Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel (27 page)

“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.”

51

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.”

“Good morning, Iggy. What the hell is…”

52

“Okay, let’s try it this way,” Mason said. “I’ll tell you what I already know, and you straighten me out if you think I’ve got something wrong.”

“I’m listening,” Paul Delvecchio said.

“On the morning of March thirteen, 2005, you were among a group of guards hanging out in the Supermax break room. Bob Araujo, Chuckie Shaad, Ty Robinson, Frank Horrocks, and maybe one or two others. Most of them were drinking coffee and making small talk. A couple of them were playing cards.”

“I’m supposed to remember where I was seven years ago?”

“You’ll remember this, all right,” Mason said. “It was the morning after Araujo was supposedly assaulted by Kwame Diggs, and he was telling everybody who’d listen what really happened.”

“And what was that?” Delvecchio asked. He took a sip of his coffee and sank his teeth into a leaking jelly doughnut.

“The way Araujo told it, he faked the assault charge on Warden Matos’s orders so they’d have an excuse to keep Diggs locked up. The other guards gave Araujo the hero treatment, shaking his hand and slapping him on the back.”

“Not the way
I
remember it,” Delvecchio said.

“So you
do
recall that morning.”

The prison guard slammed his fist on the counter.

“Here’s what
you
better remember, asshole. You better remember what happened to your fucking car. You know what kind of people drive a Prius? Tree huggers, socialists, and faggots. I got you pegged as all three. Keep this up and it won’t be your windshield that gets busted next time. It’ll be your fuckin’ skull.”

With that, Delvecchio got up and stomped out of Dunkin’ Donuts.

53

Diggs put the visitors’ room phone to his ear and scowled.

“What the fuck you doin’ to me, cuz? Why’d you put all that shit in the paper?”

“You get the paper in here?”

“The prison library gets it, yeah.”

“I put in all the things you told me, Kwame.”

“Yeah, but you also put in a bunch of crap that made me look like a liar.”

“Some of the things you told me weren’t true.”

“You played me, cuz. When I get out of here, I’m gonna fuckin’
wreck
you.”

“That so?”

“Count on it,” he said, and slammed his cuffed hands against the Plexiglas.

Two guards roused themselves from the wall they’d been leaning on, gunfighter-strutted up to Diggs, and grabbed him roughly by the shoulders.

“Calm the fuck down, asshole,” Mason heard one of them yell, the words faint through the thick Plexiglas. The guards then talked quietly to Diggs for a few seconds. When the tension fell from his shoulders, they sauntered back to their post along the wall. But they kept their eyes locked on him.

“Tell me something, Kwame,” Mason said. “Do you think I’m going to keep looking into the charges against you if you threaten me like that?”

Diggs didn’t speak.

“How do you suppose you’re going to get out of here without my help?”

“Sheee-it. You ain’t been any help so far.”

“I’ve found out enough to convince me that you were framed on the drug and assault charges, Kwame. I just don’t have enough evidence to prove it yet.”

“Of course I was framed. Did you see the fuckin’ video?”

“Video? What video?”

“Exactly, cuz.”

“What are you trying to tell me?”

“Everything that happens in here is on video. There’s cameras all over the fuckin’ place. So how come they didn’t show no video of me whacking out guards at my trials, huh? Can you explain
that
?”

*   *   *

That evening, as Mason headed home for the night, his newly repaired Prius was running rough. As he dipped off the Claiborne Pell Bridge and rolled into Newport, flames shot from the hood.

Firemen arrived in minutes and smothered the engine fire with extinguishers. A city cop arranged a tow and gave Mason a lift home.

54

“Bristol Toyota. How may we serve you?”

“Don Sockol, please.”

“May I tell him who is calling?”

“Edward Mason.”

“One moment, please.…”

“Good morning, Edward. How’s the Prius treating you?”

“Fine and dandy,” Mason lied.

“So how may I help you today?”

