Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel

by Bruce DeSilva

  I found a spot against the wall between a couple of suits of armor and watched the mayor of Boston try to dance the Soulja Boy with a teenage girl whose last name might have been Du Pont or Firestone. When a waiter glided by, I nabbed another flute, but it just made me thirsty for a Killian’s at the White Horse Tavern. After observing the festivities for a half hour, I figured I’d seen enough.

  I was looking for Hill so I could retrieve my notebook when I spotted Salvatore Maniella. He was leaning against a corner of the huge chimneypiece, as out of place as Mel Gibson at a seder. What was a creep like him doing at a swanky event like this? I was still lurking a few minutes later when our governor strolled up and tapped him on the shoulder. They crossed the ballroom together and slipped into a room behind the bandstand. I gave them twenty seconds and then followed.

  Through the half-open door I could make out red flocked wallpaper, a G clef design in gold leaf on the ceiling, and a grand piano—the mansion’s music room, which the current owner had proudly restored to its original garishness. Maniella and the governor had the room to themselves, but they stood close, whispering conspiratorially in each other’s ears. After a moment, they grinned and shook hands.

  I slipped away as they turned toward the door.

  3

  In the morning, I ordered a large coffee and an Egg McMuffin at the McDonald’s on West Main Road in Newport, took a seat by the window, and opened my laptop to check the headlines. I’d have preferred to hold a newspaper in my hands, but the Dispatch, in another cost-cutting move, had stopped delivering down here.

  A federal judge had dismissed the labor racketeering indictment against our local Mob boss, Giuseppe Arena, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Someone had taken a potshot at the medical director of Rhode Island Planned Parenthood, the rifle slug crashing through her kitchen window and burying itself in her refrigerator. A pair of loan sharks, Jimmy Finazzo and his baby brother, Dominick, had been arrested for executing a deadbeat in their Cadillac Coupe de Ville while they were being tailed—and videotaped—by the state police. The video was already on YouTube. And the coach of the Boston Celtics, who were training at Newport’s Salve Regina University, announced he’d canceled a team tour of the Newport mansions after realizing most of his players owned bigger houses.

  My story on the Derby Ball was on the paper’s Web site, too. I’d pecked it out late last night at the White Horse, making liberal use of the names and gown descriptions Hill had jotted in my notebook. Sue Wong, Adrianna Papell, and Darius Cordell, I’d proclaimed, were the hot designers this season. I had no idea who they were, but I figured Hill could be trusted. Three Killian’s later, I’d checked myself into a Motel 6, the cheapest bed to be found in Newport, and filed the story over the landline.

  After breakfast with Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar, I slid Buddy Guy’s Heavy Love into the CD player and pointed the Bronco back toward Providence. I was halfway across the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge, named for an Italian navigator who explored Narragansett Bay in 1524, when Don Henley interrupted some great blues with his thin tenor:

  “I make my living off the evening news”—the ringtone that signaled a call from Lomax.

  “Mulligan.”

  “On the way back?”

  “Be there in less than an hour.”

  “Step on it. Obits are piling up, and I need you to cover a press conference at the health department at noon.”

  Aw, crap.

  “Good job last night, by the way. I had no idea you knew so much about fashion.”

  “Yeah. I’m full of surprises.”

  I flipped the cell closed and let up on the gas. Knowing what was waiting for me, I was in no rush to get back to the newsroom. I set fire to a Partagás with my lighter, cruised north on Route 4, and let my mind wander back to last night.

  Salvatore Maniella. He’d gotten his start in the sex business in the mid-1960s when he was an accounting student at Bryant College, talking coeds out of their clothes, snapping their pictures, and publishing them in his own amateur skin magazine. Today he was said to control 15 percent of the porn sites on the Internet, although no one could say for sure. According to some experts, Internet porn is a ninety-seven-billion-dollar-a-year business worldwide—bigger than Microsoft, Apple, Google, eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Netflix combined. Chances were Sal didn’t have to rent his tux by the day.

