“Anything you want to confess before we get started?” Polecki said.
“Save us all a lot of time,” Roselli said.
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have fornicated a thousand times since my last confession.”
“In the old days,” Polecki said, “this would be the part where I slug you with a phone book.”
“But we don’t do that so much anymore,” Roselli said.
Both took a moment now to sip coffee from paper cups. They didn’t offer me any.
“You know what a criminal profile is, Mulligan?” Polecki said.
I didn’t say anything.
“The FBI’s real good at them,” Roselli said. “You give them the details of a crime, and they come back with a description of the perp, right down to the size of his dick.”
“So last week,” Polecki said, “the boys and girls at Quantico took a few hours off from chasing ragheads to work up a profile of our serial arsonist.”
He pulled something out of his jacket pocket and slapped it on the table—a few typewritten sheets of paper stapled together. It had to be notes he’d taken talking to an agent on the phone. The bureau never puts its profiles in writing. They don’t want defense lawyers using them as exculpatory evidence if they turn out to be wrong.
“Perhaps you’d like to look it over,” Polecki said. “Oh, wait. With your hands cuffed behind your back, how are you going to turn the pages?”
“That is a problem,” Roselli said.
“We could uncuff him,” Polecki said.
“Let’s not,” Roselli said.
“I know,” Polecki said. “Why don’t we summarize it for him?”
“I’ll start,” Roselli said. “According to the FBI, our arsonist is in his late twenties to late thirties.”
“You’re thirty-nine, right, Mulligan?” Polecki said.
“He lives alone,” Roselli said.
“Like Mulligan,” Polecki said.
“He drives an old, beat up SUV,” Roselli said, “probably a Chevy Blazer or a Ford Bronco.”
“Mulligan’s Bronco is a piece of shit,” Polecki said.
“He’s in pretty good physical condition,” Roselli said.
“Sort of like Mulligan,” Polecki said.
“Otherwise,” Roselli said, “he wouldn’t be able to lug five-gallon gasoline cans around and slip in and out of cellar windows.”
“But he’s got some kind of nagging illness,” Polecki said. “Didn’t we hear that Mulligan has an ulcer?”
“The fires are meticulously planned, with little evidence left behind,” Roselli said, “so we’re looking for an organized killer with a high IQ.”
“You’re a smart guy, right, Mulligan?” Polecki said.
“He has an unhealthy attitude toward authority figures,” Roselli said.
“Might even stoop to calling them names, like ‘Dumb and Dumber,’ ” Polecki said.
“He likes to cruise around at night in his Blazer or Bronco scouting for opportunities to set more fires,” Roselli said.
“Hey,” Polecki said. “Didn’t we hear something about Eddie pulling Mulligan over in Mount Hope late one night?”
“After he sets the fires, he likes to stand around and watch them burn,” Roselli said. “But he’s smart, so he’ll have a plausible excuse for why he’s there.”
“Like, say, reporting for the newspaper,” Polecki said.
“He’ll find a way to insinuate himself into the police investigation,” Roselli said.
“Maybe even implicate an innocent person like Wu Chiang or invent a phony suspect like a little thug to throw us off the track,” Polecki said.
“He has difficulty maintaining relationships with the opposite sex,” Roselli said.
“Say, how is Dorcas, anyway?” Polecki said.
And he’s fascinated by fire, I thought, remembering a snippet from my nighttime reading. But there was no way Polecki and Roselli could know that about me.
“And he’s fascinated by fire,” Roselli said.
“Yeah,” Polecki said. “What was it that Dorcas told us this morning?”
“That Mulligan is a fucking bastard.”
“I meant the other thing.”
“That he’s been mesmerized by fire ever since he watched the Capron Knitting Mill burn down fifteen years ago,” Roselli said.
Thank you, Dorcas, for finding another way to punish me.
Polecki lit a stogie with a paper match, held the flame in front of my face a moment, and then flicked it at me.
“So, Mulligan,” he said, “does this profile sound like anyone you know?”
“Sounds a little like you,” I said, “except for the high IQ and the part about being in shape.”
“Maybe we’ll be needing that phone book after all,” Roselli said.
“Come on,” I said. “You both know I didn’t do this.”
“Mulligan,” Polecki said, “you have now idea how much I’d love to see you go down for it.”
Dumb and Dumber made a few more empty threats, then got up and left the room. Fifteen minutes later they came back trailed by two more friendly faces. Jay Wargart, a big lug with a five o’clock shadow and fists like hams, and Sandra Freitas, a bottle blonde with rumble hips and a predatory Cameron Diaz smile. They worked homicide. What the hell did they want?
61
Freitas settled into the chair across from me and dropped a large manila envelope on the desk. Wargart walked around the table and stood behind me. Polecki and Roselli held up the wall near the door, the little room crowded now.
Freitas opened the envelope and extracted three crime-scene photos.
“She had your name and number on a phone-message slip in her pocketbook,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Witnesses saw you knocking on her door a couple of days before she was shot.”
I kept my mouth zipped.
“She’d been spending a lot of time looking at property in Mount Hope lately. Did she see something she shouldn’t have? Is that why you killed her?”
I just looked at her. I should have asked for a lawyer an hour ago, but I wanted to see if I could learn something from the questions.
“She was shot three times with a forty-five, but of course you know that, don’t you? I’m betting ballistics will show it’s the same gun we found when we executed a search warrant on your shit hole of an apartment this morning.”
“How much?” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“How much do you want to bet?”
Wargart kicked my chair, slamming my chest into the table. I’d seen the routine before—bad cop, worse cop. The vial of pills was still on the tabletop. My ribs were pleading for them now, but I didn’t figure Dumb and Dumber and the homicide twins were going let me have any.
They grilled me about the murder for an hour before they unhooked the cuffs and gave me my one phone call. I used it to call Jack to tell him what was going on and let him know he was off the hook, at least for now.
“Jesus, Liam,” he said. “Is there anything I can do?” I gave him Veronica’s number and asked him to let her know why I wouldn’t be home for a day or two. There wouldn’t be enough to hold me once the ballistics report came back. At least that’s what I told myself.
When I was done, they tossed me into a holding cell. I chatted up a couple of meth dealers and then made a study of the folk-art mural scratched into the concrete blocks. Its visceral intensity, raw energy, and undiluted emotion stood in sharp contrast to its cool interplay of realism and impressionism. Think Grandma Moses meets Ron Jeremy.
I was dead tired. I stretched out on a hard, dirty cot, but my ribs wouldn’t let me sleep. It seemed like hours before I finally drifted off.
* * *
Rain pelted the courtroom windows. Gloria writhed and moaned from the witness stand: “Make it stop! Make it stop!”