Rogue Island (16 page)

“The family cat.”

I pulled her into my arms, and we kissed under the spray. She scrubbed my back, and I took my sweet time with hers. I would have taken all day if she hadn't reminded me that our jobs were waiting. There's nothing better than a wet woman.

My fridge was empty, so we headed for the diner. Charlie raised a shaggy eyebrow as Veronica and I walked in together. Aside from Wu's arrest, it had been a slow news day in Rhode Island, the editors filling the news columns with spin from the presidential primaries, lies from Washington, and gore from Iraq.

While Veronica scanned the “Lifestyle” section, I turned to the sports. Curt Schilling's shoulder had mysteriously worsened over the winter, and doctors were debating whether he needed surgery. But with Beckett, Matsuzaka, Lester, Wakefield, Buchholz, Colón, and Masterson, we had more starters than we needed anyway. Charlie scraped a layer of grease from the grill, wiped his hands on his apron, and turned to grin at us.

“Your taste in women is improving, Mulligan. Whatever happened to that skanky blonde you tripped down the aisle with, the one who thought your name was ‘Bastard'?”

Whenever I ate at the diner, day or night, Charlie was there to cook for me. You've got to work a lot of hours to put a daughter through Juilliard. I grunted and dropped a twenty on the counter, grateful to be in a place where I could treat my girl to a meal without applying for a loan to cover the check.

35

“I'm about to push the send button, so go stand next to the fax machine, Liam,” Aunt Ruthie said. “I don't want someone else to get his hands on this and start wondering where it came from.”

It was ten pages in all, Wu Chiang's Visa charges for November, December, January, and February, and a partial bill for the first few days of March. I carried it back to my desk to check the billing dates against the dates of the fires, but a quick glance had already told me this was going to be trouble.

Wu was a copy-machine salesman, and most of the charges spoke of a mundane existence: CVS, Stop & Shop, Texaco, Target, B & D Liquors, although $249.95 spent at Victoria's Secret looked intriguing. He had a girlfriend, or maybe he was a cross-dresser. But what concerned me was a $477 November charge for a U.S. Airways flight and $2,457 for a twenty-one-day stay ending December 20 at the Hotel Whitcomb in downtown San Francisco. A business trip, maybe, or a winter vacation. Or could this have been an elaborate alibi?

I called the Whitcomb and got the concierge on the line. Yes, he remembered Wu. The guy'd been a chronic complainer. He didn't like the view from his window. He whined that his no-smoking room smelled like cigarettes. There was never enough J&B in his minifridge. And on the way out, he argued about his bill.

To be sure, I e-mailed him a photo of Wu, and the concierge called back with a positive ID.

I turned to my keyboard and started to write it up, a slam-dunk, page-one byline. Then I thought about it and realized I owed some people a heads-up.

36

“Sonovabitch!” Zerilli said.

“Technically this just clears him of the three December fires,” I said. “Looks like he was in town for the others. But to suspect him now, you'd have to think more than one serial arsonist is working Mount Hope.”

“Not fuckin' likely.”

“No,” I said. “It's not.”

“Shit! Last night I asked the DiMaggios to turn in their bats. Told 'em they could keep the hats. Guess I better get 'em back on the streets.”

“I think you should.”

The phone jingled. He picked up, gave odds on the Celtics-Nets game, licked his pencil stub, recorded a bet on a scrap of flash paper, hung up, and absently scratched his balls through his boxers.

“Ah, fuck,” he said. “Good of you to come by though, letting me know in person 'stead of havin' to read the bad news in the fuckin' paper.”

We smoked silently for a moment.

“CD player workin' okay?”

“Yup.”

“Out of Cubans yet?”

“Not quite yet.”

“How about putting fifty down on the Yankees, hedge your sucker bet on the Sox?”

“No thanks, Whoosh,” I said. “If the Yankees win, it would just feel like blood money.”

