Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel

by Bruce DeSilva

  “Pretty much,” I said, “although somehow she made it seem a little more convincing.”

  “Taking your moral guidance from a madam now?”

  “Better her than Reverend Crenson. Besides, my old confessor Father Donovan is no longer handy. The bishop shipped his pedophile ass off to Woonsocket.”

  “There are other priests.”

  “I prefer a lifelong friend to a stranger in a white collar.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “There’s no denying that prostitution is as old as mankind,” she said, “but so are stealing, abortion, and murder.”

  I didn’t want to get sidetracked by the abortion argument, so what I said was, “I see your point.”

  “I’ve seen how troubled you are by the child porn you’ve been exposed to,” she said.

  “What’s that have to do with prostitution? Men who lust after children have no interest in grown women.”

  “It all flows from the same sewer,” she said. “The commercialization of sex debases and dehumanizes us all. It leads people to think of one another as pieces of meat instead of creatures with immortal souls.”

  I must have looked doubtful because she added, “And if you don’t believe that, there’s always ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’”

  “Says who?”

  “I can’t believe you just said that.”

  “As I understand it,” I said, “those words were written three thousand years ago by the Hebrew elder of a tribe that treated women as property.”

  She shook her head sadly and fell silent for a moment. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper.

  “I don’t deny that my faith in the church has been shaken,” she said. “The doctrine of papal infallibility is tyrannical bullshit. The church’s medieval views on AIDS and contraception have gotten thousands of people killed. The bishops who protected pedophile priests for decades are fucking criminals. If I had the balls, I’d indict the sons of bitches. But I’ve never turned away from the Word of God.”

  “Good for you, Fiona,” I said. “Good for you.”

  56

  “The publisher specifically requested you, Mulligan,” Lomax said.

  “How come?”

  “Apparently he liked the way you handled the Derby Ball story last September. Besides, this soiree is right up your alley.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s a fund-raiser for the Milk Carton Crusade.”

  “What the hell’s that?”

  “Another one of those groups dedicated to finding missing children.”

  “What’s the publisher’s interest?”

  “I gather he’s a contributor.”

  “Do I have to wear a monkey suit again?”

  “You can put in for it.”

  “Hotel?”

  “No. We need to keep expenses to a minimum. You can drive down and back the same night, or if you want you can stay at Mason’s place. He already offered.”

  So Tuesday night after work, I found myself riding shotgun in Mason’s restored 1967 E-Type Series 1 Jaguar as it zoomed over Narragansett Bay on the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge, Providence a cold glance over our shoulders.

  “Hungry?” he asked.

  “I could eat something.”

  So he slipped down a few side streets and parked in front of the White Horse Tavern.

  “It’s on me,” Mason said as we settled into a booth; so I ordered the prime tenderloin beef appetizer and the butter-poached New England lobster, the most expensive items on the menu. For Mason it was the White Horse clam chowder and the chanterelle mushroom risotto. He ordered wine; I wanted beer but figured it was safer to stick with water.

  “Still no developments on the missing girl?” he asked.

  “Julia Arruda?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Not even a whisper.”

  “Think she’s dead?”

  “I don’t know, Thanks-Dad.”

  “You’ve been looking down lately, Mulligan. Are you okay?”

  “Never better.”

  “The fund-raiser doesn’t start till eight tomorrow night, so you can sleep in.”

  “That would be my plan.”

  “So what do you say we do the town tonight?”

  “I’m not really in the mood.”

  “Come on, Mulligan. We can hit the Landing or the Boom Boom Room, have a few drinks, maybe get lucky with a couple of Salve Regina coeds out for a good time.”

  “I’m too damn old for coeds. I’d rather go to your place, watch CSI: Miami, and turn in early.”

  Mason still lived on the family estate off Ocean Drive, where he had his own apartment with a separate entrance. Once inside, he opened a couple of bottles of Orval, a Belgian beer I’d never heard of, and joined me on a black leather couch in front of a huge flat-screen. As the CSI: Miami theme began to play, I told my gut to shut up and took a sip.

