Cliff Walk

by Bruce DeSilva

  “So he told me.”

  “Doesn’t seem right.”

  “It’s the way he wants it, Thanks-Dad.”

  “Lomax says he’s the best feature writer the Dispatch ever had.”

  “Without a doubt.”

  Earlier this week, while perusing the obituary page, Hanlon noticed that the death of a seventy-seven-year-old Pawtucket woman had been given only three lines. It was the shortest obit he’d ever seen in the Dispatch, and it offended him. So he talked to her only son, found the friends she worshipped with at St. Teresa’s, tracked down people she once made G.I. Joes with on the assembly line at Hasbro, and wrote a story that celebrated her life. The lead was typical of his elegant, unadorned style: “This is Mary O’Keefe’s second obituary.” It was his final story for the Dispatch.

  I stood and looked toward his cubicle near the city desk. He was still there, going through drawers and placing a few personal items in a shoebox. At fifty-four years old, he’d reluctantly accepted the paper’s early retirement offer, knowing it was better than the alternative. I watched as he pushed back from the desk, rose on long, storklike legs, and shrugged on his denim jacket. Then he turned in a slow circle, looking the place over one last time.

  Mason began to clap, the sound like gunshots in the cavernous space, and my opinion of him ticked up a notch. Lomax looked up from his computer screen, annoyed by the racket. Then he realized what was happening, pushed himself up from his fake leather throne, and joined in. One by one, throughout the football field–size newsroom, the survivors of the latest bloodletting got to their feet for a standing ovation. Marshall Pemberton, our fish-faced managing editor, rarely ventured from his glass-walled office that resembled an aquarium, but for this he made an exception. He waddled out of his door to join the tribute.

  Hanlon lowered his head, tucked the cardboard box under his left arm, and trudged to the elevator. He stepped in, and the door slid shut behind him. He never once looked back.

  Pemberton shook his head sadly, slipped back into the aquarium, and closed the door behind him. Once, he had managed the news department at one of the finest small-city newspapers in America. Now he was like a physician trying to keep his patient alive while the family debated whether to pull the plug.

  5

  Attila the Nun thunked her can of Bud on the cracked Formica tabletop, stuck a Marlboro in her mouth, sucked in a lungful, and said: “Fuck this shit.”

  “My sentiments exactly,” I said.

  “It’s what, a week now? And the state police still can’t ID the body? What is this, a Naked Gun sequel?” She paused to gulp more Bud. “Who’s running this investigation, Frank Drebin?”

  “Far as I know, it’s still Captain Parisi,” I said. “Think he might be stonewalling you?”

  She hit me with a steely glare. “He wouldn’t fucking dare.”

  Attila the Nun’s real name was Fiona McNerney, but a Dispatch headline writer had bestowed the nickname on her, and it stuck. She was a member of the Little Sisters of the Poor religious order. She was also the Rhode Island attorney general. Both roles called for a more discreet vocabulary, but she was always herself around me. We’d been friends since junior high. Over the years, the smiling kid with braces and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose had turned gruff and gray. Cigarettes and a holy determination that damned delicacy had graced her with a growl that rivaled John Lee Hooker’s. Her red hair was chopped short like a boy’s, and she never bothered with makeup. God wasn’t the kind of husband who needed a trophy wife to boost his ego.

  “So what’s the holdup?” I said.

  “Parisi says Salmonella’s wife and daughter are both out of the country. He’s not sure where and doesn’t know when they’re coming back.”

  “Makes sense,” I said. “I’ve been checking their place in Greenville every few days. It’s always dark and locked down tight. No one else can identify the body?”

  “Apparently not. None of his dirtbag flunkies will even talk to a cop, let alone make an official ID.”

  “What about unofficially?”

  “Unofficially, yeah, it’s him—right down to the Navy SEALs tattoo on his right arm.”

  “Maniella was in the SEALs?”

  “He was,” she said. “He enlisted right after college. Ended up getting shipped to South Vietnam, where the SEALs worked with the CIA in something called the Phoenix Program.”

