A Scourge of Vipers

by Bruce DeSilva

  The football-field-size newsroom felt hollow as I trudged to my cubicle past the handful of reporters and editors still employed there. Twenty-two years ago, when I hired on as a cub reporter, the place bustled day and night. The news department numbered three hundred and forty then, and they were the very best at what they did, making The Dispatch one of the finest small-city metros in the country. But decades of declining circulation and advertising revenue had taken a toll. By the time the local owners finally gave up and sold out last year, the news staff had already been reduced to eighty. At the time, it was hard to imagine it could get any smaller. Our new corporate overlords promptly cut it in half.

  They accomplished this—yes, they trumpeted it as an accomplishment—by eliminating the copy desk, firing the entire photo staff, and giving cameras to the reporters, most of whom didn’t know which end of the lens to look through. Now our stories, along with those from the chain’s twenty-seven other piece-of-shit dailies, were e-mailed to GCHI’s “international editing center,” located in a strip mall on the outskirts of Wichita. There, junior-college dropouts with a tenuous grasp of English grammar checked them over and e-mailed them back. Because they had never laid eyes on Providence, thought Rhode Island was an island, and couldn’t locate New England on a map, the chances of them catching our green reporters’ mistakes were close to zero.

  On today’s front page, Aborn Street appeared as Auburn Street, State Senator Parker Smyth was identified as U.S. Senator Parker Smith, Burnside Park was rechristened Sideburns Park, and the Woonasquatucket River was spelled three different ways, each of them wrong.

  Not much real journalism was getting done either. Gone were the days of aggressive political and criminal justice reporting, sophisticated science and religion writing, blanket coverage of all thirty-nine Rhode Island cities and towns, and blockbuster investigations that had sent scores of politicians, mobsters, and crooked businessmen to the gray-bar hotel. Now the news pages were filled with rewritten press releases, crime news cribbed from police reports, fawning features about our few remaining advertisers, and columns of clumsily cut wire copy. Meetings and press conferences were often covered by monitoring the local-access cable TV channel. Our reporters were seldom allowed out of the office, dispatched only when a three-alarm fire broke out or a grisly murder was committed—this thanks to our former TV producer’s “if it bleeds it leads” news philosophy. On most days, the longest story in the paper was the list of corrections on page two. I used to be proud to work at The Dispatch. Now it was a freaking embarrassment.

  Late that afternoon, I was rewriting a press release touting the Providence Place Mall’s fabulous upcoming St. Patrick’s Day celebration (“Fun for the whole family!”) when Chuckie-boy summoned me again.

  “Channel 10 is saying the cops have fished a body out of the Seekonk River just above the falls in Pawtucket.”

  “It’s the Blackstone River,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It becomes the Seekonk River below the falls. Above the falls, it’s called the Blackstone.”

  “Whatever. It’s close to here, right?”

  “Less than ten miles.”

  “I need you to get out there ASAP.”

  “Soon as I find my sunglasses. I’ve been stuck behind a desk so long that my eyes are unaccustomed to daylight.”

  3

  The Blackstone rises at the confluence of Mill Brook and Middle River in the old industrial city of Worcester, Massachusetts, tumbles southeast through a string of suburbs and rural villages, and enters Rhode Island at the decaying mill city of Woonsocket. Then it scoots south through the bedroom communities of Cumberland and Lincoln, mopes past the triple-decker slums of Central Falls, and finally rolls into the city of Pawtucket, where Samuel Slater erected the first water-powered cotton mill in America in 1790. There, forty-eight miles from its source, it spills over a low dam into the tidal Seekonk River.

  In colonial times, the Blackstone was alive with Atlantic salmon and the lamprey that preyed upon them; but by the mid-1800s it had become an open sewer, running thick with effluent from textile mills, solvents and heavy metals from jewelry and woodworking shops, and human waste from the cities and towns along its course. In 1990, the Environmental Protection Agency branded it the most toxic river in America, and recent attempts to clean it up have been only marginally successful. Today it is designated a class C river, unsafe for swimming but suitable for boating and fishing if you don’t mind the odor and have the good sense not to eat what you catch. That doesn’t deter immigrant anglers who pull carp, one of the few critters hardy enough to survive in it, out of the murk and bring them home to poison their hungry children.

