Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  “That’s fine.”

  “So you’re workin’ on a story about Diggs, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Great. I’m happy to do anything that will help keep that crazy sonovabitch locked up.”

  Mason thought it best not to straighten him out.

  “Just keep my name out of it, okay?” Sockol said. “I don’t want to get in any trouble.”

  “I will. You have my word.”

  20

  Mulligan and Gloria circled the statehouse in Secretariat, his pet name for his battered old Ford Bronco. All of the parking spaces, even the illegal ones, were taken, so they shelled out a few bucks to park in the garage at the Providence Place Mall and walked up the hill to the noon rally.

  The forecast was for rain, but that hadn’t discouraged the turnout. Thousands had gathered on the long slope of the statehouse lawn, ringed by dozens of uniformed state cops and a squadron of mounted Providence police. Most of the crowd was in shirtsleeves, thanks to global warming. The ninety-eight-degree temperature was an all-time Providence record for April.

  As they passed through the crowd, Gloria snapped photos of people waving hand-lettered signs:

  Justice for Brian Freeman.

  What Are You Thinking?

  And dozens bearing an old photo of Eric Kessler and a single word: Monster.

  Gloria spotted a little boy, no more than six, standing beside his parents. He held a sign containing a photo of Brian Freeman and a message he’d apparently written himself:

  This Could of Bin Me.

  “That one,” Gloria said, “will end up on page one.”

  Monsignor Ignatius Buffone stood at a lectern that had been placed at the top of the statehouse steps, raised his hand for silence, and spoke into the microphone.

  “Dear Lord, bless the Freeman family and all of the good people of Rhode Island who have gathered here on this day. We pray that you will give our public servants the wisdom to protect us from those who would do evil to our children. And Lord, please stay your rain just a little while longer. Blessed be God in his angels and in his saints.”

  Then Providence’s hottest radio host, Iggy Rock, stepped forward, adjusted the microphone, and shouted, “Good morning, Row Dyelin!”

  Iggy’s birth name, Mulligan knew, was Armen Bardakjian. He’d grown up in the Providence neighborhood of Fox Point; flunked out of Rhode Island College, which was no easy thing to do; washed out as a Yugo salesman, Dunkin’ Donuts store manager, and Amway distributor; and failed to make the grade as a wife beater. After he slapped his wife for the third time, she drove him to the emergency room to get his bruised testicles and broken nose treated.

  Now, as Iggy Rock, he had reinvented himself as a right-wing radio howler, his shtick a cross between Laura Ingraham–style moralizing and Rush Limbaugh–style liberal bashing. At first, he had called himself Igneous Rock, but he’d recently shortened it to Iggy after realizing few of his listeners knew what igneous meant.

  “Thank you all for answering my call to gather here today,” Iggy was saying. “Look at the size of this crowd. This is democracy in action. Your voices will be heard!”

  He thrust both hands in the air as if signaling a touchdown, and the crowd erupted with cheers and applause.

  “I am honored to be your host for these proceedings,” he said. “Without further ado, I want to introduce a true Row Dyelin hero, Chief Vincent Matea of the Hopkinton Police Department.”

  Matea, looking stiff in his dress police uniform, stepped forward, removed his cap, and placed it on the lectern.

  “Thank you, Iggy,” he said, “but I’m no hero. I’m just a country policeman who tries to do an honest job.”

  That drew a smattering of appreciative applause.

  “Back in 1982, when I was a sergeant, I arrested Eric Kessler for the murder of Brian Freeman.”

  The crowd roared its approval.

  “In the years since,” Matea continued, “I have been the custodian of Kessler’s private journal. It depicts his bizarre fantasy world and graphically describes the unspeakable things he did to that innocent little boy. It still gives me nightmares, but this is a burden I must bear alone. A court order and simple human decency prevent me from sharing its contents with you.