*  *  *

The blinds were open in Jack's little apartment, and the sun slanting through the slats lifted the atmosphere from depressing to merely dreary. Jack had replaced the terry-cloth robe with pressed jeans and a blue oxford shirt. He was freshly shaven, a razor burn on his left cheek, and his thin gray hair was neatly combed. His weatherproof nylon jacket—the blue one with the letters
PFD
in white on the back—was draped over his arm. He was getting ready to go out.

“Hear the news?” he said. And then he smiled wide enough to show most of the teeth he had left.

“Jack, I …”

“I was just on my way over to the firehouse to hang with the guys,” he said. “Wanna walk along with me?”

I grabbed his arm. “Jack, wait.”

He caught my eye and saw something that stopped him.

“What's wrong, Liam? Are your brother and sister okay?”

“Jack, the police arrested the wrong guy. They probably won't want to admit it just yet, but they'll have to release him in a day or two.”

“You sure? The TV said …”

“I'm sure.”

His shoulders slumped, and I watched the air go out of him. He let the jacket drop to the floor.

“So it's not over.”

“No.”

“Porca vacca!”

My favorite Italian curse. Literally it means “pig cow,” but it's reserved for times when most Americans would say “Oh crap!”

“This means Polecki and Roselli will start looking at you again, Jack. Remember what I told you to do if they come around again?”

“Don't say nothing. Don't go with them unless they arrest me. If they do, ask for a lawyer.”

“Right. And don't tell the cops I told you not to talk.”

“Yeah. I got it.”

He collapsed into the armchair by the table where the Jim Beam bottle, only a couple of inches of amber left in it, still stood on the doily.

“Stay for a drink, Liam?”

Together we sat in silence and drained the bottle, not bothering with glasses.

“Come visit again when you get the chance,” he said.

“Maybe next time I'll have better news.”

At the door, I turned and wrapped him up in a hug. It seemed to embarrass him a little.

“Just hang in there, Jack.” As I headed down the stairs, my ulcer was grumbling.

*  *  *

It was another thin crowd at Good Time Charlie's. Marie wasn't waiting tables this afternoon, and her body stocking was gone, replaced with nothing at all, unless you counted the garter on her right thigh. When she saw me walk in, she flowed like water to the edge of the stage and hooked a thumb in the garter so I could slip in a dollar and give her butt a pat.

“Thanks, Mulligan,” she said.

“The pleasure is all mine,” I said, and meant it.

I chose one of the empty booths in back, started to slide in, noticed a beer spill on the seat, and chose another with a decent view of Marie, who was hanging upside down now from the stripper pole.

A few years ago, the place would have been packed, but six new strip clubs had opened up in the last few years, most of them down in the old Allens Avenue industrial area. They'd drained a lot of the regulars from Good Time Charlie's and were pulling in customers from all over New England, some of them arriving on chartered buses from Boston, Hartford, and Worcester.

The boom had gotten underway after a bright young lawyer representing an escort service actually read the state's prostitution law and discovered it referred to the crime as “streetwalking.” That, he argued, meant the law explicitly criminalized the stroll but was silent on the legality of sex for money when the transactions occurred indoors. A judge agreed, and suddenly there was no need to fly to Thailand or Costa Rica anymore. The new clubs featured strobe lights, DJs, and private booths where local girls, reinforced by silicone-enhanced talent from New York and Atlantic City, performed thirty-dollar private dances and hundred-dollar blow jobs.

So far, the only thing the state's lawmakers had done about it was make some indignant speeches. Call me a cynic, but I suspected money was changing hands. The old fart who'd operated Good Time Charlie's since the seventies limited touching to the occasional fanny pat. No wonder his business was flagging.

I was on my second club soda when Polecki showed up a half hour late and squeezed in across from me, the space between the seat and the table not quite wide enough to accommodate his Kentucky Fried girth.

“What is it now, asshole?” he said.

I didn't say anything, just slid a copy of the credit-card charges across the cigarette-scarred Formica.

“Yeah, I got that this morning from the helpful folks at Fleet Bank,” he said. “All it took was the threat of a subpoena. How the hell did
you
get your hands on it?”

“I'd rather not say.”

“Break a few laws in the process?”

“Not any important ones.”

