Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel (9 page)

*   *   *

Gloria Costa unfurled her purple umbrella, stepped off the front stoop of her modest bungalow, landed in a puddle, and felt the water seep into her flats. A scream rose in her throat. She dashed for her little Ford Focus, stepped into a pothole, twisted her ankle, and nearly fell in the street. She regained her balance, unlocked the car door, closed the umbrella, and collapsed in the driver’s seat.

She shut her eyes, took a deep breath, and repeated the mantra her psychologist had provided: “I am not having a heart attack. The tightness in my chest and the shortness of breath are symptoms of adrenaline overload. My hands are clammy and tingling because I am hyperventilating.”

She opened her eyes, averted them from the rain-splattered windshield, and began the breathing exercise designed to ward off a panic attack. She took a deep breath, held it for ten seconds, and released it slowly through her nose.

The night it had happened, it was raining. A little thug in a black ski mask had forced his way into her car, punched her in the mouth, grabbed her keys, and driven her to a deserted street. There, he’d smashed her face into hash with his fists while chanting a mantra more powerful than the one her psychologist had given her: “I’m going to fuck your ass and slit your throat, you nosy picture-taking bitch.” He’d yanked her sweatshirt over her breasts, ripped off her bra, put a Buck knife to her throat, and forced her to remove her jeans and panties. Somehow, she’d managed to pull away from his grasp, bolt from the car, and run bloody and naked through the storm.

“You beat him,” her psychologist always told her; but to Gloria, that’s not how it felt. The thug had never been caught. Whenever Gloria thought of him, which she tried mightily not to do, she pictured him lurking in the rain, waiting for another chance. Waiting just for her.

Gloria repeated the breathing exercise ten times until her heart rate slowed. Then she adjusted the rearview mirror and studied her face in it. This was something she disliked doing, because
he
had left his mark there. But how could a girl live without mirrors? She fixed her lipstick and ran a comb through her damp blond hair. Then she adjusted the pirate-style patch that covered her glass eye.

She liked to say that she wore the patch because the glass eye made her look deranged, but the truth was that she couldn’t stand looking at the gift he had given her. She remembered how Mulligan once told her the patch was sexy, and her lips curled in a tight little smile.

She stuck the key in the ignition, fired the engine, switched on the wipers, and suddenly realized she’d left her camera bag on the kitchen table. A news photographer was useless without a camera. There was nothing for it. She’d have to get out of the car and limp back to the house through the rain.

*   *   *

The classical music station was playing Rachmaninoff. Edward Anthony Mason III loved Rachmaninoff. If the composition had words, he would have sung along.

He gunned the engine, and the lovingly restored silver-blue 1967 Jaguar E-Type Series 1 coupe leapfrogged the rainy-morning traffic. He raced up an on-ramp and sped across the majestic Claiborne Pell Bridge that arced over Narragansett Bay’s choppy east passage. The station was playing Dvo
ř
ák now. Mason didn’t care for Dvo
ř
ák. He fiddled with the tuner, searching for another classical station. Finding only vapid soft rock, headache-inducing rap, smug Don Imus, and the Mike & Mike sports yakkers, he snapped the radio off.

Mason was glad it was finally Monday. The weekend had not been a pleasant one at the family manse in Newport, Rhode Island. All day Saturday his father, the publisher of
The Providence Dispatch,
had cloistered himself in the library and reviewed the paper’s calamitous financials over and over again—as if he could somehow will them to change. But nothing—not even a series of buyouts and layoffs that had shuttered the paper’s suburban bureaus and slashed its news staff from 340 to 80 over the last decade—had stanched the hemorrhaging.

Now there was little left to cut.

On Sunday, after returning from services at Trinity Episcopal Church, the old man had cracked open a bottle of twelve-year-old Glenmorangie single-malt Scotch and gotten uncharacteristically rip-roaring drunk.

This morning, as servants scurried about in the dining room, refilling coffee cups and clearing china sticky with half-eaten apple puff cakes, Mason’s father had cleared his throat, clinked his spoon against his coffee cup to make sure he had his son’s full attention, and made an announcement.

