Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel

by Bruce DeSilva

  Charlie turned toward the counter to top off my coffee and noticed the headline on the unemployment story. “Damn,” he said. “Why can’t we ever be number one at anything?”

  “We are,” I said. “Rhode Island leads the nation in doughnut shops per capita.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. We’ve got one for every forty-seven hundred people—nine times the national average.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I read the paper,” I said. “You ought to try it sometime.”

  “No wonder Rhode Islanders are so fat.”

  “Your cuisine isn’t helping any, Charlie.”

  He chuckled, turned back to the grill to flip my eggs, and tossed me a question over his shoulder.

  “Anything new on Maniella?”

  “There isn’t.”

  “Think he’s dead?”

  “Looks like, but I can’t swear to it.”

  He turned back to me and leaned his forearms on the counter. “Who would want to kill him?”

  “Could be anybody,” I said. “Business rivals. Born-again Christians. A porn actress’s angry father.” Or the Mob, I thought to myself. Grasso and Arena could hold a grudge for a long time. The pope might be miffed about those condoms, but since the Borgias passed into history, murder wasn’t the Vatican’s style … as far as I knew.

  “Or maybe it was just a robbery gone bad,” I said. “The cops didn’t find a wallet on the body.”

  “In the old days, Sal used to come in here,” Charlie said. “Back before he could afford champagne and caviar for breakfast. Seemed like a decent guy, but I guess he wasn’t.”

  My eggs were ready now, so he turned back to scrape them onto a plate. Outside the diner’s greasy windows, rays of morning sunshine broke through low, scattered clouds and turned the Beaux-Arts façade of city hall to gold. Seagulls had strafed the building again overnight, continuing their war of turds with the current administration. I shoveled Charlie’s masterpiece into my mouth and tried to think things out.

  Poking into the Maniellas’ prostitution business wasn’t getting me any closer to proving they were paying off the governor. The mystery of Scalici’s pig looked like a dead end, too.

  Last night, I’d spent hours Googling investigative stories on Internet porn. The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post had unearthed details about some of the big operators, but they’d run into a black hole when they looked at the Maniellas. They were too good at hiding their money and covering their tracks. The Times and Post had far more time and money to devote to the story than I did. If they couldn’t find anything, there was no point in me trying.

  Lomax could see I’d run dry and responded by jamming me up with a diet of obits, press conferences, and weather stories. I was starting to hate the job I’d always loved. I needed to find something big to work on to get Lomax to ease up, but I had no idea what that something might be. Cash for inspection stickers was a scandal, but it didn’t qualify as news. Everybody already knew about it. Besides, for working people trying to keep clunkers on the road, it was a public service. A little graft was the only thing standing between Secretariat and the glue factory.

  I opened the paper to the metro front and read a police story under Mason’s byline. Providence vice cops had kicked in the door to a second-floor apartment on Colfax Street last night and confiscated a computer containing hundreds of child porn videos. The occupants, who had rented the place under a phony name, were nowhere to be found.

  I read the story carefully twice, but I couldn’t see anything in it for me. The Maniellas had never stooped to child porn—as far as I knew. I doubted they had moral scruples about it, but with the millions they were making on adult porn, why would they get involved in something that would bring down so much heat?

  * * *

  Back at the office, I went over the computer printouts of the governor’s campaign contributions again, looking for anything I might have missed the first five times. It was still just a blur of hundreds of names, addresses, and dollar figures. I learned nothing. I shoved it aside and started in on the stack of obits Lomax wanted by three o’clock.

  “Hi, Mulligan.”

  “What’s up, Thanks-Dad?”

  “Need help with anything?”

  “Want to try your hand with a few obits?”

  “Not really, no.”

  Hadn’t worked the last time I’d tried it, either. The publisher’s son, surprise surprise, never got stuck with scut work.

