and there’s something new in it.”
“Oh?”
“This time there was a timing device.”
“What kind of device?”
“A coffeemaker,” he said, and then looked at me like I was supposed to understand.
I stared back at him until he broke the silence.
“You fill the coffeemaker with gasoline, find a live outlet in the basement, and plug it in. Set the programmable timer and be home bopping the wife when the house goes boom.”
“Professional job?”
“Maybe,” he said. “The pros like them because they’re impossible to trace. The rooming-house fire was started with a Proctor Silex Easy Morning Coffeemaker, model 41461. Something you can shoplift in any Target or Walmart.”
“But?”
“But anybody who types
“So our firebug is getting a little more sophisticated,” I said.
“That’s my guess,” McCracken said, “but there are other explanations. Maybe the rooming-house fire isn’t related to the others. Or maybe we’ve been dealing from the start with a pro who wanted the fires to look like the work of an amateur. With the DiMaggios and extra police patrols on the streets, he’d have to be more careful now.”
He grinned and sliced the air with an imaginary bat.
“One thing I don’t get,” I said. “This building was abandoned, scheduled for demolition. Why was the electricity on?”
“Yeah, I checked on that. A salvage crew from Dio Construction’s been in there pulling out copper pipe and other stuff. It was turned back on for them.”
“How could our arsonist have known about that?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s still hard to see it as a professional job. I mean, with most of the torched buildings having different owners, with none of them overinsured, what’s the motive?”
“There’s that,” he said.
“So we really don’t know anything.”
“Exactly. We don’t even know for sure if her breasts are real.”
19
The fine dust coating everything in the city hall basement property-records room made my eyes water and my throat itch. I spent two hours with real estate transfer ledgers and property-tax books before I blew my nose and snapped the last one shut.
Records showed that the nine torched buildings had all changed hands in the past eighteen months. But with five different buyers, there was no pattern to it unless you counted the fact that they were all real estate companies I’d never heard of. A little more checking showed that those five companies had snapped up a quarter of the Mount Hope neighborhood in the last year and a half. But a lot of cheap rental property had been changing hands all over the city since the last property-tax increase.
From city hall, it was a short walk to the secretary of state’s Corporations Division on River Street. A clerk with a shellacked beehive hairdo snatched my list, made a face, and waddled into a forest of file cabinets. Thirty minutes later she waddled back and slapped the incorporation papers for five realty companies on the counter.
I said, “Thank you.” She didn’t say you’re welcome. State employees in jobs with limited graft potential are seldom happy in their work.
Most states have their incorporation records on computers, but not Rhode Island. Twice, the secretary of state had persuaded the legislature to put money for computers into his budget. Both times, he’d spread the sugar around by ordering them from a local middleman, the brother of the House Appropriations Committee chairman, instead of directly from the manufacturer. Both times, someone leaked the delivery time to an interested party. Both times, the delivery trucks got hijacked. The way I heard it, the Tillinghast brothers pulled the jobs and fenced the computers to Grasso for twenty cents on the dollar.
That’s why I was standing at the counter thumbing through paper records again. Along with a few vague remarks under the heading “Purposes of Incorporation,” the documents listed each company’s address and the names of its officers and directors. The addresses were all Providence post office boxes. I didn’t recognize any of the names. Under Rhode Island law, the people behind a corporation could remain anonymous and often did. The names filed with the state could be anyone from the cast of
Then I looked again and realized I knew the directors of one of the companies: Barney Gilligan, Joe Start, Jack Farrell, and Charles Radbourn—the catcher, first baseman, second baseman, and best pitcher for the 1882 Providence Grays.
I scrawled it all in my notebook, but I couldn’t see anything in it.
When I crossed Westminster Street to fetch Secretariat, it was getting dark, the end of a typical day in the life of L. S. A. Mulligan, investigative reporter: A personal attack from the mayor. A fruitless interview with a source. A tedious records search that produced nothing unless you wanted to count the eye strain and dripping sinuses.
I used to get discouraged by days like this, but over the years I’ve learned that it seldom comes easy. You spend long working days listening to idiots drone on at public meetings, getting lied to by cops and politicians, chasing down false tips, having doors slammed in your face, and standing in the rain at 4:00 A.M. watching something burn. You get it all down in your notebook, every detail, because you can never be sure what might turn out to be important. And then you get drunk and spill beer on your notes. Unless you’re one of the few who lands a job at
Why does anyone do it? Because it’s a calling—like the priesthood but without the sex. Because unless somebody does it, McCracken is right and freedom of the press really is just for suckers. Me? I do it because I stink at everything else. If I couldn’t be a reporter, I’d be squatting on the floor at the bus station hawking pencils out of a tin cup.
Sometimes it pays off. A few years ago, a source tipped me to a hot pillow joint in Warwick where the mob occasionally repaid the state police commandant for his frequent acts of kindness. I spent five weeks staking it out, surviving on Big Macs and caffeine, and peeing in a Mason jar. I sang along to my Tommy Castro and Jimmy Thackery CDs so many times that I learned the lyrics by heart. I gained eight pounds, got a bad case of the Red Bull shakes, and was still there holding a camera with a long lens when the commandant rolled up in his Crown Vic. A half hour later, two hookers in halter tops arrived to keep him company.
The best photo showed him standing in the open motel-room door, a half-naked hooker behind him blowing him a good-bye kiss. His hair was mussed, his tie was undone, and he was reaching down to zip his gaping fly. The paper ran it three columns wide at the top of page one, and for a week it was the talk of the town.
If this were Connecticut or Oregon, he might have been in a fix. But this is Rhode Island. He’s still on the job.
20
Logan Bedford’s insistent tenor blared from the TV over the bar. “Remember Sassy? She’s the big loveable mutt who supposedly walked all the way across the country to be reunited with her owners. Well, wait till you hear what really happened. You’ll be shocked!”