  “Why do you watch this show?” Mason said. “It sucks.”

  I pointed at the screen and said, “Because of this part right here.”

  David Caruso, aka Lieutenant Horatio Caine, stared at a naked, impossibly tanned young woman floating facedown in an impossibly blue swimming pool. He slowly raised both of his hands, gripped his sunglasses at the hinges, and ever so slowly slid them off his pasty, pocked face. He studied the girl some more and grimaced as only David Caruso can. Then he raised the sunglasses ever so slowly and, with the deliberation of a surgeon performing laparoscopic liver surgery, slid them on again.

  We both laughed.

  “He does the same thing every week,” I said. “It’s his signature move. I wonder if he realizes how ridiculous it looks.”

  We hung in there for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but when The Colbert Report came on I was ready to turn in. Mason graciously offered me his bed, but I took the couch. Shortly after the lights went out, the little girl with no arms made her nightly appearance. She didn’t have anything to say tonight. She just stared down at me and sadly shook her head.

  57

  Mason drove leisurely down Bellevue Avenue past the fairy-tale castles that the robber barons had built. As we slid by Clarendon Court, I saw Officer Phelps parked in the entrance, keeping a sharp eye out for any reasonably priced, and therefore suspicious, automobiles. I was grateful to be riding in a Jag.

  Mason joined the procession of supercharged European carriages heading toward Belcourt Castle, and when we reached its gilded gates, he pulled over to let me out.

  “Just call when you want me to pick you up,” he said.

  “Will do, Thanks-Dad.”

  Inside the walled courtyard, the same Emperor Penguin was manning the mansion’s oaken door. I handed him my invitation, and he checked it against the guest list.

  “Things must be looking up,” he said. “You smell better, and you’re using your real name.”

  The spread on the antique walnut trestle table in the vast first-floor dining room wasn’t as lavish as the last time, the charity prudent with its donors’ money; but the chicken-pecan finger sandwiches tasted good.

  I jogged up the winding oak staircase to the vaulted ballroom, where a string ensemble was playing chamber music at a volume low enough to encourage conversation. About three hundred people, the men in black tie and the women in what I took to be this season’s designer originals, stood in clusters and murmured.

  Beside the huge hearth a larger group, perhaps a dozen people, had gathered around a slim figure with a lion’s mane of pewter-gray hair. A black pirate’s patch covered his right eye. The face resembled one I’d seen on more than a dozen book jackets, but it was grayer and more deeply lined than I remembered, so I couldn’t be sure.

  Andrew Vachss was the author of a series of novels about a career criminal named Burke who specialized in hunting down pedophiles, ripping them off, and putting them in the ground. Vachss was also a lawyer known for suing child abusers on behalf of their victims with more than the customary courtroom vigor. A decade ago
, when the defendant in one of his lawsuits was found dead at the bottom of a New Hampshire quarry, the authorities wondered if Vachss had put him there but they quickly dismissed the idea. The complete text of his statement to the police: “I hope his eyes were open all the way down.”

  He’d be a great interview for tonight’s story—if this were actually him.

  I strode over, stood next to the man, waited for a lull in the conversation, and stuck out my right hand. “I’m Mulligan, a reporter for the Providence Dispatch. Can I have a few words with you?”

  His one good eye slid from my face down to my shoes and slowly back up again. Then he spun on the heels of his black wing tips and turned his back on me. Only then did I notice that Sal Maniella had been in the group around him.

  “Was that Andrew Vachss?” I asked.

  “If he’d wanted you to know his name,” Maniella said, “he’d have told you.”

  Pressing him wouldn’t have gotten me anywhere, so I changed the subject. “Why are you here? Come to make a contribution to the cause?”

  “The Milk Carton Crusade was formed by two women from Pittsburgh whose daughters were murdered by the same pedophile two years ago,” he said. “The organization doesn’t have much of a track record yet, but I thought I’d listen to their pitch.”

