Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel

by Bruce DeSilva

  “Roger Williams was a pacifist,” Fiona said. “The sword he wielded was the Word. The Sword of God seems to prefer bullets. I liked them for the shooting at the abortion doctor’s house in Cranston last fall, but Parisi couldn’t make a case.”

  We ordered another round, drank in silence, and pondered the possibilities.

  “What we’ve got,” I said, “is a lot of theories and nothing to back any of them up.”

  “The only thing we can be sure of,” she said, “is that Sal Maniella is still dead.”

  31

  The snow turned into a blizzard overnight. By first light, it was nearly two feet deep and still falling. Cars skidded into each other. Schools and businesses closed. Thirty thousand Narragansett Electric customers lost power. The mayor went on TV and urged everyone with a nonessential job to stay at home. Sugary flakes clung to tree branches, blanketed trash-strewn sidewalks, drifted across potholed streets, and transformed our hideous city hall into a fairy castle. I managed to write the weather story without using the phrase winter wonderland.

  I’d just finished the piece when I heard “Who Are You?” by the Who, my ringtone for unrecognized numbers, playing in my pants pocket.

  “Mulligan.”

  “It’s Sal Maniella. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

  * * *

  A stiff wind howled out of the northeast. Drifts formed, blew away, and re-formed across the streets. The plows couldn’t keep up. Secretariat groped his way west at ten miles an hour on Route 44, struggling to hold the road. As we passed the deserted Apple Valley Mall, he skidded into a drift and stubbornly refused to budge. I fetched a collapsible shovel from the back, dug him out, threw rock salt under the wheels for traction, and pressed on. By the time I reached Greenville, I could barely see the road through the windshield. I switched on the GPS so I wouldn’t miss the left turn onto West Greenville Road again, but the device couldn’t locate a satellite through the thick cloud cover. I managed to find the turn anyway and crept along, searching for the big white colonial that marked the entrance to unpaved Pine Ledge Road.

  I’d just spotted it when a figure in a navy-blue parka appeared out of the gloom and threw both hands in the air, directing me to stop. I pumped the brakes, and Secretariat skidded to a halt. I rolled down the window, and Black Shirt, or maybe it was Gray Shirt, filled it with his cinder-block head.

  “I just plowed the access road,” he said, “but it’s still treacherous along the top of the dike. I damn near went into the drink. We’re gonna leave the cars here and walk in.”

  I turned right onto Pine Ledge, nosed into a freshly cleared space at the side of the road, and parked beside a Jeep Wrangler with a plow mounted on the front. Next to it was another car that must have been there all day, or maybe even overnight. It was smothered with snow. As I walked behind it, I knocked enough off the back to identify it as a burgundy Acura ZDX.

  Snow crunched under my Reeboks and the ex-SEAL’s Timberland boots as we trudged west toward the dike, our hands buried in our jacket pockets. It was an eight-hundred-yard walk to the house, and my nose was already numb from the cold.

  “Where’s the forty-five at?” the ex-SEAL asked.

  “Tucked inside my jacket.”

  “I won’t undress you now, but when we get to the house I’ll have to take it away from you.”

  “Still want to beat me up?”

  “If I did, you’d already be turning the snow red.”

  We walked on in silence. New ice hugged the edge of the lake. The tracks of a lone coyote danced across the snow cover.

  Crack!

  The big guy spun toward the sound, a Glock 17 suddenly in his right hand. Another crack, and then another as pine boughs snapped under their heavy burden of snow. The ex-SEAL smiled to himself and slipped the weapon back into his deep jacket pocket.

  A drift blocked the Maniellas’ wide front steps. We bypassed them, entered through the side door to the garage, and stomped the snow from our feet. I raised my arms without being asked, and the big guy unzipped my jacket, stuck his paw inside, and pulled out the Colt. We removed our jackets, shook the snow from them, and hung them on a row of brass pegs mounted on the garage wall. Then he led me inside and turned me over to the stout maid.

  “Mr. Maniella say wait in library,” she said, and led me across the marble floor of the foyer to a large room with a wood fire crackling in a fieldstone fireplace. I walked across a black-and-tan Persian carpet and knelt before the flames. When the feeling returned to my nose and feet, I stood and took a good look around. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows with a panoramic view of the frozen lake. The other three walls were lined with built-in cherry bookcases that held the last thing I expected to find in a pornographer’s house. Books. Many of them were bound in what appeared to be original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century calf and Moroccan leather. Titles stamped in gilt glittered on the spines. In a corner of the room, a spiral staircase led to a gallery, where more built-in bookshelves covered all four walls.

  I turned to the nearest shelf and ran my finger along a row of books by Mark Twain: Following the Equator, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Innocents Abroad, Letters from the Earth, and a dozen more. I slid Life on the Mississippi from the shelf, opened it to the title page, and found “S. L. Clemens” scrawled in brown ink. A signed first edition. I gingerly returned it to its place.

