Providence Rag Read online

  “Told me to turn the other cheek like Jesus said.”

  “What did you do?” Mason asked.

  “Time’s up,” the guard hollered. “Phones down. Form a line at the door.”

  “Didn’t do nothin’ at first,” Diggs said as he rose to leave. “I was just a scared little kid. But then, the next year, I got bigger.”

  32

  Chief Angelo Ricci stepped in front of a squadron of uniformed Providence police guarding the doors to the Superior Court building on Benefit Street and spoke calmly into his bullhorn.

  “Your attention for a moment, please,” he said. “I want you to know that we’re on your side. We agree with what’s written on your picket signs. We agree with everything you’ve been saying. Just remain orderly, okay? We don’t want to have to arrest anyone today.”

  Below him, protesters carrying signs with Kessler’s picture on them swarmed over the wide courthouse steps. Gloria mingled with them, snapping photos with her Nikon. Mulligan stood near the cops on the top step and did a rough count, putting the crowd at just over a hundred.

  Attorney General Roberts arrived shortly before ten A.M., trailed by an entourage of assistant prosecutors lugging briefcases. The crowd greeted them with chants and boos but parted so they could climb the stairs and enter the building.

  Gloria joined Mulligan on the top step and snapped a few wide-angle shots. Then Mulligan squeezed through the police line, pushed through the doors, and made his way through the metal detectors.

  The spectator benches in Judge Needham’s third-floor courtroom were jammed. Gordon Freeman was seated in the first row, just behind the prosecutor’s table. Eric Kessler, Mulligan noted, was absent, his presence apparently not required. Mulligan walked down the center aisle to the jury box, which had been reserved for press, and took a seat just in time for the bailiff’s cry:

  “Hear ye, hear ye. The Superior Court of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, County of Providence, is now in session, the Honorable Judge Clifford H. Needham presiding. Please rise.”

  The rotund little judge, nicknamed “Taxi” because of his resemblance to the star of a 1980s sitcom, bustled in. He climbed onto the booster seat, which he needed to see and be seen over the top of the judicial bench, and asked everyone to be seated.

  “I am aware that emotions are running high today,” he said, “but I will not tolerate outbursts of any kind. Anyone attempting to disrupt these proceedings will be removed. There will be no second chances. Do I make myself clear?”

  He swept the courtroom with a stern gaze and then said, “Are the attorneys present?”

  “Attorney General Malcolm Roberts for the People, Your Honor.”

  “Austin Donahue representing Eric Kessler, Your Honor.”

  “Very well. Mr. Roberts, you may proceed.”

  The attorney general rose to address the court: “Your Honor, the State of Rhode Island hereby withdraws its petition that the court order Eric Kessler to be examined by a psychiatrist.”

  Donahue spun, cocked an eyebrow, and stared at Roberts. Spectators gasped and grumbled. Then several of them began to shout.

  “No!”

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  Then three men in the back row picked up the familiar chant: “Impeach Roberts! Impeach Roberts!”

  “Order!” the judge bellowed, slamming his gavel on the bench. “Bailiff, please escort those gentlemen in the back row from my courtroom.”

  It took ten minutes before decorum was restored.

  “Mr. Roberts, please continue.”

  “Your Honor, Eric Kessler has been suffering from a heart condition for several years. Late last night, he suffered a severe cardiac episode and was transported to the intensive care unit of Rhode Island Hospital. According to the chief cardiologist, his condition is grave.”

  “I see,” the judge said. “What is his prognosis?”

  “I am told that he could linger for six months or so, but he is not expected to recover. Therefore, the State has decided that justice would be served if Mr. Kessler were to be released from custody as scheduled on Friday. He will remain at Rhode Island Hospital until his condition stabilizes and then be transferred to a skilled nursing facility.”

  “Very well. Mr. Donohue, do you have anything to add?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “Case dismissed.”

  May 2012

  The man sprawls on his back in his prison bunk and curses to himself. The old fantasies aren’t working.

