Rogue Island

shoulders of your dad’s gravestone after that glorious night in 2004? How do you explain why you sat by his grave with a portable radio last fall so you could listen to the clinching game together?

“I’ve gotta have something to care about, Veronica,” is all I said. I was just realizing she might take that wrong when the phone rang. I grabbed it on the second ring.

“You!

fucking!

bastard!”

“Can’t talk now, Dorcas,” I said, and hung up.

Later, Veronica and I discussed whether she’d stay the night again. I’d need her car if there was a fire, she said, but I suspected she really liked the way it felt. I liked the way it felt, too, and expected to like it a whole lot more once we had the test results. We agreed it would be just an occasional thing. The toothbrush could stay, and she could have her own key, but feminine products were out of the question.

That night, before we slipped under the covers, I moved the police radio to my side of the bed. About four in the morning, it woke me. Something was burning in Mount Hope. I found her car keys and tried to dress without disturbing Veronica, but she stirred, heard the radio chatter, got up, and pulled on those jeans.

16

Police had Catalpa Road blocked off, so we parked and walked in through a flurry of embers.

Rosie’s crew had given up on saving the four-story rooming house and was soaking down the triple-deckers next door and across the street to stop them from catching. A window exploded, showering a five-man pumper crew with shards of glass.

At least no one’s going to die tonight, I thought. The wood-frame building had been empty since September, when it was condemned by the city housing department. The winos and welfare mothers who had been living there protested that they had nowhere to go, but the building inspector explained it was for their own good. Some of them were still sleeping in junk cars and cardboard boxes.

My next thought was the kind that always made me feel dirty at times like this: Just a flophouse and no bodies? This might not make page one.

The fire was putting on a show. Flames jitterbugged in the windows. Hungry red tongues lapped at the eaves. Majestic fireballs rose from the roof. I don’t know how long I stood there, mesmerized, until the wind shifted and a cloud of smoke sent me sprinting for air. When I could breathe again, I looked around for Veronica. Two minutes later, I found her scribbling notes in the lee of a fire truck. Gloria was there, too, methodically snapping away with her Nikon digital camera.

“I worked late in the photo lab,” Gloria said as she adjusted her focus, “and was on my way home when I smelled the smoke.”

Cracks loud as gunshots made me jump, and the roof collapsed into kindling. When the rubble cooled, this one wouldn’t need a wrecking crew—just a front-end loader and a dump truck to haul the ashes.

At dawn, Veronica scooted back to the paper to write while I hung around to feed her notes in case anything newsworthy happened in the mop-up. Firemen were curling their hoses now, except for a couple who were still drenching the wreckage, making sure. That’s when I caught a faint whiff of something new in the air.

I found Rosie by a pumper truck.

“You smell that?” I said.

She sniffed and said, “Oh, shit!”

Odors are particulate. When you smell an orange or savor the aroma of my cigar, molecules that were once part of those objects are entering your body through your nasal passages. So what do you suppose is cruising through your bronchia when you smell the candied stench of death? The thought, more than the smell, made me retch. Sometimes it’s better not to know how things work.

Rosie spoke a few words into her radio, and within the hour two cadaver dogs were on the scene, yipping as soon as their paws hit the ground. I already had a pretty good idea what they’d find.

I paced, chatted with some of the exhausted firefighters, looked at my watch a lot. It took an hour to dig the victims out of the wreckage. There were two of them, most of the clothes burned from their bodies. Firefighters laid them on the sidewalk where Polecki and Roselli squatted to look them over. Then firefighters covered the corpses with a tarp to await the medical examiner.

“If they had ID, it got burned up,” Roselli told Rosie as I sidled over to eavesdrop. “Most likely they got sick of sleeping on the street and snuck back in for a little warmth.”

“Then they came to the right place,” Polecki said, his laugh making his belly jiggle.

Rosie’s hands clenched into fists. “I ought to kick your ass,” she said, “but it wouldn’t be a fair fight.”

*  *  *

Two hours later, I was looking over Veronica’s rough draft when Gloria came by to show us her photos. Firemen ducking for cover in a hail of glass and sparks. An ice-encrusted Rosie, silhouetted against a row of flaming windows, muscling a hose. A wide shot of firemen and equipment looking small in the foreground of a building engulfed in flame. A cadaver dog straining at his leash, snout speckled with ash.

“Wow,” I said.

“When they hired me, they promised I’d be in the lab no more than a year before I got my chance,” Gloria said. “It’s been four years now. When I called it in from the scene, know what the night desk told me? Said to sit tight while they woke up a real photographer. I told them I had it covered, but they called Porter in anyway. I just looked at his stuff. Mine’s better. The photo desk says they’re gonna use one of his and four of mine. And I get page one.”

“The one of Rosie reminds me of Stanley Forman’s work,” I said, “back when he was winning Pulitzers for the Boston Herald.”

“Thanks,” Gloria said, and she touched my arm. “By the way, I thought you’d like to have this one.”

It was a picture of me staring wide-eyed at the flames. I looked like I was in a trance. As I stared at it, I felt the heat stinging my skin again as sparks danced in the dark. Behind me in the photo, I could make out a string of gawkers. I held the print close for a better look. I couldn’t be sure, but one of them might have been Mr. Rapture.

17

First thing Monday morning, my computer flashed with a message from Lomax:

MAYOR PRESS CONFERENCE, CITY HALL AT NOON.

So what? I wasn’t the city-hall reporter. But asking Lomax why he wanted something always carried the risk of public humiliation. I wandered down the street to see what was up.

City hall, a Beaux-Arts atrocity at the southern end of Kennedy Plaza, looked as if a madman had sculpted it from a mound of seagull shit. I walked up the guano-slicked stone steps and into the foyer, then turned right and entered the mayor’s office, with its crystal chandelier and floor-to-ceiling windows with a panoramic view of a Peter Pan bus stop. Carozza stood behind his desk, the same mahogany antique Buddy Cianci had fancied before they packed him off to a federal penitentiary for getting caught doing business as usual.

TV cables snaked across the red-and-blue oriental carpet. Camera crews and on-air reporters from Channels 10, 12, and 6 had arrived early and hogged the best spots up front. Channels 4 and 7 in Boston were there, too, along with an AP reporter and a woman I recognized as a stringer for The New York Times. Mount Hope was getting to be a big story.

The occasion had flipped the mayor’s “on” switch. Everything about him, from his spritzed silver pompadour to his crisp LouisBoston suit, was camera ready. Police Chief Angelo Ricci, stiff under the best of circumstances, stood beside him in full-dress uniform complete with medals, visored hat tucked under his left arm.

They exchanged a few words and turned to face the cameras. The chief had a Louisville Slugger over his right shoulder. I started to get a bad feeling.