Rogue Island

by Bruce DeSilva

  When I finished with Zerilli it was only quarter to ten. I climbed in the Bronco and drove four blocks to Larch Street.

  * * *

  “Mrs. DeLucca?”

  “Yes? Who is it?”

  “My name is Mulligan. I’m a reporter for the paper.”

  “We already take the paper.”

  I thought I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t quite place it. It was a voice that belonged somewhere else.

  “No, no. I’m a reporter.”

  “Yes? What do you want?”

  “Is Joseph home?”

  “He reads the same paper I get. He don’t need his own paper.”

  I was standing on a crumbling concrete stoop, staring at a solid door with three dead bolts.

  “Mrs. DeLucca, this might be easier if you would let me in.”

  “Whaddayou, nuts? How I know you are who you say you are and not somebody else, maybe somebody come to rape me, huh? How I supposed to know that? Open the door? Fuhgeddaboudit.”

  “Ma? Who you talking to?”

  “Nobody, Joseph. Go back to sleep.”

  Heavy footsteps.

  “Now you done it, you woke up Joseph. Hope you’re happy now.”

  The dead bolts clicked and the door swung open, revealing an ancient speck of a woman in a starched blue duster that matched her bouffant.

  Now I remembered. For about a month, Carmella DeLucca had been a waitress at the diner, snarling at customers and shuffling so slowly between the counter and the booths that even kindhearted Charlie finally couldn’t put up with it. When he let her go, nobody took her place.

  She stood in the doorway now on swollen feet stuffed into bunny rabbit slippers. If Dorcas could see me now, she’d accuse me of sleeping with her.

  Behind Mrs. DeLucca loomed her bouncing baby boy. At six foot three and about forty years of age, he looked a lot like me, if you overlooked the fifty extra pounds straining the elastic of yellowed boxers. I didn’t want to think about it. He had forgotten his shirt, although I suppose that mat of hair counted for something.

  “Why you botherin’ Ma?”

  Be careful with this one, Mulligan, I thought. One of those extra pounds might be muscle.

  “I’m a reporter working on a story about the fires.”

  “What’s that got to do with Ma?”

  “Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”

  “You the guy been writin’ all them stories?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Don’t you know that just encourages him, writin’ all them stories and puttin’ ’em in the paper like that? That’s just what he wants, see all that stuff in the paper. Bet he’s cuttin’ all those stories out, makin’ himself a fuckin’ scrapbook. Sorry, Ma.”

  “Who is?” I said.

  “Who is what?”

  “Who is making himself a scrapbook?”

  “How the hell do I know? What, you some kinda smart-ass?”

  “You happen to see any of the fires yourself?”

  “Why you askin’ that for?”

  “I’m just talking to people who’ve seen some of the fires, asking about what they saw.”

  “Yeah, I seen three of ’em. No, four. Last one was when the fireman got barbecued. Watched them pull his body out the house. Stunk somethin’ awful. It was really cool.”

  I flashed on Tony at his wedding reception, his arm around the girl everybody wanted. As my eyes slid over the landscape that was Joseph DeLucca, I managed to keep my clenched fist where it was. He probably couldn’t spell asshole, so maybe he couldn’t help being one.

  “How did you happen to be there?” I asked.

  “I was watchin’ The Brady Bunch, just like every Friday afternoon since I ain’t been workin’. Marcia was complaining ’bout her new braces, and just then sirens started goin’ off. She thought the braces made her look ugly, so I told her, ‘Yeah, they do, you whiny little bitch.’ When my show ended, I walked over there, see what was up.”

  “I see. Mrs. DeLucca, is that how you remember it? The two of you were watching The Brady Bunch?”

  “Ma was at the Duds ’n’ Suds. Why you care where Ma was at?”

  “So you were home alone, then?”

  “What the fuck you gettin’ at? Sorry, Ma. You accusin’ me of something? Get the fuck outta here, ’fore I shove my size-twelve up your ass.”

  Mark Twain said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” I wondered what Joseph DeLucca’s looked like. If I’d had a half hour to spare, I’d have walked around him to see for myself.