  “What was that?”

  “Code for hunting down Viet Cong sympathizers and slashing their throats.”

  I looked at my hands and thought about that for a moment. I hadn’t realized Maniella had been such a tough guy—or that he’d served his country before stuffing his servers with smut.

  “The ID sounds kinda tentative,” I said.

  “Best I can do, Mulligan. Maniella was so secretive about everything that our crack detective unit can’t even find out who did his dental work. And he’s never been arrested, so his prints aren’t in the system.”

  “How about the navy?” I asked. “They should have his prints on file.”

  “So far, they aren’t cooperating.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  “No idea.”

  We both thought about that, but it didn’t get us anywhere.

  “What’s happening with Scalici’s pig?” I asked. “Frank Drebin and Police Squad! making any progress on that?”

  “I think Lieutenant Jim Dangle and the misfits from Reno 911! are working that one,” she said.

  “Nothing, then?”

  “The medical examiner found a couple of intact fingers in the pig’s stomach. The crime lab pulled prints off them, but they don’t match anything on file.”

  That figured. Groups like the Polly Klaas Foundation and Safety Kids had been urging parents to fingerprint their kids in case they ever went missing, but few people ever got around to it.

  “If you use any of this, don’t attribute it to me,” Fiona said. “Just say it’s from a source close to the investigation.”

  She took another pull from her beer. I sipped from my tumbler of club soda. I was jonesing for a Killian’s, but my ulcer was grumbling.

  Hopes hadn’t changed much in the twenty-five years since Fiona and I started coming here with fake IDs to get blitzed on cheap draft beer. Same scarred mahogany bar. Same teetering chrome barstools and battered Formica-top tables. Same jukebox crammed with blind black men and fat black women singing the blues. The clientele consisted mostly of street hustlers, loan sharks, bookmakers, ambulance chasers, bail bondsmen, Providence cops, and firemen. Dispatch reporters and copy editors, too, although not nearly as many as there used to be. My favorite poet, a hot black babe who grew up on the West Side of Chicago, has a line about places like this:

  When a woman rips a man open, this is where he comes to bleed.

  Now that Fiona was the attorney general, she could afford better, but she still chose to drink here. Maybe it was the vow of poverty.

  Sitting across the table from her, I felt good to be back on a real story again. Lately, I’d been getting stuck with a lot of routine assignments—duller-than-dirt stories that used to be handled by reporters who were now collecting unemployment checks. “Get used to it,” Lomax kept telling me. “Unless we can figure out a way to blow up the Internet, it’s only gonna get worse.” The last week had been a nightmare of weather stories, obituaries, traffic accidents, and Providence planning commission meetings. Almost made me long for the Derby Ball.

  “Salmonella’s been grooming his daughter to take over the family business, so his murder won’t change much,” Fiona was saying. “The Maniellas have more money than God, and they know how to spread it around. The way I hear it, they own the governor, most of the superior court justices, and half the state legislature.”

  “Only half?”

  “Half is all they need.”

  Fiona got elected last November after turning her campaign into a crusade to outlaw prostitution. Not everyone agreed with her. It was
a close election. Since then, she’d made a lot of fiery speeches about the shame of Rhode Island—the only place in the country, outside of a few counties in Nevada, where sex for pay was legal. So far, she hadn’t made any headway in persuading the state legislature to close the loophole. She figured the fix was in.

  “I’ve been combing the campaign contribution lists for the governor and legislative committee chairmen,” I said, “but I don’t see any sign of it.”

  “And you won’t,” she said. “Salmonella conceals his campaign contributions by giving each of his porn actors five thousand dollars a year in cash and having them write personal checks to the politicians of his choice.”

  “How many actors are we talking about?”

  “A hundred. Maybe more.”

  “And we don’t know who they are,” I said.

  “No,” she said. “Not unless their mothers actually gave them names like Hugh Mungus and Lucy Bangs.”

  “How’d you hear about this?”

  “Can’t say, but my informant is reliable.”

  “Good enough to make a case?”