  “You know, there is something,” I said, and handed him the computer printouts. “I could use a fresh pair of eyes on this.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “Any hint that the Maniellas have been funneling campaign contributions to the governor by using their porn actors as fronts. You might as well look at these, too,” I said. I opened a file drawer and pulled out similar lists for the chairmen of the Rhode Island House and Senate judiciary committees.

  He fanned the pages and whistled. “A lot to go through,” he said.

  “It is, but there’s no hurry.”

  “Do we know the porn actors’ names?”

  “No, we don’t.”

  He thought for a minute, then said, “Okay. Let me play around with this for a while and see what I can do.”

  Mason didn’t know all the tricks of the trade, but he was damned smart. Maybe he could find something.

  10

  A half hour south of Providence, the little town of Warren clings like a barnacle to the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. Here, the water is sometimes streaked with sewage, and quahogs angry with coliform bacteria pave the mucky bottom. Main Street, several hundred yards from and parallel to the shoreline, is a postcard from the Great Depression—old corner drugstore, red-brick town hall with Palladian windows, and ramshackle wood-frame storefronts with vacant office space on the second and third floors.

  I parked Secretariat at a meter in front of a narrow storefront office two doors north of the police station. The office had housed a three-reporter news bureau until the Dispatch closed it down a couple of years ago to save money. Now, black lettering on the glass front door read “Bruce McCracken, Private Investigations.” I entered and found him alone, sitting behind a computer at an oak desk that had seen better days. For the desk, like the town, those days were ninety years ago. A bank of dented metal file cabinets and an old black safe the size of a minifridge had been shoved against the back wall. The only decent pieces of furniture in the place were the black leather swivel chair he was sitting in and two client chairs lined up in front of his desk.

  I’d known McCracken since our school days at Providence College. After graduation, he’d taken a job as an in-house investigator for a big fire insurance company and stayed for twenty years until he got laid off last spring. For the company, it was a brain-dead move. McCracken was good. Every year, his work had saved his employer hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars.

  He held up his cell phone to show me he was occupied and pointed at one of the client chairs, inviting me to take a seat. Instead, I walked across the warped linoleum floor to the center of the room and scanned the framed autographed photos of Providence College basketball greats mounted on the cracked plaster walls: Jimmy Walker, Ray Flynn, Jim Thompson, Johnny Egan, Vinnie Ernst, Kevin Stacom, Lenny Wilkins, Joey Hassett, Marvin Barnes, Billy Donovan, Ernie DiGregorio. I was still looking when McCracken finished his call, popped out of his chair, and walked over to grip my hand in his customary metacarpal-crushing handshake.

  “When is my picture going up?” I asked.

  “Soon as you get off the bench.”

  Fans of private eye novels have a warped idea of what real private detectives do. Most of their work is routine: delivering summonses in civil cases, locating child support delinquents, investigating pilfering from warehouses, spying on unfaithful spouses, checking the validity of insurance claims, and doing background checks on job applicants. From time
to time, they might search for missing persons the police have given up on or help lawyers gather evidence in civil and criminal cases. Some P.I.s specialize, but McCracken, like most of them, did a little of this and a little of that. Unlike Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, real private detectives rarely investigate murders. Most of them go their whole lives without beating somebody up or gunning somebody down.

  “How’s business?” I asked as I dropped into one of the visitor’s chairs.

  “Great!” he said.

  “Really? Because this place is a dump.”

  “I’m trying to keep overhead down for now,” he said, “but I’m getting so much work that I’m thinking about hiring a spunky secretary and moving into a two-room suite in the Turk’s Head Building in the spring.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Maybe I can get Effie Perine.”

  “She’s spunky all right, but she’s also loyal. You’ll never lure her away from Sam Spade.”

  “Things keep going this good and I’ll need a partner to help shoulder the load,” he said. “You oughta give it some thought. From what I hear, the Dispatch is going down the tubes.”

  “Thanks. I will. That why you wanted to see me? To offer me a job?”

  “One of the reasons.”

  “What else?”