  “Going to hang around and enjoy the Newport nightlife for a few days?”

  “No, I don’t think so. But before I head back tomorrow, I’m going to go over to the Cliff Walk, say a prayer for Dante, and toss a wreath into the water.”

  “Don’t get too close to the edge,” I said. “The rocks are pretty slippery there.”

  “Given any more thought to coming to work for me?”

  “Some.”

  “Look, why don’t you come along tomorrow and show me the spot where Dante was killed? Afterwards I’ll buy you breakfast at the coffeehouse in Washington Square, and we can talk some more about my job offer.”

  So at nine thirty the next morning I was waiting at the end of Mason’s long cobblestoned drive when a black Hummer rolled up and its back door swung open. I climbed in, sat beside Sal, and saw that Black Shirt, or maybe it was Gray Shirt, was behind the wheel. I’d never ridden in one of those monstrosities before. Just sitting in it felt ridiculous.

  The ex-SEAL parked illegally near the entrance to the Cliff Walk, plucked a Rhode Island State Police “Official Business” pass from behind the visor, and dropped it on the dash. I didn’t ask how he came by it; he probably bought it from the same counterfeiter who sold me mine.

  We got out and strolled through the entrance to the Cliff Walk, the ex-SEAL lugging a funeral wreath of hydrangea, chrysanthemums, and gladioli. A light drizzle fell from the steel-gray sky. Below us, fog hugged the surface of the ocean, but I could hear the surf angrily slap the face of the cliff. The footing was treacherous, the wet schist slick beneath our feet. I turned north and led the way. We’d gone about thirty yards when I stopped and studied the rocks.

  “This is where it happened,” I said.

  Sal just stood there for a moment, staring at where the ocean was supposed to be, but in this weather there was nothing to see. Then he bowed his head and prayed:

  “God our Father, your power brings us to birth, your providence guides our lives, and by your command we return to—”

  It was the kind of rain that muffles sound. I could barely hear the blasts from the foghorn at Castle Hill. Even without the rain, I doubt I could have distinguished between the smacking of the waves and the soft slap of sneakers on wet rock. I didn’t know he had come up behind us until I heard the first pop.

  58

  I spun toward the sound and saw a hand gripping a little nickel revolver. A thin brown finger squeezed the trigger, and the gun popped again.

  Slugs fired from cheap little handguns are low-caliber and have a slow muzzle velocity. When they enter the back of a skull, they don’t come out the front. They just bounce around inside.

  Sal crumpled.

  The ex-SEAL dropped the funeral wreath and reached inside the flap of his raincoat.

  I grabbed for Sal and missed.

  A Glock 17 appeared in the ex-SEAL’s hand.

  I reached for Sal again.

  The Glock cracked, the muzzle flashing in the corner of my eye.

  Sal toppled over the edge and vanished in the fog.

  I reached for the .45 tucked in the small of my back, but it wasn’t there. It was miles away, hanging on my wall.

  The Glock cracked again. The second shot blew the assassin off his feet, the little pistol sailing from his hand and clattering on the rocks. He landed in a broken heap at my feet, blood welling from a hole in his chest. A quarter of his skull was gone, but there was enough left for me to make the ID.

  Dying hadn’t changed him all that much. Marcus Washington, King Felix’s sixteen-year-old gun hand, still had those flat, dead eyes.

  The ex-SEAL tucked the Glock back inside his raincoat. “Dumb fuck,” he said. “If he’d shot me first, he could have iced all three of us, no problem.”

  He kicked Marcus savagely with the toe of his boot. Then he unzipped his fly, straddled the corpse, and urinated on it.

  I bent down, picked up the funeral wreath, and tossed it into the sea. I was reaching for my cell to dial 911 when the truth hit me with the force of a newspaper bundle heaved from the back of a delivery truck.

