Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  That was strike three.

  Gloria hung up, grabbed her camera bag, tugged on her leather jacket, and headed for the elevator.

  “Where you off to?” the picture editor called to her. “The council meeting doesn’t start till seven.”

  “It might go long,” Gloria said. “I thought I’d grab a burger first.”

  “Okay, then.”

  She’d drawn the assignment to shoot the Warwick City Council, where the first reading of an ordinance to slash the pensions of city workers was on the agenda. If she hurried, she could get there before the town offices closed for the day.

  Twenty minutes later, she stood at the counter in the city clerk’s office, peering at a marriage certificate. Susan Ashcroft of 66 Inez Avenue, Warwick, had married Timothy Zucchi of 22 Sunapee Ct., Coventry, and she’d taken his name. The ceremony was held at Norwood Baptist Church, just down the road on Budlong Avenue, on May 3, 1996.

  Just five years after the woman was attacked. Maybe there’s hope for me yet, Gloria thought.

  * * *

  Shortly before eight the following evening, Gloria parked her Ford Focus in front of a raised ranch on a suburban street in Coventry, walked up a brick, tulip-lined front walk, and rang the Zucchis’ doorbell. The door was opened by a tall, silver-haired man in a tobacco-colored cardigan sweater.

  “Ms. Costa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please come in. My wife is expecting you.”

  He led her down a short flight of stairs to a cozy family room, where a slim woman was seated beside a calico cat on a dark blue floral sofa. The woman had a Kate Atkinson paperback in her lap and what might have been a gin and tonic in her hand, but the first thing Gloria noticed about her was that her long, straight hair was a lustrous shade of dark brown.

  The woman shooed the cat and patted the sofa cushion next to her, inviting Gloria to sit.

  “Can I get you anything?” the woman’s husband asked. “A gin and tonic, perhaps?”

  “Nothing, thanks,” Gloria said.

  “Well then, I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Gloria picked up a framed photograph from the end table. In it, a teenage girl and two somewhat younger boys mugged for the camera.

  “Your children, Mrs. Zucchi?” she asked.

  “Call me Sue,” the woman said. “That picture is of me and my brothers. My two children are in the big photo over the fireplace.”

  “Handsome boys.”

  “Smart, too.” Gloria looked again at the photo in her hands. “You were blond,” she said.

  “I used to be.”

  “When did you color it?”

  “In 1994. Right after Kwame Diggs was arrested for killing the Stuart woman and her two little girls.”

  “Because all of his victims were blond?”

  “Yes. For some reason, I’ve never been able to go back to my natural color.”

  “Do you think Diggs is the one who attacked you?”

  “I think it must have been.”

  “What makes you think so? Was it something you saw that night?”

  “No. I never got a look at him. He knocked me out, and by the time I came out of it he was gone.”

  “What, then?”

  “About a week after Diggs was finally caught, a Warwick police detective came by to tell me the person who’d stabbed me had been arrested. He said they didn’t have evidence to charge him with attacking me, but that they had enough to put him away for things he did to other people.”

  “Did he say it was Diggs?”

  “No, and I didn’t ask. I wasn’t in any condition to talk about this back then.”

  “But you assumed he meant Diggs?”

  “Oh, yes. Before he left, the detective told me I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. But I was. For a long time.”

  “I understand,” Gloria said.

  Susan Zucchi gave Gloria a searching look. “For some reason, I get the feeling you’re one of the few people who does.”

  “Yes,” Gloria said.

  The two women sat quietly for a moment. The cat wandered over and rubbed against Mrs. Zucchi’s leg.

  “Can you tell me,” the woman said, “why you are asking about this after all these years?”

  “We’re researching a story about Diggs.”

  “Why? They aren’t going to let him out, are they?”

  “I don’t think so,” Gloria said, not wanting to frighten the woman. “We just want to remind people why they never should.”

  Gloria said her good-byes and trotted up the stairs, where Mr. Zucchi materialized to show her out.

