Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  “Sorry, but I can’t get into that.”

  “Do you know?” the chief asked, turning his eyes on Jennings.

  “Mulligan won’t tell me either,” he said, “but it smells like the ACLU.”

  “¡Santa Madre de Dios!” He leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling. “You know, it was years before I stopped having nightmares about what I saw inside the Medeiros house.”

  “I still get ’em sometimes,” Jennings said.

  “If I give you access to the evidence,” the chief said, “what do you hope to find?”

  “Back in 1991, DNA testing wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now,” Jennings said. “We’re thinking Diggs might have shed something—a drop of blood, a few hairs, some skin cells—that could still be tested.”

  “It’s a long shot,” the chief said. “A lot of old evidence has been lost or tossed. Even if we can find it, chances are the DNA has been degraded or contaminated.”

  “I know,” Jennings said, “but it’s the only shot we’ve got.”

  “Okay,” the chief said, “I’ll have our property clerk look for the evidence boxes. If he finds them, you can observe him as he goes through the contents; but I don’t want you touching or removing anything. We have to preserve chain of custody. If you see something that might be worth testing, I’ll have him hand-deliver it to the state crime lab. The lab has a huge backlog. I’m talking hundreds of cases going back years. But Diggs is the magic word, so I might be able to get them to fast-track this.”

  “When can we start?” Jennings asked.

  “I’ll call DeMaso in Property this morning and get him started. If he finds the boxes, I’ll be in touch.”

  40

  “I wasn’t there,” John Pugliese said.

  “Two former guards I spoke with said you were,” Mason told him.

  “They’re mistaken.”

  “They seemed pretty sure.”

  “Hell, I wasn’t even at Supermax in 2005. When Diggs was charged with assaulting Araujo, I was working medium security. I didn’t get transferred to Supermax till 2007.”

  “Oh.”

  They were sitting across from each other in a booth at the diner near Providence City Hall. Pugliese, swarthy and well muscled, chomped on one of Charlie’s lard-slicked bacon-and-egg sandwiches. Mason, who’d enjoyed a breakfast of mascarpone-stuffed French toast with peaches at home, nursed a cup of sweetened black coffee.

  “What about the assault on Joseph Galloway last fall?” Mason asked.

  “Oh, I know all about that one.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Why shouldn’t you? You don’t have anything to hide, right?”

  “He doesn’t,” someone said, “but he still has to work there.”

  Mason turned toward the voice, saw Mulligan standing behind his left shoulder, greeted him with a thin smile, and slid over to make room for him in the booth.

  “How have you been, John?” Mulligan asked.

  “I’m hanging in there,” Pugliese said.

  “Really? Last time we spoke, you’d gotten your nose broken for the second time and were dying to get the hell out of that madhouse.”

  “I still am, but there’s no jobs out there, Mulligan.”

  “The Crips still got a hard-on for you?”

  “Yeah. It’s more than a year since I broke Stanley Turner’s arm in the exercise yard, but the gang has a long memory.”

  “Why not quit and collect unemployment for a while, John? Better that than a shiv in the ribs.”

  “I just might,” Pugliese said. “Then again, maybe I’ll join the army. See if I can get into one of those training programs they’ve got for electrical engineering or heating and cooling mechanics.”

  “Aren’t you too old for that?” Mason chimed in.

  “Not quite. The maximum enlistment age is thirty-five. I looked it up.”

  To Mason, John Pugliese looked like somebody who’d seen thirty-five a decade ago.

  Charlie wandered over, plunked a cup of coffee in front of Mulligan, and took his order of bacon and scrambled eggs.

  “The army’s not a bad idea,” Mulligan said, “now that Iraq is over and Afghanistan is winding down.”

  “That’s what I’m thinking,” Pugliese said.

  “Then again, we might end up in a shooting war with Iran,” Mason said, trying not to show his irritation at the way Mulligan had usurped the interview.

  “Or Pakistan,” Mulligan said.

  “Or North Korea,” Pugliese said. “Then I’d have more than shivs to worry about.”

  They were still kicking the sorry state of the world around when Charlie slapped Mulligan’s order on the table and topped off his coffee.

  “If you’re serious about quitting,” Mason said, “why not talk to me about Galloway? I mean, what do you have to lose?”

  “What do I have to gain?” Pugliese said.

  “Not a thing,” Mulligan put in.

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Mason said.

  “No?” Pugliese said.

  “You’d have the satisfaction of helping me expose officials who are perverting the criminal justice system,” Mason said. “I think that’s worth something.”

  “Not much,” Pugliese said. “Besides, if you succeed, they’d have to release Diggs. When he killed again, it would be on me.”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t,” Mason said.

  “He would,” Mulligan put in. “And it wouldn’t just be on Pugliese. It would be on you, too, Mason.”

  Mason let out a long sigh. “I’ve thought a lot about this in the last few weeks,” he said. “The way I see it, my first obligation as a journalist is to the truth.”

  “Regardless of the consequences?” Mulligan said.

  “No,” Mason said. “But what about the consequences of letting them get away with this? If they can frame Diggs, what’s to stop them from doing the same thing to the next guy who comes along? Maybe somebody whose crime isn’t as serious. Maybe somebody who isn’t guilty of anything at all. Our public officials are supposed to uphold the law, not break it.”

