2
From the outside, the drab government building looked like randomly stacked cardboard boxes. Inside, the halls were grimy and shit green. The johns, when they weren’t padlocked to save civil servants from drowning, were fragrant and toxic. The elevators rattled and wheezed like a geezer chasing a taxi. I played it safe and climbed the gritty steel stairs to the third floor, then navigated four narrow hallways before I spied the sign “Chief Arson Investigator, City of Providence” painted in black on the opaque glass window of a battered oak door. I shoved it open without knocking and stepped inside.
“Get the fuck out of my office,” Ernie Polecki said.
“Good to see you too,” I said, and slumped into a wobbly wooden chair across from his army-green steel desk.
Polecki lit a cheap black stogie with a disposable lighter, leaned back in his oak office chair, and thunked his weary wingtips on a green blotter scarred with tobacco burns. The chair groaned under the weight he’d packed on since the wife left and Kentucky Fried wasn’t just for breakfast anymore. His assistant, a bum named Roselli, who got the job because he was first cousin to the mayor, sat stiffly on a gray metal chair under a cracked window skimmed over with ice on the inside.
“So it’s arson again,” I said.
“Either that or somebody thought it was a good idea to burn trash in the basement,” Polecki said. “With all the junk they had piled up down there, that dump was begging for a fire anyway.”
“Could have told you this on the phone, Mulligan,” Roselli said.
“Yeah,” Polecki said.
“But I couldn’t have looked this over by phone,” I said, and stretched for the case file on the desk.
Polecki raised his right hand and slammed it down so hard that the desk bonged like a cracked bell, then looked startled when he saw that the file wasn’t under his fat knuckles. It wasn’t anywhere else on the desk either. He glared at me. I shrugged. Then we both looked at Roselli, back in his seat now and clutching the file to his bony chest. He’d moved so fast I almost missed it.
“Investigative file,” Roselli said. “Not open to reporters or assholes, and you’re both.”
“Sure,” I said, “but how about to a First Amendment watchdog from the Fourth Estate?”
“Not to one of them either,” Polecki said.
“Any connection to the other fires?”
“None,” Polecki said.
“Ain’t nothin’,” Roselli said.
“Any pattern to who owned the buildings?” I asked. “Were any of them overinsured? Did the fires start the same way?”
Polecki took his feet off the desk and leaned forward, the shift in weight making his chair scream for its life. Patches of red flared across his cheeks, maybe from anger, maybe from exertion.
“Trying to tell me my business, Mulligan?”
“We know what we’re doing,” Roselli said.
Polecki’s stogie had gone out. He relit it, blew the exhaust at me, and grinned like he’d accomplished something. Then he took a few more puffs and flicked hot ash into his red dollar-store wastebasket.
“So Mount Hope is just having a run of bad luck?” I asked.
“Luck of the Irish,” Polecki said.
“Worst kind,” Roselli said.
“If you had the luck of the Irish, you’d be sorry and wish you were dead,” I said.
“Huh?” Polecki said.
Jesus. Doesn’t anybody remember John Lennon anymore?
A wisp of smoke rose from the wastebasket, where the cigar ash smoldered in a greasy fried-chicken bucket.
“Look, asshole,” Polecki said, “I told you before, we got no comment on ongoing investigations.”
“Which this is,” Roselli said. “Why don’t you go cover a traffic accident? Better yet, have one.”
As much as I enjoyed Roselli’s sense of humor, I decided not to stick around for another punch line. The wastebasket was smoking like Polecki’s stogie now and not smelling much better, so it seemed like an excellent time to go. I pulled the fire alarm in the hallway on my way out. Who knew the damned thing would actually work?
3
Veronica Tang, the courthouse reporter, rolled her eyes and snickered like a cartoon mouse. Except for a few Disney characters, I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone snicker like that before.
“What happened after you pulled the alarm?”
“Don’t know. I didn’t stick around for the show.”
Veronica snickered again. I liked it when she did that. Then she tossed her hair and playfully punched me in the shoulder. I liked that too.
It was happy hour at Hopes, the local press hangout. Reporters and editors from the paper and producers and on-air “talent” from the city’s TV stations were just beginning to trickle in.
“So why was Polecki being so uncooperative?” Veronica asked.
“Because he’s an asshole.”
She stared at me until I added, “Okay, we’ve got some history.”
Fifteen years ago, the police academy had overlooked Polecki’s youthful b&e conviction and admitted him as a favor to his father-in-law, the chairman of the Fourth Ward Democratic Committee. As a patrolman, he crashed a couple of patrol cars in high-speed chases. But hey, it was only two. He aced the sergeant’s exam by paying the going rate of five hundred dollars for the answers, then rose through the ranks the Rhode Island way, slipping envelopes to the mayor’s bagman. Two grand for his lieutenant bars, five grand to make captain. A Providence success story. I’d written about some of it, but it was too much to go into now, so all I said was:
“Three years ago, when he headed the tactical squad, I wrote a piece about his propensity for playing fungo with black kids’ heads. A couple of Baptist preachers got hot about it and threatened to bring Al Sharpton to town for a protest march. Made the chief so jumpy that he transferred Polecki to the arson squad, a job that doesn’t include a nightstick as standard equipment.”
Veronica lifted her stemmed glass and took another sip. “You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you when you walked through the door,” she said. “So what’s your next step?”
“No idea,” I said. “If I could just find a fresh angle on this thing, maybe I could get out of doing that sappy Lassie-come-home story.”
Her eyes widened.
“You mean you haven’t finished it yet?”
“Can’t finish what I haven’t started.”
“Jesus, Mulligan. Lomax gave it to you last Monday, for Chrissake.”
“Um,” I said.
Veronica’s brown eyes danced in amusement, but she shook her head disapprovingly, the neon bar lights doing the samba in her hair. Hair as black as the night sky when I was a kid. I hadn’t found the nerve to ask her if she colored it.
She fished a handful of quarters out of her purse and swayed down the narrow aisle between the battered Formica tables and the pockmarked thirty-foot mahogany bar. I watched her progress in the mirror that ran the length of the room and saw that her little black skirt wasn’t traveling in a straight line. She’d sipped a little too much chardonnay. I craved Bushmills, the best Irish whiskey that fit my wallet, but my ulcer kept asking the barkeep for club soda.
Journalists have been drinking themselves to death in this place ever since a reporter named Dykas sank his
