Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

Unlike Mason, they knew who she was. They knew what she wanted.

Lomax, the sixty-two-year-old managing editor, checked the time on the newsroom wall clock and tossed Mulligan a dirty look. Mulligan didn’t give a shit. He would never get paid for the overtime he’d put in on the Kessler story over the weekend, so he felt entitled to come and go as he pleased. He logged on to his computer and found a message from Lomax in his in-box:

Talk to her.

Mulligan pounded out a reply: Give her to somebody else this time.

Lomax: It’ll go quicker if you do it. She won’t have to repeat her whole song and dance.

Mulligan muttered, “Aw, crap,” rose from his ergonomically correct desk chair, and went to her.

“Good morning, Mrs. Diggs.”

“Good morning, Mr. Mulligan.” Her voice was even wearier than he remembered.

“Please come with me,” he said.

He waited as she gathered her things and then led her to his cubicle. He fetched a desk chair, one of the dozens left over from when the Dispatch ’s news staff was four times its current size, and invited her to sit.

“How may I help you today?” he asked.

Esther Diggs slapped the newspaper, still open to the metro front, on Mulligan’s desk and pointed a skeletal finger at the story under his byline.

“This says Eric Kessler is getting out.”

“Yes.”

“But my boy is still in prison.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You think that’s fair?”

“That Kessler is getting out, or that your son isn’t?”

Eric Kessler had been a thirty-seven-year-old New England Telephone Company lineman in 1976, when his seven-year-old neighbor Brian Freeman went missing.

The soft-spoken father of two was among the scores of volunteers who had searched the Hope Valley section of rural Hopkinton for ten days until police finally called it off. The child’s whereabouts remained a mystery until 1982, when Kessler was caught trying to strangle a nine-year-old Cub Scout. Detectives who searched his house, located less than a mile from the Freeman place, discovered the missing boy’s skull in a gym bag under Kessler’s bed.

He and Kwame Diggs were Rhode Island’s most notorious killers.

Diggs’s mother was gritting her teeth now and glaring at Mulligan.

“Both Kessler and your son,” he told her, “should be drawn and quartered and have their heads impaled on pikes.”

Mason, sitting in his adjoining cubicle, caught the gist and was stunned to hear Mulligan speak to the kindly-looking woman that way. He finished his regular morning call to the mayor’s appointments secretary, hung up, and settled back to eavesdrop.

“My boy is innocent,” Mrs. Diggs said.

“His prints were found all over the murder scenes,” Mulligan said.

“A lie!”

“The cops found the locket he took from Becky Medeiros and the earrings he took from Connie Stuart and her daughters hidden in a coffee can in your garden shed.”

“They were planted.”

“He confessed.”

“It was coerced.”

“We’ve been over all of this many times before, Mrs. Diggs.”

Her shoulders sagged.

Mulligan didn’t have much patience left for this woman; but looking at her now, he found himself feeling sorry for her all over again. The ordeal had aged her. If he hadn’t known she was sixty-six, he would have put her at eighty. Although she had moved out of state after the murders, she had continued to make the ninety-five-mile round trip from Brockton, Massachusetts, almost every week for the last eighteen years to visit her son at the state prison in Cranston. Her husband had died a few years after her son went to prison, and her two other children had moved far away. So she always made the trip alone.

She had never stopped believing in her son’s innocence. Her belief was delusional, but there was something noble about it. Mulligan figured she deserved an explanation.

“Kessler pled guilty and was sentenced to forty years in prison,” he said, “but Rhode Island law mandates that convicted felons, even murderers, get time off for good behavior; and Kessler has been a good boy inside. He has expressed remorse for his crimes, and he has followed prison rules to the letter. Nobody wants to let a child killer out ten years early. The state legislature is changing the law so this won’t happen again. But they are going to have to release him at the end of May.”

“I know that,” she said. “I read your story.”

“Your son,” Mulligan said, “renounced his confession and was convicted of all five murders anyway. He continues to deny his guilt and has never expressed remorse for what he did. And he has not behaved himself inside. He’s been caught with drugs in his cell. He assaulted two prison guards.”

“He did not . Kwame was supposed to be set free twelve years ago. They faked those charges so they wouldn’t have to let him out.”

“You could be right.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Mulligan said.

She glared at him again, this time through tears. “Why are they doing this to my son and not to Kessler?”

“Kessler is seventy-three years old and has a bum ticker,” Mulligan said. “He’s no longer a threat to anyone. A Cub Scout could beat the crap out of him now.”

“I think there’s another reason.”

“And what would that be?”

“Kessler is white, and my son is black.”

Mulligan sighed and shook his head.

“I don’t think that has anything to do with it.”

Mrs. Diggs pulled a tissue from her coat, wiped the tears from her cheeks, gathered her purse and umbrella from the floor, and rose to leave. Then she turned back for a parting shot.

“Kessler cooked and ate that child,” she said. “My Kwame never ate anybody.”

Mulligan had heard the cannibalism rumor. Who hadn’t? But because Kessler never stood trial, the details of his crime had never been made public. Mulligan briefly considered asking again for a look inside Kessler’s private journal, which Hopkinton police chief Vincent Matea had kept under lock and key for thirty years. But what would be the point? The journal’s contents, the chief always insisted, were too horrible to be revealed. If they were that terrible, Mulligan might not have the stomach to read them. And the Dispatch, which had withheld the most sordid details about the Diggs murders, would never print them anyway.

As Mrs. Diggs trudged toward the newsroom elevator, Mason sprang from his chair and followed her out.

Early next morning, Mason grabbed an empty chair, the same one Esther Diggs had sat in the day before, rolled it into Mulligan’s cubicle, and plopped down beside him.

“I talked to Kwame Diggs’s mother,” Mason said.

“I kind of figured that.”

“I think she has a point.”

“About her son being innocent?”

“No, not that. After I talked with her, I spent a couple of hours in the news library reading your old stories about the case. No question he killed all those people.”

“Then what?”

“That the state is faking new charges to keep him inside.”

“Maybe so,” Mulligan said.

“It’s not right.”

“Depends on how you look at it.”

“They’re breaking the law,” Mason said.

“Name a Rhode Island public official who isn’t.”

“They’re violating his civil rights.”

“Far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t have any.”

“If they can do this to him,” Mason said, “they can do it to anybody.”

“But they don’t.”

“How do you know?”

Mulligan didn’t have an answer for that.