Rogue Island (6 page)

Graft has been part of our heritage since the first colonial governor swapped favors with Captain Kidd. Call me old-fashioned. I took a twenty out of my wallet and slid it across the counter.

“Four weeks,” she said. “Have a nice day.”

*  *  *

By the time I got back to the office, Lomax had gone home for dinner. The night city editor, Judy Abbruzzi, occupied his chair.

“The dog story photos are great,” she said. “Couple of hicks smiling their asses off, big ugly dog slobbering all over them. Even you can't screw this up enough to keep it off page one.”

“It's not ready,” I said.

“You still got an hour to write,” she said.

“After I make a call.”

*  *  *

The police chief in Prineville, Oregon, had a peculiar notion about what it means to be a public servant. She was courteous, helpful, and never asked for a bribe. “Yeah, we got a John and Edna Stinson,” she said. “Got themselves a cabin out by the Deschutes River, about forty miles from town.”

“Any way I can get in touch with them tonight?”

“This an emergency?”

“No, nothing like that.”

“Well, then, I don't see how. They don't have a telephone, and we're short a man today so I can't take a run out there for you.”

“Can I get a message to them?”

“They come into town about twice a month to stock up on groceries and pick up their mail. I suppose I can stick a note in their mailbox for you. It's against federal law, of course. Mailboxes are supposed to be just for mail, you see. But I can always tell the postmaster it's police business.”

I thanked her, gave her my home, work, and cell numbers, and asked that John or Edna call collect.

“You know John and Edna well?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” she said.

“Do you happen to know if they have a dog?”

“Had a big hairy mutt for a while, but I heard something happened to it. Now what
was
the story with that dog? Got distemper, maybe? No, that was the Harrisons' spaniel. I think what I heard was that it just run off.”

After I hung up, I turned to my computer and pounded out a snappy lead about Ralph, Gladys, and Sassy.

12

I got to the meeting just as the photographer was leaving. Twenty-four men in identical red baseball caps were milling about the grocery isles. I knew several of them from high school, several more from the police blotter, and a couple from both.

“It's on me,” Zerilli was saying as I walked in. “One bag of chips and one can of soda apiece. Aaay, Vinnie! One bag, one bag. Let you eat all the stock, might as well burn the fuckin' place down myself.”

The caps were decorated with crossed bats and the words “The DiMaggios” in black letters.

“Are the caps fuckin' great, or what?” Zerilli said to me. “Got 'em made up special. Your photographer, who's got great knockers, by the way, she loved those fuckin' caps. Couldn't stop talkin' about 'em, honest to God. Posed the guys out front the market, all lined up with their bats. Guys in the front row down on one knee like a team picture, for Chrisssake.”

“So why are you doing this?” I asked several of the DiMaggios as the group got ready to head out. Tony Arcaro, who had one of those no-show highway department jobs, muttered a few words about “giving something back to the community.” Eddie Jackson, a police-blotter regular for rearranging his wife's dental work, said he was “protecting my loved ones.” Martin Tillinghast, a ragged jailhouse tattoo seared into his forearm, said he wanted to “take a stand against crime.” I scrawled their bullshit in my notepad.

“Got names to go with all but one of the faces,” Zerilli said once we were alone, the store eerily quiet now without the sound of seven hundred teeth crushing potato chips. “Only one nobody knows is the chink,” he said, pointing to the photo of Mr. Rapture. “One guy says he thinks he's seen him around, but he ain't sure.”

Zerilli turned the pictures over, showing me where he had scrawled the names along with addresses done in Providence fashion: no street numbers, just landmarks, such as “peeling yellow house on Larch between Ivy and Camp, blue Dodge Ram on blocks in the yard.”

When I finished with Zerilli it was only quarter to ten. I climbed in the Bronco and drove four blocks to Larch Street.

*  *  *

“Mrs. DeLucca?”

“Yes? Who is it?”

“My name is Mulligan. I'm a reporter for the paper.”

“We already take the paper.”

I thought I recognized the voice, but I couldn't quite place it. It was a voice that belonged somewhere else.

