Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  “It was a long time ago,” Diggs said. “How the hell am I supposed to remember that shit?”

  “Fair enough,” Mason said. “Let’s talk about the time you were convicted of having drugs in your cell.”

  “Weed,” Diggs said. “The screws be sayin’ they found weed under my mattress.”

  “And did they?”

  “Come on, man. I’m jonesin’ for a joint right now, straight up. But you seen the security in this place, right? No way I can get any drugs in here.”

  “So you’re saying it was planted.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “What, then?”

  “They didn’t even bother to hide the shit in my cell. Probably just grabbed a baggie from an evidence locker so they could wave it around at the trial.”

  “What about the two assaults on prison guards?”

  “Never happened.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “You never got mad and hit somebody?”

  “Be wanting to, sure. Plenty of times.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “The screws are always fuckin’ with me. Tossin’ my cell. Blaggin’ my burn. Tearin’ up the family pictures my mama sends me. Spittin’ in my food. Every day calling me names. Child killer. Pervert. Nigger. Anything to get me to take a swing at ’em.”

  “Blagging your burn?”

  “Stealing my cigarettes. Which they did all the time before the fuckin’ warden banned smoking in here.”

  “When they mess with you, what do you do?”

  “I laugh at ’em, cuz. Just laugh and give ’em a big ol’ pickaninny grin. Back when I was on the street, I used to get hot about shit like that. Some kid called me nigger in the school yard, I’d whup his ass and rub his face in the dirt. But I’ve had a lot of time to work on my self-control in here. Believe me, I’m way too smart to give them bastards what they want.”

  “So they made it all up?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mason asked Diggs for the names of prison guards he might talk to. All Diggs knew were a few last names.

  Glancing at his watch, Mason saw that his time was nearly gone. “I’d like to come back and see you again. Would that be okay?”

  “Sure. Ain’t like I got anything better to do. Meanwhile, can you do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Send me somethin’ to read.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Black history,” Diggs said. “I already read all they got on that in the prison library. I been askin’ my moms for more, but she don’t get me nothin’ ’cept shit about Jesus.”

  “Time’s up,” the guard hollered. “Phones down. Form a line at the door.”

  23

  Gloria sipped from her can of Coca–Cola and peered into the cage in Mulligan’s kitchen.

  “Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Does it talk?”

  “It does.”

  “Polly want a cracker?” Gloria said.

  And Larry Bird said, “Theeeeeeee Yankees win!”

  “Damn!” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  With Ellsbury, Crawford, Kalish, Bailey, Lackey, and Matsuzaka all on injured reserve, the Sox’s season was already doomed. Why did Larry have to keep rubbing it in?

  “Does it say anything else?” Gloria asked.

  “No. I’ve been trying to teach it to say, ‘Yankees suck,’ but its loyalty to the Evil Empire is unshakable.”

  “Pretty bird, though.”

  “If you want it, you can have it.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t allow that kind of profanity in my house.”

  Mulligan jiggled the cage door open and filled Larry’s feed tray, the bird stabbing its bill at the oven mitt the reporter had taken to wearing for protection. Then he tore open a package of paper plates and dropped two of them beside the Caserta Pizzeria box on his maple yard-sale table by the kitchen window.

  “Hope pepperoni’s okay.”

  “Are you kidding?” Gloria said. “Caserta could whip up a pie with bird-seed topping, and it would probably be good.”

  She sat in one of the vinyl kitchen chairs and dug in. Outside, the day was fading, so Mulligan snapped on the overhead light. Then he fetched two bottles of Killian’s from the wheezing fridge, dropped into the chair across from Gloria, and snagged a slice.

  “So what did you come up with?” Mulligan asked.

  Gloria reached into her purse and extracted the pad she’d filled with notes on what she’d found in the news library computer printouts.

  “For starters, five reports of Peeping Toms,” she said.

  “From Diggs’s neighbors?”

  “All within eight blocks. The first two in 1988, when Diggs would have been, what, ten years old?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then two more in 1989 and one in 1990. And Mulligan?”

  “Um?”

  “One of the complainants was Becky Medeiros.”

  “Anybody get a description?”

  “One in ’89 thought it might have been a black kid, but she wasn’t sure. The others, no.”

  “The Diggses were the only black family in that neighborhood back then,” Mulligan said.

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “What else you got?”

  “A dozen unsolved housebreaks,” Gloria said. “In most of them, the perp made off with TVs, VCRs, jewelry, stuff like that. But in two, the only thing taken was bras and panties.”

  “Could have been our guy,” Mulligan said. “Making dry runs before he escalated.”

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Two reports of animal cruelty. In January of 1990, a dog was mutilated and dumped in the trash can behind Diggs’s next-door neighbor’s house. Nine months later, somebody bound a dog and cat together with twine, doused them with lighter fluid, and set them on fire behind the neighborhood elementary school.”

  “That it?”

  “It is. How about you?”

  “Between the Medeiros murders in ’92 and the Stuart murders in ’94, Diggs’s neighbors made three complaints about prowlers and one about a Peeping Tom, but none of them saw enough to provide a description.”

