Cliff Walk

by Bruce DeSilva

  I stared at her, wondering how many plastic surgeons it took to keep a woman looking that good into her sixties. Then I stared some more, wondering what kind of a woman would marry a pornographer. She caught me looking and smiled.

  “Go ahead and ask,” she said. “I don’t mind.”

  “Does it bother you?” I asked. “The way your husband makes his money?”

  “And my daughter, too,” she said. “Don’t forget Vanessa.”

  “Her too,” I said.

  She laced her fingers under her chin and studied me over the top of them. “You’ve never been a woman, have you, Mr. Mulligan?”

  I thought it might be a trick question, so I went with a politician’s answer: “Not that I can recall.”

  “Being a woman is all about choices. Long ago, I made the choice to support my husband’s passion. Sal’s passion is not pornography. It’s not being surrounded by the naked women on his payroll. Sal’s passion is making money and using it to buy his family nice things. I trust his path. And I like nice things, too.”

  “But—”

  “Everyone involved in the business—the performers, the customers, even my daughter—is chasing something they’ve dreamed about. Most people just don’t dream as big as Sal.”

  Sal chuckled at that. “Let me tell you what I’m dreaming about this week,” he said, and steered the conversation to what I gathered was his favorite topic. Swann Galleries in Manhattan had scheduled a January auction of rare British mystery and spy novels, and he was pretty excited about it. I would have been, too, if the pre-auction estimates didn’t make me choke.

  After dinner, the Maniellas retired to their rooms. I went to the garage, found my parka still hanging on its peg, and pulled my antibiotics prescription and omeprazole tablets from an inside pocket. Then I reentered the house, passed Black Shirt and Gray Shirt standing watch in the foyer, and entered the library, where Yolanda was sitting on the couch.

  “Not what you expected, are they,” she said.

  “No.”

  “You thought they’d be pigs.”

  “Maybe they are,” I said. “All that dirty money can buy a lot of lipstick and deodorant.”

  “They’re not,” she said. “They’re pretty nice when you get to know them.”

  “Nice for pornographers, you mean.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such a puritan, Mulligan.”

  “Neither did I.”

  She gave me a searching look. “Pornography is legal,” she said. “They’re not doing anything wrong.”

  “A lawyer’s answer.”

  “I am a lawyer. I leave the moralizing to the preachers.”

  “Perhaps I’d like them better,” I said, “if they didn’t keep sending their thugs after me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The two ex-SEALs followed my car the other day and cornered me in a Subway parking lot.”

  “What did they want?”

  “To beat me up.”

  “What happened? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine. I showed them my gun, and they went away.”

  “You carry a gun?”

  “Only when I’m feeling threatened.”

  “Why were they after you?”

  “Because I was asking questions about the Maniellas.”

  “They didn’t seem to mind your questions today.”

  “They didn’t answer the important ones.”

  The candles in the candelabra had burned to stubs, and one of them had gone out. I relit it with my lighter.

  “When are you going to tell Captain Parisi that Sal is alive?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow, if the roads are better,” she said. “It’s something I should do face-to-face.”

  “Taking Sal with you?”

  “No.”

  “Parisi’s going to want to question him.”

  “I’m not going to allow that,” she said.

  “Mind if I call the captain in the morning and give him the news myself?”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Because it would amuse me.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t, but I can’t stop you.” She paused and then added, “I guess it wouldn’t do any harm.”

  I picked up the decanter of bourbon from the table and thought about how good it would feel on the way down. Then I thought about what would happen when it hit bottom and returned the container to the table.

  “Patricia Smith is going to be at the Cantab in Cambridge the second week in January,” I said.

  “Is that so?”

  “They say her readings are amazing. We should go.”

  “Maybe, but not together.”

  “Separate cars would waste gasoline,” I said. “Don’t you care about the environment?”

  “Going together would just encourage you,” she said.

  Vanessa stepped into the library to announce that our beds would be ready shortly. Then she noticed the way I was looking at Yolanda and asked, “Will you be wanting one room or two?”

