Rogue Island

by Bruce DeSilva

  “Marry me, Dustin!”

  “Hey, Youk! How ’bout an autograph?”

  “Josh! I wanna have your baby!”

  Rosie waded into the crowed and shoved her way to the front. A couple of guys started to object, then craned their necks for a look at her and thought better of it. That’s when Manny Ramirez bounded through the door like a schoolboy. He grinned and swung an imaginary bat as digital cameras clicked. Rosie let loose a shriek I’d heard only from smitten teenage girls at rock concerts.

  Manny turned toward the sound and, as all men must, he noticed Rosie towering over the throng. Above the dozens of maniacs screeching his name, I clearly heard him say, “Wow.”

  As he approached the fence, she stuck her fingers through it. He grinned, grabbed them, and squeezed. Chief Rosella Morelli, the hero of Mount Hope, turned to mush. Then Manny turned and walked to his restored 1966 Lincoln Continental. He looked back, marveled at Rosie again, climbed in behind the wheel, and was gone.

  She stared until the taillights disappeared around a corner. Then she turned toward me.

  “If you ever …

  tell anyone …

  about this …”

  “About what?”

  We followed the crowd to the Cask’n Flagon at the corner of Lansdowne Street and Brookline Avenue for beer and pizza, then wandered down the street to shoot some pool at the Boston Billiard Club. Much later, we had last call at Bill’s Bar around the corner. By then, it was too late to catch the last train to Providence, so the bartender pointed us to an after-hours joint that offered a choice of Budweiser or Miller straight from the can, Jim Beam or Rebel Yell in chipped shot glasses, and a lot of backslapping from blitzed Sox fans. We caught the first morning train, a 6:10 local, and tried to sleep it off on the way home. By the time we were deposited, happy and rumpled, at Providence Station, it was 6:55 A.M. Bedtime.

  A Mr. Potato Head statue greeted us in the lobby. On its flank, someone had scrawled “Yankees Suck!” in red spray paint. I thanked Rosie again for the ticket, gave her a hug, begged her to be careful, and staggered out of the station. I walked up Atwells Avenue toward home, poured some Maalox on my screaming ulcer, and collapsed on my mattress.

  It was nearly noon by the time I made it in to work. As I stepped into the city room, Lomax grabbed my arm.

  “Mulligan! Hear what happened to Gloria Costa?”

  47

  Fifteen minutes later, I slipped into her room at Rhode Island Hospital and didn’t recognize the face on the pillow. Her right eye was covered with gauze. Her nose was blue-black and hooked to the left. Her lips were split and swollen. Her right hand, encased in a cast, lay still on the crisp white sheet. Dried blood matted her blond hair. She didn’t look like Sharon Stone anymore.

  I reached for her left hand, then saw the IV line taped to the back of it, so I just laid my palm on her shoulder. Her left eye fluttered open, and she mumbled something that might have been my name.

  I got up and removed her chart from its hook at the foot of her bed. “Severed tendon, right hand. Fractured right occipital bone. Three fractured ribs, right side. Multiple contusions to face, arms, chest, and back. Detached retina, right eye. Prognosis for regaining sight uncertain.”

  I couldn’t remember which eye she used to look through the viewfinder.

  * * *

  That night Veronica cooked for me again, bringing her own wok and stir-frying a fragrant mix of shrimp, ginger, and something she called “vegetables.” The rising steam misted her skin.

  “How is Gloria doing?” she asked.

  “She’s hurting. She’s not talking much. It’s hard to look at her. You should go see her. I’m sure she’s tired of gazing up at my face.”

  There was silence as Veronica turned off the burner beneath the wok. Finally she said, “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

  The Sox game was a safer subject. As we ate, I blathered about it, stopping about ten minutes after her eyes glazed over. Then she told me about her weekend dining out and shopping at Providence Place with her sister.

  “Miss me?” she said.

  “Oh, yeah. I sure did.”

  When I got around to my encounter with the little thug, she dropped her fork and stared at me. “Jesus, Mulligan! Why didn’t you tell me this first?”

