Free Providence Rag: A Liam Mulligan Novel by Bruce DeSilva Page B

news staff from 340 to 80 over the last decade—had stanched the hemorrhaging.
    Now there was little left to cut.
    On Sunday, after returning from services at Trinity Episcopal Church, the old man had cracked open a bottle of twelve-year-old Glenmorangie single-malt Scotch and gotten uncharacteristically rip-roaring drunk.
    This morning, as servants scurried about in the dining room, refilling coffee cups and clearing china sticky with half-eaten apple puff cakes, Mason’s father had cleared his throat, clinked his spoon against his coffee cup to make sure he had his son’s full attention, and made an announcement.
    “It pains me greatly to say this, son, but I’m going to talk to the board about putting the Dispatch on the market.”
    Probably too late for that, Mason thought. Mulligan had been proclaiming for years that the newspaper business had no future, although the veteran reporter did tend to express the idea in more colorful language. “Turning to shit,” Mulligan used to say, and, more recently, “circling the fucking drain.” At first Mason had disagreed, regurgitating the Pollyannaish prattle he’d been fed at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism about how the business was just going through “a difficult transition.” But now the painful truth was too obvious to deny.
    Dad, Mason thought, I doubt you can find a buyer stupid enough to take the Dispatch ’s rotting corpse off our hands. But Mason had the courtesy, and the good sense, to keep the thought to himself.
    Just twenty-eight years old, he was the scion of six inbred Rhode Island families that had owned the paper since the Civil War. He’d been working as a reporter for the last four years, learning the trade from the bottom up; but the plan had been for him to step up to the publisher’s corner office once his father decided to step down. Now, as the Jag cruised north on Route 1 toward Providence, Mason wondered what he’d do with the rest of his life.
    He wondered, too, how he would maintain the lifestyle to which he was accustomed now that his inheritance was shriveling. Not all of his trust fund was tied up in Dispatch stock, and for that he was grateful. But what about Mulligan and the rest of his friends at the paper? What would become of them?
    Mason brooded on that for a while and then tried the radio again. Still finding nothing to his liking, he turned it off and started humming the nostalgic ragtime tune he’d composed at the family’s Steinway. He’d already come up with a title: “Providence Rag.” Now he was ready to write the words. The first stanza, an attempt to evoke the roar of the newspaper presses, was taking shape in his head when an unwelcome thought intruded.
    One of these days, he might find himself driving a Prius.
    *   *   *
    Mason, who had the longest commute, arrived first. Gloria, who lived just fifteen minutes away in suburban Warwick, slipped in a half hour later, delayed by the ordeal of fetching her camera bag and repeating her breathing exercise. Mulligan, whose apartment was within walking distance, meandered in forty minutes after her.
    One by one, the three journalists took the elevator to the third floor, stepped out into the newsroom, and walked past a slender, elderly black woman sitting in one of the white vinyl chairs set aside for visitors. She wore a red cloth coat and flat black shoes adorned with tiny red bows. Her red purse and matching umbrella rested on the floor beside her, and a soggy copy of the Dispatch, open to the metro page, lay in her lap. The woman lifted her chin and studied each of them as they passed her by. Mason gave her a curious glance and hurried on to his desk, but Gloria and Mulligan averted their eyes.
    Unlike Mason, they knew who she was. They knew what she wanted.
    Lomax, the sixty-two-year-old managing editor, checked the time on the newsroom wall clock and tossed Mulligan a dirty look. Mulligan didn’t give a shit. He would never get paid