“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.
37
That evening, she cooked for me.
She arrived toting three grocery bags, prepared to whip up something elaborate, then discovered that my cookware consisted of a single scarred saucepan. Undeterred, she used it to boil penne and tossed it with olive oil on my ancient stove while grilling bell peppers, eggplant, zucchini, and mushrooms on a sheet of aluminum foil in the crusty oven.
“So that’s what that thing is for,” I said when she turned on the gas.
When dinner was ready, my place smelled better than it ever had. We sprawled on my bed in front of another Law & Order rerun, sharing Russian River straight from the bottle and eating off paper plates with plastic forks. Dorcas had all our dishes and silverware, but I didn’t care. I hated doing dishes.
Later, I tossed the plates and forks in the trash, and we settled back into bed, I with the new Robert Parker novel swiped from the desk of the paper’s book critic, she with a slim paperback by Patricia Smith, some lame poet she’d just discovered. The domesticity was both comfy and unsettling.
I was on chapter two when Veronica started reciting poems out loud, liking the way the words felt in her mouth. Reading poetry to me now? Poetry? Things were getting out of hand. I tried to block it out, concentrating hard now on whether the suspicious husband thought Spenser was the right man for a tail job. Veronica reached over, pulled the novel from my hands, and snapped it shut.
“You’ve got to hear this.”
“I’m not into poetry, Veronica. It does nothing for me, unless Bob Dylan’s whining it through his nose.”
“Just shut up and listen.”
What gave birth to jazz,
What moist, constricted passage it struggled from,
who held it aloft,
slapped that newborn ass
and sparked the glorious screaming
doesn’t matter.
What matters is fluid line shredding into scat
and us owning that sweetness;
what matters is cigarette-thin men
swearing at their reflections in the bartop.
What matters is sugar browns,
hitching up homemade skirts
and pounding holes in the dance floor,
out past curfew and tired of asking the time.
“Holy shit!” And I meant it.
“Told you.”
“Let me see that.” She handed me the book, and I turned it over, checking out the author photo on the back cover. “Damn. She’s hot too.”
“Shut up!” she said, but she was smiling when she said it.
Later I turned the TV back on to watch a rerun of The Shield, a cop show I liked because the star, Michael Chiklis, was a rabid Red Sox fan. Veronica excused herself and scooted down the stairs to fetch something from her car. As Detective Vic Mackey and his strike team tried to figure out how the One-Niners had gotten their hands on a truckload of grenade launchers, she slipped back in carrying a duffel. She opened my closet and saw four pairs of faded jeans, three Red Sox game jerseys, a wrinkled blue blazer, and a bunch of naked wire hangers. She unzipped the duffel and hung up a few things. The domesticity was getting more comfy and more unsettling by the minute.
Veronica flopped back into bed and snaked her legs around mine. I was rolling over to grab a kiss when the police scanner broke the mood.
“Code Red on Locust Street!”
“Damn!” she said. “Is that where I think it is?”
“Yeah, it’s in Mount Hope.”
We pulled on sweatshirts and headed for Secretariat.
“This is more than just a story now,” I said as I pulled away from the curb. “It’s personal. This firebug is really pissing me off.”
“How come?”
“He’s messing with my sex life.”
* * *
As I turned left off Camp Street onto Locust, the crew of Engine Company No. 6 was already coiling hoses and stowing equipment. Rosie was standing in the front yard of a weather-beaten bungalow, laughing.
“Liam!” she shouted. “Over here. You ought to see this.”
She led us through the front door and into a parlor decorated with horror-movie posters, Heineken empties, and dirty laundry. Straight ahead was one of those collapsible staircases that pull down from a trap door in the ceiling. She snapped on her flashlight, and Veronica and I followed her up.