Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  As Mrs. Diggs trudged toward the newsroom elevator, Mason sprang from his chair and followed her out.

  14

  Early next morning, Mason grabbed an empty chair, the same one Esther Diggs had sat in the day before, rolled it into Mulligan’s cubicle, and plopped down beside him.

  “I talked to Kwame Diggs’s mother,” Mason said.

  “I kind of figured that.”

  “I think she has a point.”

  “About her son being innocent?”

  “No, not that. After I talked with her, I spent a couple of hours in the news library reading your old stories about the case. No question he killed all those people.”

  “Then what?”

  “That the state is faking new charges to keep him inside.”

  “Maybe so,” Mulligan said.

  “It’s not right.”

  “Depends on how you look at it.”

  “They’re breaking the law,” Mason said.

  “Name a Rhode Island public official who isn’t.”

  “They’re violating his civil rights.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t have any.”

  “If they can do this to him,” Mason said, “they can do it to anybody.”

  “But they don’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  Mulligan didn’t have an answer for that.

  “After I talked to Mrs. Diggs,” Mason said, “I called Olivia Monteiro at the ACLU.”

  “So?”

  “She was reluctant to talk about it at first. She kept saying nothing good could come from dredging up the whole story.”

  “She’s right.”

  “I disagree.”

  “So you pressed her.”

  “I did. I couldn’t get her to speak on the record; but off the record she thinks it’s a conspiracy—that prison officials, prosecutors, and judges all know the charges they keep bringing against Diggs are bogus.”

  “Good for them,” Mulligan said.

  “She thinks even Diggs’s lawyer may be in on it.”

  “Good for him, too.”

  Mason sadly shook his head. “I thought you’d care about this.”

  “I don’t. Monteiro isn’t all that hot and bothered about it either. If she were, she’d file a civil rights suit on Diggs’s behalf.”

  “So it’s up to us,” Mason said.

  Mulligan stared at him. Subtract the Ivy League pedigree, the trust fund, and the Giorgio Armani suit worth more than Dispatch reporters made in a month, and the kid reminded him of himself—back when Mulligan was young and naïve, before two decades of working as a reporter had taught him how the world works.

  “Look,” Mulligan said, “I admit you’ve got a point. The law should apply equally to everybody. In a democracy, the authorities don’t get to make up the rules as they go along.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But what do you think would happen,” Mulligan went on, “if you proved officials are falsifying charges against Diggs?”

  “I’d be able to write a great abuse-of-power story.”

  “Yeah. But they’d also have to let Diggs out.”

  “I suppose they would.”

  “And if he gets out, he’ll kill again.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” Mulligan said. “Kwame Diggs is a serial killer. Every night for the last eighteen years, he’s been lying in his prison bunk, fantasizing about stabbing women and children to death.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “It’s what monsters do.”

  Mason fell silent and thought about it for a while.

  “I still think we have an obligation to look into it,” he said.

  “So who’s stopping you?”

  “I could use your help.”

  “No way,” Mulligan said.

  “Saying no to the publisher’s son might not be a smart career move.”

  “When have I ever made a smart career move, Thanks-Dad?”

  “Stop calling me that. I can’t help it that my father is the publisher.”

  “Then why do you keep reminding me?”

  They were both chuckling now, the momentary tension between them gone.

  “What the hell,” Mulligan said. “There’s no future here anyway.”

  15

  Gloria perched on the edge of her desk chair and squinted at the picture on the twenty-seven-inch iMac computer monitor with her one good eye.

  The photo froze Kwame Diggs as he was being led inside the Superior Court building in Providence, his hands cuffed behind his back and his legs hobbled by a short steel chain. Two state cops held his bulging biceps in a tight grip. They were big men, but Diggs made them look like dwarfs. At six feet five and 330 pounds, he appeared fit enough to play nose tackle for Gloria’s favorite team, the New England Patriots. Just behind him, two more state cops stood with shotguns at port arms.

  Gloria clicked the mouse, zooming in for a closer look at the vacant expression on Diggs’s concrete block of a face. She remembered exactly how she’d felt when she snapped the photo last year. She’d drawn the assignment to get a picture of Diggs as he was being taken to court to answer for his latest assault on a prison guard. She’d shot a lot of photos that day, but her hands had shaken so badly that this was the only one that wasn’t a blurry mess.

  Gloria closed the picture, searched the archives, and called up the file photo of Eric Kessler. A Dispatch photographer had taken it at the killer’s last court appearance three decades ago. Kessler had been a big guy, too, but in his case, most of the weight was flab. She clicked the mouse again, zooming in on a face that looked as if it had been sculpted from a block of suet.

  Kessler looked much creepier than Diggs, she thought, so why didn’t his picture scare her as much? For a moment, she worried that it was because Kessler was white and Diggs was black. But no, that wasn’t it. She’d never been one of those women who clutched her purse tighter when she passed a black man on the sidewalk. Then it came to her. Kessler’s victims were boys, but Diggs had butchered three little girls and two women. Blond women who looked a lot like her. She remembered, then, how he had turned to leer at her as he was led up the courthouse steps. She called up Diggs’s photo again. It made her shiver.

