Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  Printing this, Mulligan figured, was asking for trouble.

  He finished his eggs, drained his mug dry, strolled two blocks to the paper, and saw that he was right. The Providence police were out in force, slapping Denver boots on the cars parked at the fifteen-minute parking meters in front of the newspaper building. Most of them belonged to reporters and copy editors who never paid their parking tickets either. Mulligan was glad he’d walked to work today. The tab for his unpaid tickets was more than Secretariat was worth.

  He took the elevator to the third floor, settled into his desk chair, checked his computer messages, and found one from Lomax: See me. So he strolled into the managing editor’s glass-walled office, dropped into a leather chair, and said, “What’s up, boss?”

  “Give me an update on Mason.”

  “He’s hiding his cards, not telling me much.”

  “How do you think he’s doing?”

  “Far as I can tell, he’s not getting anywhere.”

  “I hear he’s been interviewing prison guards,” Lomax said.

  “Yeah. I’ve been steering him to the ones I know aren’t going to tell him anything.”

  “Good. Think he’s getting discouraged?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I hear you’ve been poking into the Diggs case, too,” Lomax said.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “From an ex-cop I know.”

  Mulligan wasn’t all that surprised. It was hard to keep secrets in a state as small as Rhode Island.

  “So, what are you after?” Lomax asked.

  “I’m hoping to tie Diggs to something that can keep him locked up legally.”

  “Getting anywhere?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I don’t like it when you go off the reservation, Mulligan. Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

  “I’ve been working it on my own time. Didn’t want to bother you with it unless I came up with something.”

  “Gonna stay on it?”

  “I am.”

  “Fine, but it will still have to be on your own time. We’re too short-staffed for me to spare you while you’re off tilting at windmills.”

  “I understand. Something else you should know. Gloria Costa’s been giving me a hand with it.”

  “What? After everything she’s been through?”

  “I tried to talk her out of it, but she was insistent. The whole thing was her idea, actually.”

  Lomax sighed and shook his head.

  “Look,” Mulligan said. “She’s a journalist. A darned good one. We can’t keep protecting her.”

  “Okay, Mulligan. But can I count on you to keep a close eye on her?”

  “I promise.”

  “Meanwhile, we’ve still got a daily paper to put out. I need you to do another follow on Kessler today.”

  “Far as I know,” Mulligan said, “there’s nothing new to write about that.”

  “Come up with something. That story is selling papers. I want to keep it on the front page.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “How about talking to the governor? You’re old friends, right? Maybe she’ll spill something we can use.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Mulligan walked back to his cubicle and stared at his desk phone. He and Fiona McNerney had been close once. A quarter of a century ago, they’d been high school classmates, sometimes studying together and often partying at Hopes, where the bartenders rarely bothered to glance at their fake IDs. Later, when Fiona agonized over whether to take her vows as a Little Sisters of the Poor nun, it was Mulligan she’d poured her heart out to. For decades, they’d remained friends; and she’d been one of his best sources during her one term as state attorney general. It was then that a Dispatch headline writer, impressed by her tenacity, had dubbed her “Attila the Nun,” and she’d reveled in the name. When the Vatican finally demanded she choose between politics and the church, she’d given Mulligan the scoop that she would stick with politics and run for governor.

  But shortly after that, she’d betrayed him, leaking something he’d told her in confidence. And the leak had gotten somebody killed. The somebody deserved it, Mulligan had to admit. Still, he wasn’t ready to forgive.

  He picked up the phone, called her office, and waited on hold for five minutes before he was put through.

  “Hi, Mulligan.”

  “Hello, Governor.”

  “Long time,” she said.

  “More than a year.”

  “I’ve missed you.”

  He’d missed her, too, but he wasn’t about to admit it.

  “The reason I’m calling,” he said. “Lomax is bugging me for a follow on Kessler. Wants to keep the story alive in the paper. I was hoping you could give me something that will get him off my back.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t we get together later at the Trinity Brewhouse?”

  “Not Hopes?”

  “I don’t go there anymore. My press secretary says the governor should patronize a better class of gin joint.”

  “The Brewhouse can get loud,” Mulligan said. “It’s not the best place for a conversation.”

  “Happy hour starts at four. If we get there at three, we’ll have the place pretty much to ourselves.”

  So when Mulligan walked through the door ten minutes early, Fiona was already there, sitting alone by a window overlooking the Providence Public Library. She was a small woman whose chopped-short hair had gone prematurely gray. A pint of amber microbrew sat on the table in front of her. On the street outside the window, the governor’s official limo idled at the curb, a state trooper behind the wheel.

  Before Mulligan could seat himself on the stool across from her, Fiona sprang up and gave him an awkward hug.

  A waitress materialized and said, “Menu?”

  “No thanks,” Mulligan said. “Just bring me some chips and salsa and a glass of Tommy’s Red.”

  Fiona and Mulligan sat uncomfortably for a moment, eyes averted, each hoping the other would speak first.

  “It’s good to see you,” she finally said.

