Rogue Island

by Bruce DeSilva

  I didn’t say anything, just slid a copy of the credit-card charges across the cigarette-scarred Formica.

  “Yeah, I got that this morning from the helpful folks at Fleet Bank,” he said. “All it took was the threat of a subpoena. How the hell did you get your hands on it?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Break a few laws in the process?”

  “Not any important ones.”

  He tried his poor excuse for a hard look on me, saw it wasn’t working, and gave it up.

  “He’s got alibis for four of the other fires, too,” he said. “We’re still checking them out, but it looks like they’re gonna hold up. You sent me on a wild goose chase, shithead. Your Mr. Rapture’s not our guy.”

  “Guess not. I wonder why he ran that time when I tried to talk to him on the street.”

  “Who knows? Maybe he was holding and made you for a narc. Maybe he thought you was gonna mug him. Maybe he don’t like meeting new people. Maybe he just don’t like assholes.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “We got forty-eight hours to charge or release. The chief wants to lose him in the system for a while, let the twelve-year-old public defender who caught the case try to figure out where he is. Might buy a little time to find the right guy and avoid the public-relations disaster of letting Wu go when we got nothin’ else.”

  “I see,” I said, and his face scrunched up with worry.

  “Christ! This is all off the record, right?”

  “Come on, Polecki. You know nothing’s off the record unless you say so before you start talking. Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself with another reporter, one who’s a stickler for the rules.”

  The skinny black girl who’d been the entertainment on our last visit sashayed up in fuck-me heels and a G-string to take Polecki’s order.

  “Get him a Narragansett on me,” I said, and he looked at me funny.

  “Figure on doing a piece about the arson chief drinking on duty?”

  “Yeah, right. I buy you a beer, then do an exposé on you drinking it. Even I wouldn’t stoop that low for a byline.”

  “You’ve stooped lower.”

  The waitress came back with his beer. I handed her five bucks, peeled off another dollar, and slipped it in her G-string, not seeing an ass worth patting.

  “So we’re back to square one,” I said.

  “There is no we, Mulligan. I’m an officer of the law conducting an official investigation. You’re a fucking parasite.”

  “No other leads?”

  “Just that ex-fireman.”

  “Jack Centofanti.”

  “I’m not confirming that. If you’ve got the name, it didn’t come from me.”

  “Understood.”

  “Roselli’s got a hard-on for him, but I still don’t think he’s good for it.”

  Polecki pulled a Parodi out of his shirt pocket and lit it with a paper match. The cheap black stogie smelled like shit laced with citronella.

  “Don’t take this wrong,” I said, “but maybe you need some outside help on this.”

  “Look,” he said, “the state fire marshal’s got just three arson investigators for the whole state, and he’s already assigned two of them to work with me. One of them, Leahy, he used to be the fire chief in Westerly, and he’s pretty good. The other one, Petrelli, got the job because his cousin’s the Democratic state party chairman. Thinks he knows it all because he took a two-week federal Fire Administration course, but he don’t know shit.”

  “What’s the federal Fire Administration?”

  “Another one of them Homeland Security agencies with no idea what the fuck it’s supposed to be doing.”

  “What about the FBI?”

  “Since 9/11, if it ain’t about terrorism they ain’t interested.”

  “Still nothing to suggest it’s more than a firebug?”

  “Not a thing. You always think insurance scam first, but with five different companies owning the buildings …” He shrugged his meaty shoulders and his voice trailed off.

  “The mayor is all over our ass. The city council is screaming for answers. They don’t understand that arson investigations are a bitch. Any evidence the perp leaves behind usually gets burned up. Hell, if the fire’s bad enough, you can’t even prove how it started. Chances are this nutcase is just gonna keep setting fires till we get lucky and catch him in the act.”

  The stink from Polecki’s stogie was strong enough to make me gag. To mask the smell, I drew a Cuban from my pocket and set fire to it with the Colibri.

  “Nice lighter. Get that from your hoodlum friend Whoosh?”

