Cliff Walk: A Liam Mulligan Novel Read online

“The Internet porn, not a fuckin’ thing.”

  “The clubs, then?”

  “He don’t bother with them no more,” Zerilli said. “Turned them over to his daughter Vanessa a couple of years ago after she finally got her fuckin’ business degree from URI. What I hear, she’s a bigger cocksucker than him.”

  “She making a go of it?”

  “Oh, yeah. Was her idea to put in private rooms so the strippers can screw the customers. ’Stead of just blowing them at the tables. Bitch calls ’em VIP rooms. Shitty little booths with cum-stained vinyl couches. Jesus, what a joke.”

  “Any friction with the six clubs Arena and Grasso run?”

  “Nah. The joints are all jumpin’ on the weekend, pulling in customers from all over New England. Some of ’em come in on chartered buses from Boston and New Haven, for chrissake. Do a pretty good business most weekdays, too. There’s enough fuckin’ Johns to go around, Mulligan.”

  “The Maniellas still aren’t connected, right?”

  “Business they’re in, they gotta know some people. Back when porn was on videocassettes, before the Internet fucked up a good thing, crews outta New York, Miami, and Vegas handled the distribution—kept all the porn shop shelves stocked with filth. But the Maniellas ain’t part of This Thing of Ours, if that’s what you’re gettin’ at.”

  “So how much is Vanessa paying Arena and Grasso for the right to run her clubs on their turf?”

  “Ah, shit.” He stubbed out his cigarette, shook another from the pack, and lit it, the flame wobbling in his trembling right hand. “I don’t wanna talk about that.”

  “No?”

  “Fuck, no.”

  “Touchy subject?”

  He looked away and started in on Shortstop’s ears again. Drool dripped from the dog’s maw and puddled on the linoleum. A minute passed before Whoosh turned his attention back to me.

  “So,” he said, “are you wasting my fuckin’ time, or are you gonna lay down a bet?”

  “Okay, Whoosh,” I said. “What’s the over-under on when the Dispatch goes belly-up?” I expected a chuckle. Instead he deadpanned:

  “Three years.”

  That stopped me.

  “Seriously?”

  “Three years from Columbus Day, to be exact.”

  “People are betting on that?”

  “Come on, Mulligan. People bet on every fuckin’ thing.”

  I let out a long sigh. “Give me fifty bucks on the under.”

  “Figures. All the guys from the paper are takin’ the under.” He picked up his pencil stub to record the bet.

  I pulled out my wallet, paid him the twenty-five dollars I’d lost on Saturday’s URI-UMass football game, and got up to go, still puzzling over why Vanessa’s payoffs to Arena and Grasso were such a touchy subject. I had my hand on the doorknob when I tumbled to something.

  “Wait a sec. They aren’t paying her, are they?”

  “What? Where the fuck did you get that idea?”

  “Holy shit! They are paying her, aren’t they?”

  His eyes narrowed to slits. “No fuckin’ way this came from me.”

  “Of course not, Whoosh.”

  “I better not see anything about this in the fuckin’ Dispatch.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Swear on your mother.”

  “Already did.”

  “Do it again.”

  “Okay, okay. I swear.”

  He reached down to scratch his balls again, took another pull from his Lucky, and started talking.

  “Ten years ago, when Maniella opened his fuckin’ dives, couple of our boys paid them a visit. Said they’d be back every month to collect.”

  “How much?”

  “Two grand per club.”

  “Sounds reasonable.”

  “We thought so.”

  “So what happened?”

  “A couple weeks later, ’bout a half hour before the noon opening, a dozen guys with Navy SEALs tattoos come busting into Friction.”

  “Grasso’s place,” I said.

  “Now, yeah, but it was Johnny Dio’s before he got whacked.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The bouncer tried to stop them at the door, so they tossed him into the parking lot like he was fuckin’ trash. Tore the place up pretty good. Smashed all the liquor bottles. Threw barstools through the fuckin’ mirrors.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yeah. You ain’t heard about this? We tried to keep it quiet, but I figured you mighta heard about this.”

  “Anybody get hurt?”

