Providence Rag

by Bruce DeSilva

  “James Baldwin said, ‘To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.’” He spoke the line in a monotone, as if he were giving a grade school oral report. “I was in a rage, cuz. All I could think of was kill, kill, kill. The anger didn’t go away until they were all dead.”

  Mason stared at Diggs through the glass.

  “Kwame,” he said, “how do you feel now about what you did?”

  “I got blood on my hands I can’t wash off. I took the lives of five human beings. I see them in my sleep. I’m sorry every single day.”

  “What about Susan Ashcroft? Are you ready to admit you attacked her, too?”

  “I don’t know nothing about no Susan Ashcroft.”

  Mason sadly shook his head.

  “Be real, cuz,” Diggs said. “No way I can come clean on that. You and me, we both know the law. I could be charged as an adult, and then I’d never get out of here.”

  As Mason walked to his car in the prison parking lot, he found himself believing that Diggs was sorry, but he figured the only person he was sorry for was himself.

  When he reached the Prius, he found the lights he’d had repaired were broken again. And this time, the windshield was smashed, too.

  49

  “Mason turned in his profile of Diggs this morning,” Lomax said.

  “How’s it look?” Mulligan asked.

  “The writing needs some punching up, but it’s going to make news. Diggs spilled his guts.”

  “Um.”

  “I figure on stripping it across page one on Sunday, but I thought you ought to look it over first.” Lomax lifted a stack of paper from his laser printer, stapled the pages together, and handed them across the desk to Mulligan. “You know more about Diggs than I do, so I’m counting on you to make sure there are no problems with this.”

  Mulligan scanned the first two paragraphs:

  Kwame Diggs, the notorious killer who stabbed two women and three children to death in their Warwick homes in the 1990s, has at long last acknowledged his guilt. In a series of exclusive jailhouse interviews with The Providence Dispatch, he also disclosed—for the first time—why he killed.

  Diggs explained that he committed the murders in the throes of a rage he felt powerless to control, furious at white neighbors who taunted him with racial epithets.

  “I’ll need some time with this,” Mulligan said, “but I can already tell you I’m going to have issues.”

  He left Lomax’s office, used the Xerox machine to make a second copy, dropped it on Gloria’s desk, and asked her to join him at his place for dinner.

  * * *

  By nine that evening, they’d both read Mason’s story twice, filling the margins with notes and staining the pages with grease from still another Caserta Pizzeria pie.

  “You don’t buy the black rage excuse, do you?” Gloria asked.

  “Of course not,” Mulligan said. He was about to elaborate when Larry Bird interrupted with a squawk.

  “Theee Yankees win!” The bird glared smugly.

  “Can’t you teach him not to say that?” Gloria asked.

  “I’m still trying.”

  “So,” Gloria asked, “how do you want to break this up?”

  “See if you can get Diggs’s family to talk to you,” Mulligan said. “I’ll talk to Jennings and to Diggs’s old middle school principal.”

  “What about that FBI agent who profiled Diggs back in the nineties?” Gloria said.

  “Good idea,” Mulligan said. “I’ll see if I can track him down.”

  * * *

  Esther Diggs lived alone in a one-story cottage on Ruth Road in Brockton, Massachusetts, just a couple of blocks from Cardinal Spellman High School. A well-tended bed of petunias and pansies lined her cracked concrete front walk, and a pot of pink geraniums hung beside the door.

  Inside, Gloria and Mrs. Diggs sat together in the living room on a faded pink-and-green floral sofa, both sipping hot tea from dainty porcelain cups.

  “I see that you like elephants,” Gloria said.

  Pachyderms trailed one another across the fireplace mantel, lounged on the end tables, and crowded trunk to tail on the shelves of a floor-to-ceiling bookcase that also held a few romance novels, several self-help tomes, and half a dozen spiritual guides by T. D. Jakes, Joyce Meyer, and Joel Osteen. The herd numbered at least a hundred, mostly ceramic but a few of carved wood, blown glass, or molded plastic.

