Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

“Guess I need to start looking for another line of work,” Mulligan said.

“Yeah,” Mason said. “Me too.”

By the time Mulligan left the diner, the sky was dark. A quarter moon hung low over the city.

It was months since his last talk with Rosie. He used to visit her once or twice a week, but lately he’d fallen out of the habit. Tonight, he needed his best friend.

He climbed into Secretariat, crossed the bridge over the Providence River, stopped at Gilmore’s Flower Shop in East Providence, and sprang for a bunch of cut daffodils. Then he cruised back across the river, drove to Swan Point Cemetery, rolled slowly through the gate, and parked at the edge of the grass.

He rummaged through the Bronco’s storage compartment for his flashlight but couldn’t find it. It didn’t matter. Off to his left, the silhouette of Pastor’s Rest Monument, marking the final resting place of Providence’s leading nineteenth-century ministers, stood pitch black against a charcoal sky. With the obelisk as his guide, he would have no trouble finding his way.

He clutched the daffodils in his right fist, tucked an autographed Manny Ramirez Red Sox jersey under his left arm, and trudged blindly through the vast graveyard. He was nearly there when he cracked his knee against a grave marker that leaped at him out of the darkness.

Over the decades, he and Rosie had told each other almost everything. That’s what best friends forever were for. He knelt in the damp grass beside her granite gravestone and ran his fingers over the words he knew by heart:

Rosella Isabelle Morelli. First Woman Battalion Chief of the Providence Fire Department. Beloved Daughter. Faithful Friend. True Hero. February 12, 1968-August 27, 2008.

She’d been racing to a house fire on a foggy night when her command car crashed and burned. The fire had been deliberately set. The arsonist had never been caught. Mulligan had never stopped hunting for the bastard.

After clearing away some withered flowers, he placed the fresh ones on her grave. Then he draped the jersey over the shoulders of her tombstone, just as he did every time he came.

Manny Ramirez had been Rosie’s favorite player. She was gone before he started bitching about his paltry hundred-and-sixty-million-dollar contract, before he knocked the team’s sixty-four-year-old traveling secretary to the ground, before the Sox traded him to the Dodgers, before he was suspended for using performance-enhancing drugs. Mulligan figured she didn’t need to hear about all that. He wrapped his arms around the granite and gave her a hug.

“It’s a beautiful night, Rosie. A sliver of moon is hanging over the Seekonk River, and I can hear the Canada geese honking as they forage in the grass… No, I’m not seeing anyone just now… Last I heard, Yolanda was planning to marry that Brown chemistry professor. After her, nobody seems to measure up.”

They sat together in silence, peering up at stars barely visible through the spill of the city’s lights. Somewhere up there, an American spaceship was carrying a rover named Curiosity on a 350-million-mile journey to the surface of Mars. Mulligan hoped Rosie could see it as it sped through the firmament.

“Rosie, I’m confused. All my working life, I’ve lived by a simple code: The truth will set you free. But lately I’ve been trying to conceal it… Why? Because if the truth comes out, a serial killer will be set free… Yeah, I remember that old song. ‘There’s something happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.’

“Tonight, Thanks-Dad said some things that made me wonder if maybe I’m on the wrong side of this thing. He talked about the First Amendment and what being a reporter is all about. Fact is, he sounded an awful lot like I used to, Rosie… Yes, I remember that part of the song, too. ‘Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.’”

He imagined he could hear her singing that old Buffalo Springfield tune, her crystal voice drifting on the muggy night air.

The morning mail was light-a couple of press releases, a subscription renewal form for the American Journalism Review, a funds solicitation from the Columbia University alumni office, and a single legal-size white envelope with Mason’s name and the newspaper’s address hand-printed in neat block letters. There was no return address.

Mason didn’t like the look of it, so he walked the envelope over to the newsroom’s east-facing windows and held it up to the sunlight. As far as he could tell, it contained only a piece of paper with something written on it. He returned to his desk, slit the top of the envelope with a letter opener, and slid out a sheet of typing paper. On it were two lines hand-printed in the same block letters:

WE KNOW WHAT YOUR DOING, RICHIE RICH.

IF YOU KNOW WHATS GOOD FOR YOU, YOU’LL STOP.

Mason stood and handed the threat and the envelope it came in over the top of the cubicle divider.

“Hey, Mulligan,” he said. “What do you make of this?”

Mulligan checked the postmark on the envelope, looked the letter over, and handed it back. “Well, it’s got two grammatical errors,” he said, “so it’s probably not from a copy editor.”

“I think we can rule out English teachers, too,” Mason said.

“The paper is cheap stock you can buy anywhere,” Mulligan said. “Other than that, all we know is that it was mailed yesterday from the 02886-7157 ZIP code. Hold on a sec.”

He logged on to the USPS ZIP code finder and typed the number in.

“That’s the post office on Post Road in Warwick, the one near the airport.”

“How worried do you think I should be?”

“Not very.”

“I guess word of what I’m working on is starting to get around.”

“How many people have you interviewed so far?”

“Let’s see. There’s Diggs’s former lawyer, his new one, the heads of the ACLU and the NAACP, and more than two dozen guards and former guards.”

“And all of them probably told their husbands and wives, who told their friends, who then passed it on to their friends,” Mulligan said.

“So you’re saying this could have come from anybody.”

“Yeah, but most likely it’s from someone with something to lose.”

“One of the guards who lied in court?” Mason said.

“Or a family member of one of Diggs’s victims,” Mulligan added.

“It’s a bit unsettling. I’ve never been threatened like this before.”

“Get used to it. It goes with the job. The more the word spreads, the more people are going to be pissed off at you. And some of them are going to find creative ways to let you know about it.”

Mason fretted about the threat all afternoon as he tried to line up more interviews with former prison guards. Most of them hung up on him, but a couple agreed to meet. By the time he was done for the day, he’d finally stopped thinking about the letter.

He stepped out of the Dispatch ’s front door, crossed the street to the parking lot where he’d left his car, and stopped dead. On the driver’s-side door of the Prius, someone had left him a message in red, yellow, blue, and green refrigerator magnets.

B SMART MASON

WE C U

Mulligan and Mason sat in the red leather chairs across from their boss’s desk and waited for him to explain why they’d been summoned.

“Iggy Rock called this morning,” Lomax said. “He informed me that he’s got three sources telling him our publisher’s son here is trying to get Kwame Diggs sprung from prison.”

“Aw, hell,” Mulligan said.

“It was bound to leak out eventually,” Lomax said.