Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

Crack!

The big guy spun toward the sound, a Glock 17 suddenly in his right hand. Another crack, and then another as pine boughs snapped under their heavy burden of snow. The ex-SEAL smiled to himself and slipped the weapon back into his deep jacket pocket.

A drift blocked the Maniellas’ wide front steps. We bypassed them, entered through the side door to the garage, and stomped the snow from our feet. I raised my arms without being asked, and the big guy unzipped my jacket, stuck his paw inside, and pulled out the Colt. We removed our jackets, shook the snow from them, and hung them on a row of brass pegs mounted on the garage wall. Then he led me inside and turned me over to the stout maid.

“Mr. Maniella say wait in library,” she said, and led me across the marble floor of the foyer to a large room with a wood fire crackling in a fieldstone fireplace. I walked across a black-and-tan Persian carpet and knelt before the flames. When the feeling returned to my nose and feet, I stood and took a good look around. One wall was floor-to-ceiling windows with a panoramic view of the frozen lake. The other three walls were lined with built-in cherry bookcases that held the last thing I expected to find in a pornographer’s house. Books. Many of them were bound in what appeared to be original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century calf and Moroccan leather. Titles stamped in gilt glittered on the spines. In a corner of the room, a spiral staircase led to a gallery, where more built-in bookshelves covered all four walls.

I turned to the nearest shelf and ran my finger along a row of books by Mark Twain: Following the Equator, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Innocents Abroad, Letters from the Earth, and a dozen more. I slid Life on the Mississippi from the shelf, opened it to the title page, and found “S. L. Clemens” scrawled in brown ink. A signed first edition. I gingerly returned it to its place.

I strolled the room, stopped at a section filled with period books on the Civil War, and took the first volume of Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant from a shelf. In the center of the room, two easy chairs and a sofa upholstered in matching chocolate calfskin surrounded a low marble-top table. The table had been set with a sterling coffee service and dainty blue-and-white cups and saucers. Beside them were two crystal decanters filled with amber liquid. I sat on the sofa and looked longingly at the decanters. Then I poured a cup of hot coffee, cut it with lots of cream, and downed it in a swallow. Beside the couch, a lamp with a stained glass shade rested on an antique cherry side table. I switched it on and nothing happened. The power was out. The day was fading now, the last gray light filtering through the wall of windows. I opened the book and could make out the words on the first page:

“Man proposes and God disposes.” There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice…

I was four pages into the first chapter when a deep voice rumbled: “I see you’ve made yourself at home.”

I glanced up to see Salvatore Maniella, dressed in pressed jeans and a tan cardigan sweater, peering down at me with a kindly look on his face. I knew him to be sixty-five years old, but he looked younger thanks to good genes, clean living, or a skilled plastic surgeon. He sat beside me on the couch and stretched out his hand. I took it and didn’t give it back.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Checking for a pulse.”

The right corner of his mouth curled in a half smile. Then he took the book from my lap, checked the title, and handed it back to me.

“I always meant to read this,” I said, “but I never got around to it.”

“When we’re finished here, why don’t you take both volumes home with you,” he said. “Just return them when you’re done.”

“I wouldn’t dare,” I said. “What if something happened to them?”

“Grant’s memoir was the bestselling book of the nineteenth century,” he said. “It’s not a rare book.”

“But some of these are.”

“Yes,” he said.

“How long have you been collecting?”

“When I was a student at Bryant College, I picked up a Fitzgerald first edition for fifty cents at a library sale, and it got me hooked.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “I found a stack of Black Mask and Dime Detective pulp magazines at a flea market when I was a teenager, and I’ve been looking for more ever since.”

“You must have amassed quite a collection by now.”

“Not really. A hundred, maybe, and a lot of them are chipped and torn.”

“That the only thing you collect?”

I cast my eyes across the shelves and said, “Nothing that would interest you.”

“Everything interests me.”

I poured myself another cup of coffee. He poured himself a drink from one of the decanters and then looked at me expectantly.

“Over the years,” I said, “I picked up about fifty old blues records from the 1940s and ’50s. I also accumulated several hundred vintage paperback crime novels: Brett Halliday, Carter Brown, Richard S. Prather, Jim Thompson, John D. MacDonald. It’s all gone now, though.”

“Why is that?”

“The woman I’ve been trying to divorce for two years is keeping my stuff out of spite.”

“That must upset you.”

“Only when I think about it.”

The maid waddled into the room carrying two silver candelabra. She placed them on the marble-top table, lit the candles, and exited without speaking. Then Vanessa Maniella entered, nodded to me, and sat facing us in one of the easy chairs.

“So, Sal,” I said. “Where the hell have you been?”

Salvatore Maniella rose from the sofa, walked to the library door, opened it, and spoke to Black Shirt, or maybe Gray Shirt, who was standing watch in the hall. “Please ask our other guest to join us.”

A minute later she strode into the room, sat in the other chair, and crossed those long, long legs.

“I understand no introductions are necessary,” Sal said.

“Some reason you feel the need to have your lawyer present?” I asked.

“Just being careful.”

“I’m gonna take a wild stab here and say the body in the morgue isn’t you.”

“No.”

“So who is it?”

“His name was Dante Puglisi.”

“Age?”

“Sixty-four.”

“Address?”

“He lived here.”

“A relative?”

“No. He was in my employ. Had been for a long time.”

“How long?”

“Since we mustered out of the SEALs together.”

“What did he do for you?”

“Little of this, little of that. Driver. Bodyguard. Workout partner. Sometimes he helped out around the place.”

“Didn’t his family wonder where he was the last three months?”

“His parents were killed in a car accident twenty years ago. We were the closest thing to family he had left.”

“He looked a lot like you.”

“He did.”

“Similar features, same height and weight, same eye and hair color, same Van Damme arms and Schwarzenegger chest.”

“That’s correct.”

“Was anything done to enhance this resemblance?”

“About ten years ago, he had a little work done, yes.”

“Why?”

Sal glanced at Yolanda. She nodded, indicating it was okay to answer.

“Shortly after I opened our strip clubs, I became involved in a dispute with some of our state’s more unsavory characters.”

“Carmine Grasso and Johnny Dio,” I said.

“You know of this?”

“I do.”

“Well, perhaps you can understand why it seemed advisable to employ a double.”

“When the two of you were together, the Mob wouldn’t know which one to shoot,” I said.