Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel

by Bruce DeSilva

  The church was a converted Sinclair filling station, the two islands where the pumps had been now just parallel humps in the snow. The trademark green brontosaurus had been pulled down from the roof and left where it had fallen. In its place was a plain wooden cross. Out front, one of those portable signs with interchangeable letters sat in the bed of a rusted, 1960s-vintage Dodge flatbed that had probably been towed in. The sign read:

  Sword of God Baptist Church

  Today’s Service:

  The Blessing of the Guns

  The men and teenage boys who crunched through the snow toward the church door cradled a variety of long guns. I spotted military assault rifles, deer rifles with scopes affixed, and a couple of shotguns. A few of the women toted rifles, too. Not to be left out, the children, some as young as five or six, lugged what appeared to be Daisy air rifles.

  I took my Nikon out of its case, rolled down my window, and snapped a few shots—just in case I decided to write about this. Then I took my grandfather’s gun out of the glove box, held it in my hands for a moment, and put it back. In the unlikely event of trouble, I’d be too outgunned for it to do me any good; and the .45 didn’t need blessing. It had already been washed in my family’s blood.

  By the time I pushed through the door, most of the parishioners were already seated on folding metal chairs arranged in neat rows on an oil-stained concrete floor. I counted forty-two people in all. I knew one of them, a young guy who’d overdone it, strapping a bandolier across his chest in an attempt to blend in. I caught his eye, and he quickly turned away. I didn’t see an organ or a choir.

  I took a seat in back just as Reverend Crenson walked through the door of what had probably been the garage’s office. He was dressed in black and carried what looked to be a Revolutionary War–vintage musket at port arms. He rested its rusted barrel against an oaken lectern that looked as though it had been scavenged from a school auditorium.

  “Welcome, my brothers and sisters, to the house of God,” he said, overenunciating so the word came out “GOD-duh.” He held out his hands palms up, commanding the congregation to rise, and led them in a spirited off-key rendition of all five verses of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Scalici’s hogs could have sung it better, but they were into power ballads and 1970s arena rock. The folding chairs clattered as the members of the congregation returned to their seats.

  The order of service was reminiscent of what you might see in any Baptist church: hymn, invocation, pastoral prayer, offering, doxology, hymn, scripture reading, hymn, sermon, benediction, closing hymn. But content was something else again.

  “Brothers and sisters,” Reverend Crenson began, “have you heard the troubling news? The loathsome pornographer still walks among us. The avenging angel sent by Almighty God destroyed one of this demon’s disciples, but his work is not yet complete. Bow your heads and pray with me for the death of Salvatore Maniella.”

  He paused, surveyed his flock, rested his elbows on the lectern, and clasped his hands in prayer.

  “Lord, if it be your will, choke the breath from this vile beast and condemn him to the fiery pit of hell. And while you’re at it, Lord, if it’s not too much trouble, please snuff out the life of our mongrel president, too. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.”

  I’d read about right-wing preachers praying for the death of Barack Obama, but reading about it was one thing. Seeing it in person was quite another. My face was a mask, concealing revulsion.

  Reverend Crenson opened his sermon with a declaration that the United States Constitution had been divinely inspired—“as holy a document as any book of the BY-a-bil.” That got me wondering why a divinely inspired document had needed to be amended twenty-seven times, but the preacher soon set me straight. The amendments, too, were written “under the guiding hand of GOD-duh.” That the Eighteenth Amendment, which established prohibition, and the Twenty-first, which repealed it, were both divinely inspired seemed unlikely to me, but this wasn’t the time and place to make an issue out if it.

  The rest of the sermon consisted of a warning that the Second Amendment, which seemed to be the reverend’s favorite, was under attack by liberals, socialists, communists, homosexuals, and “a socialist president who seeks to take our guns away so that he can enslave us.”

