials. We swung by there so she could dress for church, then drove to St. Joseph's, where I'd been an altar boy as a kid. She tried to coax me inside, but I hadn't been to mass since the sex scandal broke.

I took her car to the diner for one of Charlie's heart-attack cheddar omelets and the Sunday paper. The savior who stood between me and starvation had already scanned the front page.

“Great headline,” he chuckled, then bent his sweating bald pate over an acre of sizzling bacon.

The head over my story read,
ARSON SQUAD IS DUMB AND DUMBER.
The managing editor had gotten unexpectedly playful with the layout, juxtaposing photos of Polecki and Roselli with head shots of Jim Carrey and Jeff Daniels, who'd played the title roles in the movie. I scanned the paper for other fire news, but there wasn't any. Then I called fire headquarters on my cell and confirmed Mount Hope had been quiet overnight.

I picked Veronica up just as St. Joseph's was emptying the faithful into a day that couldn't decide between drizzle and sleet. As the worshippers spilled into the street, I recognized three “made men,” four state legislators, and a judge. Tomorrow they'd be back to labor racketeering, truck hijacking, and bribe taking.

At her apartment, Veronica changed into a man's faded blue oxford shirt and a snug pair of low-rise Levis while I watched and admired the view. I wondered if the shirt had a previous owner of the male persuasion, but once again I kept my mouth shut. By the time we got to O'Malley's Billiards on Hope Street, the shirt had begun to smell like the woman who was wearing it.

My plan was to teach Veronica how to shoot eight ball. I lost three games out of five. Must have been distracted by the low in those low-rise jeans.

Late that afternoon we lay on my bed and caught an ESPN report out of the Red Sox spring camp in Fort Myers. Jonathan Papelbon, one of the stars of the 2007 World Series, was thumping his chest and saying there was no reason the team couldn't repeat. “He's a major-league blowhard,” I said, “but I think he's going to have another big year.”

And she said, “Why do you care so much about a stupid baseball team?”

Back when you could sit in the center-field bleachers for ten bucks, I spent a lot of weekend afternoons at Fenway with my dad. “Just one World Series championship in my lifetime, that's all I ask,” he used to say. His heart quit pumping the winter after Mookie Wilson's grounder skidded between Bill Buckner's legs.

How do you explain it to the uninitiated? How do you explain why you draped a Curt Schilling jersey over the shoulders of your dad's gravestone after that glorious night in 2004? How do you explain why you sat by his grave with a portable radio last fall so you could listen to the clinching game together?

“I've gotta have something to care about, Veronica,” is all I said. I was just realizing she might take that wrong when the phone rang. I grabbed it on the second ring.

“You!

fucking!

bastard!”

“Can't talk now, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up.

Later, Veronica and I discussed whether she'd stay the night again. I'd need her car if there was a fire, she said, but I suspected she really liked the way it felt. I liked the way it felt, too, and expected to like it a whole lot more once we had the test results. We agreed it would be just an occasional thing. The toothbrush could stay, and she could have her own key, but feminine products were out of the question.

That night, before we slipped under the covers, I moved the police radio to my side of the bed. About four in the morning, it woke me. Something was burning in Mount Hope. I found her car keys and tried to dress without disturbing Veronica, but she stirred, heard the radio chatter, got up, and pulled on those jeans.

16

Police had Catalpa Road blocked off, so we parked and walked in through a flurry of embers.

Rosie's crew had given up on saving the four-story rooming house and was soaking down the triple-deckers next door and across the street to stop them from catching. A window exploded, showering a five-man pumper crew with shards of glass.

At least no one's going to die tonight,
I thought. The wood-frame building had been empty since September, when it was condemned by the city housing department. The winos and welfare mothers who had been living there protested that they had nowhere to go, but the building inspector explained it was for their own good. Some of them were still sleeping in junk cars and cardboard boxes.

My next thought was the kind that always made me feel dirty at times like this:
Just a flophouse and no bodies? This might not make page one.

The fire was putting on a show. Flames jitterbugged in the windows. Hungry red tongues lapped at the eaves. Majestic fireballs rose from the roof. I don't know how long I stood there, mesmerized, until the wind shifted and a cloud of smoke sent me sprinting for air. When I could breathe again, I looked around for Veronica. Two minutes later, I found her scribbling notes in the lee of a fire truck. Gloria was there, too, methodically snapping away with her Nikon digital camera.

“I worked late in the photo lab,” Gloria said as she adjusted her focus, “and was on my way home when I smelled the smoke.”

Cracks loud as gunshots made me jump, and the roof collapsed into kindling. When the rubble cooled, this one wouldn't need a wrecking crew—just a front-end loader and a dump truck to haul the ashes.

At dawn, Veronica scooted back to the paper to write while I hung around to feed her notes in case anything newsworthy happened in the mop-up. Firemen were curling their hoses now, except for a couple who were still drenching the wreckage, making sure. That's when I caught a faint whiff of something new in the air.

I found Rosie by a pumper truck.

“You smell that?” I said.

She sniffed and said, “Oh, shit!”

Odors are particulate. When you smell an orange or savor the aroma of my cigar, molecules that were once part of those objects are entering your body through your nasal passages. So what do you suppose is cruising through your bronchia when you smell the candied stench of death? The thought, more than the smell, made me retch. Sometimes it's better not to know how things work.

Rosie spoke a few words into her radio, and within the hour two cadaver dogs were on the scene, yipping as soon as their paws hit the ground. I already had a pretty good idea what they'd find.

I paced, chatted with some of the exhausted firefighters, looked at my watch a lot. It took an hour to dig the victims out of the wreckage. There were two of them, most of the clothes burned from their bodies. Firefighters laid them on the sidewalk where Polecki and Roselli squatted to look them over. Then firefighters covered the corpses with a tarp to await the medical examiner.

