I was pretty sure now that I knew where this was going. I pulled a roll of Tums out of my pocket, peeled off a couple, and chewed.
“The victim was identified as Giovanni M. Pannone, fifty-one, of 144 Ivy Street,” the chief said. “He was taken by ambulance to Rhode Island Hospital, where he was admitted with a compound fracture of the right wrist, a concussion, and multiple contusions of the head, arms, and shoulders. At the hospital, Mr. Pannone told detectives that he had purchased gasoline for his snowblower at the Gulf station on North Main and was returning home on foot when he was accosted by the suspects.
“In their statements,” the chief went on, “the suspects expressed the belief that they had apprehended the individual responsible for the recent series of arsons in the Mount Hope neighborhood. Subsequent investigation by Providence police detectives determined that Mr. Pannone is employed as a guard on the overnight shift at the Adult Correctional Institution in Cranston and can account for his whereabouts when each of the fires was set. For most of them, he was at work. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Tillinghast have each been charged with one count of assault and battery and are being held pending arraignment. An investigation is ongoing to determine whether conspiracy charges can be brought against the organizer and other members of the so-called DiMaggios. That’s all I have.”
The chief bowed slightly and took a step backward. The blow-dry boys started shouting questions, but Carozza quieted them by holding up both hands and going “Shhhhhhh” into the microphones.
“I have something to add,” he said. “You didn’t think I’d be able to keep quiet in a room full of TV cameras, did you?” He paused for the laugh, frowned when it didn’t come, and moved on.
“What occurred last night is disturbing, very disturbing. I can’t have people prowling my city with baseball bats, taking the law into their own hands. Patrolling the streets is a job for the police, not for citizens with no training in law enforcement. You’d think that’s something we could all agree on, but our city’s only newspaper apparently takes a different view.”
My stomach was a vat of acid. The Tums weren’t working.
“Last Thursday, the newspaper published this story by L. S. A. Mulligan,” he said, holding up the front page with my feature on the DiMaggios circled in red marker. “For those of you who didn’t get around to reading it, I can tell you all you need to know. It’s disgraceful. It glorifies these vigilantes and the individual who organized them. An individual, by the way, named Dominic L. Zerilli, who has a record of bookmaking arrests and is known to police as an associate of organized crime.
“Mulligan,” he said, pointing a manicured finger at me, “I’ve had problems with you before, but this is a new low.”
With that, Logan Bedford, the asshole from Channel 10, prodded his cameraman to swing the lens my way. I thought of putting my hand in front of my face, but that would have looked too much like a perp walk. I thought of throwing the finger, but Logan would have made it look like I was flipping off the mayor. So I just smiled like a toothpaste model for the camera.
“On Sunday,” the mayor went on, “this newspaper published a page-one story by this same reporter criticizing the city’s arson squad. It was an outrageous story, full of half-truths and misleading statistics contrived to besmirch the reputations of devoted public servants. I want to make it clear that Chief Ricci and I have full confidence in our arson squad chief, Ernest M. Polecki, who is doing a remarkable job under trying circumstances, and I want to assure the people of this city that we will track down whoever is responsible for the rash of fires in Mount Hope and prosecute him or her to the full extent of the law.”
He paused so the print reporters could catch up with their scribbling.
“Okay,” he said. “Who’s got a question?”
“Mr. Mayor,” Bedford shouted, his hand in the air.
“Yes, Logan?”
“Could you please tell us how you’d like your new name pronounced on the air?”
“It’s Carozza,” the mayor replied. “The four As are silent.”
* * *
“Way to go, Mulligan,” Hardcastle crowed as I stepped off the elevator. “What’s next? A puff piece on serial rapists?”
In the newsroom, they’d watched the whole thing live on Channel 10. When I sat down, Lomax wandered over, pushed an empty Casserta Pizzeria box out of the way, and perched on the corner of my desk.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “If you hadn’t included those quotes from the cops, the ones telling people to stay home and leave the patrolling to them, we might have had a problem. But you did, so we don’t. Just keep writing about what people are doing, whether the mayor likes what they are doing or not.”
“Thanks, boss. I will.”
“So,” he said, “how about a nice little feature on cadaver dogs?”
As he walked off, I decided to proceed on the assumption that he was kidding.
18
Her long legs encased in gray wool slacks, McCracken’s secretary wasn’t flashing any thigh today. Instead, she wore a frilly white blouse with the top four buttons undone. From somewhere deep inside, I found the strength not to stare.
“Something tells me they might be real,” McCracken said, after she waved me into his office.
“Good you still got some faith,” I said.
“Faith I got, but no hope. Her boyfriend’s Vinnie Pazienza.”
Vinnie had lost some hand speed after giving up the ring for a job as a casino greeter, but he could still beat the crap out of your average middleweight.
“So I hear you’ve been prowling around Mount Hope at night,” McCracken said.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Cop friend of mine.”
