8
Efrain and Graciela Rueda had arrived in Providence seven years ago from the little town of La Ceiba in southeastern Mexico. He went to work as a day laborer. She made beds at the Holiday Inn. Two years later, the twins were born. Graciela wanted to name them Carlos, which means “free man,” and Leticia, which means “joy,” but Efrain insisted on Scott and Melissa. He wanted them to be American through and through. Their children were their life. Now they didn’t have enough money to bury them.
Their fellow parishioners at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus raised enough for two little wooden coffins. The Providence firefighters’ local donated the headstone. In a paroxysm of generosity, Lugo’s Mortuary supplied the hearse at half price.
On Monday morning, the crowns of the tallest headstones in the North Burial Ground poked above the crusted snow cover. Rosie and I stood with a little knot of mourners huddled at a pit hacked into the frozen turf. Mike Austin, the firefighter who had brought Scott’s body down the ladder, helped carry him to his grave. Brian Bazinet, who had descended with Melissa, helped carry her.
I cocked my head to catch the priest’s ancient words of comfort and glory, but they were swallowed by Graciela’s keening and the white noise of hundreds of Bridgestones, Dunlops, and Goodyears swishing by on the interstate thirty yards to the west. Off to the east, the gravedigger watched from his backhoe, its engine muttering.
After the mourners slogged to their battered Toyotas and Chevrolets, Rosie and I picked up clumps of frozen earth and dropped them into the grave. They landed on the little coffins with hollow thuds. Then we stood aside and watched the gravedigger finish the job. I tried to find calm in the steady rhythm of his work, but in my mind I could still hear Graciela’s anguished wail and the low rumble of her husband as he tried to comfort her.
Journalism professors preach that you should never get emotionally involved in your stories, that to remain objective you must cultivate a professional detachment. They are so full of shit. If you don’t care, your stories will be so bloodless that readers won’t care either.
I said a prayer in case He was listening. But where was He when the snowplow was burying the hydrant? Where was He when the twins were screaming for help?
Rosie and I crunched through the snow to the Bronco, then turned and looked back at the patch of brown earth in a blinding field of white. We didn’t speak. What was there to say?
Somebody had to pay for this, and Polecki and Roselli weren’t up to the job.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, I walked into the newsroom and found a thick manila envelope on my desk. On the front were the words “You owe me—Gloria.” She’d stuffed the envelope with eight-by-tens.
I thought about logging on, but I didn’t want to deal with the latest Lomax message just yet. I dumped the envelope out on the desk, studied the prints, and found a lot of familiar faces. Old Mrs. Doaks, who had babysat the Mulligan kids when we were little, stood at the police lines and craned her neck. Three of the Tillinghast boys, apprentices in their older brother’s truck-hijacking start-up venture, scowled at the flames and looked like they wanted to hurt somebody. Jack Centofanti, a retired fireman who missed the action so much that he spent his afternoons hanging around the firehouse, lent a hand by directing traffic. That face took me back. When I was a kid, Jack and his tackle box appeared at our front door at 4:00 A.M. every time the fish were biting at Shad Factory Pond across the river in East Providence. He’d been a steady loser at the low-stakes poker-and-beer nights that had filled our parlor with bawdy stories and good fellowship every Saturday night. Jack had been my father’s best friend. When he spoke at Pop’s funeral, he made a Mount Hope milkman sound like a hero for raising a girl who didn’t wind up pregnant and two boys who managed to stay out of jail.
I kept flipping through the same pictures over and over. Each time I saw a face at more than one fire, I circled it in red grease pencil. Best I could tell, fourteen faces showed up at two or more fires. At first I was surprised there were so many, but when I thought about it, I was surprised there weren’t more. After all, the fires were all in the same neighborhood, all but the last one breaking out at night when most people were home.
Jack’s face showed up at a record seven fires, and I’d bet a year’s pay that he’d directed traffic or handed out hot coffee at all of them. Another face showed up at six. It belonged to an Asian male, late twenties, wearing a black leather jacket. In two pictures, he was carrying a flashlight, and in one, his eyes were lifted to the roof of a burning building. On his face was a look of rapture.
I knew exactly how he felt. I was a cub reporter when the old Capron Knitting Mill in Pawtucket burned down, and even though that was a long time ago, sometimes, when I closed my eyes, I could still see it: firemen silhouetted against orange fireballs soaring hundreds of feet against the blackest of skies. It was so horrifyingly beautiful that for several long minutes, I forgot why I was there.
Suddenly I remembered that two of the Mount Hope fires hadn’t been labeled suspicious origin. I flipped back through the pictures, tossing out those from a fire that had started from careless smoking and another caused by a faulty kerosene heater. When I was done, I still had a dozen faces to check out. I recognized three of them, but I’d need help identifying the others, including Mr. Rapture.
The name made me think of Veronica, and my loins tingled a little. I picked up the phone and punched in the number for my doctor. Unless it was an emergency, his receptionist said, the first available appointment would be seven weeks from Tuesday.
“It is an emergency,” I said.
“What is the nature of the emergency?”
“It is of a delicate nature.”
“I’m very discreet,” she said.
“My girl won’t screw me until I have an AIDS test,” I said, and she hung up.
I called the Rhode Island Department of Health’s VD clinic and learned they could draw my blood today, but the lab was so backed up that it would take five weeks to get the results.
After I hung up, I logged on to my computer and found the message I expected from Lomax:
WHERE’S THE GODDAMNED DOG STORY?
I shot back a reply:
I’M WORKING ON IT.
But first I needed to see my bookie.
9
Dominic Zerilli had lived for seventy-four years, and every morning for the last forty-two of them, he would get up at 6:00 A.M., put on a blue suit, a white dress shirt, and a silk necktie, and walk four blocks to his little corner market on Doyle Avenue in Mount Hope.
Once inside, he would wish a cheery good morning to the skanky high school dropout manning the register. Then he would climb four steps to a little elevated room with a window that looked out over the grocery aisles. He would remove his suit jacket, put it on a wooden hanger, and hang it on a clothes rod he had rigged in back. Then he would do the same thing with his pants. He would sit there all day in his shirt, tie, and boxer shorts, chain- smoking unfiltered Luckies and taking sports and numbers bets through the window and over three telephones that were checked for bugs every week. He would write the bets down on slips of flash paper and deposit them in a gray metal washtub next to his chair. Whenever the cops came to bust him, which only happened when the Rhode Island Lottery Commission got worked up about lost revenue, he would remove the cigarette from his lips and toss it into the washtub.
The officially sanctioned gangsters at the lottery commission, who pushed worthless scratch tickets and chump numbers games, resented Zerilli because he gave the suckers a legitimate chance to win. The Mafia always gives better odds than the state.
Just about everybody in Mount Hope dropped by Zerilli’s store from time to time, either to lay down a bet or to replenish dwindling supplies of malt liquor, soft-porn magazines, and illegal tax-stamp-free cigarettes. They called him “Whoosh,” and it was said he knew them all by name. I bought my first pack of Topps baseball cards from Whoosh when I was seven years old, and he started taking my bets on the Sox and Patriots when I turned
