Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

“Wait a sec. They aren’t paying her, are they?”

“What? Where the fuck did you get that idea?”

“Holy shit! They are paying her, aren’t they?”

His eyes narrowed to slits. “No fuckin’ way this came from me.”

“Of course not, Whoosh.”

“I better not see anything about this in the fuckin’ Dispatch .”

“You won’t.”

“Swear on your mother.”

“Already did.”

“Do it again.”

“Okay, okay. I swear.”

He reached down to scratch his balls again, took another pull from his Lucky, and started talking.

“Ten years ago, when Maniella opened his fuckin’ dives, couple of our boys paid them a visit. Said they’d be back every month to collect.”

“How much?”

“Two grand per club.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“We thought so.”

“So what happened?”

“A couple weeks later, ’bout a half hour before the noon opening, a dozen guys with Navy SEALs tattoos come busting into Friction.”

“Grasso’s place,” I said.

“Now, yeah, but it was Johnny Dio’s before he got whacked.”

“Uh-huh.”

“The bouncer tried to stop them at the door, so they tossed him into the parking lot like he was fuckin’ trash. Tore the place up pretty good. Smashed all the liquor bottles. Threw barstools through the fuckin’ mirrors.”

“No shit?”

“Yeah. You ain’t heard about this? We tried to keep it quiet, but I figured you mighta heard about this.”

“Anybody get hurt?”

“A few cuts and bruises. Nothin’ worth cryin’ over. Before the cocksuckers left, a couple of ’em climbed up on stage, unzipped, and pissed on the stripper poles like they was fuckin’ dogs.”

“Marking their territory,” I said.

“Dio figured right off Maniella must’ve sent ’em. Wanted to drive out to Greenville hisself and whack the sonuvabitch. After we got him calmed the fuck down, we asked Maniella for a sit-down.”

“How’d that work out?”

“We invited the prick to a nice meal at Camille’s so we could explain the situation. Arena did most of the talkin’. Said if Maniella’s clubs were doing as well as ours, he was raking in the fuckin’ dough. Said two grand a month per club was a fair price for the right to operate.”

“Maniella didn’t think so?”

“He said the money was fair and that his boys would be by the first of every month to collect it.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“Have I ever?”

“What did Arena say to that?”

“First he had to grab Dio by the legs to stop him from climbing over the table to get at the asshole. Then he said no fuckin’ way.”

“And Maniella said what?”

“At first he just smiled and looked at us over the rim of his fuckin’ wineglass. Enjoying the moment.”

“And then?”

“And then he rolled up his sleeve and showed us his Navy SEALs tattoo. Said he knew plenty of guys with the same ink. Said he figured a dozen was enough but that he had the scratch to bring in fifty of ’em if he had to.”

“So Arena caved?”

“What the fuck could he do?”

“Arena and Grasso still paying?”

“To Vanessa now, yeah. Every fuckin’ month. But we never talk about it.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “It’s fuckin’ humiliating.”

“Not like the old days, huh?”

“Fuck, no,” Zerilli said. “Back when Raymond L. S. Patriarca ran this town, no way anybody’d try somethin’ like this. Bobo Marrapese, Pro Lerner, Frank Salemme, Dickie Callei, Red Kelly, Jackie Nazarian, Rudy Sciarra-just whisper the names of the guys in our crew and a dick like Maniella would have pissed his pants. But it ain’t the 1970s no more.”

“The ex-SEALs still around?”

“At least a couple are, yeah. Handling the collections.”

I thanked him and got up to go.

“Hold on a sec,” he said. “Could you use a GPS for the Bronco?”

“Don’t really need one. I got a map of Rhode Island stored in my head.”

“You go out of state sometimes, right?”

“I do.”

He got up from his chair, unlocked the door to a little storeroom behind the office, and came back with a Garmin GPS in an unopened box.

“A thousand of ’em fell off a fuckin’ truck in New Bedford last week,” he said. “I bought ’em off the Arcaro brothers for ten cents on the dollar.”

“What are you getting for them?”

“Forty bucks apiece, but yours is on the house.”

If I turned it down, my friend would be insulted. “Thanks, Whoosh,” I said. “And if you hear any chatter about the Maniella murder, give me a holler.”

“Mulligan?”

“Um?”

“The gorillas who trashed Friction? We heard they signed on with Maniella after they got fired from Titan and Blackwater.”

“No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Know what for?”

“You won’t fuckin’ believe it.”

“What?”

“Excessive force,” he said. “Or as they call it at Blackwater, too much of a good thing.”

By the time I got to city hall, the planning commission meeting was under way. I hadn’t missed a thing. Wouldn’t have missed much if I hadn’t shown up at all. Two hours of wrangling about the future of a vacant lot off Elmwood Avenue was worth just three paragraphs on the bomber page-B-17.

It was raining when I stepped out of the Dispatch ’s front door and dashed for Secretariat, and as I pointed him down Putnam Pike toward Greenville, it started coming down hard. The twenty-minute drive to the Maniellas’ place on Waterman Lake took twice that. Should have used the GPS, because I was almost to Harmony before I realized I’d missed a turn in the dark.

I backtracked, found it this time, and rolled slowly down a country road, peering through sheets of rain for a glimpse of the white center-chimney colonial that had stood at the corner of Pine Ledge Road for two hundred years. When I saw it, I turned right onto an unpaved private track that the storm had churned into mud. It was narrow, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. A hundred yards in, it got narrower as it ran along the top of an earthen dike. The waters of Waterman Lake lurked on both sides, and I knew for a fact that Secretariat couldn’t swim.

Rain caught the beams from my headlights and hurled them back at me, and halfway across, I lost sight of the road. I felt the Bronco dip as the right rear tire slid off the edge and grabbed air. I punched the gas, and the other three wheels slung mud as they fought to hold the road.

The Stillwater River, a tributary of the Woonasquatucket, is just a creek, really, and in autumn it shrinks to a trickle. The earthen-and-masonry dam thrown across its course in 1838 is still there, holding back an amoeba-shaped lake of 270 acres. Waterman Lake is clean and the average depth is just nine feet, making it ideal for swimming and boating but unsuitable for disposing of a body.

The lake is privately owned, and so is the white-pine-and-maple-studded acreage that surrounds it. When I was a kid, most of the structures here were ramshackle summer cottages. In recent years, some of them had been ripped down and replaced by sprawling villas designed by architects who lifted their ideas from Philip Johnson and Frank Lloyd Wright. The biggest belonged to the Maniellas, or what was left of them.

Just past the dike, the dirt road curved to the right. Drenched pine boughs swished against Secretariat’s side, giving him an overdue scrubbing as we groped our way in the dark. Soon, the road split into five dirt trails that stretched toward the lakeshore like the fingers of an arthritic hand. The Maniellas’ place was appropriately located at the tip of the middle finger, perched on a knoll overlooking the water.