Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel (8 page)

“Naw.”

“Look,” Mulligan said, “I think he might be the one who killed your neighbors.”

Eddie’s eyes got wide.

“Better tell me what you know.”

“I don’t know nothin’.”

“You can talk to me, or you can talk to the police,” Mulligan bluffed. “You must have asked him about it. What did he say?”

The kid fell silent and studied his feet.

“Come on, Eddie. Out with it.”

“He told me it was just a little cut,” Eddie finally said. “He didn’t want to say how he got it. But this morning, he knocked on my door and said that if the cops came around asking about it, I should tell them he got hurt breaking into a car.”

Mulligan took out his phone and called Jennings. “I’ve got something new on Kwame Diggs,” he said.

“I thought I told you to stay away from this.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know. But you really need to hear what I’ve got.”

*   *   *

Next morning, Jennings and Mello drove to the Diggs house and knocked on the door. No one answered. They were just climbing back into their unmarked car when they saw a heavyset black teenager cruising down the street on his bicycle.

“Are you Kwame?” Jennings asked.

“Who’s askin’?”

“I’m Detective Jennings and this is Detective Mello,” the lead detective said, extending his right for a shake. Kwame hesitated, then took it. Jennings pretended not to notice the bandaged thumb.

“You the cops trying to figure out who killed all those people?”

“We are.”

“What’s the holdup, man? People around here are crazy scared.”

“Can I tell you a secret?” Jennings asked.

“Uh. I guess.”

The detective leaned in close. “We don’t have a clue who did this. Looks like the bastard’s gonna get away with it.”

“No shit?”

“No shit. We’re just spinning our wheels now, reinterviewing people in the neighborhood who didn’t know anything the first two times we talked to them.”

“Damn.”

“Okay if we ask
you
a few questions?”

“Me? I don’t know nothin’.”

“Sometimes people know more than they think, Kwame. You could have seen some little detail that might point us in the right direction.”

As Jennings talked with Kwame, Mello opened the back door of the cruiser, pulled out two cans of Coke, and popped one open.

“Hot as hell out here,” he said. “Want a Coke, partner?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

Mello tossed him a can, and Jennings made a two-hand catch.

“Hey, got another one back there for Kwame?”

Mello fetched another Coke, careful to handle only the top rim, and handed it to the boy. Kwame gripped it in his right and popped the tab with his left thumb.

“So, Kwame,” Jennings said, “have you seen any unfamiliar vehicles around the neighborhood this summer?”

“Not really,” he said, and gulped from the can.

“Seen any strangers lurking around?”

“I ain’t seen nothin’ like that.” Another gulp.

“What about your friends?” Mello asked. “Any of them mention seeing something suspicious?”

“Nah,” Kwame said, and drained the can.

Jennings waited for the kid to drop the empty into the gutter. He didn’t.

“Well, thanks anyway,” Jennings said. He and Mello got back into their car and watched Kwame pedal away down the street.

“Why didn’t you take the can from him?” Mello asked.

“If we made him suspicious, he probably wouldn’t give it up,” Jennings said, “and wrestling it from him would smear the prints.”

Kwame reached the corner, turned left, and tossed the empty into the street. It bounced, rolled, and teetered at the edge of a storm drain. The detectives waited until the boy was out of sight before driving to the corner. Mello pulled a latex glove onto his right hand, got out of the car, picked up the can by the rim, dropped it into an evidence bag, and climbed back into the passenger seat.

“Think we got lucky?” he asked.

“Maybe,” Jennings said. “The kid gripped the can pretty tight, didn’t move his hand around any that I could see, so I don’t think he smudged the prints.”

*   *   *

Two days later, the state crime lab matched Kwame Diggs’s prints to the ones that had been lifted from the light bulb, front window, and kitchen windowsill at the Medeiros house. And to the knives, medicine cabinet, and downstairs windowsill in the Stuart house.

That evening, Jennings tracked down a Superior Court judge and got him to sign a warrant.

When police rapped on the door of the Diggs residence the following morning, the boy’s parents were both at work. By law, that didn’t matter. Warrant in hand, they could have kicked the door down and tossed the place. But they didn’t have to. Kwame answered their knock and let the officers inside. Then he stretched out on the living room couch and turned on the TV.

