Liam Mulligan: Cliff Walk Part 1

Liam Mulligan.

Cliff Walk.

Bruce DeSilva.

For Patricia.

My lone regret is that I didn't find you sooner.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.

This is a work of fiction. Although some of the characters are named after old friends, they bear no resemblance to them. For example, the real Stephen Parisi is a Providence contractor, not a Rhode Island State Police captain. A handful of real people are mentioned; but only one of them-the poet Patricia Smith-has a speaking part, and she is permitted only a few words of dialogue. I also borrowed the colorful nickname of a former Rhode Island attorney general, but the fictional and real Attila the Nun are nothing alike and the character's actions and dialogue are entirely imaginary. References to Rhode Island history and geography are as accurate as I can make them, but I have played around a bit with time and s.p.a.ce. For example, both the Newport Jumping Derby and Hopes, the newspaper bar where I drank decades ago when I reported the news for the Providence Journal, are long gone, but I enjoyed resurrecting them for this story. Legal prost.i.tution, a major plot element in this book, was in fact part of life in Rhode Island until 2010; but my depiction of how and why it was finally outlawed is entirely made-up.

1.

Cosmo Scalici hollered over the grunts and squeals of three thousand hogs rooting in his muddy outdoor pens. "Right here's where I found it, poking outta this pile of garbage. Gave me the creeps, the way the fingers curled like it wanted me to come closer."

"What did you do?" I hollered back.

"Jumped the fence and tried to s.n.a.t.c.h it, but one of the sows beat me to it."

"Couldn't get it away from her?"

"You s.h.i.ttin' me? Ever try to wrestle lunch from a six-hundred-pound hog? I whacked her on the snout with a shovel my guys use to muck the pens. She didn't even blink."

To mask the stink, we puffed on cigars, his a Royal Jamaica, mine a Cohiba.

"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," he said. "The nails were painted pink, and it was so small. The little girl that arm came from couldn'ta been more than nine years old. The sow just wolfed it down. You could hear the bones crunch in her teeth."

"Where's the hog now, Cosmo?"

"State cops shot her in the head, loaded her in a van, and took off. Said they was gonna open her stomach, see what's left of the evidence. I told 'em, that's two hundred and fifty bucks' worth of chops and bacon wholesale, so you d.a.m.n well better send me a check 'less you want me to sue your a.s.s."

"Any other body parts turn up?"

"The cops spent a couple hours raking through the garbage. Didn't find nothin'. If there was any more, it's all pig s.h.i.t by now."

We kept smoking as we slopped across his twelve acres to the sprawling white farmhouse with green shutters where I'd left my car. Once this was woodland and meadow, typical of the countryside in the little town of Pascoag in Rhode Island's sleepy northwest corner. But Cosmo had bulldozed his whole place into an ugly mess of stumps, mud, and stones.

"How do you suppose the arm got here?" I asked.

"The staties kept asking the same question, like I'm supposed to f.u.c.kin' know."

He scowled as I scrawled the quote in my reporter's notebook.

"Look, Mulligan," he said. "My company? Scalici Recycling? It's a three-mil-a-year operation. My twelve trucks collect garbage from schools, jails, and restaurants all over Rhode Island. That arm coulda been tossed in a Dumpster anywhere between Woonsocket and Westerly."

I knew it was true. Scalici Recycling was a fancy name for a company that picked up garbage so pigs could reprocess it into bacon, but there was big money in it. I'd written about the operation five years ago when the Mafia tried to muscle in. Cosmo drilled one hired thug through the temple with a bolt gun used to slaughter livestock and put another in a coma with his ham-size fists. He called it trash removal. The cops called it self-defense.

I'd parked my heap beside his new Ford pickup. Mine had a New England Patriots decal on the rear window. His had a b.u.mper sticker that said: "If You Don't Like Manure, Move to the City."

"Getting along any better with the folks around here?" I asked as I jerked open my car door.

"Nah. They're still whining about the smell. Still complaining about the noise from the garbage trucks. That guy over there?" he said, pointing at a raised ranch across the road. "He's a real a.s.shole. That one down there? Total jerk. This whole area's zoned agricultural. They build their houses out here and want to pretend they're in f.u.c.kin' Newport? f.u.c.k them and the minivans they rode in on."

2.

A prowl car slipped behind me on America's Cup Avenue, and when I swung onto Thames Street, it hugged my b.u.mper. A left turn onto Prospect Hill didn't shake it, so when I reached the red octagonal sign at the corner of Bellevue Avenue, I broke with local custom and came to a complete stop. Then I turned right, and the red flashers lit me up.

