Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

“No idea.”

“Does it talk?”

“It does.”

“Polly want a cracker?” Gloria said.

And Larry Bird said, “Theeeeeeee Yankees win!”

“Damn!” she said.

“Yeah.”

With Ellsbury, Crawford, Kalish, Bailey, Lackey, and Matsuzaka all on injured reserve, the Sox’s season was already doomed. Why did Larry have to keep rubbing it in?

“Does it say anything else?” Gloria asked.

“No. I’ve been trying to teach it to say, ‘Yankees suck,’ but its loyalty to the Evil Empire is unshakable.”

“Pretty bird, though.”

“If you want it, you can have it.”

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t allow that kind of profanity in my house.”

Mulligan jiggled the cage door open and filled Larry’s feed tray, the bird stabbing its bill at the oven mitt the reporter had taken to wearing for protection. Then he tore open a package of paper plates and dropped two of them beside the Caserta Pizzeria box on his maple yard-sale table by the kitchen window.

“Hope pepperoni’s okay.”

“Are you kidding?” Gloria said. “Caserta could whip up a pie with bird-seed topping, and it would probably be good.”

She sat in one of the vinyl kitchen chairs and dug in. Outside, the day was fading, so Mulligan snapped on the overhead light. Then he fetched two bottles of Killian’s from the wheezing fridge, dropped into the chair across from Gloria, and snagged a slice.

“So what did you come up with?” Mulligan asked.

Gloria reached into her purse and extracted the pad she’d filled with notes on what she’d found in the news library computer printouts.

“For starters, five reports of Peeping Toms,” she said.

“From Diggs’s neighbors?”

“All within eight blocks. The first two in 1988, when Diggs would have been, what, ten years old?”

“Yeah.”

“Then two more in 1989 and one in 1990. And Mulligan?”

“Um?”

“One of the complainants was Becky Medeiros.”

“Anybody get a description?”

“One in ’89 thought it might have been a black kid, but she wasn’t sure. The others, no.”

“The Diggses were the only black family in that neighborhood back then,” Mulligan said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“What else you got?”

“A dozen unsolved housebreaks,” Gloria said. “In most of them, the perp made off with TVs, VCRs, jewelry, stuff like that. But in two, the only thing taken was bras and panties.”

“Could have been our guy,” Mulligan said. “Making dry runs before he escalated.”

“That’s what I was thinking.”

“Anything else?”

“Two reports of animal cruelty. In January of 1990, a dog was mutilated and dumped in the trash can behind Diggs’s next-door neighbor’s house. Nine months later, somebody bound a dog and cat together with twine, doused them with lighter fluid, and set them on fire behind the neighborhood elementary school.”

“That it?”

“It is. How about you?”

“Between the Medeiros murders in ’92 and the Stuart murders in ’94, Diggs’s neighbors made three complaints about prowlers and one about a Peeping Tom, but none of them saw enough to provide a description.”

Gloria shook her head, making her blond hair bounce. “We’re not getting anywhere. This is all penny-ante stuff. The cops wouldn’t have put much effort into it, so there’s not going to be evidence tying any of this to Diggs.”

“Yeah. And the statute of limitations has run out on it, too,” Mulligan said. “But I found something else.”

“Spill.”

“In 1991, a year before the Medeiros murder, somebody broke into a house on Inez Avenue about three miles from Diggs’s neighborhood.”

“Three miles?”

“Uh-huh. Might have been him, though. He could have ridden his bike there, no problem.”

“So what happened?”

“The intruder found an open window, ripped the screen off, and climbed inside. Found a twenty-six-year-old woman named Susan Ashcroft asleep in her bed, grabbed the clock radio off the nightstand, and whacked her in the head with it. Knocked her out cold. Then he went into the kitchen, took a serrated steak knife from a drawer, and went to work on her.”

“Oh God!” Gloria felt her stomach drop.

“About three in the morning, the woman came to in bed, blood all over her. She lived alone, no one there to help her, but she had the strength to grab the phone from the nightstand and call the cops. She had five stab wounds, three in her breasts and two more in her abdomen. Three of the wounds were superficial. Hesitation wounds, the police called them. But the other two were deep.”

“Like he wasn’t quite sure he could go through with it at first?”

“What it sounds like.”

“Did she survive?”

“She did.”

“Was she a blonde like the others?”

“I don’t know, Gloria. The story doesn’t say.”

“Did the police ever try tying this to Diggs?”

“I don’t know that either. I never heard about this until now.”

“B and E and attempted murder,” she said. “It could be enough to put Diggs away for a long time.”

“Yeah. There’s no statute of limitations on either charge in Rhode Island,” Mulligan said. “If we can find evidence that he did this, he could be prosecuted as an adult now.”

“Even though he was a kid when it happened?”

“That’s right.”

They spent a few minutes plotting their next move. Then Mulligan carried the portable TV out of the bedroom, set it on the kitchen counter, and plugged it in. He grabbed two more Killian’s from the fridge and handed one to Gloria.

“Planning on having me stay for a while?” she said.

“I was hoping you’d want to keep me company.”

“Okay,” she said. “But no cop shows.”

Mulligan flicked through the channels with the remote and stopped on the Bruins-Canadiens game. The announcer was giving a medical update on Nathan Horton, the Bruins’ high-scoring right-winger, who was still woozy from a concussion he’d suffered when he was blindsided by a Philadelphia Flyers forward several months earlier. Mulligan made a mental note to see his bookie and bet against the team repeating as Stanley Cup champions.

“I love hockey,” Gloria said.

“Really?”

“Yes!”

“Will you marry me?”

“Not today.”

A few years back Gloria had a thing for Mulligan, but he was seeing somebody then, so nothing came of it. Since the attack, she’d been on a couple of dates with a handsome Textron executive and discovered she couldn’t stand being touched.

Maybe someday, she hoped, she’d get over it.

First thing next morning, Mulligan draped a towel over Larry Bird’s cage, carried it down the stairs, and packed it in the back of Secretariat. He drove across town to Hope Street and parked in front of Zerilli’s Market.

Leaving the bird in the car, he walked into the place and strolled down a narrow grocery aisle, passing racks of Twinkies and Ding Dongs and coolers filled with cheap American beer. When he reached the back of the store, he climbed a short staircase and knocked on a windowless steel door. When the electric lock buzzed, he turned the knob and stepped inside.

Dominic “Whoosh” Zerilli was slumped in a wooden chair behind his keyhole desk, an unfiltered Camel cigarette dangling from his lower lip and a phone pressed to his ear. He was dressed in a white shirt, loud tie, suit coat, and undershorts, the pants draped over a hanger on his clothes rack to preserve the crease. His big mutt, Shortstop, was sprawled in front of the minifridge. A huge thighbone looked like a toothpick in the dog’s jaws.

“Two hundred on the Bruins to repeat. Got it, Vince,” Zerilli said.