  For eighteen years, all he had to do to get a raging hard-on was close his eyes and pretend he was climbing through a bathroom window. Imagine a knife in his hand and he could come without touching himself.

  Some nights, he’d relive one of his murders. Other times, he’d pretend he was Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. Tonight he tries it all, but his cock remains flaccid. Perhaps it’s because his release from prison seems close now. He hungers for a new victim.

  He thinks about the blondes he has known: Jenny, the skinny bitch who thought she could play football with the boys. Mrs. Montgomery, the eighth-grade math teacher who taunted him with her short skirts. Connie Stuart’s twin sister, Mary, who glared at him through wet eyes at his trial. Susan Ashcroft, the one that got away. Maybe, if he gets out, he could track her down and finish her off.

  He pictures them naked one at a time, then in a group, cowering before his godlike power. The sheet rises, his penis a tent pole.

  33

  June 2012

  Mulligan parked Secretariat at the curb in front of Jennings’s barn-red ranch-style house in Warwick and watched the ex-cop trot down the sidewalk with his two Irish wolfhound–size mutts, Smith and Wesson.

  “Just got back from our daily constitutional,” Jennings said as the dogs sat on their haunches so Mulligan could pet them. “Hope you weren’t waiting long.”

  “No problem,” Mulligan said. “I just got here.”

  The four of them went through the gate to the small, sun-drenched backyard, where Jennings had a charcoal grill and a well-stocked cooler on the flagstone patio. Jennings tied on a “Taste My Meat” barbecue apron and got the charcoal going while Mulligan played fetch with Smith and Wesson. Man, he wished he could get a dog of his own. Larry Bird didn’t fetch anything but trouble.

  When the cheeseburgers and foot-longs were ready, the two men settled into red vinyl lawn chairs with heaping paper plates in their laps and bottles of Narragansett in their fists. The dogs sat at their feet and gazed wistfully at the meat.

  “Don’t give ’em nothin’,” Jennings said. “I fed ’em before their walk. I never give ’em scraps when I eat. It would just teach ’em to beg.”

  After the meal, the men dropped their grease-soaked plates into a trash can, lingered over their second beers, and talked about the sorry state of the Red Sox. Later, Mulligan roughhoused with the dogs while Jennings scrubbed the grill clean and bragged about how his son from his first marriage was doing.

  “Jerry’s an expert on the locomotion of early hominids,” Jennings was saying. “Spent the last five years studying anklebones. Can you imagine that? I don’t understand much of it, but it’s paying off for him big-time.”

  “How so?” Mulligan asked.

  “He’s one of the scientists studying a couple of two-million-year-old skeletons some kid stumbled over in a cave in South Africa. The way he tells it, the discovery is going to rewrite the story of human evolution.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Yeah. The kid just got tenured at Boston University. He’s making quite a name for himself.”

  “Good for him,” Mulligan said.

  Jennings finished with the grill, rinsed his hands with the garden hose, wiped them on the apron, and took it off. Then he handed Mulligan another beer and led him through a sliding glass door to the family room. There he plucked a videotape from a bookshelf, slid it into the DVD/VCR combo, and pressed play.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m gonna go b
ack outside with the dogs while you look at this,” Jennings said. “I don’t need to see it again.”

  Mulligan stretched out in a leather recliner that Smith and Wesson had gnawed through to the stuffing in several places, nursed the beer, and watched for nearly two hours without taking notes. Over the years, he’d seen video of other killers confessing their crimes—three times at murder trials and once in the media room at state police headquarters. Two of the killers had wept. Two had showed no emotion. But never before had he seen a killer’s eyes light up like this. Never before had he heard one giggle.

  The confession was just as Jennings had described it, so Mulligan should have been prepared. Still, it shocked him. What disturbed him most was what happened just before Diggs’s parents entered the room.

  Jennings, momentarily losing his composure, called Diggs a sonovabitch and told him he’d be spending the rest of his life in prison.

  “Wrong, asshole,” Diggs said. “I’m a kid. They’ll have to let me out on my twenty-first birthday. The most I’m gonna do is six years in juvie.”