As Jennings and Mello searched the house and grounds, two patrolmen, hands resting on the butts of their semiautos, watched the teenager munch Oreo Double Stuf cookies, swig Coke, and chuckle at a marathon telecast of
Voltron: Defender of the Universe,
a cartoon about a giant robot.

Upstairs, Jennings rummaged through Kwame’s bedroom. In the closet, he found two pairs of size thirteen Nikes. Stuffed inside one shoe was a plastic bag containing what looked like a half ounce of marijuana. Then he rooted under the bed and pulled out a stash of slasher videos:
Prom Night, Friday the Thirteenth, Halloween,
and
A Nightmare on Elm Street
.

Outside, Mello combed through the backyard garden shed. Concealed inside a bag of potting soil, he discovered a Folgers coffee can. He pried off the plastic top, dumped the contents into a gloved hand, and let out a whoop.

He tugged an evidence bag out of his pocket and dropped Becky Medeiros’s heart-shaped locket inside. Then he pulled out another bag for the earrings that had been torn from Connie Stuart and her daughters.

The detectives met in the kitchen to share what they’d found. Then they dragged Diggs up from the couch, cuffed him, read him his rights, and led him outside. At the curb, Mulligan stood beside a
Dispatch
photographer who captured the moment for the front page.

Jennings and Mello shoved their prisoner into the back of a patrol car. As it rolled away, the two exhausted detectives wrapped their arms around each other and wept with relief.

*   *   *

That evening, Jennings, Mello, and Mulligan were too keyed up to sleep, so they joined the department celebration at the FOP lodge. Word had spread about the kid reporter’s role in the arrest. Everyone in the place wanted to buy him a drink.

By nine
P.M.
, Mulligan was in an alcoholic fog. He drained his seventh bottle of Narragansett, slid off the bar stool, and staggered to the men’s room to empty his bladder. And to get a moment alone with his thoughts.

He had no illusions about his role in the murder investigation. He knew the cops would have caught Diggs eventually. But would they have figured it out before he killed again?

Mulligan hated every minute he’d spent on this story. Until Kwame Diggs came along, he’d lived life just fine without getting this close to evil. He wondered if he’d ever get the stench of gore out of his dreams. But after a decade devoted to playing games and more than three years writing about others who played them, he’d done something that mattered. He understood, now, how Rosie felt—and it felt good. Maybe he
was
cut out for this kind of thing.

He’d heard that Vic Stanton was planning to resign from the
Dispatch
’s five-man investigative team to take a job at
The New York Times
. Would Lomax consider an inexperienced sportswriter for one of the most coveted jobs at the paper?

“I helped catch a serial killer,” he told himself as he backed away from the urinal. “How many reporters can say that?”

He reclaimed his seat at the bar just as Malcolm Roberts, the state prosecutor assigned to the Diggs case, walked in and found everybody backslapping and offering toasts.

Roberts broke the mood.

“There’s something you all need to know,” he told the revelers. “Rhode Island’s criminal codes haven’t been updated in decades. When they were written, no one ever envisioned a child as twisted and dangerous as Kwame Diggs. The law says that juvenile offenders, no matter what their crimes, must be released and given a fresh start at age twenty-one. The attorney general is going to ask the legislature to rewrite the law so this won’t happen again. But they can’t change it retroactively.

“In six years, the bastard will get out and start killing all over again.”

July 1994

The boy sprawls on his jail cell bunk and studies a spider. It’s spinning a web on the ceiling. It has a plan. It knows exactly what it’s doing.

Why didn’t he wear gloves?

Why didn’t he bring a hunting knife, something with a blade that wouldn’t break off?

Why didn’t he jerk off into a hand towel and take it away with him?

He’d been impulsive and reckless. He sees that now. Still, he might have gotten away with it if it weren’t for that fucking reporter.

Then he smiles, knowing he’ll be free again in half a dozen years. Even the public defender says so.

He pictures his trophies sealed in a plastic bag inside an evidence locker. He wishes he’d hidden them better so he could dream on them again when he gets out.

Next time, he’ll think things through. Next time, he’ll be like the spider.