  This morning, she’d caught wind of what Mason was up to. It was hard to keep secrets in the Dispatch’s newsroom.

  What the hell was the publisher’s son thinking?

  16

  Wednesday morning, Mulligan was summoned to Lomax’s office. He slumped into a red leather chair, took a pull of coffee from a Styrofoam cup, and said, “What’s up, boss?”

  “We got ourselves a situation,” Lomax said.

  “And what would that be?”

  “It’s Mason.”

  “You’re gonna have to be more specific.”

  “The kid’s got a bug up his ass about Kwame Diggs.”

  “So I hear.”

  “I don’t want any part of it,” Lomax said.

  “Me either.”

  “Then how come you’re helping him?”

  “I’m not.”

  “He says you are.”

  “Uh-uh. I told him no way.”

  “Guess he’s not taking no for an answer,” Lomax said.

  “Looks like.”

  “I told him no, too,” Lomax said. “Actually, I think I said, ‘Fuck, no.’”

  “And he reminded you that he’s the publisher’s son,” Mulligan said.

  “That he did. He also reminded me that if the Dispatch manages to stay afloat, he’s going to be my boss someday.”

  “So the young pretender is starting to throw his weight around,” Mulligan said.

  “Oh hell, yeah.”

  “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss,” Mulligan said.

  “Huh?” The managing editor was not a Who fan.

  Lomax took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

  “You know,” he said, “maybe you sho
uld help him.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “That way you can keep an eye on him, let me know what he’s up to.”

  “Is that an order?”

  “Yeah. But Mulligan?”

  “Um?”

  “Don’t help him too much.”

  * * *

  Mulligan had been writing about crime and political corruption for nearly twenty years now. For more than a decade, he’d been a member of the paper’s elite investigative team. After it was disbanded and three of its members laid off, he still eked out time for investigative work between routine assignments that used to be handled by reporters who were now collecting unemployment checks. Over the years, he’d learned a few things about serial killers. He knew, for example, that they have always walked among us.

  In the fifteenth century, a wealthy Frenchman named Gilles de Rais kidnapped and slaughtered somewhere between one hundred and eight hundred peasant children. In the sixteenth century, a Hungarian aristocrat named Elizabeth Báthory tortured and murdered an estimated six hundred young girls. Herman Webster Mudgett, one of the first American serial killers, lured victims to his hundred-room World’s Fair Hotel in Chicago in the 1890s, gassed them, and sold their skeletons to medical schools. Mudgett confessed to twenty-seven murders, but historians think there may have been two hundred and fifty. By those standards, Kwame Diggs was an underachiever.

  A serial killer, by definition, is someone who commits at least three separate murders, each followed by a cooling-off period. Technically, Diggs didn’t qualify because he was caught after his second attack. But Mulligan knew exactly what he was.

  The day Mulligan’s story about Kessler’s pending release hit the paper, somebody opened a “Keep Eric Kessler Locked Up” page on Facebook. Within hours, it had more than six thousand followers. When word of what Mason is up to leaks out, Mulligan thought, the next protest won’t be on a social-networking site.

  It will be on the Dispatch’s doorstep.

  17

  Mason parked his vintage Jag in the lot outside 881 Eddy Street, sat behind the wheel, and mulled over what he’d learned when he Googled Marcus Aurelius Washington: Fifty-one years old. Boston College. New England School of Law. Ten years as a community organizer in the Roxbury section of Boston. Four terms in the Massachusetts legislature. Failed gubernatorial candidate. A half-dozen years as deputy director of the NAACP in Boston before moving fifty miles down I-95 last fall to run the organization’s Providence branch.

  This was going to be a waste of time, Mason told himself as he climbed out of the car. Washington probably hadn’t been in Rhode Island long enough to have even heard of Kwame Diggs.

  When Washington rose to greet him, Mason’s first thought was that he knew this guy from somewhere. Then he realized it was only because he was a dead ringer for the right-wing clown whose campaign for the Republican presidential nomination had been derailed by a sex scandal. The Godfather’s Pizza guy. What was his name? Oh, yeah. Herman Cain.

  Mason settled into a brown leather visitor’s chair across from the desk and took a quick survey of the framed wall photos: Washington posing with John Kerry, Jesse Jackson, Deval Patrick, Edward M. Kennedy, Barbara Jordan, and Eric Holder. He declined the obligatory offer of coffee or bottled water and explained what he had come for.

  “I know all about Kwame Diggs,” Washington said, his voice booming as if he were speaking from a pulpit. “His sweet mother was the first person at my door when I settled into this office. She’s been quite persistent.”

  “How persistent?”

  “She calls me every week.”

  “Do you think her son is a murderer?” Mason asked.

  “Of course he is.”

  “I think so too.”

  “So why are you here?”

  “Because I believe the state of Rhode Island may be violating his civil rights.”

