4
Ed Lomax hunched in his fake leather throne at the city desk, his huge hairless head swiveling like the turret of a Sherman tank. When he made city editor twelve years ago I thought he hated my stuff, the way he always grimaced and shook his head in apparent disgust as he read. Took me a month to figure out that he moved his head instead of his eyes as he tracked each line of type across the computer screen.
Lomax considered it his sacred duty to root out curse words in our copy. Such words, he believed, have no place in a family newspaper. Or, as he put it whenever a wayward “hell” or “damn” provoked him to speech, “I don’t want any of that goddamned fucking shit in my goddamned fucking paper.”
He didn’t speak often, preferring to communicate with his staff in terse orders dispensed through the newsroom’s secure internal computer-messaging system. Every morning we’d arrive for work, log on, see the message function blinking, and find our assignments. They would look something like this:
WEINER WAR.
Or this:
OVERFLOW FOLLOW.
Or this:
BRASS KNUCKLES CAPER.
If you hadn’t watched the local TV news, read everything on our paper’s Web site, devoured our seven zoned print editions, studied the AP state wire, and scanned the five small competing Rhode Island dailies, you’d have to walk up to his desk and ask him what he was talking about. And he would give you that look. The one that meant you ought to consider opportunities in retailing.
I logged on and found this waiting for me:
DOG STORY. TODAY. NO MORE EXCUSES.
I messaged Lomax back and got an immediate reply:
CAN WE TALK ABOUT THIS?
NO.
I stood and caught his eye sixty feet across the newsroom. I smiled. He didn’t. I shrugged on my brown leather bomber jacket and headed for Secretariat, my eight-year-old Ford Bronco parked at a fifteen-minute meter in front of the newspaper building. It had been sleeting, and the yellow parking ticket tucked under my wiper blade was sopping. I peeled it off the glass and slapped it on the windshield of the publisher’s BMW, parked unticketed at an expired meter. It was a trick I’d picked up from the hero of a Loren D. Estleman detective novel, and I’d been using it for years now. The publisher just tossed the tickets at his secretary to be paid with company money. The secretary noticed the tickets were mine right off—but she’s my cousin.
The dog story was waiting for me in the Silver Lake section of the city, just a few miles west of downtown. I decided to go east instead, sloshing on foot across Kennedy Plaza toward an old red-brick office building on the other side of the Providence River.
By the time I got there, my Reeboks were full of slush. I wasted ten minutes watching a secretary flash her thighs and waiting for feeling to return to my toes before I was waved through to the fire insurance investigator’s cluttered inner office. Autographed photos of Providence College basketball greats lined the cream-colored walls. Billy Donovan, Marvin Barnes, Ernie DiGregorio, Kevin Stacom, Joey Hassett, John Thompson, Jimmy Walker, Lenny Wilkins, Ray Flynn, and my old teammate, Brady Coyle. No Mulligan. Benchwarmers didn’t rate.
I’d met Bruce McCracken back in the days when he was a skinny kid trying to find himself, and I was a skinnier kid with dreams of being the next Edward R. Murrow. We’d taken a couple of journalism classes together at the little Dominican college before he decided the First Amendment was for suckers. Lately he’d become a gym rat, and he proved it with a crushing handshake. New muscles strained the seams of his blue Sears blazer.
“What do you think we’re dealing with?” I asked, wiggling my numb fingers.
“Well, it’s more than just a run of bad luck,” he said.
“I gather you talked to Polecki.”
“And his ventriloquist dummy. I swear, when Roselli talks I can see Polecki’s mouth move. I can’t decide if they’re totally incompetent or if they just enjoy being assholes.”
“The choices are not mutually exclusive,” I said.
McCracken grinned. Even his teeth had muscles.
“We wrote policies on three of the Mount Hope houses,” he said. “The claims total more than seven hundred grand, so naturally we’re interested. Polecki gave me copies of his files on all nine fires. He’s happy to have me do his work for him. Can’t say I mind if you do mine for me.”
