Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

“Did you hear what happened to Dante?”

“Yeah. A damn shame. Cops catch the guy who did it?”

“Not yet, but they’re still looking.”

He agreed to meet me at nine the next morning at a Brockton coffee shop creatively named Tea House of the Almighty. He was already there, pouring a whole lot of sugar into his mug of black coffee, when I walked in and sat down across from him.

“Nice place,” I said.

“I like it.”

“The Almighty ever show up to check the till?”

“He never shows his face, but I sense his presence every day.”

I put him at five feet ten, with stringy arms, a sunken chest, and a bowling ball-size potbelly. He wore a red plaid work shirt with a gold cross showing at the neck and a green baseball cap with the words “World’s Best Grandpa” above the bill. It was hard to imagine him as an athlete.

“Tell me more about you, Sal, and Dante,” I said.

“The three of us were wicked sinners. Drunk out of our skulls or high on marijuana most of the time, ’cept on game days, and copulating with every girl what would let us. Being as we were big men on campus, a lot of ’em did.”

“Good times,” I said.

“Sure thing, if hell’s what you’re aiming for. After college I found Jesus and got over the wildness. I guess Sal and Dante never did.”

“The way I heard it, Sal got his start in the pornography business when he was still at Bryant.”

“You heard right,” he said. “Sal shot most of the pictures for his skin magazine in our dorm room. He’d smoke a little weed with a girl and then get her to pose naked on his bed. Sometimes he’d bring in two or three at the same time and talk ’em into pleasuring each other, if you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“Sal let Dante and me help out with the lighting, not that he needed the help. It was just an excuse so’s we could watch. Afterward, we’d all get to drinking, and sometimes the girl would sleep with one of us. Couple of ’em took on all three of us, God forgive me.”

“Were any of the girls underage?”

“I don’t believe so. Sal was real careful about that, always checking ID to make sure they were at least eighteen. He got real righteous about it after what happened to Dante’s little sister.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Awful thing. She was just eight years old when it happened.”

“When was this?”

“Our junior year. Dante turned white as a sheet when he got the news over the telephone. He put down the receiver, curled up in his bed, and cried like a baby. Sal got down on his knees at the bedside and held on to him until Dante stopped blubbering and told us what was wrong.”

“Which was what, exactly?”

“Some animal grabbed her off the playground near her house. The cops found her tied to a tree the next day, raped and beaten, but still breathing, thank the Lord.”

“Where was this?”

“In New Haven, Dante’s hometown.”

“The cops catch the guy?”

“They figured out who did it all right, but they didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. Left his DNA all over her, I imagine, but they didn’t know about that stuff back then.”

“Dante must have been pretty angry about it.”

“All three of us were.”

“You do anything about it?”

“I probably shouldn’t talk about that.”

“Dante’s sister. What was her name?”

“Rachel,” he said. “Rachel Elizabeth Puglisi.”

“Know where she is now?”

“Dead.”

“What happened?”

“Way I heard it, she seemed to recover from the attack; but sometime after she turned thirteen, she found the tree she’d been tied to and hanged herself from it, God rest her soul.”

The New Haven Register ’s Web site didn’t include archives, so I called the paper and was told that its news library had never digitized them. Still worse, all its paper clippings from the 1960s and 1970s had been discarded. Fortunately, the city’s public library had all of the old newspapers on microfiche.

Friday, the deputy sports editor called in sick so he could interview with ESPN, and I got stuck editing basketball game stories and laying out sports pages all day. It was Saturday before I could saddle up Secretariat and make the two-hour drive to New Haven. When Secretariat was younger, he could have done it in an hour and a half.

An attendant in the public library’s reading room set me up with a microfiche reader. “It’s not often that somebody asks for these old newspaper files,” she said, “but you’re the second one in the last few weeks.”

“Who was the other one?”

“I didn’t get her name.”

“What did she look like?”

She frowned and shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but I can’t help you with that. We respect people’s privacy here.”

I started with the September 1, 1966, edition of the Register, began scrolling, and immediately got caught up in it.

Red Guards were on the rampage in China.

Senator Charles Percy’s twenty-one-year-old daughter was found stabbed and bludgeoned in the family mansion on Chicago’s North Shore.

A new TV show called Star Trek, starring a former Shakespearean actor named William Shatner, debuted on NBC.

Scotland Yard arrested Buster Edwards and charged him with masterminding the Great Train Robbery.

President Lyndon Johnson visited American troops in Vietnam.

The Baltimore Orioles swept the Los Angeles Dodgers to win their first World Series ever.

Edward Brooke of Massachusetts became the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction.

A B-movie actor named Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.

Dr. Sam Sheppard, on trial for murdering his pregnant wife, was acquitted.

The Beatles went into seclusion to record a new album; according to record industry gossip, the working title was Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band .

Stop it, I told myself. If you keep this up, you’ll be sitting here for a month.

Ninety minutes after I started, I spotted a one-column headline at the bottom of page one in the October 30 edition:

Girl, 8, Raped and Left Tied to Tree

New Haven-An 8-year-old city girl who was abducted from a playground near her home 12 hours earlier was found tied to a tree about a hundred yards from the Pardee Rose Garden in East Rock Park yesterday morning, New Haven police said.

Police said she was rushed to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where she was listed in fair condition with a broken nose, a fractured left arm, and multiple abrasions and contusions. A hospital examination determined that the girl had been raped, police said.

Police detectives were still in the park late yesterday afternoon collecting evidence.

Out of consideration for the family, the story didn’t mention her name.

I kept scrolling. Over the next few months, occasional updates appeared on inside pages:

Police Vow to Find Girl’s Attacker

Hamden Man Questioned in Child Rape

Police Arrest Child-Rape Suspect

Child-Rape Suspect Released, Police Cite Lack of Evidence

Child Rape Case Still Open

Then nothing until April 3, when the following appeared:

Child Molester Beaten

New Haven-Alfred V. Furtado, 44, of 62 Evergeen Ave., Hamden, a convicted child molester, was found naked and tied to a tree in East Rock Park yesterday afternoon. Police said he had been savagely beaten.

He was taken to Yale-New Haven Hospital, where he was reported in serious condition with a fractured skull. Police said he also suffered two fractured kneecaps and a broken eye socket. His nose, left clavicle, and five of his fingers were also reported broken, and his sex organs had been mutilated with a sharp object, police said. A baseball bat and a hunting knife recovered beside the tree may have been used in the attack, police said.