Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

With that, my imagination failed me. I could no longer hear Rosie’s voice. I sat with her in the dark, my hand resting on the shoulder of her gravestone, until the rain turned to snow. By the time I got home, it was coming down hard.

Tuesday afternoon, I was dashing off a fender bender wrap-up for Lomax when “Confused” by a San Francisco punk band called the Nuns began playing in my pants pocket.

“Afternoon, Fiona.”

“Let’s talk.”

“Hopes?”

“In ten minutes,” she said, and hung up.

Except for a couple of alkies hunched over boilermakers at the bar, Hopes was nearly deserted, the snow keeping the regulars away. I asked the barkeep for a club soda. It probably wasn’t the best thing for my ulcer, but I figured it was better than beer. I carried the drink to Fiona’s table, draped my hooded army surplus parka over the back of a chair, and sat across from her. The gold wedding band God had given her gleamed on her ring finger.

“So what’s up?” I asked.

“Frank Drebin and Police Squad! still aren’t getting anywhere with the Maniella murder,” she said.

“Same story with the body parts at Scalici’s pig farm,” I said.

“Problem with the body parts is we got no suspects,” she said. “Problem with the Maniella murder is we got too many.”

“Think Vanessa had Sal whacked so she could take over the family business?”

“No evidence to support it,” Fiona said, “but she’s got a hell of a motive.”

“She’s not the only one,” I said, and told her about the rival porn producers boogying on Sal’s grave.

“There’s also the Mob,” Fiona said. “Maybe Arena and Grasso whacked Sal to settle their old strip club beef.”

“Could be,” I said.

“What about your old pal King Felix? How does he fit into this?”

“I don’t think he does,” I said. “His beef is with DeLucca.”

“Can’t rule him out, though,” she said. She took another swallow of Bud, picked her box of Marlboro 100’s off the table, shook one out, and stuck it between her lips. I whipped out my lighter, and she leaned into the flame.

“Families of porn actresses?” I said.

“Parisi’s working that angle. He’s interrogated a bunch of them who are angry enough to have done it, but so far their alibis are holding up.”

“What about vigilantes?” I said.

“Like who?”

“A radical feminist group, maybe. Or right-wing religious zealots like the Sword of God. Did you know they’ve been picketing the Maniellas’ strip clubs?”

“So I’ve heard.”

“I made Reverend Crenson’s acquaintance the other day,” I said. “That’s one scary dude. Looks just like Reverend Kane in Poltergeist II .”

“Really? I think he looks more like Mr. Burns from The Simpsons .”

“Yeah, I can see that, too.”

“We’ve had our eye on him since last winter,” she said, “when his parishioners started sending hate mail to Sheldon Whitehouse and Patrick Kennedy.”

“About what?”

“Their votes for Obama’s ‘death panels,’ their support for our ‘coon’ president’s ‘socialist agenda,’ and their secret plan to take everyone’s guns away.”

“The church has been around for what, a couple of years?”

“More like ten, but they kept a low profile until last year.”

“Before he got canned,” I said, “our religion writer told me the church took its name from a Roger Williams quote. I don’t remember it word for word, but I don’t think our gentle founder was advocating the use of firearms.”

History preserved a lot of Williams’s words, but no portrait-not even a description of him-has been handed down to us. The fourteen-foot-tall granite Roger Williams who stares down from Prospect Park, arms outstretched to bless the city he founded, is entirely made up. Leo Friedlander’s statue has been up there since it was dedicated in 1939. Several years ago, vandals whacked the thumb and all five fingers from his right hand. I doubt they even knew who he was.

“Roger Williams was a pacifist,” Fiona said. “The sword he wielded was the Word. The Sword of God seems to prefer bullets. I liked them for the shooting at the abortion doctor’s house in Cranston last fall, but Parisi couldn’t make a case.”

We ordered another round, drank in silence, and pondered the possibilities.

“What we’ve got,” I said, “is a lot of theories and nothing to back any of them up.”

“The only thing we can be sure of,” she said, “is that Sal Maniella is still dead.”

The snow turned into a blizzard overnight. By first light, it was nearly two feet deep and still falling. Cars skidded into each other. Schools and businesses closed. Thirty thousand Narragansett Electric customers lost power. The mayor went on TV and urged everyone with a nonessential job to stay at home. Sugary flakes clung to tree branches, blanketed trash-strewn sidewalks, drifted across potholed streets, and transformed our hideous city hall into a fairy castle. I managed to write the weather story without using the phrase winter wonderland .

I’d just finished the piece when I heard “Who Are You?” by the Who, my ringtone for unrecognized numbers, playing in my pants pocket.

“Mulligan.”

“It’s Sal Maniella. I understand you’ve been looking for me.”

A stiff wind howled out of the northeast. Drifts formed, blew away, and re-formed across the streets. The plows couldn’t keep up. Secretariat groped his way west at ten miles an hour on Route 44, struggling to hold the road. As we passed the deserted Apple Valley Mall, he skidded into a drift and stubbornly refused to budge. I fetched a collapsible shovel from the back, dug him out, threw rock salt under the wheels for traction, and pressed on. By the time I reached Greenville, I could barely see the road through the windshield. I switched on the GPS so I wouldn’t miss the left turn onto West Greenville Road again, but the device couldn’t locate a satellite through the thick cloud cover. I managed to find the turn anyway and crept along, searching for the big white colonial that marked the entrance to unpaved Pine Ledge Road.

I’d just spotted it when a figure in a navy-blue parka appeared out of the gloom and threw both hands in the air, directing me to stop. I pumped the brakes, and Secretariat skidded to a halt. I rolled down the window, and Black Shirt, or maybe it was Gray Shirt, filled it with his cinder-block head.

“I just plowed the access road,” he said, “but it’s still treacherous along the top of the dike. I damn near went into the drink. We’re gonna leave the cars here and walk in.”

I turned right onto Pine Ledge, nosed into a freshly cleared space at the side of the road, and parked beside a Jeep Wrangler with a plow mounted on the front. Next to it was another car that must have been there all day, or maybe even overnight. It was smothered with snow. As I walked behind it, I knocked enough off the back to identify it as a burgundy Acura ZDX.

Snow crunched under my Reeboks and the ex-SEAL’s Timberland boots as we trudged west toward the dike, our hands buried in our jacket pockets. It was an eight-hundred-yard walk to the house, and my nose was already numb from the cold.

“Where’s the forty-five at?” the ex-SEAL asked.

“Tucked inside my jacket.”

“I won’t undress you now, but when we get to the house I’ll have to take it away from you.”

“Still want to beat me up?”

“If I did, you’d already be turning the snow red.”

We walked on in silence. New ice hugged the edge of the lake. The tracks of a lone coyote danced across the snow cover.