  “One,” I said.

  “Two,” Yolanda said.

  Vanessa chuckled and slipped out of the room.

  * * *

  In the morning, Sal stood on the front porch with his wife and daughter and waved good-bye as Yolanda and I headed down the snow-covered dirt road to our cars. I helped her clear the snow from hers. Then I brushed off Secretariat. I locked my .45 in the glove box and placed a plastic bag holding Grant’s two-volume memoir on the floor by the front passenger seat. I started the car, turned on the heater, and let the engine warm while I made the call to Parisi.

  “Guess who I was just talking to,” I said.

  “I don’t play guessing games, Mulligan.”

  “Sal Maniella.”

  That five-second pause, and then: “You talking to dead people now?”

  “Sometimes I do,” I said. “But he looked alive to me. He was walking and talking, and his breath turned white in the cold.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Because if this is your idea of a joke…”

  “It’s not.”

  “Then who the hell is in the morgue?”

  “A retired Navy SEAL named Dante Puglisi. Sal had been using him as a double. They looked a lot alike, and Puglisi had some plastic surgery a few years back to perfect the illusion.”

  A five-second pause again. “Plastic surgery scars were noted in the autopsy report, but we chalked it up to vanity.”

  “I would have, too.”

  “Sal’s been playing dead because somebody tried to kill him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “His wife played along by falsely identifying the body?”

  “Sal’s lawyer claims she was distraught and confused.”

  “You met her?”

  “I did.”

  “She seem confused to you?”

  “No.”

  “Did Sal tell you who wants him dead?”

  “He says he’s got a lot of enemies.”

  “I’ll bet. So where do I find him?”

  “His lawyer,” I said, “isn’t going to let you talk to him.”

  Parisi fell silent for a moment. Then he said, “Swell.”

  34

  “You sure you got it right this time?” Charlie said.

  “I am.”

  “’Cause you really fucked it up the first time around.” He smirked as he cleared away what was left of my eggs and topped off my coffee.

  I opened my mouth to argue but then thought better of it. I’d never flat-out reported that Maniella was dead. I’d just written that police believed he was. But I’d also believed it, and I’d made sure my readers did, too. The paper would not be running a correction, because by journalism standards my story had been technically accurate. But that didn’t make it true.

  Charlie was about to say something else when my cell phone interrupted with “Who Are You?”

  “Mulligan.”

  “I’m on
ly going to say this once,” the caller said, “so listen up.” The voice was muffled—a man trying to disguise his voice. “Write down this address: 442 Pumgansett Street. Got that?”

  “Got it. In the Chad Brown project, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “Big story for whoever gets there first. I suggest you haul ass.”

  “What kind of story?” I asked, but I was talking to a dead line.

  The worst places always seem to be named after the best people. Any Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School, Martin Luther King Drive, or Dorothea Dix Hospital is likely to be a war zone. Chad Brown, Providence’s oldest low-income public housing project, was named for one of the city’s leading seventeenth-century citizens, a man Roger Williams once described as “a wise and godly soul.” Its 198 cramped apartments were squeezed into twenty two-story red-brick row houses in the city’s Wanskuck neighborhood three miles northwest of the statehouse.

  When the project was completed in 1942, the apartments rented for as little as eleven dollars a month, with preference given to defense workers. By the 1970s, it had become Providence’s most dangerous neighborhood, plagued by gangs, riddled with drugs, and terrorized by drive-by shootings. This year, the decent folks who lived there were working with the police, making another attempt to take back their neighborhood. Best of luck with that.

  I parked Secretariat in the cracked macadam lot in front of 442 Pumgansett, got out of the car, and stepped in fresh dog shit. Folks who live on a battlefield don’t bother with pooper-scoopers. I scraped my Reeboks on the curb and started up the concrete walk, my Nikon dangling from my left shoulder. My Boston Bruins sweatshirt hung low in front, weighted down by the .45 I’d shoved into the hand pouch. I didn’t think I’d done anything to provoke the Maniellas and their goons again, but I had no idea what I was walking into.

