Gravewriter (6 page)

The gambler laughed. “That's my irreverent reverend,” he said. “That's why I like it here—you're different.”

Father Capricchio felt his cheeks flush at the compliment. Maybe he
was
a little different. He paid little attention to the formalities of his office, to the annoyance of the bishop, who had banished Father Capricchio to this little church in a broken neighborhood on the outskirts
of the diocese. He had survived his own crisis of confidence as a young seminarian by accepting that God—the concept, the person-could be pretty weird, and that there was no one right way to help a lost child find his path.

Billy's admission about wanting to commit murder had shaken the priest, but as Father Capricchio sipped coffee milk and spoke of the sacrament of confession, he felt his own confidence seep back. A human life was at stake—two, actually, for Billy's life was also at risk. And then there were the ripples—the families of a victim and a would-be killer.

Father Capricchio blessed himself and offered a silent prayer:

Smack me when I start to screw up.

“What makes you a slave to your needs?” Father Capricchio asked. He thought about the question and sharpened it: “What makes you gamble, for instance?”

Billy thought for a moment, and then explained, speaking quickly, with excitement, “People who play sports say that losing feels worse than winning feels good. Gamblers see it the other way. We're used to losing ‘cause we do so much of it, but
winning—
winning is more addictive than caffeinated cocaine. Losing crushes you. Winning pries the weight off for a little while, lets you breathe. I didn't gamble for money—at least not before I lost all that I had, and fell into debt to some gentlemen who, uh, probably don't go to confession too often. I gambled to feel the win. Losing was a side effect.”

Father Capricchio said nothing as he processed the information. Then he urged him to say more. “Tell me how it relates to this man you want to kill.”

Billy said, “Well, there's this other weight crushing me.”

“What kind of weight?”

“I don't, uh—”

“Is it like the weight of losing?” Father Capricchio asked.

Silence.

“Is it?” the priest prodded. He waited. “Billy? What is it, Billy?”

Billy's fist pounded the wall in rage. The answer came strained through gritted teeth.
“The son of a bitch killed my wife and got away with it.”
He bolted from the confessional and slammed the door.

Father Capricchio sat paralyzed and frightened. What had he done? His Skittles rained with tiny clicks onto the tile floor and bounced into the corners.

T
he hardest part about having no home was the logistics of daily life. The shelter in which Franklin D. Flagg spent most nights was in Cranston, a fifteen-minute bus ride from Providence. Every morning brought the same routine. The staff woke the “clients” from their cots by 7:30—to give them time to pack duffels and garbage bags with their hand-me-down clothes and their paperback romances and the tattered files they kept on the landlord who had screwed them out of a security deposit five years ago—before everyone got pushed out the doors by eight o'clock.

The bus to Providence was called “the Goose”—after nine months riding the thing, Flagg had never learned why they called it that. Maybe because it honked.

It dumped the riders at the Holy Gospel Church, just outside of downtown Providence, for breakfast. There, the lucky among the homeless—luck, Flagg had learned a hundred times since he had been paroled from prison, was relative—would meet up with the people who had spent the night on the street. Those folks looked like extras in a zombie movie, after a night under a bridge, or passed out stoned
inside an ATM booth, or fighting for space on the heating grates behind the old civic center.

The short stack of flapjacks on Flagg's tin tray filled the hole in his stomach. The food was always fine, if you could stand the preaching.

From breakfast, the homeless filed across downtown, over to the Kennedy Plaza outdoor bus depot, where panhandlers pestered bankers for change with sad lies about car troubles or that somebody had stolen their bicycle and they needed cab fare to get to a job interview
right now.
People got so sick of those tired stories. Flagg once asked a guy for money to buy himself a beer. The guy laughed, clapped Flagg so hard on the shoulder, it hurt, then slipped him twenty just for being original.

Across the plaza, a dozen concrete steps brought homeless people down below the street, below the ground, like where dead people went—the day shelter.

The day shelter was a large windowless room with six rows of cafeteria tables. The place smelled like dirty hair. Along one side, doors led to offices, where the clients could meet with nurses or social workers, or to gripe to some volunteering law student about the mysterious settlement they were supposed to get umpteen years ago for the fender bender that had hurt their back.

