Rogue Island

by Bruce DeSilva

  “Why mad?”

  “Pemberton asked, did I know that my story was based on documents you had stolen from Brady Coyle’s office?”

  “How the hell did he know that?”

  “That call he took? It was Coyle threatening to sue the paper for invasion of privacy, libel, and a couple of other things Pemberton told me that I can’t remember just now.”

  “What? How did Coyle know about the story?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know. At that point, I lost my temper. Said some things I shouldn’t have.”

  “Like what?”

  “That Giordano, Dio, and Coyne are scum. That they are arsonists and murderers. That the three of them were going to get away with it because we didn’t have the balls to take them on.”

  “Oh, boy.”

  “Yeah. I was loud about it, too. Pemberton just shook his head and said I had some growing up to do. When I went upstairs to see Dad, he said the same thing.”

  “Thanks for trying, Mason.”

  “This isn’t over, is it?”

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but there are two outs in the bottom of the ninth, and we’re down by ten.”

  McCracken and I were commiserating when the cell rang again.

  “Hello, asshole.”

  “Brady! How good of you to call.”

  “Glad to hear from me, are you?”

  “It’s always a pleasure to talk with an old teammate.”

  “Forgive me if I doubt your sincerity. After all, I’m scum. I’m an arsonist and a murderer. Isn’t that what your lapdog says? That’s malice per se, Mulligan. I almost hope the paper does print your lies. By the time I get done suing, I’ll own everything from the delivery trucks to the printing presses.”

  And then he guffawed. He was still at it when I hung up. That was the first time I’d ever heard anyone guffaw. I didn’t like it much.

  I called Mason back.

  “This is important,” I said. “Who overheard your rant about Giordano, Dio, and Coyle?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “It was just a few minutes ago, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Stand up and look around. Who’s there now?”

  “Uh … Lomax and Pemberton, of course. Abbruzzi, Sullivan, Bakst, Kukielski, Richards, Jones, Gonzales, Friedman, Kiffney, Ionata, Young, Worcester. And Veronica’s here. It’s her last day.”

  “What about Hardcastle?”

  “I don’t see him. Wait a minute. Yeah, there he is. He’s just coming out of the men’s room.”

  “That it?”

  “There are some others, but they’re too far away to have overheard.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, and hung up.

  73

  Ten minutes later, I was double-parked on Fountain Street with the motor running. At 6:45, a gray Mitsubishi Eclipse pulled out of the parking lot across from the newspaper. I let a few cars go by and then followed. The Eclipse turned right on Dyer, lurched onto I-195, and zoomed across the Providence River.

  TV cop shows make a big deal over how hard it is to tail somebody. It’s bull. When you’re driving a nondescript subcompact in light traffic and the person you’re following has no reason to be suspicious, it’s as easy as stealing on Wakefield’s knuckleball.

  In East Providence, we turned south on Route 114 toward the fashionable suburb of Barrington. Fifteen minutes later, the Eclipse stopped in front of a big Tudor-style house with a well-manicured lawn.

  I idled half a block away as Veronica got out of her car, locked it, and started up the front walk. As she rang the doorbell, I rolled slowly by the house. The door swung open, revealing a man with a wine glass in his hand. He handed it to her, and she took it. Then she stood on her tiptoes, and he brought his face down to hers.

  As I pulled away, Veronica and Brady Coyle were still in a lip-lock.

  * * *

  I didn’t feel much like driving back to Providence. I took 114 south to Newport, parked on Ocean Avenue, and sat there all night listening to the breakers beat their brains out on the rocks. I thought about the dead twins. I thought about Tony. I thought about Mr. McCready. I thought about the bullet holes in Scibelli’s body. I thought about Rosie. I wondered if Veronica had asked Coyle to get an AIDS test. I wondered if she’d ever talked to him about the future. I wondered if she’d told him she was her father’s girl. She certainly wasn’t mine.

  I wondered if I’d see the bullet coming.

  74

  There was nothing to do but run.