  “ ’Cause the Sox are way more important.”

  “What if he comes back?”

  “I’m counting on it. Believe me, I can totally kick his ass, and I’m going to, first chance I get.”

  She picked up her fork again and stabbed at a shrimp.

  “You aren’t two boys on the playground, Mulligan. If this is our firebug, we already know that he kills people. What if he has a gun next time?”

  “I’ll just take it away from him,” I said, suddenly feeling less cocksure than I sounded.

  “What if he goes for this again?” she asked, her fingers brushing the front of my jeans. “With the luck you’ve been having lately, he might do some permanent damage next time.”

  I didn’t like where the conversation was going, but I liked where her hand was wandering. I was a little tired, but the parts I planned on using weren’t. Once we flopped into bed, I was turned down flat. For the first time since we’d first done it, we weren’t doing it.

  “You need to rest,” she whispered. “And you need to stop acting like such a cowboy.”

  She pulled my head to her chest, and it felt good there. She touched her lips to my forehead, lingering on a spot I swear had never been kissed before. Suddenly, sleep became a distinct possibility. Her smell was a drug, pulling me under.

  “G’night,” I managed to mutter.

  “Love you, baby,” she said. Or maybe I dreamed it.

  48

  The next day, Gloria was a little better. Not much, but a little. Well, enough to try to tell me her story. She spoke in snapshots, sometimes stopping to weep, sometimes to catch her breath. Her voice was hoarse and faint. I sat at her bedside for two mornings and two afternoons before I had the story straight.

  Saturday night, after I’d let her stroll out of Hopes alone, she prowled Mount Hope in her little blue Ford Focus. Just before midnight, the rain turned hard and cold. She reached for her thermos and realized she’d forgotten to fill it before starting out. Zerilli’s store was still open, so she parked in the lot beside the building and dashed inside. At the coffee stand, she recharged the thermos with a quart of Green Mountain. When she stepped back outside, the rain beat down harder. Head down, she sprinted to her car and slid the key in the lock.

  She had just yanked the car door open and put her right foot inside when it happened:

  The heel of a hand ramming into her back. A face-first fall onto the driver’s seat, the thermos slipping from her hand, clattering on the asphalt. A man’s weight slamming on top of her, stealing her breath. Rain hammering the roof, drowning her screams.

  Clawing out from under him. Scrambling across the console toward the passenger-side door. Fists pounding her face. Her head shoved under the dash. Her hand wrenching off a shoe, whacking it against the side window to attract someone. Anyone. The shoe torn from her hand, bashed against her skull. A knife suddenly at her throat. A voice cutting the dark:

  “Gonna fuck your ass, you nosy bitch.” Saying it again. And again. And again.

  Lying motionless now, half on the floor, as he pulls the Nikon from her camera bag, then rummages in her purse. His voice again:

  “Where’s the money, bitch?”

  Her voice: “In the wallet. Just a few dollars.”

  The fists again. The knife on the seat now as he works the clasp on her Skagen wristwatch. The knife so close. Taking a chance. Grabbing the knife, pointing it at his face. A face that is no face. Covered with a blue ski mask.

  His voice: “Asking for it now, bitch.”

  Her small hand crushed in his, mangled, making popping sounds. The blade biting through the base of her right thumb, severing the tendon, then dropping to the seat. Her head gr
abbed and whacked against the dash again and again. And the mantra: “Gonna fuck your ass, you nosy bitch.” A mantra just for her.

  Suddenly the voice stopping, his body falling over hers, pinning her to the seat. Two of them out of sight, still as death. Was someone passing by? The DiMaggios? A police patrol?

  Her car keys had gone flying when their dance began. He found them now on the passenger-side floor mat, fired the ignition, drove. She tried to peek out the window, to catch a glimpse of freedom, but he slapped her hard for it, then put his big hand on top of her head and pushed it down. She wasn’t sure how long they had been driving when she felt the car slow and stop.

