A Scourge of Vipers (10 page)

The Lieutenant Governor wishes to offer his sincere apologies to anyone who may have been embarrassed by his faux pas at the Blue Grotto Restaurant on Federal Hill Thursday night. The unfortunate incident occurred when he felt a case of the sniffles coming on. He reached into the inside pocket of his suit jacket and pulled out what he thought was a handkerchief. Unfortunately, he found himself wiping his nose with a pair of women's panties. The Lieutenant Governor doesn't know how this piece of apparel found its way into his pocket, but he wants to make it perfectly clear that it belongs to his wife.

This would have been witnessed by no more than a couple of dozen people. Why Mancuso wanted to spread the news to everyone who still took
The Dispatch
was a mystery until I did a Google search for “Mancuso
+
panties” and found three separate videos of the incident on YouTube and another on the
Ocean State Rag
website. Between them, they already had more than sixty thousand hits.

I wrote it up word for word with one minor alteration. The garment the lieutenant governor had wiped his honker with was actually a pink thong with a grinning black pussycat on the front.

At noon, I slipped out to wolf down a burger and fries at my favorite diner. When I was done, I figured I had forty minutes or so to do some real reporting before Chuckie-boy released the hounds. I jogged up the hill to the statehouse and found Pichardo, the House minority leader, eating Chinese takeout from the carton in her cluttered office.

“I already told you I don't know anything about this,” she said.

“Yeah, but now I'd like the truth.”

She narrowed her eyes and bared her teeth.

“Look,” I said. “Alfano was a dangerous guy. Whoever he was working for is probably going to send somebody else. In fact, his replacement might already be here.”

She folded her hands, the nails painted blood red, and stared at her desktop.

“Off the record?” she said.

“Sure.”

“Okay, you're right. I recognized the picture.”

“You met with Alfano?”

“I did.”

“What were the circumstances?”

“I already reported this to the state police. Why should I tell you?”

“Because I'm trying to figure out what's going on,” I said, “and some of the people who talk to me would never spill to the cops.”

She took a few seconds to think it over, then said, “He came to my office unannounced and offered me a bribe.”

“When was this?”

“A couple of weeks before he was killed.”

“Remember the date?”

“Give me a sec to check my calendar,” she said, and turned to her computer screen. “It was the day we voted on the redistricting bill, so that would have made it March 3.”

“Four weeks ago.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And he asked you to hold up the gambling bill until the governor agrees to privatize the bookmaking?”

“He did.”

“That's exactly what you are doing, isn't it?” I said.

“I resent the implication. I told him that was already my position and that he should keep his dirty money.”

“Did he warn you not to call the police?”

“He said things would go badly for me if I did.”

“Go badly for you? Were those his exact words?”

“Yes.”

“But you called the police anyway?” I said.

“I figured things might go worse for me if I didn't.”

*   *   *

I ducked back into the newsroom before I was missed, sat down in my cubicle, and made a call.

“State Police Headquarters, Parisi speaking.”

“Afternoon, Captain.”

“Mulligan? What is it this time? I'm pretty busy here.”

“Lucan Alfano,” I said.

He fell silent, then said, “Aw, shit.”

“We need to have a chat about him.”

“The usual place in twenty minutes,” he said, and hung up.

I tugged on my jean jacket and meandered toward the elevator, hoping Chuckie-boy wouldn't notice.

Johnston City Hall was halfway between
The Dispatch
and state police headquarters in Scituate. When I arrived, Parisi's unmarked car was already in the parking lot. I pulled in beside it, nose to tail, and we lowered our driver's-side windows.

Parisi, always impeccably groomed, with a gray military brush cut and knife-scarred knuckles, was well past fifty now and bearing down on retirement age. Over the years, he'd put a dozen murderers away, solved scores of other violent crimes, and broken the back of New England's largest drug ring. The scalps of three corrupt mayors, fifteen crooked state legislators, and at least twenty members of the Patriarca crime family hung from his gun belt. He was the best cop I'd ever known.

Parisi tended to be tight-lipped with the press, usually taking at least five seconds, and often more, to frame cautious responses to my questions. I'd learned to wait him out.

“Jesus,” he said. “You're still driving that piece of crap?”

“Stop it,” I said. “You're eroding Secretariat's self-esteem.”

“Only women and assholes name their cars.”

“You left out vigilant watchdogs of the fourth estate.”

“Like I said. Assholes.”

“So how's the Alfano investigation going?” I asked.

Five seconds, and then, “What Alfano investigation?”

“The one about him offering bribes to public officials.”

Another pause. “Bribes? Where'd you hear that?”

“Some of the people who talked to you have been talking to me.”

Five seconds again, and then, “Alfano's dead.”

“I know that. It was in the paper.”

“So any investigation, and I'm not confirming there was one, would be dead now, too.”

“You're not curious about who he was working for?”

Ten seconds this time. “Do you know?”

“I'm working on it.”

“If you find out, be sure to let me know,” he said, and started to roll up his window.

“Hold on,” I said.

“What?”

“Besides the five names on Alfano's list, did he offer bribes to anyone else?”

Five seconds. “What list?”

“The one Oscar Hernandez showed you.”

Ten seconds. “Off the record?”

“Sure.”

“If such a list exists, and I'm not confirming that it does, there could be reason to suspect it is not complete.”

“How incomplete is it?”

Five seconds. “Hard to say.”

“Come on, Captain. Give me something to go on.”

Twelve seconds this time. “I don't know what I don't know. Could be a lot of others. Could be just one or two.”

“Meaning there's at least one more for sure?”

Five seconds. “If I were in your position, that would be my assumption.”

Parisi wasn't giving me much to go on, but I was betting this meant McCracken's client, whose name was not on the list, had taken the P.I.'s advice and called the state police.