  “Maybe.”

  He smirked, finished his beer, and unwedged himself from the booth.

  “Later, asshole,” he said, and headed out.

  As soon as I got back to the office, I was going to make a photocopy of the credit-card charges and mail it to Wu’s lawyer. Public defenders rarely have time for anything besides routine court appearances, and I didn’t trust Polecki to do the right thing.

  Marie was shaking her stuff in the red stage lights, bopping to “Ladies’ Night” by Kool & the Gang. I stood and carried my club soda up front for a closer look. Several minutes later I snapped to the fact that my face was inches from Marie’s nipples, and my mind was on Veronica.

  37

  That evening, she cooked for me.

  She arrived toting three grocery bags, prepared to whip up something elaborate, then discovered that my cookware consisted of a single scarred saucepan. Undeterred, she used it to boil penne and tossed it with olive oil on my ancient stove while grilling bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, and mushrooms on a sheet of aluminum foil in the crusty oven.

  “So that’s what that thing is for,” I said when she turned on the gas.

  When dinner was ready, my place smelled better than it ever had. We sprawled on my bed in front of another Law & Order rerun, sharing Russian River straight from the bottle and eating off paper plates with plastic forks. Dorcas had all our dishes and silverware, but I didn’t care. I hated doing dishes.

  Later, I tossed the plates and forks in the trash, and we settled back into bed, I with the new Robert Parker novel swiped from the desk of the paper’s book critic, she with a slim paperback by Patricia Smith, some lame poet she’d just discovered. The domesticity was both comfy and unsettling.

  I was on chapter two when Veronica started reciting poems out loud, liking the way the words felt in her mouth. Reading poetry to me now? Poetry? Things were getting out of hand. I tried to block it out, concentrating hard now on whether the suspicious husband thought Spenser was the right man for a tail job. Veronica reached over, pulled the novel from my hands, and snapped it shut.

  “You’ve got to hear this.”

  “I’m not into poetry, Veronica. It does nothing for me, unless Bob Dylan’s whining it through his nose.”

  “Just shut up and listen.”

  What gave birth to jazz,

  What moist, constricted passage it struggled from,

  who held it aloft,

  slapped that newborn ass

  and sparked the glorious screaming

  doesn’t matter.

  What matters is fluid line shredding into scat

  and us owning that sweetness;

  what matters is cigarette-thin men

  swearing at their reflections in the bartop.

  What matters is sugar browns,

  hitching up homemade skirts

  and pounding holes in the dance floor,

  out past curfew and tired of asking the time.

  “Holy shit!” And I meant it.

  “Told you.”

  “Let me see that.” She handed me the book, and I turned it over, checking out the author photo on the back cover. “Damn. She’s hot too.”

  “Shut up!” she said, but she was smiling when she said it.

  Later I turned the TV back on to watch a rerun of The Shield, a cop show I liked because the sta
r, Michael Chiklis, was a rabid Red Sox fan. Veronica excused herself and scooted down the stairs to fetch something from her car. As Detective Vic Mackey and his strike team tried to figure out how the One-Niners had gotten their hands on a truckload of grenade launchers, she slipped back in carrying a duffel. She opened my closet and saw four pairs of faded jeans, three Red Sox game jerseys, a wrinkled blue blazer, and a bunch of naked wire hangers. She unzipped the duffel and hung up a few things. The domesticity was getting more comfy and more unsettling by the minute.

  Veronica flopped back into bed and snaked her legs around mine. I was rolling over to grab a kiss when the police scanner broke the mood.

  “Code Red on Locust Street!”

  “Damn!” she said. “Is that where I think it is?”

  “Yeah, it’s in Mount Hope.”

  We pulled on sweatshirts and headed for Secretariat.

  “This is more than just a story now,” I said as I pulled away from the curb. “It’s personal. This firebug is really pissing me off.”

  “How come?”

  “He’s messing with my sex life.”

