Shortly before eight the following evening, Gloria parked her Ford Focus in front of a raised ranch on a suburban street in Coventry, walked up a brick, tulip-lined front walk, and rang the Zucchis’ doorbell. The door was opened by a tall, silver-haired man in a tobacco-colored cardigan sweater.
“Ms. Costa?”
“Yes.”
“Please come in. My wife is expecting you.”
He led her down a short flight of stairs to a cozy family room, where a slim woman was seated beside a calico cat on a dark blue floral sofa. The woman had a Kate Atkinson paperback in her lap and what might have been a gin and tonic in her hand, but the first thing Gloria noticed about her was that her long, straight hair was a lustrous shade of dark brown.
The woman shooed the cat and patted the sofa cushion next to her, inviting Gloria to sit.
“Can I get you anything?” the woman’s husband asked. “A gin and tonic, perhaps?”
“Nothing, thanks,” Gloria said.
“Well then, I’ll leave you two alone.”
Gloria picked up a framed photograph from the end table. In it, a teenage girl and two somewhat younger boys mugged for the camera.
“Your children, Mrs. Zucchi?” she asked.
“Call me Sue,” the woman said. “That picture is of me and my brothers. My two children are in the big photo over the fireplace.”
“Handsome boys.”
“Smart, too.” Gloria looked again at the photo in her hands. “You were blond,” she said.
“I used to be.”
“When did you color it?”
“In 1994. Right after Kwame Diggs was arrested for killing the Stuart woman and her two little girls.”
“Because all of his victims were blond?”
“Yes. For some reason, I’ve never been able to go back to my natural color.”
“Do you think Diggs is the one who attacked you?”
“I think it must have been.”
“What makes you think so? Was it something you saw that night?”
“No. I never got a look at him. He knocked me out, and by the time I came out of it he was gone.”
“What, then?”
“About a week after Diggs was finally caught, a Warwick police detective came by to tell me the person who’d stabbed me had been arrested. He said they didn’t have evidence to charge him with attacking me, but that they had enough to put him away for things he did to other people.”
“Did he say it was Diggs?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. I wasn’t in any condition to talk about this back then.”
“But you assumed he meant Diggs?”
“Oh, yes. Before he left, the detective told me I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. But I was. For a long time.”
“I understand,” Gloria said.
Susan Zucchi gave Gloria a searching look. “For some reason, I get the feeling you’re one of the few people who does.”
“Yes,” Gloria said.
The two women sat quietly for a moment. The cat wandered over and rubbed against Mrs. Zucchi’s leg.
“Can you tell me,” the woman said, “why you are asking about this after all these years?”
“We’re researching a story about Diggs.”
“Why? They aren’t going to let him out, are they?”
“I don’t think so,” Gloria said, not wanting to frighten the woman. “We just want to remind people why they never should.”
Gloria said her good-byes and trotted up the stairs, where Mr. Zucchi materialized to show her out.
She got into her car and cranked the ignition. Then she tilted the rearview to look at herself in the mirror. If Diggs ever did get out, maybe she’d color her hair, too.
26
“Corrections Department library. Paul Delvecchio speaking.”
“Hello. My name is Edward Mason. An inmate at Supermax tells me he has read all of the books on black history in your collection and has asked me to send him additional titles. I’m wondering if you have Taylor Branch’s Martin Luther King trilogy.”
“One moment please… No, sir, we don’t. The only book we have by Taylor Branch is The Cartel, a book about college sports.”
“Okay, then.”
“But sir?”
“Yes?”
“You will not be permitted to bring books to the prison, and they will be returned if you mail them yourself. They can be delivered to an inmate only if they are shipped directly from a major bookseller.”
Mason thanked him, hung up, and logged on to Amazon.com. He placed an order for Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge and arranged for them to be mailed to Diggs at Supermax.
As Mason logged off, a copyboy dropped the morning mail on his desk. Mason sorted through it and found a manila envelope from Don Sockol, his Corrections Department source. Inside was the list he’d been waiting for. It contained 184 names. Beside each was a mailing address. The list also indicated which of the men were still employed as guards at Supermax and which ones had quit, retired, or been transferred to other units.
Mason figured those no longer employed by the Corrections Department might be more willing to talk. He flipped through the list and marked them with a yellow highlighter. Blacks might be more sympathetic to Diggs than whites, Mason thought, so he searched the highlighted names and circled fifteen probables.
It was a place to start.
Wyclef Jefferson lived on the top floor of a three-story tenement house in the Elmwood section of Providence. A few quick questions established that he was thirty-six years old, had worked at Supermax for eleven years until he burned out, and had quit in January to take a job as a security guard at the Providence Place Mall.
He was seated now in a maple rocker, a bowl of unshelled peanuts in his lap and a pile of broken shells on the bare wood floor by his stocking feet. Mason sat across from him on a matching sofa, his notepad open in his lap.
“Have some,” Jefferson said, extending the bowl toward Mason.
“No thanks.”
Jefferson’s wife, Jada, swooped in with a bottle of Red Stripe in each hand. She dropped one on the end table next to her husband’s chair and offered the other to Mason.
“Thanks, but I’m fine,” he said.
“Don’t trust a man that won’t drink with me,” Jefferson said.
“Well then,” Mason said, and extended his hand for the beer.
“And honey?” Jefferson said.
“Yes, baby?”
“Tell the kids to turn down that damned rap music.”
“I will.”
“Prefer jazz myself,” Jefferson said as his wife darted from the room. “Miles, Dizzy, Coltrane, Charlie Parker.”
“The giants,” Mason said.
“Damned straight.”
“So tell me,” Mason said. “How well did you know Kwame Diggs?”
“Not well. You don’t exactly make friends in Supermax.”
“He ever give you any trouble?”
“Mouthed off to me sometimes.”
“He ever take a swing at you?”
“If he had, the fucker would still be walkin’ with a limp.”
Yeah, right, Mason said to himself. If Diggs had wanted to, he could have torn Jefferson’s arms and legs off and entertained the cell block by juggling them. But Mason swallowed the thought and moved on.
“According to court records,” he said, “Diggs assaulted a guard named Robert Araujo on March 12, 2005. Do you remember the incident?”
“No. That was my day off.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.”
“You remember what days you had off seven years ago?”
Jefferson glared.
“When you returned to work that week, did you happen to notice if Araujo had any visible injuries?”
“I don’t recall.”
“I see. I also understand that Diggs assaulted a guard again last year, and that on another occasion a bag of marijuana was found in his cell. Do you remember any of that?”