  Gloria shook her head, making her blond hair bounce. “We’re not getting anywhere. This is all penny-ante stuff. The cops wouldn’t have put much effort into it, so there’s not going to be evidence tying any of this to Diggs.”

  “Yeah. And the statute of limitations has run out on it, too,” Mulligan said. “But I found something else.”

  “Spill.”

  “In 1991, a year before the Medeiros murder, somebody broke into a house on Inez Avenue about three miles from Diggs’s neighborhood.”

  “Three miles?”

  “Uh-huh. Might have been him, though. He could have ridden his bike there, no problem.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The intruder found an open window, ripped the screen off, and climbed inside. Found a twenty-six-year-old woman named Susan Ashcroft asleep in her bed, grabbed the clock radio off the nightstand, and whacked her in the head with it. Knocked her out cold. Then he went into the kitchen, took a serrated steak knife from a drawer, and went to work on her.”

  “Oh God!” Gloria felt her stomach drop.

  “About three in the morning, the woman came to in bed, blood all over her. She lived alone, no one there to help her, but she had the strength to grab the phone from the nightstand and call the cops. She had five stab wounds, three in her breasts and two more in her abdomen. Three of the wounds were superficial. Hesitation wounds, the police called them. But the other two were deep.”

  “Like he wasn’t quite sure he could go through with it at first?”

  “What it sounds like.”

  “Did she survive?”

  “She did.”

  “Was she a blonde like the others?”

 
; “I don’t know, Gloria. The story doesn’t say.”

  “Did the police ever try tying this to Diggs?”

  “I don’t know that either. I never heard about this until now.”

  “B and E and attempted murder,” she said. “It could be enough to put Diggs away for a long time.”

  “Yeah. There’s no statute of limitations on either charge in Rhode Island,” Mulligan said. “If we can find evidence that he did this, he could be prosecuted as an adult now.”

  “Even though he was a kid when it happened?”

  “That’s right.”

  They spent a few minutes plotting their next move. Then Mulligan carried the portable TV out of the bedroom, set it on the kitchen counter, and plugged it in. He grabbed two more Killian’s from the fridge and handed one to Gloria.

  “Planning on having me stay for a while?” she said.

  “I was hoping you’d want to keep me company.”

  “Okay,” she said. “But no cop shows.”

  Mulligan flicked through the channels with the remote and stopped on the Bruins–Canadiens game. The announcer was giving a medical update on Nathan Horton, the Bruins’ high-scoring right-winger, who was still woozy from a concussion he’d suffered when he was blindsided by a Philadelphia Flyers forward several months earlier. Mulligan made a mental note to see his bookie and bet against the team repeating as Stanley Cup champions.

  “I love hockey,” Gloria said.

  “Really?”

  “Yes!”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Not today.”

  A few years back Gloria had a thing for Mulligan, but he was seeing somebody then, so nothing came of it. Since the attack, she’d been on a couple of dates with a handsome Textron executive and discovered she couldn’t stand being touched.

  Maybe someday, she hoped, she’d get over it.

  24

  First thing next morning, Mulligan draped a towel over Larry Bird’s cage, carried it down the stairs, and packed it in the back of Secretariat. He drove across town to Hope Street and parked in front of Zerilli’s Market.

  Leaving the bird in the car, he walked into the place and strolled down a narrow grocery aisle, passing racks of Twinkies and Ding Dongs and coolers filled with cheap American beer. When he reached the back of the store, he climbed a short staircase and knocked on a windowless steel door. When the electric lock buzzed, he turned the knob and stepped inside.

  Dominic “Whoosh” Zerilli was slumped in a wooden chair behind his keyhole desk, an unfiltered Camel cigarette dangling from his lower lip and a phone pressed to his ear. He was dressed in a white shirt, loud tie, suit coat, and undershorts, the pants draped over a hanger on his clothes rack to preserve the crease. His big mutt, Shortstop, was sprawled in front of the minifridge. A huge thighbone looked like a toothpick in the dog’s jaws.

  “Two hundred on the Bruins to repeat. Got it, Vince,” Zerilli said.

  He hung up, jotted the bet down on a piece of flash paper, and dropped it into a washtub at his feet. If the cops ever raided the place, he’d drop his cigarette into the tub and, whoosh! Good-bye, evidence. Which was how the seventy-seven-year-old bookie had gotten his nickname. But the cops, content with their payoffs, hadn’t bothered him in years.

  “How are you, Whoosh?”

  “Rheumatism’s been acting up again, and my fuckin’ prostate’s the size of a softball. Takes me ten minutes just to take a piss.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Maggie’s been buggin’ me to turn the book over to my no-good nephew and move us into one of them gated retirement communities down in Florida. I told her no way. Them fuckin’ places are full of old people.”

  Zerilli got up, opened the door to his storeroom, and disappeared inside. A minute later, he reappeared with a box of illegal Cubans and handed it to Mulligan. The reporter pried it open, took out a Partagás Presidente, snipped the end with his cigar cutter, and stuck it in his mouth. Zerilli leaned over to give him a light.