  I strolled the room, stopped at a section filled with period books on the Civil War, and took the first volume of Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant from a shelf. In the center of the room, two easy chairs and a sofa upholstered in matching chocolate calfskin surrounded a low marble-top table. The table had been set with a sterling coffee service and dainty blue-and-white cups and saucers. Beside them were two crystal decanters filled with amber liquid. I sat on the sofa and looked longingly at the decanters. Then I poured a cup of hot coffee, cut it with lots of cream, and downed it in a swallow. Beside the couch, a lamp with a stained glass shade rested on an antique cherry side table. I switched it on and nothing happened. The power was out. The day was fading now, the last gray light filtering through the wall of windows. I opened the book and could make out the words on the first page:

  “Man proposes and God disposes.” There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.…

  I was four pages into the first chapter when a deep voice rumbled: “I see you’ve made yourself at home.”

  I glanced up to see Salvatore Maniella, dressed in pressed jeans and a tan cardigan sweater, peering down at me with a kindly look on his face. I knew him to be sixty-five years old, but he looked younger thanks to good genes, clean living, or a skilled plastic surgeon. He sat beside me on the couch and stretched out his hand. I took it and didn’t give it back.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Checking for a pulse.”

  The right corner of his mouth curled in a half smile. Then he took the book from my lap, checked the title, and handed it back to me.

  “I always meant to read this,” I said, “but I never got around to it.”

  “When we’re finished here, why don’t you take both volumes home with you,” he said. “Just return them when you’re done.”

  “I wouldn’t dare,” I said. “What if something happened to them?”

  “Grant’s memoir was the bestselling book of the nineteenth century,” he said. “It’s not a rare book.”

  “But some of these are.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “How long have you been collecting?”

  “When I was a student at Bryant College, I picked up a Fitzgerald first edition for fifty cents at a library sale, and it got me hooked.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I found a stack of Black Mask and Dime Detective pulp magazines at a flea market when I was a teenager, and I’ve been looking for more ever since.”

  “You must have amassed quite a collection by now.”

  “No
t really. A hundred, maybe, and a lot of them are chipped and torn.”

  “That the only thing you collect?”

  I cast my eyes across the shelves and said, “Nothing that would interest you.”

  “Everything interests me.”

  I poured myself another cup of coffee. He poured himself a drink from one of the decanters and then looked at me expectantly.

  “Over the years,” I said, “I picked up about fifty old blues records from the 1940s and ’50s. I also accumulated several hundred vintage paperback crime novels: Brett Halliday, Carter Brown, Richard S. Prather, Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald. It’s all gone now, though.”

  “Why is that?”

  “The woman I’ve been trying to divorce for two years is keeping my stuff out of spite.”

  “That must upset you.”

  “Only when I think about it.”

  The maid waddled into the room carrying two silver candelabra. She placed them on the marble-top table, lit the candles, and exited without speaking. Then Vanessa Maniella entered, nodded to me, and sat facing us in one of the easy chairs.

  “So, Sal,” I said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  32

  Salvatore Maniella rose from the sofa, walked to the library door, opened it, and spoke to Black Shirt, or maybe Gray Shirt, who was standing watch in the hall. “Please ask our other guest to join us.”

  A minute later she strode into the room, sat in the other chair, and crossed those long, long legs.

  “I understand no introductions are necessary,” Sal said.

  “Some reason you feel the need to have your lawyer present?” I asked.

  “Just being careful.”

  “I’m gonna take a wild stab here and say the body in the morgue isn’t you.”

  “No.”

  “So who is it?”

  “His name was Dante Puglisi.”

  “Age?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “Address?”

  “He lived here.”

  “A relative?”

  “No. He was in my employ. Had been for a long time.”

  “How long?”

  “Since we mustered out of the SEALs together.”

  “What did he do for you?”

  “Little of this, little of that. Driver. Bodyguard. Workout partner. Sometimes he helped out around the place.”

  “Didn’t his family wonder where he was the last three months?”

  “His parents were killed in a car accident twenty years ago. We were the closest thing to family he had left.”

  “He looked a lot like you.”

  “He did.”

  “Similar features, same height and weight, same eye and hair color, same Van Damme arms and Schwarzenegger chest.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Was anything done to enhance this resemblance?”

  “About ten years ago, he had a little work done, yes.”

  “Why?”

  Sal glanced at Yolanda. She nodded, indicating it was okay to answer.

  “Shortly after I opened our strip clubs, I became involved in a dispute with some of our state’s more unsavory characters.”

  “Carmine Grasso and Johnny Dio,” I said.

  “You know of this?”

  “I do.”

  “Well, perhaps you can understand why it seemed advisable to employ a double.”

  “When the two of you were together, the Mob wouldn’t know which one to shoot,” I said.

  “Quite right.”

  “And you could send him on errands posing as you.”

  “From time to time I did that, yes.”

  “Last September, he went to the Derby Ball in your place.”

  “He did.”

  “And it got him killed.”

  “Yes.”

  “What was he there for?”