  “It’s time, nosy picture-taking bitch.”

  His hands at her clothes now, yanking the sweatshirt over her breasts, ripping off the bra. The fists again. An endless beating. Pointing the knife at her throat, making her tug off her jeans and panties. Thick fingers snaking clumsily between her legs.

  Remembering. You don’t resist a rapist. Something she read somewhere.

  Her voice: “Let’s get in the backseat so we can both enjoy this.”

  His voice: “Yeah. Go ahead, bitch.”

  Scrambling over the seat on all fours into the back, feeling in the dark for the lever that unlatches the hatchback. The man just behind her, his big hands groping.

  Her good hand finding the latch, jerking it, flinging the hatchback open. Scrambling out. Slamming the hatch in his face. Running blindly, smack into a telephone pole. Turning and running, naked and bloody, through the cold, cold rain.

  Jesus. She’d asked me to go with her.

  “What did he look like?”

  She mumbled something I didn’t catch.

  “Short? Muscular?”

  Could it have been the little thug?

  Another mumble.

  I stopped pressing. I’d put her through enough.

  49

  “She never saw his face,” Laura Villani, the sex-crimes sergeant, told me late that afternoon. “He kept the ski mask on the whole time. All we got is white male, smoker’s voice, wedding band, green windbreaker. She never saw him standing, so she couldn’t guess his height.”

  Did the little thug wear a wedding band? I tried picturing his hands, but I couldn’t remember.

  “She was prowling the neighborhood waiting for the next fire,” I said.

  “So she told me.”

  “And he called her ‘nosy picture-taking bitch.’ ”

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s the angle we’re working. Her description doesn’t give us much to go on, but we pulled a couple of fingerprints from her vinyl camera bag. If they’re his and he’s in the system, we’ll get him.”

  “If you do, I’d like to have a few minutes alone with him.”

  “If we do, I just might let you.”

  * * *

  I went back to the office, pulled all my notes on the fires out of my file drawer, and stacked them on my desk. Twenty-two notepads crammed with fire scene descriptions, property ownership records, arson findings, and countless interviews with victims, firefighters, and arson investigators. Twenty-two notebooks full of nothing.

  Or were they?

  When a homicide detective hits a dead end, he studies the murder book, a chronological record of every detail of his investigation. I didn’t have a murder book, but I did have all those notebooks. Was there something in them that I had overlooked? Was there something that should have been in them but wasn’t? Could I find some sort of pattern in four months worth of scribbles? I flipped the first one open and started reading.

  I’d just started the second notebook when Mason walked up.

  “I’m so sorry about Gloria,” he said.

  “I know you are.”

  “I sent flowers.”

  “I know. I saw them in her room.”

  He frowned and shook his head.

  “Her right eye,” he said. “It’s the one she uses to look through the viewfinder.”

  He’d noticed that? Maybe he had some reporter in him after all.

  “Maybe she can learn to use her left,” I said.

  “Either way, she’s got a job for life. I’ll see to it.”

  He stood silently for a moment, a slim file folder clutched in his left hand.

  “Whatcha got there?” I said, already knowing what it was.

  “My manhole-covers file. I’d really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and go over this with me, make sure I haven’t missed anything.”

  “Okay. Drag that empty chair over here and let’s have a look.”

  He sat down, pushed an empty pizza box aside, and laid the folder on my desk. He opened it carefully, as if he were handling a Gutenberg Bible, and took out three sheets of paper—photocopies of city purchasing records showing transactions with a local manufacturer called West Bay Iron.

  “How many does it add up to?” I asked.

  “Nine hundred and ten.”

  “Quit whispering, Thanks-Dad. Nobody’s going to steal your story.”

  “The orders are spread over a year,” he said, “each one kept under fifteen hundred dollars to evade the city’s competitive-bidding requirement. All together, nine hundred and ten cast-iron manhole covers at fifty-five dollars each comes to just over fifty thousand.”

  “What does the city highway department need with nine hundred and ten new manhole covers?”