  59

  The Newport cops had some questions for me. Then Parisi wanted his turn. He drove me back to state police headquarters, tucked me away in an interrogation room, and kept me waiting for two hours before coming in to grill me. This time, he didn’t confiscate my cell phone; so while I was waiting I called Lomax and fed him details about the murder. When Parisi finally got to me, I answered all of his questions.

  But I didn’t tell him everything.

  By the time he finished with me, it was nearly midnight. I was famished and dead tired. The captain was kind enough to drive me home. I stepped inside my apartment, opened the refrigerator, and found a half quart of milk, two bottles of beer, and a block of cheddar cheese. The milk was sour, so I poured it down the sink. I couldn’t remember when I bought the cheese, but it was still yellow and I didn’t see anything growing on it. I gnawed the cheese standing up, washed it down with one of the beers, and took the second one into the bedroom. There, I stripped off my clothes and left them where they fell. Then I took my laptop and the beer to bed with me.

  Could urine be tested for DNA? I didn’t know. I fired up the laptop and started searching for the answer.

  * * *

  When I awoke the next morning, the laptop was still on my belly, the screen dark and the battery dead. Somewhere, Don Henley was singing “Dirty Laundry.” For a moment, I thought it was coming from my neighbor’s apartment. Then I shook off the cobwebs, got out of bed, picked my jeans off the floor, and plucked the cell from the pocket.

  “Mulligan.”

  “Where the hell are you?” Lomax said. “It’s nearly ten, for chrissake.”

  “I’m fine, thanks,” I said. “And how are you?”

  “I don’t have time for pleasantries, Mulligan. Nice job last night, but I need you to get your ass in here to write Maniella’s obit.”

  “I can do better than that,” I said. “Plan on a page one start with a half-page jump inside.”

  * * *

  Sunday morning, my long story was stripped across the top of page one:

  Salvatore Alonso Maniella, 65, the reclusive Rhode Island pornographer who was murdered in Newport on Thursday, was more than he seemed.

  Although he had no scruples about exploiting women for profit, he bore a deep antipathy toward anyone who sexually abused children, the result of a traumatic incident that occurred in his youth. For at least a decade, he secretly contributed millions of dollars to organizations that fought for missing and abused children and their families.

  And there is mounting evidence that military-trained assassins in his employ routin
ely hunted down and killed pedophiles. Among their apparent victims: the three child pornographers who were shot to death in the Chad Brown housing project; a pedophile priest in Fon du Lac, Wis.; a child pornography collector in Edison, NJ; and Dr. Charles Bruce Wayne, the Brown University Medical School dean who had a similar taste in entertainment. All of those killings occurred in the last few months, but there could well have been others.

  In a display of contempt, the killers often urinated on their victims, apparently unaware that urine contains traces of DNA that could be used to identify them.…

  Twenty minutes after the paper hit the streets, Jimmy Cagney’s voice screeched from my cell: “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

  60

  “What the fuck?”

  “Morning, Captain.”

  “How the hell did you figure all this out?”

  “Remember when Maniella’s ex-SEALs trashed the Tongue and Groove ten years ago?”

  “I heard about it, yeah.”

  “When they were done, they pissed on the stripper poles.”

  “Where’d you get that?”

  “From a confidential source.”

  “Going to tell me who?”

  “No.”

  “And the ex-SEAL who took out Maniella’s murderer urinated on the body,” he said.

  “He did.”

  “Sounds like you’re jumping to an awfully big conclusion.”

  “There’s more.”

  “What?”

  “The Chad Brown murder scene stunk of urine,” I said, “and so did Dr. Wayne’s study.”

  “We figured the victims evacuated when they got shot.”

  “Maybe they did,” I said, “but they weren’t the only ones who pissed on your crime scenes.”

  “I’ve already ordered DNA testing of the victims’ clothing,” he said. “That should tell us if you’re right.”

  “I am.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me about this when I questioned you Thursday night?”

  “Maybe I just figured it out,” I said. “Or maybe it slipped my mind.”

  “Why didn’t you give me a heads-up before the story hit the paper?”