Rogue Island

by Bruce DeSilva

  Now Gloria and Abbruzzi were giggling, too.

  “They really think it’s their dog, don’t they?” Logan said.

  “Sure do. Miss their own dog so much they convinced themselves it could have walked all the way across the country to find them. Of course, you gotta be a little nuts to believe that.”

  “And a little nuts to print it,” Logan said, gleefully holding up a copy of last week’s paper with the big picture of Sassy/Sugar on the front. “So, what are you going to do now, Martin?”

  “Cops promised they’d come by tomorrow, get my dog for me.”

  “And Action News will be there! This is Logan Bedford, reporting live from Silver Lake. Back to you, Beverly.”

  We were all roaring now, Gloria laughing so hard that tears rolled down her cheeks. This was bad for the paper. It damaged our credibility. It made us look ridiculous. But we were so giddy with drink and wacky newspaper stories that tonight a hockey game would have struck us as hilarious.

  We were still giggling five minutes later when Hardcastle slid down from the bar stool where he’d been drinking alone and stomped over to our table. By his expression, it was apparent that at least someone was able to appreciate the gravity of the situation.

  “Did you set me up, Mulligan?” he said. Thanks to the evening’s diet of boilermakers, his lazy drawl was even lazier. “Did you?”

  That made all of us at the table laugh louder. We laughed so hard that a half dozen firemen sitting three tables away joined in, even though they had no idea what they were laughing at.

  I could have saved Hardcastle from himself, but I didn’t because he was such a jerk. I was going to have to live with that for a long time. That’s what I thought. What I said was, “Hardcastle, maybe you should have waited for the doggy DNA.”

  “Fuck you,” he said, provoking more peals of laughter.

  “Well,” Gloria said as Hardcastle stalked off, “no call for any more newspaper horror stories. We have a winner.”

  “Not so fast,” I said. “My turn.”

  “No way you can top Sassy,” Veronica said.

  “It’s Sugar,” Abbruzzi said, and Gloria laughed so hard that she tipped over her Bud.

  “Back in the eighties,” I said as a waitress mopped up the spill with a bar rag, “the paper used to crown a Rhode Island Mother of the Year. Winner got a nice write-up in the ‘Living’ section and a free six-month subscription to the paper. Hundreds of readers would write in to tell us why their mothers were worthy of the honor. The reporter who dreamed up the idea would read each heartfelt letter, choose the best one, interview the letter writer and his mom, and write it up for the Mother’s Day paper. In 1989, I think it was, the city editor got a call the day we announced the winner: ‘Did you know that four of her sons are in prison?’ ”

  The table erupted again. This time, it was Abbruzzi’s Amstel Light that went airborne.

  “Nice try,” Veronica said, when it quieted down. “But the dog story can’t be beat.”

  “You haven’t heard the rest of it,” I said. “Guess who wrote the Mother’s Day story?”

  “Hardcastle?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh, no, he didn’t!”

  “Oh, yes, he did.”

  With that, I got up, gave Veronica a good-bye kiss, and headed for Secretariat.

  21

  I prowled the Mount Hope neighborhood again that night, looking for Mr. Rapture but harboring no hope of actually finding him. Around midnight, with a Cuban between my lips and Tommy Castro’s No Foolin’ album in the CD player, I swung the Bronco onto Doyle Avenue, and there he was. Mr. Rapture, his hands in the pockets of that black leather jacket from the photographs, was striding purposefully down the sidewalk. I rolled to a stop a few yards ahead of him, got out, climbed over the snowbanked curb, and watched him close the distance between us.

  “How ya doing?” I said. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  He studied me for a heartbeat. Then his eyes got big. He spun on his heels and took off. I set out to run him down.

  He was ten yards ahead as we raced down the sidewalk past Zerilli’s Market, our shoes crunching in the inch of fresh snow covering a month’s worth of bad Rhode Island February. I’d been chasing him for less than a minute, and already I was regretting all those cigars and those missed Saturday mornings at the gym. My right thigh was beginning to cramp, there was a stitch in my side, and my heart was a runaway drum.