  I cruised down Roosevelt Avenue past Pawtucket City Hall, a grotesque pile of masonry that gives Art Deco a bad name, and pulled Secretariat, my pet name for the Bronco, into the nearly empty Slater Mill Historic Site parking lot. There, a uniformed cop was waving away two Mystic, Connecticut, school buses crammed with middle-school kids who were too preoccupied with their iPhones to look out the windows. No field trip today, boys and girls. Take a rain check. The docents at the Slater Mill museum will bore the hell out of you with their looms and shuttles at a later date.

  I grabbed my Nikon, climbed out of Secretariat, and flashed my press pass at the uniform.

  “You’re gonna have to wait over there,” he said, pointing toward two TV vans and a clutch of reporters and photographers who didn’t seem to be doing anything.

  “No inglés,” I said. I brushed past him and hustled toward a medical examiner’s wagon and six Pawtucket police cars clustered beside a band of bare young maples that skirted the riverbank.

  “Hey, bud! You hard of hearing?”

  “No comprendo,” I shouted and kept moving.

  Before I got there, I was intercepted by a bespectacled young man wearing a cheap suit and tie under an unbuttoned cloth topcoat. He was carrying a clipboard.

  “Excuse me, sir. Are you with the press?”

  “¿Por qué?” I said.

  And he said, “¿Cómo te llamas?”

  The game was up. I didn’t know any more Spanish.

  “I’m Mulligan from The Dispatch. And who would you be?”

  “My name is Kevin Muñoz,” he said, stifling a laugh. “I’m the new press officer for the Pawtucket PD. I’m going to have to ask you to wait back there with the rest of the reporters. I’ll have a statement for you in about an hour.”

  “Is Detective Sergeant Lebowski on the scene?”

  “Yes, sir, I believe he is.”

  “Then trot on back where you came from and tell him Mulligan would like a word.”

  He raised an eyebrow. I raised one right back at him.

  “Okay, sir. Please wait right here.”

  He scurried off and disappeared behind the meat wagon. Two minutes later, a detective with a head suitable for ten-pin bowling and shoulders borrowed from a silverback gorilla stepped from between two of the cruisers and waved.

  “Mulligan? How the hell are you? Been so long since I seen you I was thinkin’ maybe you croaked.”

  “My new boss doesn’t let me out of the office much, Dude.”

  I’m not one of those assholes who calls everyone “dude,” but I had to make an exception in this case. It was the detective’s nickname, pinned on him when the Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski came out back in ’98. I extended my right hand. Dude crushed it in his simian paw.

  “So what have you got?” I asked.

  “A floater,” he said. “Couple of kids from Newport spotted it as they were lining up to get on their bus. They alerted their handlers, who called 911.”

  “Male or female?”

  “Male.”

  “Age?”

  “Hard to say. The body took a beating from all the flotsam in the river. The M.E. says the carp chowed down on it, too. No wallet on him. Not much face left either.”

  “Mind if I have a look?”

  He hesitated a b
eat, then said, “Yeah, okay. But don’t touch anything. And no pictures.”

  He raised the yellow police tape, and I ducked under it. We brushed through the screen of trees and found Glenna Ferguson, an assistant state medical examiner, squatting beside the body. It looked to be about six feet long, clothed in a muck-smeared yellow and black Bruins sweatshirt and what once might have been blue jeans. With the loaded Boston hockey team poised for another deep playoff run and the rebuilding Celtics going nowhere, half the male population of Rhode Island was sporting Bruins gear this spring. I looked closer and saw that the corpse wore one mud-caked running shoe. The left shoe and sock were missing.

  “A drowning?” I asked.

  “Hey there, Mulligan,” Ferguson said. “Might have drowned unless he bled out from the gunshot wound in his neck first. Gotta open him up and look around before I can establish cause of death.”