  “Wish I could say the same.”

  “You’re not going to make this easy, are you.”

  “Guess not. We Irish know how to hold a grudge.”

  “Better than anybody,” Fiona said.

  “You’re looking well,” Mulligan said. He decided not to mention the new lines at the corners of her eyes. “Running the state must agree with you.”

  “Since the election, it’s been one disaster after another,” she said. “The state pension system is collapsing. Tax revenues have plummeted. Unemployment is over ten percent. Half our cities and towns are on the brink of bankruptcy. And we might have to set a child killer loose. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I fuckin’ love it.”

  Not the choice of words you’d expect from a governor, let alone a former nun, but Fiona had always been herself around Mulligan.

  “So what about you?” she said.

  “What about me?”

  “Judging from all your page-one bylines, I gather the job is going well.”

  “I’m doing okay.”

  “Seeing anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Cooled off on that hot lawyer, did you?”

  “She cooled off on me,” Mulligan said.

  “Oh. Too bad.”

  “I’ll get over it.”

  “Meaning you haven’t yet?”

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure. Think the Red Sox have a shot at the playoffs?”

  “No.”

  “No? That’s all you’ve got to say about that?”

  “It is.”

  She scowled.

  “I probably should tell you to go to hell and walk out the door,” she said. “But I’m not going to do that. I’m still your friend, even i
f you don’t want to think so. So I’m going to give you what you came for.”

  “Shoot,” Mulligan said, and slid a notebook from his jacket pocket.

  31

  Mason sat at the dining room table, sipped his morning coffee, and listened patiently to his father.

  “The older members of the board are not eager to sell,” the old man said. “They have always valued the influence the newspaper gives them in the affairs of the community, and they are willing to preserve that influence, even at a substantial financial loss.”

  “Meaning Uncle Arthur, Aunt Charlotte, and Aunt Mildred?”

  “And my brother Bradford as well.”

  “How very noblesse oblige of them,” Mason said.

  “Quite so,” his father said.

  “And the younger members?”

  “Except for Cameron, who sided with his father, all of your cousins voted to sell.”

  “So that’s it, then,” Mason said.

  “Yes, I’m afraid so. I’ve been directed to engage the services of Dirks, Van Essen & Murray, the leading brokerage firm for newspaper mergers and acquisitions, to negotiate the sale of the Dispatch.”

  “To whom?”

  “The board would prefer to reach an agreement with one of the respectable newspaper groups: Belo, Media General. The New York Times Company, perhaps.”

  “And if they’re not interested?”

  “Over the last couple of years, we’ve had several inquiries from General Communications Holdings International,” his father said. “If no alternatives present themselves, we might be compelled to work something out with them.”

  Mason was familiar with that company’s track record. For a decade, it had been buying up struggling newspapers and television stations at rock-bottom prices, stripping their newsrooms bare of staff, filling their news holes with wire copy, running them into the ground, and then selling off their equipment and real estate.

  For The Providence Dispatch, one of the finest small-city newspapers in America for 150 years, it would be an ignoble end.

  Mason nodded, indicating that he understood.

  “Why don’t we drive in together this morning?” his father said. “We can talk about this some more on the way.”

  “I’d like that,” Mason said, “but I’m not going straight in. I have an interview scheduled this morning.”

  After his father left, Mason asked the maid to refill his coffee. He lingered over it as he read the morning paper, starting with Mulligan’s front-page update on the Kessler case. State officials were scheduled to appear before Superior Court judge Clifford Needham on Thursday to ask that Kessler be ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which he had declined to take voluntarily.

  “It is our position,” Governor McNerney was quoted as saying, “that Eric Kessler is suffering from a severe mental disorder that would make him an imminent danger to the public if he were to be released, as scheduled, next week. If this can be confirmed by a mental health professional, we will then ask the court to order that he be confined indefinitely in a secure facility until such time as his condition no longer presents a serious risk to the community.”

  Kessler’s court-appointed defense attorney, Austin Donahue, declared that he would oppose the petition.

  “This is a naked attempt to subvert the law and violate my client’s rights,” he was quoted as saying. “He has paid his debt to society, and under the laws of our state, he is entitled to his freedom.”

  Mulligan had given the governor the last word: “Kessler’s debt to society is not something that can ever be repaid.”

  Huh, Mason thought. Maybe Mulligan and Fiona have finally made up.

  * * *

  An hour later, Mason sat in a cubicle at Supermax and watched Diggs drop into the chair on the other side of the thick glass partition.

  Diggs’s lawyer hadn’t come along this time, but she’d arranged for Mason’s name to be placed on the inmate’s approved visitors list. Mason should have been pleased to have Diggs all to himself. But he wasn’t. He missed Felicia.

  Since they’d met, his nighttime ritual of reviewing his notes and sipping his whiskey had taken a disturbing turn. He’d been imagining her there, curled up beside him on the Belgravia leather sofa, intent on her legal work. Every once in a while, still engrossed, she’d reach out and touch his arm. Mason was amazed, and a little flustered, about how that imaginary contact made him feel.