  “Wait!” I called to him. “I just want to talk!”

  At the end of the block he cut right and slipped, his arms flying out for balance, his fingers clawing at the frigid air. I was almost on him now, close enough to reach for the collar of his black leather jacket. Then my right shoe landed where he’d slipped, and I went down hard, cracking my left elbow on jagged ice that a snowplow had thrown up from the street.

  Pain shot from elbow to shoulder now as I scrambled to my feet and saw him running hard down the middle of the deserted street. I set out once more to chase him down. He ran well for a small man, but my stride was longer. My thigh was cramping badly in the cold, but I fought through it as the distance between us slowly closed.

  Fifteen yards.

  Ten yards.

  Five.

  And when I caught him, I was going to do what? Knock him down? Beat him up? Not the sort of interviewing technique I’d learned in Brother Fry’s journalism class. And what if he was carrying something? A knife, maybe. Or a gun. If I was right about him, he was already a killer several times over.

  I thought about that for an instant, then flashed on the bodies of the twins being loaded into the ambulance. I sucked in a breath, lunged for him, and my feet flew out from under me. I landed hard, face-first, and skidded to a stop. As I raised my face from the ice, he threw me a look over his left shoulder, and I thought I heard him laugh.

  Mr. Rapture sprinted to the corner, turned right, slowed to a jog, and was gone.

  I was surprised how far we’d run; it was an eight-block limp back to the Bronco. Someone had broken into it and yanked out the CD player. I rummaged in the backseat with my one good arm, found an old T-shirt, and used it to sop up the blood flowing from my nose.

  * * *

  In the morning, my elbow was black and swollen and my nose knew exactly how it felt.

  I’d been injured before. I broke my nose three times and my left wrist twice. Errant elbows had opened gashes over both eyes. I cracked bones in three fingers, and one of them was still crooked. A half-moon surgical scar tattooed my right knee. But the damage was all done on the basketball court. Since when was journalism a contact sport?

  I spent two hours reading last year’s Time magazines in the waiting room of the Rhode Island Hospital emergency department and another hour waiting for an intern to read my X-rays before learning that the only thing broken this time was my pride.

  It was early afternoon before I finally got to work, arriving just in time to see a copyboy deposit the day’s keg of press releases on Hardcastle’s desk. As I walked toward mine, a half dozen people stopped me to ask about my nose.

  “Slipped on the ice,” I said, which was more or less the truth.

  I jerked open my file drawer, drew out the envelope of spectator pictures, and fanned them across my desk. Mr. Rapture stood transfixed in six of them, mocking me. I stared at the pictures for a long time.

  I was still at it when Edward Anthony Mason IV walked in. I had to look twice to be sure it was him. He’d gone off to Columbia University Journalism School in a Hugo Boss suit, but now he was back, striding across the newsroom in a wrinkled ankle-length trench coat, a brown felt fedora perched on the back on his head the way Clark Gable wore it in It Happened One Night. Yup, it was a Gable getup, all right, complete with cigarette tucked behind the right ear. Maybe he’d seen the movie and thought that was the way real reporters looked.

  Mason was old money, the scion of six inbred Yankee families that ran the state for more than two hundred year
s until the Irish and Italians showed up and took it away from them. Judging by the sour expressions that were always plastered on their faces, they were still mad about it. The families had secured their fortunes by running slaves from the Guinea Coast to the southern colonies and by operating the Blackstone Valley textile mills that spun King Cotton into cloth. But the good times were long gone now, and the newspaper was one of the few institutions left to them.