“Can you lighten up and give me the damned names?”

There was no delay this time.

“Get that broken headlight fixed,” he said, “or next time I'm going to give you a ticket. Oh, and when you see Hernandez, tell him I said he's got a big fucking mouth.”

With that, he cranked the ignition and peeled out of the lot.

Not bad for Parisi, I thought. He'd tossed me a morsel and suggested there might be a next time.

I was on my way back to Providence when the cell phone played my ringtone for Chuckie-boy. I ignored it. He kept calling. Finally, I pulled over in a KFC parking lot and picked up.

“Mulligan.”

“Where the hell are you?”

“At the doctor. I've had a relapse. Looks like I came back to work too soon.”

“Bullshit. Get your butt back here right now.”

“I don't think so, Chuckie. The doc says I need to go home and lie down. You don't want me too weak to try out for the Vipers on Saturday, do you?”

“I'm going to need a doctor's note.”

“No problem,” I said.

Doc Israel was a fan. A few months back, he'd given me a short stack of his stationery for just such eventualities.

 

14

The men in mismatched T–shirts and basketball shorts lined up single file along the sideline so Coach Derrick Martin and his two assistants could look us over. By my headcount, there were sixty-two of us, and we were mostly a sorry lot.

There was Ruben Mendoza, a twenty-five-year-old Providence playground legend with what looked like needle tracks on his arms. And Butch Bowditch, a slow-footed center who'd packed on twenty pounds of fat since his graduation from Brown University two years ago. And Chris Sears, an All–Big East shooting guard who'd been cut from the PC squad last December after getting caught stealing laptops from dorm rooms for the third time. And the unfortunately named Freddie Krueger, a former URI power forward who might have been drafted in the second round two years ago if he hadn't torn his ACL to shreds in a snowboarding accident. And Marvin Benton, a dazzling former PC point guard who'd been ignored in last year's draft because he was only five foot eight. And twenty-year-old Keenan Jefferson, so dominating at Hope High that he was being compared to Kevin Durant until he dropped out two years ago to marry his pregnant girlfriend and take a job slinging burgers.

Earlier, as I laced my Nike All Stars, I watched Krueger strap a brace on his surgically repaired knee while Sears prowled the overcrowded locker room and talked trash.

“You ain't nothin' but a bunch of has-beens and never-weres. I'm gonna burn the lot of ya.” Then he spotted me and snarled, “And what the fuck are
you
doin' here, grandpa?”

I grinned, peeled off my white T-shirt, and printed “GRANDPA” on the back with a Sharpie. I still figured the tryout was a sham, but I wished all of them but Sears good luck. Jefferson, the kid who'd tried to do the right thing by his girl, was the one I'd be rooting for the hardest.

As we stood on the sidelines, I stared up at 12,993 empty seats and remembered how, on those rare occasions when I got off the bench for PC, every one of them had been filled.

Coach Martin and his two assistants were strutting down the line like drill sergeants now, giving each of us the once-over. When they reached me, Martin smirked and said, “I hear they're calling you grandpa.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I kinda like it.”

“You sure you don't want to go on home, old-timer? Maybe fix yourself some warm milk and take a nap?”

The others laughed. I joined in. Then I broke the line, ambled over to the two carts that held the basketballs, picked one up, squared myself to the basket, and swished a thirty-foot jump shot.

“Beginner's luck,” Sears growled.

I smiled and kept shooting until I emptied both carts. Sixteen of twenty hit nothing but net.

“Great form,” Martin said. “Any of you other wannabes think you can match that? No? Okay then. Break off into groups of five for suicides. Six times down and back.”

A basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Six times down and back meant a sprint of more than eleven hundred feet. I finished next to last in my group, well ahead of Bowditch, who jogged the last two laps. I was winded and drenched in sweat, but not bending over and gasping for breath like some of the others.

When we were done, the coaches lined us up again, asked Bowditch, Mendoza, and sixteen others to take one step forward, and told them to go home.

We spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon on standard basketball drills: the four-spot fast break shooting drill, the elbow shooting drill, the post feed/spot up drill, and the wing screen. The guys who'd played college ball mostly did okay. The unschooled playground legends struggled.

Shortly after one
P.M.
, they lined us up on the sidelines again, told another twenty-four that they were done, and asked the remaining twenty of us, including Sears, Krueger, Benton, and Jefferson, to come back the following Saturday.

As the exhausted winners and losers trudged to the locker room, I pulled Martin aside.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because the fix is in. The ownership is desperate for publicity, so you were gonna stick no matter what. Now that I've seen what you can do, I might have kept you around anyway. You're slow, you can't jump, and you couldn't guard Danny DeVito if he played in a wheelchair. But your shooting form reminds me of Ray Allen. Think you can teach the rest of these clowns the proper way to stick a jump shot?”

 

15

“Fiona? It's Mulligan.”

“Huh? What time is it?”

“Did I wake you?”

“Yeah.”

“It's eleven o'clock Sunday morning. Why aren't you in church?”

“I attended midnight mass.”

“Are you alert enough to answer a question, or should I call back?”

“Give me a sec.”

I heard her drop the phone and rustle around for half a minute. Then she was back.

“Okay, shoot.”

“Remember telling me that a couple of committee chairmen knew about the gambling bill before the news leaked?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Guys who weren't on Alfano's list?”

“Yeah.”

“Who are they?”

“Phil Templeton and Joseph Longo.” Templeton, I knew, was the chairman of the House Corporations Committee, and Longo headed the Senate Finance Committee. “They're my point men on this,” Fiona was saying. “I'm counting on them to line up support, make the necessary horse trades, and count the votes so we can drive the bill through the legislature.”

“I need to talk to them.”

“About what?”

“Alfano.”

“Why?”

“I think he might have tried to bribe them, too.”