Rogue Island Read online

  In the fall of 1994, I received a note from a reader praising a “nice little story” I’d written. “In fact,” the note said, “it could serve as the outline for a novel. Have you considered this?”

  The note was from Evan Hunter, who wrote the brilliant 87th Precinct police procedurals under the pen name Ed McBain.

  I sealed the note in plastic, taped it to my home computer, and started writing.

  I was twenty thousand words into the novel when my home and work life both turned upside down. Years flew by. Each time I bought a new computer, I taped Hunter’s note to it, but my busy new life allowed no time for novel writing.

  Then, a couple of years ago, I met Otto Penzler, the dean of New York City crime-novel editors, and happened to mention that long-ago note from Hunter.

  “Evan never had a good thing to say about anything anyone else wrote,” Penzler said. “He really wrote you that note?”

  “He did. I still have it.”

  “Well, then you’ve got to finish that novel,” he said.

  And so, at long last, I did. This one is for you, Evan. I wish you were still around to read it.

  This is entirely a work of fiction. Although a few real people (hello, Buddy Cianci) are mentioned, none of them but baseball player Manny Ramirez have speaking parts, and he is permitted only a single word of dialogue. All the other characters who speak are made up. Some of them are named after old friends but bear scant resemblance to them. For example, the real Paul Mauro is a young New York City police captain, not a wizened old Providence priest. Rhode Island history and geography are accurately portrayed for the most part, but I have played around a little with time and space. For example, Hopes, like most newspaper bars, is long gone, but I enjoyed resurrecting it for this story. Good Time Charlie’s closed years ago. And there never was a Nelson Aldrich Junior High School in Providence’s Mount Hope neighborhood.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Letter

  Author's Note

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright

  1

  A plow had buried the hydrant under five feet of snow, and it took the crew of Engine Company No. 6 nearly fifteen minutes to find it and dig it out. The first fireman up the ladder to the second-floor bedroom window laid a hand on the aluminum siding and singed his palm through his glove.

  The five-year-old twins had tried to hide from the flames by crawling under a bed. The fireman who carried the little boy down the ladder wept. The body was black and smoking. The fireman who descended with the little girl had already wrapped her in a sheet. The EMTs slid the children into the back of an ambulance and fishtailed down the rutted street with lights flashing, as if there were still a reason to hurry. The sixteen-year-old babysitter looked catatonic as she watched the taillights disappear in the dark.

  Battalion Chief Rosella Morelli knocked the icicles off the brim of her fire hat. Then she whacked her gloved fist against the side of the gleaming red pumper.

  “You counting?” I asked.

  “Makes nine major house fires in Mount Hope in three months,” she said. “And five dead.”

  The neighborhood of Mount Hope, wedged between an old barge canal and the swanky East Side, had been nailed together before the First World War to house the city’s swelling class of immigrant mill workers. Even then, decades before the mills closed and the jobs moved to South Carolina on their way to Mexico and Indonesia, it hadn’t been much to look at. Now lead paint flaked from the sagging porches of tinderbox triple-deckers. Flimsy cottages, many built without garages or driveways in an age of streetcars and shoe leather, smelled of dry rot in summer and wet rot in winter. Corroding Kenmores and Frigidaires crouched in the weeds that sprouted after the city dynamited the old Nelson Aldrich Junior High, where Mr. McCready first introduced me to Ray Bradbury and John Steinbeck.

  The neighborhood’s straight, narrow streets, many named for varieties of trees that refused to grow there anymore, crisscrossed a gentle slope that offered occasional glimpses of downtown office towers and the marble dome of the statehouse. Real estate agents, fingers crossed behind their backs, called them “vistas.”

  Mount Hope may not have been Providence’s best neighborhood, but it wasn’t its worst, either. A quarter of the twenty-six hundred families proudly owned their own homes. A community crime watch had cut down on the burglaries. Only 16 percent of the toddlers had lead poisoning from all that peeling paint, darn right healthy compared to the predominantly black and Asian neighborhood of South Providence, where the figure topped 40 percent. And five dead meant business was picking up at Lugo’s Mortuary, the neighborhood’s biggest legal business now that Deegan’s Auto Body had morphed into a chop shop and Marfeo’s Used Cars had given way to a heroin dealership.

  The battalion chief watched her crew aim a jet of water through the twins’ bedroom window. “I’m getting real tired of notifying next of kin,” she said.

  “Thank God you haven’t lost any of your men.”

  She turned from the smoldering building and hit me with a withering glare, the same one she used to shame me when she caught me cheating at Chutes and Ladders when we were both six years old.

  “You’re saying I should count my blessings?” she said.

  “Just stay safe, Rosie.”

  The glare softened a little. “Yeah, you too,” she said, although in my job the worst that was likely to happen was a paper cut.

