I stood in the street, held my breath, and counted the seconds.
Ten. The window curtains caught fire.
Twenty. A stuffed chair near the front window ignited.
Thirty. Flames chewed through the siding near the door.
Forty. A tongue of fire curled from the eaves and licked the roof.
Fifty. Joseph hurtled through the front door like he’d been thrown. Behind him, Rosie and the other fireman materialized in the smoky doorway. Joseph tried to shove past them to get back inside. They wrestled him to the ground, beating on his burning hair with their insulated gloves. Another fireman tipped his nozzle to the sky and let the spray fall on them like spring rain.
39
The next day’s front page headline: HELL NIGHT IN MOUNT HOPE. The lead photo, played four columns wide, captured Rosie as she emerged from a smoky doorway cradling Carmella DeLucca in her arms.
Thanks to Veronica’s call, Lomax had reached the newsroom in time to stop the city-edition press run after only twelve hundred papers had been printed. He filed a series of updates for the online edition and then wrote the print story himself with feeds from reporters at the scenes. He remade the front page with dramatic fire photos and put out a great newspaper that started flowing onto the delivery trucks only ninety minutes past normal deadline.
“Wait till the publisher gets the overtime bill from the pressmen and truck drivers,” Veronica said.
“Yeah,” I said, “he’ll probably dock Lomax’s pay.”
We were hunched over plates of scrambled eggs and bacon at the diner, devouring the paper. Last night we’d been isolated at separate fire scenes, and we were hungry for the whole story in one place. There’d been five suspicious fires in all, the last one eating through a three-story garden apartment building on Mount Hope Avenue. I didn’t even know about that one until I read what Lomax had written.
“Bet they’ll give your friend Rosie a medal,” Veronica said.
“She’s already got a drawer full of them.”
Charlie cleared the cold, half-eaten eggs away and topped off our coffees. “Here comes that asshole I was telling you about,” he said. “The one that come in here the other day asking could I whip him up a cheese soufflé.”
Mason strolled in looking uncharacteristically casual in a buff cashmere sweater and knife-creased tan slacks, his left hand clutching the handle of a Dunhill briefcase worth more than my pension. He perched on the stool next to mine and asked Charlie for coffee.
“What, no café au lait this morning? No chai latte? Must be something you want that I ain’t got.”
“A cup of your excellent coffee would be fine.”
The fry cook snorted, slammed a mug in front of Mason, and dumped in the dregs from a nearly empty pot. Mason took a sip of the sludge and pointed at the front page.
“Guess I missed a big story last night.”
“Yes, you did,” I said. “That’s what happens when you work in Providence and live in a palace way the hell down in Newport.”
“You guys did a great job.”
“Why, thank you, Thanks-Dad. That means soooo much coming from you.”
Veronica stretched out her right leg and gave me a kick. It hurt enough to make me wonder whose side she was on.
“Ease up on him,” she said. “Not his fault his father’s rich.”
Mason just shrugged, snapped open the silver latch on his briefcase, and pulled out a slim file folder.
“I’ve been working on that manhole covers story, and I think I may have found something,” he said. “I was hoping you could look it over and advise me on what to do next.”
“Later. Right now, I got someplace I have to be.”
Leaving the cub reporter with the hot babe, I walked out of the diner and whistled for Secretariat. When he didn’t come, I fetched him from the lot across from the paper and pointed him toward Mount Hope.
40
At Prospect Terrace, a Mr. Potato Head statue stood watch over Roger Williams’s grave. Sexually confused vandals had already enhanced the spud with D-cups and a big red penis.
A state fire marshal’s car was parked at the curb in front of the torched triple-decker on Doyle. I pulled in behind it, got out, ducked under the yellow police tape, and skirted a sooty, soggy heap of mattresses and upholstered furniture. A uniformed cop stood with crossed arms on the concrete front stoop. He didn’t tell me to get out.
“Guy from the state fire marshal’s office is nosing around in the basement,” he said. “Want me to see if he’ll talk to you?”
“Thanks, Eddie.”
While I waited, I looked over what was left of 188 Doyle Avenue, where I’d played cops and robbers with the Jenkins twins when I was a kid. Now half the roof was gone. Nothing but black behind every shattered window. A total loss. I stared at the unblinking third-story window on the southeast corner where old Mr. McCready, the teacher who’d first introduced me to Ray Bradbury and John Steinbeck, had been strangled by the smoke. The arsonist was reducing my childhood to ashes.
The crew of Engine 12, the first on the scene last night, had gotten everyone but Mr. McCready out safely, but two firemen were in Rhode Island Hospital with smoke inhalation and another was on a slab with fried lungs. I was still looking at the window when Leahy stepped out on the stoop.
“Nothing I can say officially, Mulligan,” he said.
“But?”
“But unofficially, there’s heavy charring in three places on the basement walls.”
“In the shape of upside-down arrowheads?” I asked.
“Yeah. I take it you know what that means.”
“Signs of an accelerant,” I said, my late-night reading of government arson reports beginning to pay off.
“Yeah,” he said. “Signs of an accelerant. Big surprise.”
“A timing device? Coffeemaker again?”
“I scraped some broken glass and melted plastic off the floor and sent it to the lab, but, yeah, that’s probably what it is.”
I thanked him and drove a block north to Pleasant, where a uniformed officer slumped behind the wheel of a cruiser in the driveway of a two-story bungalow. The place had been so badly burned there was no way to tell what color it had been painted.
“The people who lived here just came by,” he said. “Wanted to go inside, see if they could salvage something, maybe find some family pictures. It’s going to be at least a week before the arson investigators get around to this one, so I had to chase them off. Look at this place. Wouldn’t you think they’d know there’s nothing left that isn’t drenched or burned to ash?”
On Mount Hope Avenue, the roof of the garden apartments was a skeleton of blackened rafters. Thin gray smoke wafted from the smoldering interior. A pumper crew was still on the scene, shooting a jet of water through the collapsed northwest wall. The reinforcements from Pawtucket had fought this one, arriving in time to see people leaping from second- and third-story windows. Three jumpers snapped their ankles, and two broke their legs. A fireman and six tenants, including a toddler, were hospitalized with second-degree burns and smoke inhalation.
I was looking for someone to talk to when Roselli stepped out of the wreckage and threw me the finger, his own special way of saying No comment.
At the ruined duplex on Larch, a crew from Dio Construction sprawled on the curb next to their front-end loader, popping the tabs on a mid-morning twelve-pack of ’Gansett and sharing the suds with Polecki.
“I was wondering when you were going to show up, asshole,” he said.
“What are they doing here? You release this scene already?”
“Nah. The owner hired them to knock the place down and clear the rubble, which is fine with me. The roof and floors collapsed into the basement. I can’t even get in there for a look until they clear some of this crap away.”