  * * *

  As I turned left off Camp Street onto Locust, the crew of Engine Company No. 6 was already coiling hoses and stowing equipment. Rosie was standing in the front yard of a weather-beaten bungalow, laughing.

  “Liam!” she shouted. “Over here. You ought to see this.”

  She led us through the front door and into a parlor decorated with horror-movie posters, Heineken empties, and dirty laundry. Straight ahead was one of those collapsible staircases that pull down from a trap door in the ceiling. She snapped on her flashlight, and Veronica and I followed her up.

  “Watch your head,” she said, just as my skull met a rafter.

  Firemen had hacked holes in the roof to vent the smoke, but the cramped attic still reeked of burned wiring and something more. Rosie swung her flashlight to the left, illuminating a crude plywood table with two-by-fours for legs. On top was a hydroponic farm, two dozen marijuana plants under a bank of charred high-intensity lights. Half of the plants were just stalks, their leaves consumed by the fire. The rest had withered in the heat.

  “A house full of Brown students growing their own,” Rosie said. “The lights overheated and would have burned the place to the ground, we hadn’t gotten here in time.”

  “Mind if I inhale?”

  “Be my guest,” she said. “Half the crew’s been up here sucking in breaths and holding them.”

  She laughed again, and we joined in. It wasn’t that funny, but we were all giddy with relief that the serial arsonist had taken the night off. And I think Rosie was a little high.

  Rosie pulled me aside and whispered in my ear. She was only two inches taller than me, so she didn’t have to bend down much to do it.

  “I thought you liked ’em tall.”

  “Short works for me, too. All the parts are still there, just closer together.”

  “She’s beautiful, Liam.”

  “And she cooks.”

  “She got any idea how crazy you are about her?”

  That stopped me. “What makes you think that?”

  “Are you kidding? I can tell just by the way you look at her.”

  She kissed me on the cheek and said, “Buy her something nice she can wear against her skin.”

  * * *

  On the drive home I felt jittery. Rosie knew me better than I knew myself, and what she’d said had thrown me off balance. And the adrenaline rush of a big story was still cruising my arteries with no place to go. Veronica sensed it and laid her hand on my thigh.

  “Why don’t we stop for a drink at Hopes?” she said.

  “I got a better idea. Let’s go home and get naked.”

  “Only if you explain something to me first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “How come Rosie gets to call you ‘Liam’?”

  “She’s been calling me that since first grade, Veronica. I guess it’s a habit she can’t break.”

  I backed Secretariat into a parking space across from my place and was reaching for the ignition key when the police scanner crackled again.

  “Code Red on Doyle!”

  My adrenal glands started pumping again as I turned the Bronco around. I drove back the way we’d come, monitoring the radio chatter.

  “Triple-decker fully involved. People in the windows. Engine Six needs assistance.”

  And then, a minute later, “Code Red on Pleasant! Single-family home fully involved. Engine Twelve needs assistance.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” Veronica said.

  I floored the pedal as we crossed the Providence River, raced up the steep slope of Olney Street, and swung left on Camp into Mount Hope.

  The radio again.

  “Code Red on Larch Street. Code Red! Code Red! All hell is breaking loose out here!”

  38

  Veronica fished the cell from her purse.

  “Which one are we heading for?” she said.

  “I’ll drop you at Doyle, then head for Larch.”

  She called the city-desk overnight supervisor, told him where we were going, and urged him to send everyone he had to Mount Hope. Then she made another call, getting Lomax out of bed.

  The radio squawked again, telling us the city of Pawtucket was responding to a mutual-aid request from Providence, three pumpers and a ladder truck on the way.

  From the corner of Camp and Doyle, we could see flames in the first- and second-story windows of a triple-decker fifty yards down the street. Police cruisers had Doyle blocked off, so I pulled over, told Veronica to be careful, and let her out.

  I watched her charm her way through the police line; then I sped five blocks north on Camp. The cops had Larch blocked off too, so I drove half a block past the intersection and pulled the Bronco up on the sidewalk, giving fire equipment and emergency vehicles room to maneuver.