  “You looking into that Colfax Street child porn bust?”

  “I’m not,” I said.

  “Maybe you should.”

  “And why would that be?”

  “Day after the raid, this guy shows up in my office. Six two, blue eyes, gray hair, expensive razor cut. Wearing an Armani suit and a TAG Heuer watch. Maybe fifty or fifty-five. Wants to know do I have any Providence police contacts.”

  “Which you do.”

  “Of course.”

  “And?”

  “He asks could I give him a heads-up if his name surfaces in the child porn investigation.”

  “What’s this guy’s name?”

  “He says I don’t need to know until I agree to take his case.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I pulled out the top drawer of my desk, reached in, and told him I was going to shoot him if he didn’t get the hell out of my office.”

  “Got a gun in the top drawer, do you?”

  “I keep my Sturm, Ruger in the safe, but he didn’t know that.”

  “Recognize him?”

  “I didn’t. But it was a busy morning. Hard to find a parking space on the street. I figured he must have left his car in the municipal lot behind the town hall. As soon as he went out the door, I slipped out the back, checked the lot, and watched him get behind the wheel of a black, year-old Jaguar XJ.”

  “Piece of shit,” I said.

  “Yeah. Shouldn’t drive one of those unless you can afford to have a mechanic follow you around in a tow truck.”

  “Get the plate?”

  “Of course.”

  “Run it?”

  “Duh.”

  “So who is he?”

  “Charles B. Wayne.”

  “Doctor Charles B. Wayne?”

  “The same.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  I thanked him and got up to go.

  “Mulligan?”

  “Um?”

  “If the good doctor is a chicken hawk, do me a favor?”

  “What?”

  “Bury the sonuvabitch.”

  11

  The most interesting thing about Mary and Joseph Mendoza was that they had eight children and had named the three girls Mary and the five boys Joseph. I wondered how Joseph Sr. would manage now that his wife, just thirty-seven, had died from what the undertaker described as “a short illness.”

  I had two obits to go when Jimmy Cagney screamed, “You’ll never take me alive, copper!” The line from his 1931 classic, Public Enemy, was my ringtone for incoming from law enforcement sources.

  “Mulligan.”

  “Steve Parisi.”

  “Afternoon, Captain.”

  “Thought you’d like to know Vanessa Maniella and her mother came home Tuesday.”

  “Three days ago?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Guess you’ve been a little busy,” I said.

  “Be grateful I called at all, smart-ass.”

  “They ID the body?”

  Five seconds ticked off. Maybe six. “No, they did not.”

  “It’s not him?”

  “We still don’t know.”

  “What? Okay. Start from the beginning and tell me the whole story.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Hey, you called me, remember? What can you tell me?”

  Five seconds again. “Just that they’re home. When I drove up to their place on the lake again Tuesday night, they were pulling a couple of big suitcases out of the Lexus.”

  “Where’d they been?”

  “They declined to say.”

  “Did they say anything?”

  “I asked when did they last speak to Sal.”

  “And?”

  “Vanessa informed me that she and her mother had nothing to say to the police and referred me to her attorney.”

  “Why would she act like that?”

  “Been asking myself the same question.”

  “Makes you wonder if maybe she had him killed, doesn’t it?”

  That five-second delay again. “The thought crossed my mind.”

  “Got tired of waiting for the old man to turn the rest of the business over to her, did she?”

  “I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” I said. “So who’s the lawyer?”

  “Some broad named Yolanda Mosley-Jones.”

  “At McDougall, Young, and Limone,” I said.

  “You know her?”

  “We’ve met.”

  “What’s she like?”

  “Girl of my dreams. Young, pretty, smart, honest, and legs that go all the way to the floor.”

  “If she’s so honest,” he said, “what’s she doing representing the Maniellas?”

  “Hey, porn’s not illegal. And a girl’s gotta make a living.”

  “Name like Yolanda, sounds like she might be black.”

  “That she is.”

