“Please take a seat,” she said. “Mr. Maniella will be with you shortly.”
I dropped into a red leather couch—probably better than anything that had been in the place when it was a discount furniture store—and Joseph sat beside me in a matching easy chair.
“Where’d you get the gun?” I asked.
“Mr. Maniella give it to me.”
“A Glock 17?”
“Just like his other bodyguards got.”
“Seventeen-cartridge magazine, right?”
“Yeah. Lot more firepower than the Remington Arms piece of crap I got at home.”
“Got a permit to carry?”
“It’s pending.”
The phone on the desk beeped. The receptionist picked it up, listened for a moment, hung up, and said, “Mr. Maniella will see you now.” She touched something on the desk, and the lock in a steel door to her right clicked. Joseph and I got up and went through it.
To our left, rusted fluorescent light fixtures, all of them dark, hung over a scarred wood floor lined with rows of makeshift plywood display tables left over from the building’s flea market days. To our right, two studio lights on tripods loomed over an unmade bed in a set built to look like a five-star hotel room. Joseph kept walking, so I followed him past another set, this one built to look like a room in a massage parlor. Over the massage table, bottles of oil glistened on a shelf that also held an impressive assortment of dildos.
The third and final set had pink walls hung with posters from the latest Twilight movie. A huge teddy bear sat at the foot of the bed. Piles of girl’s underwear had been scattered on the floor. A teenager’s room. A pretty young blonde who couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds—maybe just a hundred without the implants—was on all fours on the bed’s fresh pink sheet. She wore a Hope High School cheerleader’s uniform, the top yanked up to expose her nipples and the skirt flipped to expose her ass. An older guy with a handheld camera moved in close to catch the spittle dripping from her lips as she sucked a grinning twentysomething’s large black penis. A young guy with another handheld trained it on an enormous white phallus as its owner doused it with lubricant and then wedged it, with some difficulty, into the girl’s rectum. Her eyes got wide, and she went, “Mmmm,” pretending to enjoy it. White phallus saw me watching and winked. I gave him a wave. Dwayne Carter, a lanky murmuring dude who ran the Shell station on Broadway in Providence, had been helping me keep Secretariat on the road for years.
We tiptoed past the set and walked on until we arrived at an oak door in a new off-white wall. Joseph rapped softly, and a deep voice rumbled, “Come on in.” Joseph opened the door, stepped aside, waved me in, and closed it softly behind me. Inside, the walls were decorated with movie posters from the 1970s, when feature-length porn played in theaters all over the country: Debbie Does Dallas, Flesh Gordon, Deep Throat, The Opening of Misty Beethoven, Babylon Pink, The Devil in Miss Jones. Maniella was seated behind an enormous cherrywood desk. He could have parked his Hummer on it and had enough room left over for a sorority house lesbian orgy. He rose and strolled across a newly laid rust carpet to greet me, taking my hand in both of his.
“Mulligan,” he said. “It’s good to see you. Please sit down and make yourself comfortable.”
I dropped into a black leather couch, the back of my head inches from the blond tresses of Marilyn Chambers, the all-American girl star of the Mitchell Brothers’ 1972 gang-rape fantasy, Behind the Green Door. In front of the couch, five AVN awards, the Oscars of porn, stood on a spotless glass coffee table.
“Can I get you anything?” Maniella asked as he opened a small refrigerator and rummaged inside.
“Whatever you’re having.”
He took out a bottle of Evian, poured the contents into two crystal glasses, handed me one, and sat down beside me.
“Are you enjoying the Grant memoir?” he asked.
“I’m nearly done with the first volume,” I said, “and it really surprised me.”
“How so?”
“I had no idea that he wrote so well.”
“Yes, the prose is quite remarkable. He was a great general, too. It’s a shame he wasn’t a better president.”
“So,” I said as I cast my eyes about the room, “I like what you’ve done with the place.”
“It’s a work in progress.”
“Moving your whole operation here, are you?”
“Just part of it. Can you tell me how you found us?”
“It’s a small state, Sal. Hard to keep something like this a secret.”
“True, but perhaps we could keep it between us for now.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The opening of a movie studio is a story for the business pages.”
“I see.”
“Then again, I don’t write for the business pages.”
Sal smiled and was about to say something else when the door flew open and a black woman with a narrow waist and enormous breasts burst in. The older man I’d seen holding a camera on the movie set stepped in behind her.
“I told this muthafucka I do not do anal,” the woman screeched. Except for red high heels, she was stark naked.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have agreed to shoot a scene titled Anal Action,” the older guy shouted.
“Okay, everybody calm down,” Sal said. “Obviously, there’s been a misunderstanding. Doreen, no one is going to make you do something you are uncomfortable with.”
“That’s for damn sure,” she said.
“Would you be willing to do the scene if we paid you an additional five hundred dollars?” he asked.
“No fuckin’ way, Sal.”
“All right, then.” Sal rubbed his chin and thought for a moment. “Chet, why don’t we just change the title to reflect Doreen’s most appealing feature? Maybe we could call it Black Boobs or something. Doreen, would you be okay with Dwayne ejaculating on your nipples?”
