49
“She never saw his face,” Laura Villani, the sex-crimes sergeant, told me late that afternoon. “He kept the ski mask on the whole time. All we got is white male, smoker’s voice, wedding band, green windbreaker. She never saw him standing, so she couldn’t guess his height.”
Did the little thug wear a wedding band? I tried picturing his hands, but I couldn’t remember.
“She was prowling the neighborhood waiting for the next fire,” I said.
“So she told me.”
“And he called her ‘nosy picture-taking bitch.’ ”
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s the angle we’re working. Her description doesn’t give us much to go on, but we pulled a couple of fingerprints from her vinyl camera bag. If they’re his and he’s in the system, we’ll get him.”
“If you do, I’d like to have a few minutes alone with him.”
“If we do, I just might let you.”
* * *
I went back to the office, pulled all my notes on the fires out of my file drawer, and stacked them on my desk. Twenty-two notepads crammed with fire scene descriptions, property ownership records, arson findings, and countless interviews with victims, firefighters, and arson investigators. Twenty-two notebooks full of nothing.
Or were they?
When a homicide detective hits a dead end, he studies the murder book, a chronological record of every detail of his investigation. I didn’t have a murder book, but I did have all those notebooks. Was there something in them that I had overlooked? Was there something that should have been in them but wasn’t? Could I find some sort of pattern in four months worth of scribbles? I flipped the first one open and started reading.
I’d just started the second notebook when Mason walked up.
“I’m so sorry about Gloria,” he said.
“I know you are.”
“I sent flowers.”
“I know. I saw them in her room.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“Her right eye,” he said. “It’s the one she uses to look through the viewfinder.”
He’d noticed that? Maybe he had some reporter in him after all.
“Maybe she can learn to use her left,” I said.
“Either way, she’s got a job for life. I’ll see to it.”
He stood silently for a moment, a slim file folder clutched in his left hand.
“Whatcha got there?” I said, already knowing what it was.
“My manhole-covers file. I’d really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes and go over this with me, make sure I haven’t missed anything.”
“Okay. Drag that empty chair over here and let’s have a look.”
He sat down, pushed an empty pizza box aside, and laid the folder on my desk. He opened it carefully, as if he were handling a Gutenberg Bible, and took out three sheets of paper—photocopies of city purchasing records showing transactions with a local manufacturer called West Bay Iron.
“How many does it add up to?” I asked.
“Nine hundred and ten.”
“Quit whispering, Thanks-Dad. Nobody’s going to steal your story.”
“The orders are spread over a year,” he said, “each one kept under fifteen hundred dollars to evade the city’s competitive-bidding requirement. All together, nine hundred and ten cast-iron manhole covers at fifty-five dollars each comes to just over fifty thousand.”
“What does the city highway department need with nine hundred and ten new manhole covers?”
“That’s what I wondered. I went over there to ask Gennaro Baldelli, but he threw me out.”
“ ‘Blackjack’ Baldelli.”
“Excuse me?”
“That’s what our highway superintendent likes to be called.”
“So I went to see his deputy, Louis Grieco. He have a nickname, too?
“ ‘Knuckles.’ ”
“Yeah, well Knuckles told me to get lost.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I went over to city hall and checked campaign contribution records,” he said, extracting another sheet of paper from the file folder. “Turns out that Peter Abrams, the owner of West Bay Iron, gave the legal limit to the mayor’s last reelection campaign.”
“Pretty good work, Thanks-Dad.”
“I’ve been working on my lead. Can you take a look at it?”
“No.”
“Why not?
“Because you aren’t ready to write.”
“I’m not?”
“You don’t have enough. All you’ve got is the city throwing a little business to a big campaign contributor. That might be a story in Iowa or Connecticut, but in Rhode Island it’s not news. It’s business as usual.”
“I wasted my time, then?”
“Not necessarily.”
“So what’s my next step?”
“Find out what they’re doing with all those manhole covers.”
“But I already asked. They won’t tell me.”
“That’s because you asked the wrong people. You’ve got to cultivate some sources, Thanks-Dad. Seduce a secretary. Find out where the snowplow drivers drink and buy them a few rounds. Chat up the men who work with shovels and don’t have titles after their names.”
Mason smiled, walked back to his desk, slipped the manhole-covers file in his top drawer, and reached for the phone. Maybe I’d been wrong about him. That got me to wondering what else I’d been wrong about.
I picked up the first notebook and started in again, wanting to read them all straight through without interruption. Over the next hour, six reporters and five copy editors stopped by my desk to ask how Gloria was doing. McCracken and Rosie called for the same reason, and Dorcas rang me up to offer her customary salutation.
Clearly, this wasn’t going to work.
I turned off the cell phone, stuffed the notebooks in a beat-up vinyl briefcase, and headed for Secretariat.
The “Out of Order” hood I’d tugged over the parking meter was gone, and something was scrawled on the ticket tucked under my wiper blade: “Nice try.” I hated losing that hood, but I still had my backup plan. I walked down the block, put the ticket on the publisher’s windshield, got in the Bronco, and drove home.
I stretched out on my mattress and started in again with the first notebook, reading slowly and jotting an occasional note on a fresh yellow legal pad. It took me two hours to go through all the notebooks, the one I’d spilled beer on still mostly legible. Then I started over and read them all again. When I was done, all I had on the legal pad was a half page of scribbled questions.
Who owned the five mystery companies that had bought up a quarter of Mount Hope? Chances were it wasn’t really the long-dead roster of the Providence Grays. Was there any way to find out? Were they still in the market for property in the fire-prone neighborhood? If so, why? What was it Joseph DeLucca had told me? That they should have sold their place when they had the chance. Had someone made Ma an offer?
On my second reading, I noticed that my notes on the incorporation papers included everything but the names of the lawyers who’d filed them. At the time, it hadn’t seemed important. It probably still wasn’t. Lawyers for clients who wanted to remain anonymous weren’t likely to give me the time of day. Still, it was a loose end.
Why had Giordano tipped me about the manhole covers? It certainly wasn’t out of concern for the civic good. What had he said when he gave me the tip? That I should stop wasting my time with Mount Hope. Was he trying to distract me from the arson story? What reason would he have for doing that? More likely he was nursing a grudge against Blackjack and Knuckles for the time they refused to give one of their no-show jobs to his brother Frank.
On one of the beer-stained notebook pages, I’d recorded seeing a Dio Construction crew knocking down a burned-out triple-decker. I’d underlined Dio three times. Why had I thought that might be important? I thought about it. I got up, swigged some Maalox, came back, and thought about it some more. But I didn’t have a clue.