  “Probably so,” Washington said.

  “What are you doing about that?”

  “Not a thing.”

  They stared silently at each other. Mason fidgeted with his pen and notepad. Washington calmly clasped his hands on his desk blotter.

  “I’m guessing your next question is, ‘Why not?’” Washington said.

  “It is.”

  The lawyer took a moment to compose his answer.

  “Diggs was a big, scary-looking black kid who butchered five white females,” he finally said. “Do you have any idea how much racial hatred that stirred up back in the nineties?”

  “I don’t. I was a kid myself back then.”

  “I didn’t know either until I asked around about it.”

  “And?”

  “And the answer is, ‘Not all that much.’”

  “Really?”

  “Really. The day after Diggs’s arrest, a local radio talk show host got a couple of on-air calls from morons who wanted to rant about the jigaboos. He cut them right off. It’s a shame, he told his listeners, that the killer turned out to be a black kid, because it brought out the worst in some people. After that, the subject of race never came up. Not publicly, anyway.”

  “Wow.”

  “Exactly. If this had happened in Boston, all you would have heard was nigger this and nigger that.”

  The word, spoken in Washington’s resounding baritone, made Mason cringe.

  “What about now?” Mason asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “There’s a big difference between the way the Diggs and Kessler cases are being handled. Mrs. Diggs thinks race has something to do with that.”

  “I suppose it’s possible,” Washington said, “but I don’t really think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “The two situations are quite different. Kessler committed an abominable act, but given his present age and condition, he’s no longer a threat. He’ll be standing before his Maker soon enough. Diggs is another story. When he turned twenty-one, it was obvious to everyone that he was too dangerous to be set free, no matter what the law said.”

  “So the authorities found creative ways to keep him locked up,” Mason said.

  “They did.”

  “Olivia Monteiro suspects that those creative ways violated the law.”

  “I haven’t looked into that in any detail,” Washington said, “but it may well be the case.”

  “Have you discussed this with her?”

  “I have.”

  “And?”

  “Officially, the ACLU has other priorities. Unofficially, Olivia is a young woman with two daughters.”

  “So nobody is investigating this?”

  “Nobody but you, apparently.”

  Mason just shook his head.

  “Look, Mr. Mason. You need to understand something here. The last thing the NAACP wants is a black serial killer on the loose in Rhode Island.”

  Mason got to his feet, shook Washington’s hand, and thanked him for his time. Then he went out the door, strode through the parking lot, and froze. His ride was gone.

  Mulligan had warned him more than once not to drive the Jaguar in Providence, the stolen car capital of New England. But the silver-blue coupe was a joy to drive. Mason took it everywhere. He pulled out his cell to report it stolen, but he figured it was already being dismantled in a nearby chop shop.

  Mulligan, he thought, will probably get a good laugh out of this.

  * * *

  Four days later, Mason drove his new car south on I-95, turned off at exit 13 in Warwick, and cruised toward a storefront lawyer’s office located in a Post Road strip mall near T. F. Green Airport.

  If he’d waited for the insurance money to come in, Mason would have had the cash for another vintage Jag; but given the precarious state of the paper’s finances, it seemed prudent to economize. True, he had shelled out extra for the voice-activated touch-screen navigation system and splurged on a sound system with eight speakers, a four-disc CD changer, and MP3/WMA playback capability.

  But this new car was no
fun to drive. No fun at all.

  Jerome Haggerty’s legal secretary turned out to be a frumpy forty-something with a plunging neckline and long, straight hair that had been chemically tortured to the color and consistency of straw. No fun there, either. Haggerty apparently disagreed.

  His first words to Mason: “Did you get a load of those tits?”

  They were looking at each other now across Haggerty’s obsessively neat desk, his reading glasses, a stapler, and a couple of ballpoint pens neatly arranged on the blotter and not photo or a scrap of paper in sight.

  “As I told you on the telephone,” Haggerty said, “I no longer represent Kwame Diggs.”

  “Since when?”

  “Last week.”

  “Can you tell me why were you dismissed?”

  Haggerty shook his head. Flakes of dandruff floated down to settle on his shoulder.

  “The client declined to say.”

  “I was hoping you still might be willing to answer a few questions about his case.”

  “Only if they do not intrude upon lawyer-client privilege.”

  “I understand.”

  Mason removed the cap from his Montblanc fountain pen and flipped open his notebook.

  “By my count,” he said, “the state has charged Diggs with four additional offenses since he was incarcerated for murder in 1994.”

  “I believe your numbers are correct.”

  “The first charge, filed two years after his murder convictions, was contempt of court for refusing to submit to a psychiatric evaluation?”

  “It was.”

  “And he received the maximum sentence for that?”

  “There’s no maximum sentence for contempt,” Haggerty said. “It is entirely at the discretion of the judge.”

  “Who gave him seven years,” Mason said.

  “Yes.”

  “Doesn’t that seem excessive?”

  “Let’s just call it unusually stiff.”