  “How long was he in the water?”

  “A day, maybe less.”

  I squatted for a closer look as she rolled the body to examine the exit wound.

  “Looks like a large caliber,” I said.

  “Maybe. Hard to be sure yet with all the scavenger damage. It’s through-and-through, so there’s no slug.”

  “Damn thing could be anywhere between here and Woonsocket,” Lebowski said. “No point in even looking, cuz we’re never gonna find it.”

  “Give me a call when you get an ID?” I asked him.

  “Sure thing.”

  “Thanks. I’d really appreciate it.”

  The Dude abides.

  When I got back to the newsroom to write it up, Chuckie-boy had already punched me out. In doing so, he’d violated several state and federal labor laws, but I didn’t hold it against him. He couldn’t allow any overtime if he wanted to keep his job.

  The story, which made me late for my evening feast of canned pork and beans, was worth just three paragraphs on an inside page of the metro section.

  4

  I spent the early part of the evening watching my snake explore every inch of the cracked twenty-five-gallon aquarium I’d snapped up at a big discount at Petco on North Main. Where he’d come from remained a mystery. A couple of neighbors thought he might have belonged to the meth addict who got evicted from the third floor last week, but they couldn’t say for sure. I was going to name the snake Chara after the Boston Bruins’ star defenseman, but when I mentioned it to Fadi, the Brown grad student who lived downstairs, he said it was a filthy word in Arabic.

  “Eat up, Tuukka,” I said, opening the aquarium top and dropping in one of the wriggling baby mice I’d bought. Tuukka Rask was the Bruins’ quick-as-a-snake goaltender. Tuukka flicked his tongue at the mouse for a couple of minutes before unhinging his jaw and swallowing it whole. Then he curled up for a nap and stopped being interesting.

  I poured three fingers of Bushmills into a reasonably clean tumbler, fired up a cigar, and settled down to watch the second period of the hockey game on my twenty-four-inch TV. Moments after a David Krejci breakaway gave the Bruins a three-goal lead, “Confused” began playing in my shirt pocket. The tune by a San Francisco punk band called The Nuns signaled an incoming call from Fiona McNerney, a former Little Sisters of the Poor cenobite who was serving her second term as Rhode Island’s governor.

  “Attila the Nun,” the handle a clever headline writer tagged her with because of her take-no-prisoners brand of politics, still attended mass every week, but her wardrobe and manner had become decidedly secular since she was released from her vows four years ago. The stern demeanor she’d adopted as a novice was gone now. Except for the graying hair, she’d reverted to the fun-loving, underage drinking partner I’d loved hanging out with in high school.

  “Evening, Mulligan,” she said. “What are you doing right now?”

  “Watching the Bs kick the crap out of the Rangers.”

  “What are you wearing?”

  “My clean pair of Boston Bruins boxers,” I lied.

  “Yum! I’ll be right over.”

  “Time to finally shed your virginity?”

  “It is a burden,” she said, “but if I ever do the deed, it’s gonna be with someone who can shower me with diamonds.”

  “Damn. That leaves me out.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “I take it the vow of poverty is history, too.”

  “Oh, hell yeah. That was just a phase. At the moment I’m sipping Dom Pérignon White Gold from a Waterford crystal goblet.”

  “Shall I come over and help you finish the bottle?”

  “Please do. I’m making a major announcement in a couple of weeks, and I want to give you a heads-up.”

  “How major?”

  “I’ll be unveiling my foolproof plan to solve the state’s budget crisis.”

  “Oh, really? The last foolproof plan I heard about was when John Henry emptied his vault to create the greatest Red Sox team ever assembled.”

  “When they signed Carl Crawford, John Lackey, Nick Punto, and Adrian Gonzalez?”

  “Yeah. Remember how that turned out, Fiona?”

  “Not well.”

  “But your plan is foolproof?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “This I’ve got to hear. I’ll be right over.”