“Small world,” I said.
“No, small state,” he said. “Ought to stop wasting your time. It’s not like you’re gonna catch the guy in the act.”
“I know.”
“Terrific story on Polecki and Roselli,” he said. “About time somebody took them on. Maybe it’ll do some good.”
“I doubt it.”
“So do I.”
“So is that why you wanted to see me, tell me what a bang-up job I’m doing?”
“Got something for you,” he said. “Polecki gave me a look at his preliminary report on the rooming-house fire, and there’s something new in it.”
“Oh?”
“This time there was a timing device.”
“What kind of device?”
“A coffeemaker,” he said, and then looked at me like I was supposed to understand.
I stared back at him until he broke the silence.
“You fill the coffeemaker with gasoline, find a live outlet in the basement, and plug it in. Set the programmable timer and be home bopping the wife when the house goes boom.”
“Professional job?”
“Maybe,” he said. “The pros like them because they’re impossible to trace. The rooming-house fire was started with a Proctor Silex Easy Morning Coffeemaker, model 41461. Something you can shoplift in any Target or Walmart.”
“But?”
“But anybody who types arson into Google can learn to do this in five minutes. Coffeemakers are used for arson so often now that even Dumb and Dumber knew what it meant when they tripped over the melted remains of one in the ashes.”
“So our firebug is getting a little more sophisticated,” I said.
“That’s my guess,” McCracken said, “but there are other explanations. Maybe the rooming-house fire isn’t related to the others. Or maybe we’ve been dealing from the start with a pro who wanted the fires to look like the work of an amateur. With the DiMaggios and extra police patrols on the streets, he’d have to be more careful now.”
He grinned and sliced the air with an imaginary bat.
“One thing I don’t get,” I said. “This building was abandoned, scheduled for demolition. Why was the electricity on?”
“Yeah, I checked on that. A salvage crew
from Dio Construction’s been in there pulling out copper pipe and other stuff. It was turned back on for them.”
“How could our arsonist have known about that?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s still hard to see it as a professional job. I mean, with most of the torched buildings having different owners, with none of them overinsured, what’s the motive?”
“There’s that,” he said.
“So we really don’t know anything.”
“Exactly. We don’t even know for sure if her breasts are real.”
19
The fine dust coating everything in the city hall basement property-records room made my eyes water and my throat itch. I spent two hours with real estate transfer ledgers and property-tax books before I blew my nose and snapped the last one shut.
Records showed that the nine torched buildings had all changed hands in the past eighteen months. But with five different buyers, there was no pattern to it unless you counted the fact that they were all real estate companies I’d never heard of. A little more checking showed that those five companies had snapped up a quarter of the Mount Hope neighborhood in the last year and a half. But a lot of cheap rental property had been changing hands all over the city since the last property-tax increase.
From city hall, it was a short walk to the secretary of state’s Corporations Division on River Street. A clerk with a shellacked beehive hairdo snatched my list, made a face, and waddled into a forest of file cabinets. Thirty minutes later she waddled back and slapped the incorporation papers for five realty companies on the counter.
I said, “Thank you.” She didn’t say you’re welcome. State employees in jobs with limited graft potential are seldom happy in their work.
Most states have their incorporation records on computers, but not Rhode Island. Twice, the secretary of state had persuaded the legislature to put money for computers into his budget. Both times, he’d spread the sugar around by ordering them from a local middleman, the brother of the House Appropriations Committee chairman, instead of directly from the manufacturer. Both times, someone leaked the delivery time to an interested party. Both times, the delivery trucks got hijacked. The way I heard it, the Tillinghast brothers pulled the jobs and fenced the computers to Grasso for twenty cents on the dollar.
That’s why I was standing at the counter thumbing through paper records again. Along with a few vague remarks under the heading “Purposes of Incorporation,” the documents listed each company’s address and the names of its officers and directors. The addresses were all Providence post office boxes. I didn’t recognize any of the names. Under Rhode Island law, the people behind a corporation could remain anonymous and often did. The names filed with the state could be anyone from the cast of The Sopranos to a dozen winos from the Pine Street gutter.
Then I looked again and realized I knew the directors of one of the companies: Barney Gilligan, Joe Start, Jack Farrell, and Charles Radbourn—the catcher, first baseman, second baseman, and best pitcher for the 1882 Providence Grays.
I scrawled it all in my notebook, but I couldn’t see anything in it.
When I crossed Westminster Street to fetch Secretariat, it was getting dark, the end of a typical day in the life of L. S. A. Mulligan, investigative reporter: A personal attack from the mayor. A fruitless interview with a source. A tedious records search that produced nothing unless you wanted to count the eye strain and dripping sinuses.
