Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel (34 page)

“You heard what the judge decided?”

There was tension on both sides of the door, each woman pushing lightly against it.

“Oh, yes. Kwame’s lawyer called me right away with the news.”

“If he’s released, will he be staying with you?”

“At first, yes. Until he gets a job.”

She thinks someone will
hire
him? Gloria thought.

“My baby might be coming home,” Mrs. Diggs said. A tear slid down her left cheek. “After all these years.”

Gloria thought she looked more apprehensive than happy. The rain was stronger now. The old woman pushed harder against the door. Gloria needed to keep her talking.

“Mrs. Diggs,” she said, “how come you’ve never asked me about my eye? I mean, you must have wondered.”

“Yes … but it’s none of my business. If you wanted to talk about it, you would have.”

“I’d like to talk about it now,” Gloria said, her lower lip quivering. “It was raining the night it happened. Now I’m terrified of the rain. Please let me in.”

“If this is another one of your tricks…”

“It’s not. I swear.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” Mrs. Diggs said, opening the door wide. The bitterness slid from her shoulders, revealing the gentle, churchgoing soul beneath. “Can I get you anything? Do you need to sit down?”

“Just let me stand here for a moment and do my breathing exercise,” Gloria said.

Mrs. Diggs watched curiously until Gloria was finished.

“Does that help?” the old woman asked.

“It does.”

“Sit down, and I’ll bring you something,” she said, and walked out of the room. Gloria heard her fussing in the kitchen.

A few minutes later they were seated on the faded couch, cups of hot tea nestled in saucers on their laps.

“I’d just opened my car door when it happened,” Gloria said. “Out of nowhere, a man slammed into my back.…”

Gloria felt guilty about manipulating this kindly woman; but the more she talked about the terror and humiliation of that night, the better it felt to tell the story to someone who was not being paid to listen. Mrs. Diggs sat silently, taking an occasional sip of tea.

When Gloria was finished, the woman took her hand.

“Good Lord!” she said. “You poor child.”

“It was awful,” Gloria said, “but not nearly as horrible as it was for the women and children your son killed.”

Mrs. Diggs glared at Gloria, then lowered her eyes.

“Did you watch the confession?” Gloria asked.

The woman’s head twitched, an almost imperceptible nod.

“Did you see anyone beating Kwame?”

She hunched her shoulders, then slowly shook her head.

“Did you see the way his eyes lit up when he talked about killing?”

Mrs. Diggs began to weep, her thin body racked with sobs. After a minute, maybe two, she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then mumbled something.

“What was that? I couldn’t hear you.”

“The worst part,” the woman said, her voice a hoarse whisper. “The worst part was the way he laughed about it.”

Gloria took the teacup from the woman’s quaking hand and set it on the coffee table. Mrs. Diggs was sobbing again, her chest heaving. The robe parted, revealing a shriveled breast. Gloria averted her eyes and waited for the worst to pass.

“Mrs. Diggs? Are you all right?”

“Of course I’m not all right.”

“Neither am I,” Gloria said. “I’m scared.”

“Of my son?”

“Yes.”

“Is that why you dyed your hair?”

“It is.”

The woman fell quiet again, then whispered, “Maybe they won’t let him out.”

“They’ll have to unless they discover something else to charge him with. Do you know of anything like that, Mrs. Diggs?”

The woman shook her head no.

“The police tried to connect him with unsolved crimes in Rhode Island and couldn’t find anything,” Gloria said. “Did you ever take him out of state? For a vacation, maybe?”

Another head shake. Then Mrs. Diggs began to cry again. Gloria quietly let herself out.

69

The streetlight outside Mulligan’s tenement had burned out months ago. From his kitchen window, he could barely make out the activity on the street.

He’d been drawn to the window by the pounding bass line of an overamped car radio. Some rap song he couldn’t identify. A white Escalade was rolling slowly down America Street, as if the driver were looking for an unfamiliar address. It pulled to a stop, the doors flew open, and four figures stepped out. Moments later, feet pounded on the stairwell leading to Mulligan’s second-floor apartment.

Mulligan didn’t like the feel of it. He went to the bedroom, opened his bedside table drawer, and pulled out his Colt .45.