“I’m working on another story about Kwame Diggs, and I could use your help again.”

“Man, that story in the Sunday paper really tore him a new one,” Sockol said.

“It did,” Mason said.

“Was the information I sent you any help?”

“It sure was. Thanks so much.”

“That’s great. But what’s this I been hearing about the
Dispatch
trying to get Diggs sprung?”

“Don’t believe everything you hear on the radio,” Mason said. “That’s just Iggy Rock trying to stir up trouble.”

“That’s what I figured. I gotta tell you, though. A lot of the guards believe that shit. Some of them are pretty worked up about it, so you better watch your back.”

“Thanks. I will.”

“So what do you need now?”

“Is it true that everything that happens in Supermax is caught on surveillance cameras?”

“Not everything, no.”

“What’s covered?”

“The corridors, the exercise yard, the visitors’ room … all the common areas. No cameras in the cells, though. Got to give the skels their privacy.”

“The guards’ break room?”

“No.”

“How long do they keep the tapes?”

“There aren’t any tapes. It’s all digital nowadays. The video files are stored on hard drives. We’re supposed to delete the old stuff every five years, but we don’t always get around to it, to tell you the truth.”

“Do you have access to the files?”

“Yeah. The hard drives are kept in my office.”

Careful, Mason told himself. If Sockol figures out what you’re after, you’re sunk.

“I don’t suppose there’s any interesting video of Diggs.”

“Actually, there is, although it’s not from the surveillance cameras. Last summer, the warden brought in some lame poet from Providence College to run a writing workshop. The idea was to help the inmates get in touch with their feelings or some such bullshit. We record all our education programs, so we’ve got video and sound of the whole thing.”

“Diggs was there?”

“Yeah. The inmates were supposed to write poems and read them out loud. Most of them just sat on their asses for an hour and laughed at the guy, but a few of them actually wrote something.”

“Including Diggs?”

“Uh-huh. The other guys wrote about their mothers or their dogs or how much they missed their kids. But Diggs? He wrote some rap lyrics about fucking blondes.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. Afterwards, all the guards were talking about it, so I cued the video in my office and watched it. Diggs was doing this bouncy little dance while he rapped about all the places he wanted to put his dick. Creepy as all hell.”

“Any chance
I
could see that video?”

“Uh … you can’t come to my office to watch it. That would get me in a world of trouble.”

“I understand,” Mason said, making his voice thick with disappointment. Don’t suggest the solution, he thought to himself. Let Sockol work it out.

The Corrections Department clerk thought it over, then said, “What if I made you a copy?”

“Could you? That would be great.”

“I could download it onto a portable hard drive and drop it in the mail. Long as you don’t tell anybody how you got it.”

“I promise.”

“Anything else you need?”

“There is. A source tells me there might be surveillance footage of Diggs acting freaky a couple of other times.”

“Where and when?”

“March twelve, 2005, and October twenty of last year,” Mason said. “Both times as he was being led from his cell to the exercise yard.”

“Prisoners can be taken to the yard any time between eight
A.M.
and four
P.M.
Can you narrow down the time any?”

Mason could. Testimony at the two assault trials had established the exact times of both alleged attacks. But what he said was, “Sorry, but I can’t.” The less Sockol knew, the better.

“Okay, then,” Sockol said. “Diggs’s cell is about sixty yards or so from the yard, so that means video from a half-dozen cameras. With eight hours of video from each camera, that’s … uh … forty-eight hours for each day. No way I’ve got time to wade through all that. I’ll have to download it all for you if that’s okay.”

“That would be fine.”

“The stuff from 2005 might have been deleted, but I’ll look to be sure. The other date is no problem. Just give me a day or two, okay?”

*   *   *

In 1989,
The New Yorker
published “The Journalist and the Murderer,” a two-part series by Janet Malcolm. In it, the author painted a cynical portrait of the journalist. “He is a kind of confidence man,” she wrote, “preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust, and betraying them without remorse.”