Bruce DeSilva - Providence Rag

“Yeah, we do, Thanks-Dad,” Mulligan said. “Diggs is a psychosexual serial killer. He stabbed women and little girls to death because he got off on it.”

Mason drew a deep breath and told himself to calm down.

“Okay,” he said. “Perhaps you know some things I don’t. Why don’t you lay it out for me?”

Gloria took the lead, describing what Esther Diggs had told her about how kind and welcoming their neighbors had been.

“I asked her specifically about Connie Stuart and Becky Medeiros,” Gloria said. “She told me that on the day they moved in, Stuart brought them a tuna casserole. And she said Becky Medeiros used to give Kwame cookies.

“After I talked with Mrs. Diggs, I called Kwame’s sister, Amina, in Oakland and his brother, Sekou, in Tuscaloosa. They told pretty much the same story about the neighbors. Sekou didn’t want to say much about Kwame. He said the last thing he needed was for folks in Alabama to know he was the brother of a serial killer. But Amina said Kwame was a very strange kid. When he was twelve or thirteen years old, he chopped the arms, legs, and heads off all of her Barbie dolls. And she thinks he killed her cat. Her mother never wanted to believe anything bad about Kwame, but Amina spent most of her childhood scared to death of him. She said he never actually hurt her, but she put a bolt latch on her door to stop him from creeping into her bedroom at night.

“Oh, and Marcus Washington checked his records for me and found that before she was killed, Becky Medeiros was contributing two hundred dollars a year to the NAACP.”

“I see,” Mason said, hating how disappointed he sounded. “Is there anything else?”

“The story Kwame told you about breaking a racist bully’s arm in a school-yard brawl?” Mulligan said. “I tracked down Craig Hennessey, who was the school principal at the time. He said it never happened.”

“He must be pretty old now,” Mason said. “Maybe he forgot.”

“I doubt he’d forget something like that,” Mulligan said. “Besides, Andy Jennings, the lead detective on the Medeiros and Stuart murders, says the same thing. Back in ’96, he did a lot of digging into Kwame’s background. If it had happened, he would have found out about it. Just to be sure, I asked him to check the old police files. He confirmed there’s no record of it.”

“I see,” Mason said, feeling smaller by the moment. He was glad Felicia couldn’t see him now.

“I also tracked down Peter Schutter, a retired FBI agent who did a psychological profile of Diggs back in the nineties. He says Diggs’s race rage excuse is laughable. If that had been his motive, why he didn’t kill any men or boys? How come all of his victims were women and little girls?

“The evidence that these were sex murders is overwhelming,” Mulligan continued. “I won’t bother you with all the details, but how about this? Diggs masturbated on the dead bodies.”

“What?” Mason said. “I didn’t see anything about that in the trial transcripts.”

“That’s because family members of the victims attended the trial,” Mulligan explained. “Prosecutors didn’t want them to have to sit there and listen to all the sordid details. They had more than enough evidence to convict without dragging that stuff up.”

“There was nothing about it in your old Dispatch clippings either,” Mason said.

“I knew about it, but I didn’t use it,” Mulligan said. “At the time, it seemed like the decent thing to do.”

Lomax raised an eyebrow.

“It was all off the record,” Mulligan said. “My sources wouldn’t even let me tell my editors about it.”

Mason put his head in his hands.

“I guess I really fucked up.” He rarely used the f-word, but it felt appropriate to the occasion.

“Yeah, you did,” Lomax said.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Lomax. You’ll have my resignation on your desk in the morning.”

Lomax shook his head.

“It won’t be accepted, Edward. The mistake you made is one a lot of aggressive young reporters make early in their careers. You fell in love with your story.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What Diggs told you made for good copy,” Lomax said. “You got excited about it. So excited that you lost perspective. You wanted his story to be true, so you convinced yourself that it was. As a result, you neglected to check it out properly.”

Mason looked Mulligan in the eye. “Did you ever make a mistake like that?”

Before he could reply, Lomax cut him off.

“Yeah, he did. But only once. More than once and he wouldn’t still be here.”

Mason looked ashen.

“Edward, you’ve still got the makings of a fine profile here,” Lomax said, his eyes softening a little. “It’s just going to be a different story from the one you thought you had. What you’ve got is the story of a killer who finally admits what he did but tries to excuse it by making up lies about his victims. I’ll give you exactly sixty seconds to get over feeling sorry for yourself. Then I need you to sit down with Mulligan and Gloria and rewrite this thing from top to bottom.”

He shot his cuff and checked his watch.

“I’ll need the copy on my desk no later than forty-seven hours from right now.”

Monday morning, the three friends gathered for breakfast at the diner in Kennedy Plaza. Outside the grease-flecked windows, the street was still wet from last night’s rain.

Charlie clunked plates of bacon and eggs in front of Mulligan and Gloria. Mason, who had breakfasted on apple puff pancakes at home, sipped his second cup of the fry cook’s strong coffee.

“You sure you don’t want anything else, kid?” Charlie asked. “That was one hell of a story Sunday. Whatever you want is on the house.”

“Thanks, Charlie, but I think I’ll just stick with coffee.”

The cook nodded and turned back to the grill. Mason swiveled on his stool to face Mulligan and Gloria.

“In the rush to get the story in shape to print, I never did properly thank you two for saving my butt.”

“You’re welcome,” Mulligan said.

“I still think it should have had your bylines on it,” Mason said.

“Nah,” Mulligan said. “It was your story, Thanks-Dad. You’re the one who got Diggs to talk.” He shoveled a forkful of eggs into his mouth, checked his watch, and said, “Hey, Charlie, would you mind tuning the radio to WTOP?”

“What a scumbag Kwame Diggs is,” Iggy Rock was saying. “How dare he play the race card? I’m gonna give credit where credit is due here and say The Providence Dispatch did a great job exposing Diggs for the lying pervert that he truly is.

“But before any of you start regretting that you canceled your subscriptions, there’s something you need to know. According to my sources, the newspaper is continuing its investigation into the drug and assault charges that have kept Diggs behind bars. How the Dispatch could persist in this after what it published Sunday is beyond me. I have again invited Ed Lomax, the paper’s managing editor, to come on this show and explain, but once again he has refused to face our questions.

“The phone board is all lit up, so let’s take some calls. Marcie from Johnston, you are on the air.”

“Hi, Iggy. Longtime listener, first-time caller. I just want to say that the editors and reporters at the Dispatch are a bunch of commie nigger lovers who-”

“Marcie from Johnston, you are off the air. Let’s not have any more of that, people. Kwame Diggs killed because he is a vicious sexual predator. The fact that he’s black had nothing to do with it, okay? If you want to know the truth, most serial killers are white. Paulie from Pawtucket, you are on the air.”