Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel (7 page)

You lost, what, fifty, sixty pounds?”

“Closer to a hundred.”

“Good for you, Joseph. So how long you been working here?”

“Since June. First time I had steady work in more’n three years.”

The bartender wandered over and tapped Joseph’s swollen, pasty forearm. “Friend of yours?” he asked.

“Yeah. Give us a couple of brews, Sonny.”

“Sure thing,” he said. He drew two Buds from the ice chest, popped the tops, and slid the bottles onto the bar. “Take your time. It’ll take me a half hour to clean up.”

I pulled a roll of Tums from my pocket, peeled off a couple, chewed them to calm my stomach, and chased them with beer.

“So whatcha doing here, Mulligan?” Joseph said. “Guy like you oughta be able to get his pussy for free. Never figured you for a John.”

“I’m not. I’m workin.’”

“Saw you upstairs with Destiny on your lap. Nice work if you can get it.”

“The
Dispatch
doesn’t pay much,” I said, “but the job does have fringe benefits.”

“Mine, too. I watch out for the girls, make sure nobody gives ’em a hard time. And they take care of me.”

“Complimentary blow jobs?”

“Complimentary means free?”

“It does.”

“Then yeah, every fuckin’ night.”

“Do customers give the girls a hard time often?”

“Nah. Most of ’em know better. But every now and then, one of them South Providence pimps comes bopping in and tries to squeeze the girls for a cut. Miss Maniella don’t allow that. Says the girls got a right to keep what they make.”

“Good for her.”

“Last month King Felix came in. Heard of him?”

“We’ve met.” In fact, Felix and I went way back.

“Couple of the girls, Sacha and Karma, used to be in his stable. He seemed to think they still were.”

“What’d you do?”

“Told him he was mistaken.”

“How’d that work out?”

“Asshole went for a little silver pistol stuck in his waistband, so I took it away from him. Always heard he was a tough guy, but when I grabbed him by his fuckin’ dreads and dragged him outside, he screamed like a little girl.”

“Knock him around a little, did you?”

“Nothin’ major. Smashed his nose. Cracked a few ribs. When I was done, I told him to go back out on the street and spread the word. Then I tossed the fucker in the Dumpster.”

Joseph picked up his Bud and drained half the bottle in a swallow. The bartender wandered back our way and mopped a wet spot with his bar rag.

“You ain’t told me what you’re workin’ on,” Joseph said.

“I’m looking for Vanessa Maniella. Seen her around lately?”

He frowned, and his blue eyes turned to slits. “I don’t want to read my name in your fuckin’ paper.”

“Okay.”

“’Cause if I do, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Understood.”

The bartender was still mopping that same spot. Maybe he was eavesdropping. Maybe he was just being thorough.

“Ain’t seen Miss Maniella in weeks,” Joseph said. “She’s got people what run the place for her. She don’t come in much.”

“How about her father?”

“Ain’t never seen him in here.”

“Think he’s dead?”

“All I know about that is what you put in your fuckin’ paper.”

“No scuttlebutt about it around the club?”

“Scuttlebutt?”

“Gossip.”

“Nah. Nobody here knows a fuckin’ thing.”

“That beating you gave King Felix. You said it was last month?”

“Yeah.”

“Before or after the shooting on the Cliff Walk?”

He took a moment to think about it. “’Bout a week before.”

“Think he was mad enough about it to go gunning for Sal?”

“Wouldn’t have been in any condition to go after anybody,” Joseph said.

“He could have sent one of his peeps.”

“King Felix is a fuckin’ moron,” Joseph said. “I doubt he even knows who Sal is. And the retards who work for him? They wouldn’t be able to find Newport on a map. Besides, if they had the balls to come after somebody, it would have been me.”

“They still might,” I said, “so watch your back.”

9

That night I logged on to iTunes and built a new thirty-song playlist: “Love for Sale” by Ella Fitzgerald, “Teen-Age Prostitute” by Frank Zappa, “Bad Girls” by Donna Summer, “Roxanne” by the Police, “Call Me” by Blondie, “What Do You Do for Money Honey” by AC/DC, “Lady Marmalade” by Labelle, “The Fire Down Below” by Bob Seger, “Honky Tonk Women” by the Rolling Stones, “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” by Tom Waits, and a bunch more.

