Bruce DeSilva - A Scourge of Vipers

“ No inglés, ” I said. I brushed past him and hustled toward a medical examiner’s wagon and six Pawtucket police cars clustered beside a band of bare young maples that skirted the riverbank.

“Hey, bud! You hard of hearing?”

“ No comprendo, ” I shouted and kept moving.

Before I got there, I was intercepted by a bespectacled young man wearing a cheap suit and tie under an unbuttoned cloth topcoat. He was carrying a clipboard.

“Excuse me, sir. Are you with the press?”

“¿Por qué?” I said.

And he said, “¿Cómo te llamas?”

The game was up. I didn’t know any more Spanish.

“I’m Mulligan from The Dispatch . And who would you be?”

“My name is Kevin Muñoz,” he said, stifling a laugh. “I’m the new press officer for the Pawtucket PD. I’m going to have to ask you to wait back there with the rest of the reporters. I’ll have a statement for you in about an hour.”

“Is Detective Sergeant Lebowski on the scene?”

“Yes, sir, I believe he is.”

“Then trot on back where you came from and tell him Mulligan would like a word.”

He raised an eyebrow. I raised one right back at him.

“Okay, sir. Please wait right here.”

He scurried off and disappeared behind the meat wagon. Two minutes later, a detective with a head suitable for ten-pin bowling and shoulders borrowed from a silverback gorilla stepped from between two of the cruisers and waved.

“Mulligan? How the hell are you? Been so long since I seen you I was thinkin’ maybe you croaked.”

“My new boss doesn’t let me out of the office much, Dude.”

I’m not one of those assholes who calls everyone “dude,” but I had to make an exception in this case. It was the detective’s nickname, pinned on him when the Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski came out back in ’98. I extended my right hand. Dude crushed it in his simian paw.

“So what have you got?” I asked.

“A floater,” he said. “Couple of kids from Newport spotted it as they were lining up to get on their bus. They alerted their handlers, who called 911.”

“Male or female?”

“Male.”

“Age?”

“Hard to say. The body took a beating from all the flotsam in the river. The M.E. says the carp chowed down on it, too. No wallet on him. Not much face left either.”

“Mind if I have a look?”

He hesitated a beat, then said, “Yeah, okay. But don’t touch anything. And no pictures.”

He raised the yellow police tape, and I ducked under it. We brushed through the screen of trees and found Glenna Ferguson, an assistant state medical examiner, squatting beside the body. It looked to be about six feet long, clothed in a muck-smeared yellow and black Bruins sweatshirt and what once might have been blue jeans. With the loaded Boston hockey team poised for another deep playoff run and the rebuilding Celtics going nowhere, half the male population of Rhode Island was sporting Bruins gear this spring. I looked closer and saw that the corpse wore one mud-caked running shoe. The left shoe and sock were missing.

“A drowning?” I asked.

“Hey there, Mulligan,” Ferguson said. “Might have drowned unless he bled out from the gunshot wound in his neck first. Gotta open him up and look around before I can establish cause of death.”

“How long was he in the water?”

“A day, maybe less.”

I squatted for a closer look as she rolled the body to examine the exit wound.

“Looks like a large caliber,” I said.

“Maybe. Hard to be sure yet with all the scavenger damage. It’s through-and-through, so there’s no slug.”

“Damn thing could be anywhere between here and Woonsocket,” Lebowski said. “No point in even looking, cuz we’re never gonna find it.”

“Give me a call when you get an ID?” I asked him.

“Sure thing.”

“Thanks. I’d really appreciate it.”

The Dude abides.

When I got back to the newsroom to write it up, Chuckie-boy had already punched me out. In doing so, he’d violated several state and federal labor laws, but I didn’t hold it against him. He couldn’t allow any overtime if he wanted to keep his job.

The story, which made me late for my evening feast of canned pork and beans, was worth just three paragraphs on an inside page of the metro section.

I spent the early part of the evening watching my snake explore every inch of the cracked twenty-five-gallon aquarium I’d snapped up at a big discount at Petco on North Main. Where he’d come from remained a mystery. A couple of neighbors thought he might have belonged to the meth addict who got evicted from the third floor last week, but they couldn’t say for sure. I was going to name the snake Chara after the Boston Bruins’ star defenseman, but when I mentioned it to Fadi, the Brown grad student who lived downstairs, he said it was a filthy word in Arabic.

“Eat up, Tuukka,” I said, opening the aquarium top and dropping in one of the wriggling baby mice I’d bought. Tuukka Rask was the Bruins’ quick-as-a-snake goaltender. Tuukka flicked his tongue at the mouse for a couple of minutes before unhinging his jaw and swallowing it whole. Then he curled up for a nap and stopped being interesting.

I poured three fingers of Bushmills into a reasonably clean tumbler, fired up a cigar, and settled down to watch the second period of the hockey game on my twenty-four-inch TV. Moments after a David Krejci breakaway gave the Bruins a three-goal lead, “Confused” began playing in my shirt pocket. The tune by a San Francisco punk band called The Nuns signaled an incoming call from Fiona McNerney, a former Little Sisters of the Poor cenobite who was serving her second term as Rhode Island’s governor.

“Attila the Nun,” the handle a clever headline writer tagged her with because of her take-no-prisoners brand of politics, still attended mass every week, but her wardrobe and manner had become decidedly secular since she was released from her vows four years ago. The stern demeanor she’d adopted as a novice was gone now. Except for the graying hair, she’d reverted to the fun-loving, underage drinking partner I’d loved hanging out with in high school.

“Evening, Mulligan,” she said. “What are you doing right now?”

“Watching the Bs kick the crap out of the Rangers.”

“What are you wearing?”

“My clean pair of Boston Bruins boxers,” I lied.

“Yum! I’ll be right over.”

“Time to finally shed your virginity?”

“It is a burden,” she said, “but if I ever do the deed, it’s gonna be with someone who can shower me with diamonds.”

“Damn. That leaves me out.”

“Sorry to disappoint.”

“I take it the vow of poverty is history, too.”

“Oh, hell yeah. That was just a phase. At the moment I’m sipping Dom Pérignon White Gold from a Waterford crystal goblet.”

“Shall I come over and help you finish the bottle?”

“Please do. I’m making a major announcement in a couple of weeks, and I want to give you a heads-up.”

“How major?”

“I’ll be unveiling my foolproof plan to solve the state’s budget crisis.”

“Oh, really? The last foolproof plan I heard about was when John Henry emptied his vault to create the greatest Red Sox team ever assembled.”

“When they signed Carl Crawford, John Lackey, Nick Punto, and Adrian Gonzalez?”

“Yeah. Remember how that turned out, Fiona?”

“Not well.”

“But your plan is foolproof?”

“Absolutely.”

“This I’ve got to hear. I’ll be right over.”

Ten minutes later, Secretariat’s chipped wiper blades slapped futilely at the mist gathering on the windshield, and his one working headlight bounced off a heavy fog that had descended on the city. As I crawled up Waterman Street, my cell played the opening bars of “Headline Hustler” by 10cc.-my ringtone for Chuckie-boy. I considered ignoring it, then reached for it and nearly sideswiped a parked car that materialized out of the gloom.