  She got into her car and cranked the ignition. Then she tilted the rearview to look at herself in the mirror. If Diggs ever did get out, maybe she’d color her hair, too.

  26

  “Corrections Department library. Paul Delvecchio speaking.”

  “Hello. My name is Edward Mason. An inmate at Supermax tells me he has read all of the books on black history in your collection and has asked me to send him additional titles. I’m wondering if you have Taylor Branch’s Martin Luther King trilogy.”

  “One moment please.… No, sir, we don’t. The only book we have by Taylor Branch is The Cartel, a book about college sports.”

  “Okay, then.”

  “But sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “You will not be permitted to bring books to the prison, and they will be returned if you mail them yourself. They can be delivered to an inmate only if they are shipped directly from a major bookseller.”

  Mason thanked him, hung up, and logged on to Amazon.com. He placed an order for Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and At Canaan’s Edge and arranged for them to be mailed to Diggs at Supermax.

  As Mason logged off, a copyboy dropped the morning mail on his desk. Mason sorted through it and found a manila envelope from Don Sockol, his Corrections Department source. Inside was the list he’d been waiting for. It contained 184 names. Beside each was a mailing address. The list also indicated which of the men were still employed as guards at Supermax and which ones had quit, retired, or been transferred to other units.

  Mason figured those no longer employed by the Corrections Department might be more willing to talk. He flipped through the list and marked them with a yellow highlighter. Blacks might be more sympathetic to Diggs than whites, Mason thought, so he searched the highlighted names and circled fifteen probables.

  It was a place to start.

  * * *

  Wyclef Jefferson lived on the top floor of a three-story tenement house in the Elmwood section of Providence. A few quick questions established that he was thirty-six years old, had worked at Supermax for eleven years until he burned out, and had quit in January to take a job as a security guard at the Providence Place Mall.

  He was seated now in a maple rocker, a bowl of unshelled peanuts in his lap and a pile of broken shells on the bare wood floor by his stocking feet. Mason sat across from him on a matching sofa, his notepad open in his lap.

  “Have some,” Jefferson said, extending the bowl toward Mason.

  “No thanks.”

  Jefferson’s wife, Jada, swooped in with a bottle of Red Stripe in each hand. She dropped one on the end table next to her husband’s chair and offered the other to Mason.

  “Thanks, but I’m fine,” he said.

  “Don’t trust a man that won’t drink with me,” Jefferson said.

  “Well then,” Mason said, and extended his hand for the beer.

  “And honey?” Jefferson said.

  “Yes, baby?”

  “Tell the kids to turn down that damned rap music.”

  “I will.”

  “Prefer jazz myself,” Jefferson said as his wife darted from the room. “Miles, Dizzy, Coltrane, Charlie Parker.”

  “The giants,” Mason said.

  “Damned straight.”

  “So tell me,” Mason said. “How well did you know Kwame Diggs?”

  “Not well. You don’t exactly
make friends in Supermax.”

  “He ever give you any trouble?”

  “Mouthed off to me sometimes.”

  “He ever take a swing at you?”

  “If he had, the fucker would still be walkin’ with a limp.”

  Yeah, right, Mason said to himself. If Diggs had wanted to, he could have torn Jefferson’s arms and legs off and entertained the cell block by juggling them. But Mason swallowed the thought and moved on.

  “According to court records,” he said, “Diggs assaulted a guard named Robert Araujo on March 12, 2005. Do you remember the incident?”

  “No. That was my day off.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You remember what days you had off seven years ago?”

  Jefferson glared.

  “When you returned to work that week, did you happen to notice if Araujo had any visible injuries?”

  “I don’t recall.”

  “I see. I also understand that Diggs assaulted a guard again last year, and that on another occasion a bag of marijuana was found in his cell. Do you remember any of that?”

  “I musta been off on those days, too.”