  “What I can tell you with certainty,” he continued, “is that Eric Kessler does not deserve his freedom. If it were up to me, he would remain in a prison cell until he rots. That’s all I am prepared to say, so let me introduce you to the man you have come here to see: Brian’s courageous father, Mr. Gordon Freeman.”

  The crowd clapped politely as the tall, gaunt man stepped to the microphone. Iggy rushed to his side, grabbed his hand, and thrust it in the air.

  “Let’s have a huge Little Rhody welcome for Mr. Freeman!”

  The applause swelled.

  “I can’t hear you!” Iggy shouted.

  The crowd responded with a roar.

  Before it subsided, Freeman began to weep.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said, his deep voice trembling. He sounded like a man who had gone one day without drinking and now wished he hadn’t. “Thank you all for remembering Brian. My son was a beautiful little boy, and Eric Kessler took him from me. It is unthinkable that this monster would ever be set free, but the unthinkable is about to happen.”

  He paused, swiped the tears away with his palm, and continued, his voice stronger now.

  “Nothing will ever bring my boy back, but I promise that this madman will never enjoy a single day of freedom. If Eric Kessler gets out of prison, I’m going to kill him.”

  That sounded like an applause line to Mulligan, but it stunned the crowed into silence.

  “Still,” Freeman said, “I’d rather not get locked up myself. So I have come here to ask, to demand, that the folks with the power to stop this do the right thing. They say the law requires that Kessler be released. I say there is a higher law that says he must not be.”

  This time, the applause line did its job.

  “Attorney General Roberts is here with us this morning,” Freeman said. “I’d like him to come to the microphone now and tell us what he’s going to do about this.”

  The crowd booed and hooted as the patrician, silver-haired politician, who had first come to public attention as the lead prosecutor at Kwame Diggs’s murder trials, stepped to the lectern.

  Iggy elbowed him aside and shouted, “What? I still can’t hear you. Show him how you really feel.”

  Visibly irritated, Roberts stiff-armed Iggy away from the microphone.

  “Two days ago,” Roberts said, “Eric Kessler was observed flushing paper towels down the toilet in his cell. That is a violation of prison rules. For this offense, corrections officials were able to shave thirty days from the good time he earned during his years of incarceration. This fortunate turn of events has provided us with additional time to find a resolution to our dilemma.”

  That provoked angry shouts.

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s all you’ve got?”

  “Impeach Roberts!”

  The crowed took up the chant: “Impeach Roberts! Impeach Roberts!” The attorney general’s expression never changed. He waited for the chants to subside before continuing.

  “We are attempting to persuade Mr. Kessler that it would be in his best interest to agree to voluntary commitment in a secure psychiatric hospital upon his release.”

  That provoked a scattering of applause.

  “If he refuses, we could ask a judge to order his involuntary commitment,” Roberts said. “However, I don’t want to mislead you. As a rule, the courts are very reluctant to issue such orders.”

  With that, the crowd howled in protest. Roberts shrugged and stepped back. Iggy took his place at the microphone and led the crowd in the chant: “Impeach Roberts! Impeach Roberts! Impeach Roberts!”

  After a few minutes of this, Iggy raised his hand to silence the crowd, urged everyone to flood the attorney general and
the governor with letters and e-mails, and thanked everyone for coming.

  * * *

  “They sure were pissed,” Gloria said as she and Mulligan headed back to the newspaper to file the story.

  “You really can’t blame them,” Mulligan said. “They’ve got a lot of things to be angry about.”

  “You think this is about more than Kessler?”

  “Oh, sure. Rhode Island’s unemployment rate is the second highest in the country. Half the home mortgages in the state are underwater. Most of our cities and towns can’t afford to pay the pensions they’ve promised to teachers, cops, and firemen. Central Falls is in bankruptcy, Pawtucket is on the brink of it, and Woonsocket is in such a mess that it’s begging the state to take over its school system.”

  “And don’t forget Curt Schilling,” Gloria said. The former Red Sox World Series hero’s video game business was in so much trouble that the state was on the verge of losing the entire seventy-five million it had loaned him to lure the company to Providence.

