My stomach was a vat of acid. The Tums weren’t working.
“Last Thursday, the newspaper published this story by L. S. A. Mulligan,” he said, holding up the front page with my feature on the DiMaggios circled in red marker. “For those of you who didn’t get around to reading it, I can tell you all you need to know. It’s disgraceful. It glorifies these vigilantes and the individual who organized them. An individual, by the way, named Dominic L. Zerilli, who has a record of bookmaking arrests and is known to police as an associate of organized crime.
“Mulligan,” he said, pointing a manicured finger at me, “I’ve had problems with you before, but this is a new low.”
With that, Logan Bedford, the asshole from Channel 10, prodded his cameraman to swing the lens my way. I thought of putting my hand in front of my face, but that would have looked too much like a perp walk. I thought of throwing the finger, but Logan would have made it look like I was flipping off the mayor. So I just smiled like a toothpaste model for the camera.
“On Sunday,” the mayor went on, “this newspaper published a page-one story by this same reporter criticizing the city’s arson squad. It was an outrageous story, full of half-truths and misleading statistics contrived to besmirch the reputations of devoted public servants. I want to make it clear that Chief Ricci and I have full confidence in our arson squad chief, Ernest M. Polecki, who is doing a remarkable job under trying circumstances, and I want to assure the people of this city that we will track down whoever is responsible for the rash of fires in Mount Hope and prosecute him or her to the full extent of the law.”
He paused so the print reporters could catch up with their scribbling.
“Okay,” he said. “Who’s got a question?”
“Mr. Mayor,” Bedford shouted, his hand in the air.
“Yes, Logan?”
“Could you please tell us how you’d like your new name pronounced on the air?”
“It’s Carozza,” the mayor replied. “The four As are silent.”
* * *
“Way to go, Mulligan,” Hardcastle crowed as I stepped off the elevator. “What’s next? A puff piece on serial rapists?”
In the newsroom, they’d watched the whole thing live on Channel 10. When I sat down, Lomax wandered over, pushed an empty Casserta Pizzeria box out of the way, and perched on the corner of my desk.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If you hadn’t included those quotes from the cops, the ones telling people to stay home and leave the patrolling to them, we might have had a problem. But you did, so we don’t. Just keep writing about what people are doing, whether the mayor likes what they are doing or not.”
“Thanks, boss. I will.”
“So,” he said, “how about a nice little feature on cadaver dogs?”
As he walked off, I decided to proceed on the assumption that he was kidding.
18
Her long legs encased in gray wool slacks, McCracken’s secretary wasn’t flashing any thigh today. Instead, she wore a frilly white blouse with the top four buttons undone. From somewhere deep inside, I found the strength not to stare.
“Something tells me they might be real,” McCracken said, after she waved me into his office.
“Good you still got some faith,” I said.
“Faith I got, but no hope. Her boyfriend’s Vinnie Pazienza.”
Vinnie had lost some hand speed after giving up the ring for a job as a casino greeter, but he could still beat the crap out of your average middleweight.
“So I hear you’ve been prowling around Mount Hope at night,” McCracken said.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Cop friend of mine.”
“Small world,” I said.
“No, small state,” he said. “Ought to stop wasting your time. It’s not like you’re gonna catch the guy in the act.”
“I know.”
“Terrific story on Polecki and Roselli,” he said. “About time somebody took them on. Maybe it’ll do some good.”
“I doubt it.”
“So do I.”
“So is that why you wanted to see me, tell me what a bang-up job I’m doing?”
“Got something for you,” he said. “Polecki gave me a look at his preliminary report on the rooming-house fire, and there’s something new in it.”
“Oh?”
“This time there was a timing device.”
“What kind of device?”
“A coffeemaker,” he said, and then looked at me like I was supposed to understand.
I stared back at him until he broke the silence.
“You fill the coffeemaker with gasoline, find a live outlet in the basement, and plug it in. Set the programmable timer and be home bopping the wife when the house goes boom.”
“Professional job?”
“Maybe,” he said. “The pros like them because they’re impossible to trace. The rooming-house fire was started with a Proctor Silex Easy Morning Coffeemaker, model 41461. Something you can shoplift in any Target or Walmart.”
“But?”
“But anybody who types arson into Google can learn to do this in five minutes. Coffeemakers are used for arson so often now that even Dumb and Dumber knew what it meant when they tripped over the melted remains of one in the ashes.”
“So our firebug is getting a little more sophisticated,” I said.
“That’s my guess,” McCracken said, “but there are other explanations. Maybe the rooming-house fire isn’t related to the others. Or maybe we’ve been dealing from the start with a pro who wanted the fires to look like the work of an amateur. With the DiMaggios and extra police patrols on the streets, he’d have to be more careful now.”
He grinned and sliced the air with an imaginary bat.
“One thing I don’t get,” I said. “This building was abandoned, scheduled for demolition. Why was the electricity on?”
“Yeah, I checked on that. A salvage crew from Dio Construction’s been in there pulling out copper pipe and other stuff. It was turned back on for them.”
“How could our arsonist have known about that?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s still hard to see it as a professional job. I mean, with most of the torched buildings having different owners, with none of them overinsured, what’s the motive?”
“There’s that,” he said.
“So we really don’t know anything.”
“Exactly. We don’t even know for sure if her breasts are real.”
19
The fine dust coating everything in the city hall basement property-records room made my eyes water and my throat itch. I spent two hours with real estate transfer ledgers and property-tax books before I blew my nose and snapped the last one shut.
Records showed that the nine torched buildings had all changed hands in the past eighteen months. But with five different buyers, there was no pattern to it unless you counted the fact that they were all real estate companies I’d never heard of. A little more checking showed that those five companies had snapped up a quarter of the Mount Hope neighborhood in the last year and a half. But a lot of cheap rental property had been changing hands all over the city since the last property-tax increase.
From city hall, it was a short walk to the secretary of state’s Corporations Division on River Street. A clerk with a shellacked beehive hairdo snatched my list, made a face, and waddled into a forest of file cabinets. Thirty minutes later she waddled back and slapped the incorporation papers for five realty companies on the counter.
I said, “Thank you.” She didn’t say you’re welcome. State employees in jobs with limited graft potential are seldom happy in their work.