Rogue Island

you see. But I can always tell the postmaster it’s police business.”

I thanked her, gave her my home, work, and cell numbers, and asked that John or Edna call collect.

“You know John and Edna well?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” she said.

“Do you happen to know if they have a dog?”

“Had a big hairy mutt for a while, but I heard something happened to it. Now what was the story with that dog? Got distemper, maybe? No, that was the Harrisons’ spaniel. I think what I heard was that it just run off.”

After I hung up, I turned to my computer and pounded out a snappy lead about Ralph, Gladys, and Sassy.

12

I got to the meeting just as the photographer was leaving. Twenty-four men in identical red baseball caps were milling about the grocery isles. I knew several of them from high school, several more from the police blotter, and a couple from both.

“It’s on me,” Zerilli was saying as I walked in. “One bag of chips and one can of soda apiece. Aaay, Vinnie! One bag, one bag. Let you eat all the stock, might as well burn the fuckin’ place down myself.”

The caps were decorated with crossed bats and the words “The DiMaggios” in black letters.

“Are the caps fuckin’ great, or what?” Zerilli said to me. “Got ’em made up special. Your photographer, who’s got great knockers, by the way, she loved those fuckin’ caps. Couldn’t stop talkin’ about ’em, honest to God. Posed the guys out front the market, all lined up with their bats. Guys in the front row down on one knee like a team picture, for Chrisssake.”

“So why are you doing this?” I asked several of the DiMaggios as the group got ready to head out. Tony Arcaro, who had one of those no-show highway department jobs, muttered a few words about “giving something back to the community.” Eddie Jackson, a police-blotter regular for rearranging his wife’s dental work, said he was “protecting my loved ones.” Martin Tillinghast, a ragged jailhouse tattoo seared into his forearm, said he wanted to “take a stand against crime.” I scrawled their bullshit in my notepad.

“Got names to go with all but one of the faces,” Zerilli said once we were alone, the store eerily quiet now without the sound of seven hundred teeth crushing potato chips. “Only one nobody knows is the chink,” he said, pointing to the photo of Mr. Rapture. “One guy says he thinks he’s seen him around, but he ain’t sure.”

Zerilli turned the pictures over, showing me where he had scrawled the names along with addresses done in Providence fashion: no street numbers, just landmarks, such as “peeling yellow house on Larch between Ivy and Camp, blue Dodge Ram on blocks in the yard.”

When I finished with Zerilli it was only quarter to ten. I climbed in the Bronco and drove four blocks to Larch Street.

*  *  *

“Mrs. DeLucca?”

“Yes? Who is it?”

“My name is Mulligan. I’m a reporter for the paper.”

“We already take the paper.”

I thought I recognized the voice, but I couldn’t quite place it. It was a voice that belonged somewhere else.

“No, no. I’m a reporter.”

“Yes? What do you want?”

“Is Joseph home?”

“He reads the same paper I get. He don’t need his own paper.”

I was standing on a crumbling concrete stoop, staring at a solid door with three dead bolts.

“Mrs. DeLucca, this might be easier if you would let me in.”

“Whaddayou, nuts? How I know you are who you say you are and not somebody else, maybe somebody come to rape me, huh? How I supposed to know that? Open the door? Fuhgeddaboudit.”

“Ma? Who you talking to?”

“Nobody, Joseph. Go back to sleep.”

Heavy footsteps.

“Now you done it, you woke up Joseph. Hope you’re happy now.”

The dead bolts clicked and the door swung open, revealing an ancient speck of a woman in a starched blue duster that matched her bouffant.

Now I remembered. For about a month, Carmella DeLucca had been a waitress at the diner, snarling at customers and shuffling so slowly between the counter and the booths that even kindhearted Charlie finally couldn’t put up with it. When he let her go, nobody took her place.

She stood in the doorway now on swollen feet stuffed into bunny rabbit slippers. If Dorcas could see me now, she’d accuse me of sleeping with her.

Behind Mrs. DeLucca loomed her bouncing baby boy. At six foot three and about forty years of age, he looked a lot like me, if you overlooked the fifty extra pounds straining the elastic of yellowed boxers. I didn’t want to think about it. He had forgotten his shirt, although I suppose that mat of hair counted for something.

“Why you botherin’ Ma?”

Be careful with this one, Mulligan, I thought. One of those extra pounds might be muscle.

“I’m a reporter working on a story about the fires.”

“What’s that got to do with Ma?”

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you.”

“You the guy been writin’ all them stories?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t you know that just encourages him, writin’ all them stories and puttin’ ’em in the paper like that? That’s just what he wants, see all that stuff in the paper. Bet he’s cuttin’ all those stories out, makin’ himself a fuckin’ scrapbook. Sorry, Ma.”

“Who is?” I said.

“Who is what?”

“Who is making himself a scrapbook?”

“How the hell do I know? What, you some kinda smart-ass?”

“You happen to see any of the fires yourself?”

“Why you askin’ that for?”

“I’m just talking to people who’ve seen some of the fires, asking about what they saw.”

“Yeah, I seen three of ’em. No, four. Last one was when the fireman got barbecued. Watched them pull his body out the house. Stunk somethin’ awful. It was really cool.”

I flashed on Tony at his wedding reception, his arm around the girl everybody wanted. As my eyes slid over the landscape that was Joseph DeLucca, I managed to keep my clenched fist where it was. He probably couldn’t spell asshole, so maybe he couldn’t help being one.

“How did you happen to be there?” I asked.

“I was watchin’ The Brady Bunch, just like every Friday afternoon since I ain’t been workin’. Marcia was complaining ’bout her new braces, and just then sirens started goin’ off. She thought the braces made her look ugly, so I told her, ‘Yeah, they do, you whiny little bitch.’ When my show ended, I walked over there, see what was up.”

“I see. Mrs. DeLucca, is that how you remember it? The two of you were watching The Brady Bunch?”

“Ma was at the Duds ’n’ Suds. Why you care where Ma was at?”

“So you were home alone, then?”