“It pains me greatly to say this, son, but I’m going to talk to the board about putting the
Dispatch
on the market.”

Probably too late for that, Mason thought. Mulligan had been proclaiming for years that the newspaper business had no future, although the veteran reporter did tend to express the idea in more colorful language. “Turning to shit,” Mulligan used to say, and, more recently, “circling the fucking drain.” At first Mason had disagreed, regurgitating the Pollyannaish prattle he’d been fed at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism about how the business was just going through “a difficult transition.” But now the painful truth was too obvious to deny.

Dad, Mason thought, I doubt you can find a buyer stupid enough to take the
Dispatch
’s rotting corpse off our hands. But Mason had the courtesy, and the good sense, to keep the thought to himself.

Just twenty-eight years old, he was the scion of six inbred Rhode Island families that had owned the paper since the Civil War. He’d been working as a reporter for the last four years, learning the trade from the bottom up; but the plan had been for him to step up to the publisher’s corner office once his father decided to step down. Now, as the Jag cruised north on Route 1 toward Providence, Mason wondered what he’d do with the rest of his life.

He wondered, too, how he would maintain the lifestyle to which he was accustomed now that his inheritance was shriveling. Not
all
of his trust fund was tied up in
Dispatch
stock, and for that he was grateful. But what about Mulligan and the rest of his friends at the paper? What would become of them?

Mason brooded on that for a while and then tried the radio again. Still finding nothing to his liking, he turned it off and started humming the nostalgic ragtime tune he’d composed at the family’s Steinway. He’d already come up with a title: “Providence Rag.” Now he was ready to write the words. The first stanza, an attempt to evoke the roar of the newspaper presses, was taking shape in his head when an unwelcome thought intruded.

One of these days, he might find himself driving a Prius.

*   *   *

Mason, who had the longest commute, arrived first. Gloria, who lived just fifteen minutes away in suburban Warwick, slipped in a half hour later, delayed by the ordeal of fetching her camera bag and repeating her breathing exercise. Mulligan, whose apartment was within walking distance, meandered in forty minutes after her.

One by one, the three journalists took the elevator to the third floor, stepped out into the newsroom, and walked past a slender, elderly black woman sitting in one of the white vinyl chairs set aside for visitors. She wore a red cloth coat and flat black shoes adorned with tiny red bows. Her red purse and matching umbrella rested on the floor beside her, and a soggy copy of the
Dispatch,
open to the metro page, lay in her lap. The woman lifted her chin and studied each of them as they passed her by. Mason gave her a curious glance and hurried on to his desk, but Gloria and Mulligan averted their eyes.

Unlike Mason, they knew who she was. They knew what she wanted.

Lomax, the sixty-two-year-old managing editor, checked the time on the newsroom wall clock and tossed Mulligan a dirty look. Mulligan didn’t give a shit. He would never get paid for the overtime he’d put in on the Kessler story over the weekend, so he felt entitled to come and go as he pleased. He logged on to his computer and found a message from Lomax in his in-box:

Talk to her.

Mulligan pounded out a reply:
Give her to somebody else this time.

Lomax:
It’ll go quicker if you do it. She won’t have to repeat her whole song and dance.

Mulligan muttered, “Aw, crap,” rose from his ergonomically correct desk chair, and went to her.

“Good morning, Mrs. Diggs.”

“Good morning, Mr. Mulligan.” Her voice was even wearier than he remembered.

“Please come with me,” he said.

He waited as she gathered her things and then led her to his cubicle. He fetched a desk chair, one of the dozens left over from when the
Dispatch
’s news staff was four times its current size, and invited her to sit.

“How may I help you today?” he asked.

Esther Diggs slapped the newspaper, still open to the metro front, on Mulligan’s desk and pointed a skeletal finger at the story under his byline.

“This says Eric Kessler is getting out.”

“Yes.”

“But
my
boy is still in prison.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You think that’s fair?”

“That Kessler is getting out, or that your son isn’t?”

13

Eric Kessler had been a thirty–seven–year–old New England Telephone Company lineman in 1976, when his seven-year-old neighbor Brian Freeman went missing.

