Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

Diggs cracked a grin. “Jimmy O’Keefe. He was the main one. Pig-eyed white boy who liked to act tough. After I got bigger, he was still near as tall as me. But he was a coward, cuz. Even when I was little he never tried nothin’ ’less his peeps was around. First day of school, eighth grade, I caught him alone on the playground and beat the shit out of him. Smashed his nose. Blacked both his eyes. Whacked his arm against the pole that held up the basketball hoop. Heard his fuckin’ wrist snap, cuz. It was beautiful.”

“Did you get in trouble for this?”

“Not really. The principal? Mr. Hennessey? He suspended me for a month. Like he thought not goin’ to school was some badass punishment. The man was a fool.”

“What about the police?”

“They didn’t do nothin’. Held me in a cell for a couple of hours. Then let me go with a lecture about keepin’ my nose clean.”

“Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know, cuz. Maybe they had better things to do than bust kids for brawlin’.”

“After that, you weren’t afraid of the white kids anymore?”

“Never again, cuz. Like Stokely Carmichael said, ‘All the scared niggers are dead.’ From then on, the white kids were afraid of me .”

“Your brother and sister, did they get picked on too?”

“Amina, she just got called names. But Sekou? He got messed with somethin’ awful. Till I told everybody they’d get what Jimmy O’Keefe got if they didn’t stop messin’ with him. Gotta look after your little brother.”

“So things got better after that?”

“With the kids, yeah. But the grown-ups? They still disrespected me, dog.”

“How?”

“Whenever I’d go into the Cumberland Farms to pick up milk or a carton of Kools for my moms? The fuckin’ clerk would follow me around like he thought I was gonna steal something. Every time a cop saw me riding my bike down the street? He’d stop me and ask who I swiped it from.”

“It must have been frustrating, not being able to do anything about any of that.”

“What makes you think I didn’t?”

“What did you do, Kwame?”

“A bunch of stuff.”

“Give me an example.”

“One time, I was riding my bike by this white bitch’s house. She gave me the eye and said something under her breath. Probably figured I couldn’t hear her, but I read her lips, cuz. Nigger. That’s what she said. Got so mad I started to cry. Tears just ran down my face. I didn’t say nothin’, though. Just rode my bike on home. But that night, once it got dark, I came back.”

He paused, wanting Mason to beg for the rest of it.

“What happened then, Kwame?”

“I broke her car window with a baseball bat, squirted lighter fluid on the seats, and tossed in a match. Hid in the bushes and watched it burn till the fire truck showed up.”

“How’d that make you feel?”

“I was fuckin’ happy, cuz.”

“Did you get caught?”

“Uh-uh. I got clean away.”

“What was the woman’s name?”

“Medeiros,” Diggs said. “Becky Medeiros.”

Mason froze. Diggs grinned.

“A few months later, when they found the bitch dead, everybody else was real sad. Me? I laughed my ass off.”

Back in the newsroom, Mason logged on to his computer, looked up Rhode Island’s criminal laws online, and learned that there was no statute of limitations on arson.

At first, he was excited. If he could prove that the charges prison officials had brought against Diggs were false, the killer still might not get out of jail. He could be charged with torching Medeiros’s car.

But as he dug further, his mood turned somber. Torching a car was only fourth-degree arson, punishable by no more than three years in prison. Still, he told himself, it was better than nothing.

Jimmy Cagney screeched from Mulligan’s cell phone: “You’ll never take me alive, copper!” The line from the 1931 movie The Public Enemy was his ring tone for law enforcement sources.

“Mulligan.”

“He’s on the move,” Chief Matea said.

“Heading north?”

“Yeah. He just took the I-95 turnoff onto Route 295.”

“Sounds like this could be it. I’ll meet you there.”

Twenty minutes later, Mulligan and the Hopkinton police chief sat together at Eric Kessler’s bedside on the second floor of the Woonasquatucket Convalescent Center in the little town of Greenville. From the look of him, Kessler wasn’t exactly convalescing. The room reeked of antiseptic, rancid breath, and urine. Mulligan chewed on an unlit cigar, the Dispatch sports page open on his lap. Matea sipped from a can of Mountain Dew and studied the door.

Mulligan was halfway through a preview of the upcoming Summer Olympics when Matea hissed, “Shhhhhh,” and dropped his right hand to the heel of his semiauto. Seconds later the door swung open, and Gordon Freeman stepped into the room.

“Afternoon, Gordon,” Matea said. “Nice of you to drop by.”

Freeman froze. For several seconds, the only sound in the room was the beeping of Kessler’s heart monitor.

“Turn around, please,” Matea said, “and put your hands against the wall.”

Freeman’s eyes shifted to the door. For a moment, Mulligan thought he was going to bolt. Instead, he turned and did as he’d been told.

Matea calmly got out of his chair, lifted Freeman’s shirttail, and yanked the.25-caliber Raven from his waistband. The chief unloaded the little pistol and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

“Flowers would have been more appropriate, don’t you think?” he asked.

“I’m not saying anything without a lawyer.”

“Now, Gordon, why would you need a lawyer? Have you done something illegal? I didn’t notice anything. How about you, Mulligan?”

“All I see,” the reporter said, “is a man visiting a sick neighbor.”

“I’m not under arrest?”

“You can put your hands down now, Gordon.”

Mulligan pulled himself out of his chair.

“Mr. Freeman,” he said, “please step over to the bed.”

Eric Kessler lay on his back, a sheet and a sky-blue blanket pulled up to his chin. An oxygen tube ran into his nose. His face was ashen. Mulligan grabbed the sheet and blanket and whipped them off.

The child killer’s ankles were bloated with fluid, but the withered arms poking out of his hospital johnny looked like month-old road kill. His eyelids fluttered open. Then he startled. His unfocused eyes darted about the room before settling on Freeman.

“You,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. That was all he could manage before he drifted away again.

Mulligan put a hand on Freeman’s shoulder. “Tell me,” he said, “have you ever watched a man die of congestive heart failure?”

“Can’t say that I have.”

“A lot of his heart muscle is dead,” Mulligan said. “The organ can’t pump enough blood to keep his body working. His kidneys are failing. Fluid is building up in his lungs. He needs to cough it up, but he can’t. He’s too weak. Eric Kessler is slowly drowning in his own fluid. It’s a rotten way to die.”

“You make it sound like shooting him would be doing him a favor,” Freeman said.

“It would,” Matea said. “Go on home now, Gordon.”

“Just a second,” Mulligan said. “I was wondering. What were you planning to do with all that chili, eggplant, and olive oil?”

Freeman’s eyes widened in surprise. He dropped into one of the visitor’s chairs, looking tired and defeated.

“Before he had his latest heart attack, I was planning to snatch him off the street,” he said. “I was gonna tie him up and stick him down my cellar. I figured on cutting out a chunk of his thigh and make him watch me cook it before I killed him.”