“What the fuck you gettin’ at? Sorry, Ma. You accusin’ me of something? Get the fuck outta here, ’fore I shove my size-twelve up your ass.”
Mark Twain said, “Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.” I wondered what Joseph DeLucca’s looked like. If I’d had a half hour to spare, I’d have walked around him to see for myself.
According to Secretariat’s dashboard clock, there was time to try another of the names Zerilli had provided. Darned if I could see what good it would do. What had I been thinking? That one of the guys in the pictures was the firebug and that as soon as I showed up he’d pour his confession into my notebook?
I drove home over rutted streets, cursing myself for thinking it would be easy. I unlocked my door and stared for a long minute at my rumpled bed. After gulping a Maalox nightcap, I peeled the Band-Aid and cotton ball off the spot where the needle had gone in and crawled under a blanket that still smelled of Veronica.
13
Breakfast at the diner was coffee cut with lots of milk, eggs over easy, and the city edition. Bruccola, the aging mob boss, had been admitted to Miriam Hospital with congestive heart failure. Providence College’s star forward, a lock to make McCracken’s office wall, had been sentenced to twenty hours of community service for breaking his English tutor’s arm with a lug wrench. Our sports columnist trumpeted the good news that, thank God, the player would not have to miss any Big East Tournament games. And our mayor had once again outwitted a political enemy.
Seems that last week, the mayor’s probable opponent in next fall’s election had legally changed her name from Angelina V. Rico to Angelina V. aRico so she would be listed first alphabetically on the ballot. But yesterday, Mayor Rocco D. Carozza legally changed his name to Rocco D. aaaaCarozza. It was a strong front page, even without the dog story. I couldn’t find Sassy anywhere else in the paper, either.
A couple of stools away, a city councilman was checking the news on his laptop. The paper was too cheap to buy me one, but I didn’t much care. I preferred holding a real newspaper in my hands.
“Hey, Charlie.”
“Yeah?”
“I ran into Carmella DeLucca last night, and she was as charming as ever.”
Charlie turned from the grill, rested both hands on the counter, and bent toward me. “I took her on ’cause she needed the dough, but she couldn’t keep up with all the work around here.”
I grinned and looked down the counter at the diner’s only other customer, waiting for Charlie to burn his pancakes. Charlie followed my gaze.
“Fuck you, Mulligan.”
* * *
In the newsroom, I logged on and found a message from Lomax on my computer:
YOUR DOG STORY SUCKED. ABBRUZZI GAVE IT TO HARDCASTLE TO REWRITE. HOPE YOU WEREN’T EXPECTING A RAISE THIS YEAR.
Hardcastle, a rawboned Arkansas transplant who wrote occasional features and a twice-weekly metro column, was hunched in his cubicle, drumming at his keyboard with his big red hands. I ambled over and said, “What gives?”
“Mulligan, you never could write, but your Sassy story was dog shit,” he said, blessing the word with an extra syllable—
“Well,” I said, “it couldn’t be confirmed.”
“The hick sheriff told you the Stinsons live in town, that they had a mutt, that it run off. Sounds like confirmation to me. What the hell was you waiting for? Paw prints? Doggie DNA?”
“Have it your way, Hardcastle. Just make sure my byline isn’t on it.”
“Don’t skip your nap over that, Mulligan. You blew your shot. Got so many page-one stories you can afford to piss ’em away?”
I saw it clearly now. My story was dog shit, and I pissed it away because I didn’t stroke it like it was my dick. Why bother with journalism school when Hardcastle Academy is tuition free?
Back at my desk, the message function was blinking with another rocket from Lomax:
PRESS RELEASES.
As I read it, a copy boy deposited a beer keg–sized plastic box beside my desk. It was white with “U.S. Mail” stenciled in blue letters on the side. Inside was the day’s incoming from every press agent and political candidate with a hope of hoodwinking us into putting something worthless in the paper. Usually an intern sorted through them, but today I was being punished.
I picked up the one on top. In it, Marco Del Torro promised that if reelected to the city council he would do something about the long lines for the restrooms at the civic center. Just what he would do he didn’t say.
The phone rang as I was dumping the contents of the box into my big green wastebasket. I accepted the collect call, asked a question, listened for a few minutes, hung up, and scanned the newsroom. I spotted Hardcastle schmoozing at the copydesk. He slapped his thigh and squealed as several deskmen joined in the laughter.
“Hardcastle,” I called out as I walked over. “Got something you need to know.”
“Hey, here’s our boy now,” he said. “I was just recounting your Pulitzer-worthy work on the Sassy story, but how ’bout you tell it in your own words?”
I turned my back on him, walked back to my desk, checked my computer messages, and found another from Lomax:
AND WHAT’S WITH THE JACKET AND TIE TODAY? DID SOMEBODY DIE OR SOMETHING?
* * *
That afternoon, Rosie sat beside me in a church pew and wept into my shoulder.
Firefighters from six states had come to Tony DePrisco’s funeral at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus on Camp Street, just two blocks from the cellar where he’d burned to death.
A few rows in front of us, I saw the bent figure of Tony’s wife Jessica, her sleeping daughter Mikaila curled in her lap. A dazed little boy sat stone still on either side of her—Tony Jr. and Jake.
Father Paul Mauro, a wizened little man who had presided at Tony’s confirmation more than twenty-five years ago, stood in front of the closed casket and spoke of heroism, integrity, sacrifice, and salvation. I had to smile a little. The Tony I knew was a goof-off who’d passed math and English by copying from my exam papers, and whose lone contribution to our school’s athletic prowess was kidnapping other schools’ mascots. Somehow he’d managed to snag the senior-prom queen and then squeak through the fire academy after washing out twice. In nearly twenty years as a fireman, he’d never won a commendation. He would have wondered who Father Mauro was talking about.
A hand closed around mine and squeezed hard enough to make me cringe.
Late that afternoon, I finished knocking out the feature on the DiMaggios for the next day’s paper, describing the hats and bats and laying the bullshit quotes on thick. By then it was too late to catch the end of the Sox spring- training game, even if I’d been in the mood, so I decided to get a head start on the weekend piece about Polecki and Roselli. I double-checked the stats on their abysmal record for closing cases and called McCracken at home for a not-for-attribution quote about how insurance investigators all over New England were calling them “Dumb and Dumber.”
The Farrelly Brothers’ lowbrow comedy was a local favorite because Dumb and Dumber hailed from Providence, the movie starting with an establishing shot of Hope Street. Another reason to be proud.
Me? Call me Dumbest. By midnight I was cruising Mount Hope on the off chance that I might spot something. It was no way to investigate anything, but I couldn’t sit around doing nothing, and I was out of ideas.