“I can do that,” she said.
“Great. Back to work, now. And Chet, please close the door on your way out.”
“Actors,” I said as the door clicked shut. “Always complaining about the size of the dressing room, the brand of sparkling water, or somebody trying to shove something up their ass.”
“Story of my life,” Sal said.
“So tell me,” I said. “How’s business?”
“Lousy.”
“Really? I thought porn was recession-proof.”
“It is,” he said. “That’s not the problem.”
“What, then?”
“You really want to know about this?”
“I do.”
“Off the record?”
“Sure.”
“Then let me give you a little background.”
“Okay.”
“I saw you looking at my vintage posters.”
“Hard to miss them.”
“They’re from the 1970s, when Cecil Howard, the Mitchell Brothers, Howard Ziehm, and Gerard Damiano were making feature-length hard-core films. People went to the theater to watch them. They attracted the raincoat crowd, of course, but some guys went with dates.”
“So I’ve heard,” I said. “I was in diapers then.”
“The VCR changed all that,” Sal said. “Once people could rent or buy videocassettes, they preferred to watch pornography at home. But the industry still made feature-length films. We employed scriptwriters. Our movies had plots. Then porn went online, and things changed again.”
“How so?”
“Attention spans got shorter. Nobody cared about plots anymore. Ninety-minute feature films mostly disappeared. We still shoot a couple a year, but they don’t make any money. We just make them to maintain our self-respect.”
A half-dozen smart remarks ran through my mind, but I decided to keep them to myself.
“The thirty- and sixty-minute DVDs that replaced them were just compilations of ten-minute sex scenes that could be chopped and posted separately on Internet pay sites,” Sal said. “
Turned out even they were too long. Guys just watched the first penetration, fast-forwarded to the money shot, and jumped to the next video.”
“But it was profitable,” I said.
“Very.”
“So what went wrong?”
“The market got flooded. Cheap handheld video cameras made it easy for any fool to shoot a porno. The number of online pay sites exploded. A price war broke out. We used to charge forty-five dollars a month for a subscription to one of our sites. Now we’re asking nineteen ninety-five, and it’s hard to get people to pay even that.”
“Because?”
“Because our videos are being pirated. People download them and then post them by the hundreds on porn-sharing sites where anyone can watch them for free.”
“Like what happened with music,” I said.
“Exactly. Then it got worse. Now guys are shooting videos of themselves having sex with their fat wives and skanky girlfriends and posting them online.” Sal looked at me and shook his head. “I never dreamed people would be giving this stuff away.”
“Sounds like you’re in a dying business,” I said.
“I don’t think so. There are still people out there who want to see beautiful women having sex, and who want their videos to be in focus and well lighted. There’s still a market for our product, but the margins are smaller now, so we have to keep our costs down.”
“Which is why you opened the studio here,” I said.
“That’s right. The rent is lower, and the actors we’ve recruited locally work cheaper. In Southern California, we competed with Vivid, Digital Playground, and a dozen other studios for the best talent, so we had to pay the girls three to five thousand for each sex scene. Here, they take a grand and are grateful to get it.”
“What about the men?”
“In the Valley, they get five to eight hundred per scene,” he said. “Here we’re paying them two hundred, and they’re so glad for the chance to fuck girls like Doreen that they’d probably work for free.”
“Know what all this reminds me of?” I asked.
“The newspaper business?”
“Yeah. Aggregators pirate our news, readers don’t want to pay for something they can get for free, and we keep cutting costs to keep our heads above water.”
“One big difference, though,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“The pornography business will survive.” Sal rubbed his face and looked at me for a moment. “How much longer do you think the Dispatch will hold on?”
“I don’t know. Two or three years, maybe.”
“What will you do then?”
“No idea.”
“Would you consider coming to work for me?”
“Doing what?”
“You are an expert at digging up hard-to-get information,” Sal said.
“So I’ve been told.”
“I could use somebody like you.”
“What kind of information are you after?”
“That is something to be discussed after you take the job.”
I considered asking Sal about the Chad Brown murders again but then thought better of it. He’d already told me the only thing he knew was what he’d read in the paper. If he wasn’t involved, that was probably the truth. If he was involved, he wasn’t going to tell me.
I told Sal I’d think about his offer. I shook his hand, and I was on my way out when I ran into Vanessa in the hall.
“Did Dad offer you that job?” she asked.
“He did.”
“Going to take it?”
“I don’t know.”
“You should. You’d look good in front of a camera.”
“Oh God, no!”
She threw back her head and laughed. “Just kidding,” she said, and walked on by. I turned and watched her step into her father’s office.
I continued down the hall, pushed through the door to the outer office, and found it empty. The receptionist had left for the day, or maybe she’d stepped out for a smoke. I walked across the beige carpet and went through the steel door to the peeling green vestibule. Then I stopped, thought for a second, and decided to employ one of those investigative reporting techniques they don’t teach at Columbia. I turned back just as the lock in the steel door clicked shut. I punched the first four numbers into the electronic keypad, guessed at the fifth, and hit it on the fourth try. At the receptionist’s desk, I found the button that unlocked the inner door, slipped inside, and crept back to Sal’s office. Standing outside the door, I could just make out the voices.