The pistol was a family heirloom, his maternal grandfather’s sidearm when he served in the Providence Police Department. For years, it had resided in a shadow box mounted in a place of honor on Mulligan’s wall. But a few years ago, after his stories about a Mount Hope arson spree had led to death threats, he’d gotten a permit to carry. The only place he’d ever fired it was at the range at the Providence Revolver Club.

The visitors were pounding on his door now, a door not sturdy enough to keep them out if they were determined to get in. He tucked the gun into the waistband at the small of his back, went to the door, and opened it.

Four black teenagers swaggered in. They wore matching black-and-white Oakland Raiders sweatshirts and loose jeans that sagged low on their hips. Tattoos on their necks identified them as members of the Goonies, the city’s newest street gang.

“Where is it, muthafucka?” the shortest one said.

“Tell me,” Mulligan said. “Where did you guys get the name Goonies, anyway? Was it inspired by your favorite movie, or is it just an endearing form of goon?”

The short one raised an eyebrow and cracked a smile. “Shit,” he said, “I don’t muthafuckin’ know.”

Which was when Larry Bird decided to join the conversation: “Theeee Yankees win!”

“
There’s
the muthafucka!” the tallest one said.

“So,” the shortest one said, “why’d you steal our muthafuckin’ bird?”

“I didn’t,” Mulligan said. “After the shooting at Chad Brown, the cops didn’t want to be bothered with it, so they gave it to me.”

“You’ve been taking care of the muthafucka?” the short one said.

“I have,” Mulligan said.

“Feeding it and cleaning the cage and shit?”

“Yup.”

“That’s cool,” the short one said. “But we want the muthafucka back.”

“Can you prove it’s yours?”

“It belonged to my muthafuckin’ cousin,” the tall one said.

“The guy who got shot?”

“Yeah.”

The guys who shot him were also driving a white Escalade, Mulligan remembered, but he figured it best not to bring that up.

“How’d you find me?” Mulligan asked.

“We been askin’ around,” the short one said.

Mulligan raised an eyebrow. The short one did not elaborate.

“You gonna give us trouble, muthafucka?” the tall one asked.

“Muthafucka!” Larry Bird said. “Muthafucka! Muthafucka! Muthafucka!”

“It’s all yours,” Mulligan said. “And you may as well take the package of bird feed on the counter.”

The tall one grabbed the cage, the short one snatched the seed, and the four young hoodlums swaggered out the door and pounded down the stairs.

Mulligan watched them go. Then he pushed the door closed, locked it, and said, “Good riddance, muthafucka.”

70

Protesters gathered in front of the newspaper every day now; but they seldom numbered more than twenty, and there were no more rock-throwing incidents. Still, two weeks after Mason’s story was printed, the publisher thought it best to keep the Wackenhut guards at their posts.

On Wednesday morning, Mulligan took the elevator to the third floor, stepped out into the newsroom, and walked by a slender, sixty-six-year-old black woman sitting in one of the white vinyl chairs set aside for visitors. She wore a yellow summer dress and flat white shoes. Her white vinyl purse rested in her lap. She looked up at Mulligan and scowled.

Two minutes later, Mason walked in and spotted her.

“May I help you, Mrs. Diggs?” he asked.

“No, thank you, Mr. Mason. I’m waiting for Gloria Costa.”

When Gloria arrived five minutes later, the woman rose to meet her.

“I have something I need to tell you,” she said.

From their desks, Mulligan and Mason watched Gloria lead the woman to one of the small meeting rooms and close the door.

“Please sit down, Mrs. Diggs,” Gloria said, and then pulled a chair over to sit next to her. “I’ve been worried about you. Are you okay?”

“No,” the woman said. “I don’t think I ever will be again.”

Gloria waited in silence, letting the woman get to it in her own time.

“In the summer of 1993, when Kwame was fourteen, we sent him to a sleepover camp. It was the first time he’d ever been away from home.”

That was the year between the Warwick murders, Gloria knew.

“What was the name of the camp?” she asked.

“I can’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

“Do you remember where it was?”

“In the Catskills.”

“What town?”

“Big Indian.”

“How long was he gone?”

“Just three days. Then the camp sent all the children home.”

“Why did they do that, Mrs. Diggs?”