  According to Secretariat’s dashboard clock, there was time to try another of the names Zerilli had provided. Darned if I could see what good it would do. What had I been thinking? That one of the guys in the pictures was the firebug and that as soon as I showed up he’d pour his confession into my notebook?

  I drove home over rutted streets, cursing myself for thinking it would be easy. I unlocked my door and stared for a long minute at my rumpled bed. After gulping a Maalox nightcap, I peeled the Band-Aid and cotton ball off the spot where the needle had gone in and crawled under a blanket that still smelled of Veronica.

  13

  Breakfast at the diner was coffee cut with lots of milk, eggs over easy, and the city edition. Bruccola, the aging mob boss, had been admitted to Miriam Hospital with congestive heart failure. Providence College’s star forward, a lock to make McCracken’s office wall, had been sentenced to twenty hours of community service for breaking his English tutor’s arm with a lug wrench. Our sports columnist trumpeted the good news that, thank God, the player would not have to miss any Big East Tournament games. And our mayor had once again outwitted a political enemy.

  Seems that last week, the mayor’s probable opponent in next fall’s election had legally changed her name from Angelina V. Rico to Angelina V. aRico so she would be listed first alphabetically on the ballot. But yesterday, Mayor Rocco D. Carozza legally changed his name to Rocco D. aaaaCarozza. It was a strong front page, even without the dog story. I couldn’t find Sassy anywhere else in the paper, either.

  A couple of stools away, a city councilman was checking the news on his laptop. The paper was too cheap to buy me one, but I didn’t much care. I preferred holding a real newspaper in my hands.

  “Hey, Charlie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I ran into Carmella DeLucca last night, and she was as charming as ever.”

  Charlie turned from the grill, rested both hands on the counter, and bent toward me. “I took her on ’cause she needed the dough, but she couldn’t keep up with all the work around here.”

  I grinned and looked down the counter at the diner’s only other customer, waiting for Charlie to burn his pancakes. Charlie followed my gaze.

  “Fuck you, Mulligan.”

  * * *

  In the newsroom, I logged on and found a message from Lomax on my computer:

  YOUR DOG STORY SUCKED. ABBRUZZI GAVE IT TO HARDCASTLE TO REWRITE. HOPE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING A RAISE THIS YEAR.

  Hardcastle, a rawboned Arkansas transplant who wrote occasional features and a twice-weekly metro column, was hunched in his cubicle, drumming at his keyboard with his big red hands. I ambled over and said, “What gives?”

  “Mulligan, you never could write, but your Sassy story was dog shit,” he said, blessing the word with an extra syllable—shee-it. “You take a homey little yarn about some nice folks and their amazing animal, and you write it up like you just caught the governor with his hand on your wallet. ‘Fleming claimed.’ ‘Alleged to have walked.’ ‘Could not be confirmed.’ What the hell was you thinking? Story like this, gotta stroke it like it’s your dick, have a little fun with it.”

  “Well,” I said, “it couldn’t be confirmed.”

  “The hick sheriff told you the Stinsons live in town, that they had a mutt, that it run off. Sounds like confirmation to me. What the hell was you waiting for? Paw prints? Doggie DNA?”

  “Have it your way
, Hardcastle. Just make sure my byline isn’t on it.”

  “Don’t skip your nap over that, Mulligan. You blew your shot. Got so many page-one stories you can afford to piss ’em away?”

  I saw it clearly now. My story was dog shit, and I pissed it away because I didn’t stroke it like it was my dick. Why bother with journalism school when Hardcastle Academy is tuition free?

  Back at my desk, the message function was blinking with another rocket from Lomax:

  PRESS RELEASES.

  As I read it, a copy boy deposited a beer keg–sized plastic box beside my desk. It was white with “U.S. Mail” stenciled in blue letters on the side. Inside was the day’s incoming from every press agent and political candidate with a hope of hoodwinking us into putting something worthless in the paper. Usually an intern sorted through them, but today I was being punished.