  In the morning, I crossed Narragansett Bay on the majestic Claiborne Pell and Jamestown bridges. When I reached the little town of West Kingston, I parked Gloria’s car at the train station and bought a northbound ticket.

  As the local pulled into Providence, I buried my head in a newspaper and kept it there until we arrived at Boston’s South Station. Before I got off, I turned my cell phone on, muted the ringtone, and wedged it between the seat cushions. If Giordano had any cop friends who could track me through its signal, they’d go crazy chasing me up and down the Northeast Corridor until the battery ran down.

  Aunt Ruthie put me up in my cousin’s old room. She was glad for the company.

  I bought a Nokia prepaid to keep track of things back home. McCracken said he’d locked the original documents and the Giordano recording in his safe-deposit box, and that as far as he could tell, no one but Mason and I knew he had them. Whoosh said the word on the street was that someone, he wasn’t sure who, had a contract out on me, and what the hell had I gotten myself into? Mason said he didn’t think they’d be coming after him, but that Daddy had hired a couple of former Treasury agents as bodyguards just in case. Jack said Polecki and Roselli hadn’t hassled him lately, but that he still wasn’t welcome at the firehouse. Gloria said her first plastic surgery had gone well and that her mother had found the car right where I’d left it. The hospital said Rosie was still critical.

  I didn’t give anyone my number. I didn’t tell anyone where I was.

  I grew a beard and let my hair grow. The beard surprised me by coming in gray. Weekdays, when Aunt Ruthie went to her job at Fleet Bank, I’d get into a pickup basketball game at the Y or stretch out on her floral damask couch and devour Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. I was used to writing every day, and I missed it. After a couple of weeks, I’d read so many crime novels that I started thinking I could write one. I banged out sixty pages on Ruthie’s old Smith Corona before I realized I was wrong.

  Rosie and Veronica haunted my dreams. Each morning I awoke with a strand of razor wire wrapped around my heart. First thing, before sitting down to breakfast with Aunt Ruthie, I’d punch the familiar numbers into my prepaid and always get the same news about Rosie. And the wire around my heart would tighten.

  Ruthie insisted on buying the groceries and wouldn’t hear of me paying rent. With Maalox and cigars my biggest expenses, the twenty-six hundred dollars in vacation pay I’d withdrawn in cash before leaving Rhode Island just might last till Christmas. I didn’t dare use my credit card.

  Nights and weekends, we sat together in her parlor and watched the Red Sox on TV. By the beginning of June, Ortiz was on the shelf with a torn tendon, Ramirez was day-to-day with a hamstring, and the team had slipped a game and a half behind the upstart Rays.

  On rainy days, I used Ruthie’s laptop to check the news from Providence. When the weather was good, I took the Red Line to Cambridge in the afternoon and bought the Providence newspaper at Out of Town News in Harvard Square. Summer headlines heralded Carozza’s big lead in the polls, bid-rigging at the Providence Highway Department, kickbacks in Pawtucket, the exposure of another pedophile priest, and sixty-three parishioners getting sick on polluted shellfish at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus’s annual summer clambake. None of the stories carried my byline. I missed the rush.

  I tried to distract myself on those daily subway trips by reading the graffiti or inventing lives for my fellow riders. But my mind wandered. Suddenly Ver
onica would be sitting beside me, reaching for my hand. I imagined whole conversations, trying out different explanations for her betrayal. Each day, she had a new reason. None of them mattered. People are what they do.

  It was a summer of painful obituaries. First George Carlin. Then another of my favorites, Bernie Mac. I never believed the old saw about death coming in threes, but I found myself dreading the third one anyway. Then Carl Yastrzemski checked into a hospital for triple-bypass surgery. Yaz had been one of my father’s favorites, which made him one of mine too, but given the alternative, I almost hoped the third one would be him.

  The news about the newspaper business was all bad. Desperate to stem the tide of red ink, papers all over the country slashed employee pay and laid off journalists by the thousands. The Miami Herald. The Courier-Journal of Louisville. The Los Angeles Times. The Kansas City Star. The Baltimore Sun. The San Francisco Examiner. The Detroit News. The Philadelphia Inquirer … Not even The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal were immune.