  “’Scuse me, sir. ’Scuuuuuse me.”

  I turned and saw two scrawny teenagers sitting on the Bronco’s hood. Gang tattoos on their necks identified them as members of the Goonies, the city’s newest street gang. I wondered if they’d borrowed the name from the kid movie or if it was just a diminutive form of goon.

  “Give us twenty bucks and we’ll watch the car for y’all, make sure nothin’ happens to it.”

  I smiled and showed them my gun.

  “The cracker got hisself a piece,” the tall one said.

  “Never seen one like dat,” the short one said. “Looks fuckin’ old.”

  “Prolly don’t even shoot,” the tall one said.

  I pulled back the hammer. “Stick around,” I said, “and maybe you’ll find out.”

  They shrugged, slid off the hood, and pimp-walked down the street.

  The guardrails flanking the row house’s six concrete steps were loose and corroded. The shades on the apartment windows, two upstairs and one down, were drawn. The front door, dark green with two tiny broken windows, was open a crack. When I knocked no one answered, so I nudged it open with my shoulder, stepped inside, and elbowed it closed. I’d reported on enough crime scenes in the project to know the layout: an open living room–kitchen area on the first floor, two small bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs.

  The living room held three fake-leather desk chairs, a daybed covered with a rumpled chenille bedspread, and two tipped-over aluminum worktables. Hundreds of DVDs in jewel cases were scattered across the threadbare green carpet. Many of them were cracked, as if they’d been stomped on. On top of them were two open Apple laptops, their screens smashed.

  “Hello. Is anyone here?”

  When no one answered, I skirted the mess on the floor and checked out the kitchen. The rust-stained porcelain sink was piled high with food-encrusted dishes. A bottle of Early Times with two inches in the bottom stood on the yellow linoleum countertop next to a roll of paper towels. There was also a twelve-cup coffeemaker with a couple of refills left inside. I touched the pot with the back of my hand. It was warm.

  A white Apple laptop, its power cord plugged into the wall, sat in the middle of a round, pressboard kitchen table. The screen was open but dark. On the keyboard, someone had left a note, hand-printed in big block letters on a sheet of copy paper:

  MULLIGAN!

  PRESS PLAY.

  WATCH TO END.

  THEN CHECK UPSTAIRS.

  Not sure what was going on here, I didn’t want to risk leaving my prints, so I took a Bic pen out of my pocket and used it to nudge the note off the keyboard. Then I tapped the pen on the touch pad. The screen lit up, displaying a paused video. I dragged the pen across the touch pad, trying to move the cursor to the control panel, but it didn’t work. I tore a paper towel off the roll on the counter, laid it on the touch pad, and slid my finger across it, moving the cursor to the play button. Then I reeled back.

  A naked child was sprawled facedown across a queen-size bed. She was sobbing. A pale, skinny man climbed on top of her, and the child’s mouth opened in a scream. Mercifully, the sound had been turned off. She couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old.

  “WATCH TO END,” the note said, but I couldn’t take much of this. I hit the fast-forward button, slowing the video in time to watch the man complete his business, grab a fistful of brown curls, and pick up a buck knife. I averted my eyes too late to miss the big finish.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, immobilized by the shock of it. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe several minutes. Then I turned from the computer and threw up in the sink. When I finished heaving, I grabbed another paper towel, used it to turn on the cold water, and cupped some in my hands to wash the sour taste from my mouth. I hoped I wasn’t washing any important trace evidence down the drain.

  In twenty years as a journalist, I’d seen a lot of death: firemen burned to cinders in collapsed buildings, mobsters shotgunned against barroom walls, teenagers dismembered by fast-moving trains. But I’d never seen anything like this.

  “THEN CHECK UPSTAIRS,” the note said. I jerked the .45 out of my sweatshirt, craving an opportunity to use it.

