“Be no trouble at all,” Gladys said. “Got some olive-loaf sandwiches all made up.”
“No. Thank you.”
“So the next day,” Ralph said, picking up the story, “we got to talking about how amazing it was. The way Sassy tracked us all the way across the country like that, just like them dogs in the movies. Glady said we ought to call the TV, but I figured we should give it some thought.”
“Amazing Animals would have paid a pretty penny,” Gladys said, a bit wistfully, I thought.
“Maybe so,” Ralph said, “but seems to me nobody’ll believe our story ’less they read it in the paper.”
“I thought Channel 10,” I said.
“What was that?” Ralph said.
“I thought you were thinking of calling Channel 10.”
“Well, sure,” Ralph said. “That’s the channel Amazing Animals is on, ain’t that right, Glady?”
“No it ain’t, Ralph. It’s on one of them cable channels.”
On the way out, I gave a wide birth to Sassy. I wasn’t all that eager to write about Ralph, Gladys, and their amazing animal, so I decided to stop at the health department on the way back to the paper, even though it wasn’t really on the way back.
11
I made it to the clinic forty minutes before closing and spent half an hour guessing what everyone else in the waiting room was there for.
The pimply redhead with the gnawed fingernails? She had unprotected sex with her lout of a boyfriend and was afraid she might be pregnant again. The bald guy with the bulbous honker? He wanted to be sure the city council president, who’d picked him up on karaoke night at the Dark Lady, hadn’t passed him AIDS along with the bar nuts. The middle-aged guy in the mirror across the room, the one with the tousled hair, the Dustin Pedroia T-shirt, and the hangdog expression? He hated needles but would have gone under the knife without anesthesia if it meant that the woman with the cartoon-mouse snicker would finally let him.…
The clerk was calling my name.
The phlebotomist spiked me three times before she struck a vein. The clerk reaffirmed that the lab was backed up.
“Be seven weeks before the results come back,” she said.
“This morning, on the phone, they said five.”
“Seven,” she said. “Look at this stack of blood test orders, most of ’em for HIV, which you say no way you got anyway. So what’s your rush?”
When a Rhode Islander needs something he can’t flat out steal, there are two ways to get it. Need a plumber’s license but can’t pass the state test? Want those fifty parking tickets fixed? Or maybe you’d just like a rush job on an HIV test. Chances are, in a state this small, you know somebody who can help. Maybe your uncle’s on the state plumbing board. Maybe you went to school with a police captain. Maybe the health department clerk is married to your cousin. No? Then you have the option of offering a small gratuity.
Graft, Rhode Island’s leading service industry, is widely misunderstood by citizens of states you can’t stroll across on your lunch break. Those of us who live here know that it comes in two varieties, good and bad, just like cholesterol. The bad kind enriches politicians and their greedy friends at taxpayers’ expense. The good kind supplements the wages of underpaid government workers, puts braces on their kids’ teeth, builds college funds. Good graft is fat free. It’s biodegradable. It dissolves red tape. Without the lubricant of graft and personal connections, not much would get done in Rhode Island, and nothing at all would happen on time.
Graft has been part of our heritage since the first colonial governor swapped favors with Captain Kidd. Call me old-fashioned. I took a twenty out of my wallet and slid it across the counter.
“Four weeks,” she said. “Have a nice day.”
* * *
By the time I got back to the office, Lomax had gone home for dinner. The night city editor, Judy Abbruzzi, occupied his chair.
“The dog story photos are great,” she said. “Couple of hicks smiling their asses off, big ugly dog slobbering all over them. Even you can’t screw this up enough to keep it off page one.”
“It’s not ready,” I said.
“You still got an hour to write,” she said.
“After I make a call.”
* * *
The police chief in Prineville, Oregon, had a peculiar notion about what it means to be a public servant. She was courteous, helpful, and never asked for a bribe. “Yeah, we got a John and Edna Stinson,” she said. “Got themselves a cabin out by the Deschutes River, about forty miles from town.”
“Any way I can get in touch with them tonight?”
“This an emergency?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Well, then, I don’t see how. They don’t have a telephone, and we’re short a man today so I can’t take a run out there for you.”
“Can I get a message to them?”
“They come into town about twice a month to stock up on groceries and pick up their mail. I suppose I can stick a note in their mailbox for you. It’s against federal law, of course. Mailboxes are supposed to be just for mail, you see. But I can always tell the postmaster it’s police business.”
I thanked her, gave her my home, work, and cell numbers, and asked that John or Edna call collect.
“You know John and Edna well?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” she said.
“Do you happen to know if they have a dog?”
“Had a big hairy mutt for a while, but I heard something happened to it. Now what was the story with that dog? Got distemper, maybe? No, that was the Harrisons’ spaniel. I think what I heard was that it just run off.”
After I hung up, I turned to my computer and pounded out a snappy lead about Ralph, Gladys, and Sassy.
12
I got to the meeting just as the photographer was leaving. Twenty-four men in identical red baseball caps were milling about the grocery isles. I knew several of them from high school, several more from the police blotter, and a couple from both.
“It’s on me,” Zerilli was saying as I walked in. “One bag of chips and one can of soda apiece. Aaay, Vinnie! One bag, one bag. Let you eat all the stock, might as well burn the fuckin’ place down myself.”
The caps were decorated with crossed bats and the words “The DiMaggios” in black letters.
“Are the caps fuckin’ great, or what?” Zerilli said to me. “Got ’em made up special. Your photographer, who’s got great knockers, by the way, she loved those fuckin’ caps. Couldn’t stop talkin’ about ’em, honest to God. Posed the guys out front the market, all lined up with their bats. Guys in the front row down on one knee like a team picture, for Chrisssake.”
“So why are you doing this?” I asked several of the DiMaggios as the group got ready to head out. Tony Arcaro, who had one of those no-show highway department jobs, muttered a few words about “giving something back to the community.” Eddie Jackson, a police-blotter regular for rearranging his wife’s dental work, said he was “protecting my loved ones.” Martin Tillinghast, a ragged jailhouse tattoo seared into his forearm, said he wanted to “take a stand against crime.” I scrawled their bullshit in my notepad.
“Got names to go with all but one of the faces,” Zerilli said once we were alone, the store eerily quiet now without the sound of seven hundred teeth crushing potato chips. “Only one nobody knows is the chink,” he said, pointing to the photo of Mr. Rapture. “One guy says he thinks he’s seen him around, but he ain’t sure.”
Zerilli turned the pictures over, showing me where he had scrawled the names along with addresses done in Providence fashion: no street numbers, just landmarks, such as “peeling yellow house on Larch between Ivy and Camp, blue Dodge Ram on blocks in the yard.”