“Mom,” he shouted. “I’m going out for a while.”
“Okay, hon. Can you pick up a loaf of bread on your way back?”
Ten minutes later, Mulligan pushed through the door of Hopes, the local press hangout, and took a seat at the bar. The Sox game was playing on the overhead TV. Boston had fallen behind by a run, and Viola was in a jam with runners on first and third. Not that it mattered. The Sox were going nowhere. If it weren’t for the pathetic Seattle Mariners, they were probably the worst team in the league.
Lee Dykas, the nightside reporter who owned the place, wandered over and thunked a bottle of Bud in front of Mulligan.
“Your tab’s getting a little long,” he said. “Want to settle up?”
“Thursday. Right after I get paid.”
“Okay. By the way, great job yesterday. The first one’s on me.”
“Thanks, Lee.”
“Thought you should know Hardcastle was in here running his mouth about you last night.”
“That so?”
“Yeah. Told everyone who would listen how you poached his story.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“Don’t let it bother you. Hardcastle’s a dick.”
Mulligan was on his second bottle when Rosella Morelli came through the door in jeans and a tank top, pausing to let her eyes adjust to the dark. No matter how many times he saw her, he was always thrown by her Sicilian good looks. Huge dark eyes, raven hair cropped close to her head, wide shoulders, slim waist. She glided to the bar, claimed the stool next to Mulligan, and wrapped her impossibly long legs around it. At six feet five, she was an inch taller than him.
“Need some company?”
“Yeah. Thanks for coming, Rosie.”
Mulligan and Rosie had been playmates in kindergarten and friends all through grade school, then dated off and on in their teens. She was the first girl Mulligan ever kissed. She lied and told him it was her first kiss, too. During their senior year at Providence’s Hope High School, he took her to the prom.
One summer night after graduation, when Rosie’s parents were out of town, she and Mulligan got sloshed on Pabst while watching When Harry Met Sally at a theater in East Providence. Mulligan squirmed and Rosie giggled when Sally, played by Meg Ryan, faked an explosive orgasm inside Manhattan’s crowded Katz’s Delicatessen. When an older woman diner told a waiter, “I’ll have what she’s having,” Rosie howled. Then she tossed Mulligan a sultry look and whispered, “Yeah. Me too.”
Later, as they made out in Rosie’s living room, she pulled her T-shirt over her head and unfastened her bra. Then she rose and slid her shorts and panties from her hips. She grabbed Mulligan by the hand, pulled him up from the couch, and led him upstairs to her bedroom. She told him it was going to be her first time. He lied and told her it was going to be his first, too. They giggled as they crawled into bed. But when it was over, neither spoke. They just held each other in the dark until they fell asleep.
In the morning, they avoided eye contact as they pulled on their clothes. They drove in silence to the diner in Kennedy Plaza. After their coffee was delivered, Rosie raised her eyes from her cup, looked into Mulligan’s eyes, and said, “It wasn’t what I expected.”
“I know,” he said. “I felt like I was making love to my sister.”
Nearly five years later, their families were still mystified that Mulligan hadn’t popped the question, but he and Rosie never twisted the sheets again. Now, as he pictured the lithe body beneath the boyish clothes she had always favored, he still felt nothing but, well, friendship. The movie that had inspired them to leap into bed was the story of their lives, but with an alternate ending. Harry and Sally were lifelong friends who finally realized they were in love. Mulligan and Rosie were lifelong friends whose brief sexual encounter had convinced them that’s what they’d always be.
Dykas dropped a Bud in front of Rosie, checked Mulligan’s bottle, fetched him another from the cooler, and turned to watch the Royals scampering around the bases.
“What’s wrong?” Rosie asked. “I thought you’d be on top of the world today.”
“I feel more like it’s on top of me.”
“Want to talk about it?”
Mulligan just shook his head. He picked up his beer and took a pull.
“How’s the training going?” he asked.
“Great. One more week and I’ll be a full-fledged Providence firefighter. They already told me I’ll be assigned to the station in our old neighborhood.”
“Good for you. That’ll be me cheering right up front at graduation. I might even pull the fire alarm to celebrate.” He pulled a cheap cigar out of his shirt pocket and set fire to it. “You know, Rosie, we’ve talked about this before, but I still don’t understand why you turned down that offer from the New York Liberty.”
She’d been a star at Rutgers, breaking every career scoring and rebounding record for the Scarlet Knights and even making the cover of Sports Illustrated. After her senior season, she was the second player chosen in the WNBA draft.
“That was a children’s game,” she said. “Now I want to do something important.”
“Not me.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Nope.”
She swiveled on her stool and draped an arm over his shoulder.
“What happened to becoming the next Seymour Hersh?”
“I’m over that. I took the sportswriting job to get my foot in the door, figuring once they saw what I could do, I could maybe work my way onto the investigative team. But now I just want to get back to covering the Brown Bears and the Friars.”
“That’s your dream? Writing about sweaty ballers for the rest of your life?”
“It’s what I’m cut out for.”
“What makes you say that?”
“They get elbowed, tackled, or thrown out at third, but nobody gets stabbed.”
Rosie stretched out her arms and wrapped him up in a hug.
“I could hold you here until you come to your senses.”
That sounded fine to Mulligan. He felt like hiding there for the rest of his life.
Mulligan stopped at the Cumberland Farms on North Main Street, grabbed a loaf of Wonder Bread, and asked the girl behind the counter for a package of Garcia y Vega cigars. To him, they tasted like shredded cardboard laced with citronella, but on a rookie sports reporter’s pay, they were the best smokes he could afford.
As he slid back into Citation, his mobile phone rang.
“Mulligan.”
“It’s Lomax. What time can you get in tomorrow?”
“I thought I was back on vacation.”
“I’d like you to stick with the murder case for a while.”
Jennings’s recounting of the horrors inside Becky Medeiros’s house flashed through Mulligan’s mind. He didn’t want anything more to do with stories like that.
“The murder case? Can’t Hardcastle handle it?”
“The Warwick PD is shutting him out. Apparently there’s some bad history there. I need you on this, Mulligan. You’re the only one the cops are talking to.”
“I’ve got plans to spend the week in Boston,” Mulligan lied. “Got seats for the whole Sox home stand.”
“I’ll find a way to make it up to you. Suppose I have the sports editor add you to our World Series coverage in the fall? How’s that sound?”
Mulligan could see there was no way to talk Lomax out of this.
“All right, Mr. Lomax. I’ll be on it first thing Monday morning.”
“Good. And Mulligan?”
“Yeah?”
“Call me Ed.”