“If they had ID, it got burned up,” Roselli told Rosie as I sidled over to eavesdrop. “Most likely they got sick of sleeping on the street and snuck back in for a little warmth.”

“Then they came to the right place,” Polecki said, his laugh making his belly jiggle.

Rosie's hands clenched into fists. “I ought to kick your ass,” she said, “but it wouldn't be a fair fight.”

*  *  *

Two hours later, I was looking over Veronica's rough draft when Gloria came by to show us her photos. Firemen ducking for cover in a hail of glass and sparks. An ice-encrusted Rosie, silhouetted against a row of flaming windows, muscling a hose. A wide shot of firemen and equipment looking small in the foreground of a building engulfed in flame. A cadaver dog straining at his leash, snout speckled with ash.

“Wow,” I said.

“When they hired me, they promised I'd be in the lab no more than a year before I got my chance,” Gloria said. “It's been four years now. When I called it in from the scene, know what the night desk told me? Said to sit tight while they woke up a real photographer. I told them I had it covered, but they called Porter in anyway. I just looked at his stuff. Mine's better. The photo desk says they're gonna use one of his and four of mine. And I get page one.”

“The one of Rosie reminds me of Stanley Forman's work,” I said, “back when he was winning Pulitzers for the
Boston Herald
.”

“Thanks,” Gloria said, and she touched my arm. “By the way, I thought you'd like to have this one.”

It was a picture of me staring wide-eyed at the flames. I looked like I was in a trance. As I stared at it, I felt the heat stinging my skin again as sparks danced in the dark. Behind me in the photo, I could make out a string of gawkers. I held the print close for a better look. I couldn't be sure, but one of them might have been Mr. Rapture.

17

First thing Monday morning, my computer flashed with a message from Lomax:

M
AYOR PRESS CONFERENCE, CITY HALL AT NOON.

So what? I wasn't the city-hall reporter. But asking Lomax why he wanted something always carried the risk of public humiliation. I wandered down the street to see what was up.

City hall, a Beaux-Arts atrocity at the southern end of Kennedy Plaza, looked as if a madman had sculpted it from a mound of seagull shit. I walked up the guano-slicked stone steps and into the foyer, then turned right and entered the mayor's office, with its crystal chandelier and floor-to-ceiling windows with a panoramic view of a Peter Pan bus stop. Carozza stood behind his desk, the same mahogany antique Buddy Cianci had fancied before they packed him off to a federal penitentiary for getting caught doing business as usual.

TV cables snaked across the red-and-blue oriental carpet. Camera crews and on-air reporters from Channels 10, 12, and 6 had arrived early and hogged the best spots up front. Channels 4 and 7 in Boston were there, too, along with an AP reporter and a woman I recognized as a stringer for
The New York Times
. Mount Hope was getting to be a big story.

The occasion had flipped the mayor's “on” switch. Everything about him, from his spritzed silver pompadour to his crisp LouisBoston suit, was camera ready. Police Chief Angelo Ricci, stiff under the best of circumstances, stood beside him in full-dress uniform complete with medals, visored hat tucked under his left arm.

They exchanged a few words and turned to face the cameras. The chief had a Louisville Slugger over his right shoulder. I started to get a bad feeling.

“We ready?” Carozza asked. He paused as TV lights switched on. “All right, let's get started. We're going to begin with an announcement from Chief Ricci.”

“At 11:57 last night,” the chief began, “two Providence police officers on patrol in Mount Hope observed two male subjects armed with baseball bats committing an assault upon another male subject at the southeast corner of Knowles and Cypress streets. The officers exited their vehicle, drew their weapons, and apprehended the suspects, who did not offer resistance. The suspects were then transported to police headquarters for questioning. There, detectives advised them of their rights, which they agreed to waive.

“The suspects identified themselves as Eddie Jackson, twenty-nine, of 46 Ivy Street, and Martin Tillinghast, thirty-seven, of 89 Forest Street. Both have criminal records, Mr. Jackson for assault and battery on his wife, and Mr. Tillinghast for truck hijacking and assault with a deadly weapon. They further identified themselves as members of a recently organized Mount Hope vigilante group calling itself the DiMaggios. The suspects stated that they were proceeding west on Cypress when they observed the victim walking toward them carrying an object. They subsequently determined that this object was a metal two-gallon gasoline can. The patrol officers did, in fact, recover such a can at the scene. They also recovered two baseball bats, including this one,” he said, holding it up for the cameras.

I was pretty sure now that I knew where this was going. I pulled a roll of Tums out of my pocket, peeled off a couple, and chewed.

“The victim was identified as Giovanni M. Pannone, fifty-one, of 144 Ivy Street,” the chief said. “He was taken by ambulance to Rhode Island Hospital, where he was admitted with a compound fracture of the right wrist, a concussion, and multiple contusions of the head, arms, and shoulders. At the hospital, Mr. Pannone told detectives that he had purchased gasoline for his snowblower at the Gulf station on North Main and was returning home on foot when he was accosted by the suspects.

“In their statements,” the chief went on, “the suspects expressed the belief that they had apprehended the individual responsible for the recent series of arsons in the Mount Hope neighborhood. Subsequent investigation by Providence police detectives determined that Mr. Pannone is employed as a guard on the overnight shift at the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston and can account for his whereabouts when each of the fires was set. For most of them, he was at work. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Tillinghast have each been charged with one count of assault and battery and are being held pending arraignment. An investigation is ongoing to determine whether conspiracy charges can be brought against the organizer and other members of the so-called DiMaggios. That's all I have.”