He shoved a stack of manila folders to the edge of his desk.
“Just don’t take them from the office. And no, you can’t make copies.”
I flipped through the nine files and set aside two cases that were not labeled “arson” or “suspicious origin.” Then I settled down with the rest. Method of entry varied, but not by much. Sometimes the torch had gone in through the bulkhead, snapping off the padlock with a bolt cutter. More often he’d just kicked in a cellar window. Each fire had started in the basement, which is where I’d whip out the Zippo if I wanted to burn a house down. Even I knew fire spreads upward. Each fire had at least three points of origin, proof that they were not accidental.
In two of the cases, scrapings Polecki and Roselli had sent to the state police crime lab showed no signs of an accelerant. The lab techs had worked with the two goofballs before, so they went to the scenes themselves to collect more scrapings, this time from spots below the heaviest charring. Gas chromatology tests on the new samples showed both fires were started with generous splashes of gasoline, same as the others.
But those seven burned tenement houses were owned by five different real estate companies. They were insured by three different insurance companies. None seemed to be insured for more than its market value. I scribbled all the company names in my notepad, but I couldn’t see anything in it.
“What do you make of it?” I asked.
“What do you make of it?”
“Doesn’t have the look of an insurance scam.”
“Probably not,” McCracken said, “although you can’t rule it out entirely. In Providence, half of all fires are started by someone rubbing his mortgage and his insurance policy together.”
He waited for a laugh, but I had heard the line before.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve got seven arsons, all within a half mile of each other, all set the same way, all strictly amateur. A pro would use a timing device and be in Newport knocking back boilermakers at the White Horse Tavern before anybody smelled smoke.”
“A firebug, then?”
“Maybe. What’s ‘Chief Lesbo’ telling you?”
“I told you before. Rosie likes guys.”
“Something you know from experience?”
You could say that. In first grade, I pushed her on the swings. In junior high, she bent down to cry on my shoulder when some boy she liked called her “Stilts.” In high school, I took her to the prom. And the summer before college we made love, but we’d been pals for so long that it was like sleeping with my sister. Every straight man I knew would think me a fool, but Rosie and I never twisted the sheets again.
“Know where that rumor comes from?” I said. “Male recruits in her class at the Providence Fire Academy started it after she dusted them in every fitness test. She put up with it as long as she could, but when a fellow firefighter called her a dyke in the firehouse a few years back, she kissed him on the lips and then dropped him with a right cross. Six weeks later a beam fell on the jerk, and she threw him over her shoulder and lugged him out of a burning building. Today she’s the Providence Fire Department’s first woman battalion chief. Nobody calls her names anymore.”
“So,” McCracken said, “does that mean I’ve got a shot?”
“Sure. All you’ve got to do is grow another six inches and stop being an asshole.”
“For her, I’d get lifts. But she’s your friend, so I figure she must be okay with assholes.”
“When I said you needed to grow six inches, I wasn’t talking about your height.”
McCracken’s eyes narrowed. Then he grinned and fired a carefully placed left jab that whizz
ed past my right ear.
We called the testosterone contest a draw and got back to business.
“Look,” McCracken said. “You always think arson-for-hire first because pyromania is rare. Some psychiatrists aren’t sure it even exists. But it’s the only thing that fits the facts here. My guess is we’re dealing with a psycho who sets houses on fire and gets a hard-on watching them burn. Most likely someone who lives in the neighborhood.”
“You asked Polecki for his pictures of the spectators at the fires?”
“Of course.”
“And of course there aren’t any.”
“Oh, but there are!” he said. “Not for the first six arsons. It took that long for Polecki and Roselli to figure out what they should be doing. But there are forty shots from the seventh. Want to see them? Twenty-eight bad exposures and twelve artsy close-ups of Roselli’s left thumb.”
5
Next morning, my eyes were among two dozen pairs trained on Veronica. It was hard to know what the women were thinking. The men, not so much.