  * * *

  Two hours later, I sat at the counter in my favorite Providence diner, sipping coffee from a heavy ceramic mug. The coffee was so good that I hated cutting it with so mu
ch milk. My ulcer growled that the milk wasn’t helping anyway.

  The mug was smeared with ink from a fresh copy of the city edition. A pit bull, Rhode Island’s unofficial state dog, had mauled three toddlers on Atwells Avenue. The latest federal crime statistics had Providence edging out Boston and Los Angeles as the per-capita stolen-car capital of the world. Ruggerio “the Blind Pig” Bruccola, the local mob boss who pretended he was in the vending machine business, was suing the newspaper for printing that he was a mob boss pretending to be in the vending machine business. The state police were investigating game rigging at the state lottery commission. There was so much bad news that a perfectly good bad-news story, the fatal Mount Hope fire, had been forced below the fold on page one. I didn’t read that one because I’d written it. I didn’t read the others because they made my gut churn.

  Charlie wiped beef-bloody hands on an apron that might have been white once and topped off my cup. “The hell you been, Mulligan? You smell like a fuckin’ ashtray.”

  He didn’t expect an answer, and I didn’t offer one. He turned back to his work, tearing open two packs of buns. He balanced a dozen of them from wrist to shoulder along his sweat-slicked left arm, slapped in twelve Ball Park franks, and added mustard and sauerkraut. A snack for the overnighters at Narragansett Electric.

  I took a sip and flipped to the sports page for the spring training news from Fort Myers.

  2

  From the outside, the drab government building looked like randomly stacked cardboard boxes. Inside, the halls were grimy and shit green. The johns, when they weren’t padlocked to save civil servants from drowning, were fragrant and toxic. The elevators rattled and wheezed like a geezer chasing a taxi. I played it safe and climbed the gritty steel stairs to the third floor, then navigated four narrow hallways before I spied the sign “Chief Arson Investigator, City of Providence” painted in black on the opaque glass window of a battered oak door. I shoved it open without knocking and stepped inside.

  “Get the fuck out of my office,” Ernie Polecki said.

  “Good to see you too,” I said, and slumped into a wobbly wooden chair across from his army-green steel desk.

  Polecki lit a cheap black stogie with a disposable lighter, leaned back in his oak office chair, and thunked his weary wingtips on a green blotter scarred with tobacco burns. The chair groaned under the weight he’d packed on since the wife left and Kentucky Fried wasn’t just for breakfast anymore. His assistant, a bum named Roselli, who got the job because he was first cousin to the mayor, sat stiffly on a gray metal chair under a cracked window skimmed over with ice on the inside.

  “So it’s arson again,” I said.

  “Either that or somebody thought it was a good idea to burn trash in the basement,” Polecki said. “With all the junk they had piled up down there, that dump was begging for a fire anyway.”

  “Could have told you this on the phone, Mulligan,” Roselli said.

  “Yeah,” Polecki said.

  “But I couldn’t have looked this over by phone,” I said, and stretched for the case file on the desk.

  Polecki raised his right hand and slammed it down so hard that the desk bonged like a cracked bell, then looked startled when he saw that the file wasn’t under his fat knuckles. It wasn’t anywhere else on the desk either. He glared at me. I shrugged. Then we both looked at Roselli, back in his seat now and clutching the file to his bony chest. He’d moved so fast I almost missed it.

  “Investigative file,” Roselli said. “Not open to reporters or assholes, and you’re both.”

  “Sure,” I said, “but how about to a First Amendment watchdog from the Fourth Estate?”

  “Not to one of them either,” Polecki said.

  “Any connection to the other fires?”

  “None,” Polecki said.

  “Ain’t nothin’,” Roselli said.

  “Any pattern to who owned the buildings?” I asked. “Were any of them overinsured? Did the fires start the same way?”

  Polecki took his feet off the desk and leaned forward, the shift in weight making his chair scream for its life. Patches of red flared across his cheeks, maybe from anger, maybe from exertion.

  “Trying to tell me my business, Mulligan?”

  “We know what we’re doing,” Roselli said.

  No, you don’t, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

  Polecki’s stogie had gone out. He relit it, blew the exhaust at me, and grinned like he’d accomplished something. Then he took a few more puffs and flicked hot ash into his red dollar-store wastebasket.

  “So Mount Hope is just having a run of bad luck?” I asked.

  “Luck of the Irish,” Polecki said.

  “Worst kind,” Roselli said.

  “If you had the luck of the Irish, you’d be sorry and wish you were dead,” I said.

  “Huh?” Polecki said.

  Jesus. Doesn’t anybody remember John Lennon anymore?