I used to get discouraged by days like this, but over the years I’ve learned that it seldom comes easy. You spend long working days listening to idiots drone on at public meetings, getting lied to by cops and politicians, chasing down false tips, having doors slammed in your face, and standing in the rain at 4:00 A.M. watching something burn. You get it all down in your notebook, every detail, because you can never be sure what might turn out to be important. And then you get drunk and spill beer on your notes. Unless you’re one of the few who lands a job at The New York Times or CNN, the pay is shit, and no one will ever know your name.
Why does anyone do it? Because it’s a calling—like the priesthood but without the sex. Because unless somebody does it, McCracken is right and freedom of the press really is just for suckers. Me? I do it because I stink at everything else. If I couldn’t be a reporter, I’d be squatting on the floor at the bus station hawking pencils out of a tin cup.
Sometimes it pays off. A few years ago, a source tipped me to a hot pillow joint in Warwick where the mob occasionally repaid the state police commandant for his frequent acts of kindness. I spent five weeks staking it out, surviving on Big Macs and caffeine, and peeing in a Mason jar. I sang along to my Tommy Castro and Jimmy Thackery CDs so many times that I learned the lyrics by heart. I gained eight pounds, got a bad case of the Red Bull shakes, and was still there holding a camera with a long lens when the commandant rolled up in his Crown Vic. A half hour later, two hookers in halter tops arrived to keep him company.
The best photo showed him standing in the open motel-room door, a half-naked hooker behind him blowing him a good-bye kiss. His hair was mussed, his tie was undone, and he was reaching down to zip his gaping fly. The paper ran it three columns wide at the top of page one, and for a week it was the talk of the town.
If this were Connecticut or Oregon, he might have been in a fix. But this is Rhode Island. He’s still on the job.
20
Logan Bedford’s insistent tenor blared from the TV over the bar. “Remember Sassy? She’s the big loveable mutt who supposedly walked all the way across the country to be reunited with her owners. Well, wait till you hear what really happened. You’ll be shocked!”
With that, Channel 10 Action News broke for commercial, and we all returned to drinking and swapping stories about other newspaper screwups. I was on my fourth Killian’s. Ulcer be damned; tonight I needed beer.
Logan had called the newspaper for comment, tipping us off to what was coming, so we’d fled the grim visage of the city editor and found a place more suitable for our gallows humor.
We’d been at it for nearly an hour already, Gloria kicking off the game of can-you-top-this by swearing that the small North Carolina paper where she got her start once reported a cat show with the headline NORFOLK PUSSY BEST IN SOUTH.
Abbruzzi had the floor now, spinning a tale about her days with the AP in Richmond, when a reporter trying to get literary with a weather story wrote, “Jack Frost stuck his icy finger into Virginia Tuesday.”
Sean Sullivan, a night-side copy editor for forty years, chipped in with a story about the drunk who covered Pawtucket City Hall for us back in the seventies. Not about to let the city fathers cut into his drinking time, he’d skip the council meetings and drop by the newsroom of the rival Pawtucket Times later to peek at their story. One day, the Times’ city-hall reporter banged out a fake lead about three councilmen and the police chief resigning after admitting they’d bought an old motel with city money and turned it into a brothel. Next morning, it was in our paper under the drunk’s byline. The big news in the Pawtucket paper was the council debate over whether to hire two more crossing guards.
“Took years, but we eventually lived that one down,” Sullivan said, “so maybe we’ll eventually live Sassy down too.”
Unless you’re a member of the tribe, you have no idea how hard journalists take mistakes. Sure, the business occasionally attracts a fraud like Jayson Blair, the reporter who got fired for making stuff up at The New York Times. But the lies they tell hurt the rest of us, and so does every honest mistake that makes readers doubt what we print.
“If you write ‘Blackstone Street,’ which is in the poor part of town, when you mean ‘Blackstone Boulevard,’ which is in the rich part of town, no one will believe anything in your story,” my first city editor, the legendary Albert R. Johnson, once told me. That mistake cost me three nights’ sleep.
As we waited for Logan to come back and shock us, it was Veronica’s turn to tell a story.
We all howled, but the commercial was over now, and the foxlike face of Logan Bedford was smirking again above the bar.
“I’m here with Martin Lippitt in the Silver Lake section of Providence,” he said, the camera angle widening to show a thirty-something standing beside Logan. “Martin, please tell us what you know about the amazing dog named Sassy.”
“Well, it’s like I told you. Her name isn’t Sassy. It’s Sugar. And there’s nothing amazing about her at all.”
“Sassy is really Sugar?”
“That’s right, Logan. See, I left her with some friends for a couple of weeks to go snowboarding in Vermont, but she managed to get away from them. Didn’t wander far though, just a few doors down.”
“To the home of Ralph and Gladys Fleming, right?”
“The new people, I guess that’s their names. Wouldn’t of known where she was, I hadn’t glanced at the papers piled up on the porch and seen her picture. That was some surprise, I’ll tell you.”
Veronica nudged me and started to giggle.
“So, where is Sassy, I mean Sugar, now?” Logan said.
“New people still got her. Won’t give her back.”
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