  This wasn’t getting Mason anywhere, so he decided to come at it from another angle. “I hear security is pretty tight at Supermax.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “That makes me wonder. How could someone smuggle a bag of marijuana in there?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Jefferson said. “Inmates got all kinds of tricks.”

  “Such as?”

  “Like sometimes one of their bitches will stick a plastic bag in her mouth and pass it to her man when they kiss in the visitors’ room.”

  Mason just stared at him.

  “What?” Jefferson said.

  “I’ve been in the visitors’ room. Assuming they could fool the drug-sniffing dog, just how would they manage to kiss through that thick sheet of plate glass?”

  “Fuck you. Finish your beer and get the hell out.”

  Mason set the half-full Red Stripe on the floor, went out the door, tramped down the stairs, and pointed his Prius toward the next name on his list.

  June 2006

  Except for his waking dreams, books are the only thing that sustain him.

  In the dim overhead light, he squints at the final page of Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery, written by a brother named Charles Johnson and a sister named Patricia Smith. He wonders idly if the two of them are fucking.

  He had read the book swiftly, lingering only over the chapters about Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, and Nat Turner, ferocious brothers who led bloody rebellions against their white masters.

  He closes the book, drops it on the floor beside his cot, and picks up a paperback from the prison library. Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver. On the first page, a dateline: Folsom Prison, Jan. 25, 1968. He smiles at that.

  And he loves the brother’s last name.

  27

  May 2012

  Mulligan grabbed his desk phone and started to dial. Then he thought better of it. He hung up, stood, and peeked over the top of his cubicle. Mason was just a few feet away, bending over several sheets of paper that were spread across his desktop.

  “Whatcha got there?” Mulligan asked.

  “A list of guards and former guards at Supermax. You probably know some of these guys. Maybe you can point out the ones who are straight shooters.”

  “Sure thing,” Mulligan said.

  Mason gathered up the sheets of paper and handed them over the top of the cubicle.

  Mulligan flipped through the names, recognizing about thirty of them. He picked up a red marker and made checks beside the ones who would lie to a reporter about the weather.

  “Here you go, Thanks-Dad,” he said, handing the list back. “Try the twelve I marked first.”

  “Thanks, Mulligan.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Mulligan tugged on his jeans jacket and headed for the elevator. Mason watched him go. Then he glanced at the names Mulligan had checked. One of them was Wyclef Jefferson. It didn’t surprise him any. He figured his colleague could be counted on to weed out the guards who wouldn’t tell him anything.

  Mulligan took the elevator down, stood on the sidewalk, fired up a Partagás, and placed the call from his cell.

  “Warwick Police Department.”

  “Andrew Jennings, please.”

  “Lieutenant Jennings retired from the force last November.”

  That was news to Mulligan. He and his old friend had lost touch a couple of years back.

  “He’s an old pal of mine. Do you know how I can reach him?”

  “I’m not permitted to give out his phone number, but you can find him at the FOP lodge on Tanner Avenue most afternoons.”

  * * *

  When Mulligan pulled up to the lodge a half hour later, there were only four cars in the parking lot. He found Jennings alone at the bar, the former cop’s right arm curled around a bottle of Narragansett and a whiskey back. His forearms were still roped with muscle, but his hair had thinned, and he seemed smaller than Mulligan remembered. He looked gaunt, as if something more than the job had drained out of him.

  Mulligan took the adjoining stool, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, “How you doing, Andy?”

  “Mulligan? Long time.” His voice still rumbled like a muscle car. “I’m doin’ jess fine. And you?”

  “About the same.”

  “Really? Cuz from what I been hearin’, things aren’t too good at the paper.”

  “We’ve had a lot of layoffs, but I’m still hanging on.”

  “I ever tell you I was a paperboy when I was a kid?” Jennings asked.

  “I don’t think you ever did.”

  “In those days, the Dispatch was so fat I could only carry ten at a time. Now it looks like a fuckin’ pamphlet.”