  They’d owned it since the Civil War. For a century it had been an archconservative mouthpiece, spewing nativist propaganda and portraying every human achievement from women’s suffrage to Social Security as a slippery slope toward socialism. Somewhere around World War II, the six families mellowed, shedding their crude mill-baron manners and adopting the paternalistic posture of socially superior public benefactors. Since then they had run the paper as a public trust, sacrificing millions in profits to the cause of informing the electorate and educating the masses. They were the sort that would spend an extra million a year on newsprint for the good of the paper and then bridle at buying business cards for reporters. The Newspaper Guild local had been without a contract for the last five years, the families choking at the thought of a 3 percent raise and dental insurance.

  Now a new generation was rising, a generation of summer-in-Newport, winter-in-Aspen wastrels who dabbled in the market and squandered their trust funds at the Foxwoods baccarat tables. Young Mason was the only one among them who gave a shit about the paper. It was natural, then, that his elders were grooming him to run it. After wasting twenty grand of daddy’s money at Columbia J-School—a hidebound bastion of fuddy-duddies that prepares the young to put out a newspaper that’s fifty years out of date—he had returned to begin his apprenticeship for the job that was his by birthright.

  All eyes were on the kid as he crossed the newsroom and slipped into the managing editor’s office. I turned back to the photographs and stared at them some more. Mr. Rapture had to be stopped, and my nose and elbow were telling me that I wasn’t up to the job.

  I needed help.

  22

  “It’s Mulligan. I’ve got something that might interest you.”

  “I’ve got something for you too. My size-twelve up your ass.”

  “Second time in a week somebody said that to me.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me any,” Polecki said, and slammed down the receiver.

  Screw him, I thought. Then I thought about it some more. I thought about the dead twins. I thought about the two scorched corpses pulled from the rooming-house fire. I thought about the DePrisco kids who didn’t have a daddy anymore. I thought about Rosie and her crew out there risking their lives night after night. I picked up the phone and called him back.

  “You really should see what I’ve got.”

  “Why don’t you try Roselli? He only wears a size nine.”

  “Look, I’m offering you some useful information here. You want it or not?”

  “How useful?”

  “Might make you a hero. Make everybody forget that ‘Dumb and Dumber’ story.”

  “Everybody but me, maybe. I plan on holding a grudge.”

  “Look,” I said, “I think I know who’s setting the Mount Hope fires. Thought maybe you might want his picture.”

  He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Seriously?”

  “Yup.”

  “Okay, asshole. Come on over. I’ll hold my nose and look at what you got.”

  “Not there,” I said. “Some place we won’t be recognized.”

  “The McDonald’s on Fountain Street in fifteen minutes.”

  “People from the paper get coffee there.”

  “Central Lunch on Weybosset, then.”

  “City editor’s sister runs the place.”

  “Okay, Mulligan, how about this. There’s a titty bar called Good Time Charlie’s near the Sax chicken-and-ribs place on Broad.”

  “Just up from the YMCA?”

  “Yeah. Got any pervert friends that hang out there?”

  “I think that’ll work,” I said, and hung up.

  I swung Secretariat around the newspaper building, crossed over the interstate to the Italian tenement district, bounced four blocks south on what passes for roads in Rhode Island, and parked on Broad at the edge of the hood, where sixteen-year-old daytime hookers in hot pants competed for sidewalk space with used condoms and smashed forty-ounce Colt 45 empties.

  The joint was dark except for a small floodlit stage where a skinny black girl writhed like a freshly killed snake. The small afternoon crowd sat up close, glassy-eyed and clutching sweating cans of beer. Polecki was already there, squeezed into a dark booth in back. I slid in across from him. A waitress, snapped into a body stocking so transparent I could almost see behind her, materialized to take our orders.

  “Hey, Mulligan!” she said. “What’s shakin’?”

  Polecki looked at me and made a face.

  I’d been wondering what had happened to Marie after she quit waiting tables at Hopes. I also used to wonder what she looked like naked. Two mysteries solved already, and it was only two thirty.

  We sat silently until Marie returned with my club soda and Polecki’s can of Narragansett, a local favorite named in honor of a Rhode Island Indian tribe butchered by our God-fearing colonial ancestors. Marie gave me fifteen back from my twenty and hooked a finger in the red garter on her right thigh. I slid in a dollar, and she winked and went away.