“When did this happen?” Sal said.
“A couple of hours ago,” Vanessa said.
“Where?”
“Pawtucket.”
“Sonuvabitch,” Sal said. “It’s not over.”
Then the phone rang. Sal took the call and started arguing with someone about the price of a new video camera. I tiptoed down the hall, went back out the door, and headed for the Dispatch.
I’d just stepped into the newsroom when Lomax grabbed me by the arm and handed me a printout of a story under Mason’s byline:
Nine-year-old Julia Arruda of 22 Maynard St., Pawtucket, was abducted at 3:15 p.m. today and remains missing.
Pawtucket police said the child had been playing with friends outside the Potter Burns Elementary School, which she attends, when she was struck in the face with a snowball and decided to go home. She had just stepped onto the sidewalk when a van pulled up and the back door flew open. A man wearing a black ski mask jumped out, grabbed her, and dragged her inside. Julia’s best friend, Karen Rose, also 9, ran after the van, caught the license plate, and wrote it down in the snow, police said.
Twenty minutes later, police found the van abandoned on a side street a half-mile away. It had been reported stolen yesterday from a U-Haul lot on Harris Street in nearby South Attleboro.
42
Tuesday at dawn, FBI agents raided houses in Fort Worth, Texas; Naples, Florida; Cape Girardeau, Missouri; Andover, Massachusetts; and Edison, New Jersey. They arrested five middle-aged men and seized their computers. By Thursday, all five had been formally charged with possession of child pornography, released on bail pending trial, and fired from their jobs. According to Parisi, all five were warned that the charges might be the least of their problems—that someone out there might be gunning for them.
Shortly before noon on Friday, Charles H. Gleason of 43 Carmello Drive in Edison was waiting at a red light at the corner of Lincoln Highway and Plainfield Avenue when somebody driving a stolen Buick Regal pulled up next to him, rolled down the passenger-side window, and fired three shots from a nine-millimeter Springfield XdM. According to the Associated Press account, cops found the Buick abandoned a few miles away on the Rutgers University campus. The handgun, reported stolen from a gun shop in Providence a month earlier, was under the driver’s seat. Gleason’s wife, referring to her late husband as “the pathetic little pervert,” told the AP he’d been on his way to the state unemployment office to apply for benefits.
I didn’t care. I had a date.
43
I liked to go into Boston for the games. Secretariat had memorized the directions to Fenway Park and the Garden and knew to drop me off at a couple of watering holes along the route. The bars on Yawkey Way always served up just what I needed—cheese fries, entertaining loudmouths, and the occasional Yankees or Knicks fan who wandered into the wrong place. I didn’t often bother with the rest of the city. Providence had all the problems I could handle, and it was small enough to fit in my pocket.
Cambridge, just north of Boston, was a schizophrenic little place: halfway houses and mom-and-pop grocers interspersed with pretentious eateries and ivory towers that hummed with possibility. The center of the town was gritty enough to remind me of home.
As Yolanda and I headed to Central Square for Patricia Smith’s poetry reading, I pointed out everything I didn’t like. “Another Starbucks,” I said for the fourth time. “Another grill with an ‘e’ on the
end. And there’s another shop with an extra ‘pe’ on the end. Either folks around here can’t spell, or we’ve wandered into an alternate universe.”
Behind the wheel of her Acura, Yolanda shook her head and laughed, and I felt my breath catch on something.
“MIT and Harvard spell money,” she said. “What did you expect?”
The Cantab Lounge was in the middle of a block that lifted my spirits a little. Although it held one of those ghastly fern-filled restaurants, there was also a pizza joint that sold sloppy slices and a 7-Eleven with ancient hot dogs spinning on hot rollers—cuisine for the tipsy, late-night connoisseur.
We grabbed a parking spot behind the bar, and I walked behind my date, getting a load of the scenery. Yolanda had tucked a man’s blue oxford shirt into faded jeans that looked poured on. On the back right pocket was a familiar logo—True Religion. I don’t consider myself a prayin’ man, but …
“Mulligan, c’mon, the show’s starting soon. What are you doing back there?” I looked up to see Yolanda smirking at me from beneath the brim of a Chicago Cubs hat. She looked so gorgeous that I’d already decided to forgive her for the ball cap.
She’d finally agreed to go with me because she really wanted to hear Patricia read, didn’t want to go alone, and couldn’t find anyone else who gave a shit about poetry. Her usual ground rule applied: We were just going together, not goin’ together.
We opened the door to the Cantab and were greeted by the smell of cheap whiskey and old fried food, the sound of heartbreak on the jukebox, and dark the way drunks like it. Before my eyes adjusted, I could barely make out the forms of guys who’d probably been glued to their stools since breakfast.
We followed a stream of people down a narrow staircase to the basement, where the poetry reading was set to start in fifteen minutes. The buzz there hinted at an optimism sorely lacking on the first floor. The room was strung with colored lights. The stage was just a small area cleared at the front of the room. A DJ was playing songs that sounded like drums mumbling.
Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel Page 19