  “May I tell you a secret?”

  “Certainly, Mrs. Diggs.”

  “I really don’t like elephants.”

  “Then why in the world do you have so many?”

  The woman chuckled and slowly shook her head.

  “When Kwame was eight years old, he bought me an elephant figurine for my birthday. That one right there,” she said, pointing to the coffee table where a white, eight-inch-tall ceramic elephant with red lips and rouged cheeks reared on its hind legs. It seemed poised to stomp on a People magazine with a photo of Kim Kardashian on the cover.

  “Hideous, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Gloria said. She felt the same way about the Kardashians.

  “But of course, I gushed over it. I told Kwame it was the most wonderful gift I had ever received. So naturally the kids bought me more elephants for Christmas. And for my next birthday. And the one after that. And the one after that. Before long, visitors noticed them. Neighbors. Cousins. Aunts and uncles. So they started bringing me elephants, too, trinkets they picked up for fifty cents or a dollar at tag sales and secondhand shops. I didn’t have the heart to tell folks I didn’t like them, and one thing just led to another.”

  Mrs. Diggs’s bottom lip quivered, and Gloria was afraid she was about to cry. Instead, the two women burst out laughing.

  “But I don’t imagine you’re here to talk about elephants,” Mrs. Diggs said.

  “No,” Gloria said. “I’m helping Mason out on his story about Kwame, and I wanted to ask a few questions about his childhood.”

  “I guess that would be all right.”

  “Was he a happy child?”

  “It seemed to me that he was. He loved video games, playing ball with his friends, riding his bike around the neighborhood. He really loved that Schwinn of his. He’d ride fast, no hands, right down the middle of the street. I’d holler, ‘Kwame, put your hands on the handlebars before you fall and crack your head!’ And he would. But as soon as he thought I wasn’t looking, he’d be riding no hands again.”

  “Did he have many friends?”

  “Oh, my goodness, yes. The neighborhood was full of kids, a lot of them Kwame’s age. They were always hanging out together, playing card games, listening to music, playing football in the street.”

  “I understand you were the only black family in the neighborhood back then.”

  “That’s true.”

  “How did Kwame feel about that?”

  “That was never an issue with Kwame. He didn’t think much about color back then, as far as I could tell, and he fit right in with the white boys his age. Of course, there were a few black kids in his school. He made friends with them, too, and sometimes they’d sleep over at our house. But so did some of the white boys.”

  “How about your white neighbors? Did they treat your family well?”

  “Why, yes, they did. I was worried about that when we first moved in, seeing as we were the first black family and all. But on the very first day, that nice Mrs. Bigsby who lived next door came by to welcome us to the neighborhood and bring us one of her homemade cherry pies. Connie Stuart, God bless her soul, took the trouble to bring us a tuna casserole even though she was pregnant at the time. Over the years, we were invited to lots of backyard barbecues and kids’ birthday parties and such. People couldn’t have been nicer. Until after Kwame was arrested, of course. Then everyone stopped talking to us.”

  “Was everybody nice before that?”

  “Not everybody, no. There were a couple of people who shunn
ed us. When we said hello, they’d just turn their heads. But they were the exception. Most everybody was very neighborly.”

  “Including Becky Medeiros?”

  “We didn’t get to know her very well, but she always smiled and greeted us whenever we passed by her house on one of our walks. Kwame said that when he’d ride by her house on his bicycle, she’d flag him down and give him cookies sometimes. Not homemade. The store-bought kind. Oreos or Fig Newtons.”

  “So none of your neighbors ever called your kids racist names, then?”

  “Lord, no. Some of the black boys called each other nigger. I caught Kwame doing it once, and I took his bike away for a week. I told him, ‘Young man, I don’t ever want to hear that filthy word come out of your mouth again.’”

  “What about at school? Did he and his brother fit in well there?”

  “Yes, they did. It was hard to get Kwame to study or do his homework, but we didn’t get on him about it because he got mostly B’s anyway. And he always got an A in history. Sekou and Amina were more studious, and Sekou was very good at sports.”

