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:
YOUR DOG STORY SUCKED. ABBRUZZI GAVE IT TO HARDCASTLE TO REWRITE. HOPE 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.”