Musically, the sound track for my latest obsession was a mixed bag. My favorite was “867-5309/Jenny,” by Tommy Tutone, who screeched about finding the number written on a wall—“for a good time, call.” When the song hit the top of the charts back in 1982, pranksters all over the country called the number and asked for Jenny. I’d dialed it a few times myself, when my kid sister wasn’t hogging the phone, and reached a humorless functionary at Brown University. Brown, like scores of other annoyed phone company customers, responded to the onslaught by changing phone numbers.

Next morning, I sat at the counter at my favorite Providence diner and skimmed the
Dispatch
’s sports section while sipping coffee from a chipped ceramic mug. Jerod Mayo, Matt Light, and Wes Welker were all doubtful for the Patriots’ game on Sunday, making me regret the latest bet I’d phoned in to Zerilli.

Charlie, the short-order cook who also owned the place, bent over the grill and cracked eggs for my breakfast. Somebody’s pancakes looked about ready. Beside them, strips of bacon popped and sizzled.

I flipped to the front page and saw that Fiona was back in the news, calling the governor a whoremaster because he wouldn’t back her antiprostitution bill. Blackjack Baldelli and Knuckles Grieco, the two lunkheads who ran the Providence Highway Department, also made page one. A jury had convicted both of grand larceny, conspiracy, and income tax evasion for buying fifty thousand dollars’ worth of manhole covers with city money, reselling them to a scrap dealer for fourteen thousand, and pocketing the cash. Two members of the Sword of God had been arrested for throwing rocks through the windows of the Planned Parenthood clinic on Point Street. And the Rhode Island unemployment rate had reached almost 12 percent, second highest in the nation after Michigan.

Charlie turned toward the counter to top off my coffee and noticed the headline on the unemployment story. “Damn,” he said. “Why can’t we ever be number one at anything?”

“We are,” I said. “Rhode Island leads the nation in doughnut shops per capita.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. We’ve got one for every forty-seven hundred people—nine times the national average.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I read the paper,” I said. “You ought to try it sometime.”

“No wonder Rhode Islanders are so fat.”

“Your cuisine isn’t helping any, Charlie.”

He chuckled, turned back to the grill to flip my eggs, and tossed me a question over his shoulder.

“Anything new on Maniella?”

“There isn’t.”

“Think he’s dead?”

“Looks like, but I can’t swear to it.”

He turned back to me and leaned his forearms on the counter. “Who would want to kill him?”

“Could be anybody,” I said. “Business rivals. Born-again Christians. A porn actress’s angry father.” Or the Mob, I thought to myself. Grasso and Arena could hold a grudge for a long time. The pope might be miffed about those condoms, but since the Borgias passed into history, murder wasn’t the Vatican’s style … as far as I knew.

“Or maybe it was just a robbery gone bad,” I said. “The cops didn’t find a wallet on the body.”

“In the old days, Sal used to come in here,” Charlie said. “Back before he could afford champagne and caviar for breakfast. Seemed like a decent guy, but I guess he wasn’t.”

My eggs were ready now, so he turned back to scrape them onto a plate. Outside the diner’s greasy windows, rays of morning sunshine broke through low, scattered clouds and turned the Beaux-Arts façade of city hall to gold. Seagulls had strafed the building again overnight, continuing their war of turds with the current administration. I shoveled Charlie’s masterpiece into my mouth and tried to think things out.

Poking into the Maniellas’ prostitution business wasn’t getting me any closer to proving they were paying off the governor. The mystery of Scalici’s pig looked like a dead end, too.

Last night, I’d spent hours Googling investigative stories on Internet porn. The
Los Angeles Times
and
The Washington Post
had unearthed details about some of the big operators, but they’d run into a black hole when they looked at the Maniellas. They were too good at hiding their money and covering their tracks. The
Times
and
Post
had far more time and money to devote to the story than I did. If they couldn’t find anything, there was no point in me trying.

Lomax could see I’d run dry and responded by jamming me up with a diet of obits, press conferences, and weather stories. I was starting to hate the job I’d always loved. I needed to find something big to work on to get Lomax to ease up, but I had no idea what that something might be. Cash for inspection stickers was a scandal, but it didn’t qualify as news. Everybody already knew about it. Besides, for working people trying to keep clunkers on the road, it was a public service. A little graft was the only thing standing between Secretariat and the glue factory.