  Sal had also broken into the brothel business in the 1990s after a clever lawyer actually read the state’s antiprostitution law and discovered it defined the offense as streetwalking. That, the lawyer argued, meant sex for pay was legal in Rhode Island as long as the transaction occurred indoors. When the courts agreed, entrepreneurs leaped through the loophole, opening a string of gentlemen’s clubs where strippers peddled blow jobs between pole dances. Maniella owned three of them, but the clubs were never more than a footnote to his pornography empire.

  I was rolling slowly through North Kingstown and thinking about Sal when my police scanner started squawking. Both the Newport cops and the Rhode Island State Police were worked up about something. When I caught the gist, I turned around and floored it back to Newport.

  * * *

  In the harsh light of morning, Belcourt Castle wasn’t as elegant as it had appeared the night before. The concrete cherubs and Grecian urns in the formal garden were crumbling from decades of acid rain and hard New England winters. Chocolate brown paint was peeling from window sashes. The side yard was a jumble of broken marble columns, refuse from restoration projects that had been started and then abandoned. Slate shingles that had tumbled from the roof littered the grass. I parked in the deserted drive and fetched my Nikon digital camera from the back. Don Henley started yowling again, but I let the call go to voice mail as I trotted through the mansion grounds toward the sea.

  Newport’s famous Cliff Walk is just what it sounds like. It skirts a rocky, guano-slick precipice that tumbles seventy feet to the mean high-tide line and another thirty feet or so to the shallow floor of the bay. From hoi polloi Easton’s Beach in the north to exclusive Bailey’s Beach in the south, the walk is a three-and-a-half-mile public right of way, much to the dismay of mansion owners who are compelled to share the spectacular ocean views with the rest of us. Occasionally, the patricians express their displeasure by trucking in boulders to block the path.

  For much of its length, the walk is smoothly paved, and in places there is a guardrail; but those who press on past the Vanderbilt Tea House must negotiate crumbling paving stones, scramble between boulders, and maintain footing on slippery shelves of granite and schist. The late Claiborne Pell, a Newport aristocrat who represented the state in the U.S. Senate for thirty-six years, took a tumble here once while jogging and was fortunate he didn’t go over the edge. The careless, the drunken, and the just plain unlucky fall with some regularity, and from time to time one of them gets killed. Judging by the chatter I’d overheard on the police radio, this was one of those times.

  As I approached the Cliff Walk, the press was already swarming. Three bored Newport uniforms, arms folded across their chests, had the entrance blocked with yellow crime scene tape. Logan Bedford, a reporter for Channel 10 in Providence, was using them as a backdrop for one of his I’m-not-sure-what’s-going-on-here-but-I-have-great-teeth stand-ups.

  I swerved south, trespassed across forty yards of very private property, scaled a fence, fought through a tangle of dense brush, and emerged on a slab of rock overlooking the sea. Below, a dozen sailboats tacked in the light morning breeze. Above, a state police helicopter hovered. About thirty yards to the north, a uniformed Newport cop was waving his arms at a pair of tourists, ordering them to turn around and go back the way they had come.

  Seagulls had strafed here, and the footing was treacherous. My cell played Lomax’s ringtone again, but I ignored it. I crept as close to the edge as I dared, raised my Nikon, and studied the scene through the 135mm lens.

  A body, its arms and legs splayed like a starfish, sprawled faceup on
a partially submerged, blood-spattered boulder. Three men in plain clothes—I figured them for two detectives and a medical examiner—were squatting beside it, one taking photographs and the others collecting bits of evidence and dropping them into clear plastic bags. The ropes they’d used to rappel down still dangled from the cliff. The tide was coming in, waves tossing foam on the investigators’ trousers. In a few minutes, the scene would be underwater.

  I snapped some photos, hoping for one or two usable shots. A real photographer would have done better, but as usual I didn’t have one handy. Our photo department had been depleted by layoffs.