  “Did the white kids ever pick on them?”

  “Not that I ever heard.”

  “Kwame never got in any school-yard fights, then?”

  “Goodness, no.”

  “He never came home from school with a split lip or black eye or maybe a bloody nose?”

  “He got a bloody nose a couple of times playing football, I do recall that. But fights? No. If that had happened, I’m sure I’d remember.”

  “Mrs. Diggs, I want to be honest with you here. Kwame has been telling Mason a lot of things that just aren’t true.”

  The woman folded her hands, rested them on her knees, and studied them for a moment. Gradually, her gaze turned to steel.

  “If Kwame did that,” she said, “I’m sure he must have had his reasons.”

  50

  “I hope you’ve got something else you can put on page one on Sunday,” Mulligan said.

  “Problems?” Lomax said.

  “Oh, yeah. Big-time.”

  “Anything that can’t be fixed in the next forty-eight hours?”

  Mulligan thought about it for a moment. “Depends on how fast Mason can rewrite this piece of shit. But what’s your hurry?”

  “Tuesday morning, I sent the story down to promotion,” Lomax said. “Asked them to work up a radio promo so it would be ready once we had the piece set to go. The dumb bastards didn’t just write the promo. They sent it out. It started running on WTOP and WPRO last night.”

  “Aw fuck,” Mulligan said.

  “Yeah,” Lomax said. “If you run a promo and then don’t run the story, you look like a fool.”

  “What’s the promo say?”

  Lomax picked up a sheet of paper from his desk and read aloud: “‘Coming this Sunday: Rhode Island’s most notorious killer in his own words. Kwame Diggs breaks his silence to explain why he killed. And you’ll find it only in The Providence Dispatch.’”

  “That all of it?”

  “It is.”

  “Nothing about black rage, then?”

  “No.”

  “Thank God,” Mulligan said. “Diggs lied his ass off to Mason about that.”

  “Guess we better get the kid in here,” Lomax said.

  “Yeah. And we’ll need Gloria, too.”

  * * *

  Mulligan and Gloria had already claimed the leather visitors’ chairs opposite Lomax’s desk, so Mason rolled in a spare desk chair from the copy desk.

  “Edward,” Lomax began, “earlier this week I asked Mulligan to look over your Diggs profile, and he recruited Gloria to help him with the task. Today, they came back with some concerns that need to be addressed before the story can be published.”

  “I see,” Mason said. “What are they and what do I need to do to fix them?”

  “Your story portrays Diggs as a young man who killed in a blind rage because his neighbors called him racist names. Mulligan and Gloria believe he lied to you about that. They say it’s simply not true.”

  Mason blanched visibly. He’d expected nitpicks about a few details. Instead, the central premise of a story he’d invested weeks in was being challenged. He felt cornered and ganged up on. His first instinct was to argue.

  “So I suppose you geniuses think you know the real reason he killed,” he said, surprised to find that he’d balled his fists at his sides.

  “Yeah, we do, Thanks-Dad,” Mulligan said. “Diggs is a psychosexual serial killer. He stabbed women and little girls to death because he got off on it.”

  Mason drew a deep breath and told himself to calm down.

  “Okay,” he said. “Perhaps you know some things I don’t. Why don’t you lay it out for me?”

  Gloria took the lead, describing what Esther Diggs had told her about how kind and welcoming their neighbors had been.

  “I asked her specifically about Connie Stuart and Becky Medeiros,” Gloria said. “She told me that on the day they moved in, Stuart brought them a tuna casserole. And she said Becky Medeiros used to give Kwame cookies.

  “After I talked with Mrs. Diggs, I called Kwame’s sister, Amina, in Oakland and his brother, Sekou, in Tuscaloosa. They told pretty much the same story about the neighbors. Sekou didn’t want to say much about Kwame. He said the last thing he needed was for folks in Alabama to know he was the brother of a serial killer. But Amina said Kwame was a very strange kid. When he was twelve or thirteen years old, he chopped the arms, legs, and heads off all of her Barbie dolls. And she thinks he killed her cat. Her mother never wanted to believe anything bad about Kwame, but Amina spent most of her childhood scared to death of him. She said he never actually hurt her, but she put a bolt latch on her door to stop him from creeping into her bedroom at night.