  I picked up the one on top. In it, Marco Del Torro promised that if reelected to the city council he would do something about the long lines for the restrooms at the civic center. Just what he would do he didn’t say.

  The phone rang as I was dumping the contents of the box into my big green wastebasket. I accepted the collect call, asked a question, listened for a few minutes, hung up, and scanned the newsroom. I spotted Hardcastle schmoozing at the copydesk. He slapped his thigh and squealed as several deskmen joined in the laughter.

  “Hardcastle,” I called out as I walked over. “Got something you need to know.”

  “Hey, here’s our boy now,” he said. “I was just recounting your Pulitzer-worthy work on the Sassy story, but how ’bout you tell it in your own words?”

  I turned my back on him, walked back to my desk, checked my computer messages, and found another from Lomax:

  AND WHAT’S WITH THE JACKET AND TIE TODAY? DID SOMEBODY DIE OR SOMETHING?

  * * *

  That afternoon, Rosie sat beside me in a church pew and wept into my shoulder.

  Firefighters from six states had come to Tony DePrisco’s funeral at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus on Camp Street, just two blocks from the cellar where he’d burned to death.

  A few rows in front of us, I saw the bent figure of Tony’s wife Jessica, her sleeping daughter Mikaila curled in her lap. A dazed little boy sat stone still on either side of her—Tony Jr. and Jake.

  Father Paul Mauro, a wizened little man who had presided at Tony’s confirmation more than twenty-five years ago, stood in front of the closed casket and spoke of heroism, integrity, sacrifice, and salvation. I had to smile a little. The Tony I knew was a goof-off who’d passed math and English by copying from my exam papers, and whose lone contribution to our school’s athletic prowess was kidnapping other schools’ mascots. Somehow he’d managed to snag the senior-prom queen and then squeak through the fire academy after washing out twice. In nearly twenty years as a fireman, he’d never won a commendation. He would have wondered who Father Mauro was talking about.

  A hand closed around mine and squeezed hard enough to make me cringe. Rosie, I thought to myself, we really need to stop meeting like this.

  Late that afternoon, I finished knocking out the feature on the DiMaggios for the next day’s paper, describing the hats and bats and laying the bullshit quotes on thick. By then it was too late to catch the end of the Sox spring-training game, even if I’d been in the mood, so I decided to get a head start on the weekend piece about Polecki and Roselli. I double-checked the stats on their abysmal record for closing cases and called McCracken at home for a not-for-attribution quote about how insurance investigators all over New England were calling them “Dumb and Dumber.”

  The Farrelly Brothers’ lowbrow comedy was a local favorite because Dumb and Dumber hailed from Providence, the movie starting with an establishing shot of Hope Street. Another reason to be proud.

  Me? Call me Dumbest. By midnight I was cruising Mount Hope on the off chance that I might spot something. It was no way to investigate anything, but I couldn’t sit around doing nothing, and I was out of ideas.

  14

  On Larch Street, a big-screen TV glowed blue behind the thin white curtains of a two-story bungalow where I covered a mob hit ten years back, the widow and her teenage daughter living comfortably there now on their monthly Mafia pension. On Hopedale Road, the lights were all out in the second-floor tenement where Sean and Louisa Mulligan had managed to raise two boys and a girl on a milkman’s salary. On Doyle Avenue, an idle front-end loader with “Dio Construction” in green letters on its flank sat among the ruins of a burned-out triple-decker.

  Neighborhood trash pickup was Thursday morning, and by the look of the mess in the snow, most folks had already dragged their trash barrels and Hefty bags to the curb. At the corner of Ivy and Forest, Norwegian brown rats, their eyes burning red in my headlights, yanked food scraps from holes they had burrowed in the plastic. Down the street from Zerilli’s store, a half dozen dogs had toppled a couple of trash barrels and were partying at the curb.

  I decided to join them. I unscrewed the lid from my thermos, swigged coffee, and popped in a CD. Tommy Castro rocked the Bronco with electric blues:

  All my nasty habits … they just won’t let me be

  I’d been circling for most of an hour when I spied someone crossing the street half a block ahead, silhouetted in the wash of a streetlight that hadn’t been shot out yet. The figure walked like a woman and carried something. Too small for a gasoline can. Could have been a large handgun, or maybe a camera with a telephoto lens. Before I could check it out, blue lights flashed in my rearview.