  A couple of uniformed state troopers lowered a steel basket down the cliff face. As the detectives lifted the body and strapped it into the basket, I could see that the victim was dressed in a tuxedo. I took a few more pictures, but the Newport uniform who’d been shooing the tourists was heading my way now, his boots clicking on the stone path.

  “Good morning, Officer Phelps.”

  He threw me a puzzled look, then nodded in recognition.

  “Mulligan, right? From last night?”

  “The same.”

  “You press?”

  “Right again.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me that when I pulled you over?”

  “Would it have made a difference?”

  “Ahhh … guess not.”

  We stood quietly for a moment, looking out over the sea. Phelps pulled a granola bar from his pocket, tore the shiny green wrapper, and took a small bite.

  “Beautiful place to die,” he said.

  “That it is. Maybe that’s why people come here to jump.”

  “This guy was no jumper.”

  “No?”

  “Didn’t fall, either,” he said.

  “And you know that because…?”

  “I could tell right off,” he said, “just from the position of the body.”

  “Because he never tried to break his fall,” I said.

  “You noticed that, too, huh?”

  “Yeah. It’s a natural reaction. Even suicides usually do it. This guy just went over backwards and landed on his spine.”

  “There’s some other stuff that seems suspicious, too,” he said.

  “Like?”

  “Like the through-and-through bullet wound to his throat.”

  That explained the state police. They wouldn’t have shown up for a jumper.

  Phelps broke a crumb from his granola bar and tossed it into the air. A gull swooped in, snatched it, and dived toward the surf.

  “I suppose that just encourages them,” he said.

  “Hey, everybody needs a little encouragement.”

  “Yeah? Well, the state cops said I should encourage you to stop taking pictures.”

  “That right?”

  “Uh-huh. Also said to confiscate your camera.”

  “And?”

  “And fuck them,” he said. “They strut in here, bigfoot our case, treat us like errand boys. If they want your camera, they can come get it themselves. Far as I’m concerned, take all the pictures you want.”

  “Got an ID yet?”

  “We’re off the record, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “The state cops ain’t big on sharing, but from what I overheard, there was no identification on the body.”

  “Who found it?”

  “Couple of early morning joggers spotted it and called 911.”

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “Yeah, but it don’t make no sense,” he said. “The staties keep mumbling about salmonella. Seem pretty excited about it. What the hell does food poisoning have to do with anything? This dude got shot.”

  “Salmonella? You’re sure that’s what they said?”

  “What it sounded like.”

  “Dirty Laundry” started playing again. I pulled the cell from my jacket pocket, told Phelps I had to take the call, and strolled out of earshot down the Cliff Walk.

  “Mulligan.”

  “Been trying to reach you for an hour,” Lomax said. “Why the hell aren’t you answering the phone?”

  “I’ve been a little busy.”

  “Listen, I need you to get your ass back to Newport. There’s chatter on the state police radio, something about a body at the bottom of the Cliff Walk.”

  “Already on it,” I said.

  “And?”

  “Guy in a tuxedo got shot and went over the edge.”

  “ID?”

  “None on the body, but the state cops seem to think it’s Sal Maniella.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “Yeah.”

  “So Salmonella finally got what he deserved,” Lomax said.

  “Looks that way.”

  “ID good enough to go with?”

  “Not even close. I got it secondhand from a Newport cop who eavesdropped on the staties and thought they were talking about food poisoning.”

  “Okay, but stay on it,” Lomax said, “and for chrissake stay in touch.”

