Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

Furtado was found tied to the same tree that had been used to bind an 8-year-old New Haven girl after she was beaten and raped last October, police said. They added they are exploring the possibility that the two crimes are linked.

Furtado was initially arrested in connection with the attack on the girl, but he was subsequently released for lack of evidence. Police said he has a criminal record that includes public lewdness and molestation, and that he served 7 years of his 15-year sentence for the violent rape of a 10-year-old East Haven girl in 1957.

When I walked out of the library, it was after seven P.M. and raining. I dashed to Secretariat and drove home in the dark. I parked illegally on the street outside near my apartment, trudged up the stairs, shrugged off my damp clothes, and stepped into the shower. I stood under the hot water for a long time. It took the chill off but didn’t do much to wash away the day. Maybe talking about it would help.

“Hi, Yolanda. It’s Mulligan.”

“Hi, baby. You okay? You sound weary.”

“That I am.”

“Tough day?”

“Tough year. Uh… listen, I know it’s on the late side, but I wonder if you’d like to have a nightcap. Maybe grab a little something to eat somewhere.”

“Sorry, but I can’t.”

“No?”

“No.”

“Okay, then.”

“Mulligan?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve started seeing somebody.”

“Oh.”

“He teaches chemistry at Brown, and he’s a really great guy.”

“What’s he got that I don’t?”

“You know.”

“Oh, that.”

“Can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“No, I can’t… He’s there now, isn’t he?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, I better let you go, then.”

“Still friends?”

“Always,” I said.

“’Night, Mulligan.”

“Good night, Yolanda.”

So what. I’d been shot down by women before. Short ones and tall ones. Plump and skinny. Blondes, brunettes, and redheads. White, black, and yellow. Schoolteachers, barmaids, reporters, secretaries, and college professors. Most times, I’d shaken it off with a shot of Bushmills and a good night’s sleep. This was one of those other times. This time, I felt blue drop over me like a shroud.

I pulled on jeans and a sweatshirt, zipped a windbreaker over it, tromped down the stairs, and stepped out into the rain. It was coming down harder now, but I didn’t care. Like a batter who’d been drilled in the ribs with a fastball, I needed to walk it off. I sloshed two blocks north on America Street and turned right. The bars and restaurants on Atwells Avenue beckoned, but I wasn’t in the mood for food, light, or company that wasn’t Yolanda. I walked east to DePasquale, turned right, and trudged past a long row of triple-deckers and rooming houses all the way to Broadway. There I turned right, walked to the corner of America Street, and turned back toward home.

Outside my apartment, Secretariat shivered in the rain. I climbed in, wrung the wet from my hair, and fired the engine. The drive to Swan Point Cemetery took fifteen minutes. I thought about leaving the Manny Ramirez jersey in the car, not wanting to get it wet, but on a night like this, Rosie would welcome what little warmth it could provide. I draped it over the shoulders of her gravestone, sat in the mud, and rested my back against the cold granite.

“Evening, Rosie. How are you tonight?”

The same. Rosie was always the same now.

“Me? I’ve been better… Yeah, it’s about that lawyer I’ve been seeing. Remember me telling you that as long as she didn’t say, ‘Let’s just be friends,’ I still had a chance?”

Rosie always remembered everything.

“Well, tonight, she finally said it.”

“I’m confused.”

“What about?” Fiona asked.

“Sex and religion.”

“Oh, that.”

“Yeah.”

“Welcome to the club.”

“You too?” I asked.

“About religion, sure. Sex? Not so much.”

We were sitting at opposite ends of a brown leather couch in her parlor, she with a calico cat in her lap and I with a rolled-up copy of the Dispatch in my left hand. An autographed photo of Fiona getting a peck on the cheek from Barack Obama stood on the mantel in the spot where a photo of Joseph Ratzinger in his white-mitered, post-Hitler Youth incarnation used to be. The log fire she’d lit when we came in from the cold had burned low. The red coals hissed and popped.

“Vanessa Maniella gave me the ‘oldest profession’ speech,” I said.

“Let me guess,” Fiona said. “She claims prostitution is older than the Bible, that women have a right to sell their bodies, and that all she’s been doing is providing them with a clean, safe place to do it.”

“Pretty much,” I said, “although somehow she made it seem a little more convincing.”

“Taking your moral guidance from a madam now?”

“Better her than Reverend Crenson. Besides, my old confessor Father Donovan is no longer handy. The bishop shipped his pedophile ass off to Woonsocket.”

“There are other priests.”

“I prefer a lifelong friend to a stranger in a white collar.”

She took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh. “There’s no denying that prostitution is as old as mankind,” she said, “but so are stealing, abortion, and murder.”

I didn’t want to get sidetracked by the abortion argument, so what I said was, “I see your point.”

“I’ve seen how troubled you are by the child porn you’ve been exposed to,” she said.

“What’s that have to do with prostitution? Men who lust after children have no interest in grown women.”

“It all flows from the same sewer,” she said. “The commercialization of sex debases and dehumanizes us all. It leads people to think of one another as pieces of meat instead of creatures with immortal souls.”

I must have looked doubtful because she added, “And if you don’t believe that, there’s always ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery.’”

“Says who?”

“I can’t believe you just said that.”

“As I understand it,” I said, “those words were written three thousand years ago by the Hebrew elder of a tribe that treated women as property.”

She shook her head sadly and fell silent for a moment. When she spoke again, it was in a whisper.

“I don’t deny that my faith in the church has been shaken,” she said. “The doctrine of papal infallibility is tyrannical bullshit. The church’s medieval views on AIDS and contraception have gotten thousands of people killed. The bishops who protected pedophile priests for decades are fucking criminals. If I had the balls, I’d indict the sons of bitches. But I’ve never turned away from the Word of God.”

“Good for you, Fiona,” I said. “Good for you.”

“The publisher specifically requested you, Mulligan,” Lomax said.

“How come?”

“Apparently he liked the way you handled the Derby Ball story last September. Besides, this soiree is right up your alley.”

“How so?”

“It’s a fund-raiser for the Milk Carton Crusade.”

“What the hell’s that?”

“Another one of those groups dedicated to finding missing children.”

“What’s the publisher’s interest?”

“I gather he’s a contributor.”

“Do I have to wear a monkey suit again?”

“You can put in for it.”

“Hotel?”

“No. We need to keep expenses to a minimum. You can drive down and back the same night, or if you want you can stay at Mason’s place. He already offered.”

So Tuesday night after work, I found myself riding shotgun in Mason’s restored 1967 E-Type Series 1 Jaguar as it zoomed over Narragansett Bay on the Jamestown Verrazzano Bridge, Providence a cold glance over our shoulders.