Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (2 page)

I strolled through the courtyard to a heavy oak door where an emperor penguin with a clipboard was checking the guest list. He studied my engraved invitation and scowled.

“Surely you are not Mrs. Emma Shaw of the
Providence Dispatch
.”

“What gave me away?”

“Do this job as long as I have,” he said, “and you develop a sixth sense about this sort of thing.” He looked me up and down. “I can see that your eyebrows haven’t been plucked lately.” He paused to rub his chin with his big left wing. “And your perfume is a little off. The last dame to walk through here was wearing Shalimar. You smell like Eau d’Cigars.”

“You don’t know any women who smoke cigars?”

“Not the kind made out of tobacco,” he said. From his snicker, I could tell he took special pride in that one. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t admit you.”

“Oh yeah? Well, this isn’t the only mansion in town, buster.” I turned away to retrieve Secretariat, my pet name for the Bronco.

I’d drawn the assignment to cover the annual Derby Ball after Emma, our society reporter, quit last week, taking a buyout that trimmed thirty more jobs from a newsroom already cut to the marrow by last year’s layoffs. Ed Lomax, the city editor, had pretended he was doing me a favor.

“I can guarantee you the cover of the ‘Living’ section,” he said.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “We can no longer afford to have our baseball writer travel with the Red Sox. We don’t have a medical writer or a religion writer anymore. Our Washington bureau is down to one reporter. And
this
is a priority?”

“The ball is the final event of the weeklong Newport Jumping Derby,” he said. “It’s one of the biggest hoity-toity events of the year.”

“So they say, but who gives a shit?”

“Other than the horses?”

“I’m a little busy with
real
stories right now, boss. I’m trolling through the governor’s campaign contribution list to figure out who’s buying him off
this
year. I’m looking into the toxic waste dumping in Briggs Marsh. And I’m still trying to figure out how that little girl’s arm ended up as pig food last week.”

“Look, Mulligan. Sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. It’s part of being a professional.”

“And I have to do this particular thing because…?”

“Because the publisher’s seventeen-year-old niece is one of the equestrians.”

“Aw, crap.”

But if I couldn’t get in, I couldn’t be blamed for not covering it. Lomax didn’t need to hear how readily I took no for an answer. I’d almost made it out of the courtyard when I heard high heels clicking behind me and a woman’s voice calling my name. I quickened my pace. I was asking a valet where I could find my car when the high heels clattered to a stop beside me and their owner, a tiny middle-aged woman who’d had one face-lift too many, took me by the arm.

“I am
so
sorry for the confusion, Mr. Mulligan. Your Mr. Lomax called to say you would be taking Mrs. Shaw’s place, and I neglected to amend the guest list.”

“And you are…?”

“Hillary Proctor, but you can call me ‘Hill.’ I’m the publicity director for the Derby, and I am honored that you are joining us this evening. I do hope my lapse hasn’t caused you any embarrassment.”

Aw, crap.

“Look, Hill,” I said as she escorted me past the shrugging penguin and into the mansion’s antechamber, “I’m supposed to write about the important people who are here and describe what they are wearing, but I can’t tell the difference between a Vanderbilt draped in a Paris original and a trailer park queen dressed by J. C. Penney.”

“Of course you can’t. You’re the young man who writes about mobsters and crooked politicians. I
love
your work, darling.”

“So you’re the one,” I said.

“Oh, I do love a man with a sense of humor. How would you like to be my escort for the evening? I’ll whisper the names of the worthies and what they are wearing in your ear, and the gossips will be all atwitter about the mysterious man on my arm.”

“That’s a very gracious offer, Hill, but I like to work alone. Do you think you could just jot everything down while I wander around and soak up a little color?”

“Certainly,” she said, not looking the least bit disappointed.

I handed her my notebook, strolled across the antechamber, and stepped into a huge dining room with a mosaic pink marble floor and a wall of stained glass windows that bristled with Christian iconography. Men in tuxedos and women in ball gowns were loading china plates with shrimp, roast beef, and several dishes I couldn’t identify, all of it tastefully displayed on a sixteen-foot-long walnut trestle table. The room was illuminated by nine crystal chandeliers. The grande dame who owned the house liked to boast that the largest of them had once graced the parlor of an eighteenth-century Russian count. The hunky plumber she had impetuously married and then divorced tattled that it had actually been scavenged from a dilapidated movie house in Worcester, Massachusetts. I made a mental note to include that tidbit of Newport lore in my story.