  “No.”

  “With the millions Maniella makes selling virtual sex, why would he still care about a few Rhode Island brothels?”

  “Maybe he’s one of those guys who can never have enough money.”

  I wasn’t much bothered by the Maniellas’ prostitution business. The way I saw it, women could do whatever they wanted with their bodies, and men could do whatever they wanted with their money. But it bothered me a whole lot that the state government was for sale.

  “I’ll keep digging,” I said. “If I can prove the Maniellas are doing what you say they are, it’s a hell of a big corruption story.”

  “Good.”

  “But I gotta tell you, prostitution seems like a victimless crime to me,” I said, and immediately regretted it.

  “Tell that to the Johns’ wives when they come down with gonorrhea or HIV,” Fiona said. “It’s a filthy business. It exploits women, it enriches vile people like the Maniellas, and it’s an ugly blot on the reputation of our state.” Her tone did not invite further discussion.

  She took a swig from her beer and added, “I just hope I can hang on to this job long enough to do something about it.”

  Back in 1980, when a fiery Jesuit priest named Robert Drinan was a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, Pope John Paul II ordered priests and nuns to shun electoral politics. Now, thirty years later, it was still church policy. Fiona had chosen to ignore it.

  “Better hurry,” I said, “if you want to get the job done before the thunderbolt strikes from Rome.”

  “I’m hoping the Holy Father will understand that I’m doing the Lord’s bidding.”

  “What’s the bishop telling you?”

  “That if I don’t resign from public office, I could get excommunicated.”

  “Jesus, Fiona!”

  “Don’t take our Lord’s name in vain in my presence, asshole.”

  She took another drag on her cigarette and brushed away the ash that fell on her jeans. Last year, the state legislature had finally gotten around to banning smoking in public accommodations. Nobody drinking in Hopes had the balls to mention it to her.

  Attila the Nun excused herself and got up to pee. I checked out her ass (some habits are hard to break) and noticed the brand name on the back of those jeans: True Religion.

  6

  I collapsed into my ergonomically correct office chair, booted my desktop, checked my messages, and found this from Lomax:

  STILL NO ID ON THE BODY?

  No, but thanks to Fiona I had enough for an update that might keep him off my back for a while. I opened a new file and banged out a lead:

  Authorities believe the man who was shot to death and thrown from the Cliff Walk in Newport a week ago was Salvatore Maniella, the notorious and reclusive Rhode Island pornographer, but so far they have been unable to positively identify the body.

  A few minutes later, I was putting the final touches on the story when Lomax plopped on a corner of my desk and read over my shoulder.

  “Fiona your source for this?”

  “One of ’em, yeah.”

  “Who else?”

  “Captain Parisi.”

  “How’d you manage that? The tight-lipped SOB never tells us anything.”

  “I just got off the phone with him. When I asked him how the Maniella murder investigation was coming, he said he had no idea what I was talking about. But when I told him I got the ID from a ‘source close to the investigation,’ he let loose with a stream of curses about ‘fucking leaks’ and hung up.”

  “Good enough for me. Listen, you got plans for tonight?”

  “I do.” But I really didn’t.

  “Cancel them. Todd Lewan called in sick, so I need you to cover the city planning commission again.”

  Aw, crap. I checked my watch. Those meetings started at eight o’clock. If I hurried, there was still time to visit my bookie.

  * * *

  I shoved open the door to the little variety store on Hope Street and heard a familiar ding. Ever since I was a kid, that old brass bell had announced my visits to the storekeep, my old friend Dominic “Whoosh” Zerilli. For most of those years, it had dangled over a door on Doyle Avenue. The bell was one of the things Whoosh had salvaged after the arson there last year.

  Teresa, who worked the register on weeknights, was hunched over the glass candy counter, studying the front page of the National Enquirer. Judging by her furrowed brow, it was hard going. I leaned down and plucked out her iPod earphones.

  “And they say that young people don’t read newspapers.”

  “Hi, Mulligan.”

  “How are you, Teresa?”