  Then came the part that I’d come to hear:

  “Dear Lord, we have faith that you did not place your children on this earth to be easy prey for the sons of Satan. We thank you for giving us the courage to defend ourselves and our families and to fight for what is right. Joyfully, we thank you for providing us with the tools to do so. Bless our guns, O Lord, and steady our hands so that our aim may be true. In Jesus’ name, amen.”

  Afterward, the congregants arranged the chairs in a circle for an hour-long Bible study. Reverend Crenson surprised me with his tolerance for dissent on the topic of the day: whether Barack Obama was the Antichrist, as the preacher believed, or merely one of his minions.

  As the members of the Sword of God gathered their guns and headed out, Reverend Crenson stood in the doorway and wrapped each of them in an embrace. When it was my turn, he grasped my right hand in both of his, curled his lips into a smile, thanked me for coming, and urged me to come again.

  39

  A couple of days later, Fiona joined me for breakfast at the diner.

  “We got the names of the pedophiles from the Internet providers,” she said, “and one of them fits the profile.”

  “The profile?”

  “Yeah. He’s a fucking priest.”

  “Oh boy.”

  “Father Rajane Valois of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.”

  “Who are the others?” I pulled a notepad from my hip pocket and took notes as she rattled off the names, ages, and hometowns of five middle-aged men from Fort Worth, Texas; Naples, Florida; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Andover, Massachusetts; and Edison, New Jersey.

  “They in custody yet?”

  “They’re all out of state,” she said, “so we have to turn this over to the FBI. Probably be a couple of weeks before they move on it.”

  “The names are off the record till they do?”

  “Yeah. Don’t want to tip the bastards off. After that, do me a favor and make them famous.”

  “I will,” I said. “It’s a big story. The AP will pick it up and move it on the national wire. The perverts will get to read about themselves on the front pages of their hometown newspapers.”

  “Good,” she said.

  “Think there’s a connection between the Chad Brown murders and the Providence PD’s child porn raid on Colfax Street a couple of months back?”

  “There must be,” she said. “I mean, what are the odds that there were two child porn factories in our little state? The way I figure it, the Winklers were running their operation out of Colfax Street, somehow got away when the bust went down, and moved their operation to Chad Brown.”

  “That’s how I figure it, too.”

  “Of course, we don’t know for sure,” she said. “The Providence cops are pissed at the way Parisi’s been bigfooting them, so they’re stonewalling us.”

  “I don’t suppose Dr. Charles Wayne’s name has come up in any of this.”

  That startled her. “Some reason it should?”

  So I told her what I’d heard, leaving McCracken and Peggi out of it. “Be nice if we could get a look at his home computer,” I said.

  “It would, but we can’t. There’s no probable cause for a warrant.”

  We lapsed into silence as Charlie shuffled over to top off our coffees. The silence dragged when he moseyed back to the grill. We were probably both thinking the same thing: We didn’t have a clue who was behind the Chad Brown murders. The body parts at the pig farm were still a dead end. And we had no idea why Sal’s double had been whacked. We were just blundering around in the dark.

  We broke the silence at the same time.

  “Could it all be connected somehow?” I asked, just as Fiona said:

  “What if i
t’s all connected?”

  “Parisi won’t speculate,” I said.

  “But we will,” she said.

  So we started brainstorming, throwing out ideas that had been bouncing around in our skulls for weeks.

  “A war between rival pornographers?” I suggested.

  “Maybe. The Chad Brown creeps try to whack Sal so he whacks them.”

  “Of course, the creeps could have been working for Sal.”

  “In that case,” Fiona said, “maybe Arena and Grasso whacked them all to settle their old strip club beef.”

  “Then again, what if this is all the handiwork of the Sword of God?” I said, and started to give her a rundown on Sunday’s service.

  “I heard all about that,” she interrupted. “Parisi planted an undercover in the congregation to keep an eye on them.”

  “Jimmy Ludovich,” I said.

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I saw him there Sunday.”