I rolled down the window and watched in the side mirror as a Newport city cop unfolded himself from the cruiser and swaggered toward me, the heels of his boots clicking on the pavement, his leather gun belt creaking. I shoved the paperwork at him before he asked for it. He s.n.a.t.c.hed it without a word, walked back to the cruiser, and ran my license and registration. I listened in on my police scanner and was relieved to learn that my Rhode Island driver's license was valid and that the heap I'd been driving for years had not been reported stolen.

I heard the gun belt creak again, and the cop, whose name tag identified him as Officer Phelps, was back, handing my paperwork through the window.

"May I ask what business you have in this neighborhood tonight, Mr. Mulligan?"

"No."

Ordinarily, I don't pick fights with lawmen packing high-powered sidearms. Anyone who'd covered cops and robbers as long as I had could recognize the .357 SIG Sauer on Officer Phelps's hip. But he'd had no legitimate reason to pull me over.

"Have you been drinking tonight, sir?"

"Not yet."

"May I have permission to search your vehicle?"

"h.e.l.l, no."

Officer Phelps dropped his right hand to the b.u.t.t of his pistol and gave me a hard look.

"Please step out of the car, sir."

I did, affording him the opportunity to admire how fine I looked in a black Ralph Lauren tuxedo. He hesitated a moment, wondering if I might actually be somebody; but tuxedos can be rented, and a somebody would have had better wheels. I put my palms against the side of the car and a.s.sumed the position. He patted me down, sighing when he failed to turn up a crack pipe, lock picks, or a gravity knife.

When he was done, he wrote me up for running the sign I'd stopped at and admonished me to drive carefully. I was lucky he didn't shoot me. In this part of Newport, driving a car worth less than eighty thousand dollars was a capital offense.

I fired the ignition and rolled past the marble-and-terra-cotta dreams of nineteenth-century robber barons: The Breakers, Marble House, Rosecliff, Kingscote, The Elms, Hunter House, Beechwood, Ochre Court, Chepstow, Chateau-sur-Mer. And my favorite, Clarendon Court, where Claus von Blow either did or did not try to murder his heiress wife by injecting her with insulin, depending on whether you believe the first jury or the second. Here, sculpted cherubs frolic in formal gardens. Greek G.o.ds cling to gilded cornices and peer across the Atlantic Ocean. Ma.s.sive oak doors open at a touch, and vast dining rooms rise to frescoed ceilings. A few of these shrines to hubris and bad taste have been turned into museums, but the rest remain among the most exclusive addresses in the world, just as they have been for more than a hundred years.

Men who ripped fortunes from the grasps of compet.i.tors built the Newport mansions. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who st.i.tched the face of America with rails and ties. Big Jim Fair, who dug silver out of Nevada's Comstock Lode. Edward J. Berwind, who fueled American industry with Appalachian coal. They were doers, and they built these forty-, sixty-, and eighty-room monstrosities as retreats, playgrounds, and monuments to themselves.

But that was generations ago. Today, those who live in the mansions are scions of the doers, living on somebody else's money in somebody else's dream. They try to keep the Gilded Age alive in a blaze of crystal chandeliers, the scent of lilies drifting over elegantly attired dinner guests. And they keep the likes of me out with ivy-covered walls, hand-wrought iron gates, and a vigilant local constabulary.

Except tonight. Tonight, I had an invitation.

Just past Beechwood, the Astors' Italianate summer cottage, I slid behind a shimmering silver Porsche in a line of cars drifting toward the gilded iron gate to the grounds of Belcourt Castle. One by one, they turned into the torch-lit, crushed-stone drive: a Maserati, a Bentley, a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Maybach, another Bentley, and something sleek that may have been a Bugatti, although I'd never seen one before. Trailing them was a poverty-stricken sad sack in a mere Mercedes-Benz. I wondered if Officer Phelps had ha.s.sled him, too.

Up ahead, liveried valets opened car doors, grasped bejeweled hands to help ladies from their fairy-tale carriages, climbed in, and floated away to distant parking lots. Then a nine-year-old Bronco with rust pocks on the hood, a crushed pa.s.senger-side fender, and a diseased m.u.f.fler rumbled up, and I got out.

"Be careful with it this time," I said as I flipped the keys to a valet. "Look what happened the last time you parked it."

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 a.s.signment 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 s.h.i.t?"

"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, c.r.a.p."

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 embarra.s.sment."

Aw, c.r.a.p.

"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 gla.s.s 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, Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 pa.s.s 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 chteau, 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed a flute of champagne from a circulating waiter and circ.u.mnavigated 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 sw.a.n.ky 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 Mcm.u.f.fin 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.