  By late July, I was no longer a suspect, and the paper had reinstated me. Wu Chiang’s lawyer, more grateful than she needed to be for the credit-card records I’d mailed to her, had followed Brady Coyle’s script exactly, providing Polecki with my alibis and pressing the chief of police for a public exoneration and apology. Polecki dragged his feet as long as he could before grudgingly issuing a statement. The cops had released my Bronco and my grandfather’s gun, and the lawyer said she was holding them for me. I didn’t give her my number, either.

  I wanted to go home. I missed the scent of salt, spilled petroleum, and decaying shellfish that rose like Lazarus from the bay. I missed the bellowing of the parti-colored tugs that bulled rusting barges up the river. I missed the way the setting sun turned the marble dome of the statehouse the color of an antique gold coin. I missed Annie’s tattoo, Mason’s fedora, Charlie’s omelets, Zerilli’s Cubans, McCracken’s crushing handshakes, Jack’s Italian curses, and Gloria’s one good eye. I missed knowing the names of almost everyone on the streets.

  But there was still a price on my head. And it was only a matter of time before Providence joined the layoff trend. Would there be a job waiting if it were ever safe for me to return?

  One evening Ruthie pulled out her photo albums, and we paged through them together on the couch. Ruthie and her sister—my mother—holding tennis rackets and mugging for the camera. Their father looking sharp in his Providence PD uniform, his chest bedecked with medals. Aidan and Meg ripping open Christmas presents. Little Liam playing with a Tonka hook-and-ladder truck.

  When I was six, that truck and I were inseparable. I’d even slept with it. “Wow!” I said. “I’d forgotten how much I loved that thing.”

  Ruthie smiled, got up, rummaged in the hall closet, and came back cradling the truck in her arms. I remembered it as a huge thing in my life, but when she handed it to me, I was surprised how small it was.

  “I rescued it from the basement after your mother died,” she said. “You should have it.”

  Maybe I’d sleep with it again. Better than sleeping alone.

  In early August, the paper’s owners finally tired of bleeding money and laid off 130 employees, 80 of them news staffers. I called Mason to learn the names. Abbruzzi. Sullivan. Ionata. Worcester. Richards … So many old friends.

  “You and Gloria were on the list, too,” Mason said, “but I talked to Dad.”

  I was touched that he’d done that for me. I wasn’t surprised he’d kept his promise to her. But if readers and advertisers kept on deserting us, this wouldn’t be the last of the layoffs. Mason might not be able to save us next time.

  By mid-August, the Yankees were finished, their stars looking old and slow and the young pitchers they’d counted on not yet ready for the big time. But the Sox trailed the surprising Rays by seven games now, and three of our starting pitchers, our right fielder, our shortstop, and our third baseman were all on the disabled list. Ortiz had returned from his wrist injury, but he wasn’t the same. And the great one, Manny Ramirez, was gone, traded to the Dodgers after throwing one tantrum too many about his pitiful twenty-million-dollar contract. I wondered what Rosie would have said about that. Me? After all that had happened, it was hard to care about baseball anymore.

  On a Sunday afternoon in early September, the Providence paper’s banner headline grabbed me before I grabbed it from the newsstand: ARSON RETURNS TO MOUNT HOPE.

  I carried the paper to the Algiers Coffee House on Brattle Street and read it over a cup of Arabic coffee and a lamb-sausage sandwich. A duplex on Ivy Street had burned to the ground, and a fast-moving fire had gutted Zerilli’s Market on Doyle Avenue. The story, under Mason’s byline, quoted Polecki as saying the fires were definitely suspicious but still under investigation. When I turned to page eight for the rest of it, I was thrilled to see that the fire picture on the jump page was credited to Gloria.

  Mason’s story went on to speculate that the arsons had resumed because, after a quiet summer, the police and the neighborhood vigilante group known as the DiMaggios had “let their guard down.” I made a mental note to talk to Mason about clichés.

  I tried to call Whoosh, but his home number was unlisted and the phones in his store were melted lumps of plastic.