The day shelter was lively, full of gabbing and laughing and the sounds of sickly people hacking wet phlegm.

Around the room, some people read books, and some filled out job applications. They chatted about winning the lottery, about the weather, the Red Sox, or the wisdom of taking their Social Security money to the Indian casino. They gossiped about the homeless guy they
thought
they knew, who might not really be homeless, because a friend of a friend had sworn he saw the guy dressed in a duck costume as the full-time mascot for the Quack-in-the-Box takeout joint.

The hookers staying at the shelter wore short shorts and shook their asses for people.

Crazy folk sat alone and grabbed at invisible flies.

There were some quiet, tidy people embarrassed to be there, and loud, stinky people who didn't know that they
were
there.

Mostly, the homeless just passed time. Funny thing about being homeless in Providence, Flagg had noticed: Time passed as slowly as it had in prison.

The staff who served the free sandwiches at noon—bologna, yellow cheese, and a smear of Miracle Whip on white Wonder bread—were all saints, of course. The executives who worked in the upper floors of the bank tower next door probably threw staff parties every month that cost more than these saints earned in a year.

Flagg pitied the saints of the day shelter.

He might have been a homeless ex-con, but he was not shackled to the shelter forever by any sense of Christian duty, unlike the saints. At least Flagg had a
chance
to get away from there and make some money someday.

From across the room, Flagg watched Mia, the little redheaded saint who dyed the tips of her spiked hair a different color every week. At the moment, her hair was teal blue. She was a teeny thing, dressed in black slacks and clunky black heels and a long, flowing silk shirt tied at the waist by a matching silk belt. From the patterned splotches over the shirt, Flagg thought it looked Far Eastern, like a tiny bathrobe from Japan.

Mia had coaxed Flagg into the shelter system.

Flagg remembered her walking without fear beneath the highway overpass under which he had settled in a nest of trash to ride out a cold night. The social services called what she did “outreach”—to go where the bums were and to bring them inside.

Flagg lusted for her.

He listened to her laugh louder than anybody else in the room and watched her ass swing side to side when she walked.
That would be a good time,
he thought. He wanted to strangle her, too. She had taken
him off the street but had landed him in this cycle of shelters that kept him barely alive. He couldn't escape. Maybe Flagg would have been better off living without a net, on the street, where you either clawed yourself back into a normal way of life or died.

Flagg read a battered crime novel from the shelter's meager library. Every few pages were ripped or missing, and he had to guess at what he had missed. He kept close watch on the clock. Around four in the afternoon, the daily migration of homeless reversed—as people started scheming to get back to the overnight shelters. The Goose bus would take you back for free, but it was slow. By the time you got to where you wanted to sleep, the place could be full and your ass would be on the street. The city bus was faster, but it cost money. The homeless traded bus passes like their own legal tender.

At three minutes past two, a tall man in dark slacks and a white shirt descended the concrete steps and entered the shelter. He balanced a pizza box on one hand, like a waiter carrying a tray. The deliveryman looked close to fifty, which seemed too old to be driving pizza for tips.

“Yo, pizza guy, over here,” beckoned a hoarse voice from the back of the room.

The deliveryman ignored the cry and spoke to a clique of homeless women, each in matching red caps they had scavenged from the pile of free clothes at the day shelter. The women glanced at one another and shrugged, and the deliveryman moved on.

Flagg watched him bounce from table to table, working his way around the room, obviously looking for somebody. He spoke to the fat man whom Flagg had taken for two bus passes in a tense game of cribbage a few weeks before. The fat man rubbed his bottom chin and jerked his thumb in Flagg's direction.

The pizza guy thanked him and walked the pizza box to Flagg.

“Franklin?” the deliveryman asked.

Ten years in the slammer had taught Flagg to trust nobody. But
the scent of the pizza pie overpowered his wariness. Maybe the delivery was a lucky mistake.

“Yeah.” He put his hands out for the pizza.

