A Scourge of Vipers Read online

  As I took the stool next to her, she caressed the pendant with the fingers of her left hand and fixed her eyes on me.

  “This was sweet,” she said.

  “But did it work?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

  “It was Rosie’s idea,” I said.

  “You still talk to her?”

  “All the time.”

  “Does it ever worry you that she talks back?”

  Oh-oh. How could I make the woman I wanted a relationship with understand my relationship with a dead woman? Buying time to find the words, I waved the bartender over and ordered another martini for Yolanda and a Killian’s for me.

  “Better make mine a club soda,” Yolanda said. “Martinis are like breasts. One is too few, but three is too many.”

  “I disagree.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “There can never be too many breasts—as long as they come in even numbers.”

  “Mulligan, you’re such a boy.”

  “Um.”

  “So can we get back to Rosie?”

  “Sure. The way it works is, I talk and Rosie listens.”

  “What do you talk about?”

  “I tell her what’s going on in my life. I ask for her advice.”

  “And she gives it?”

  “We knew each other so well, Yolanda. I can always sense her answer.”

  “But do you actually hear her voice?”

  “Not the way the Son of Sam killer heard a demon whisper orders in his ear. I mean, it’s not like I’m psychotic. But whenever I need her, she’s there. In fact, she’s with me now.”

  Yolanda leaned back to look at the empty stool on the other side of me. “She’s keeping a pretty low profile. What’s she saying?”

  “She’s warning me not to say anything stupid.”

  “Too bad she didn’t tell you that the last time.”

  “Maybe she did. Koko Taylor’s wailing from the jukebox probably drowned her out. That’s another woman who speaks to me from the grave.”

  “You really remember what was playing on the jukebox? Or did you just make that up?”

  “Yolanda, I remember everything that happens when we’re together.”

  “Smooth line, white boy. Ever use that one before?”

  “Never. I swear. You’re the only Yolanda I know.” My nerves were bringing Mulligan the smartass to the surface again.

  She sipped, smiled slightly, and stared at me over the rim of her glass.

  “You look hungry,” she said.

  I was sure I did.

  She laughed then. “For food, I mean. Eat yet?”

  “Not since breakfast.”

  “Me either. I’m famished.”

  I tossed some bills on the bar, and we strolled to the Trinity Brewhouse, our hands tangling. We took a table by the mullioned windows that look out on the Providence Public Library.

  Over drinks, hers another club soda and mine a Pickman’s Pale Ale, we talked about work until the food arrived. The calamari appetizer and a Cobb salad wrapped in a tortilla for her. The nachos appetizer and cowboy burger for me. Yolanda reached across the table, plucked a gooey nacho with her fingers, and popped it between those lips I longed to kiss. She’d always helped herself to my plate whenever we dined together.

  “Mulligan?”

  “Um?”

  “Did I ever tell you about my parents?”

  “No, you never did.”

  “They met in a Chicago candy factory where they both worked the line. Mama always smelled like sugar. Daddy smelled like sugar and cigarettes.”

  “How sweet,” I said.

  “Please. No more jokes tonight.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “They’d moved up north in the early sixties, Mama from Mississippi and Daddy from East Texas. They must have had it rough down there because I could never get them to talk about it. Daddy’s gone now, and my mama still won’t talk.”

  “Probably didn’t have it all that easy up north either,” I said.

  “They found steady work, but we never did have much. Clothes somebody else wore first, furniture handed down by church folk, and an apartment on the second floor of a walk-up on the West Side. Every damned day, we had to fight the roaches for it.”

  That sounded like the way I was living now, but I knew enough to keep my mouth shut.

  “The city was split into black and white back then. Still pretty much is, I guess. The only white folks I knew growing up were the teachers at the for-shit public schools I attended. White cops were on patrol, but they never got out of their cars unless they were looking to shoot somebody. To get to my elementary school, I had to cross West Madison, which hadn’t been rebuilt since a twenty-eight-block stretch was looted and burned ten years before I was born.”

  “On the night of the King assassination,” I said.

  “That’s right. My folks never talked much about that either.”

  She paused to nibble at her Cobb salad and perhaps to consider how much more of her past to share with me.

  “For my first eighteen years, white folks were a mystery to me,” she said. “I’d decided not to trust them. I didn’t have any white friends at all till I got to Illinois State.”

  “Your parents must have given up a lot to pay for that.”

  “They did what they could, but I still had to take out twenty-five grand in college loans.”

  She stopped talking again and toyed with her food.

  “I’d like to hear more,” I said. “I want to know it all. But I can’t help wondering why you’re telling me this now.”

  “I’m getting to that,” she said. “At college, the black kids mostly kept to themselves. Hardly anyone dated outside of that circle. The few white boys who did ask black girls out mostly treated them like whores.”

  “Did that happen to you?”

  “No. But to a couple of my friends.”

  “That’s why you vowed not to date white guys?”