  “That’s right,” Mulligan said. “All Iggy Rock has done is gather all that fear and anger and focus it on Kessler. When he’s finished with that, he’ll get people worked up about something else. It’s what he does.”

  “He’s good at it,” Gloria said. “You gotta give him that.”

  “He is,” Mulligan said. “Imagine what he’ll do with the Diggs case when he finds out what Thanks-Dad is up to.”

  * * *

  Back in the newsroom, Mulligan called Providence police headquarters and asked the desk sergeant for the official crowd estimate.

  “Six thousand,” he was told.

  Mulligan thanked him and hung up.

  Crowd estimates, Mulligan knew, were the product of a dishonest, age-old game between cops and journalists. Cops knew journalists were going to ask for them, so they just pulled numbers out of their asses. Journalists then published the figures even though they knew they were bullshit.

  It was a lesson Mulligan had learned back in 2004 when he covered the Boston parade celebrating the Red Sox’s World Series victory over the St. Louis Cardinals. When he wrote the story, he left out the official crowd estimate.

  “Why isn’t it in here?” the city editor had demanded.

  “Because it’s three point two million,” Mulligan had said.

  “So?”

  “The population of Boston is six hundred thousand. If every man, woman, and child in the city, including those who don’t give a rat’s ass about baseball, had actually shown up, another two point six million people would have had to drive in from out of town. No way that happened. If it had, they’d still be looking for parking spaces.”

  The city editor had ordered him to put the number in the story anyway.

  It was a fight Mulligan couldn’t win. He dutifully dropped the inflated six thousand figure into his story about the statehouse rally for Tuesday morning’s paper.

  21

  Gloria was seated alone at a table in back, working on her second Thursday afternoon Bud, when Mulligan walked into Hopes with a bulging shopping bag under each arm.

  “That all of it?” she asked.

  “It is.”

  “How long did it take you to print all this out?”

  “Nine hours.”

  “I believe it. You look like you didn’t get much sleep.”

  “I don’t want Mason to know what we’re up to,” Mulligan said, “so I had to wait until he went home last night.”

  “What time was that?”

  “After ten.”

  “He’s dedicated,” Gloria said.

  “Yeah, but so are we.”

  Mulligan dumped the bags, and computer printouts of every crime story and police log the paper had published about Diggs’s hometown of Warwick between 1988 and 1994 spilled onto the table. Back then, before the paper started to retrench, there was a five-person news bureau in Warwick; and every police report, from murders to dogs hit by cars, ended up in the Dispatch’s West Bay edition.

  “You take 1988 through 1990,” he said. “I’ll take the rest.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Serial killers start with small cruelties and gradually work their way up to murder. Look for unsolved cases of Peeping Toms, animal torture, arson, and assaults on women and children. He was just a kid back then, not old enough to drive, so focus on addresses within a mile or two of his house.”

  “And what are you looking for?”

  “Unsolved assaults, murders, or attempted murders between 1991, the year before he killed Becky Medeiros and her daughter, and 1994, when he slaughtered the Stuart family.”

  22

  The official name of the bunkerlike, reinforced concrete building off Interstate 95 in Cranston is the High Security Center, but no one in Rhode Island calls it that. To the locals, it’s Supermax, and it warehouses the state’s most violent criminals.

  It was built in 1981, when a glad-handing former beer salesman named J. Joseph Garrahy was governor. He made sure it was big enough to house 138 men. But now, only 84 of Rhode Island’s 3,311 inmates were considered badass enough to be locked up there.

  It was costing the state a hundred and fifty-seven thousand dollars per convict annually to run the facility, nearly four times the average for the state’s other prisons. Taxpayers didn’t complain. This was a rare case of them getting what they paid for. No one had ever escaped from Supermax.