  I dashed back down the sidewalk to Larch, where gawkers gathered at the police lines. They looked scared this time. Some of the women were weeping.

  I shouldered my way through until a uniformed officer blocked my way. Patrolman O’Banion was not a Mulligan fan. Probably had something to do with the time I wrote about him filching joints from the evidence locker, and the chief—no doubt pissed he hadn’t thought of it first—suspended him for a month without pay. I flashed my press pass at him. He glanced at it and said, “Get the fuck out of here.”

  I did, resisting the urge to break into a run. No point risking one of the DiMaggios mistaking me for a torch fleeing the scene. I walked a block south on Camp, turned east on Cypress, strolled up a driveway, climbed a stockade fence, found myself in another driveway, and emerged on Larch.

  I heard the fire before I felt it, the flames sounding like a thousand flags snapping in the wind. I felt it before I saw it, the heat like a backhand slap from the devil.

  A sheet of flame climbed the front of the duplex. Black smoke boiled from cheap asphalt siding, mixing with gray smoke that curled from the eaves. On the roof, two firemen swung axes, cutting vents to release the smoke trapped inside. The wind shot blazing tongues up the east side of the building to the peak. The two firemen gave up and scrambled down an aerial ladder on the other side as their brothers laid down a cover of spray.

  The street was a snare of fire hoses. Leakage from loose couplings soaked my jeans.

  Behind me, I heard a pop.

  I turned and saw a flash of light in a cellar window of a two-story bungalow. Peeling yellow paint, blue Dodge ram on blocks in the front yard. The house where I’d talked to Carmella DeLucca and her Neanderthal son, Joseph. A sheet of flame shot across the basement from right to left, illuminating the three cellar windows.

  “Hey!” I yelled. “Over here!”

  But four firemen had already turned from the duplex and were hauling two four-inch lines across the street. Rosie and two of her men strapped on respirators, lowered their faceplates, kicked in the front door, and burst insid
e. Half a minute later they emerged, Rosie carrying the flailing birdlike figure of Carmella DeLucca.

  “Put me down!”

  So she did. The old woman appeared to be all right, but one of the firemen led her to the rescue truck. I followed, and as a medic checked her over, I tried to pump her for details.

  “Mrs. DeLucca? Where were you when the fire started?”

  “None of your business,” she said. “And don’t go putting my name in your paper.”

  “Want to say something about the chief? She just saved your life.”

  “Like hell she did. I was perfectly capable of walking out of there my own self.”

  Across the street, smoke from the duplex had changed from black billows to white steam, a sign that the fire was retreating, its work well done.

  The bungalow took up the slack. It burped a series of dull thuds, probably old paint cans exploding in the basement. Smoke rolled from the gutters along the roofline as the fire clawed up the walls between the studs, where the streams from the hoses couldn’t reach it. Thin gray smoke curled from the open front door.

  That’s when Joseph DeLucca lumbered down the sidewalk dragging Officer O’Banion, who was clinging to his leg. Joseph reached down with one paw, peeled the cop off, and bellowed.

  “MA!”

  “She’s safe,” I shouted, but he didn’t listen.

  He charged up the front walk, rushed through the door, and was swallowed by smoke. Rosie and one of the other firemen who’d just rescued “Ma” went in after him.

  I stood in the street, held my breath, and counted the seconds.

  Ten. The window curtains caught fire.

  Twenty. A stuffed chair near the front window ignited.

  Thirty. Flames chewed through the siding near the door.

  Forty. A tongue of fire curled from the eaves and licked the roof.

  Fifty. Joseph hurtled through the front door like he’d been thrown. Behind him, Rosie and the other fireman materialized in the smoky doorway. Joseph tried to shove past them to get back inside. They wrestled him to the ground, beating on his burning hair with their insulated gloves. Another fireman tipped his nozzle to the sky and let the spray fall on them like spring rain.