  “It was more than that. Interracial dating wasn’t just rare back then. A black guy risked his life just being seen with a white girl. In some places that’s still a sin. But black girls were expected to stick to their own kind, too. Sisters who dared to date white boys were either pitied or scorned. Older black folks, especially, thought they were letting themselves be used and saw them as traitors to their race.”

  “Times have changed, Yolanda.”

  “Maybe that’s true,” she said. “But time changes slower for some folks. A lot of older black people, like my mama, still think stirring the pot is a mistake.”

  She paused for a moment to sip from her drink.

  “These days, some black women seek out white men out of desperation,” she said. “With so many brothers behind bars, it’s a numbers game. But mostly, most young people don’t think about race as a barrier anymore. Somebody looks good, they go for it.”

  “But not you,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not that young. It’s taken me a long time to even think about letting my guard down.”

  “And now?”

  “Like I said, I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately.”

  “Why me? You’re a goddess, Yolanda. You can have anybody you want.”

  “Baby,” she said, “didn’t Rosie tell you not to say anything stupid?”

  Our entrees had barely been touched, and they were getting cold. I picked up my burger and took a few bites. She nibbled again at her Cobb salad. When the waitress returned, we declined coffee and dessert. I reached for the check. Yolanda beat me to it and fished an AmEx card out of her purse.

  “Don’t let male pride get in the way,” she said. “I make way more money than you.”

  We finished our drinks. Then I took her by the hand and led her outside. Empire Street was nearly deserted. She turned to face me, and I wrapped my arms around her. She draped her arms around my neck and pulled me closer. Then she tilted her head the way women do when they want to be kissed.r />
  * * *

  “So then what happened?” Joseph asked.

  “I said, ‘Your place or mine?’”

  “You were gonna bring her here?”

  I looked around at the salvaged furniture, the ravaged pizza boxes, the crushed beer cans, and Joseph sprawled on the couch where he’d been sleeping in his boxer shorts for a week. The couch had started to smell like Joseph.

  “I guess her place would have been better.”

  “And what did she say?”

  “She said, ‘Let’s not rush things, baby.’”

  “Aw, fuck. Well, at least she called you baby.”

  “She calls the mailman baby.”

  “So when you gonna see her again?”

  “Lunch tomorrow.”

  “Lunch? Sheee-it. Not much bangin’ goes on at noon. But I guess it’s better than nothin’.”

  But that’s not the way it worked out.

  24

  “We found the Colt forty-five you reported stolen,” Wargart said.

  “Where?”

  “We think you know where,” Freitas said.

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh, no?” she said. “Get up. You’re coming with us.”

  “Sorry, I said, but I have a prior engagement.”

  “Get out of that chair, or I’ll drag you up,” Wargart said. “You’re under arrest.”

  He ordered me to empty my pockets and toss everything on my desk. Then he pulled my arms back, snapped the handcuffs on tight, patted me down, and read me my rights. Chuckie-boy came out of his office and watched openmouthed as they led me out. He didn’t ask what was going on. He didn’t ask if he should call a lawyer. He didn’t say a word.

  At the station, they shoved me into an interrogation room, removed the cuffs, and forced me into a metal chair that was bolted to the floor. Then they cuffed my hands in front, left the room, and let me stew for more than an hour.

  The acoustic ceiling tiles looked to be twelve inches square. There were eight of them running along the wall to my left and twelve along the wall in front of me. If my math was correct, that meant the room was ninety-six square feet in size. It also meant that ceiling was covered with exactly ninety-six tiles. I counted them anyway. Yup. Ninety-six. Then I counted them again. The distance from floor to ceiling looked to be the standard eight feet, which meant the room had a volume of seven hundred and sixty-eight cubic feet. The scuffed and gritty floor tiles were the same size as the ceiling tiles. That meant there had to be ninety-six of those, too, but I still counted them. Three times. Then I counted the coffee cup rings on the heavy oak interrogation-room table. There were sixteen. It was something to do.

  When Wargart and Freitas returned, they brought a video camera on a tripod and three paper cups filled with black coffee. They pulled up chairs across from me, sat down, pried the lids off the coffees, and plunked one of them down in front of my face.

  “Be easier to drink this if you take the cuffs off,” I said.

  “Not gonna happen,” Wargart said.

  “Wow. I’m considered an escape risk? That’s quite the honor.”

  I grasped the cup with both hands and drank. The coffee wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t the lunch, or the lunch company, I’d been planning on. I pictured Yolanda waiting, wondering why I’d stood her up.

  Freitas recited Miranda again for the benefit of the video camera. I waived my right to a lawyer. I wanted to hear their questions. I figured it was the best way to find out what the hell was going on.

  “How well do you know Frances Mirabelli?” Freitas asked.

  “Never heard of him.”

  “It’s a she,” Wargart said. “But of course, you knew that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “She knows you,” Freitas said.

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “She says you’ve been sniffing around her place for a couple of weeks. Claims you’ve been trying to pork her.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Pork? Nobody says pork any more unless they’re ordering barbecue.”

  “Let me rephrase,” Freitas said. “She says you’ve been coming around trying to bang her.”

