“It happened so fast!” the secretary told the cops. No, she couldn’t provide a description.
As Dio bled to death on his office floor, gunshots disturbed the perfect ambiance of the main dining room at Camille’s on Bradford Street. Afterward, no one could remember how many shooters there had been, what they looked like, or what door they’d left by. All anyone could say for sure was what the police could plainly see: Vinnie Giordano had enjoyed his last plate of Chef Granata’s justly famous Vongole alla Giovanni.
Brady Coyle knew none of this as he and his luncheon companion sipped from their glasses of Russian River and perused the menu at the Capital Grille. She settled on the pan-fried calamari appetizer and the Maine lobster salad. He ordered the clam chowder and the seared citrus-glazed salmon. As they waited for their food, he told lawyer jokes. She toyed with the little silver typewriter on the chain around her neck. She’d come up from Washington to see him, and he planned to make the most of it. He reached across the table and took her hand.
As they dug into their main courses, Channel 10 interrupted its regular programming with a bulletin about a shooting at Camille’s. But the volume was turned low on the TV over the bar, and neither of them took notice. They decided against dessert.
He paid the tab and left a generous tip. Outside on the sidewalk, she stood on tiptoes as he leaned in for a kiss. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a man approaching. He stood about five foot five, not much taller than she, but big in the shoulders. Red scaly patches speckled his shaved skull.
The man drew a little black pistol from his windbreaker and pressed it into Coyle’s ear.
She screamed.
The gun popped.
She was surprised it wasn’t louder.
Coyle toppled into the gutter.
The man stood over him and fired three more shots, making sure.
He turned then and looked at her, thinking about it. The magazine of his .25-caliber Raven Arms semiautomatic still held two rounds.
“No,” she said. “Please, no.”
He shrugged and let the gun slip from his hand. It landed soundlessly on Coyle’s body. Then the little thug crossed the street and strolled through Burnside Park as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
The woman’s shoulders shook. For just a moment, she thought she was going to lose her expensive lunch. Then she regained her composure, opened her purse, took out a pen and pad, and started taking notes.
I read Mason’s sketchy story about the hits in the Providence paper. A breathless, blow-by-blow, first-person account of Coyle’s execution appeared in
79
My old landlord let me move back into the America Street apartment in return for half the back rent, which I covered with an advance on my Visa card. He wasn’t happy about the arrangement, but nobody else had wanted the dump.
I wiped away the dust, hung my grandfather’s forty-five back on the cracked plaster wall, and arranged to have the utilities and phone turned back on. Guess who called first?
“You!
fucking!
bastard!”
“Hello, Dorcas. How nice to hear your voice.”
“Where the hell have you been?”
“Visiting Aunt Ruthie.”
“For the whole fucking summer?”
“That’s right. Hey, how’s Rewrite doing? You didn’t really take her to the pound, did you?”
“What if I did?”
“Are you remembering her heartworm pills?”
“Fuck you,” she said, and I hung up.
In the morning I shaved the beard, saddled up Secretariat, rolled down Atwells Avenue past Camille’s, crossed over I-95, and parked at a fifteen-minute meter in front of the newspaper.
When I stepped off the elevator, Mason got up from his desk to greet me. I stuck out my hand. He ignored it and wrapped me up in a bear hug. Gloria dashed over from the photo desk to do the same. I liked her hug better.
“Hey, everybody!” Hardcastle shouted. “The arsonist’s back from summer camp.”
It was good to hear his drawl again, but it was sad to see so many of the cubicles bare and empty. I walked to my desk past the one where Dante Ionata and Wayne Worcester had spent the last ten years exposing the polluters who were poisoning the bay. The bastards would be getting away with it from now on.
I logged on to my computer and checked my messages. There were several hundred. The most recent one, from Lomax, had been sent this morning:
CADAVER DOGS FEATURE DONE YET?
His way of saying “Welcome back.”
Shortly after ten, Lomax asked Mason and me to join him in Pemberton’s office.
“The truth now,” Pemberton said. “Which one of you really wrote that arson expose last spring?”
“Mason did,” I said.
“Mulligan did,” Mason said.
“I see. Well, how about a double byline, then? If the two of you can put your heads together and update it this afternoon, we’d like to lead the paper with it tomorrow.”
“Sure, we can do that,” I said. Of course, there were a few details I’d have to leave out.
“How come we can run it now when we couldn’t run it then?” Mason said.
“Because dead men don’t sue,” Lomax said.
Mid-afternoon, my desk phone rang.
“Mulligan?”
“Yeah.”
“I heard you were back to work.”
“You heard right.”
“I’m glad.”
“That why you called? To welcome me back?”
“I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I don’t want it to end like this.”
“What sort of ending do you have in mind?”
“That lust-filled weekend you talked about? We can still have it. Why don’t you come down this weekend? Or maybe I could come up there.”
“I’m busy.”
She was silent for a moment. I could hear her breathing.
“He didn’t mean anything to me.”
“That I can believe, but how does that make it better?”
She didn’t have anything to say to that. I could hear her breath again. While I was away, Verizon had worked some new digital miracle with the phone. I smelled the sweet scent that collected in the curve of her neck. Her lips brushed the side of my face. It made me shiver.
“Don’t you miss me?”
“Hell, yes.”
“So why can’t you forgive me?”
Preachers say forgiveness is good for the soul. That it does more for the person who forgives than for the one