  I sipped coffee that was turning as cold as my investigation.

  “Got anything solid yet on the Maniellas’ illegal campaign contributions?” Fiona asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “That’s what you should be concentrating on. You’re a reporter, not a cop. Murder investigations are way out of your league.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  She picked up her cup of coffee, discovered it was cold, clunked it back on the table, and sighed.

  “So we’re still nowhere with all of this,” she said.

  “Only thing we can be pretty sure of,” I said, “is that the body parts at Scalici’s farm came from the Chad Brown snuff film factory.”

  “No, we can’t,” she said. “We can’t be sure of anything.”

  40

  Christmas Day I didn’t have anything better to do, so I volunteered for a double shift on the city desk again. I edited the annual holiday traffic fatal—a family of five erased in a collision with a snowplow—and was scrolling the AP national wire when a story out of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, caught my eye.

  The parish priest at St. Agnes Roman Catholic Church had presided over midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, but he failed to show up for Mass on Christmas morning. Alarmed, the vicar went looking for him, found the back door of the rectory kicked in, and called the police. Two patrolmen arrived promptly and discovered that the place had been ransacked. They found the priest dead in his bed. Father Rajane Valois had been executed with a single gunshot to the back of his head.

  I thought about calling Parisi to see if he’d heard the news, but it was Christmas. I figured it could wait a day. Twenty minutes later, Jimmy Cagney’s voice shrieked from my cell phone: “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

  “Merry Christmas, Captain.”

  “Not so merry in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.”

  “Is that so?”

  “A parish priest was shot to death sometime early this morning.”

  “Father Rajane Valois,” I said.

  “You know about this?”

  “I read about it on the AP wire.”

  A five-second delay, and then: “I just got off the phone with the chief of police in Fond du Lac. He says they found about a hundred child porn videos on the good father’s personal computer.”

  “Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  “He was one of the names you got from the Internet providers,” I said.

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “A source.”

  “Jesus! This investigation leaks like the Titanic.”

  “Now we know why the Chad Brown killers downloaded all those e-mails,” I said.

  “Looks like.”

  “How do you suppose they got the priest’s name from the Internet provider?”

  “Probably paid somebody off,” Parisi said. “A bribe is as good as a subpoena.”

  “Better,” I said. “You don’t have to wait for it to be signed by a judge.”

  “They probably have the other five names, too,” Parisi said.

  “A hit list,” I said.

  “Be my guess. I called the FBI this morning, but nobody on duty today knows anything about our case. If the bureau doesn’t move on this soon, we might end up with five more deserving corpses.”

  “Vigilantes,” I said.

  “Or Good Samaritans with guns.”

  After we signed off, I tried to remember what I knew about Fond du Lac. All I could come up with was that it was about the size of Providence and that Edward L. Doheny, an Irish American oil tycoon, was born there. Doheny was the inspiration for the fictional Daniel Plainview, the evil genius played by Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

  41

  Three days later, the cops reporter called in sick, so I got stuck with writing the police briefs—a dozen short, pointless paragraphs about purse snatchings, break-ins, fender benders, and Peeping Toms. A few minutes after I turned it in, Lomax was standing over my desk with a computer printout in his hand. He gave me a dirty look and began to read out loud.

  John Mura, 24, of 75 Chalkstone Avenue, was charged with burglary yesterday after four teenagers walking their Great Dane spotted him climbing through the window of an apartment at 21 Zone Street. Mura told police he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their dog.

  “Exactly right,” I said.

  “I can’t help but notice that you didn’t quote Mura directly,” Lomax said.

  “I paraphrased.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because according to the Providence police, his exact words were ‘those little cocksuckers and their fucking mutt.’”

  “And do I detect, in your paraphrase, an allusion to Scooby-Doo?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

  One corner of his mouth curled in a poor excuse for a smile. “I kinda like this one, so I’m gonna run with it,” he said, “but I’m keeping my eye on you.”

