Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (23 page)

“Is that so?”

“A parish priest was shot to death sometime early this morning.”

“Father Rajane Valois,” I said.

“You know about this?”

“I read about it on the AP wire.”

A five-second delay, and then: “I just got off the phone with the chief of police in Fond du Lac. He says they found about a hundred child porn videos on the good father’s personal computer.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

“Oh?”

“He was one of the names you got from the Internet providers,” I said.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“A source.”

“Jesus! This investigation leaks like the
Titanic
.”

“Now we know why the Chad Brown killers downloaded all those e-mails,” I said.

“Looks like.”

“How do you suppose they got the priest’s name from the Internet provider?”

“Probably paid somebody off,” Parisi said. “A bribe is as good as a subpoena.”

“Better,” I said. “You don’t have to wait for it to be signed by a judge.”

“They probably have the other five names, too,” Parisi said.

“A hit list,” I said.

“Be my guess. I called the FBI this morning, but nobody on duty today knows anything about our case. If the bureau doesn’t move on this soon, we might end up with five more deserving corpses.”

“Vigilantes,” I said.

“Or Good Samaritans with guns.”

After we signed off, I tried to remember what I knew about Fond du Lac. All I could come up with was that it was about the size of Providence and that Edward L. Doheny, an Irish American oil tycoon, was born there. Doheny was the inspiration for the fictional Daniel Plainview, the evil genius played by Daniel Day-Lewis in
There Will Be Blood
.

41

Three days later, the cops reporter called in sick, so I got stuck with writing the police briefs—a dozen short, pointless paragraphs about purse snatchings, break-ins, fender benders, and Peeping Toms. A few minutes after I turned it in, Lomax was standing over my desk with a computer printout in his hand. He gave me a dirty look and began to read out loud.

John Mura, 24, of 75 Chalkstone Avenue, was charged with burglary yesterday after four teenagers walking their Great Dane spotted him climbing through the window of an apartment at 21 Zone Street. Mura told police he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their dog.

“Exactly right,” I said.

“I can’t help but notice that you didn’t quote Mura directly,” Lomax said.

“I paraphrased.”

“And why is that?”

“Because according to the Providence police, his exact words were ‘those little cocksuckers and their fucking mutt.’”

“And do I detect, in your paraphrase, an allusion to
Scooby-Doo
?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

One corner of his mouth curled in a poor excuse for a smile. “I kinda like this one, so I’m gonna run with it,” he said, “but I’m keeping my eye on you.”

I was flipping through my notes on the Chad Brown murder, trying to see if I’d missed anything, when Johnny Rivers interrupted me with his rendition of “Secret Agent Man,” my ring-tone for McCracken.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Did you know Vanessa Maniella bought an old warehouse in West Warwick six weeks ago?” the private detective said.

“I didn’t. Your source good on this?”

“A Realtor I know brokered the deal.”

“Where is it exactly?”

“On Washington Street. Used to be a discount furniture warehouse. When that went belly-up, the Cunha brothers ran a flea market there for a while.”

“What’s she doing with it?”

“Don’t know. Another strip club, maybe.”

“Sounds like a lot of space for a strip club,” I said. “Have you been out there?”

“No. Just thought there might be a story in it for you.”

Late that afternoon, I drove out to West Warwick to check it out. The warehouse was a three-story red-brick structure sandwiched between a print shop and a pawnbroker. A “Half Price on Discount Furniture” sign, so faded that it was almost unreadable, stretched across the front of the building between the first- and second-floor windows. A “Cunha’s Fabulus Flea Market” sign, misspelled and hand-painted on a barn door–size slab of plywood, was nailed across three of the second-floor windows. All of the windows were dark, but eight cars were parked head in against the front of the building. One of them was Sal Maniella’s black Hummer. The others, low-end-model Fords and Toyotas, looked a few miles short of the junkyard.

I pulled in beside the Hummer, got out, and saw why the warehouse windows were dark. The glass had been painted black on the inside. I climbed the crumbling concrete steps to the front door and tried the latch. It was locked, and there was no bell. I pounded on the peeling green paint with my fist until I heard heavy footsteps. The door was shoved open by a big man wearing a leather shoulder holster over a green-and-white Celtics T-shirt with Kevin Garnett’s number 5 on the front.

“Mulligan? The hell you doing here? This place is secret.”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“Mr. Maniella ain’t gonna like this.”

“He’ll get over it,” I said. “So what are
you
doing here, Joseph? Get tired of bouncing drunks at the Tongue and Groove?”

“I got promoted.”

“To what?”

“Bodyguard.”

“The two ex-SEALs aren’t enough?”

“Them guys are fuckin’ good, but they ain’t always around.”

“Out of town, are they?”

“Yeah. Took off a couple of days ago and won’t be back till the end of the week.”

“I’d like to have a word with Sal,” I said.

“What makes you think he’s here?”

“His car’s right out front, Joseph.”

“Oh, yeah. I told him he shoulda parked in back. Hang here and I’ll see if he’ll talk to you,” he said, and slammed the door in my face.

I was watching an alarming number of grackles gather on the telephone wires across the street when the opening guitar lick to “Bitch” started playing. I didn’t see Keith Richards in the immediate vicinity so I pulled the phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.

“You … fucking … bastard!”

“And a good afternoon to you, too, Dorcas.”

“Today is my birthday, asshole.”

“Shall I break into song?”

“I’m still your wife, you know. You could have sent a fucking card.”

“Have you checked your mail today?”

“What? No. Hold on a sec,” she said, but Joseph was swinging the door open now.

“Happy birthday, Dorcas. Gotta go.”

Joseph ushered me into a vestibule with peeling green walls and a splintered wood floor. A naked bulb burned in a fixture that dangled by its wires from the ceiling. In front of us was a new steel door with a keypad lock. Joseph punched in a sequence of five numbers. I managed to catch four of them. He turned the handle and led me inside.

There, a young woman in a forest-green business suit sat behind a kidney-shaped glass desk decorated with a framed family photo and a pink orchid in a ceramic pot. Antique photographs of Rhode Island landmarks, most of them long gone, hung in bird’s-eye maple frames on new drywall. The off-white paint was so fresh that I could smell it.

“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.”