  The worn vinyl stair treads felt gritty under my Reeboks. As I nudged open the door to the first bedroom, the first thing that hit me was the odor. The room smelled as if an army had used it as a urinal.

  Two men and a woman dressed in jeans and T-shirts were crumpled on a beige shag carpet beside an unmade queen-size bed. Beside them, several thousand dollars’ worth of professional video equipment—two Sony video cameras, a couple of 5,500-watt DayFlo lights, and a tripod—lay twisted and broken. The carpet, the bed, and the room’s flowered wallpaper were splattered with blood and brain matter. It was the same wallpaper I’d seen in the video downstairs. The blood was still wet.

  I stuck the Colt back in my sweatshirt, popped the lens cover off the Nikon, and snapped photos from as many angles as I could without stepping in blood. The paper would never print such horrific pictures, but my mind would try to block this out. I’d need photos to write an accurate story.

  Careful not to touch anything, I backed into the hall. The bathroom was just ahead to my left, the door pulled closed. I shouldered it open. The room was empty.

  I stepped back into the hall and saw that the door to the second bedroom was padlocked. I put my ear to it and thought I heard a whimper, but it was so faint that I couldn’t be sure.

  “Hello? Is anyone in there?”

  No one answered. I put my ear to the door again. Another whimper.

  My first instinct was to kick the door down, but I’d contaminated the crime scene too much already. Instead, I rushed down the stairs and fled the house. I had Captain Parisi on speed dial. He picked up on the second ring.

  35

  The day had turned bitterly cold. A stiff northwest wind blew McDonald’s wrappers and old newspapers around the project parking lot. A half-dozen kids, one of them bouncing a basketball, strolled by. It was good to see children still pushing and pulling their own breath. I sucked in air to clear the stench of blood and urine from m
y nostrils. Then I unlocked the Bronco, slid in, and pulled a Partagás out of the glove box. As I lit it, my hands shook. I cracked the side window, smoked, and waited for Parisi to roll up.

  After a few minutes, I started thinking more clearly. It wouldn’t do to be carrying when the authorities arrived, so I tugged the Colt from my sweatshirt and locked it in the glove box. What else? Parisi might confiscate my camera. I ejected the memory card and concealed it between the passenger-seat cushions. Then I unzipped the pouch on the front of my camera bag, took out the spare card, and slipped it in the Nikon. I snapped a few shots of the front of the death house through the car window so there’d be something on the fresh card if anyone looked. Then I called Lomax, gave him the gist, and suggested he get a real photographer over here in time for the show.

  Parisi must have made a courtesy call to the Providence PD, because they arrived first—two squad cars and an unmarked Crown Vic. The Vic’s doors swung open, and out climbed the homicide twins: Jay Wargat, a big lug with a permanent five o’clock shadow and fists like hams, and Sandra Freitas, a bottle blonde with rumble hips and a predatory Cameron Diaz smile. I got out of the Bronco and met them on the sidewalk.

  “Mulligan?” Freitas said. “You the one called this in?”

  “I am.”

  “Been inside?”

  “I have.”

  “And?”

  “Two dead males and a dead female in one of the bedrooms upstairs. Looks like they were head-shot. And something worse in the kitchen.”

  “What would that be?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Go look for yourself.”

  “Touch anything?”

  “Not so you’d notice. But I walked all the way through the place. Oh, and I threw up in the kitchen sink.”

  “You did, huh?” Wargat said, his face cracking into a grin.

  “There’s something else,” I said. “The second bedroom is padlocked. I think someone might be locked inside, but I’m not sure.”

  “Stay here,” Freitas said, “while we have a look.”

  I got back in the Bronco and watched the four uniforms mill around outside. Ten minutes later Wargat bolted out the apartment door, stumbled down the front steps, and gave the snuff film a thumbs-down review by emptying his stomach on the sidewalk. When he finished heaving, he walked over to the Crown Vic, opened the door, pulled out a Poland Spring bottle, and washed out his mouth. Then he shook himself like a dog, straightened his shoulders, and trudged back inside.