“Franklin Delano Flagg?” the deliveryman asked.

“You got him.”

The deliveryman reached to his back pocket, drew out a sheet of paper folded into thirds, and gave it to Flagg.

Flagg unfolded it.

A court summons.

Flagg had been had. “You're a fucking process server,” he muttered, irked at himself for falling for the pizza gag. The summons ordered to him appear as a witness in a murder trial—for the kid on the hook for killing Garrett Nickel.

A swirl of hot rage stirred in Flagg's belly as he recalled what Garrett Nickel had done to him in prison, the way that son of a bitch had humiliated him. He caught himself grinding his teeth, and then reminded himself that Nickel was dead.

Dead in the stinking river.

Flagg smiled at the thought.

The process server left the pie on a table and started to leave.

“Wait,” Flagg said, suddenly remembering the rules of the court. “I'm supposed to get, like, eighteen bucks in travel money to get to trial.”

“I spent it,” the guy said, “on the pizza.”

M
artin Smothers stared at a speck of dirt on the wall ten inches from his face and tried to concentrate on the critical business of the moment, despite the prosecutor whining in his ear.

“Come on, Martin, take the deal.”

“I'm busy, Ethan.”

“Don't bother holding out on me,” the prosecutor said, his voice echoing faintly in the tiny white-tiled bathroom. “I can't go any lower than manslaughter for Peter Shadd.”

“Can you see that I'm trying to take a piss?”

Assistant Attorney General Ethan J. Dillingham stood back, rested an elbow on the neighboring urinal, looked Martin up and down, and frowned. “Yeah, what's taking so long? Stage fright?” He laughed through his sinuses, an annoying hiss-hiss-hissing.
Goddamn that laugh
… “I know I intimidate defense lawyers in the courtroom, Marty, but the courthouse men's room, too?”

“We're not taking any deal.”

“Thirty years on paper, he's out in ten.”

“Oh bullshit,” Martin muttered. “He's already got thirteen years
left on his original bid for the armed robberies, plus the three additional he'll get for escaping. He has to serve that time before he'll even start a new sentence.”

“I won't ask for the three.”

“Who gives a crap? There's no way he's taking the offer. With Peter's record, his file would be delivered to the Parole Board in a steel box with a biohazard sticker. He'd do the full thirty years.”

Ethan paused a moment, then gave a disapproving cluck. He held up his hands—Yankee hands that were calloused only from gripping the silver spoon he'd been born with, hands that had never touched a rake or a mop, hands as soft as a virgin's thigh. He touched lightly on Martin's shoulder and said gravely, “The case is a slam dunk. If we go to trial, Shadd will leave prison in a hearse, however long that takes.”

Martin stared at him. Ethan was forty-seven, handsome, even striking at first glance, but slightly unreal when you looked a little closer; it was hard to pinpoint, but maybe it was the orange-tinted salon tan. Or the colored contact lenses, too pure a shade of ocean blue. Or the impossible perfection of his chemically whitened teeth. At least the hair was real, unless Ethan had somehow dyed it salt-and-pepper. The prosecutor was six three, slim and fit. The tan suit Ethan had worn to court probably cost more than the car Martin had driven there.

Oh hell.
When the two lawyers stood side by side, Ethan would remind the jury of an anchorman, somebody they trusted by habit. As for Martin? He'd look like Ethan's reflection in a fun-house mirror. Oh well, at least Martin knew it—lots of potbellied, dumpy guys enjoyed the delusion of being studs, but not Martin Smothers. He was aware he could pass for a porked-out, hippied-up Colonel Sanders.

Martin finished his business and zipped up.

Ethan stared down at Martin, lips pressed tight enough to squeeze the pink out of them. “The kid is
twenty-two
years old,” Ethan said. He let Martin digest the number a moment. “To be convicted at that age
of murder one? If he's unlucky enough to stay healthy, he could do
sixty years.”
He repeated at a whisper, “Sixty years, Marty.” He turned his palms up, then made fists and gently shook them in the air, saying, “Why not take the deal and at least give him some hope of one day seeing a sunrise over Conimicut Point?”