The soft-spoken father of two was among the scores of volunteers who had searched the Hope Valley section of rural Hopkinton for ten days until police finally called it off. The child’s whereabouts remained a mystery until 1982, when Kessler was caught trying to strangle a nine-year-old Cub Scout. Detectives who searched his house, located less than a mile from the Freeman place, discovered the missing boy’s skull in a gym bag under Kessler’s bed.

He and Kwame Diggs were Rhode Island’s most notorious killers.

Diggs’s mother was gritting her teeth now and glaring at Mulligan.

“Both Kessler and your son,” he told her, “should be drawn and quartered and have their heads impaled on pikes.”

Mason, sitting in his adjoining cubicle, caught the gist and was stunned to hear Mulligan speak to the kindly-looking woman that way. He finished his regular morning call to the mayor’s appointments secretary, hung up, and settled back to eavesdrop.

“My boy is innocent,” Mrs. Diggs said.

“His prints were found all over the murder scenes,” Mulligan said.

“A lie!”

“The cops found the locket he took from Becky Medeiros and the earrings he took from Connie Stuart and her daughters hidden in a coffee can in your garden shed.”

“They were planted.”

“He confessed.”

“It was coerced.”

“We’ve been over all of this many times before, Mrs. Diggs.”

Her shoulders sagged.

Mulligan didn’t have much patience left for this woman; but looking at her now, he found himself feeling sorry for her all over again. The ordeal had aged her. If he hadn’t known she was sixty-six, he would have put her at eighty. Although she had moved out of state after the murders, she had continued to make the ninety-five-mile round trip from Brockton, Massachusetts, almost every week for the last eighteen years to visit her son at the state prison in Cranston. Her husband had died a few years after her son went to prison, and her two other children had moved far away. So she always made the trip alone.

She had never stopped believing in her son’s innocence. Her belief was delusional, but there
was
something noble about it. Mulligan figured she deserved an explanation.

“Kessler pled guilty and was sentenced to forty years in prison,” he said, “but Rhode Island law mandates that convicted felons, even murderers, get time off for good behavior; and Kessler has been a good boy inside. He has expressed remorse for his crimes, and he has followed prison rules to the letter. Nobody
wants
to let a child killer out ten years early. The state legislature is changing the law so this won’t happen again. But they are going to have to release him at the end of May.”

“I
know
that,” she said. “I read your story.”

“Your son,” Mulligan said, “renounced his confession and was convicted of all five murders anyway. He continues to deny his guilt and has never expressed remorse for what he did. And he has not behaved himself inside. He’s been caught with drugs in his cell. He assaulted two prison guards.”

“He did
not
. Kwame was supposed to be set free twelve years ago. They faked those charges so they wouldn’t have to let him out.”

“You could be right.”

“What are you going to do about it?”

“Nothing,” Mulligan said.

She glared at him again, this time through tears. “Why are they doing this to my son and not to Kessler?”

“Kessler is seventy-three years old and has a bum ticker,” Mulligan said. “He’s no longer a threat to anyone. A Cub Scout could beat the crap out of him now.”

“I think there’s another reason.”

“And what would that be?”

“Kessler is white, and my son is black.”

Mulligan sighed and shook his head.

“I don’t think that has anything to do with it.”

Mrs. Diggs pulled a tissue from her coat, wiped the tears from her cheeks, gathered her purse and umbrella from the floor, and rose to leave. Then she turned back for a parting shot.

“Kessler cooked and ate that child,” she said. “My Kwame never
ate
anybody.”

Mulligan had heard the cannibalism rumor. Who hadn’t? But because Kessler never stood trial, the details of his crime had never been made public. Mulligan briefly considered asking again for a look inside Kessler’s private journal, which Hopkinton police chief Vincent Matea had kept under lock and key for thirty years. But what would be the point? The journal’s contents, the chief always insisted, were too horrible to be revealed. If they were that terrible, Mulligan might not have the stomach to read them. And the
Dispatch,
which had withheld the most sordid details about the Diggs murders, would never print them anyway.