  “Bullshit,” Jennings said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The kid must have researched the state’s antiquated juvenile justice statutes before he committed his crimes. He knew the law better than the detective did.

  Mulligan turned off the VCR, walked to the door, and watched Jennings work with Smith and Wesson. The ex-cop was teaching them to play dead.

  34

  “When we left off last time,” Mason said, “you were telling me about getting beaten up by white kids in the neighborhood.”

  “I remember,” Diggs said.

  “And then you got bigger, you said.”

  “Uh-huh. Shot up crazy when I turned twelve. Grew four inches over the summer.”

  “They didn’t pick on you after that?”

  “They didn’t dare.”

  “Did you do something to get even?”

  “Damn straight.”

  “Tell me about that.”

  Diggs cracked a grin. “Jimmy O’Keefe. He was the main one. Pig-eyed white boy who liked to act tough. After I got bigger, he was still near as tall as me. But he was a coward, cuz. Even when I was little he never tried nothin’ ’less his peeps was around. First day of school, eighth grade, I caught him alone on the playground and beat the shit out of him. Smashed his nose. Blacked both his eyes. Whacked his arm against the pole that held up the basketball hoop. Heard his fuckin’ wrist snap, cuz. It was beautiful.”

  “Did you get in trouble for this?”

  “Not really. The principal? Mr. Hennessey? He suspended me for a month. Like he thought not goin’ to school was some badass punishment. The man was a fool.”

  “What about the police?”

  “They didn’t do nothin’. Held me in a cell for a couple of hours. Then let me go with a lecture about keepin’ my nose clean.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know, cuz. Maybe they had better things to do than bust kids for brawlin’.”

  “After that, you weren’t afraid of the white kids anymore?”

  “Never again, cuz. Like Stokely Carmichael said, ‘All the scared niggers are dead.’ From then on, the white kids were afraid of me.”

  “Your brother and sister, did they get picked on too?”

  “Amina, she just got called names. But Sekou? He got messed with somethin’ awful. Till I told everybody they’d get what Jimmy O’Keefe got if they didn’t stop messin’ with him. Gotta look after your little brother.”

  “So things got better after that?”

  “With the kids, yeah. But the grown-ups? They still disrespected me, dog.”

  “How?”

  “Whenever I’d go into the Cumberland Farms to pick up milk or a carton of Kools for my moms? The fuckin’ clerk would follow me around like he thought I was gonna steal something. Every time a cop saw me riding my bike down the street? He’d stop me and ask who I swiped it from.”

  “It must have been frustrating, not being able to do anything about any of that.”

  “What makes you think I didn’t?”

  “What did you do, Kwame?”

  “A bunch of stuff.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “One time, I was riding my bike by this white bitch’s house. She gave me the eye and said something under her breath. Probably figured I couldn’t hear her, but I read her lips, cuz. Nigger. That’s what she said. Got so mad I started to cry. Tears just ran down my face. I didn’t say nothin’, though. Just rode my bike on home. But that night, once it got dark, I came back.”

  He paused, wanting Mason to beg for the rest of it.

  “What happened then, Kwame?”

  “I broke her car window with a baseball bat, squirted lighter fluid on the seats, and tossed in a match. Hid in the bushes and watched it burn till the fire truck showed up.”

  “How’d that make you feel?”

  “I was fuckin’ happy, cuz.”

  “Did you get caught?”

  “Uh-uh. I got clean away.”

  “What was the woman’s name?”

  “Medeiros,” Diggs said. “Becky Medeiros.”

  Mason froze. Diggs grinned.

  “A few months later, when they found the bitch dead, everybody else was real sad. Me? I laughed my ass off.”

  * * *

  Back in the newsroom, Mason logged on to his computer, looked up Rhode Island’s criminal laws online, and learned that there was no statute of limitations on arson.

  At first, he was excited. If he could prove that the charges prison officials had brought against Diggs were false, the killer still might not get out of jail. He could be charged with torching Medeiros’s car.