  “I’m bored.”

  “Of course you are. It’s the universal teenage affliction.”

  “Finally ready to take me on that date?”

  “Soon as you grow up.”

  “But I turned eighteen last week!”

  I muffled a laugh. She pouted.

  “So are you gonna buy something or what?”

  “Just came by to see the old man.”

  She rolled her eyes. “He’s in the back.”

  I strolled down a narrow grocery aisle. To my right, Ding Dongs, Twinkies, Fruit Pies, Honey Buns, and Devil Dogs. To my left, a rack of soft porn magazines with names like Only 18, Black Booty, and Juggs. Just ahead, coolers stocked with Yoo-hoo, Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and twelve brands of cheap American beer. The illegal tax-stamp-free cigarettes were kept out of sight behind the counter.

  At the end of the aisle, I climbed a short flight of wooden stairs and knocked on a reinforced steel door. When the dead bolt snicked open, I turned the knob, stepped into Zerilli’s private sanctum, and was greeted with a low woof.

  “He won’t hurt you none,” Zerilli said. “He’s fuckin’ harmless.”

  “Where’d you get him?”

  “The pound.”

  “Got a name for him yet?”

  “Calling him Shortstop.”

  “How come?”

  “’Cause Centerfielder’s a stupid fuckin’ name.”

  Shortstop got up from his spot in the corner and wandered over to lick my hand with a blue sandpaper tongue. He was a big dog, probably had a mastiff or two somewhere down the family tree.

  “I turn him loose in the store at closing,” Zerilli was saying. “Figured he’d discourage the neighborhood kids from breaking in again, but it ain’t workin’. Useless fuckin’ mutt loves everybody.”

  I almost asked if he was going to keep the dog, but from the way his fingers were working behind its ears, I had my answer. The phone rang, and when Zerilli reached for it, I noticed a tremor in his right hand. That was new. He turned seventy-five last March and was finally starting to show his age.

  “Eight points,” he told the caller. “And the over-under is thirty-seven.” He paused, then scratched some code on a scrap of flash paper with a yellow pencil s
tub. “Okay, you’re in for a dime,” he said, and hung up.

  “Pats game?”

  “Yeah. Want a piece?”

  “Not this time, Whoosh.”

  “Don’t blame you. Brady’s third game back from knee surgery, it’s hard to know whether he’ll be throwing more touchdowns than interceptions.”

  He picked up the flash paper he’d recorded the bet on and dropped it into a metal washtub by his feet. If the cops ever raided the place, something that hadn’t happened in years, he’d just drop a lighted cigarette in the tub and … whoosh! Which was how he got the nickname.

  Zerilli fussed with his blue rep tie, loosening the Windsor knot. Then he drew a Colibri lighter from the inside pocket of his black Louis Boston suit jacket and set fire to the unfiltered Lucky that had been dangling from his lower lip. He took a drag, blew it out through his nose, and scratched his balls through his boxer shorts. As usual, he had removed his suit pants and hung them in the closet to preserve the crease.

  I sat in the wooden Windsor visitor’s chair, and Zerilli presented me with a box of illegal Cubans. I pried it open, took one out, and clipped the butt with my cigar cutter. Zerilli leaned over to give me a light.

  “Swear on your mother you won’t write about anything you see or hear in here,” he said.

  “I swear,” I said, not mentioning that there was nothing to write because everybody already knew what went on in here. This was our ritual. The only thing that ever changed was the brand of Cubans. Sometimes Cohibas, this time Partagás.

  “So,” he said, “I’m guessing this ain’t just a social call.”

  “Not entirely.”

  “You here to talk about Arena’s labor racketeering case?”

  “No.”

  “’Cause I got nothin’ to say about that.”

  “Of course you don’t.”

  “Salmonella, then?”

  “Right.”

  “The fuckin’ prick dead or not?” he asked.

  “Looks like, but I can’t say for sure.”

  “Humph.”

  “What can you tell me about his operation?”

  “The Internet porn, not a fuckin’ thing.”

  “The clubs, then?”