Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

Felicia leaned in, and they locked eyes.

“But we can’t get involved right now,” she said.

“No, we can’t. Not until Kwame’s situation is resolved. It would be a conflict of interest.”

“For both of us,” Felicia said.

Mason drew a deep breath and then sighed audibly.

“If you’re going to keep me at arm’s length,” he said, “I advise you never to wear that perfume again.”

She laughed and squeezed his arm, trying to make him smile. Mason just stared and stared.

Mulligan parked Secretariat beside Andy Jennings’s Ford pickup in the Warwick police station parking lot. He found the ex-cop waiting for him on the front steps. They entered the building together, passed through the metal detector, and tromped upstairs for their morning appointment with Chief Oscar Hernandez.

The first thing Mulligan noticed as Hernandez rose to greet them was that he’d grown a potbelly since his promotion to chief last year. The second thing Mulligan noticed was a ten-by-twelve-inch color photo of Joe Arpaio, the jowly sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who was notorious for his harassment of Mexican immigrants. It was pinned to a bulletin board with thumbtacks, and it had several dozen small holes in it. Mulligan guessed they were made by the five darts that rested beside the blotter on Hernandez’s big mahogany desk.

“How’s retirement treating you, Andy?” the chief asked.

“I miss the action,” Jennings said. “Some days I don’t know what to do with myself.”

“Maybe you need a hobby.”

“Yeah, right. Like I could get into scrapbooking or collecting stamps.”

“How’s Mary?”

“She’s good, Oscar. I’ll tell her you asked after her.”

“Mulligan, I see you’ve survived the layoffs.”

“So far, but one of these days my luck’s gonna run out.”

The looming truth of that led to an uncomfortable pause. Finally, Hernandez cleared his throat.

“So what can I do for you gentlemen this morning?”

“You can give us access to the evidence from a cold case,” Jennings said.

“What case?”

“The Susan Ashcroft stabbing.”

Hernandez folded his hands on his desk blotter, looked Jennings in the eye, and said, “What for?”

“We want to take another run at nailing Kwame Diggs for it.”

“And by we, you mean you and Mulligan?”

“Yup.”

Hernandez shook his head vigorously.

“Last time I checked, newspaper reporters were not considered law enforcement officers in the state of Rhode Island. And you don’t carry a badge anymore, Andy. When I said you need a hobby, this isn’t what I had in mind.”

“You owe me this, Oscar,” Jennings said. “If I hadn’t insisted on promoting you to detective twelve years ago, when Chief Bennett thought Hispanics weren’t fit for anything but patrol…”

“I might still be riding shotgun in a squad car,” Hernandez said.

He clasped his hands on his blotter and studied the two men for a moment.

“I can see this is important to both of you,” he said. “What is it you’re not telling me?”

“We’re worried that Diggs is going to get out,” Jennings said.

“You kidding me?”

“’Fraid not.”

“What the hell makes you think that?”

“The charges the state has brought against him since he turned twenty-one were all concocted,” Mulligan said.

“So I’ve heard,” Hernandez said.

“Now somebody’s poking into that, and if they can prove it, he’ll have to be released.”

“You must be shitting me.”

“Wish I were,” Mulligan said.

“Who the hell would want to do that?”

“He’s got an aggressive new lawyer,” Mulligan said. “I hear she’s good, and she’s getting some outside help.”

“From whom?”

“Sorry, but I can’t get into that.”

“Do you know?” the chief asked, turning his eyes on Jennings.

“Mulligan won’t tell me either,” he said, “but it smells like the ACLU.”

“¡Santa Madre de Dios!” He leaned back in his chair and studied the ceiling. “You know, it was years before I stopped having nightmares about what I saw inside the Medeiros house.”

“I still get ’em sometimes,” Jennings said.

“If I give you access to the evidence,” the chief said, “what do you hope to find?”

“Back in 1991, DNA testing wasn’t as sophisticated as it is now,” Jennings said. “We’re thinking Diggs might have shed something-a drop of blood, a few hairs, some skin cells-that could still be tested.”

“It’s a long shot,” the chief said. “A lot of old evidence has been lost or tossed. Even if we can find it, chances are the DNA has been degraded or contaminated.”

“I know,” Jennings said, “but it’s the only shot we’ve got.”

“Okay,” the chief said, “I’ll have our property clerk look for the evidence boxes. If he finds them, you can observe him as he goes through the contents; but I don’t want you touching or removing anything. We have to preserve chain of custody. If you see something that might be worth testing, I’ll have him hand-deliver it to the state crime lab. The lab has a huge backlog. I’m talking hundreds of cases going back years. But Diggs is the magic word, so I might be able to get them to fast-track this.”

“When can we start?” Jennings asked.

“I’ll call DeMaso in Property this morning and get him started. If he finds the boxes, I’ll be in touch.”

“I wasn’t there,” John Pugliese said.

“Two former guards I spoke with said you were,” Mason told him.

“They’re mistaken.”

“They seemed pretty sure.”

“Hell, I wasn’t even at Supermax in 2005. When Diggs was charged with assaulting Araujo, I was working medium security. I didn’t get transferred to Supermax till 2007.”

“Oh.”

They were sitting across from each other in a booth at the diner near Providence City Hall. Pugliese, swarthy and well muscled, chomped on one of Charlie’s lard-slicked bacon-and-egg sandwiches. Mason, who’d enjoyed a breakfast of mascarpone-stuffed French toast with peaches at home, nursed a cup of sweetened black coffee.

“What about the assault on Joseph Galloway last fall?” Mason asked.

“Oh, I know all about that one.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why should I?”

“Why shouldn’t you? You don’t have anything to hide, right?”

“He doesn’t,” someone said, “but he still has to work there.”

Mason turned toward the voice, saw Mulligan standing behind his left shoulder, greeted him with a thin smile, and slid over to make room for him in the booth.

“How have you been, John?” Mulligan asked.

“I’m hanging in there,” Pugliese said.

“Really? Last time we spoke, you’d gotten your nose broken for the second time and were dying to get the hell out of that madhouse.”

“I still am, but there’s no jobs out there, Mulligan.”

“The Crips still got a hard-on for you?”

“Yeah. It’s more than a year since I broke Stanley Turner’s arm in the exercise yard, but the gang has a long memory.”

“Why not quit and collect unemployment for a while, John? Better that than a shiv in the ribs.”

“I just might,” Pugliese said. “Then again, maybe I’ll join the army. See if I can get into one of those training programs they’ve got for electrical engineering or heating and cooling mechanics.”

“Aren’t you too old for that?” Mason chimed in.

“Not quite. The maximum enlistment age is thirty-five. I looked it up.”

To Mason, John Pugliese looked like somebody who’d seen thirty-five a decade ago.