  “Oh, and Marcus Washington checked his records for me and found that before she was killed, Becky Medeiros was contributing two hundred dollars a year to the NAACP.”

  “I see,” Mason said, hating how disappointed he sounded. “Is there anything else?”

  “The story Kwame told you about breaking a racist bully’s arm in a school-yard brawl?” Mulligan said. “I tracked down Craig Hennessey, who was the school principal at the time. He said it never happened.”

  “He must be pretty old now,” Mason said. “Maybe he forgot.”

  “I doubt he’d forget something like that,” Mulligan said. “Besides, Andy Jennings, the lead detective on the Medeiros and Stuart murders, says the same thing. Back in ’96, he did a lot of digging into Kwame’s background. If it had happened, he would have found out about it. Just to be sure, I asked him to check the old police files. He confirmed there’s no record of it.”

  “I see,” Mason said, feeling smaller by the moment. He was glad Felicia couldn’t see him now.

  “I also tracked down Peter Schutter, a retired FBI agent who did a psychological profile of Diggs back in the nineties. He says Diggs’s race rage excuse is laughable. If that had been his motive, why he didn’t kill any men or boys? How come all of his victims were women and little girls?

  “The evidence that these were sex murders is overwhelming,” Mulligan continued. “I won’t bother you with all the details, but how about this? Diggs masturbated on the dead bodies.”

  “What?” Mason said. “I didn’t see anything about that in the trial transcripts.”

  “That’s because family members of the victims attended the trial,” Mulligan explained. “Prosecutors didn’t want them to have to sit there and listen to all the sordid details. They had more than enough evidence to convict without dragging that stuff up.”

  “There was nothing about it in your old Dispatch clippings either,” Mason said.

  “I knew about it, but I didn’t use it,” Mulligan said. “At the time, it seemed like the decent thing to do.”

  Lomax raised an eyebrow.

  “It was all off the record,” Mulligan said. “My sources wouldn’t even let me tell my editors about it.”


  Mason put his head in his hands.

  “I guess I really fucked up.” He rarely used the f-word, but it felt appropriate to the occasion.

  “Yeah, you did,” Lomax said.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Lomax. You’ll have my resignation on your desk in the morning.”

  Lomax shook his head.

  “It won’t be accepted, Edward. The mistake you made is one a lot of aggressive young reporters make early in their careers. You fell in love with your story.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What Diggs told you made for good copy,” Lomax said. “You got excited about it. So excited that you lost perspective. You wanted his story to be true, so you convinced yourself that it was. As a result, you neglected to check it out properly.”

  Mason looked Mulligan in the eye. “Did you ever make a mistake like that?”

  Before he could reply, Lomax cut him off.

  “Yeah, he did. But only once. More than once and he wouldn’t still be here.”

  Mason looked ashen.

  “Edward, you’ve still got the makings of a fine profile here,” Lomax said, his eyes softening a little. “It’s just going to be a different story from the one you thought you had. What you’ve got is the story of a killer who finally admits what he did but tries to excuse it by making up lies about his victims. I’ll give you exactly sixty seconds to get over feeling sorry for yourself. Then I need you to sit down with Mulligan and Gloria and rewrite this thing from top to bottom.”

  He shot his cuff and checked his watch.

  “I’ll need the copy on my desk no later than forty-seven hours from right now.”

  51

  Monday morning, the three friends gathered for breakfast at the diner in Kennedy Plaza. Outside the grease-flecked windows, the street was still wet from last night’s rain.

  Charlie clunked plates of bacon and eggs in front of Mulligan and Gloria. Mason, who had breakfasted on apple puff pancakes at home, sipped his second cup of the fry cook’s strong coffee.