  “Is she hot?” I asked.

  “If you like ’em doe-eyed and stacked,” Wargart said.

  “Then it does sound like the sort of thing I might do.”

  “So you admit it,” Freitas said.

  “Admit what? Did our state legislature outlaw the horizontal bop when I wasn’t looking?”

  “God, I hope not,” Freitas said, “but the law does take a dim view of this.”

  She slid a photograph out of a manila file folder and placed it on the table.

  “Jesus! Is she saying I did this to her?”

  “Signed a sworn statement to that effect,” Wargart said.

  “It’s not true,” I said. “I’ve never seen this woman before. Besides, I have a strict policy against sleeping with anyone named Frances. Got the same issue with Leslie, Dana, Casey, Jackie, Hilary, and Leigh. Too much potential for gender confusion.”

  “You’re a liar,” Freitas said.

  “Okay,” I said. “Now I understand why I got dragged in here. But why you two? Why are the homicide twins wasting time on a routine assault case?”

  “Homicide twins?” Freitas said.

  “S’what people are calling us,” Wargart said.

  “Really?” she said. “I hadn’t heard that.”

  “Yeah,” Wargart said. “I kinda like it.”

  “You haven’t answered my question,” I said.

  “This is part of an ongoing murder investigation,” Wargart said.

  I looked at the photo on the table again.

  “Murder? The girl took an awful beating, but she doesn’t look dead.”

  “She’s not,” Wargart said.

  “So who is?”

  “Her boyfriend,” Freitas said. “Is that why you killed him? So you could get in his girlfriend’s pants?”

  “Who’s her boyfriend?”

  “Mario Zerilli,” Wargart said.

  “Mario? I’d never put my dick anyplace his has been. Wouldn’t even want to use the same urinal, for chrissake. Besides, in case it’s slipped your mind, he’s not dead either.”

  “Oh, no?” Wargart said.

  “The corpse they pulled out of the Blackstone was somebody else,” I said.

  “True,” Wargart said. “But that doesn’t mean Mario’s still sucking air. Nobody’s seen him in weeks.”

  I looked up at the ceiling for a moment and thought things over.

  “I gather all this has something to do with my gun,” I said.

  “It does,” Wargart said.

  “Where’d you recover it?”

  “In Frances Mirabelli’s apartment,” he said.

  “Huh,” I said. “Mario must have left it there after he trashed my place.”

  “That’s not how she tells it,” Freitas said. “She says you had it with you when you kicked down her door. It fell out of your waistband when you were knocking her around, and she managed to grab it. She pointed it at you, and you bolted out the door.”

  “And you want to hear the best part?” Wargart said.

  “You mean it gets better?” I said.

  “We ran the ballistics,” he said. “Turns out it’s the same gun you used to shoot Phil Templeton.”

  I couldn’t help myself. I laughed out loud.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “Who is it I killed again? Phil Templeton or Mario Zerilli?”

  “We’re thinking both,” Freitas said.

  “I already told you,” I said. “The gun was stolen.”

  “You reported it stolen after Templeton was killed,” Wargart said.

  “True,” I said.

  “So even if we believed your bullshit story, which we don’t,” Freitas said, “you could have used it on him.”

  “Why would I kill Templeton? Did I want to bang his girlfriend, too? Oh, wait. That can’t be it. Templeton was gay.”
/>
  “You shot him because he was a key supporter of the governor’s gambling bill,” Wargart said.

  “Why would I care about that?” I asked.

  “Because you’re scheming to take over Dominic Zerilli’s bookmaking business,” Freitas said.

  “What? Where the hell did you get that?”

  I figured they weren’t going to tell me, and they didn’t. It must have been something else they got from Mario’s girlfriend.

  “We hear Mario was mad as hell about it,” Freitas said. “We think that’s why you killed him, too.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “You’re losing me again. I thought I killed Mario because I wanted to hump his girlfriend.”

  “Two motives are better than one,” Wargart said.

  I tried to come up with a snappy riposte, but nothing came to me, so I picked up the paper cup and swallowed the last of my coffee.

  “Where were you when Templeton was shot?” Freitas asked.

  “No idea.”

  “And why is that?” she asked.

  “Because I don’t know when he was shot,” I said. “Nobody does. Nobody knows what he was shot with either. No way you linked my gun to it. That’s bullshit.”

  “What makes you say that?” Wargart asked.

  “Because the slug was never found.”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “I’m a reporter,” I said. “I hear all kinds of stuff.”

  I picked up the photo with my cuffed hands and took a closer look at Frances Mirabelli’s split lip and blackened eyes.

  “Poor thing,” I said. “You know Mario’s been abusing her for years, right? He even did six months in the state pen for it. This time, he must have told her to blame it on me.”

  “Why would he do that?” Wargart said.

  “You’d have to ask him.”

  “Dead men don’t talk,” Freitas said.

  I placed the photo back on the table.

  “Look, when does she say this happened?” I asked.

  “Last night,” Wargart said.