I opened the paper to the metro front and read a police story under Mason’s byline. Providence vice cops had kicked in the door to a second-floor apartment on Colfax Street last night and confiscated a computer containing hundreds of child porn videos. The occupants, who had rented the place under a phony name, were nowhere to be found.

I read the story carefully twice, but I couldn’t see anything in it for me. The Maniellas had never stooped to child porn—as far as I knew. I doubted they had moral scruples about it, but with the millions they were making on adult porn, why would they get involved in something that would bring down so much heat?

*   *   *

Back at the office, I went over the computer printouts of the governor’s campaign contributions again, looking for anything I might have missed the first five times. It was still just a blur of hundreds of names, addresses, and dollar figures. I learned nothing. I shoved it aside and started in on the stack of obits Lomax wanted by three o’clock.

“Hi, Mulligan.”

“What’s up, Thanks-Dad?”

“Need help with anything?”

“Want to try your hand with a few obits?”

“Not really, no.”

Hadn’t worked the last time I’d tried it, either. The publisher’s son, surprise surprise, never got stuck with scut work.

“You know, there
is
something,” I said, and handed him the computer printouts. “I could use a fresh pair of eyes on this.”

“What am I looking for?”

“Any hint that the Maniellas have been funneling campaign contributions to the governor by using their porn actors as fronts. You might as well look at these, too,” I said. I opened a file drawer and pulled out similar lists for the chairmen of the Rhode Island House and Senate judiciary committees.

He fanned the pages and whistled. “A lot to go through,” he said.

“It is, but there’s no hurry.”

“Do we know the porn actors’ names?”

“No, we don’t.”

He thought for a minute, then said, “Okay. Let me play around with this for a while and see what I can do.”

Mason didn’t know all the tricks of the trade, but he was damned smart. Maybe he
could
find something.

10

A half hour south of Providence, the little town of Warren clings like a barnacle to the eastern shore of Narragansett Bay. Here, the water is sometimes streaked with sewage, and quahogs angry with coliform bacteria pave the mucky bottom. Main Street, several hundred yards from and parallel to the shoreline, is a postcard from the Great Depression—old corner drugstore, red-brick town hall with Palladian windows, and ramshackle wood-frame storefronts with vacant office space on the second and third floors.

I parked Secretariat at a meter in front of a narrow storefront office two doors north of the police station. The office had housed a three-reporter news bureau until the
Dispatch
closed it down a couple of years ago to save money. Now, black lettering on the glass front door read “Bruce McCracken, Private Investigations.” I entered and found him alone, sitting behind a computer at an oak desk that had seen better days. For the desk, like the town, those days were ninety years ago. A bank of dented metal file cabinets and an old black safe the size of a minifridge had been shoved against the back wall. The only decent pieces of furniture in the place were the black leather swivel chair he was sitting in and two client chairs lined up in front of his desk.

I’d known McCracken since our school days at Providence College. After graduation, he’d taken a job as an in-house investigator for a big fire insurance company and stayed for twenty years until he got laid off last spring. For the company, it was a brain-dead move. McCracken was good. Every year, his work had saved his employer hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millions, of dollars.

He held up his cell phone to show me he was occupied and pointed at one of the client chairs, inviting me to take a seat. Instead, I walked across the warped linoleum floor to the center of the room and scanned the framed autographed photos of Providence College basketball greats mounted on the cracked plaster walls: Jimmy Walker, Ray Flynn, Jim Thompson, Johnny Egan, Vinnie Ernst, Kevin Stacom, Lenny Wilkins, Joey Hassett, Marvin Barnes, Billy Donovan, Ernie DiGregorio. I was still looking when McCracken finished his call, popped out of his chair, and walked over to grip my hand in his customary metacarpal-crushing handshake.

“When is my picture going up?” I asked.

“Soon as you get off the bench.”

Fans of private eye novels have a warped idea of what real private detectives do. Most of their work is routine: delivering summonses in civil cases, locating child support delinquents, investigating pilfering from warehouses, spying on unfaithful spouses, checking the validity of insurance claims, and doing background checks on job applicants. From time to time, they might search for missing persons the police have given up on or help lawyers gather evidence in civil and criminal cases. Some P.I.s specialize, but McCracken, like most of them, did a little of this and a little of that. Unlike Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe and Robert B. Parker’s Spenser, real private detectives rarely investigate murders. Most of them go their whole lives without beating somebody up or gunning somebody down.