Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

I snatched a flute of champagne from a circulating waiter and circumnavigated 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 swanky 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.

In the morning, I ordered a large coffee and an Egg McMuffin 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.

My story on the Derby Ball was on the paper’s Web site, too. I’d pecked it out late last night at the White Horse, making liberal use of the names and gown descriptions Hill had jotted in my notebook. Sue Wong, Adrianna Papell, and Darius Cordell, I’d proclaimed, were the hot designers this season. I had no idea who they were, but I figured Hill could be trusted. Three Killian’s later, I’d checked myself into a Motel 6, the cheapest bed to be found in Newport, and filed the story over the landline.

After breakfast with Ronald McDonald and the Hamburglar, I slid Buddy Guy’s Heavy Love into the CD player and pointed the Bronco back toward Providence. I was halfway across the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge, named for an Italian navigator who explored Narragansett Bay in 1524, when Don Henley interrupted some great blues with his thin tenor:

“I make my living off the evening news”-the ringtone that signaled a call from Lomax.

“Mulligan.”

“On the way back?”

“Be there in less than an hour.”

“Step on it. Obits are piling up, and I need you to cover a press conference at the health department at noon.”

Aw, crap.

“Good job last night, by the way. I had no idea you knew so much about fashion.”

“Yeah. I’m full of surprises.”

I flipped the cell closed and let up on the gas. Knowing what was waiting for me, I was in no rush to get back to the newsroom. I set fire to a Partagás with my lighter, cruised north on Route 4, and let my mind wander back to last night.

Salvatore Maniella. He’d gotten his start in the sex business in the mid-1960s when he was an accounting student at Bryant College, talking coeds out of their clothes, snapping their pictures, and publishing them in his own amateur skin magazine. Today he was said to control 15 percent of the porn sites on the Internet, although no one could say for sure. According to some experts, Internet porn is a ninety-seven-billion-dollar-a-year business worldwide-bigger than Microsoft, Apple, Google, eBay, Yahoo!, Amazon, and Netflix combined. Chances were Sal didn’t have to rent his tux by the day.

Sal had also broken into the brothel business in the 1990s after a clever lawyer actually read the state’s antiprostitution law and discovered it defined the offense as streetwalking. That, the lawyer argued, meant sex for pay was legal in Rhode Island as long as the transaction occurred indoors. When the courts agreed, entrepreneurs leaped through the loophole, opening a string of gentlemen’s clubs where strippers peddled blow jobs between pole dances. Maniella owned three of them, but the clubs were never more than a footnote to his pornography empire.

I was rolling slowly through North Kingstown and thinking about Sal when my police scanner started squawking. Both the Newport cops and the Rhode Island State Police were worked up about something. When I caught the gist, I turned around and floored it back to Newport.

In the harsh light of morning, Belcourt Castle wasn’t as elegant as it had appeared the night before. The concrete cherubs and Grecian urns in the formal garden were crumbling from decades of acid rain and hard New England winters. Chocolate brown paint was peeling from window sashes. The side yard was a jumble of broken marble columns, refuse from restoration projects that had been started and then abandoned. Slate shingles that had tumbled from the roof littered the grass. I parked in the deserted drive and fetched my Nikon digital camera from the back. Don Henley started yowling again, but I let the call go to voice mail as I trotted through the mansion grounds toward the sea.

Newport’s famous Cliff Walk is just what it sounds like. It skirts a rocky, guano-slick precipice that tumbles seventy feet to the mean high-tide line and another thirty feet or so to the shallow floor of the bay. From hoi polloi Easton’s Beach in the north to exclusive Bailey’s Beach in the south, the walk is a three-and-a-half-mile public right of way, much to the dismay of mansion owners who are compelled to share the spectacular ocean views with the rest of us. Occasionally, the patricians express their displeasure by trucking in boulders to block the path.

For much of its length, the walk is smoothly paved, and in places there is a guardrail; but those who press on past the Vanderbilt Tea House must negotiate crumbling paving stones, scramble between boulders, and maintain footing on slippery shelves of granite and schist. The late Claiborne Pell, a Newport aristocrat who represented the state in the U.S. Senate for thirty-six years, took a tumble here once while jogging and was fortunate he didn’t go over the edge. The careless, the drunken, and the just plain unlucky fall with some regularity, and from time to time one of them gets killed. Judging by the chatter I’d overheard on the police radio, this was one of those times.