  But as he dug further, his mood turned somber. Torching a car was only fourth-degree arson, punishable by no more than three years in prison. Still, he told himself, it was better than nothing.

  35

  Jimmy Cagney screeched from Mulligan’s cell phone: “You’ll never take me alive, copper!” The line from the 1931 movie The Public Enemy was his ring tone for law enforcement sources.

  “Mulligan.”

  “He’s on the move,” Chief Matea said.

  “Heading north?”

  “Yeah. He just took the I-95 turnoff onto Route 295.”

  “Sounds like this could be it. I’ll meet you there.”

  Twenty minutes later, Mulligan and the Hopkinton police chief sat together at Eric Kessler’s bedside on the second floor of the Woonasquatucket Convalescent Center in the little town of Greenville. From the look of him, Kessler wasn’t exactly convalescing. The room reeked of antiseptic, rancid breath, and urine. Mulligan chewed on an unlit cigar, the Dispatch sports page open on his lap. Matea sipped from a can of Mountain Dew and studied the door.

  Mulligan was halfway through a preview of the upcoming Summer Olympics when Matea hissed, “Shhhhhh,” and dropped his right hand to the heel of his semiauto. Seconds later the door swung open, and Gordon Freeman stepped into the room.

  “Afternoon, Gordon,” Matea said. “Nice of you to drop by.”

  Freeman froze. For several seconds, the only sound in the room was the beeping of Kessler’s heart monitor.

  “Turn around, please,” Matea said, “and put your hands against the wall.”

  Freeman’s eyes shifted to the door. For a moment, Mulligan thought he was going to bolt. Instead, he turned and did as he’d been told.

  Matea calmly got out of his chair, lifted Freeman’s shirttail, and yanked the .25-caliber Raven from his waistband. The chief unloaded the little pistol and slipped it into the inside pocket of his suit jacket.

  “Flowers would have been more appropriate, don’t you think?” he asked.

  “I’m not saying anything without a lawyer.”

  “Now, Gordon, why would you need a lawyer? Have you done something illegal? I didn’t notice anything. How about you, Mulligan?”

  “All I see,” the
reporter said, “is a man visiting a sick neighbor.”

  “I’m not under arrest?”

  “You can put your hands down now, Gordon.”

  Mulligan pulled himself out of his chair.

  “Mr. Freeman,” he said, “please step over to the bed.”

  Eric Kessler lay on his back, a sheet and a sky-blue blanket pulled up to his chin. An oxygen tube ran into his nose. His face was ashen. Mulligan grabbed the sheet and blanket and whipped them off.

  The child killer’s ankles were bloated with fluid, but the withered arms poking out of his hospital johnny looked like month-old road kill. His eyelids fluttered open. Then he startled. His unfocused eyes darted about the room before settling on Freeman.

  “You,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. That was all he could manage before he drifted away again.

  Mulligan put a hand on Freeman’s shoulder. “Tell me,” he said, “have you ever watched a man die of congestive heart failure?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “A lot of his heart muscle is dead,” Mulligan said. “The organ can’t pump enough blood to keep his body working. His kidneys are failing. Fluid is building up in his lungs. He needs to cough it up, but he can’t. He’s too weak. Eric Kessler is slowly drowning in his own fluid. It’s a rotten way to die.”

  “You make it sound like shooting him would be doing him a favor,” Freeman said.

  “It would,” Matea said. “Go on home now, Gordon.”

  “Just a second,” Mulligan said. “I was wondering. What were you planning to do with all that chili, eggplant, and olive oil?”

  Freeman’s eyes widened in surprise. He dropped into one of the visitor’s chairs, looking tired and defeated.

  “Before he had his latest heart attack, I was planning to snatch him off the street,” he said. “I was gonna tie him up and stick him down my cellar. I figured on cutting out a chunk of his thigh and make him watch me cook it before I killed him.”

  Mulligan and Matea stared at him.

  “Hey, no way I was gonna eat it, guys,” Freman said. “I’m not like him, for chrissake.”