I thought about logging on, but I didn’t want to deal with the latest Lomax message just yet. I dumped the envelope out on the desk, studied the prints, and found a lot of familiar faces. Old Mrs. Doaks, who had babysat the Mulligan kids when we were little, stood at the police lines and craned her neck. Three of the Tillinghast boys, apprentices in their older brother’s truck-hijacking start-up venture, scowled at the flames and looked like they wanted to hurt somebody. Jack Centofanti, a retired fireman who missed the action so much that he spent his afternoons hanging around the firehouse, lent a hand by directing traffic. That face took me back. When I was a kid, Jack and his tackle box appeared at our front door at 4:00 A.M. every time the fish were biting at Shad Factory Pond across the river in East Providence. He’d been a steady loser at the low-stakes poker-and-beer nights that had filled our parlor with bawdy stories and good fellowship every Saturday night. Jack had been my father’s best friend. When he spoke at Pop’s funeral, he made a Mount Hope milkman sound like a hero for raising a girl who didn’t wind up pregnant and two boys who managed to stay out of jail.
I kept flipping through the same pictures over and over. Each time I saw a face at more than one fire, I circled it in red grease pencil. Best I could tell, fourteen faces showed up at two or more fires. At first I was surprised there were so many, but when I thought about it, I was surprised there weren’t more. After all, the fires were all in the same neighborhood, all but the last one breaking out at night when most people were home.
Jack’s face showed up at a record seven fires, and I’d bet a year’s pay that he’d directed traffic or handed out hot coffee at all of them. Another face showed up at six. It belonged to an Asian male, late twenties, wearing a black leather jacket. In two pictures, he was carrying a flashlight, and in one, his eyes were lifted to the roof of a burning building. On his face was a look of rapture.
I knew exactly how he felt. I was a cub reporter when the old Capron Knitting Mill in Pawtucket burned down, and even though that was a long time ago, sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could still see it: firemen silhouetted against orange fireballs soaring hundreds of feet against the blackest of skies. It was so horrifyingly beautiful that for several long minutes, I forgot why I was there.
Suddenly I remembered that two of the Mount Hope fires hadn’t been labeled suspicious origin. I flipped back through the pictures, tossing out those from a fire that had started from careless smoking and another caused by a faulty kerosene heater. When I was done, I still had a dozen faces to check out. I recognized three of them, but I’d need help identifying the others, including Mr. Rapture.
The name made me think of Veronica, and my loins tingled a little. I picked up the phone and punched in the number for my doctor. Unless it was an emergency, his receptionist said, the first available appointment would be seven weeks from Tuesday.
“It is an emergency,” I said.
“What is the nature of the emergency?”
“It is of a delicate nature.”
“I’m very discreet,” she said.
“My girl won’t screw me until I have an AIDS test,” I said, and she hung up.
I called the Rhode Island Department of Health’s VD clinic and learned they could draw my blood today, but the lab was so backed up that it would take five weeks to get the results.
After I hung up, I logged on to my computer and found the message I expected from Lomax:
WHERE’S THE GODDAMNED DOG STORY?
I shot back a reply:
I’M WORKING ON IT.
But first I needed to see my bookie.
9
Dominic Zerilli had lived for seventy-four years, and every morning for the last forty-two of them, he would get up at 6:00 A.M., put on a blue suit, a white dress shirt, and a silk necktie, and walk four blocks to his little corner market on Doyle Avenue in Mount Hope.
Once inside, he would wish a cheery good morning to the skanky high school dropout manning the register. Then he would climb four steps to a little elevated room with a window that looked out over the grocery aisles. He would remove his suit jacket, put it on a wooden hanger, and hang it on a clothes rod he had rigged in back. Then he would do the same thing with his pants. He would sit there all day in his shirt, tie, and boxer shorts, chain-smoking unfiltered Luckies and taking sports and numbers bets through the window and over three telephones that were checked for bugs every week. He would write the bets down on slips of flash paper and deposit them in a gray metal washtub next to his chair. Whenever the cops came to bust him, which only happened when the Rhode Island Lottery Commission got worked up about lost revenue, he would remove the cigarette from his lips and toss it into the washtub.
Whoosh!
The officially sanctioned gangsters at the lottery commission, who pushed worthless scratch tickets and chump numbers games, resented Zerilli because he gave the suckers a legitimate chance to win. The Mafia always gives better odds than the state.
Just about everybody in Mount Hope dropped by Zerilli’s store from time to time, either to lay down a bet or to replenish dwindling supplies of malt liquor, soft-porn magazines, and illegal tax-stamp-free cigarettes. They called him “Whoosh,” and it was said he knew them all by name. I bought my first pack of Topps baseball cards from Whoosh when I was seven years old, and he started taking my bets on the Sox and Patriots when I turned sixteen. Now, thanks to the snow-induced parking ban, I found a spot for Secretariat right out front.
“Pictures?” Zerilli said. “You want me to look at fuckin’ pictures?”
“That’s right.”
“Ah, shit. I thought you was gonna ask me about the DiMaggios.”
We were sitting in Zerilli’s inner sanctum, only one of us wearing pants, the photographs fanned out on his keyhole desk. We had already gone through our rituaclass="underline" him presenting me with a new box of illegal Cubans and asking me to swear on my mother that I wouldn’t write about anything I saw in there; me swearing, opening the box, getting a cigar going, and not mentioning there was nothing to write about because everybody already knew what went on in there. Except for the part about the pants.
I said, “What’s the DiMaggios?”
And he said, “Watch where you flick them fuckin’ ashes.”
“A new way to bet baseball or something?”
“Nah! Ain’t no new way to bet nothin’. S’all been done.”
“So?”
“So last week I started in thinkin’. Do I sit around waitin’ for some asshole to torch my store, or do I do somethin’ about it? Cops been tellin’ me not to worry, said they put on an extra patrol. Big fuckin’ deal. Prowl car makes a few extra passes through the neighborhood, like that’s gonna do any fuckin’ good. Last Thursday night I got two dozen of the guys together. Guys what come in the store regular, live in the neighborhood. You ain’t heard about this? You must be slippin’. I figured you woulda heard about this. I broke ’em up into two-man teams, give each of ’em four-hour shifts, overlapping, you know, so they’s always at least four guys on the streets. Some of the guys ain’t workin’, so we can cover the whole day no problem. They’re all good guys, mostly micks and wops, coupla spics.”
“The DiMaggios?” I said.
“Yeah, well, they needed somethin’ to carry, you know, in case they run into trouble. Don’t need no more fuckin’ guns on the street. Got enough headache, pukes strollin’ in here with UZIs they buy in schoolyards, scarin’ the help half to death. So I got the guys twenty-four brand-new Louisville Sluggers. Woulda set me back a few hundred bucks if Carmine Grasso hadn’t had ’em sittin’ around, you know, from the time he … ah … acquired a truckload of sporting goods. Charged me two bucks apiece. Ended up buyin’ eighty of ’em. Gonna stick the rest out front the store this spring, sell ’em to the kids. If spring ever comes—this fuckin’ snow—Jesus!”