She stood in the middle of the newsroom, an unlit Virginia Slim dangling from plum-tinged lips. She had taken to chewing on the filters since the publisher’s no-smoking edict. Now that I was fond enough of Veronica to care about her health, I had to concede the ban was a good thing, even though it kicked me to the curb for my daily Cuban.
Still, it rankled. The ban was another of those incremental changes that had turned our traditional newsroom into an urban-renewal project gone bad. Gone were the overflowing ashtrays, the banks of dented metal desks, the ink-stained tile floor, and the harsh fluorescent lights that forced copy editors to wear green eyeshades. The clacking typewriters had disappeared during my first year on the job, and I still missed their staccato beat. Now we had recessed lighting, a maroon carpet, and computers humming on fake butcher-block desks. The desks were walled off with four-foot-high dividers so you had to stand up to ask your neighbor how to spell delicatessen, then strain to hear him say “Look it up, asshole.” Turning the newsroom into an insurance office had cost a lot of money, but it hadn’t made the daily paper any better.
It took somebody like Veronica to do that. This morning, her story on the federal labor-racketeering grand jury, with direct quotes from the clever perjury of Giuseppe “the Cheeseman” Arena, was stripped across page one. Even the managing editor had ventured out of his office to join in the attaboys. If he hadn’t blown so much on carpeting and room dividers, maybe he could have given her a raise.
This made the third time this year that Veronica had gotten big hunks of secret grand-jury testimony into a story. Each time, the U.S. attorney demanded to know how she had done it. Each time, she politely told him to stuff it. When I asked her how she was managing it, she just Mona Lisa smiled. The smile made me forget what I’d asked.
I forced myself to stop leering, logged on, and found a message from Lomax:
SEE ME.
As I sauntered to his desk, he shot me that opportunities-in-retailing look.
“Listen, boss …”
“No, you listen. The dog story wasn’t in the paper yesterday. It wasn’t in the paper today. It had better be in the paper tomorrow.”
“Why not give it to Hardcastle? He’s got a touch with the fluff.”
“I gave it to you, Mulligan. I know you think you’ve got better things to do, but let me explain something to you. Circulation has been falling sixty papers a month for the past five years. The most common reason people give for dropping the paper is that they don’t have time to read. Know what the second most common reason is?”
“CNN? The Colbert Report? Matt Drudge? Yahoo!?”
“No, but you can bet those are some of the reasons they don’t have time for the paper anymore. The second reason is they think we print too much bad news.”
“I know how they feel,” I said, but Lomax was still talking, running over my words like a snowplow flattening a paperboy.
“We need good-news stories like a gangbanger needs bullets. It’s hard to find good news. It’s not every day that a scientist finds a cure for cancer or a Good Samaritan opens fire at a Democratic fund-raiser. So when good news smacks you in the face, you’ve got to write it. And the dog story is a genuine, honest-to-God good-news story.”
“But …”
“No buts. I’m not crazy about fluff, either, but we’ve got to give readers what they want if we’re going to be able to keep giving them what they need. The Internet and the twenty-four-hour cable news channels are killing us, and we’ve got to do everything we can to fight back. Folks want to read about something besides organized crime, political corruption, and burned-up babies. You’re overspecialized, Mulligan. I’m trying to help you out here.”
“People are dying, boss.”
“And you think you can stop it? You’ve got an inflated opinion of yourself. Investigating fires is the arson squad’s job. After they solve this thing, you can write about it.”
“Let me tell you about the arson squad,” I said, and gave Lomax a quick rundown on the Polecki-Roselli vaudeville act.
“Jesus Christ!” he said. “Why the hell don’t you write that story?”
“Yeah. Okay. How about for Sunday?”
“First the dog story. Today, Mulligan. Don’t make me talk to you about this again.”
He dropped his hands to his keyboard, a signal that our talk was over. I’d never heard Lomax put so many words together. Maybe nobody had. I figured I better do as I was told.