  The bartender wandered over, wiped a wet spot with a bar rag, and gave Mulligan the once-over.

  “Don’t remember seeing you in here before,” he said. “You on the job?”

  “I’m not.”

  “It’s members only here, buddy.”

  “He’s a friend of mine, Rico,” Jennings said.

  “Then the first one’s on the house. What’s your poison?”

  “Whatever Andy’s having. And bring him a reload on me.”

  “Thanks, pal,” Jennings said.

  “You’re welcome, Andy. So tell me, how’s Mary?”

  “She’s good.”

  “Still teaching at the high school?”

  “She is.”

  “I hear you finally turned in the badge.”

  “Yeah. It was time.” But the look in his eyes said he wasn’t so sure.

  Rico delivered their order, moseyed toward the other end of the bar, and gazed up at a television tuned to a Fox News show hosted by a blond airhead named Megyn Kelly.

  Mulligan swallowed his shot of bourbon and took a swig of beer. He was eager to get to the point, but he knew Jennings liked to chat about this and that before getting down to business.

  “So,” Mulligan asked, “what are you doing with yourself these days?”

  “Mornings I putter around the house. Most afternoons I drop in here to play a little pool and shoot the shit with old friends. ’Course, I’ll have to find another job if the Republicans on the city council get their way. They’re tryin’ to slice all the city pensions in half.”

  “Already happened in Central Falls,” Mulligan said. “From what I hear, Providence and Pawtucket could be next.”

  “Hard times,” Jennings said.

  “Unless you’re on Wall Street.”

  “Jesus, don’t get me started. They keep shipping jobs overseas and the whole country’s gonna be outta work. One of these days, you’ll dial 911 and find yourself talking to some moron in Bangladesh.”

  They sipped their beers, Mulligan hoping they’d chatted enough.

  “So,” Jennings said. “Workin�
� on anything interesting?”

  “I am. I was thinking you might be able to help.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Twenty-one years ago, somebody broke into a house on Inez Avenue and attacked a woman with a knife.”

  “Sue Ashcroft,” Jennings said.

  “You remember this?”

  “Oh yeah. It was maybe my third or fourth case after I made chief of detectives.”

  “Her name’s Susan Zucchi now,” Mulligan said. “One of my colleagues tracked her down through her marriage license. Found her living in a nice house in Coventry.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is she?”

  “She’s good. Got herself an attentive husband, a couple of fine sons.”

  “Glad to hear it. But why would the Dispatch go looking for her now, after all these years?”

  “To ask her about Kwame Diggs.”

  “Diggs? Shoulda shot that fucker full of holes when I had the chance.” He picked up his shot and sipped. “So what did she have to say?”

  “That she’s always believed he was the one who attacked her.”

  “Most likely was,” Jennings said.

  “Really? He would have been just twelve years old.”

  “He was only thirteen when Becky Medeiros was butchered, and we know for sure he did that.”

  “Why didn’t I hear anything about this back then?” Mulligan asked.

  “Chief’s orders. Folks were in a panic over the Medeiros and Stuart murders. He didn’t see any point in making things worse.”

  “Was there any evidence tying Diggs to Ashcroft?”

  “Nothing hard. Just circumstantial.”

  “No prints?”

  “A couple of bloody palm prints in the bedroom, but they were smeared. Not good enough to make a comparison.”

  “No DNA?”

  “Not enough of anything you could test. At least not back then. Folks who believe what they see on them CSI shows think there’s always hair, saliva, skin cells, or some other damned thing the lab rats can use to finger the perp. Most times it ain’t that easy.”

  “What about the circumstantial evidence?”

  Jennings raised his right hand and ticked it off one finger at a time: “Ashcroft was young and blond, just like Diggs’s other victims. In all three attacks, the perp pried the screen off an unlocked rear window and climbed inside. All three times, he didn’t bring a weapon with him. Just grabbed what he could find in the victims’ kitchens. All three times, the victims had multiple stab wounds.”