The
Dispatch
’s ethics policy prohibited reporters from accepting freebies, but the roast beef looked too good to pass up. I scarfed some down and then followed the sound of music up a winding oak staircase to the second floor. There, four chandeliers blazed from a vaulted cream-colored ceiling that arched thirty feet above a parquet ballroom floor. A fireplace, its limestone-and-marble chimneypiece carved to resemble a French château, commanded one end of the room. The hearth was big enough to roast a stegosaurus or cremate the New England Patriots’ offensive line. At the other end of the room, a band I wasn’t hip enough to recognize played hip-hop music I wasn’t tone-deaf enough to like.

I snatched a flute of champagne from a circulating waiter and circumnavigated the dance floor, spotting the mayors of Newport, Providence, New Haven, and Boston; the governors of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, Kentucky, and New Jersey; one of Rhode Island’s U.S. senators; both of its congressmen; three bank presidents; four Brown University deans; twelve captains of industry; two Kennedys; a Bush; and a herd of athletic-looking young women.

I found a spot against the wall between a couple of suits of armor and watched the mayor of Boston try to dance the Soulja Boy with a teenage girl whose last name might have been Du Pont or Firestone. When a waiter glided by, I nabbed another flute, but it just made me thirsty for a Killian’s at the White Horse Tavern. After observing the festivities for a half hour, I figured I’d seen enough.

I was looking for Hill so I could retrieve my notebook when I spotted Salvatore Maniella. He was leaning against a corner of the huge chimneypiece, as out of place as Mel Gibson at a seder. What was a creep like him doing at a swanky event like this? I was still lurking a few minutes later when our governor strolled up and tapped him on the shoulder. They crossed the ballroom together and slipped into a room behind the bandstand. I gave them twenty seconds and then followed.

Through the half-open door I could make out red flocked wallpaper, a G clef design in gold leaf on the ceiling, and a grand piano—the mansion’s music room, which the current owner had proudly restored to its original garishness. Maniella and the governor had the room to themselves, but they stood close, whispering conspiratorially in each other’s ears. After a moment, they grinned and shook hands.

I slipped away as they turned toward the door.

3

In the morning, I ordered a large coffee and an Egg McMuffin at the McDonald’s on West Main Road in Newport, took a seat by the window, and opened my laptop to check the headlines. I’d have preferred to hold a newspaper in my hands, but the
Dispatch,
in another cost-cutting move, had stopped delivering down here.

A federal judge had dismissed the labor racketeering indictment against our local Mob boss, Giuseppe Arena, because of prosecutorial misconduct. Someone had taken a potshot at the medical director of Rhode Island Planned Parenthood, the rifle slug crashing through her kitchen window and burying itself in her refrigerator. A pair of loan sharks, Jimmy Finazzo and his baby brother, Dominick, had been arrested for executing a deadbeat in their Cadillac Coupe de Ville while they were being tailed—and videotaped—by the state police. The video was already on YouTube. And the coach of the Boston Celtics, who were training at Newport’s Salve Regina University, announced he’d canceled a team tour of the Newport mansions after realizing most of his players owned bigger houses.

My story on the Derby Ball was on the paper’s Web site, too. I’d pecked it out late last night at the White Horse, making liberal use of the names and gown descriptions Hill had jotted in my notebook. Sue Wong, Adrianna Papell, and Darius Cordell, I’d proclaimed, were the hot designers this season. I had no idea who they were, but I figured Hill could be trusted. Three Killian’s later, I’d checked myself into a Motel 6, the cheapest bed to be found in Newport, and filed the story over the landline.

After breakfast with Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar, I slid Buddy Guy’s
Heavy Love
into the CD player and pointed the Bronco back toward Providence. I was halfway across the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge, named for an Italian navigator who explored Narragansett Bay in 1524, when Don Henley interrupted some great blues with his thin tenor:

“I make my living off the evening news”—the ringtone that signaled a call from Lomax.