  “You do realize we are in Rhode Island, right?” Mulligan said.

  “Yeah, yeah. I know all about our sordid history,” Mason said. “Crooked politicians, corrupt judges, dirty cops. It’s been that way for as long as anybody can remember. Hell, it’s been that way for three hundred years. But for the last hundred and fifty of them, the Dispatch has crusaded against it. Sure, we don’t catch them all. Not even close. But we nail enough to make the rest of them think twice.

  “Now the paper is dying,” he continued. “Who’s going to investigate public corruption when we’re gone? Bloggers? The bobbleheads on TV? Don’t make me laugh. When we know public officials are corrupting the criminal justice system, it’s our job to do something about it. If we don’t, the First Amendment is just words on paper. And this could be one of our last chances to set something right.”

  “Nice speech,” Mulligan said.

  “It was,” Pugliese said. “Did anyone else hear the music playing?”

  “One of our last chances?” Mulligan said.

  “That’s right,” Mason said.

  “Something going on that I should know?” Mulligan asked. “Is the paper closing down?”

  “Not in front of Pugliese,” Mason said. “We’ll talk about it later.”

  That was a conversation stopper. The three men sat for a while and sipped their coffee.

  “You know, Mulligan,” Pugliese finally said, “I remember you giving me that same speech one time—minus the part about the newspaper dying.”

  “When was that?”

  “About six years ago when you wanted me to spill my guts about no-show jobs at medium security.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mulligan said. “I remember now. I tried to snow you with that First Amendment crap, but you didn’t tell me shit.”

  “Did the speech work any better this time?” Mason asked
.

  “I’m thinking about it,” Pugliese said.

  “According to court records,” Mason said, “Galloway and another guard had just taken Diggs out of his cell for his exercise period when a scuffle broke out.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Diggs supposedly got mad for no apparent reason, charged into Galloway, cracked his head against the hallway wall, and then head-butted him.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Earlier, you said you know all about it. What do you know?”

  Pugliese slid his eyes off Mason and looked at Mulligan.

  “Up to you, John,” Mulligan said. “I wouldn’t, but it’s your ass.”

  The guard stared at the tabletop and rubbed his chin. Then he moved his eyes back to Mason.

  “I was there,” Pugliese said.

  “You were?” Mason said. “According to the court records, the other guard was named Quinn.”

  “Eddie Quinn. That’s right.”

  “So what were you doing there?”

  “Normal procedure,” Pugliese said, “is for two guards to escort a prisoner to the exercise yard, but Diggs was so big that three were always assigned to him.”

  “And that day, you were the third?”

  “I was.”

  “So you were a witness. Why didn’t you testify at the trial?”

  “The warden asked me to, but I refused.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t want to commit perjury.”

  Mason and Mulligan both stared at Pugliese, knowing that whatever he said next could change everything.

  “So what really happened in that hallway, John?” Mason asked.

  “Not a fucking thing. We led Diggs out of his cell, and he walked quietly to the yard. He didn’t give us any trouble at all.”

  * * *

  After Pugliese left, the first thing Mulligan said was, “Are you going to quote him by name?”

  “Why shouldn’t I? He never said it was off the record.”

  “Better give him a heads-up before the story runs, then.”

  “I will once I have enough to get it in print.”

  “Are you close?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “On just the Galloway case, or the Araujo assault too?”

  “Both,” Mason said. “And the drug charges as well.”

  “Prison guards are your sources for all this?”

  “For most of it, yeah.”

  He picked up his mug, discovered that the coffee had gone cold, and waved Charlie over for a refill.

  “Tell me what more you need,” Mulligan said, “and maybe I can help.”

  “The same way you’ve been helping so far?”

  “I culled that list of guards for you.”

  “That was a help,” Mason said. “I crossed the ones you recommended right off my list. Saved me a lot of time.” And then he laughed.

  Mulligan stared at him and shook his head.

  “How long have you known?”

  “Right from the start,” Mason said.

  “You’re getting pretty good at this, aren’t you.”

  “Not as good as you.”

  “Of course not,” Mulligan said, and they both chuckled.

  “Still friends?” Mulligan asked.

  “Always,” Mason said.

  “So what’s going on with the paper that you couldn’t talk about in front of Pugliese?”

  “I’m not supposed to talk about it at all,” Mason said. “Can I trust you not to repeat this?”

  “I promise, Thanks-Dad.”

  “Will you please stop calling me that?”

  “Sorry, Thanks-Dad, but some habits are hard to break.”

  Mason shot Mulligan an annoyed look, then said, “The board has decided to put the paper on the market. They’re hoping to get an offer from one of the major chains like Belo or Media General.”

  “They won’t.”

  “Probably not, but General Communications Holdings International has expressed interest.”

  “Who the hell is that?”

  “Not anybody either of us would want to work for, even if they didn’t lay us off, which I’m pretty sure they would.”

  “Guess I need to start looking for another line of work,” Mulligan said.

  “Yeah,” Mason said. “Me too.”