  A wisp of smoke rose from the wastebasket, where the cigar ash smoldered in a greasy fried-chicken bucket.

  “Look, asshole,” Polecki said, “I told you before, we got no comment on ongoing investigations.”

  “Which this is,” Roselli said. “Why don’t you go cover a traffic accident? Better yet, have one.”

  As much as I enjoyed Roselli’s sense of humor, I decided not to stick around for another punch line. The wastebasket was smoking like Polecki’s stogie now and not smelling much better, so it seemed like an excellent time to go. I pulled the fire alarm in the hallway on my way out. Who knew the damned thing would actually work?

  3

  Veronica Tang, the courthouse reporter, rolled her eyes and snickered like a cartoon mouse. Except for a few Disney characters, I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone snicker like that before.

  “What happened after you pulled the alarm?”

  “Don’t know. I didn’t stick around for the show.”

  Veronica snickered again. I liked it when she did that. Then she tossed her hair and playfully punched me in the shoulder. I liked that too.

  It was happy hour at Hopes, the local press hangout. Reporters and editors from the paper and producers and on-air “talent” from the city’s TV stations were just beginning to trickle in.

  “So why was Polecki being so uncooperative?” Veronica asked.

  “Because he’s an asshole.”

  She stared at me until I added, “Okay, we’ve got some history.”

  Fifteen years ago, the police academy had overlooked Polecki’s youthful b&e conviction and admitted him as a favor to his father-in-law, the chairman of the Fourth Ward Democratic Committee. As a patrolman, he crashed a couple of patrol cars in high-speed chases. But hey, it was only two. He aced the sergeant’s exam by paying the going rate of five hundred dollars for the answers, then rose through the ranks the Rhode Island way, slipping envelopes to the mayor’s bagman. Two grand for his lieutenant bars, five grand to make captain. A Providence success story. I’d written about some of it, but it was too much to go into now, so all I said was:

  “Three years ago, when he headed the tactical squad, I wrote a piece about his propensity for playing fungo with black kids’ heads. A couple of Baptist preachers got hot about it and threatened to bring Al Sharpton to town for a protest march. Made the chief so jumpy that he transferred Polecki to the arson squad, a job that doesn’t include a nightstick as standard equipment.”

  Veronica lifted her stemmed glass and took another sip. “You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you when you walked through the door,” she said. “So what’s your next step?”

  “No idea,” I said. “If I could just find a fresh angle on this thing, maybe I could get out of doing that sappy Lassie-come-home story.”

  Her eyes widened.

  “You mean you haven’t finished it yet?”

  “Can’t finish what I haven’t started.”

  “Jesus, Mulligan. Lomax gave it to you last Monday, for Chrissake.”

  “Um,” I said
.

  Veronica’s brown eyes danced in amusement, but she shook her head disapprovingly, the neon bar lights doing the samba in her hair. Hair as black as the night sky when I was a kid. I hadn’t found the nerve to ask her if she colored it.

  She fished a handful of quarters out of her purse and swayed down the narrow aisle between the battered Formica tables and the pockmarked thirty-foot mahogany bar. I watched her progress in the mirror that ran the length of the room and saw that her little black skirt wasn’t traveling in a straight line. She’d sipped a little too much chardonnay. I craved Bushmills, the best Irish whiskey that fit my wallet, but my ulcer kept asking the barkeep for club soda.

  Journalists have been drinking themselves to death in this place ever since a reporter named Dykas sank his meager savings into it forty years ago. He named it Hopes because all of his were riding on it. It didn’t look like much now and probably never did. Rickety chrome bar stools, a splintered floor, a stock high on octane and low on finesse. I’d been drinking here since I was eighteen, and the only renovation I’d noticed was the addition of a condom dispenser in the men’s room.

  But Hopes had the best jukebox in town: Son Seals, Koko Taylor, Buddy Guy, Ruth Brown, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker, Big Mama Thornton, Jimmy Thackery and the Drivers. Veronica punched up something heart-wrenching by Etta James and steered her skirt back in my direction.

  “The perfect song for a woman who’s thinking of taking up with a married man,” she said as she settled back in her seat. I hated being reminded I was still officially hitched to Dorcas, but I reached across the table and took Veronica’s hand as Etta set the mood.

  Veronica was gorgeous and I wasn’t. She was Princeton and I was Providence College. She was twenty-seven and I was on a collision course with forty. Her father was a Taiwanese immigrant who’d taught mathematics at MIT, gambled his life savings on Cisco and Intel stocks, and walked away with over a million before the dot-com bubble burst. My dad had been a Providence milkman and died broke. With only five years in the business, Veronica already worked her beat like a pro, while I filched confidential files and pulled fire alarms in government buildings. Maybe Veronica had lousy taste in men. Or maybe I was just an overachiever.