“Mulligan.”

“On the way back?”

“Be there in less than an hour.”

“Step on it. Obits are piling up, and I need you to cover a press conference at the health department at noon.”

Aw, crap.

“Good job last night, by the way. I had no idea you knew so much about fashion.”

“Yeah. I’m full of surprises.”

I flipped the cell closed and let up on the gas. Knowing what was waiting for me, I was in no rush to get back to the newsroom. I set fire to a Partagás with my lighter, cruised north on Route 4, and let my mind wander back to last night.

Salvatore Maniella. He’d gotten his start in the sex business in the mid-1960s when he was an accounting student at Bryant College, talking coeds out of their clothes, snapping their pictures, and publishing them in his own amateur skin magazine. Today he was said to control 15 percent of the porn sites on the Internet, although no one could say for sure. According to some experts, Internet porn is a ninety-seven-billion-dollar-a-year business worldwide—bigger than Microsoft, Apple, Google, eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Netflix combined. Chances were Sal didn’t have to rent
his
tux by the day.

Sal had also broken into the brothel business in the 1990s after a clever lawyer actually read the state’s antiprostitution law and discovered it defined the offense as streetwalking. That, the lawyer argued, meant sex for pay was legal in Rhode Island as long as the transaction occurred indoors. When the courts agreed, entrepreneurs leaped through the loophole, opening a string of gentlemen’s clubs where strippers peddled blow jobs between pole dances. Maniella owned three of them, but the clubs were never more than a footnote to his pornography empire.

I was rolling slowly through North Kingstown and thinking about Sal when my police scanner started squawking. Both the Newport cops and the Rhode Island State Police were worked up about something. When I caught the gist, I turned around and floored it back to Newport.

*   *   *

In the harsh light of morning, Belcourt Castle wasn’t as elegant as it had appeared the night before. The concrete cherubs and Grecian urns in the formal garden were crumbling from decades of acid rain and hard New England winters. Chocolate brown paint was peeling from window sashes. The side yard was a jumble of broken marble columns, refuse from restoration projects that had been started and then abandoned. Slate shingles that had tumbled from the roof littered the grass. I parked in the deserted drive and fetched my Nikon digital camera from the back. Don Henley started yowling again, but I let the call go to voice mail as I trotted through the mansion grounds toward the sea.

Newport’s famous Cliff Walk is just what it sounds like. It skirts a rocky, guano-slick precipice that tumbles seventy feet to the mean high-tide line and another thirty feet or so to the shallow floor of the bay. From hoi polloi Easton’s Beach in the north to exclusive Bailey’s Beach in the south, the walk is a three-and-a-half-mile public right of way, much to the dismay of mansion owners who are compelled to share the spectacular ocean views with the rest of us. Occasionally, the patricians express their displeasure by trucking in boulders to block the path.

For much of its length, the walk is smoothly paved, and in places there is a guardrail; but those who press on past the Vanderbilt Tea House must negotiate crumbling paving stones, scramble between boulders, and maintain footing on slippery shelves of granite and schist. The late Claiborne Pell, a Newport aristocrat who represented the state in the U.S. Senate for thirty-six years, took a tumble here once while jogging and was fortunate he didn’t go over the edge. The careless, the drunken, and the just plain unlucky fall with some regularity, and from time to time one of them gets killed. Judging by the chatter I’d overheard on the police radio, this was one of those times.

As I approached the Cliff Walk, the press was already swarming. Three bored Newport uniforms, arms folded across their chests, had the entrance blocked with yellow crime scene tape. Logan Bedford, a reporter for Channel 10 in Providence, was using them as a backdrop for one of his I’m-not-sure-what’s-going-on-here-but-I-have-great-teeth stand-ups.

I swerved south, trespassed across forty yards of very private property, scaled a fence, fought through a tangle of dense brush, and emerged on a slab of rock overlooking the sea. Below, a dozen sailboats tacked in the light morning breeze. Above, a state police helicopter hovered. About thirty yards to the north, a uniformed Newport cop was waving his arms at a pair of tourists, ordering them to turn around and go back the way they had come.