  Ten minutes later, Secretariat’s chipped wiper blades slapped futilely at the mist gathering on the windshield, and his one working headlight bounced off a heavy fog that had descended on the city. As I crawled up Waterman Street, my cell played the opening bars of “Headline Hustler” by 10cc.—my ringtone for Chuckie-boy. I considered ignoring it, then reached for it and nearly sideswiped a parked car that materialized out of the gloom.

  “Mulligan.”

  “It’s Twisdale.”

  “What do you want, now, Chuck?”

  “Channels 12 and 10 are reporting that a small plane has crashed in a residential area near Green Airport.”

  “Sorry to hear that, but I’m off duty.”

  “I know, but I need you on this.”

  “Are you authorizing overtime?”

  ‘Come on, Mulligan. You know I can’t do that.”

  “Then find somebody else.”

  A year ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated. I used to put in a lot of hours that I never got paid for. Back then, I was working for people who cared about the news more than they cared about money, so I did, too. It was different now.

  “Look, do this for me and you can take tomorrow off.”

  “Tomorrow and the day after,” I said.

  “No way.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, and clicked off. As I pulled away from the curb, Chuck called back.

  “Yeah?”

  “Okay, you win. Two days off. But make it tomorrow and Monday. I can’t spare you two days in a row.”

  “Done. What’s the address?”

  I finished up with him and called Fiona.

  “I need a rain check. Gotta go play reporter.”

  “That’s a real shame.” She sounded vaguely drunk. “Did I tell you that my announcement was major? Oh, and foolproof? Don’t forget foolproof.”

  “I remember. But somebody tried to park a plane on a side street near the airport, so I gotta go take some pictures.”

  * * *

  The plane had gone down on Brunswick Drive, less than a half mile south of the airport, in a neighborhood of modest brick and wood-frame houses in the Providence suburb of Warwick. I crept south on Post Road, turned left on Main Avenue, and ran into a police roadblock.

  “The plane hit a house, and jet fuel is leaking into the basement,” a uniformed officer told me. “We’ve got the whole neighborhood cordoned off, and we’re evacuating everybody who lives within two thousand feet of the scene. It’s a dangerous situation, bud. You need to get the hell out of here. And, hey, you got a busted headlight. Better get that fixed before you get a ticket.”

  I thanked him, turned around, worked my way down to West Shore Road, and parked the Bronco on a side street. Then I g
rabbed my camera and jogged a half mile to the scene, easily slipping by the police checkpoints in the fog.

  The fuselage of a small plane was wedged in the wreckage of a red-brick two-story colonial. The aircraft’s tail had snapped off and crushed the roof of a Ford Expedition parked in the driveway. The site looked chaotic with police cruisers, ambulances, and fire trucks parked at odd angles all over front lawns on both sides of the street. Some bore the insignias of the Warwick PD and FD. Others were Green Airport security and rescue vehicles.

  So far, nothing was on fire, but the damp air reeked of kerosene and, oddly, of french fries. That puzzled me until I remembered reading that jet fuel is sometimes manufactured by mixing distilled petroleum with recycled cooking grease from fast food joints. The street was strewn with what looked like tufts of cotton candy. I bent down, picked up a piece, and discovered that it was the house’s fiberglass insulation.

  As near as I could tell, I was the only journalist on the scene. With TV helicopters grounded by the weather, nobody else would have pictures by morning. The crash site was a news photographer’s dream. Fog swirled around cops and firemen clawing through a tangle of shattered bricks and twisted metal. Everything was in silhouette, backlit by fire department spotlights. I wished my friend Gloria Costa, the great one-eyed photographer, could be here; but like the rest of The Dispatch’s photo staff, she’d been let go. Last time we talked, she was still looking for work. My photography skills were rudimentary, but I popped the lens cap and started shooting.

  It was nearly a half hour before anybody noticed me. Then Oscar Hernandez, the Warwick police chief, emerged from the wreckage carrying a blood-streaked black leather briefcase.

  “Mulligan? Who the hell let you in here?”

  “Nice to see you, too, Oscar. Whatcha got there?”

  “Nothing that concerns you. We’re dealing with a perilous situation here. I need you to leave right now.”