  41

  By the time Mulligan left the diner, the sky was dark. A quarter moon hung low over the city.

  It was months since his last talk with Rosie. He used to visit her once or twice a week, but lately he’d fallen out of the habit. Tonight, he needed his best friend.

  He climbed into Secretariat, crossed the bridge over the Providence River, stopped at Gilmore’s Flower Shop in East Providence, and sprang for a bunch of cut daffodils. Then he cruised back across the river, drove to Swan Point Cemetery, rolled slowly through the gate, and parked at the edge of the grass.

  He rummaged through the Bronco’s storage compartment for his flashlight but couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter. Off to his left, the silhouette of Pastor’s Rest Monument, marking the final resting place of Providence’s leading nineteenth-century ministers, stood pitch black against a charcoal sky. With the obelisk as his guide, he would have no trouble finding his way.

  He clutched the daffodils in his right fist, tucked an autographed Manny Ramirez Red Sox jersey under his left arm, and trudged blindly through the vast graveyard. He was nearly there when he cracked his knee against a grave marker that leaped at him out of the darkness.

  Over the decades, he and Rosie had told each other almost everything. That’s what best friends forever were for. He knelt in the damp grass beside her granite gravestone and ran his fingers over the words he knew by heart:

  Rosella Isabelle Morelli. First Woman Battalion Chief of the Providence Fire Department. Beloved Daughter. Faithful Friend. True Hero. February 12, 1968—August 27, 2008.

  She’d been racing to a house fire on a foggy night when her command car crashed and burned. The fire had been deliberately set. The arsonist had never been caught. Mulligan had never stopped hunting for the bastard.

  After clearing away some withered flowers, he placed the fresh ones on her grave. Then he draped the jersey over the shoulders of her tombstone, just as he did every time he came.

  Manny Ramirez had been Rosie’s favorite player. She was gone before he started bitching about his paltry hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar contract, before he knocked the team’s sixty-four-year-old traveling secretary to the ground, before the Sox traded him to the Dodgers, before he was suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs. Mulligan figured she didn’t need to hear about all that. He wrapped his arms around the granite and gave her a hug.

  “It’s a beautiful night, Rosie. A sliver of moon is hanging over the Seekonk River, and I can hear the Canada geese honking as they forage in the grass.… No, I’m not seeing anyone just now.… Last I heard, Yolanda was planning to marry that Brown chemistry professor. After her, nobody seems to measure up.”

  They sat together in silence, peering up at stars barely visible through the spill of the city’s lights. Somewhere up there, an American spaceship was carrying a rover named Curiosity on a 350-million-mile journey to the surface of Mars. Mulligan hoped Rosie could see it as it sped through the firmament.

  “Rosie, I’m confused. All my working life, I’ve lived by a simple code: The truth will set you free. But lately I’ve been trying to conceal it.… Why? Because if the truth comes out, a serial killer will be set free.… Yeah, I remember that old song. ‘There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.’

  “Tonight, Thanks-Dad said some things that made me wonder if maybe I’m on the wrong side of this thing. He talked about the First Amendment and what being a reporter is all about. Fact is, he sounded an awful lot like I used to, Rosie.… Yes, I remember that part of the song, too. ‘Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.’”

  He imagined he could hear her singi
ng that old Buffalo Springfield tune, her crystal voice drifting on the muggy night air.

  42

  The morning mail was light-a couple of press releases, a subscription renewal form for the American Journalism Review, a funds solicitation from the Columbia University alumni office, and a single legal-size white envelope with Mason’s name and the newspaper’s address hand-printed in neat block letters. There was no return address.

  Mason didn’t like the look of it, so he walked the envelope over to the newsroom’s east-facing windows and held it up to the sunlight. As far as he could tell, it contained only a piece of paper with something written on it. He returned to his desk, slit the top of the envelope with a letter opener, and slid out a sheet of typing paper. On it were two lines hand-printed in the same block letters:

  WE KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING, RICHIE RICH.

  IF YOU KNOW WHATS GOOD FOR YOU, YOU’LL STOP.

  Mason stood and handed the threat and the envelope it came in over the top of the cubicle divider.

  “Hey, Mulligan,” he said. “What do you make of this?”

  Mulligan checked the postmark on the envelope, looked the letter over, and handed it back. “Well, it’s got two grammatical errors,” he said, “so it’s probably not from a copy editor.”

  “I think we can rule out English teachers, too,” Mason said.

  “The paper is cheap stock you can buy anywhere,” Mulligan said. “Other than that, all we know is that it was mailed yesterday from the 02886-7157 ZIP code. Hold on a sec.”

  He logged on to the USPS ZIP code finder and typed the number in.

  “That’s the post office on Post Road in Warwick, the one near the airport.”

  “How worried do you think I should be?”

  “Not very.”

  “I guess word of what I’m working on is starting to get around.”

  “How many people have you interviewed so far?”

  “Let’s see. There’s Diggs’s former lawyer, his new one, the heads of the ACLU and the NAACP, and more than two dozen guards and former guards.”

  “And all of them probably told their husbands and wives, who told their friends, who then passed it on to their friends,” Mulligan said.