  “A few cuts and bruises. Nothin’ worth cryin’ over. Before the cocksuckers left, a couple of ’em climbed up on stage, unzipped, and pissed on the stripper poles like they was fuckin’ dogs.”

  “Marking their territory,” I said.

  “Dio figured right off Maniella must’ve sent ’em. Wanted to drive out to Greenville hisself and whack the sonuvabitch. After we got him calmed the fuck down, we asked Maniella for a sit-down.”

  “How’d that work out?”

  “We invited the prick to a nice meal at Camille’s so we could explain the situation. Arena did most of the talkin’. Said if Maniella’s clubs were doing as well as ours, he was raking in the fuckin’ dough. Said two grand a month per club was a fair price for the right to operate.”

  “Maniella didn’t think so?”

  “He said the money was fair and that his boys would be by the first of every month to collect it.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Have I ever?”

  “What did Arena say to that?”

  “First he had to grab Dio by the legs to stop him from climbing over the table to get at the asshole. Then he said no fuckin’ way.”

  “And Maniella said what?”

  “At first he just smiled and looked at us over the rim of his fuckin’ wineglass. Enjoying the moment.”

  “And then?”

  “And then he rolled up his sleeve and showed us his Navy SEALs tattoo. Said he knew plenty of guys with the same ink. Said he figured a dozen was enough but that he had the scratch to bring in fifty of ’em if he had to.”

  “So Arena caved?”

  “What the fuck could he do?”

  “Arena and Grasso still paying?”

  “To Vanessa now, yeah. Every fuckin’ month. But we never talk about it.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s fuckin’ humiliating.”

  “Not like the old days, huh?”

  “Fuck, no,” Zerilli said. “Back when Raymond L. S. Patriarca ran this town, no way anybody’d try somethin’ like this. Bobo Marrapese, Pro Lerner, Frank Salemme, Dickie Callei, Red Kelly, Jackie Nazarian, Rudy Sciarra—just whisper the names of the guys in our crew and a dick like Maniella would have pissed his pants. But it ain’t the 1970s no more.”

  “The ex-SEALs still around?”

  “At least a couple are, yeah. Handling the collections.”

  I thanked him and got up to go.

  “Hold on a sec,” he said. “Could you use a GPS for the Bronco?”

  “Don’t really need one. I got a map of Rhode Island stored in my head.”

  “You go out of state sometimes, right?”

  “I do.”

  He got up from his chair, unlocked the door to a little storeroom behind the office, and came back with a Garmin GPS in an unopened box.

  “A thousand of ’em fell off a fuckin’ truck in New Bedford last week,” he said. “I bought ’em off the Arcaro brothers for ten cents on the dollar.”

  “What are you getting for them?”

  “Forty bucks apiece, but yours is on the house.”

  If I turned it down, my friend would be insulted. “Thanks, Whoosh,” I said. “And if you hear any chatter about the Maniella murder, give me a holler.”

  “Mulligan?”

  “Um?”

  “The gorillas who trashed Friction? We heard they signed on with Maniella after they got fired from Titan and Blackwater.”


  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “Know what for?”

  “You won’t fuckin’ believe it.”

  “What?”

  “Excessive force,” he said. “Or as they call it at Blackwater, too much of a good thing.”

  * * *

  By the time I got to city hall, the planning commission meeting was under way. I hadn’t missed a thing. Wouldn’t have missed much if I hadn’t shown up at all. Two hours of wrangling about the future of a vacant lot off Elmwood Avenue was worth just three paragraphs on the bomber page—B-17.

  It was raining when I stepped out of the Dispatch’s front door and dashed for Secretariat, and as I pointed him down Putnam Pike toward Greenville, it started coming down hard. The twenty-minute drive to the Maniellas’ place on Waterman Lake took twice that. Should have used the GPS, because I was almost to Harmony before I realized I’d missed a turn in the dark.

