“Well,” I said, “it couldn’t be confirmed.”
“The hick sheriff told you the Stinsons live in town, that they had a mutt, that it run off. Sounds like confirmation to me. What the hell was you waiting for? Paw prints? Doggie DNA?”
“Have it your way, Hardcastle. Just make sure my byline isn’t on it.”
“Don’t skip your nap over that, Mulligan. You blew your shot. Got so many page-one stories you can afford to piss ’em away?”
I saw it clearly now. My story was dog shit, and I pissed it away because I didn’t stroke it like it was my dick. Why bother with journalism school when Hardcastle Academy is tuition free?
Back at my desk, the message function was blinking with another rocket from Lomax:
PRESS RELEASES.
As I read it, a copy boy deposited a beer keg–sized plastic box beside my desk. It was white with “U.S. Mail” stenciled in blue letters on the side. Inside was the day’s incoming from every press agent and political candidate with a hope of hoodwinking us into putting something worthless in the paper. Usually an intern sorted through them, but today I was being punished.
I picked up the one on top. In it, Marco Del Torro promised that if reelected to the city council he would do something about the long lines for the restrooms at the civic center. Just what he would do he didn’t say.
The phone rang as I was dumping the contents of the box into my big green wastebasket. I accepted the collect call, asked a question, listened for a few minutes, hung up, and scanned the newsroom. I spotted Hardcastle schmoozing at the copydesk. He slapped his thigh and squealed as several deskmen joined in the laughter.
“Hardcastle,” I called out as I walked over. “Got something you need to know.”
“Hey, here’s our boy now,” he said. “I was just recounting your Pulitzer-worthy work on the Sassy story, but how ’bout you tell it in your own words?”
I turned my back on him, walked back to my desk, checked my computer messages, and found another from Lomax:
AND WHAT’S WITH THE JACKET AND TIE TODAY? DID SOMEBODY DIE OR SOMETHING?
* * *
That afternoon, Rosie sat beside me in a church pew and wept into my shoulder.
Firefighters from six states had come to Tony DePrisco’s funeral at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus on Camp Street, just two blocks from the cellar where he’d burned to death.
A few rows in front of us, I saw the bent figure of Tony’s wife Jessica, her sleeping daughter Mikaila curled in her lap. A dazed little boy sat stone still on either side of her—Tony Jr. and Jake.
Father Paul Mauro, a wizened little man who had presided at Tony’s confirmation more than twenty-five years ago, stood in front of the closed casket and spoke of heroism, integrity, sacrifice, and salvation. I had to smile a little. The Tony I knew was a goof-off who’d passed math and English by copying from my exam papers, and whose lone contribution to our school’s athletic prowess was kidnapping other schools’ mascots. Somehow he’d managed to snag the senior-prom queen and then squeak through the fire academy after washing out twice. In nearly twenty years as a fireman, he’d never won a commendation. He would have wondered who Father Mauro was talking about.
A hand closed around mine and squeezed hard enough to make me cringe. Rosie, I thought to myself, we really need to stop meeting like this.
Late that afternoon, I finished knocking out the feature on the DiMaggios for the next day’s paper, describing the hats and bats and laying the bullshit quotes on thick. By then it was too late to catch the end of the Sox spring-training game, even if I’d been in the mood, so I decided to get a head start on the weekend piece about Polecki and Roselli. I double-checked the stats on their abysmal record for closing cases and called McCracken at home for a not-for-attribution quote about how insurance investigators all over New England were calling them “Dumb and Dumber.”
The Farrelly Brothers’ lowbrow comedy was a local favorite because Dumb and Dumber hailed from Providence, the movie starting with an establishing shot of Hope Street. Another reason to be proud.
Me? Call me Dumbest. By midnight I was cruising Mount Hope on the off chance that I might spot something. It was no way to investigate anything, but I couldn’t sit around doing nothing, and I was out of ideas.
14
On Larch Street, a big-screen TV glowed blue behind the thin white curtains of a two-story bungalow where I covered a mob hit ten years back, the widow and her teenage daughter living comfortably there now on their monthly Mafia pension. On Hopedale Road, the lights were all out in the second-floor tenement where Sean and Louisa Mulligan had managed to raise two boys and a girl on a milkman’s salary. On Doyle Avenue, an idle front-end loader with “Dio Construction” in green letters on its flank sat among the ruins of a burned-out triple-decker.
Neighborhood trash pickup was Thursday morning, and by the look of the mess in the snow, most folks had already dragged their trash barrels and Hefty bags to the curb. At the corner of Ivy and Forest, Norwegian brown rats, their eyes burning red in my headlights, yanked food scraps from holes they had burrowed in the plastic. Down the street from Zerilli’s store, a half dozen dogs had toppled a couple of trash barrels and were partying at the curb.
I decided to join them. I unscrewed the lid from my thermos, swigged coffee, and popped in a CD. Tommy Castro rocked the Bronco with electric blues:
All my nasty habits … they just won’t let me be
I’d been circling for most of an hour when I spied someone crossing the street half a block ahead, silhouetted in the wash of a streetlight that hadn’t been shot out yet. The figure walked like a woman and carried something. Too small for a gasoline can. Could have been a large handgun, or maybe a camera with a telephoto lens. Before I could check it out, blue lights flashed in my rearview.
I pulled Secretariat to the curb and listened in on my police scanner as the cops ran my plate. In the mirror, I saw one cop climb out of the cruiser’s passenger-side door and position herself at the rear of the Bronco, her gun unholstered and pressed against her right leg. Her partner got out on the driver’s side and walked toward me, flashlight in his right hand, left hand resting on the butt of his revolver. I rolled down the window, the cold hitting me like a karate chop, as he shined his light in my face.
“How you doing, Eddie?” Ed Lahey had been in my brother Aidan’s posse back in the days when the word wasn’t synonymous with gang.
“Mulligan? That you? The hell you doing out here middle of the night?”
“Same as you, Eddie. Wasting my time.”
“Got that right,” he said. “Supposed to cruise the neighborhood all night, stop anyone looks suspicious. Ever see anyone in Mount Hope who didn’t look suspicious?”
“Just the pedophile priest,” I said. “I hear the bishop is transferring him to Woonsocket.”
“Not planning on burning anything down tonight, are you, Mulligan?”
“Not right this minute,” I said, “but I’ve got a cigar I’m saving for later.”
“No cans of gasoline in back?” His tone was light, but he shined his flashlight into the backseat, then walked back and peered through the window of the empty cargo space.
When he was done, he narrowed his eyes and told me to head for home.
“Okay, maybe I will.”
“Uh-huh. Sure you will. Look, you got a cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Here’s my cell number,” he said, handing me a card. “Call it if you see anything. And next time you talk to your brother, tell him …”