Bruce DeSilva - A Scourge of Vipers

It took a second to realize who he was talking about. Yolanda was no broad.

“No idea.”

“What’s she look like?”

“Remember Marical?” I asked.

“The Haitian chick?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Fuck, yeah,” he said. “Great ass on her. Legs up to here. Skin so black it was almost blue. Always wore a pink thong with sequins. Never bothered with pasties.”

“Like that,” I said, “but taller. And with class.”

“Damn! You want her back?”

“I think so.”

“You’re not sure?”

“I guess maybe I do, but-”

“But she ripped your heart out the last time, and you’re afraid she’s gonna do it again.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“She probably will, but I still think you gotta go for it.”

“Why?”

“Ain’t she worth it?”

“She is, but after tonight, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

Joseph rubbed his brow with a big paw, popped open a can of beer, and guzzled half of it.

“Maybe you could buy her somethin’ romantic and send it to her,” he said.

“Like what?”

“Shit, I dunno. Chocolates? Flowers? A box of ribbed condoms?”

I laughed at that, but Joseph didn’t. I had to entertain the possibility that he wasn’t kidding.

After two more beers, I decided I needed advice from a more genteel source. So fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in the wet grass at Swan Point Cemetery, running my fingers over an inscription cut into a marble slab. It was too dark to read, but I knew the words by heart.

ROSELLA ISABELLE MORELLI.

FIRST WOMAN BATTALION CHIEF OF THE

PROVIDENCE FIRE DEPARTMENT.

BELOVED DAUGHTER. FAITHFUL FRIEND.

TRUE HERO.

FEBRUARY 12, 1968-AUGUST 27, 2008.

I unfolded an autographed Manny Ramirez jersey and draped it over the shoulders of her gravestone, just as I did every time I visited. Manny had been Rosie’s favorite Red Sox player, not because he could hit but because she thought he was, as she’d often put it, “smokin’ hot.”

Rosie and I had been best friends since we were six years old, and we’d always told each another almost everything. She’d died in a car crash before Ramirez got caught up in the steroids scandal, but I figured she didn’t need to hear about that.

“I’ve spent two years trying to forget her, Rosie. And now she shows up out of the blue… What does she want? I’m not sure… No, I didn’t ask.

“What do I want? Jesus, I don’t know… Okay, you’re right. I do know. But she scares the hell out of me. I couldn’t stand losing her a second time.”

I don’t how long I sat there with my arms wrapped around the headstone. When I finally headed home, it was with the same advice Rosie had given me the last time I thought I was in love: Buy her something pretty that she can wear against her skin.

At midnight, I sat at my kitchen table and scanned jewelry sites on the Internet while Joseph snored on the couch in the next room. Yolanda usually wore gold, but that was out of my price range. A sterling scales-of-justice pendant on a delicate silver chain seemed fitting for a lawyer. I arranged for it to be shipped to her with a terse message.

Forgive me.

“Mulligan?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve got that airport surveillance video you wanted.”

“Fantastic. I’m on my way.”

“No need,” McCracken said. “I’ll walk over and drop it at your office.”

Ten minutes later he stepped off the elevator, strode to my cubicle, and handed me a high-capacity portable hard drive.

“We’ve got video from the three cameras that cover the passenger pickup area,” he said. “All seven days for the first week of March. My source wouldn’t part with anything from inside the terminal. Something about not wanting to reveal internal security procedures.”

“Jesus,” I said. “It’s going to take seven days just to scan through all this.”

“No, it won’t.”

“How do you mean?”

“I checked the arrival times for flights originating in Atlantic City,” he said, and handed me a slip of paper. “This should narrow it down.”

“Good thinking,” I said. “I should have thought of that.”

“Yes, you should have.”

“Have you looked at it?” I asked.

“No.”

“Got time now?”

“I can spare an hour or two,” he said, so we slipped into a vacant meeting room off the newsroom and attached the drive to a desktop computer.

The second March 3 flight from Atlantic City had touched down at quarter past eleven in the morning. Fifteen minutes later, one of the video cameras caught Lucan Alfano strolling out of the terminal doors dragging a small rolling suitcase with his left hand and clutching a black briefcase in his right. A wiry man in a Bruins sweatshirt got out of a waiting car, stepped behind it, and popped the trunk. Alfano tossed the bags inside. Then they got into the car and drove away.

“Bet there’s a shitload of cash in that briefcase,” McCracken said.

“No doubt.”

I rewound the video, slowly rolled it forward, and froze it just as the driver slammed the trunk lid down.

“Isn’t that Mario Zerilli?” McCracken asked.

“Either him or his twin.”

“I don’t think he has a twin.”

“He doesn’t.”

A theory was taking shape inside my head. Alfano had tried to bribe Phil Templeton and been turned down. Templeton subsequently had gone missing. Mario was violent, and he worked for Alfano. So maybe Mario had beaten Templeton, shot him, and dumped his body in the Blackstone. True, the little pistol Mario had threatened me with was a.22, and Templeton had been killed with a large-caliber handgun. But a thug like Mario probably had more than one firearm. Chances are, the murder weapon was lying in muck somewhere along the bottom of the river.

“I’ll be damned,” McCracken said. “What do you think this means?”

“Can’t say for sure,” I said. “But nothing good.”

At eight o’clock sharp on Saturday morning, Coach Martin split the twenty remaining Vipers hopefuls into four five-man teams. Benton, the flashy but undersized point guard, and Krueger, the leaper with the brace on his knee, were on my team for the first thirty-minute scrimmage. Benton penetrated and dished often enough for me to nail four three-pointers with only one miss. But on defense, I had to guard Sears, the former All-Big East shooting guard. It was no contest. He blew by me for sixteen easy points, and we lost by twelve.

As we walked to the bench after time expired, Krueger bumped me so hard that he almost knocked me down.

“What the hell?”

“Play some fuckin’ defense, grandpa,” he said. “Keep up this shit and Sears is gonna get the spot that’s s’posed to go to me.”

“Yeah?” I said. “Maybe you could grab a rebound once in a while, asshole.”

During the second game, we sat on the bench and watched Keenan Jefferson, the kid who’d quit high school to marry his girlfriend, out-shoot, out-pass, and out-defend everyone on the court.

“Hey, Krueger,” I said.

He looked down the bench and glared.

“If Martin keeps anybody, it won’t be you,” I said. “It’ll be Jefferson.”

“You think? Wait till I go up against him. I’ll eat his lunch.”

Late that morning, when the coaches pitted us against Jefferson’s squad, that’s not how it worked out. Fifteen minutes in, Krueger was visibly frustrated. When Jefferson flashed to the basket and dunked over him, the jerk fouled the kid hard, knocking him to the floor.

Jefferson sprang up, went nose to nose with Krueger, and snarled, “Do that again and you’ll need a brace on your other damned knee.”