I was still at it when Edward Anthony Mason IV walked in. I had to look twice to be sure it was him. He’d gone off to Columbia University Journalism School in a Hugo Boss suit, but now he was back, striding across the newsroom in a wrinkled ankle-length trench coat, a brown felt fedora perched on the back on his head the way Clark Gable wore it in It Happened One Night. Yup, it was a Gable getup, all right, complete with cigarette tucked behind the right ear. Maybe he’d seen the movie and thought that was the way real reporters looked.
Mason was old money, the scion of six inbred Yankee families that ran the state for more than two hundred years until the Irish and Italians showed up and took it away from them. Judging by the sour expressions that were always plastered on their faces, they were still mad about it. The families had secured their fortunes by running slaves from the Guinea Coast to the southern colonies and by operating the Blackstone Valley textile mills that spun King Cotton into cloth. But the good times were long gone now, and the newspaper was one of the few institutions left to them.
They’d owned it since the Civil War. For a century it had been an archconservative mouthpiece, spewing nativist propaganda and portraying every human achievement from women’s suffrage to Social Security as a slippery slope toward socialism. Somewhere around World War II, the six families mellowed, shedding their crude mill-baron manners and adopting the paternalistic posture of socially superior public benefactors. Since then they had run the paper as a public trust, sacrificing millions in profits to the cause of informing the electorate and educating the masses. They were the sort that would spend an extra million a year on newsprint for the good of the paper and then bridle at buying business cards for reporters. The Newspaper Guild local had been without a contract for the last five years, the families choking at the thought of a 3 percent raise and dental insurance.
Now a new generation was rising, a generation of summer-in-Newport, winter-in-Aspen wastrels who dabbled in the market and squandered their trust funds at the Foxwoods baccarat tables. Young Mason was the only one among them who gave a shit about the paper. It was natural, then, that his elders were grooming him to run it. After wasting twenty grand of daddy’s money at Columbia J-School—a hidebound bastion of fuddy-duddies that prepares the young to put out a newspaper that’s fifty years out of date—he had returned to begin his apprenticeship for the job that was his by birthright.
All eyes were on the kid as he crossed the newsroom and slipped into the managing editor’s office. I turned back to the photographs and stared at them some more. Mr. Rapture had to be stopped, and my nose and elbow were telling me that I wasn’t up to the job.
I needed help.
22
“It’s Mulligan. I’ve got something that might interest you.”
“I’ve got something for you too. My size-twelve up your ass.”
“Second time in a week somebody said that to me.”
“Doesn’t surprise me any,” Polecki said, and slammed down the receiver.
Screw him, I thought. Then I thought about it some more. I thought about the dead twins. I thought about the two scorched corpses pulled from the rooming-house fire. I thought about the DePrisco kids who didn’t have a daddy anymore. I thought about Rosie and her crew out there risking their lives night after night. I picked up the phone and called him back.
“You really should see what I’ve got.”
“Why don’t you try Roselli? He only wears a size nine.”
“Look, I’m offering you some useful information here. You want it or not?”
“How useful?”
“Might make you a hero. Make everybody forget that ‘Dumb and Dumber’ story.”
“Everybody but me, maybe. I plan on holding a grudge.”
“Look,” I said, “I think I know who’s setting the Mount Hope fires. Thought maybe you might want his picture.”
He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Seriously?”
“Yup.”
“Okay, asshole. Come on over. I’ll hold my nose and look at what you got.”
“Not there,” I said. “Some place we won’t be recognized.”
“The McDonald’s on Fountain Street in fifteen minutes.”
“People from the paper get coffee there.”
“Central Lunch on Weybosset, then.”
“City editor’s sister runs the place.”
“Okay, Mulligan, how about this. There’s a titty bar called Good Time Charlie’s near the Sax chicken-and-ribs place on Broad.”
“Just up from the YMCA?”
“Yeah. Got any pervert friends that hang out there?”
“I think that’ll work,” I said, and hung up.
I swung Secretariat around the newspaper building, crossed over the interstate to the Italian tenement district, bounced four blocks south on what passes for roads in Rhode Island, and parked on Broad at the edge of the hood, where sixteen-year-old daytime hookers in hot pants competed for sidewalk space with used condoms and smashed forty-ounce Colt 45 empties.
The joint was dark except for a small floodlit stage where a skinny black girl writhed like a freshly killed snake. The small afternoon crowd sat up close, glassy-eyed and clutching sweating cans of beer. Polecki was already there, squeezed into a dark booth in back. I slid in across from him. A waitress, snapped into a body stocking so transparent I could almost see behind her, materialized to take our orders.
“Hey, Mulligan!” she said. “What’s shakin’?”
Polecki looked at me and made a face.
I’d been wondering what had happened to Marie after she quit waiting tables at Hopes. I also used to wonder what she looked like naked. Two mysteries solved already, and it was only two thirty.
We sat silently until Marie returned with my club soda and Polecki’s can of Narragansett, a local favorite named in honor of a Rhode Island Indian tribe butchered by our God-fearing colonial ancestors. Marie gave me fifteen back from my twenty and hooked a finger in the red garter on her right thigh. I slid in a dollar, and she winked and went away.
“So,” Polecki said. “Which one am I supposed to be?”
“Huh?”
“Am I Dumb or Dumber?”
“Does it matter?”
“Might be the difference between one broken arm or two.”
I stared at him over the top of my glass for a long moment.
“Look,” I said. “You’re never going to invite me to share a box of Kentucky Fried, and I’m never going to invite you to share a box at Fenway Park. But people in the old neighborhood are getting burned to death, and I’m betting that bothers you as much as it does me.”
“More,” he said.
“So I’m going to show you some photographs,” I said. “And then you’re going to give them back to me, and we’re going to talk about what to do next.”
“Okay.”
I pulled a manila envelope out of my jacket, drew out the crowd pictures with Mr. Rapture’s face circled in red, and fanned them across the table. He picked them up one at a time and studied them in the dim blue bar light. When he was done, I gathered them up, slid them back in the envelope, and stuck it back inside my jacket.
“So, who is he?” he said.
“Don’t know. Been calling him Mr. Rapture.”
“Because of that look,” he said.
“Yeah, because of that look.”
“Anything else make you think this is our guy?”
“Found him walking on Doyle last night. When I tried to talk to him, he ran.”
“Couldn’t catch him, big lanky guy like you?”
“Nearly did, but I slipped and fell.”
“That how you got that nose?”
“Yeah.”