  Inside, a dozen sad-faced women sat on two rows of molded plastic chairs that were bolted to the waiting room floor. Three of the women were attempting to shush their unruly children, who seemed to think this was a playdate. The rest of the women didn’t look as if they had the energy to make the effort. Mason, the only man in the room, stood in a corner with Felicia Freyer, Diggs’s new lawyer, and tried to stay clear of the mayhem. He thought she looked like a polished diamond among the slope-shouldered women.

  After what seemed like a long wait, a single prison guard dressed in a gray uniform with black piping on the pants legs stepped into the room and passed out sign-in forms. Mason hurriedly filled his in, not marking the box you were supposed to check if you had ever been convicted of a felony.

  Then another guard entered, holding a drug-sniffing German shepherd by a short leash.

  “Do not attempt to pet the dog,” he shouted.

  The pooch meandered through the narrow room, failed to alert, and was led away.

  The first guard collected the paperwork. Then he muttered something into a radio fastened to his left shoulder, and a steel door rolled open. The guard led Mason and Freyer through it, the three of them stepping into a claustrophobic steel compartment about the size of a small elevator. The door rolled shut behind them, and Mason heard the lock clank. Fifteen seconds later, a similar door in front of them buzzed and slid open.

  Mason and Freyer stepped out into a long, narrow room lined with twelve cramped booths. Each was furnished with a single blue plastic chair. Mason pulled one out for Freyer and stood beside her, peering through a thick Plexiglas partition smeared with greasy handprints and no telling how many years’ worth of dried tears. Beyond the partition another steel door slid open, and Kwame Diggs lumbered in, his big hands cuffed in front. He wore leg chains and an orange jumpsuit. A tan patch on his chest held his six-digit prison number: 694287.

  When he was arrested at the age of fifteen, Diggs had been a five-foot-ten, 250-pound behemoth with close-cropped naps, a mild case of acne, and lips that snarled for the camera. In prison, he’d grown into a giant with a shiny shaved skull and a neatly trimmed goatee. His face, Mason thought, looked disconcertingly jolly.

  Diggs approached the partition, his gait part grizzly bear and part furniture mover, and dropped into a plastic chair that looked too frail to hold his weight. He raised his big cuffed paws and picked up a black telephone receiver. Freyer already held its twin to her ear.

  Behind her, women and children were filing in and taking their places in the other booths. A guard holl
ered, “You’ve got thirty minutes.”

  “How are you today, Kwame?” Freyer asked. She paused for his clipped response. “Well, hang in there. This is Edward Mason, the reporter I told you about. Will you talk to him?”

  Diggs nodded.

  “Good,” she said, “but first let me give you a rundown on what I’ve been doing on your case.” As she talked, Mason kept checking his watch, the half hour they were allotted ticking away. Finally, Freyer handed Mason the phone. It crackled with static, like a long-distance call to Rwanda.

  “’Sup, cuz?”

  Mason was surprised by Diggs’s voice. It still had a trace of child in it.

  “I’d like to ask you some questions if that’s all right.”

  “Sure, no biggie. If I don’t like ’em, I’ll just rip this partition down and twist your fuckin’ head off.”

  Mason reeled back from the glass. Diggs threw back his head and howled.

  “Man, you shoulda seen your face just then. Just kidding, cuz. No way anybody can break through this glass. Folks done tried it, believe me.”

  “We don’t have much time,” Mason said, “so can we get to it?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Back in 1996, you were convicted of contempt for refusing a psych evaluation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why did you refuse?”

  “Lawyer told me to.”

  “Haggerty?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  “Why didn’t he want you to take it?”

  “He said they’d use the answers to get me locked up in the crazy house.”

  “But after you were sentenced to seven years for contempt, you changed your mind?”

  “Hell, yeah. Wouldn’t you?”

  “They say you were evasive during the evaluation.”

  “The dude in the white coat kept asking why I killed all those people. I told him I didn’t.”

  “But you did, didn’t you?”

  “Same answer, cuz.”

  “What else did they ask you?” Mason said, although he already knew from reading the case files. There had been a lot of questions about why Diggs was so angry. He’d insisted that he wasn’t.