“How long did they hold you?”
“Overnight. Spent half of it on a metal chair that hurt my back somethin’ wicked, getting threatened by two detectives and a snot-nosed junior prosecutor who kept sayin’ he’d throw the book at me on the DiMaggios’ assault case ’less I rolled on Grasso. Like I’m gonna do that, the fuckin’ morons. Jesus!”
“Grasso send his lawyer over to get you out?”
“Yeah. Brady Coyle showed up about eight in the mornin’ looking like he just stepped out of a can of starch. Didn’t need ’em, it turned out.”
“How’s that?”
“Just after the sun come up they led me out of the holding cell, took me up to the chief’s office. Chief took the cuffs off himself, shook my hand, apologized all over the place. Set me down on one of his leather chairs, gave me coffee and a Danish. Then apologized some more. Kept callin’ it a misunderstanding. Hoped I wouldn’t hold it against him.”
“What the hell?” I said.
And he said, “Who’s the asshole in the hat?”
We were both looking at him now through the window over the grocery aisles, skinny guy in a fedora and a trench coat picking up a soft-porn mag, grimacing, and placing it back on the rack.
“He’s with me,” I said. “I told him to stay in the car, but he’s not used to taking orders.”
“Long as he doesn’t try comin’ up here.”
“He does that,” I said, “and I’ll shoot him myself.”
“So I was eating a Danish,” he said, picking up the story, “when those two retards, Polecki and Roselli, come waltzin’ in. Chief introduces them, real formal, like I don’t already know the pricks.”
“What did
“The four of ’em—the two retards, the snot-nosed prosecutor, and the chief—pull up chairs, sit in a half-circle around me. Show me a fuckin’ picture—young chink in a black leather jacket watching one of the fires. The one where DePrisco got burned up, I think. Terrible thing. I put a collection can on the counter for his wife and kids.”
Mason was over by the coffee stand now, pouring himself a cup of Green Mountain. He sneaked a look at Zerilli’s office window, saw me staring back at him, and quickly looked away.
“Same guy that was in one of the pictures you showed me that time,” Zerilli was saying. “Didn’t get it from you, did they?”
“Fuck, no.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Mason poured a second cup and grabbed some sugar packets and a couple of those little creamers.
“So then what?” I said.
“Chief said they want to talk to this guy real bad, and would I be willing to hand the picture out to the DiMaggios, ask them to be on the lookout.”
“Amazing,” I said.
“Yeah. One day, we’re a menace to society. Next day, we’re practically deputized.”
“Officer Zerilli,” I said.
“Fuck you, Mulligan. That ain’t funny.”
“So you turned him down?”
“Nah! No percentage in pissing them off. ’Sides, I want this asshole bad as they do. They give me this here stack of pictures,” he said, slapping a pale, bony hand on a stack of eight-by-tens lying facedown on his keyhole desk. “Gonna hand ’em out to the boys tonight.”
Mason was at the register now, paying for the coffees.
“ ’Course, they asked me to make sure the boys don’t rough him up, we happen to catch the asshole. I told ’em, Sure, I can do that. Then they told me to take their bats away. Citizen patrol was a great idea, they said, but arming them was askin’ for trouble.”
“What’d you say?”
“That I wasn’t sendin’ my boys out at night with nothin’ to carry. Up to you, I told ’em—bats or semiautomatics.”
“Good for you,” I said, and got up to leave.
“Hey. Heard your CD player got ripped off the other night.”
“Where’d you hear that?”
“Can’t say. But if you pop over to Deegan’s chop shop, he’ll put one in for you free. As a favor to me. Who knows, might be the same one you lost. I told him you might be droppin’ by.”
I walked down the stairs, put a twenty in the collection jar, strolled over to the coffee stand, and grabbed a handful of creamers. Mason was waiting by the Bronco. He handed me a coffee, and I pried off the plastic lid, poured a quarter of it out, and dumped the creamers in.
“So what was that all about?” he said.
“It was about you not doing what you were told.”
“How’s the coffee? I didn’t know how you take it.”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes, I did. I’m sorry, Mulligan. It won’t happen again.”
“And lose the stupid hat,” I said.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s a Mallory and I rather like it. I think it makes me look older.”
“Well, it doesn’t.”
28
The day they buried Ruggerio “the Blind Pig” Bruccola, I wore a black hoodie to the funeral. White letters splashed across the front read “Your Message in This Space.”
Six hours later, I was sprawled in a fake-leather chair in somebody’s idea of a classy bar on the top floor of the Biltmore. Outside the streaked plate-glass windows, the city skulked in a drizzle.
Vinnie Giordano strolled in, looked the place over, and dropped heavily into the chair across from mine. He was wearing the Providence wiseguy uniform: tapered LouisBoston suit, black shirt, white silk tie, white leather belt. He flashed me his hard look, something he probably practiced in the mirror daily. It still needed work.
“Wear that to the funeral?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Lucky nobody shot you.”
“I saw you there this morning, whispering in the mayor’s ear,” I said. “Didn’t know the two of you were tight.”
“We ain’t. He grew up on Federal Hill, same as me and Bruccola and your asshole buddy Whoosh, but since he got elected he’s been acting like he don’t know us. I was surprised to see him there, so I was just thanking him for paying his respects.”
* * *
The day had dawned clear and unseasonably warm. A low March sun vaporized the snow banks, conjuring a dense gray fog that drifted over the shoes of the mourners. The women’s Sergio Rossi and Prada pumps, the men’s Ferragamo wingtips, and my Reeboks.
To the west, the spire of Pastor’s Rest Monument, the tallest in Swan Point Cemetery, floated over the fog, marking the final resting place of the city’s leading nineteenth-century ministers. To the east, the gray surface of the Seekonk River crinkled like old skin. A yellow tug churned upstream with the tide.
At least one thousand mourners, a Who’s Who of Rhode Island crime, politics, business, and religion, had gathered in a grassy clearing still patched with snow. All about them, an undergrowth of laurel, rhododendron, and azalea shivered in the southerly breeze. Alongside the gunmetal-steel casket with its gold-plated handles was a bonfire of funeral wreaths. Figuring an average of three hundred dollars each, it must have set the assembled back a cool hundred and fifty grand.