  The killer plucked the telephone receiver from the wall and said, “’Sup, cuz?”

  “Did you get the books I sent you?” Mason asked.

  “Yeah. I’m already a hundred pages into the first one. Didn’t realize there was so much stuff I didn’t know about Dr. King.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “So what we be talkin’ about today, cuz?”

  Not the phony charges that had been brought against him, Mason decided. Their first conversation had convinced him that Diggs didn’t have much light to shed on that. But in his eighteen years of incarceration, Diggs had never been interviewed by a reporter. If Mason could coax him into talking about his life, he could write a kick-ass profile of the killer. Mason envisioned the page-one headline: KWAME DIGGS IN HIS OWN WORDS. It would be a solid scoop—enough to justify the time he’d been putting in, even if his investigation of the bogus charges flamed out.

  As it happened, getting Diggs to talk about himself was not difficult. He was his favorite subject.

  “How old were you,” Mason asked, “when your family moved to Warwick?”

  “I was seven.”

  “Before that, you lived in Providence?”

  “Yeah. In an apartment on Willard Avenue.”

  “Where did you go to school?”

  “Flynn Elementary.”

  “That’s on Blackstone Street, right?”

  “Yeah. Right around the corner.”

  “Did you like it there?”

  “It was cool. Lots of neighborhood shorties to hang with. Stickball games in the street every afternoon. My moms worked the overnight at Miriam Hospital, so she was always there when I got home from school.”

  “Who took care of you at night?”

  “My dad, when he wasn’t workin’ a double shift.”

  “And when he was?”

  “My sister,” Diggs said. “She’s two years older than me.”

  “When you were seven, she was only nine, Kwame.”

  “Yeah, but our nana lived right upstairs.”

  “Why did you move?”

  “It was a bad neighborhood, cuz. Run-down houses. Gangs. Rats big enough to saddle up and ride. I didn’t realize how shitty it was when we was livin’ there ’cause I didn’t have nothin’ to compare it to. But my moms, she hated it. Always talkin’ about how she wanted her kids to grow up in the ’burbs. Told me later she was scared Amina, Sekou, and me would end up smokin’ crack or hooked on skag if she didn’t get us the hell outta there.” And then he laughed. “I mean, shit. Like there’s no fuckin’ drugs in Warwick.”

  “How did you feel about moving?”

  “I was happy at first. When I saw that new house, it was like a dream, cuz. Our own flower garden out front. Big backyard to play in. Trees to climb. A swing set with a slide. I even got my own room.”

  Diggs fell quiet for a moment, giving Mason time to catch up with his notes. A guard had confiscated the reporter’s tape recorder at the door, informing him that electronic devices were not permitted.

  “My papa,” Diggs finally said. “He worked a lot of overtime at the Narragansett bottling plant to save the down payment for that place.”

  “He’s gone now?” Mason asked.

  “Yeah. Died of a bad heart five years after I hit the bin. Moms still blames it on my conviction. She says Papa never got over it. Bastards wouldn’t even let me out for the funeral.”

  “Hit the bin?”

  “Went to prison.”

  “You said you were happy about the move at first. Did something
change after a while?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What was that?”

  “I looked around the neighborhood and saw it was full of nothin’ but white folks.”

  “No other black kids?”

  “Just me and my brother and sister.”

  “What was that like for you?”

  “What the fuck do you think it’s like when there ain’t nobody else looks like you?”

  “I don’t know,” Mason said. “Tell me.”

  Diggs took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. “Lonely. You’re an outsider. You don’t belong there. Everybody be burnin’ you off all the time.”

  “Burning you off?”

  “Giving you the eye.”

  “That’s how your neighbors treated you? Like an outsider?”

  “Most of ’em, yeah. Lookin’ down their noses at us. Callin’ us nigger behind our backs. Tellin’ their kids not to play with the porch monkeys.”

  “How did that make you feel?”

  Diggs focused on the ceiling, as if the answer were written up there.

  “Maya Angelou said, ‘Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean.’”

  “So you were angry.”

  “What the fuck do you think?”

  “What about school? Any black kids there?”

  “Just a handful. We always sat together in the lunchroom. Hung out in a group near the school steps at recess.”

  “Why?”

  “Self-defense, cuz.”

  “Because the white kids picked on you?”

  “Hell, yeah, they did. Catch one of us alone and they’d whack us up.”

  “That ever happen to you?”

  “A couple of times, sure.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  “One time five or six of ’em caught me walkin’ home from school alone. Snatched the Indiana Jones lunch box my moms had just bought me and threw it down a storm drain. Socked me in the grill, knocked me down in the street, and whupped my natural ass. It was a serious bang-out, cuz. When they got done with me, I limped home cryin’.”

  “Were you hurt bad?”

  “Split lip. Bloody nose. Black eye. My damn ribs ached for a month.”

  “What did your parents do?”