  75

  Next morning, I borrowed Aunt Ruthie’s immaculate two-year-old Camry and headed south on I-95. An hour later I turned off at Branch Avenue, parked on the street by the gate to the North Burial Ground, opened the trunk, and took out my Tonka hook-and-ladder truck. A bunch of dead mums slumped against the headstone that marked the final resting place of Scott and Melissa Rueda. I placed the toy on the twins’ grave and took the dead flowers away.

  Then I walked to the car, cruised a few miles east, and swung into Swan Point Cemetery. Rosie was buried among the rhododendrons, about fifty yards west of where they’d planted Ruggerio “the Blind Pig” Bruccola. Her grave was smothered in a mound of dead flowers. I cleared them away, preserving the mementos her fellow firefighters had placed there—three fire hats, a brass nozzle from a fire hose, several dozen Providence FD patches, and a few score more from other fire departments around the state. I draped a signed Manny Ramirez jersey over the shoulders of her gravestone, kneeled in the grass, and talked with her for a while, just the two of us reminiscing about our Hope High days while watching a tug churn its way up the Seekonk River. I kidded her about the neon flowered monstrosity she’d worn to the prom. She made fun of my awkward, left-handed layups. We agreed we had made a mistake, that one time we slept together, but we weren’t sure if the mistake was doing it at all or not giving it another try.

  “I’m so sorry I missed the funeral, Rosie. I would have been there, but Aunt Ruthie talked me out of it. If she hadn’t, I’d probably be lying right next to you.”

  When the chat between two friends turned into a conversation between the living and the dead, and I couldn’t hear her voice anymore, I walked back to the car, taking the jersey along with me. She’d want to wear it again the next time I dropped by to talk, and there was no point in leaving it behind so some punk could steal it.

  I took a shortcut past Brown Stadium and swung Ruthie’s car onto Doyle Avenue. The store was a blackened shell, and Whoosh was standing out front supervising a sidewalk sale of smoke-damaged goods. I parked on the street, strolled over to him, and stuck out my hand.

  “Do I know you?”

  “You do.”

  “You’re gonna have to remind me.”

  “Look harder,” I said, and removed my sunglasses.

  He squinted at my face, then said, “Ah, shit. I didn’t figure you for a suicide.”

  “Hard to recognize me with the beard?”

  “Yeah, but what really threw me was the Yankees cap and jersey. Fuckin’ good disguise.”

  “Take a walk with me.”

  “Hang on a sec,” he said.

  He walked through the store’s charred doorway and disappeared into the ruins. A couple of minutes later, he
emerged carrying a stack of six wooden cigar boxes.

  “Might as well have these,” he said. “The heat dried them out, but throw some apple slices into the boxes, and some of them should come back okay.”

  I thanked him and locked the boxes in the trunk of Ruthie’s car. Then we strolled together under the old, half-dead maples lining the sidewalk, where a few of the leaves were starting to turn.

  “I’m so sorry about Rosie. I know the two of you were close.”

  “My best friend.”

  “John McCready was mine, so I know how you must feel.” He threw his arms wide. “So many fucking fires. So many neighbors dead.”

  “Sorry about the store,” I said.

  “Hell, that’s the least of it.”

  “Going to rebuild?”

  “Gonna reopen next week in a storefront on Hope Street,” he said. “It’s a good space. Giordano gave it to me in a straight swap for the old place. Guess he’s thinking of building something here. Damned good of him, though. And to think I had him pegged for an asshole.”

  “The DiMaggios still on patrol?”

  “They disbanded back in June when it looked like the fires had stopped. Big fuckin’ mistake. As of last night, they’re back on the streets. They catch the prick what burned my place down and I won’t be calling the cops next time. He’s going right into the Field’s Point sludge incinerator.”

  “Whoever he is, he’s just a hired hand,” I said. “Want the names of the bastards who sent him?”

  76

  “It’s Mulligan. I need a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “I need you to get the recording and documents out of your safe deposit box and bring them to me.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Better you don’t know.”

  “Okay. When and where?”