14
On Larch Street, a big-screen TV glowed blue behind the thin white curtains of a two-story bungalow where I covered a mob hit ten years back, the widow and her teenage daughter living comfortably there now on their monthly Mafia pension. On Hopedale Road, the lights were all out in the second-floor tenement where Sean and Louisa Mulligan had managed to raise two boys and a girl on a milkman’s salary. On Doyle Avenue, an idle front-end loader with “Dio Construction” in green letters on its flank sat among the ruins of a burned-out triple-decker.
Neighborhood trash pickup was Thursday morning, and by the look of the mess in the snow, most folks had already dragged their trash barrels and Hefty bags to the curb. At the corner of Ivy and Forest, Norwegian brown rats, their eyes burning red in my headlights, yanked food scraps from holes they had burrowed in the plastic. Down the street from Zerilli’s store, a half dozen dogs had toppled a couple of trash barrels and were partying at the curb.
I decided to join them. I unscrewed the lid from my thermos, swigged coffee, and popped in a CD. Tommy Castro rocked the Bronco with electric blues:
I’d been circling for most of an hour when I spied someone crossing the street half a block ahead, silhouetted in the wash of a streetlight that hadn’t been shot out yet. The figure walked like a woman and carried something. Too small for a gasoline can. Could have been a large handgun, or maybe a camera with a telephoto lens. Before I could check it out, blue lights flashed in my rearview.
I pulled Secretariat to the curb and listened in on my police scanner as the cops ran my plate. In the mirror, I saw one cop climb out of the cruiser’s passenger-side door and position herself at the rear of the Bronco, her gun unholstered and pressed against her right leg. Her partner got out on the driver’s side and walked toward me, flashlight in his right hand, left hand resting on the butt of his revolver. I rolled down the window, the cold hitting me like a karate chop, as he shined his light in my face.
“How you doing, Eddie?” Ed Lahey had been in my brother Aidan’s posse back in the days when the word wasn’t synonymous with
“Mulligan? That you? The hell you doing out here middle of the night?”
“Same as you, Eddie. Wasting my time.”
“Got that right,” he said. “Supposed to cruise the neighborhood all night, stop anyone looks suspicious. Ever see anyone in Mount Hope who
“Just the pedophile priest,” I said. “I hear the bishop is transferring him to Woonsocket.”
“Not planning on burning anything down tonight, are you, Mulligan?”
“Not right this minute,” I said, “but I’ve got a cigar I’m saving for later.”
“No cans of gasoline in back?” His tone was light, but he shined his flashlight into the backseat, then walked back and peered through the window of the empty cargo space.
When he was done, he narrowed his eyes and told me to head for home.
“Okay, maybe I will.”
“Uh-huh. Sure you will. Look, you got a cell phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Here’s my cell number,” he said, handing me a card. “Call it if you see anything. And next time you talk to your brother, tell him …”
I rolled the window up before he could finish. I had enough problems.
I drove down the block and turned right, looking for the figure I’d seen crossing the street, but of course, she was gone. A few minutes later, cruising up Cypress, I saw a couple of the DiMaggios, bats on their shoulders, smoking cigarettes and stamping their feet in the snow. I slowed, rolled the passenger-side window down, and leaned toward it.
“Hey, Vinnie! Seen anything unusual tonight?”
“Nothing ’cept for Lucinda Miller standing in her window, giving us a good look at her tits.”
His colleague snorted. “That ain’t so unusual.”
I pulled out the three-flame Colibri that Zerilli had given me. I didn’t have anything that needed welding, so I used it to fire up a Cuban and smoked as I prowled the empty streets. I didn’t see anyone skulking about with a can of gasoline. I didn’t see anyone resembling Mr. Rapture. Except for the DiMaggios, I didn’t see anyone at all.
The CD cycled around to “Nasty Habits” twice before I shut it off. Around three in the morning, the Bronco’s heater coughed and surrendered. The eastern sky was lightening when a newspaper delivery truck pulled up in front of Zerilli’s store and heaved out two bundles of city editions. I headed home to catch a couple hours’ sleep, see what my dreams could conjure.
I heard the phone ringing through the apartment door, stepped in, and picked up the receiver.
“You!
fucking!
bastard!”
“Hello, Dorcas.”
“So, who is she?”
“Who?”
“The bitch you’ve been out fucking all night.”
“What makes you think it was only one?”
“I’m still your wife, you evil bastard!”
“Good morning, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up. Just before I set the receiver down, I thought I heard Rewrite bark.
* * *
By the time I dragged myself in to work, the editors were meeting behind closed doors, discussing an issue that required their collective experience and judgment: Should the paper start printing the mayor’s name as “aaaaCarozza” or stick with the more headline-friendly “Carozza”? Judging by the muffled sounds coming through the wall, the debate was heating up.
I snatched a newspaper off the stack beside the city desk and saw that page one was dominated by a four- column picture of Sassy. She had her paws on Ralph’s shoulders, digging at his ear with her tongue while Gladys stood by looking embarrassed. Looking at the page made me feel bad about what I’d done. Not that I gave a damn about Hardcastle, but I cared a whole lot about the paper.
I was just a kid when Dan Rather broke into a Red Sox broadcast with the news that Pope Paul VI had died. “Maybe so,” my dad said, “but we won’t know for sure till we read tomorrow’s paper.” In a state where politicians lie like the rest of us breathe, the newspaper is the only institution people trust to tell the truth. I knew right then that I wanted to be a part of it.
That night, I prowled Mount Hope again in the heatless Bronco, giving it up around three in the morning, when hypothermia set in and even Tommy Castro’s guitar couldn’t heat things up. My apartment was warm only by comparison, the landlord thrifty with his heating oil.
Sleeping alone under a thin blanket, I dreamed of Norwegian brown rats with glowing red eyes and fierce cartoon dogs that wore red baseball caps and wielded Louisville Sluggers. The hair on the backs of their necks stood up as they growled in the dark and swung their bats at a man clutching a gas can in his left hand. He tried to escape the blows by crawling headfirst into an overturned plastic trash barrel, but the dogs clamped their jaws on his ankles and yanked him out. Their snapping teeth tore chunks of flesh from his thighs, and the rats scurried to devour the bloody pieces. A police car, blue lights swirling, roared down the street and screeched to a stop. The cops leaped out, shouted “Good dogs,” tossed them Beggin’ Strips, and stomped the man with their gleaming black jackboots. His mouth opened in a silent scream.
He had my face.