  “So,” Polecki said. “Which one am I supposed to be?”

  “Huh?”

  “Am I Dumb or Dumber?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Might be the difference between one broken arm or two.”

  I stared at him over the top of my glass for a long moment.

  “Look,” I said. “You’re never going to invite me to share a box of Kentucky Fried, and I’m never going to invite you to share a box at Fenway Park. But people in the old neighborhood are getting burned to death, and I’m betting that bothers you as much as it does me.”

  “More,” he said.

  “So I’m going to show you some photographs,” I said. “And then you’re going to give them back to me, and we’re going to talk about what to do next.”

  “Okay.”

  I pulled a manila envelope out of my jacket, drew out the crowd pictures with Mr. Rapture’s face circled in red, and fanned them across the table. He picked them up one at a time and studied them in the dim blue bar light. When he was done, I gathered them up, slid them back in the envelope, and stuck it back inside my jacket.

  “So, who is he?” he said.

  “Don’t know. Been calling him Mr. Rapture.”

  “Because of that look,” he said.

  “Yeah, because of that look.”

  “Anything else make you think this is our guy?”

  “Found him walking on Doyle last night. When I tried to talk to him, he ran.”

  “Couldn’t catch him, big lanky guy like you?”

  “Nearly did, but I slipped and fell.”

  “That how you got that nose?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Broken?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad.”

  He flagged Marie down, and we sat quietly as she fetched him another beer. Who says cops can’t drink on the job?

  “Well,” he said, “what you got isn’t much. Doesn’t prove a damn thing. But it is a lead, and we don’t have many. What do I have to do to get my hands on those pictures?”

  I pulled the envelope back out of my jacket, slid out the best picture of Mr. Rapture, and laid it on the table between us. I kept my hand on it and looked at him hard.

  “I’m going to give you just this one,” I said, “but there is a condition.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You didn’t get it from me, and we never had this conversation.”

  “Figured it was something like that.”

  “Deal?”

  “Deal.”

  Polecki drained h
is beer, picked up the picture, and hauled himself to his feet.

  “Hold on a minute. You don’t have many? Is that what you said?”

  “Huh?”

  “Leads, Polecki. You said you don’t have many. That means you must have some, right?”

  He sat back down and said, “Why should I tell you?”

  “I gave you something. Your turn to give me something.”

  “This ain’t Let’s Make a Deal, asshole.”

  “Look at it this way. If Mr. Rapture turns out to be the guy, I just cracked the case for you. But until we know, I’m going to keep digging, and some of the people who talk to me aren’t ever gonna talk to you.”

  He stared hard at me for a minute.

  “If you learn something you’ll call me?”

  “Called you today, didn’t I?”

  He sat silently for a moment, fiddling with the gold wedding band he still wore. Maybe because he still loved her. Maybe because the extra pounds he’d packed on made it impossible to get it off.

  “Off the record?” he said.

  “Absolutely.”

  “ ’Cause I don’t wanna be reading this in the fuckin’ paper.”

  “You won’t be.”

  “Okay, Mulligan. We’re lookin’ at a retired fireman, an old fart who has nothing better to do than hang around the Mount Hope Firehouse every afternoon and get in everybody’s way. Likes to show up at fires and hand out coffee to the crew.”

  Oh, shit. That sounded like Jack.

  “Anything solid makes you thing it’s him?”

  “Nothing yet, but his alibi sucks. Claims he’s home alone every night watching cop shows and FOXNews. ’Stead of being helpful and answering our questions, he got all indignant when we braced him. Roselli’s got a hunch this is our guy. Me, I’m not so sure. But he does seem the type.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Lives alone. Something of a loser. Spent thirty years in the department and never got a promotion. And somebody who used to put out fires would know how to set them.”

  “You think an ex-fireman would do this?”

  “You got any idea how many arsonists turn out to be firemen or former firemen?