“No, no. I'm a reporter.”

“Yes? What do you want?”

“Is Joseph home?”

“He reads the same paper I get. He don't need his own paper.”

I was standing on a crumbling concrete stoop, staring at a solid door with three dead bolts.

“Mrs. DeLucca, this might be easier if you would let me in.”

“Whaddayou, nuts? How I know you are who you say you are and not somebody else, maybe somebody come to rape me, huh? How I supposed to know that? Open the door? Fuhgeddaboudit.”

“Ma? Who you talking to?”

“Nobody, Joseph. Go back to sleep.”

Heavy footsteps.

“Now you done it, you woke up Joseph. Hope you're happy now.”

The dead bolts clicked and the door swung open, revealing an ancient speck of a woman in a starched blue duster that matched her bouffant.

Now I remembered. For about a month, Carmella DeLucca had been a waitress at the diner, snarling at customers and shuffling so slowly between the counter and the booths that even kindhearted Charlie finally couldn't put up with it. When he let her go, nobody took her place.

She stood in the doorway now on swollen feet stuffed into bunny rabbit slippers. If Dorcas could see me now, she'd accuse me of sleeping with her.

Behind Mrs. DeLucca loomed her bouncing baby boy. At six foot three and about forty years of age, he looked a lot like me, if you overlooked the fifty extra pounds straining the elastic of yellowed boxers. I didn't want to think about it. He had forgotten his shirt, although I suppose that mat of hair counted for something.

“Why you botherin' Ma?”

Be careful with this one, Mulligan,
I thought. One of those extra pounds might be muscle.

“I'm a reporter working on a story about the fires.”

“What's that got to do with Ma?”

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”

“You the guy been writin' all them stories?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don't you know that just encourages him, writin' all them stories and puttin' 'em in the paper like that? That's just what he wants, see all that stuff in the paper. Bet he's cuttin' all those stories out, makin' himself a fuckin' scrapbook. Sorry, Ma.”

“Who is?” I said.

“Who is what?”

“Who is making himself a scrapbook?”

“How the hell do I know? What, you some kinda smart-ass?”

“You happen to see any of the fires yourself?”

“Why you askin' that for?”

“I'm just talking to people who've seen some of the fires, asking about what they saw.”

“Yeah, I seen three of 'em. No, four. Last one was when the fireman got barbecued. Watched them pull his body out the house. Stunk somethin' awful. It was really cool.”

I flashed on Tony at his wedding reception, his arm around the girl everybody wanted. As my eyes slid over the landscape that was Joseph DeLucca, I managed to keep my clenched fist where it was. He probably couldn't spell
asshole,
so maybe he couldn't help being one.

“How did you happen to be there?” I asked.

“I was watchin'
The Brady Bunch,
just like every Friday afternoon since I ain't been workin'. Marcia was complaining 'bout her new braces, and just then sirens started goin' off. She thought the braces made her look ugly, so I told her, ‘Yeah, they do, you whiny little bitch.' When my show ended, I walked over there, see what was up.”

“I see. Mrs. DeLucca, is that how you remember it? The two of you were watching
The Brady Bunch
?”

“Ma was at the Duds 'n' Suds. Why you care where Ma was at?”

“So you were home alone, then?”

“What the fuck you gettin' at? Sorry, Ma. You accusin' me of something? Get the fuck outta here, 'fore I shove my size-twelve up your ass.”

Mark Twain said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” I wondered what Joseph DeLucca's looked like. If I'd had a half hour to spare, I'd have walked around him to see for myself.

According to Secretariat's dashboard clock, there was time to try another of the names Zerilli had provided. Darned if I could see what good it would do. What had I been thinking? That one of the guys in the pictures was the firebug and that as soon as I showed up he'd pour his confession into my notebook?

I drove home over rutted streets, cursing myself for thinking it would be easy. I unlocked my door and stared for a long minute at my rumpled bed. After gulping a Maalox nightcap, I peeled the Band-Aid and cotton ball off the spot where the needle had gone in and crawled under a blanket that still smelled of Veronica.