  4

  Next morning I took the elevator to the Dispatch’s third-floor newsroom and tiptoed through a graveyard. By the windows that looked out on Fountain Street, a couple of technicians were dismantling Dell desktops. I could still picture Celeste Doaks, the bespectacled religion writer, hunched over one of those keyboards, cringing as Ted Anthony, the overweight medical writer, passed gas from his latest burrito. Malcolm Ritter, so damned good he had me understanding science, was always hidden behind a tower of books that couldn’t muffle his asthmatic sniffs. Sometimes Mary Rajkumar, the travel babe, breezed in on her way to or from someplace exotic, reminding them that there was a life outside the newsroom. But none of them wanted to be anywhere else. Now two bored techs were pulling the plugs on their life’s work.

  I logged on to my computer and was skimming my messages when I sensed someone hovering. Whoever it was waited patiently, hesitant to intrude on my work. Someone genteel, then, and well mannered. Had to be the publisher’s son. Anyone else would have had the sense to butt in. If I ignored him, maybe he would go away. I finished with my messages and reached for the phone.

  “Excuse me, Mulligan. May I have a word?”

  Aw, crap. “What is it now, Thanks-Dad?”

  “I’d prefer that you stop calling me that. My name is Edward.”

  “So file a grievance.”

  “I just wanted to tell you that your Cliff Walk photographs were excellent.”

  “No, they weren’t. Only good thing about them was that they were in focus.”

  “Well, I liked them.”

  “Maybe if your daddy hadn’t laid off most of the photo staff, we could have had some professional pictures to go with the story.”

  He sighed. “It’s not like he had a choice, you know.”

  Edward Anthony Mason IV was Rhode Island aristocracy, the scion of six inbred Yankee families that had owned the Dispatch since the Civil War. A year and a half ago, he’d been awarded a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia, returned to Rhode Island, and moved back into the oceanfront Newport McMansion where he’d been raised. He’d been working as a reporter here ever since, learning the business that would soon be his by birthright. By the look of things, there wouldn’t be much left of it by the time his daddy relinquished the corner office on the fourth floor. Given the size of Mason’s trust fund, I wasn’t about to start praying for him. In fact, I wanted to hate his privileged ass. But I didn’t.

  Mason had taken to hanging around me, eager to learn the things about street reporting that they didn’t teach at Columbia—which was just about everything. Sometimes he got underfoot, but he was starting to pick up a few things.

  “My father,” Mason was saying, “deeply regrets the recent staff reductions, but they were necessary to preserve the financial health of our family newspaper.”

  “Yeah? Well, it’s not working. The Dispatch is circling the drain.”

  “Perhaps, but it’s hardly Father’s fault. Every newspaper is having dif
ficulties.”

  “Of course they are,” I said, “and do you want to know why?”

  “I’d welcome your opinion on the subject.”

  “Because they are run by idiots.”

  “A bit harsh, don’t you think?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Newspapers have fallen victim to forces that are beyond their control,” Mason said.

  “Bullshit,” I said. “When the Internet first got rolling, newspapers were the experts on reporting the news and selling classified advertising. They were ideally positioned to dominate the new medium. Instead, they sat around with their thumbs up their asses while upstarts like Google, the Drudge Report, the Huffington Post, and ESPN.com lured away their audience and newcomers like Craigslist, eBay, and AutoTrader.com stole their advertising business. By the time newspapers finally figured out what was happening and tried to make a go of it online, it was too late.”

  Mason stroked his chin, thinking it over.

  “People like your daddy forgot what business they were in,” I said. “They thought they were in the newspaper business, but they were really in the news and advertising business. It’s a classic mistake—the same one the railroads made in the 1950s when the interstate highway system was being built. If Penn Central had understood it was in the freight business instead of the railroad business, it would be the biggest trucking company in the country today.”

  “A provocative analysis,” Mason said. “Perhaps you might expand it into an op-ed piece.”

  “Already did. Your daddy declined to print it.”

  “Maybe if I had a word with him…”

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “Writing about it isn’t gonna change anything. What’s done is done, and now thousands of journalists who devoted their lives to reporting the news are paying the price.”

  Mason fell silent for a moment, then said, “Did you know this is Mark Hanlon’s last day?”