  “Didn’t know that was your type.”

  “The good-looking ones are all my type,” I said. “So what did she have to say?”

  “I left a message. She didn’t return the call.”

  “Maybe she’ll return mine,” I said. I’d been looking for an excuse to call her, and now I had one.

  “And you’ll let me know what you learn?”

  “After three days or so, you mean?”

  “Wiseass.”

  “Maybe I’ll drop in on Vanessa, too. See if she likes reporters more than cops.”

  “I’m betting not,” he said.

  * * *

  The Maniellas’ front door had a mahogany frame, a round-top transom, four panels of stained glass, and a hand-wrought iron grill. This was the first time I’d seen it in daylight. I stood on the porch and admired it for a moment before I rang the fleur-de-lis-shaped doorbell. The door swung open to reveal a stout Hispanic woman in a demure black-and-white maid’s uniform. Behind her, I caught a glimpse of a vast foyer with a sparkling white marble floor.

  “Yes?” she said, although it came out sounding more like “Jes?”

  “Is the lady of the house in?”

  “Who may I say is calling?”

  “Mr. Mulligan of the Dispatch.”

  “Un momento, por favor,” she said, and firmly shut the door.

  I stood on the porch and looked out over the lake, its surface riffling in a stiff breeze. It was late in the season for water sports, but three teenagers in wet suits roared past on Jet Skis, throwing spray onto the Maniellas’ floating wooden dock. It was a good five minutes before the maid swung the door open again and stood aside so Vanessa Ma
niella could block the entrance with her ample hips.

  I knew her to be thirty-five, but she appeared younger in knee-high calf boots and the kind of short, clingy skirt favored by the Kardashian sisters. Bleached blond tresses tumbled to her shoulders in a style suitable for one of Sal’s MILF videos. Vanessa looked me up and down and smirked.

  “How was Rome?” I asked, trying an old reporting gambit. Pretend you know something you don’t, and more often than not a source will either confirm it or correct you.

  “Barcelona,” she blurted out. “We were in Barcelona.”

  “Don’t suppose your dad came along for the ride.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say about that.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  She was closing the door now.

  “Is he in the morgue?”

  I heard the dead bolt click.

  “Why won’t you ID the body?” I shouted. “Is the maid in the country legally? Are you paying her Social Security taxes?” Not that I cared about that. It was just something to say.

  I climbed into Secretariat, cranked the ignition, peeled out of the driveway, and tore down the narrow causeway at a reckless speed. After weeks of work on the Maniellas, I still had nothing worth printing. The frustration was getting to me. I felt like pounding on something.

  12

  It was nearly eight in the evening when I picked up a burger and fries to go at the lunch cart next to Providence City Hall and called Joseph DeLucca from the Bronco. He sounded groggy, as if my phone call had awakened him. Must have been his day off.

  “Mulligan? Whassup?”

  “I need a favor.”

  “Name it.”

  “I need to hit something.”

  “Sure. No prob. Vinny gave me a key to the gym. Meet you there in thirty minutes.”

  Vinny Pazienza’s private gym was in an old brick firehouse on Laurel Hill Avenue. Inside, the walls were hung with fight memorabilia: Everlast boxing gloves, framed sports pages, fight cards, and boxing posters from Foxwoods, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City.

  Vinny was a local folk hero, partly because of his inspiring story and partly because he was small but tenacious—just like Rhode Island. He grew up as a skinny undersized kid who played a mean Little League shortstop, provoked on-field brawls, and kept the playground bullies at bay with his wild-eyed ferocity. When he was fourteen, he sat in the dark in the Park Cinema in his hometown of Cranston, watched Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed beat each other half to death, and decided then and there that he wanted to become a boxer. He hit the weights, built himself a gladiator’s body muscle by muscle, won a hundred out of a hundred twelve amateur bouts, turned pro in 1983, and defeated Greg Haugen for the IBF world lightweight championship in 1987.