Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

I thought about calling Parisi to see if he’d heard the news, but it was Christmas. I figured it could wait a day. Twenty minutes later, Jimmy Cagney’s voice shrieked from my cell phone: “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

“Merry Christmas, Captain.”

“Not so merry in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.”

“Is that so?”

“A parish priest was shot to death sometime early this morning.”

“Father Rajane Valois,” I said.

“You know about this?”

“I read about it on the AP wire.”

A five-second delay, and then: “I just got off the phone with the chief of police in Fond du Lac. He says they found about a hundred child porn videos on the good father’s personal computer.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

“Oh?”

“He was one of the names you got from the Internet providers,” I said.

“How the hell do you know that?”

“A source.”

“Jesus! This investigation leaks like the Titanic .”

“Now we know why the Chad Brown killers downloaded all those e-mails,” I said.

“Looks like.”

“How do you suppose they got the priest’s name from the Internet provider?”

“Probably paid somebody off,” Parisi said. “A bribe is as good as a subpoena.”

“Better,” I said. “You don’t have to wait for it to be signed by a judge.”

“They probably have the other five names, too,” Parisi said.

“A hit list,” I said.

“Be my guess. I called the FBI this morning, but nobody on duty today knows anything about our case. If the bureau doesn’t move on this soon, we might end up with five more deserving corpses.”

“Vigilantes,” I said.

“Or Good Samaritans with guns.”

After we signed off, I tried to remember what I knew about Fond du Lac. All I could come up with was that it was about the size of Providence and that Edward L. Doheny, an Irish American oil tycoon, was born there. Doheny was the inspiration for the fictional Daniel Plainview, the evil genius played by Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood .

Three days later, the cops reporter called in sick, so I got stuck with writing the police briefs-a dozen short, pointless paragraphs about purse snatchings, break-ins, fender benders, and Peeping Toms. A few minutes after I turned it in, Lomax was standing over my desk with a computer printout in his hand. He gave me a dirty look and began to read out loud.

John Mura, 24, of 75 Chalkstone Avenue, was charged with burglary yesterday after four teenagers walking their Great Dane spotted him climbing through the window of an apartment at 21 Zone Street. Mura told police he would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for those meddling kids and their dog.

“Exactly right,” I said.

“I can’t help but notice that you didn’t quote Mura directly,” Lomax said.

“I paraphrased.”

“And why is that?”

“Because according to the Providence police, his exact words were ‘those little cocksuckers and their fucking mutt.’”

“And do I detect, in your paraphrase, an allusion to Scooby-Doo ?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”

One corner of his mouth curled in a poor excuse for a smile. “I kinda like this one, so I’m gonna run with it,” he said, “but I’m keeping my eye on you.”

I was flipping through my notes on the Chad Brown murder, trying to see if I’d missed anything, when Johnny Rivers interrupted me with his rendition of “Secret Agent Man,” my ring-tone for McCracken.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“Did you know Vanessa Maniella bought an old warehouse in West Warwick six weeks ago?” the private detective said.

“I didn’t. Your source good on this?”

“A Realtor I know brokered the deal.”

“Where is it exactly?”

“On Washington Street. Used to be a discount furniture warehouse. When that went belly-up, the Cunha brothers ran a flea market there for a while.”

“What’s she doing with it?”

“Don’t know. Another strip club, maybe.”

“Sounds like a lot of space for a strip club,” I said. “Have you been out there?”

“No. Just thought there might be a story in it for you.”

Late that afternoon, I drove out to West Warwick to check it out. The warehouse was a three-story red-brick structure sandwiched between a print shop and a pawnbroker. A “Half Price on Discount Furniture” sign, so faded that it was almost unreadable, stretched across the front of the building between the first- and second-floor windows. A “Cunha’s Fabulus Flea Market” sign, misspelled and hand-painted on a barn door-size slab of plywood, was nailed across three of the second-floor windows. All of the windows were dark, but eight cars were parked head in against the front of the building. One of them was Sal Maniella’s black Hummer. The others, low-end-model Fords and Toyotas, looked a few miles short of the junkyard.

I pulled in beside the Hummer, got out, and saw why the warehouse windows were dark. The glass had been painted black on the inside. I climbed the crumbling concrete steps to the front door and tried the latch. It was locked, and there was no bell. I pounded on the peeling green paint with my fist until I heard heavy footsteps. The door was shoved open by a big man wearing a leather shoulder holster over a green-and-white Celtics T-shirt with Kevin Garnett’s number 5 on the front.

“Mulligan? The hell you doing here? This place is secret.”

“Not anymore,” I said.

“Mr. Maniella ain’t gonna like this.”

“He’ll get over it,” I said. “So what are you doing here, Joseph? Get tired of bouncing drunks at the Tongue and Groove?”

“I got promoted.”

“To what?”

“Bodyguard.”

“The two ex-SEALs aren’t enough?”

“Them guys are fuckin’ good, but they ain’t always around.”

“Out of town, are they?”

“Yeah. Took off a couple of days ago and won’t be back till the end of the week.”

“I’d like to have a word with Sal,” I said.

“What makes you think he’s here?”

“His car’s right out front, Joseph.”

“Oh, yeah. I told him he shoulda parked in back. Hang here and I’ll see if he’ll talk to you,” he said, and slammed the door in my face.

I was watching an alarming number of grackles gather on the telephone wires across the street when the opening guitar lick to “Bitch” started playing. I didn’t see Keith Richards in the immediate vicinity so I pulled the phone out of my pocket and flipped it open.

“You… fucking… bastard!”

“And a good afternoon to you, too, Dorcas.”

“Today is my birthday, asshole.”

“Shall I break into song?”

“I’m still your wife, you know. You could have sent a fucking card.”

“Have you checked your mail today?”

“What? No. Hold on a sec,” she said, but Joseph was swinging the door open now.

“Happy birthday, Dorcas. Gotta go.”

Joseph ushered me into a vestibule with peeling green walls and a splintered wood floor. A naked bulb burned in a fixture that dangled by its wires from the ceiling. In front of us was a new steel door with a keypad lock. Joseph punched in a sequence of five numbers. I managed to catch four of them. He turned the handle and led me inside.

There, a young woman in a forest-green business suit sat behind a kidney-shaped glass desk decorated with a framed family photo and a pink orchid in a ceramic pot. Antique photographs of Rhode Island landmarks, most of them long gone, hung in bird’s-eye maple frames on new drywall. The off-white paint was so fresh that I could smell it.

“Please take a seat,” she said. “Mr. Maniella will be with you shortly.”