We were already doing a bang-up job of that without their help according to the so-called news spewed by cable TV pundits, talk radio demagogues, and lunatic-fringe websites. I’d come to dread their daily blizzard of paranoia, misinformation, and outright lies about climate change, Sharia law, secret government concentration camps, and phony wars on everything from guns to Christmas. Conspiracy nuts were in ascendance, hallucinating about communists in the White House, spreading fear about jihadists in the State Department, praying for the Apocalypse, buying gold as a hedge against impending social disorder, stockpiling assault weapons to defend themselves from their freely elected leaders, and ranting about the New World Order, black helicopters, autism-causing vaccines, immigrants who don’t learn English fast enough, and imaginary assaults on a Constitution most of them had never read.
I tried to be hopeful about the future, but sometimes, like now, I believed that I was living in an insane asylum. Tens of millions of Americans, so buried in bullshit that they were no longer able to distinguish fact from fiction, had lost the capacity for rational debate. They shrieked insults across a widening chasm, treated political opponents as mortal enemies, and thought compromise was synonymous with treason. I couldn’t see a way out of the mess. Newspapers were dying, and nothing was on the horizon to replace them as honest brokers of information.
I clicked the TV off and opened a mystery novel by the late Robert B. Parker, eager to immerse myself in an imaginary world in which problems had solutions and the good guys always won.
Five chapters in, Jesse Stone, the police chief in the mythical coastal town of Paradise, Massachusetts, learned that the body he’d found on the first page belonged to a fear-mongering radio talk-show host who reminded me of Iggy Rock. Jesse didn’t think the guy would be missed.
13
By Monday, I’d recovered enough from my fake illness to return to work. Several days’ worth of mail had piled up on my desk, and it was mostly the usual crap. The lone bright spot was an offering from Lieutenant Governor Pasquale Mancuso, the undisputed winner of my daily stupid press release challenge.
The Lieutenant Governor wishes to offer his sincere apologies to anyone who may have been embarrassed by his faux pas at the Blue Grotto Restaurant on Federal Hill Thursday night. The unfortunate incident occurred when he felt a case of the sniffles coming on. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out what he thought was a handkerchief. Unfortunately, he found himself wiping his nose with a pair of women’s panties. The Lieutenant Governor doesn’t know how this piece of apparel found its way into his pocket, but he wants to make it perfectly clear that it belongs to his wife.
This would have been witnessed by no more than a couple of dozen people. Why Mancuso wanted to spread the news to everyone who still took The Dispatch was a mystery until I did a Google search for “Mancuso + panties” and found three separate videos of the incident on YouTube and another on the Ocean State Rag website. Between them, they already had more than sixty thousand hits.
I wrote it up word for word with one minor alteration. The garment the lieutenant governor had wiped his honker with was actually a pink thong with a grinning black pussycat on the front.
At noon, I slipped out to wolf down a burger and fries at my favorite diner. When I was done, I figured I had forty minutes or so to do some real reporting before Chuckie-boy released the hounds. I jogged up the hill to the statehouse and found Pichardo, the House minority leader, eating Chinese takeout from the carton in her cluttered office.
“I already told you I don’t know anything about this,” she said.
“Yeah, but now I’d like the truth.”
She narrowed her eyes and bared her teeth.
“Look,” I said. “Alfano was a dangerous guy. Whoever he was working for is probably going to send somebody else. In fact, his replacement might already be here.”
She folded her hands, the nails painted blood red, and stared at her desktop.
“Off the record?” she said.
“Sure.”
“Okay, you’re right. I recognized the picture.”
“You met with Alfano?”
“I did.”
“What were the circumstances?”
“I already reported this to the state police. Why should I tell you?”
“Because I’m trying to figure out what’s going on,” I said, “and some of the people who talk to me would never spill to the cops.”
She took a few seconds to think it over, then said, “He came to my office unannounced and offered me a bribe.”
“When was this?”
“A couple of weeks before he was killed.”
“Remember the date?”
“Give me a sec to check my calendar,” she said, and turned to her computer screen. “It was the day we voted on the redistricting bill, so that would have made it March 3.”
“Four weeks ago.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And he asked you to hold up the gambling bill until the governor agrees to privatize the bookmaking?”
“He did.”
“That’s exactly what you are doing, isn’t it?” I said.
“I resent the implication. I told him that was already my position and that he should keep his dirty money.”
“Did he warn you not to call the police?”
“He said things would go badly for me if I did.”
“Go badly for you? Were those his exact words?”
“Yes.”
“But you called the police anyway?” I said.
“I figured things might go worse for me if I didn’t.”
I ducked back into the newsroom before I was missed, sat down in my cubicle, and made a call.
“State Police Headquarters, Parisi speaking.”
“Afternoon, Captain.”
“Mulligan? What is it this time? I’m pretty busy here.”
“Lucan Alfano,” I said.
He fell silent, then said, “Aw, shit.”
“We need to have a chat about him.”
“The usual place in twenty minutes,” he said, and hung up.
I tugged on my jean jacket and meandered toward the elevator, hoping Chuckie-boy wouldn’t notice.
Johnston City Hall was halfway between The Dispatch and state police headquarters in Scituate. When I arrived, Parisi’s unmarked car was already in the parking lot. I pulled in beside it, nose to tail, and we lowered our driver’s-side windows.
Parisi, always impeccably groomed, with a gray military brush cut and knife-scarred knuckles, was well past fifty now and bearing down on retirement age. Over the years, he’d put a dozen murderers away, solved scores of other violent crimes, and broken the back of New England’s largest drug ring. The scalps of three corrupt mayors, fifteen crooked state legislators, and at least twenty members of the Patriarca crime family hung from his gun belt. He was the best cop I’d ever known.
Parisi tended to be tight-lipped with the press, usually taking at least five seconds, and often more, to frame cautious responses to my questions. I’d learned to wait him out.
“Jesus,” he said. “You’re still driving that piece of crap?”
“Stop it,” I said. “You’re eroding Secretariat’s self-esteem.”
“Only women and assholes name their cars.”
“You left out vigilant watchdogs of the fourth estate.”
“Like I said. Assholes.”
“So how’s the Alfano investigation going?” I asked.
Five seconds, and then, “What Alfano investigation?”
“The one about him offering bribes to public officials.”
Another pause. “Bribes? Where’d you hear that?”
“Some of the people who talked to you have been talking to me.”
Five seconds again, and then, “Alfano’s dead.”