  I was flipping through my notes on the Chad Brown murder, trying to see if I’d missed anything, when Johnny Rivers interrupted me with his rendition of “Secret Agent Man,” my ring-tone for McCracken.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Did you know Vanessa Maniella bought an old warehouse in West Warwick six weeks ago?” the private detective said.

  “I didn’t. Your source good on this?”

  “A Realtor I know brokered the deal.”

  “Where is it exactly?”

  “On Washington Street. Used to be a discount furniture warehouse. When that went belly-up, the Cunha brothers ran a flea market there for a while.”

  “What’s she doing with it?”

  “Don’t know. Another strip club, maybe.”

  “Sounds like a lot of space for a strip club,” I said. “Have you been out there?”

  “No. Just thought there might be a story in it for you.”

  Late that afternoon, I drove out to West Warwick to check it out. The warehouse was a three-story red-brick structure sandwiched between a print shop and a pawnbroker. A “Half Price on Discount Furniture” sign, so faded that it was almost unreadable, stretched across the front of the building between the first- and second-floor windows. A “Cunha’s Fabulus Flea Market” sign, misspelled and hand-painted on a barn door–size slab of plywood, was nailed across three of the second-floor windows. All of the windows were dark, but eight cars were parked head in against the front of the building. One of them was Sal Maniella’s black Hummer. The others, low-end-model Fords and Toyotas, looked a few miles short of the junkyard.

  I pulled in beside the Hummer, got out, and saw why the warehouse windows were dark. The glass had been painted black on the inside. I climbed the crumbling concrete steps to the front door and tried the latch. It was locked, and there was no bell. I pounded on the peeling green paint with my fist until I heard heavy footsteps. The door was shoved open by a big man wearing a leather shoulder holster over a green-and-white Celtics T-shirt
with Kevin Garnett’s number 5 on the front.

  “Mulligan? The hell you doing here? This place is secret.”

  “Not anymore,” I said.

  “Mr. Maniella ain’t gonna like this.”

  “He’ll get over it,” I said. “So what are you doing here, Joseph? Get tired of bouncing drunks at the Tongue and Groove?”

  “I got promoted.”

  “To what?”

  “Bodyguard.”

  “The two ex-SEALs aren’t enough?”

  “Them guys are fuckin’ good, but they ain’t always around.”

  “Out of town, are they?”

  “Yeah. Took off a couple of days ago and won’t be back till the end of the week.”

  “I’d like to have a word with Sal,” I said.

  “What makes you think he’s here?”

  “His car’s right out front, Joseph.”

  “Oh, yeah. I told him he shoulda parked in back. Hang here and I’ll see if he’ll talk to you,” he said, and slammed the door in my face.

  I was watching an alarming number of grackles gather on the telephone wires across the street when the opening guitar lick to “Bitch” started playing. I didn’t see Keith Richards in the immediate vicinity so I pulled the phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.

  “You … fucking … bastard!”

  “And a good afternoon to you, too, Dorcas.”

  “Today is my birthday, asshole.”

  “Shall I break into song?”

  “I’m still your wife, you know. You could have sent a fucking card.”

  “Have you checked your mail today?”

  “What? No. Hold on a sec,” she said, but Joseph was swinging the door open now.

  “Happy birthday, Dorcas. Gotta go.”

  Joseph ushered me into a vestibule with peeling green walls and a splintered wood floor. A naked bulb burned in a fixture that dangled by its wires from the ceiling. In front of us was a new steel door with a keypad lock. Joseph punched in a sequence of five numbers. I managed to catch four of them. He turned the handle and led me inside.

  There, a young woman in a forest-green business suit sat behind a kidney-shaped glass desk decorated with a framed family photo and a pink orchid in a ceramic pot. Antique photographs of Rhode Island landmarks, most of them long gone, hung in bird’s-eye maple frames on new drywall. The off-white paint was so fresh that I could smell it.