Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

“Think it would help me remember the words to ‘Symphony of Destruction’?”

“What’s that?”

“Only Megadeth’s biggest hit ever, dude.”

“You’d probably be better off writing them on your wrist,” Mason said. “Diggs was also charged with assaulting a guard named Joseph Galloway last fall. What can you tell me about that?”

“I was out of there by then.”

“Oh. Right. So you never saw Diggs hit anybody?”

“Never. And they gave him plenty of reason to, believe me.”

“Tell me about that.”

“The guards were always trying to provoke him into doin’ something. Trashing his cell. Calling him names. Nigger, nigger, nigger, whenever he was close enough to hear.”

“And what did Diggs do?”

“Didn’t do nothing. Just turned the other cheek. He’s a goddamned political prisoner, dude.”

“How do you mean?”

“They wouldn’t be doing none of this if he was white.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Come on. It’s sooo obvious. I mean, you don’t see them fuckin’ with Eric Kessler this way, do you?”

“I see your point,” Mason said, and jotted the quote in his notebook. “So, you worked as a guard for six years, is that right?”

“About that, yeah.”

“Why did you quit?”

“I didn’t. They fired me, man.”

“Why?”

“They said I was coming to work stoned.”

“Were you?”

“It was just a couple of times. They coulda let it slide. But no. They had to make a big fuckin’ deal out of it.”

“Stoned on what?”

“Cocaine.”

Mason hadn’t asked Ty about the drugs supposedly found in Diggs’s cell, but he saw no point in going into that now. A guard who had been fired for drug use had zero credibility.

Charlie, the fry cook at Mulligan’s favorite diner, had the radio tuned to Iggy Rock’s drive-time talk show on WTOP. The only thing the callers wanted to talk about was Eric Kessler’s looming release from Supermax. Most of them sounded angry. Iggy assured them that they should be.

Mulligan listened for a few minutes, then tuned it out and folded the Dispatch to the opinion page. The lead editorial demanded that the state find a way to keep Kessler in prison. Just how this was to be done, the writer didn’t say. The op-ed page was filled with letters to the editor, all of them about Kessler. They sounded pretty much like the radio callers. The Kessler story was heating up.

Charlie turned from the grill to top off Mulligan’s coffee.

“What the fuck are they going to do about this?” he said. There was no need to define “this.” It was all anyone was talking about.

“I don’t know, Charlie.”

“Well, then maybe you oughta find out,” the fry cook said.

Mulligan nodded, sipped his coffee, and scanned the sports section, finding nothing but bad news about his favorite teams. Then he flipped to the metro page, spotted the headline on Billy Hardcastle’s metro column, and gasped. Everybody already knew that Providence’s fifteen city councilmen never paid their parking tickets, so why did this jerk find it necessary to write about it? It didn’t qualify as news. According to the column, every councilman had at least forty outstanding tickets. Shirley Iannuzzo, who represented the seventh ward, was in first place with 246.

Printing this, Mulligan figured, was asking for trouble.

He finished his eggs, drained his mug dry, strolled two blocks to the paper, and saw that he was right. The Providence police were out in force, slapping Denver boots on the cars parked at the fifteen-minute parking meters in front of the newspaper building. Most of them belonged to reporters and copy editors who never paid their parking tickets either. Mulligan was glad he’d walked to work today. The tab for his unpaid tickets was more than Secretariat was worth.

He took the elevator to the third floor, settled into his desk chair, checked his computer messages, and found one from Lomax: See me. So he strolled into the managing editor’s glass-walled office, dropped into a leather chair, and said, “What’s up, boss?”

“Give me an update on Mason.”

“He’s hiding his cards, not telling me much.”

“How do you think he’s doing?”

“Far as I can tell, he’s not getting anywhere.”

“I hear he’s been interviewing prison guards,” Lomax said.

“Yeah. I’ve been steering him to the ones I know aren’t going to tell him anything.”

“Good. Think he’s getting discouraged?”

“I don’t know.”

“I hear you’ve been poking into the Diggs case, too,” Lomax said.

“Where’d you hear that?”

“From an ex-cop I know.”

Mulligan wasn’t all that surprised. It was hard to keep secrets in a state as small as Rhode Island.

“So, what are you after?” Lomax asked.

“I’m hoping to tie Diggs to something that can keep him locked up legally.”

“Getting anywhere?”

“Not yet.”

“I don’t like it when you go off the reservation, Mulligan. Why didn’t you tell me about this before?”

“I’ve been working it on my own time. Didn’t want to bother you with it unless I came up with something.”

“Gonna stay on it?”

“I am.”

“Fine, but it will still have to be on your own time. We’re too short-staffed for me to spare you while you’re off tilting at windmills.”

“I understand. Something else you should know. Gloria Costa’s been giving me a hand with it.”

“What? After everything she’s been through?”

“I tried to talk her out of it, but she was insistent. The whole thing was her idea, actually.”

Lomax sighed and shook his head.

“Look,” Mulligan said. “She’s a journalist. A darned good one. We can’t keep protecting her.”

“Okay, Mulligan. But can I count on you to keep a close eye on her?”

“I promise.”

“Meanwhile, we’ve still got a daily paper to put out. I need you to do another follow on Kessler today.”

“Far as I know,” Mulligan said, “there’s nothing new to write about that.”

“Come up with something. That story is selling papers. I want to keep it on the front page.”

“Any suggestions?”

“How about talking to the governor? You’re old friends, right? Maybe she’ll spill something we can use.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Mulligan walked back to his cubicle and stared at his desk phone. He and Fiona McNerney had been close once. A quarter of a century ago, they’d been high school classmates, sometimes studying together and often partying at Hopes, where the bartenders rarely bothered to glance at their fake IDs. Later, when Fiona agonized over whether to take her vows as a Little Sisters of the Poor nun, it was Mulligan she’d poured her heart out to. For decades, they’d remained friends; and she’d been one of his best sources during her one term as state attorney general. It was then that a Dispatch headline writer, impressed by her tenacity, had dubbed her “Attila the Nun,” and she’d reveled in the name. When the Vatican finally demanded she choose between politics and the church, she’d given Mulligan the scoop that she would stick with politics and run for governor.

But shortly after that, she’d betrayed him, leaking something he’d told her in confidence. And the leak had gotten somebody killed. The somebody deserved it, Mulligan had to admit. Still, he wasn’t ready to forgive.

He picked up the phone, called her office, and waited on hold for five minutes before he was put through.

“Hi, Mulligan.”

“Hello, Governor.”