Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

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.

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.