  “I’d prefer not to get into that.”

  “I was there, too,” I said, “covering the event for the Dispatch.”

  “Were you now.”

  “I was. I saw him there, cozying up to the governor. Of course, I thought it was you. The governor probably thought so, too.”

  “Perhaps he did.”

  “Conducting some business for you with the governor, was he?”

  “That’s not a subject I am prepared to discuss.”

  “Does it bother you that you put a target on Dante Puglisi’s back?”

  “More than you know.”

  “Of course it bothers him,” Vanessa broke in. “Dante wasn’t just an employee. He was like family.” She swiped at her eyes—maybe wiping away a tear, maybe just making a show of it.

  “Yes, he was,” Sal said. He reached for one of the decanters, poured three inches of whiskey into a tumbler, and drank it straight down. “Please help yourselves,” he said. “The Scotch is Bowmore, a seventeen-year-old single-malt. The bourbon is sixteen-year-old A. H. Hirsch Reserve.”

  No one did. Sal poured himself another.

  “Dante knew the risks,” Sal said. “He volunteered for the job, and I paid him well for it, but that doesn’t make us feel any better. I miss him every single day.”

  “The body looked enough like you to fool the state police,” I said.

  “Apparently so.”

  “So you decided to play dead.”

  “I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Surely the reason is obvious.”

  “You didn’t want the killers to know they hit the wrong guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think the Mob was behind this?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had any trouble with them in years.”

  “But they have long memories,” I said.

  “So I’ve been told.”

  “Anyone else who might want you dead?”

  “I’ve made some enemies over the years.”

  “Families and boyfriends of porn actors?”

  “A few of them, yes.”

  “Rivals in the porn business?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “The Sword of God?”

  “They’re a dangerous bunch of lunatics, and they’ve made it clear that they disapprove of us,” Sal said.

  “The Sword of God hates everybody,” Vanessa broke in. “Gays, Jews, blacks, liberals, moderates, feminists, abortion doctors, Obama, the media, the government. They scare the hell out of me.”

  “With so many enemies out there, why resurface now, Sal?”

  “Something came up that required my attention.”

  “What would that be?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Can you tell me where you’ve been for the last three months?”

  “Here and there,” he said.

  “That’s a little vague.”

  “I prefer to keep it that way.”

  “Got a hideout you don’t want anyone knowing about?”

  “Something like that.”

  “The state police asked the navy for help in identifying the body and got stonewalled,” I said. “You have something to do with that?”

  Sal looked at Yolanda, and she shook her head.

  “Still got some old pals working in the Pentagon, do you?”

  Sal didn’t answer.

  “I assume your family knew you were alive,” I said.

  Sal glanced at Yolanda again. “We are not prepared to discuss that subject,” she said.

  I turned back to Sal. “Obviously your wife and daughter knew you had a double. You said he lived here.”

  “Yes,” Sal said.

  “Yet your wife positively identified his body as you,” I said.

  “Anita Maniella is an older woman,” Yolanda said. “She was distraught and confused.” I was surprised by how different she sounded. Her lawyer voice was nothing like her “I don’t date white guys” voice. You might think she’d never met me before.

  “Mrs. Maniella is only sixty-two,” I said. “This is the story you’re going to stick with?”

/>   “That is our position, yes,” Yolanda said.

  “Oh, boy,” I said. “Captain Parisi is gonna love this. Have you talked to him yet?”

  “Not yet, no,” Yolanda said.

  “Figured you’d try the story out on me first?”

  No reply.

  “Well, if that was your plan,” I said, “I can tell you right now there are a lot of holes in it.”

  33

  Vanessa rose from her chair, walked to the hearth, and added a log to the fire. Then we all went to the wall of windows and looked out at the dark, still lake.

  “The roads must be treacherous,” Sal said. “You and Yolanda are welcome to dine with us and spend the night. We have plenty of room.”

  Being a pornographer’s overnight guest wasn’t on my bucket list, but it was better than the alternative.

  We ate by candlelight, Sal’s wife, Anita, joining us at a carved antique table that could have seated twice our number. Two uniformed servants piled slabs of roast beef, grilled vegetables, and mountains of mashed potatoes onto expensive-looking china plates. Classical music, something with a lot of strings, played softly from hidden speakers. Sal pulled the corks on three bottles of Pétrus, a pricey red wine whose virtues were wasted on me.

  The conversation veered from the Patriots’ playoff prospects, which we agreed were not good, to the Red Sox’s signing of pitcher John Lackey, which we all deplored. I waited for Yolanda to soften up a little and throw in something about the Cubs or the Bears, but apparently she was still on the clock. After the servants cleared away our plates and returned with hot coffee and generous wedges of apple pie, Anita turned the conversation to President Obama’s proposal to reform the banking industry.

  “What he should do is restore the wall between investment banks and retail banks,” she said. “Institutions that trade in derivatives, equity securities, fixed-income instruments, and foreign exchange should not be allowed to accept savings deposits.”