13

Breakfast at the diner was coffee cut with lots of milk, eggs over easy, and the city edition. Bruccola, the aging mob boss, had been admitted to Miriam Hospital with congestive heart failure. Providence College's star forward, a lock to make McCracken's office wall, had been sentenced to twenty hours of community service for breaking his English tutor's arm with a lug wrench. Our sports columnist trumpeted the good news that, thank God, the player would not have to miss any Big East Tournament games. And our mayor had once again outwitted a political enemy.

Seems that last week, the mayor's probable opponent in next fall's election had legally changed her name from Angelina V. Rico to Angelina V. aRico so she would be listed first alphabetically on the ballot. But yesterday, Mayor Rocco D. Carozza legally changed his name to Rocco D. aaaaCarozza. It was a strong front page, even without the dog story. I couldn't find Sassy anywhere else in the paper, either.

A couple of stools away, a city councilman was checking the news on his laptop. The paper was too cheap to buy me one, but I didn't much care. I preferred holding a real newspaper in my hands.

“Hey, Charlie.”

“Yeah?”

“I ran into Carmella DeLucca last night, and she was as charming as ever.”

Charlie turned from the grill, rested both hands on the counter, and bent toward me. “I took her on 'cause she needed the dough, but she couldn't keep up with all the work around here.”

I grinned and looked down the counter at the diner's only other customer, waiting for Charlie to burn his pancakes. Charlie followed my gaze.

“Fuck you, Mulligan.”

*  *  *

In the newsroom, I logged on and found a message from Lomax on my computer:

Y
OUR DOG STORY SUCKED.
A
BBRUZZI GAVE IT TO
H
ARDCASTLE TO REWRITE.
H
OPE YOU WEREN'T EXPECTING A RAISE THIS YEAR.

Hardcastle, a rawboned Arkansas transplant who wrote occasional features and a twice-weekly metro column, was hunched in his cubicle, drumming at his keyboard with his big red hands. I ambled over and said, “What gives?”

“Mulligan, you never could write, but your Sassy story was dog shit,” he said, blessing the word with an extra syllable—
shee-it.
“You take a homey little yarn about some nice folks and their amazing animal, and you write it up like you just caught the governor with his hand on your wallet. ‘Fleming claimed.' ‘Alleged to have walked.' ‘Could not be confirmed.' What the hell was you thinking? Story like this, gotta stroke it like it's your dick, have a little fun with it.”

“Well,” I said, “it couldn't be confirmed.”

“The hick sheriff told you the Stinsons live in town, that they had a mutt, that it run off. Sounds like confirmation to me. What the hell was you waiting for? Paw prints? Doggie DNA?”

“Have it your way, Hardcastle. Just make sure my byline isn't on it.”

“Don't skip your nap over that, Mulligan. You blew your shot. Got so many page-one stories you can afford to piss 'em away?”

I saw it clearly now. My story was dog shit, and I pissed it away because I didn't stroke it like it was my dick. Why bother with journalism school when Hardcastle Academy is tuition free?

Back at my desk, the message function was blinking with another rocket from Lomax:

P
RESS RELEASES.

As I read it, a copy boy deposited a beer keg–sized plastic box beside my desk. It was white with “U.S. Mail” stenciled in blue letters on the side. Inside was the day's incoming from every press agent and political candidate with a hope of hoodwinking us into putting something worthless in the paper. Usually an intern sorted through them, but today I was being punished.

I picked up the one on top. In it, Marco Del Torro promised that if reelected to the city council he would do something about the long lines for the restrooms at the civic center. Just what he would do he didn't say.

The phone rang as I was dumping the contents of the box into my big green wastebasket. I accepted the collect call, asked a question, listened for a few minutes, hung up, and scanned the newsroom. I spotted Hardcastle schmoozing at the copydesk. He slapped his thigh and squealed as several deskmen joined in the laughter.

“Hardcastle,” I called out as I walked over. “Got something you need to know.”

“Hey, here's our boy now,” he said. “I was just recounting your Pulitzer-worthy work on the Sassy story, but how 'bout you tell it in your own words?”