“Because something happened.”

“What was it?”

The old woman lowered her eyes and spoke in a whisper.

“One of the camp counselors was murdered.”

71

“I was a cub reporter back in ’93,” said Dan Hurley, city editor of
The Poughkeepsie Journal
. “It was the first time I covered a murder. Big Indian is a little out of our coverage area, but the victim was from New Paltz, just across the Hudson, so it was a big story for us.”

“Tell me what you remember,” Mulligan said.

“Her name was Allison Foley. Just turned eighteen. Would have been a freshman at Stony Brook University in the fall.”

“How did she die?”

“Brutally. She was stabbed a dozen times in the chest with a jackknife. When the killer figured out the blade wasn’t long enough to pierce her heart, he stabbed her in the neck and then strangled her with her belt.”

“Where did this happen?”

“In the woods about eighty yards from a cabin she shared with three other camp counselors.”

“Was the knife recovered?”

“Yeah. Tossed in the bushes about twenty yards from the body.”

“Prints?”

“Nothing usable.”

“Footprints around the body?”

“No. When she went missing, counselors and campers searched the woods for her and tromped all over the scene.”

“Any physical evidence at all?”

“Yeah. The killer masturbated on her body.”

“Suspects?”

“Detectives focused on a known sex offender who lived in a shack few miles away in Shandaken. He didn’t have an alibi, and he had the same blood type as the killer.”

“They knew that how?”

“They tested the semen for blood type, and it matched the information in his police jacket. That gave them enough for a warrant to test his DNA, but when they went to pick him up, he was gone. One of the state cops, a detective named Forrest, never did stop searching for him, but the guy was a ghost.”

“What did the victim look like?”

“Tall. Athletic. A real pretty girl.”

“What color was her hair?”

“Blond,” Hurley said. “So how about telling me why you’re asking about this now.”

“Think I know who killed her,” Mulligan said.

*   *   *

Jennings rode shotgun in Secretariat as Mulligan cruised south on I-95 toward Connecticut.

“How come you didn’t bring Gloria along?” Jennings asked. “She earned the right.”

“She did, but Lomax said he couldn’t spare both of us.”

“That why you brought the camera?”

“Uh-huh.”

Jennings cracked open a Narragansett and handed it to Mulligan, who shook his head no. The ex-cop shrugged and took a pull from the can.

“Doesn’t seem fair,” he said.

“It isn’t.”

“She must be pissed.”

“Oh hell, yeah.”

At New Haven, Mulligan swung north toward Waterbury, then picked up I-84 west. At Danbury, he pulled off the highway for coffee at McDonald’s. A few minutes later, he crossed the New York State line and took the Taconic Parkway heading north. Just west of the little town of Lagrangeville, he slipped off the parkway and took country roads the rest of the way to Poughkeepsie.

Shortly after one
P.M.
, nearly five hours after they’d left Providence, he pulled into the parking lot of the Coyote Grill, a pub on South Road, where they found two men in T-shirts and Yankees caps waiting for them at the bar.

“Mulligan?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t you know you can get shot wearing a Red Sox cap in these parts?”

“I figured I’d risk it. You must be Dan Hurley.”

“I am. And this is Carter Forrest, the retired New York State cop I told you about.”

Mulligan shook their hands and introduced them to Jennings. Moments later, the four men were seated in a booth, waiting for their burgers.

“You really think a
fourteen
-year-old camper could have done this?” Forrest was saying.

“He stabbed two women and three little girls to death in my town by the time he was fifteen,” Jennings said. “So, yeah. He definitely could have done this.”

“And here’s the worst part,” Mulligan said, taking a few minutes to run down Diggs’s legal status. “If we can’t nail him for Foley, they’re going to have to turn him loose.”

“You’ve
got
to be shitting me,” Forrest said.

“’Fraid not,” Jennings said.

“Okay, then,” Forrest said. “Let’s get to work.” He opened his briefcase and slid out a loose-leaf binder—his copy of the Allison Foley murder book.

“And you’ll be wanting this,” Jennings said, passing Forrest copies of the Medeiros and Stuart murder books. The two ex-cops started paging through them. Thirty minutes later, after the burgers and beer had been consumed, they were still at it.