Rosie spoke a few words into her radio, and within the hour two cadaver dogs were on the scene, yipping as soon as their paws hit the ground. I already had a pretty good idea what they’d find.
I paced, chatted with some of the exhausted firefighters, looked at my watch a lot. It took an hour to dig the victims out of the wreckage. There were two of them, most of the clothes burned from their bodies. Firefighters laid them on the sidewalk where Polecki and Roselli squatted to look them over. Then firefighters covered the corpses with a tarp to await the medical examiner.
“If they had ID, it got burned up,” Roselli told Rosie as I sidled over to eavesdrop. “Most likely they got sick of sleeping on the street and snuck back in for a little warmth.”
“Then they came to the right place,” Polecki said, his laugh making his belly jiggle.
Rosie’s hands clenched into fists. “I ought to kick your ass,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be a fair fight.”
* * *
Two hours later, I was looking over Veronica’s rough draft when Gloria came by to show us her photos. Firemen ducking for cover in a hail of glass and sparks. An ice-encrusted Rosie, silhouetted against a row of flaming windows, muscling a hose. A wide shot of firemen and equipment looking small in the foreground of a building engulfed in flame. A cadaver dog straining at his leash, snout speckled with ash.
“Wow,” I said.
“When they hired me, they promised I’d be in the lab no more than a year before I got my chance,” Gloria said. “It’s been four years now. When I called it in from the scene, know what the night desk told me? Said to sit tight while they woke up a real photographer. I told them I had it covered, but they called Porter in anyway. I just looked at his stuff. Mine’s better. The photo desk says they’re gonna use one of his and four of mine. And I get page one.”
“The one of Rosie reminds me of Stanley Forman’s work,” I said, “back when he was winning Pulitzers for the Boston Herald.”
“Thanks,” Gloria said, and she touched my arm. “By the way, I thought you’d like to have this one.”
It was a picture of me staring wide-eyed at the flames. I looked like I was in a trance. As I stared at it, I felt the heat stinging my skin again as sparks danced in the dark. Behind me in the photo, I could make out a string of gawkers. I held the print close for a better look. I couldn’t be sure, but one of them might have been Mr. Rapture.
17
First thing Monday morning, my computer flashed with a message from Lomax:
MAYOR PRESS CONFERENCE, CITY HALL AT NOON.
So what? I wasn’t the city-hall reporter. But asking Lomax why he wanted something always carried the risk of public humiliation. I wandered down the street to see what was up.
City hall, a Beaux-Arts atrocity at the southern end of Kennedy Plaza, looked as if a madman had sculpted it from a mound of seagull shit. I walked up the guano-slicked stone steps and into the foyer, then turned right and entered the mayor’s office, with its crystal chandelier and floor-to-ceiling windows with a panoramic view of a Peter Pan bus stop. Carozza stood behind his desk, the same mahogany antique Buddy Cianci had fancied before they packed him off to a federal penitentiary for getting caught doing business as usual.
TV cables snaked across the red-and-blue oriental carpet. Camera crews and on-air reporters from Channels 10, 12, and 6 had arrived early and hogged the best spots up front. Channels 4 and 7 in Boston were there, too, along with an AP reporter and a woman I recognized as a stringer for The New York Times. Mount Hope was getting to be a big story.
The occasion had flipped the mayor’s “on” switch. Everything about him, from his spritzed silver pompadour to his crisp LouisBoston suit, was camera ready. Police Chief Angelo Ricci, stiff under the best of circumstances, stood beside him in full-dress uniform complete with medals, visored hat tucked under his left arm.
They exchanged a few words and turned to face the cameras. The chief had a Louisville Slugger over his right shoulder. I started to get a bad feeling.
“We ready?” Carozza asked. He paused as TV lights switched on. “All right, let’s get started. We’re going to begin with an announcement from Chief Ricci.”
“At 11:57 last night,” the chief began, “two Providence police officers on patrol in Mount Hope observed two male subjects armed with baseball bats committing an assault upon another male subject at the southeast corner of Knowles and Cypress streets. The officers exited their vehicle, drew their weapons, and apprehended the suspects, who did not offer resistance. The suspects were then transported to police headquarters for questioning. There, detectives advised them of their rights, which they agreed to waive.
“The suspects identified themselves as Eddie Jackson, twenty-nine, of 46 Ivy Street, and Martin Tillinghast, thirty-seven, of 89 Forest Street. Both have criminal records, Mr. Jackson for assault and battery on his wife, and Mr. Tillinghast for truck hijacking and assault with a deadly weapon. They further identified themselves as members of a recently organized Mount Hope vigilante group calling itself the DiMaggios. The suspects stated that they were proceeding west on Cypress when they observed the victim walking toward them carrying an object. They subsequently determined that this object was a metal two-gallon gasoline can. The patrol officers did, in fact, recover such a can at the scene. They also recovered two baseball bats, including this one,” he said, holding it up for the cameras.
I was pretty sure now that I knew where this was going. I pulled a roll of Tums out of my pocket, peeled off a couple, and chewed.
“The victim was identified as Giovanni M. Pannone, fifty-one, of 144 Ivy Street,” the chief said. “He was taken by ambulance to Rhode Island Hospital, where he was admitted with a compound fracture of the right wrist, a concussion, and multiple contusions of the head, arms, and shoulders. At the hospital, Mr. Pannone told detectives that he had purchased gasoline for his snowblower at the Gulf station on North Main and was returning home on foot when he was accosted by the suspects.
“In their statements,” the chief went on, “the suspects expressed the belief that they had apprehended the individual responsible for the recent series of arsons in the Mount Hope neighborhood. Subsequent investigation by Providence police detectives determined that Mr. Pannone is employed as a guard on the overnight shift at the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston and can account for his whereabouts when each of the fires was set. For most of them, he was at work. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Tillinghast have each been charged with one count of assault and battery and are being held pending arraignment. An investigation is ongoing to determine whether conspiracy charges can be brought against the organizer and other members of the so-called DiMaggios. That’s all I have.”
The chief bowed slightly and took a step backward. The blow-dry boys started shouting questions, but Carozza quieted them by holding up both hands and going “Shhhhhhh” into the microphones.
“I have something to add,” he said. “You didn’t think I’d be able to keep quiet in a room full of TV cameras, did you?” He paused for the laugh, frowned when it didn’t come, and moved on.
“What occurred last night is disturbing, very disturbing. I can’t have people prowling my city with baseball bats, taking the law into their own hands. Patrolling the streets is a job for the police, not for citizens with no training in law enforcement. You’d think that’s something we could all agree on, but our city’s only newspaper apparently takes a different view.”