  “That’s what I wondered. I went over there to ask Gennaro Baldelli, but he threw me out.”

  “ ‘Blackjack’ Baldelli.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what our highway superintendent likes to be called.”

  “So I went to see his deputy, Louis Grieco. He have a nickname, too?

  “ ‘Knuckles.’ ”

  “Yeah, well Knuckles told me to get lost.”

  “Then what did you do?”

  “I went over to city hall and checked campaign contribution records,” he said, extracting another sheet of paper from the file folder. “Turns out that Peter Abrams, the owner of West Bay Iron, gave the legal limit to the mayor’s last reelection campaign.”

  “Pretty good work, Thanks-Dad.”

  “I’ve been working on my lead. Can you take a look at it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?

  “Because you aren’t ready to write.”

  “I’m not?”

  “You don’t have enough. All you’ve got is the city throwing a little business to a big campaign contributor. That might be a story in Iowa or Connecticut, but in Rhode Island it’s not news. It’s business as usual.”

  “I wasted my time, then?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “So what’s my next step?”

  “Find out what they’re doing with all those manhole covers.”

  “But I already asked. They won’t tell me.”

  “That’s because you asked the wrong people. You’ve got to cultivate some sources, Thanks-Dad. Seduce a secretary. Find out where the snowplow drivers drink and buy them a few rounds. Chat up the men who work with shovels and don’t have titles after their names.”

  Mason smiled, walked back to his desk, slipped the manhole-covers file in his top drawer, and reached for the phone. Maybe I’d been wrong about him. That got me to wondering what else I’d been wrong about.

  I picked up the first notebook and started in again, wanting to read them all straight through without interruption. Over the next hour, six reporters and five copy editors stopped by my desk to ask how Gloria was doing. McCracken and Rosie called for the same reason, and Dorcas rang me up to offer her customary salutation.

  Clearly, this wasn’t going to work.

  I turned off the cell phone, stuffed the notebooks in a beat-up vinyl briefcase, and headed for Secretariat.

  The “Out of Order” hood I’d tugged over the parking meter was gone, and something was scrawled on the ticket tucked under my wiper blade: “Nice try.” I hated losing that hood, but I still had my b
ackup plan. I walked down the block, put the ticket on the publisher’s windshield, got in the Bronco, and drove home.

  I stretched out on my mattress and started in again with the first notebook, reading slowly and jotting an occasional note on a fresh yellow legal pad. It took me two hours to go through all the notebooks, the one I’d spilled beer on still mostly legible. Then I started over and read them all again. When I was done, all I had on the legal pad was a half page of scribbled questions.

  Who owned the five mystery companies that had bought up a quarter of Mount Hope? Chances were it wasn’t really the long-dead roster of the Providence Grays. Was there any way to find out? Were they still in the market for property in the fire-prone neighborhood? If so, why? What was it Joseph DeLucca had told me? That they should have sold their place when they had the chance. Had someone made Ma an offer?

  On my second reading, I noticed that my notes on the incorporation papers included everything but the names of the lawyers who’d filed them. At the time, it hadn’t seemed important. It probably still wasn’t. Lawyers for clients who wanted to remain anonymous weren’t likely to give me the time of day. Still, it was a loose end.

  Why had Giordano tipped me about the manhole covers? It certainly wasn’t out of concern for the civic good. What had he said when he gave me the tip? That I should stop wasting my time with Mount Hope. Was he trying to distract me from the arson story? What reason would he have for doing that? More likely he was nursing a grudge against Blackjack and Knuckles for the time they refused to give one of their no-show jobs to his brother Frank.

  On one of the beer-stained notebook pages, I’d recorded seeing a Dio Construction crew knocking down a burned-out triple-decker. I’d underlined Dio three times. Why had I thought that might be important? I thought about it. I got up, swigged some Maalox, came back, and thought about it some more. But I didn’t have a clue.

  And who was the little thug? Was he the pyromaniac, or was he hired muscle delivering a message for someone else?