Bruce DeSilva - A Scourge of Vipers

“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea what someone like him would do.”

Later that night, I drove up Olney Street and pulled into the deserted lot at Hope High School. I parked beside the basketball courts and fetched my Spalding from the back. Somebody had shot out the lights that hung over the courts, so I worked on my crossover dribble, my left-handed runner, and my jump shot in the glare from Secretariat’s lone working headlight.

For years, basketball had been my life. From the age of seven, my buddy Felix and I spent hour after hour shooting baskets in his driveway and playing horse on these same outdoor courts. Our boyhood hero was Ernie DiGregorio, a local legend who had led Providence College to the Final Four. Ernie D., as he was affectionately known, went on to win the NBA Rookie of the Year Award and, despite a gimpy knee, played eight seasons as a pro, the last as a member of our beloved Boston Celtics. Felix and I had read about how, as a child, Ernie dribbled a basketball everywhere he went. So we did, too, bouncing our worn Spaldings and Wilsons even when we walked to school.

Together, we made the Hope High freshman team; and by then, I had big dreams. I was going to lead our varsity in scoring for three years, star for the PC Friars, and then get drafted by the Celtics. But by our junior year of high school, Felix had grown taller, stronger, and faster than I. It was he who led the team in scoring and rebounding, dominating the paint while I planted myself at the three-point line to discourage the defense from collapsing on him. My jump shot was deadly from thirty feet. When he kicked the ball out to me, I rarely missed.

I pictured the two of us doing the same for PC; but during our senior year, Felix tanked his SATs, and I wasn’t good enough to get scholarship offers. I ended up making the PC team as a walk-on. Felix matriculated in the fast food industry until he decided to pursue a career as a pimp and drug dealer.

The Friars’ starters and most of the bench players were also faster and stronger than I, so I didn’t get much playing time. But my jump shot? A thing of beauty.

I had no delusions about impressing the Vipers’ coaches, but I didn’t relish the thought of embarrassing myself. As I practiced, I ran through what I knew about Alfano and his briefcase full of cash. It wasn’t much. I still didn’t think the names were a hit list, but the more I thought about it, the more I wondered who he was working for and what they were after.

If I’d been right about Pichardo recognizing Alfano’s picture, the fatal crash wasn’t his first trip to Rhode Island. It was merely his last.

First thing next morning, I was refilling Tuukka’s water dish when I heard footsteps pound up the stairs to the second floor. Then a heavy fist rattled my apartment door.

“Providence PD. Open up.”

So I did.

In stepped the homicide twins: Jay Wargart, a big lug with a five o’clock shadow and fists like hams, and Sandra Freitas, a bottle blonde with a predatory Cameron Diaz smile.

“I don’t recall poisoning, bludgeoning, garroting, stabbing, or shooting anybody this week,” I said, “so this must be a social visit.”

“Mind if we sit?” Freitas asked.

I waved them toward the kitchen table, where Tuukka was curled up in his aquarium, blissfully digesting his breakfast.

“Jesus!” Freitas said. “What the hell is that?”

“Exactly what it looks like.”

“You have a snake ?”

“Why are you surprised, Sandy?” Wargart said. “You know the old saying. Birds of a feather.”

“Feathers?” I said. “Snakes don’t have feathers. Their ancestors shed both their feathers and their legs millions of years ago. I don’t have any feathers either, although there’s a feather boa around here somewhere. One of my overnight guests left it under my bed.”

I went to the kitchen counter and dumped what was left of the morning’s coffee into three chipped mugs. Then I carried them to the table and sat down with my guests.

“Seen Mario Zerilli around lately?” Wargart asked.

“Not for a couple of weeks.”

“His girlfriend has reported him missing.”

“That so?”

“Yeah.”

“Did this girlfriend have a black eye or a split lip?”

“Both.”

“That must be her, all right.”

“We’re thinking the corpse the Pawtucket PD fished out of the Blackstone might be Mario,” Wargart said. “Same height and weight. Same shoe size. Same Bruins sweatshirt he had on when the girlfriend last saw him.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me.”

“Why’s that?” Freitas asked.

“The guy was a punk,” I said. “He was bound to come to a bad end.”

“Didn’t you have a run-in with him outside Hopes a while back?” Wargart asked.

“Where’d you get that from?”

He smirked, then said, “The way we heard it, he pulled a gun on you.”

“Sounds like the sort of thing he’d do,” I said.

“What was the altercation about?” Freitas asked. Altercation? I grinned at her. The detective had been working on her vocabulary.

“You aren’t going to tell us about it, are you?” she said.

“No.”

“Why didn’t you report it?” Wargart asked.

“If I bothered you every time somebody threatened me,” I said, “the mayor would have to double the size of the police department.”

“I’ll bet,” he said.

“We’re thinking you might be the last person to have seen him alive,” Freitas said.

“Except for the good Samaritan who iced him,” I said. “Assuming he’s dead, of course.”

“The victim was shot with a large caliber pistol,” Freitas said. “Don’t you own a Colt forty-five?”

I didn’t say anything.

“You’ve got a nine mil, too,” Wargart said. “They’re both registered in your name. Where are the weapons now?”

“In a safe place.”

“Go get them.”

“No.”

“No?”

“Not unless you have a warrant.”

Wargart hadn’t touched his coffee. He picked up the mug now and slammed it down. Tuukka startled and fled to a corner of the aquarium as coffee sloshed over the tabletop.

“Look,” I said. “You don’t even know for sure if Mario’s dead.”

“Somebody is,” Wargart said.

“We’ll know if it’s Mario soon enough,” Freitas said. “We can’t find a record of him ever getting dental x-rays, but we collected a comb and toothbrush from his bathroom, and the crime lab is running the DNA as we speak.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “There’s a huge backlog for DNA tests. If that’s what you’re waiting on, it’ll be a year before you know dick.”

With that, the homicide twins pushed back from the table and clambered to their feet. Wargart loomed over me, trying to intimidate with his bulk. I rose and crowded him, a subtle reminder that I had him by two inches.

“We’ve got our eye on you, Mulligan,” Wargart said. “Don’t leave town.”

After they left, I called Ferguson at the M.E.’s office and Lebowski at the Pawtucket PD and asked if there was anything new on the floater. There wasn’t. Then I rang the receptionist at The Dispatch to call in sick.

It was eight on the dot when I climbed into Secretariat, tuned the radio to WTOP, and rumbled down Broadway toward downtown Providence under a slate-colored sky.

“Good morning, Row Dyelin!”

The mellifluous voice of Iggy Rock, the state’s most popular morning drive-time radio host, oozed from my tinny speakers. Iggy’s shtick was a toxic mix of Laura Ingraham-style moralizing, Rush Limbaugh-style liberal bashing, and Glenn Beck-style lunacy.