He tried his poor excuse for a hard look on me, saw it wasn't working, and gave it up.

“He's got alibis for four of the other fires, too,” he said. “We're still checking them out, but it looks like they're gonna hold up. You sent me on a wild goose chase, shithead. Your Mr. Rapture's not our guy.”

“Guess not. I wonder why he ran that time when I tried to talk to him on the street.”

“Who knows? Maybe he was holding and made you for a narc. Maybe he thought you was gonna mug him. Maybe he don't like meeting new people. Maybe he just don't like assholes.”

“So what happens now?”

“We got forty-eight hours to charge or release. The chief wants to lose him in the system for a while, let the twelve-year-old public defender who caught the case try to figure out where he is. Might buy a little time to find the right guy and avoid the public-relations disaster of letting Wu go when we got nothin' else.”

“I see,” I said, and his face scrunched up with worry.

“Christ! This is all off the record, right?”

“Come on, Polecki. You know nothing's off the record unless you say so before you start talking. Something to keep in mind if you ever find yourself with another reporter, one who's a stickler for the rules.”

The skinny black girl who'd been the entertainment on our last visit sashayed up in fuck-me heels and a G-string to take Polecki's order.

“Get him a Narragansett on me,” I said, and he looked at me funny.

“Figure on doing a piece about the arson chief drinking on duty?”

“Yeah, right. I buy you a beer, then do an exposé on you drinking it. Even I wouldn't stoop that low for a byline.”

“You've stooped lower.”

The waitress came back with his beer. I handed her five bucks, peeled off another dollar, and slipped it in her G-string, not seeing an ass worth patting.

“So we're back to square one,” I said.

“There is no
we
, Mulligan. I'm an officer of the law conducting an official investigation. You're a fucking parasite.”

“No other leads?”

“Just that ex-fireman.”

“Jack Centofanti.”

“I'm not confirming that. If you've got the name, it didn't come from me.”

“Understood.”

“Roselli's got a hard-on for him, but I still don't think he's good for it.”

Polecki pulled a Parodi out of his shirt pocket and lit it with a paper match. The cheap black stogie smelled like shit laced with citronella.

“Don't take this wrong,” I said, “but maybe you need some outside help on this.”

“Look,” he said, “the state fire marshal's got just three arson investigators for the whole state, and he's already assigned two of them to work with me. One of them, Leahy, he used to be the fire chief in Westerly, and he's pretty good. The other one, Petrelli, got the job because his cousin's the Democratic state party chairman. Thinks he knows it all because he took a two-week federal Fire Administration course, but he don't know shit.”

“What's the federal Fire Administration?”

“Another one of them Homeland Security agencies with no idea what the fuck it's supposed to be doing.”

“What about the FBI?”

“Since 9/11, if it ain't about terrorism they ain't interested.”

“Still nothing to suggest it's more than a firebug?”

“Not a thing. You always think insurance scam first, but with five different companies owning the buildings …” He shrugged his meaty shoulders and his voice trailed off.

“The mayor is all over our ass. The city council is screaming for answers. They don't understand that arson investigations are a bitch. Any evidence the perp leaves behind usually gets burned up. Hell, if the fire's bad enough, you can't even prove how it started. Chances are this nutcase is just gonna keep setting fires till we get lucky and catch him in the act.”

The stink from Polecki's stogie was strong enough to make me gag. To mask the smell, I drew a Cuban from my pocket and set fire to it with the Colibri.

“Nice lighter. Get that from your hoodlum friend Whoosh?”

“Maybe.”

He smirked, finished his beer, and unwedged himself from the booth.

“Later, asshole,” he said, and headed out.

As soon as I got back to the office, I was going to make a photocopy of the credit-card charges and mail it to Wu's lawyer. Public defenders rarely have time for anything besides routine court appearances, and I didn't trust Polecki to do the right thing.

Marie was shaking her stuff in the red stage lights, bopping to “Ladies' Night” by Kool & the Gang. I stood and carried my club soda up front for a closer look. Several minutes later I snapped to the fact that my face was inches from Marie's nipples, and my mind was on Veronica.