* * *
Maybe the star of the dog story would turn out to be a Portuguese water dog, I thought as I headed for the Bronco. Dorcas had custody of ours, a six-year-old psycho named Rewrite. I missed that dog. I would have paid the pooch a visit, but that would have meant running into Dorcas. I’d rather run headfirst into a train.
Dorcas didn’t like the dog, but she kept him for the same reason she wouldn’t let me have my turntable, my blues LPs, my collection of Dime Detective and The Black Mask pulp magazines, and the hundreds of tattered Richard S. Prather, Carter Brown, Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald, Brett Halliday, and Mickey Spillane paperbacks I’d been picking up at flea markets since I was a kid. Anything to punish me.
Dorcas had seemed to be a perfectly decent human being until she woke up married to me. Once the rice was tossed and she figured she’d hooked me for life, she grew a pretty impressive set of horns. Suddenly, I spent too many hours at work. I didn’t make enough money. I never touched her. I groped her nonstop. I didn’t love her. I smothered her with love. She accused me of bedding every female from Westerly to Woonsocket, and those I hadn’t conquered were on my list: the dental hygienist, the supermarket bagger, her friends, her sisters, the Channel 10 weather girl, the mayor’s daughter, the models in the Victoria’s Secret catalog. I had boinked or was planning to boink them all.
After a year of it, I dragged her to a marriage counselor, who wasted several sessions listening to her tales of my rampant infidelity. When he finally caught on and suggested she might have jealousy issues, she branded him an idiot and refused to go anymore. The last six months of our marriage settled into a familiar pattern: Dorcas would say I thought she was an unattractive shrew and must be cheating on her, and I would tell her she was wrong.
Until she wasn’t wrong anymore.
I had just turned onto Pocasset Avenue when the police scanner crackled. Someone had pulled a fire alarm in Mount Hope. I slowed, ignoring the honking behind me on the two-lane street, and waited for the first engine on the scene to broadcast the code. “Code Yellow” would mean false alarm. “Code Red” would mean no dog story this morning.
It came in four minutes, by the digital clock on the dash.
6
I made an illegal U-turn in front of a boarded-up Del’s Lemonade stand and headed back at forty, a reckless speed on a frigid day that had turned yesterday’s slush into icy ruts. I held the wheel tight as Secretariat, his suspension beaten to mush by too many Rhode Island pothole seaso
ns, bounced hard enough to loosen my fillings. At the intersection of Dyer and Farmington, I blasted my horn at a stooped old man painting a snowbank yellow with his dachshund.
Turning onto Doyle Avenue in Mount Hope, I pulled over to let an ambulance race past, its siren screaming. Bitter tendrils of smoke stung my nostrils, even with the windows up. Ahead, a dozen red emergency lights flashed. I pulled to the curb, climbed out, flashed my press pass, and talked my way past the police line.
Firemen had knocked down most of the flames, but smoke still seeped from the rafters of the ruined triple-decker. The dirty, crusted snow in the front yard was peppered with evidence of lives lived. A melted plastic kitchen chair, a smoldering yellow blanket, a Tickle Me Elmo streaked with soot. On the top floor, a fluttering lace curtain caught on a jagged piece of glass, all that was left of a window.
Smoke from house fires used to smell like burning wood, but that was a long time ago. Now, house fires stink of burning vinyl, polyester fabrics, chipboard, wood glues, electric appliances, hazardous cleaning products, and polyurethane foam that generates poisonous gases, including hydrogen cyanide. This fire smelled like an exploding petrochemical plant.
The world turned eerily silent as I stared at the scarred frame of the collapsing building, mesmerized by what the fire had done. But as soon as I pulled my gaze away, sound flooded in—the insistent wail of sirens, the hoarse shouts of the firemen, Rosie screeching orders into a walkie-talkie. The usual assortment of gawkers leered at the destruction, hoping the flames might come back for an encore. Everyone was talking at once, dishing out useless advice to the firemen and the cops in a version of the English language spoken only in little RowDIElin.
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