  I backtracked, found it this time, and rolled slowly down a country road, peering through sheets of rain for a glimpse of the white center-chimney colonial that had stood at the corner of Pine Ledge Road for two hundred years. When I saw it, I turned right onto an unpaved private track that the storm had churned into mud. It was narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. A hundred yards in, it got narrower as it ran along the top of an earthen dike. The waters of Waterman Lake lurked on both sides, and I knew for a fact that Secretariat couldn’t swim.

  Rain caught the beams from my headlights and hurled them back at me, and halfway across, I lost sight of the road. I felt the Bronco dip as the right rear tire slid off the edge and grabbed air. I punched the gas, and the other three wheels slung mud as they fought to hold the road.

  7

  The Stillwater River, a tributary of the Woonasquatucket, is just a creek, really, and in autumn it shrinks to a trickle. The earthen-and-masonry dam thrown across its course in 1838 is still there, holding back an amoeba-shaped lake of 270 acres. Waterman Lake is clean and the average depth is just nine feet, making it ideal for swimming and boating but unsuitable for disposing of a body.

  The lake is privately owned, and so is the white-pine-and-maple-studded acreage that surrounds it. When I was a kid, most of the structures here were ramshackle summer cottages. In recent years, some of them had been ripped down and replaced by sprawling villas designed by architects who lifted their ideas from Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright. The biggest belonged to the Maniellas, or what was left of them.

  Just past the dike, the dirt road curved to the right. Drenched pine boughs swished against Secretariat’s side, giving him an overdue scrubbing as we groped our way in the dark. Soon, the road split into five dirt trails that stretched toward the lakeshore like the fingers of an arthritic hand. The Maniellas’ place was appropriately located at the tip of the middle finger, perched on a knoll overlooking the water.

  When I pulled into the crushed-shell drive, the house looked dark and empty. I tugged the hood of my rain slicker over my head, sprinted through the storm, and climbed the stairs to the wide front porch. The doorbell chimed like Big Ben. No one answered. To be thorough, I sloshed around the house and peeked in the windows. Through a pane in the side door to the three-car garage, I could just make out the silhouettes of the year-old Maybach and the 2009 Hummer registered to Sal Maniella. Made me wonder how he’d gotten to Newport if he hadn’t driven either of his cars. The stall reserved for Vanessa’s Lexus was empty. Maybe he’d taken hers.

  My jeans were soaked through with rain now, and the temperature was falling. I dashed for the Bronco, cranked the ignition, turned on the headlights and wipers, and could barely see the house through the windshield. Risking the dike again would be pushing my luck. I turned off the engine, opened my thermos, and sipped coffee for the warmth. It worked. It also triggered a gnawing pain just below my breastbone. I popped the glove box, cracked open a fresh bottle of Maalox, and took two big gulps. Then I let the seat down to catch a nap and wait for the rain to let up.

  I’d just dozed off when Mick Jagger started growling the lyrics to “Bitch,” a ringtone that alerted me to the frequent late-night calls from that special someone.

  “Hello,” I said, and received the usual salutation.

  “You … fucking … bastard!”

  “Good evening, Dorcas.”

  “Who are you out screwing tonight, you prick?”

  “Five of the six Pussycat Dolls. Nicole Scherzinger couldn’t make it.”

  “Always with the fucking jokes.”

  “Okay, you’re on to me. Truth is, Melody Thornton couldn’t make it, either.”

  “My lawyer call you today?”

  “He did.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m still not agreeing to lifetime alimony, Dorcas.”

  “You are such a prick.”

  “I did offer all the child support you could possibly want. He thought that was generous until he remembered we never had any kids.”

  “You think you’re funny? Because you’re not.”

  “I keep telling you, Dorcas, things are going downhill at the paper. Chances are I’m gonna get laid off. Even if I don’t, the Dispatch is likely to close down in a few years, and I have no idea what I’ll do then.”

  “Not my problem, asshole.”

  “Being a reporter is all I know, Dorcas. I’ve never been any good at anything else.”

  “You got that right.”

  “Do I need to point out again that you make twice as much money as I do?”

  “Go to hell!”

  “Sleep tight, Dorcas,” I said, but she’d already hung up.