  I pulled Secretariat to the curb and listened in on my police scanner as the cops ran my plate. In the mirror, I saw one cop climb out of the cruiser’s passenger-side door and position herself at the rear of the Bronco, her gun unholstered and pressed against her right leg. Her partner got out on the driver’s side and walked toward me, flashlight in his right hand, left hand resting on the butt of his revolver. I rolled down the window, the cold hitting me like a karate chop, as he shined his light in my face.

  “How you doing, Eddie?” Ed Lahey had been in my brother Aidan’s posse back in the days when the word wasn’t synonymous with gang.

  “Mulligan? That you? The hell you doing out here middle of the night?”

  “Same as you, Eddie. Wasting my time.”

  “Got that right,” he said. “Supposed to cruise the neighborhood all night, stop anyone looks suspicious. Ever see anyone in Mount Hope who didn’t look suspicious?”

  “Just the pedophile priest,” I said. “I hear the bishop is transferring him to Woonsocket.”

  “Not planning on burning anything down tonight, are you, Mulligan?”

  “Not right this minute,” I said, “but I’ve got a cigar I’m saving for later.”

  “No cans of gasoline in back?” His tone was light, but he shined his flashlight into the backseat, then walked back and peered through the window of the empty cargo space.

  When he was done, he narrowed his eyes and told me to head for home.

  “Okay, maybe I will.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure you will. Look, you got a cell phone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Here’s my cell number,” he said, handing me a card. “Call it if you see anything. And next time you talk to your brother, tell him …”

  I rolled the window up before he could finish. I had enough problems.

  I drove down the block and turned right, looking for the figure I’d seen crossing the street, but of course, she was gone. A few minutes later, cruising up Cypress, I saw a couple of the DiMaggios, bats on their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet in the snow. I slowed, rolled the passenger-side window down, and leaned toward it.

  “Hey, Vinnie! Seen anything unusual tonight?”

  “Nothing ’cept for Lucinda Miller standing in her window, giving us a good look at her tits.”

  His colleague snorted. “That ain’t so unusual.”

  I pulled out the three-flame Colibri that Zerilli had given
me. I didn’t have anything that needed welding, so I used it to fire up a Cuban and smoked as I prowled the empty streets. I didn’t see anyone skulking about with a can of gasoline. I didn’t see anyone resembling Mr. Rapture. Except for the DiMaggios, I didn’t see anyone at all.

  The CD cycled around to “Nasty Habits” twice before I shut it off. Around three in the morning, the Bronco’s heater coughed and surrendered. The eastern sky was lightening when a newspaper delivery truck pulled up in front of Zerilli’s store and heaved out two bundles of city editions. I headed home to catch a couple hours’ sleep, see what my dreams could conjure.

  I heard the phone ringing through the apartment door, stepped in, and picked up the receiver.

  “You!

  fucking!

  bastard!”

  “Hello, Dorcas.”

  “So, who is she?”

  “Who?”

  “The bitch you’ve been out fucking all night.”

  “What makes you think it was only one?”

  “I’m still your wife, you evil bastard!”

  “Good morning, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up. Just before I set the receiver down, I thought I heard Rewrite bark.

  * * *

  By the time I dragged myself in to work, the editors were meeting behind closed doors, discussing an issue that required their collective experience and judgment: Should the paper start printing the mayor’s name as “aaaaCarozza” or stick with the more headline-friendly “Carozza”? Judging by the muffled sounds coming through the wall, the debate was heating up.

  I snatched a newspaper off the stack beside the city desk and saw that page one was dominated by a four-column picture of Sassy. She had her paws on Ralph’s shoulders, digging at his ear with her tongue while Gladys stood by looking embarrassed. Looking at the page made me feel bad about what I’d done. Not that I gave a damn about Hardcastle, but I cared a whole lot about the paper.