  It was their ritual: Zerilli presenting Mulligan with cigars and asking him to swear that he’d never tell anyone what went on inside the bookie’s inner sanctum. Mulligan swearing and getting a cigar going. About a year ago, the bookie finally dispensed with administering the oath, but they both understood it was implied.

  “So what odds are you giving on the Bruins surviving the first round?” Mulligan asked.

  “They’re three to two favorites.”

  “Give me a hundred on the Capitals.”

  “You sure? I mean, no way Boston’s going all the way again, but Washington ain’t that good.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay. Your funeral.”

  “So listen,” Mulligan said. “This time, I brought you a present. Something that might help draw customers into the store.”

  “I don’t see nothin’ in your hands.”

  “I left it in the car.”

  Together they walked outside and fetched the cage from the Bronco. Mulligan carried it inside, set it on the candy counter, and pulled off the towel.

  “Now ain’t that a fine-lookin’ specimen,” Zerilli said.

  “It is.”

  “He got a name?”

  “Larry Bird.”

  “Does it talk?”

  “Doesn’t say much, but maybe you can teach him.”

  “Thanks, Mulligan. I’m gonna leave it right here so folks will see it right off when they come in.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Come on back to the office,” Zerilli said. “Got something I need to tell you.”

  As they stepped back through the steel door, Shortstop growled. A low rumble.

  “Easy, boy,” Zerilli said. “Mulligan doesn’t want your fuckin’ bone.”

  “So what’s up?” Mulligan asked.

  “Gordon Freeman was in here the other day.”

  “That right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he want?”

  “A gun.”

  “Aw, hell. You didn’t sell him one, did you?”

  Zerilli shrugged. “He woulda just bought one off somebody else.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “A piece-of-shit twenty-five-cal. Raven.”

  “He’ll be lucky if it doesn’t blow up in his hand,” Mulligan said.

  “If he fires it a lot, yeah, but I get the feelin’ he’s only planning to use it once.”

  “I don’t give a shit about the guy he’s planning to shoot,” Mulligan said, “but I’d hate to see the old guy get in trouble.”

  “Me too, but there’s no way I can go to the fuckin’ cops. Figured maybe this was something you could handle.”

  “I’m on it,” Mulligan said. He rose, opened the door, and then turned back. “I don’t suppose he bought anything else when he was in here.”

  “Just a few groceries.”

  “Do you remember what exactly?”

  “Four cans of Hormel chili, some eggplant, and a bottle of olive oil.”

  Chili? It was probably nothing, Mulligan told himself. But on the drive back to the office, he couldn’t help wondering.

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, Mulligan dropped into his chair in the newsroom, called the Hopkinton Police Department, and asked for Chief Matea.

  “What is it, Mulligan? We’re pretty busy here.”

  “Really? Did somebody shoplift a Snickers bar from the 7-Eleven? Some kids leaving burning bags of dog poop on doorsteps again?”

  “Screw you.”

  “Sorry. Sometimes I can’t help myself.”

  “So why the call?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me what Hormel chili, eggplant, and olive oil mean to you.”

  Matea’s stony silence told Mulligan he was on to something.

  “It’s Eric Kessler’s recipe, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t take this as confirmation, but where in hell did you hear that?”

  “Can’t say, but I think you
should see if you’re missing something.”

  “Just a second.”

  It was five minutes before the chief came back on the line.

  “Sonovabitch.”

  “The journal’s gone?”

  “Yeah. Did you take it?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Better tell me what you know.”

  “I know that Gordon Freeman went shopping the other day with Kessler’s grocery list. I also know he bought a handgun.”

  “Oh, shit. You know what kind?”

  “A Raven 25.”

  “And you know this how?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Did you find tool marks on the drawer you had the journal in?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How could he have gotten inside your office?”

  “No idea.”

  “Still just one guy manning the station overnight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Think he dozes on the job?”

  “I think maybe I should have a word with him. And I guess I better bring the old man in.”

  “What if he doesn’t cooperate?”

  “Probably won’t.”

  “Can you search his place?”

  “Not without a warrant.”

  “What I told you isn’t enough to get one?”

  “Not even close.”

  “Okay,” Mulligan said. “Let’s talk about what we can do.”

  25

  According to the telephone directories, there were three Susan Ashcrofts living in Rhode Island. Gloria picked up her desk phone and placed some calls.

  “Hello.” A man’s voice.

  “Hi. My name is Gloria Costa. I’m a newsperson at the Dispatch.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m trying to locate a woman named Susan Ashcroft who lived on Inez Avenue in Warwick back in 1991.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’ve reached the wrong party. We moved here from Connecticut three years ago. My wife grew up in New Jersey. She never lived in Warwick.”

  “I see. Could the person I’m looking for be a relative?”

  “No. I’m sorry I can’t be helpful.”

  “Okay, then. Thank you for your time.”