  * * *

  The rapping on the car window startled me. I opened my eyes to see Captain Parisi knocking on the glass with his knife-scarred knuckles. Across the lake, the sun had crept over the horizon and was peeking through the pines.

  “Mulligan?” he said as I rolled down the window. “The hell you doing here?”

  “Same thing you are.”

  I’d known Steve Parisi for years. Despite Fiona’s grousing about the lack of results, he was a damned fine detective, although he did tend to be tight-lipped with the press. There was often a five-second delay before anything he said to me, as if he were afraid some juicy official secret would slip.

  “House still empty?” he asked.

  “It is.”

  “Doesn’t explain why you’re sleeping in a junk car in our favorite pornographer’s driveway.”

  “I got caught in the storm last night and didn’t dare risk the dike.”

  “Got an inspection sticker on this heap?” He checked and found it on the windshield. “How much of a bribe did you pay to get that?”

  “The going rate is forty bucks.”

  Five seconds ticked off before he sighed and said, “Yeah, that’s what I hear, too.”

  “If Rhode Islanders would stop killing each other for a week or two,” I said, “maybe one of us could look into it.”

  That five-second delay again. Talking with Parisi was like conversing by radio signal with somebody on the moon.

  “If I tell you not to come out here again,” he said, “it won’t do any good, will it?”

  “It won’t.”

  “How ’bout giving me a call if you find them before I do?”

  “Sure,” I said. “And if you find them first, you’ll give me a heads-up, right?”

  “I’ll think about it. Watch yourself on the way out. The edge of the causeway broke away in a couple of spots last night, and from the skid marks in the mud, it looks like someone damn near went into the drink.”

  8

  I was sitting at the bar nursing a six-dollar can of Bud when a bottle blonde sashayed up in a G-string and stiletto heels, thrust a pair of store-bought tits in my face, and said, “Want a blow job?” Well, sure, but not at these prices. I shook my head, and she stamped her heel in frustration. Then she spun away and scanned the room for another mark. I took a good look at her ass. Some habits
are hard to break.

  It was a slow Thursday night at the Tongue and Groove. There were no chartered buses in the parking lot, and the twenty hookers taking turns on the stripper poles outnumbered the paying customers. Most of the men looked as if they’d already had their fun. Now short on cash and stamina, they hunched over beers at the cocktail tables or slumped on stools by the stage to review the choreography. The girls gyrated in G-strings, but ten dollars would get you into the “all-nude room” upstairs. In the name of research, I pulled a Hamilton out of my pocket. As I handed it to the palooka watching the door, I wondered how I should phrase the entry on my expense account.

  The room at the top of the stairs was dark except for the stage, where two naked women, one black and one white, were on their hands and knees, shaking their asses to the beat of a romantic mood setter by 50 Cent:

  I’ll take you to the candy shop,

  I’ll let you lick the lollipop …

  Their genitals gyrated inches from the noses of two men sitting on barstools in a row of otherwise empty ones at the edge of the stage. One guy thrust a dollar in a garter and reached out to fondle the merchandise.

  The Tongue and Groove was my last stop on a three-night tour of Vanessa Maniella’s strip clubs. I’d been hoping to find out how they operated—and maybe pick up some gossip about the family’s whereabouts. But the main thing I’d discovered was that Vanessa had learned a thing or two about merchandising at URI.

  On Tuesday night, I’d hung out at Shakehouse. There, the cover was twenty dollars, which a large gentleman in a Joseph Abboud suit politely requested at the door. A poster-size photo of three naked stunners mugging with a linebacker from the New England Patriots was mounted just inside the entrance. Behind the gleaming granite bar, five mixologists in white shirts and black bow ties whipped up flavored martinis and drew mugs of premium draft beer.

  The women, some fresh from appearances in Manhattan and Atlantic City, had spent a lot of time at the gym. They shimmied nude on three stages in a swirl of colored lights, moving as though Shakira had taught them to dance. The customers, most wearing business suits, lined up to tuck ten-dollar bills into garters strapped high on sweat-damp thighs. Now and then, one of the men would toss a fistful of bills in honor of a spirited performance. And I’d thought money showers went out when the recession came in.