He pulls himself to his feet, climbs onto the bunk, and plucks the bug from its web. He jumps to the floor, sits on the edge of the mattress, opens his palm, and gazes at the predator’s swollen belly, its quivering legs.

Then he closes his fingers and crushes it in his big, strong hands.

PART II

Nobody’s Right When Everybody’s Wrong

12

March 2012

Larry Bird had been living in Mulligan’s kitchen for less than a week, and already he’d become a big pain in the ass.

Every day, he shredded the newspaper he was supposed to shit on, kicked it through the bars of his cage, and watched it drop, shit and all, onto the scuffed linoleum floor. Every night, he let out two or three skull-piercing shrieks that made the veteran reporter bolt from his bed and grope for his gun. Larry knew only one English phrase, and he didn’t squawk it often; but when he did, Mulligan had to fight the urge to strangle him.

Mulligan brushed his teeth, tugged on his jeans, pulled on a Boston Red Sox T-shirt with Jacoby Ellsbury’s number 2 on the back, and was tying his black Reeboks when the fucker said it:

“Yankees win. Theeeeeeee Yankees win!”

Mulligan couldn’t figure it. Why would a guy name a bird after one of the greatest sports heroes in New England history and then teach it to talk that crap? But there was no way to find out now, because the asshole responsible for this abomination was dead.

Mulligan would have preferred a dog—a big one that would jump all over him when he came home from work, curl up beside him when he rooted for the Sox on TV, and snore contentedly every night at the foot of his bed. After several recent disappointments, he’d come to believe that the love of a dog was preferable to the love of a woman. Dogs were unwaveringly faithful, and not a one had ever lied to him. But the landlord didn’t allow dogs in this run-down tenement building in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood; and with Mulligan’s crazy hours, there was no way he could take care of one anyway.

The asshole, a small-time heroin dealer, had been sitting on the stoop outside his apartment in the Chad Brown housing project last Wednesday when a white Escalade rolled up, the passenger-side window slid down, and a dozen nine-millimeter slugs stuttered out. An hour later, Mulligan ducked under the yellow crime scene tape and yanked his reporter’s notebook from his hip pocket. He doubted he’d need it, but he figured on being ready in case the investigating detective broke precedent and said something worth printing in
The Providence Dispatch
. They’d just started wrangling when a uniform lugged a big brass cage out of the apartment and set it down in the blood on the stoop.

“Oops,” he said. “Sorry about that, Sarge.”

“No biggie,” the detective said.

“Really? Didn’t I just compromise the physical evidence?”

“Compromise?” Mulligan said.

“It’s what they’re taught to say at the Police Academy,” the detective said, “when what they really mean is ‘fuck up.’”

“Oh, shit,” the uniform said. “I can’t believe I did that.”

“Doesn’t matter, kid,” the detective said.

“It doesn’t?”

“It might if we went to trial,” the detective said, “but it’s not like we’re ever gonna ID the shooter.”

Mulligan and the detective watched the uniform lift the cage from the stoop. A little metal sign clipped to the bars read: “Larry Bird.” Inside the cage, a midnight-blue macaw squatted and took a dump.

“Looks like you’ve got a witness,” Mulligan said.

“Yeah,” the uniform said, “he must have heard the whole thing go down, but the shit-bird ain’t talking. I don’t think he likes cops.”

“Birds of a feather,” Mulligan said, and immediately regretted the cliché.

“You got that right,” the detective said. He pointed at the fresh graffiti scrawled next to the apartment door:
If you see something, don’t say anything.

“Handsome bird,” Mulligan said.

“If you want it, it’s yours,” the detective said.

“You serious?”

“Why not? The skel with all the holes in him won’t be feeding it anymore, and I’d just as soon avoid dealing with the lazy pricks at Animal Control.”

Which was how Larry Bird found a new home in Mulligan’s kitchen and promptly dedicated himself to soiling it.

Mulligan finished tying his shoes, filled Larry’s food tray, got pecked on the hand for his trouble, and told the bird to go fuck himself. Then he shrugged on his bomber jacket and went out the apartment door. He trotted down one flight of worn wooden stairs and stepped out into a cold morning rain.