“Look, Kwame. I don’t understand why you keep denying that you killed those people. Everybody knows you did it. Admitting it can’t do you any harm now. You’ve already done your time for it. And who knows? Showing remorse might even do you some good.”
Diggs sat silently, his eyes lowered. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft and raspy.
“Don’t know why I let you in, cuz. Don’t know why I tell you shit.”
Another moment passed before he lifted his eyes to meet Mason’s and whispered, “It’s ’cause of my moms.”
“Your what? I didn’t quite catch that.”
“My moms. How do you tell your mother that you stabbed five people to death? How do you look into the eyes of the woman who gave birth to you and say that shit? You can’t, cuz. You just can’t fuckin’ do that. So all these years I been telling her I’m innocent. And she believes me, cuz. She really does.”
“What exactly have you been telling her?”
Diggs closed his eyes and rubbed them with the backs of his cuffed hands. For the first time, Mason noticed a scar on Diggs’s right thumb. He wondered if it was from when he cut himself with the knife he used to murder the Stuart family.
“When I was thirteen,” Diggs said, “I started hanging on the streets. Got in with some older kids who liked to break into houses and steal shit. Some nights, they’d ask me to come along as a lookout. My moms didn’t know about the break-ins, but she knew those kids were trouble. She always told me to stay away from them. So I figured I could blame everything on them. I told my moms I was there the nights of the murders but never went inside-that I didn’t even know anybody got killed until the police came around asking questions.”
“Why didn’t she go to the police with that story?”
“Cuz she knew I’d get arrested anyway, as an accessory to murder.”
“How’d you explain your fingerprints at the crime scenes and the trophies in your garden shed?”
“I told her the police planted all that stuff.”
Mason took a deep breath.
“Why did you kill those people, Kwame?”
“Cuz they hated black folks.”
“Not just Becky Medeiros? The Stuarts, too?”
“Oh, yeah. Connie Stuart and them little girls would stand on their front stoop and point at me when I rode my bike in the street. They’d say, ‘There goes the porch monkey,’ and then they’d laugh at me. Made me so fuckin’ mad I couldn’t think straight.
“James Baldwin said, ‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’” He spoke the line in a monotone, as if he were giving a grade school oral report. “I was in a rage, cuz. All I could think of was kill, kill, kill. The anger didn’t go away until they were all dead.”
Mason stared at Diggs through the glass.
“Kwame,” he said, “how do you feel now about what you did?”
“I got blood on my hands I can’t wash off. I took the lives of five human beings. I see them in my sleep. I’m sorry every single day.”
“What about Susan Ashcroft? Are you ready to admit you attacked her, too?”
“I don’t know nothing about no Susan Ashcroft.”
Mason sadly shook his head.
“Be real, cuz,” Diggs said. “No way I can come clean on that. You and me, we both know the law. I could be charged as an adult, and then I’d never get out of here.”
As Mason walked to his car in the prison parking lot, he found himself believing that Diggs was sorry, but he figured the only person he was sorry for was himself.
When he reached the Prius, he found the lights he’d had repaired were broken again. And this time, the windshield was smashed, too.
49
“Mason turned in his profile of Diggs this morning,” Lomax said.
“How’s it look?” Mulligan asked.
“The writing needs some punching up, but it’s going to make news. Diggs spilled his guts.”
“Um.”
“I figure on stripping it across page one on Sunday, but I thought you ought to look it over first.” Lomax lifted a stack of paper from his laser printer, stapled the pages together, and handed them across the desk to Mulligan. “You know more about Diggs than I do, so I’m counting on you to make sure there are no problems with this.”
Mulligan scanned the first two paragraphs:
Kwame Diggs, the notorious killer who stabbed two women and three children to death in their Warwick homes in the 1990s, has at long last acknowledged his guilt. In a series of exclusive jailhouse interviews with The Providence Dispatch, he also disclosed-for the first time-why he killed.
Diggs explained that he committed the murders in the throes of a rage he felt powerless to control, furious at white neighbors who taunted him with racial epithets.
“I’ll need some time with this,” Mulligan said, “but I can already tell you I’m going to have issues.”
He left Lomax’s office, used the Xerox machine to make a second copy, dropped it on Gloria’s desk, and asked her to join him at his place for dinner.
By nine that evening, they’d both read Mason’s story twice, filling the margins with notes and staining the pages with grease from still another Caserta Pizzeria pie.
“You don’t buy the black rage excuse, do you?” Gloria asked.
“Of course not,” Mulligan said. He was about to elaborate when Larry Bird interrupted with a squawk.
“Theee Yankees win!” The bird glared smugly.
“Can’t you teach him not to say that?” Gloria asked.
“I’m still trying.”
“So,” Gloria asked, “how do you want to break this up?”
“See if you can get Diggs’s family to talk to you,” Mulligan said. “I’ll talk to Jennings and to Diggs’s old middle school principal.”
“What about that FBI agent who profiled Diggs back in the nineties?” Gloria said.
“Good idea,” Mulligan said. “I’ll see if I can track him down.”
Esther Diggs lived alone in a one-story cottage on Ruth Road in Brockton, Massachusetts, just a couple of blocks from Cardinal Spellman High School. A well-tended bed of petunias and pansies lined her cracked concrete front walk, and a pot of pink geraniums hung beside the door.
Inside, Gloria and Mrs. Diggs sat together in the living room on a faded pink-and-green floral sofa, both sipping hot tea from dainty porcelain cups.
“I see that you like elephants,” Gloria said.
Pachyderms trailed one another across the fireplace mantel, lounged on the end tables, and crowded trunk to tail on the shelves of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that also held a few romance novels, several self-help tomes, and half a dozen spiritual guides by T. D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen. The herd numbered at least a hundred, mostly ceramic but a few of carved wood, blown glass, or molded plastic.
“May I tell you a secret?”
“Certainly, Mrs. Diggs.”
“I really don’t like elephants.”
“Then why in the world do you have so many?”
The woman chuckled and slowly shook her head.
“When Kwame was eight years old, he bought me an elephant figurine for my birthday. That one right there,” she said, pointing to the coffee table where a white, eight-inch-tall ceramic elephant with red lips and rouged cheeks reared on its hind legs. It seemed poised to stomp on a People magazine with a photo of Kim Kardashian on the cover.
“Hideous, isn’t it?”
“It is,” Gloria said. She felt the same way about the Kardashians.
“But of course, I gushed over it. I told Kwame it was the most wonderful gift I had ever received. So naturally the kids bought me more elephants for Christmas. And for my next birthday. And the one after that. And the one after that. Before long, visitors noticed them. Neighbors. Cousins. Aunts and uncles. So they started bringing me elephants, too, trinkets they picked up for fifty cents or a dollar at tag sales and secondhand shops. I didn’t have the heart to tell folks I didn’t like them, and one thing just led to another.”